Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

I forgot Wednesday S2 came out this week, anyone watch it?

didn't even finish ep1 of first season. seemed well-made, just wasn't interested.

Just watched the first ep with friends who are Aramco employees
That was.. something, lol

Course. It's about as good as the first season. They do red herrings pretty well.

It's a good mystery.

More entertaining the king of the hill, less than dexter

Was Al***ia invited too?

I didn't send out invites. I was invited.
But do you know what Aramco is?

They made balatro

I knew it sounded familiar somehow

*Raise hands* I know, pick me, the good student in this classroom!

It's a big oil company!!!

Good job, Afania-kun. I see that you're putting your internet skills to good use again.



BUT!! you're almost right. Aramco isn't just a big oil company, it's the biggest oild company in the world. And since I'm an anal highschool teacher, I have to behave like one, so I won't give you full marks. Nobody deserves full marks in this world anyways. Humans are imperfect, so it's only natural. But I still get to grade you anyways, because I have the authority.

Today is fathers day here.

So happy fathers day to you whose father inserted the doll in your mother, went to buy cigarettes and never came back.

Or you who did it yourself

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/1mli9gc/financial_report_of_the_square_enix_mmo_division/

https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/pdf/26q1slides.pdf

Dawntrail flopped, not really a suprise when the game shifted story after a decade. wonder what implications this will have on FFXI, if any.

Thoughts on the decline.

The WoW refugees that hopped aboard in ShB have been slowly vanishing. Then when DT came out to a less than thunderous approval and WoW apologized and came out with stuff worth playing again the rest bailed.

The old story arc, which goes back to the unlamented 1.0, was finished. Many decided it was a good time to move on.

DT was a weak expansion. Yoshi said it was going to be like a vacation. Many players did not like not being the main character.

Squenix pulled XIV's best talent to try to save some big budget flops.

AFIK XI has been more than self supporting and is too skeletonized for staff raiding. You should be OK. But this IS Squenix so no bets.

It's classic Square Enix corporate blunder.

Expect XIV team to do more with less, for a game style design that only ever needs more. Vertical prog MMOs are a ladder system, when the new rungs get added, they become all that's worth doing outside of farming for cosmetics.

If you pay attention to the credits, in Dawntrail they slowed the credit crawl and started to include even people like social media managers, and literally anyone they could that so much as looked at XIV during development time. Pretty soon they'll be adding players to the credits again claiming them as play testers or some ***.

But reality is that XIV dev team has been bleeding actual developers for years, which is why they started cutting back on dungeons, and why we're now down to a single dungeon each major patch. Also why dungeon design started to lean into visuals over gameplay substance. Those monologues by the villain that were successful in Shadowbringers are mostly there now to distract you from hallway simulator 3000.

Their original claim on dungeon cut back was that they needed to cut dungeon dev time for serious, new content. But when you look at what slotted in to supposedly replace the "extra" dungeons, it's a copy paste overworld zones with an in-instance FATE progression system. i.e. Just a single set of FATEs, all simply Kill Boss, with a separate leveling system that throttles your progression by limiting your power while in instance (Eureka, Bozja, Occult Crescent).

Players say they like these a lot, and while I did enjoy both Eureka and Bozja, their most enjoyable content was not the bulk of the content introduced. And for the first example of Eureka, it took 4 zones of Fate farming til we got actual new content with Baldesion Arsenal. Meaning, for a time, they were comfortable calling old content, new, and hand feeding us slop repeatedly.

(then there's the fact they did no overworld slop instances in 6.0)

Before I get too long again, all that's to say they don't have a full time staff, haven't had one since 2017, but are expected to just print money all the same. Shadowbringers doing really well was lightning in a bottle, and it was super bad for them, because it signalled to the corpos that they were justified in reducing the team size, and they likely reduced it again immediately after Endwalker base game development was over.

The real answer is they need to invest more in XIV, and give it back a real, full dev team. But I feel like they won't.

/search dog_surprise_at_computer.jpg

The creation of the job title project manager was a mistake.

Imagine having a job where you manage things you don't care about.
Especially the contracted ones.

But think of our shareholders.
Creativity is dying and executives are speeding it up by thinking you can do creativity with AI

Instead of getting a decent creator to use AI
You need a creative with freedom to experiment to get something good with AI not the other way around

The machine cannot imagine.

I've tried several times but never made it to dawntrail. we'll see how it goes this try, but even if I do get there the only thing that interests me is the FFXI raid honestly.

I know MMO industry is pretty volatile with people constantly coming and going, but those financials do indicate a real problem with players being that dissatisfied with the game.

that's interesting about FFXIV dungeons Vyre, I vaguely remember them being one of the easier types of content to churn out, which is why ARR and HW had so many of them. wonder what changed.

I've worked in a company with almost non-existent project management and trust me, it's a huge pain and a total mess. Which only leads to more overtime and people burn out from endless overtime.

