Dev Tracker - Discussion

I was sort of hoping they realized their error in effort:reward ratio and were trying to revamp stuff before dumping a third mistake on us.

I gave up with that in january 2017.
It's pretty clear that is their model now.
They can't offer new content at a rate fast enough where they can afford more comfortable effort:reward ratio, so they're doing their best to skew that to make so one specific event lasts as long as possible.

Hopefully just like Omen Campaign changed everything for omen, the same is gonna happen for Dynamis Divergence eventually, one of these days, but not anytime soon. Summer?

Just think the time spent on making mounts and costumes could be put towards actual game development !

Actually, no. The designs for the mounts are so so so soooo horribly pathetic I could have made them. Just pick a mount, any random mount and you'll notice two things:

1. Your character NEVER moves. They bounce up and down to the elevation of the area, but the head, body, limbs and such do not move. You can't even emote on the mounts.

2. The mount is literally just a reskinned chocobo with a copy paste job over the actual beast.

They probably took all of five minutes to combine the /sit or /sitchair emote to the motion of the mount so that it looks a little neat. Other than that, they added zero animation to the effects. Which should really give you a solid idea of how lazy they have gotten with creating content.

anyways, where's my Ullikummi mount!?

Even so we could do with less mounts and costumes and more actual content.

Yo I've been saying this since the first god damn mount.

Who gives a *** about having 60 different mounts. Even though it's only a few minutes time to make a new one, it's time wasted.

If we really wanted mounts put them behind a .99 cent pay wall. Just to get people to outrage about incoming pay to win !

Hell for 99 cents they could have plus 30% speed on travel Just to make it worthwhile.

I think several MMO do or did.
FFXI included, to the point many people complained about the Effort:Reward ratio being too skewed towards the latter on multiple periods of time.

I guess there is a degree of subjectivity here, but Omen pre-campaign and these Relic+3 upgrades are quite further away from those examples I was making

I'd go with the business justification argument: Creating mounts is just a superficial way of showing their "work"; they can circle back to management and say "look, we created something". Though it literally took less than 5 minutes of production time, its something feasible they can touch once and be done with it, and put it on their performance review that they did something. Actually creating new content requires that they know how the game works, then balancing NMs and mechanics, creating drops and pools, and outlining the entire "game" behind the event. The have to plan, build, develop, test, and implement new stuff, and they are just lazy as ***when it comes to any of that. So their DEV team has decided: "Just keep rolling out campaigns and bonanzas and login events. Eventually we'll finish something tangible, even if it takes 6-8 mos. In the meantime, enjoy this"

They should re skin Jeuno in black and white call it Escha Jeuno and you fight NPCs throughout town.

I bet we all agree on that, but the point Bukki is making is that even if you take all the time they spent for mounts/cosmetic stuff and take it away from there, it still would be nowhere enough to offer even the shittiest content ever.

Hell I'd take a message saying we are working on x or y. Remember when they used to keep us in the loop. Now it is trust us we got something. Then months of silence no content.

To be fair, there's like one guy working with the game







....and he doesn't think Carby is a radioactive squirrel.

I wouldn't mind re skinning unused zones and added new NM that drops weapons armor etc. Or at the very least have new high tier battles of the lottery NM in the zone.

Just think they add another person to the dev team we could get content 2 times a year instead of one.

I've got it Mog Bonanza every day for an entire year ! The problem I have with campaigns is that it kinda is a way out of fixing content. They could fix voidwatch or increase drop rates in Omen. But instead they say well. Let's use a campaign instead of doing actual work.

No because if they did that, they are more or less obligated to deliver. This habit of benign neglect is a planned maneuver to not promise anything, that way they can't be bound to any particular plans. They can literally freelance the entire game and just go with the flow. And ignore any other glaring issues (SMN) while feigning this "busy at work" ***. They aren't doing anything that takes any real amount of time. They are just fillerbustering the year with superficial crap so in the long run it looks big, but to the consumer its garbage.

They did used to have the whole project roadmaps for a year or so mapped out, but they realized that paper trail did more harm than good because players had a good memory and would call them out on their faulure to deliver. At this point, you're lucky to get update notes.

Like you said the campaign is a way of keeping people subscribed while people thinking they are hard at work. It fixes/improves content just enough to make people do it. It isn't a permanent fix it is a temporary fix to avoid doing work.

So instead of working on summoner they say we'll look into it. Hoping you forget about it.

Instead of adjusting monk. We'll look into it.

Standard dev speak to say what the fan base wants to hear and do absolutely nothing.

This is actually how many corporations work. They divert resources to projects they care about, and just let the ones they don't give a damn about drag on and on.

The funny thing is, years ago, people would reason that more people playing = more revenue = more money to pay dev team = more content for the end user. We all see that idea is a crock of ***and they decided to cut out the middle man and just keep the money and deliver nothing good. The FFXI community has been completely content with that so far, so they have no intention of changing anything.

The day when the collective mass of players decides to leave ffxi, they will either release an expansion to bring them back, make it ftp, or close down servers. They are handling this game like a real corporation, right on down to straining every penny out of this cash cow they can get.

Yea the psychology of a MMO is interesting. It attracts people that are willing to put up with a lot of ***. Hoping things get better. Even if in the back of your mind. You expect things to stay the same.

As much as people hate free to play. If it meant they would deliver some substantial content. I might say bring it on.

An expansion would be unexpected because that would require actual work. I'm not saying it won't happen but seems unlikely.

I'd laugh really hard if the expansion was just Escha tons of zones. With some really nice armor sets that don't require 10,000 items to upgrade.

MMOs are literally built for addiction. We all know this.

Give you just enough incentive to keep people playing. Through dailys and chores, and taking advantage of that "missing out" feeling.

So I'd put in a Aeonic style system for really good armor set specific for your job. And of course it would be glowy armor. Just because.

You can't make it obvious or too easy...

Making things that glow/flashy that are exceptionally hard to get keep people paying for a long time.

Making them pay to obtain only works once.

Maybe it's interesting how glowing was seen as some sort of reward. In before 100,000 plutons for relic upgrade. For ultimate weapon.

Yeah kind of what I meant. They want this to last as long as omen

Dynamis was a let down

Zero spice and just drawn out...

No accessories

Long lock out

Soso gear

Grindy

Not even challenging

Omen is atleast fun

#smndidnothingwrong

Omen and Dread are both regoddamndiculous.

The reward:effort ratios are epically skewed. Disgustingly so. I haven't seen a relic piece worth the effort yet. (there are decent pieces, yes, but worth the value/effort, *** no)

If you haven't seen a piece worth the effort, you haven't been looking.