Good project management = everyone needs less work to get the same thing done and happier life for everyone. I don't understand why it's a mistake.


What do you mean exactly?

Balastro was only possible due to its project managers

It all goes back to 2.1's Pharos Sirius.

In 2.0 base XIV, the game rose out of its 1.0 death, and became a WoW clone somewhat.

However, at the time the content types available were few still, so they opted to make them more challenging, believing players wanted to be challenged (this was the era where Dark Souls had taken the world by storm, after all, and comparisons about a game's challenge were very important at the time).

Some of the 2.0 dungeons were challenging enough, at the time, to make players a little bit anxious about whether or not they'd get stuck on certain bosses if their group didn't know what to do or wasn't geared very well etc.

The Binding Coil raid also had this same feeling. Challenging, apprehension, weekly lockouts on drops etc.

2.1 rolled around, and they released 3 dungeons. Copperbell Mines Hard Mode, Haukke Manor Hard Mode, and Pharos Sirius. Two reskins with harder(max level) monsters, different monsters, different bosses, and a new route through the reskinned dungeons.

Pharos Sirius, on the other hand, was entirely new. Entirely new.

And it shook up the dungeon formula, quite a bit.

For starters, it actually had 4 bosses, instead of 3. Then, it had road blocks on release, unlike prior dungeons which had them added in later to cockblock 4-man dungeon meta comp (PLD, BLM, BLM(or SMN), WHM).

Then, it had problem monster in each trash pack. Monsters with higher HP than other trash and deadly/debilitating moves. The first ones being the Elbsts that if alive long enough, inflicted a % damage taken debuff onto anyone caught in the cone immediately in front of them. An effect debilitating enough to floor a tank.

Then there were the pirate barbers, which if not killed first, could heal the trash packs.

Then there was the first boss. Bosses in Pharos Sirius followed a theme of Add management, and an attempt at forcing steady, thoughtful kills. So, first boss of Pharos Sirius summons corrupted crystal hounds, which immediately spit super fast acting AOEs onto random party members, often times the same one, if not dealt with immediately. The trigger for them spawning was merely HP% and happened independently of the boss performing or casting moves, so what would happen is that very competent groups would spawn adds too fast, and get completely wrecked by being unable to manage the sheer amount of adds. Smarter groups kept it steady, killed adds, then raced his HP and add spawns when he was LOW. Further complication though is he'd reduce the size of the arena by placing field AOEs that persist.

After that you encounter new problem monsters in the trash. THere were Bhoots that could inflict potent 30 second paralsysis to the entire party, as well as Corrupted Sprites that could cast Banish III (Banishga really) which would deal over 3000 damage to the entire party if it went off, in a trash pull, in a time when DDs and Healers if fully geared, barely met 4000 HP (at i90). If you walled to wall these pulls, you would encounter 2 Bhoots, 2 Corrupted Sprites, and a Pirate Barber all in the same pull. This Banish III is also a radial AOE, hitting all party members within 30y of the Sprite. Meaning you could pull this entire trash pull to the next gate, and then, if your DPS didn't know, your entire party could be killed simultaneously by two casts from trash.

After that was the second boss. A Zu, FFIV style. A Zu mother, in her nest of eggs. Add management again. This time, when you break an egg, the Zu mother gains rage stacks. At 12 rage stacks or higher, her mane glows pink-red, and she gains access to new deadly moves, and begins to spam them until the rage stacks go under 12. One egg break = 8 rage stacks. Rage stacks only decay with time. As the fight went on, more eggs would start to hatch. As babies they become fairly deadly adds with wind cleave attacks, and one add that tethers to a party member and proceeds to vomit on them as a quick kiling DOT. So what you'd wanna do is denote which eggs spawn which add. The spotted eggs are the vomit adds, so if you see spotted eggs hatch, you need to break at least 1. At times you'd have to gauge whether you could break an egg at all, as if you pushed the Zu up to 16 rage, it would literally body slam the arena for so long, that there's no way for the party to live through it. You get one reprieve in that, at a certain point the Zu opts to fly high, and only spam chasing wind aoes, at the point, you could break 2 eggs at once, as it would be up in the air long enough to decay 5 rage stacks. This boss also walled a lot of parties :D

After that, there's only a couple of more trash pulls, but also with a new problem monster. Splitting Flans on a staircase where you also have to shut valves of corrupted aether. You could stun the flans to stop the split, but once they split, it more than doubled the size of the trash pulls. Also, 2 more Corrupted Sprites on the way to the second valve at the stair top, with the corrupted aether also doing AOE damage to your party as you ascend the staircase. Rough, but you should know what these things do by now, and it shouldn't take more than a couple tries to get by, if you wipe on the first go around.

Then the third boss. Third boss was kind of a fake out. It had severely low HP, but would spam adds. Very very simple to just kill outright while ignoring the adds, it's the last type of add management, really. Gauge the strength of the boss, kill the boss instead.

No more trash.

Last boss, Siren.

One of the first instances of in or out mechanics in the game, with a donut AOE cast. Also made use of the outside border for Ifrit like dashes across the arena. Two types of adds. Regular zombie pirates, and crawling zombie pirates. Crawling pirates go for your healer and tank, and if they do, the tank or healer is completely immobilized/unable to act until the DPS kill the add.

Sported one of the earliest heal checks as well. If party members HP not full, and Lunatic Voice not silenced (she builds stun resistance, and not all party comps could silence at the time, silence is also a 1 second interrupt in XIV), then your entire party could be charmed and hitting one another for 15~20 seconds. While still being able to be hurt by adds and Siren. Oh yeah, Siren also inflicts a long full time bleed on your tank, and can inflict party wide, "Healing Effect Received" down debuff, which would need to be Esuna'd/Leeches'd off before any meaningful healing could happen. Another boss that would often time people out of the instance.

The minimum iLvl requirements were also introduced in this patch, and Pharos Sirius's were absurdly low. i49 needed to enter the dungeon in Duty Finder. An i49 player would not be able to live through any of the trash AOEs even with SCH shields, and an i49 tank would get absolutely wrecked by all of the bosses.

This lead to the first demands for a content nerf by the playerbase on the first iteration of the FFXIV official forums. Often times, when you got Pharos Sirius in a roulette, people would bail on the instance immediately.

This lead FFXIV devs to reduce the difficulty and nerf Pharos Sirius come 2.2, and it also lead them to keep dungeon difficulty lower than they initially planned it to be, turning almost all future dungeons into relatively casual content, rather than serious content as they had originally been.

Combine that with power creep over the years, and you basically have a content form that is dead in all but presence. Like, dungeons in XIV are basically just there. They're just there. THey're like a vestigal organ, now. A pinky toe or an appendix.

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TL;DR - They wanted to make dungeons hard originally. They made dungeons hard, and players got butthurt, and ocntinued to express butthurt if any dungeon ever had even a slight inconvenience, so players drove dungeons to be unfun for the devs to make, and so we get slop for dungeons.

We have contracted project managers they are not versed in the organization and resources.

It takes time for them to get up to speed if they ever get up to speed.
Most of us end up absorbing their responsibilities in order to get the project done correctly and on time while they collect the credit.

Frequently they leave after a project or my company does not keep them we just had one quit mid project for a better job.

There's a difference between a leader and a project manager
Rarely will you find one capable of being both

FFXIV is slop now and safe
Most mmos do not have mechanics anymore

When they removed damage types bonuses and silence and stun got simplified it was a sign of how much more watering down the game would go through

i do remember pharos sirius well, and it was quite annoying.

but I meant that in terms of required dev time and resources, dungeons in general were supposed to be pretty easy to make, independent of any difficulty the players had completing them.

Well they used to tie them into prior story threads, or explore what happened to areas after the MSQ caused you to change them drastically.

Example:
Sohm Al vs. Sohm Al HM

You kill all the dragons on Sohm Al in MSQ. Sohm Al HM now has problem monsters causing the mountain to possibly erupt.

Probably just the devs not having a writer to write reuse dungeons back in, and not wanting to cook up new excuses/locations for dungeons.

Combined with the restriction of being unable to make interesting/fun mechanical systems for the dungeon bosses themselves. Likely no devs on the ever shrinking team even want to make dunngeons.

You remember Saint Mocianne's Arboretum Hard Mode? The dungeon that's literally a reskinned dungeon, and they reskinned it to be covered in ***?

With a final boss that's a giant pile of ***?

Something something meta commentary by dev for that dungeon.

And now they are using developer resources to remove any unique mechanics from dungeons so they will be dumb enough for NPCs.

Sounds like the issues here isn't because this position is a mistake, but whoever decided this position can be contracted, lol. There are better positions to contract than this imo.

Contracting often increase the cost of communication, this isn't easily avoidable. The purpose of project manager is to reduce the organizing/communication cost. So contracting this position pretty much defeat the purpose of this position to begin with lol.

had an MRI for my shoulder this morning. we've made amazing advances as humans with science and medicine, but surely we can do better than this. what a trippy experience, and not one of the good ones.

I hope you find solutions
I shaved off my collar bone some how

I went to two different doctors and rehab places for shoulder issues and felt it was a waste of money

Continuing with the gym at home with more of a correctional approach ended up making it livable.

Really messed up your sleep though

no exaggeration, I haven't slept more than 3hrs at a time without being woken up for one reason or another in years. pain is pretty manageable atm just hoping for no surgery required.

We are doing better.

My best friend's husband is a liver transplant recipient. Only a few years ago if his liver started failing he would have been put on a transplant list. Today they would start culturing stem cells, program them, and watch him grow a new liver.

Can cartilage for worn out or damaged joints be far behind?