Asura Inflation - What's Going On?

If SE is going to create Mario-Party-style randomization and gimmicks and call it "content", then they should add similar mechanisms that can potentially work in the player's favor.

Meh you'd just leave until you hit the good one. That'd be even lamer.

You already instantly give up when it's one you don't like but if there was chance of enemy defense- or player attack plus you'd literally exit until you hit it. It'd lose all meaning.

It doesn't have to be a random positive aura. It could just be a proc'ing method. Emotes? Elemental trigger? Position in the arena?

Bumba, for example, sits in a circle with 4 or 5 different ramps. I don't know why we can't pull him to a different a ramp, for a different effect. (Maybe not the best example, but you get the idea).

Nobody's upset about the randomness, they're upset about the difficulty. If you removed the randomness and made WC always land a 6 and the desired aura/pet show up every time, but required the player to kill it 10x to unlock.. nobody would be any happier and there wouldn't be any more R30 sets available. If you kept the randomness and reduced the difficulty to the point a shout group could win when the random rolls lined up, everyone would do it and not really care about the randomness. Groups with the ability to clear V25 aren't refusing to try 10x because of the luck element, groups without the dedication to clear it are using the luck as an excuse to not try.

If you remove the randomness, but keep the requirement at winning once, you've effectively just dropped the bar from 'be able to consistantly perform the strategy correctly' to 'perform the strategy correctly once', which is a significant change to the difficulty. Same goes for whether it's a negative aura or a positive aura, if it doesn't result in a lesser amount of attempts or gear required, the complainers won't be happy. They don't want it to be less random, they want to be able to beat it.

TLDR; There isn't gamewide crying about randomness when a boss everyone can beat has a 10-15% droprate item. The randomness is acting as a proxy for people upset they either can't, or believe they can't, clear the boss. It's easier to say 'its not skill, its just chance' than to admit they don't want to put in the time needed to create a group capable of winning.

This is all assuming that the gimmicky and abstract strategy mischief's group devised is the only way to win, which is extremely unlikely. The boss hits like a wet noodle when aura is down, and DT only builds when you do large damage with aura up. Presumably, you are intended to swap to lower damage weapons and proc the aura before resuming damage. For that matter, Denounce could be a reaction to spike damage too and we'd never know because everyone just bangs the same strategy out complaining about the luck involved.

I doubt SE's going to change it anyway, so this discussion is beyond pointless.

Well no, if it was made so that you had to beat it once so that you could upgrade and then had to beat it again (or at least try to RP the gear - RP proportionate to damage done more seriously) then people would have had the motivation to actually clear them more. Keep the high DPS check and add management but remove the random aura and pet (Bumba). It's too late to fix this now, but it didn't need to be such ***design in the first place.

Fair point that randomness to cockblock is no worse than a low drop rate, but the last part is what we've been saying all along - it is time needed that is the real factor, but it is not always "want" for some of us when we have limitations.

So everyone without clears might as well quit and RIP FFXI. For those with lots of free time and can work their life around FFXI still who've already made a stage 5 Prime, and I've seen some with stage 5 and a stage 4, are they really going to play forever to make more Primes? Doing the same mundane run day in day out? I don't see where the motivation is anymore.

I know people are going to say the game has been at this point several times in the past but I barely played so haven't experienced that myself, with the difference being they might be seriously genuine when they say there really will be no more content forever now.

This argument makes no sense. If you're going to quit because you don't have the motivation to make more primes, how would getting a Bumba clear and spending 3 weeks RPing your set keep you playing? You finish RP in a fraction of the time one prime takes, it's not providing some new content.

Being able to beat Bumba V25 or not doesn't change how much content is in the game. Attempting and failing is something to work at, and gives you a reason to play. Once you've beat it, it's gone and irrelevant, unless you count a couple weeks of cheesing RP. I don't understand what argument you're trying to make.

That's the hardest part of any MMO. You could say the exact same thing about top tier FFXIV or WoW raids, the hardest part is finding an entire group capable of doing them.

But, free time is still an excuse. If you personally are 'good enough' to do the content, and geared enough to do the content, and play enough to care that you can't do the content.. then you've already invested thousands of hours into FFXI. You're not going to tell me you don't have an hour a day to set up a group. If you look at the people around when you're playing, quite a few have the gear too. You don't need a group that knows the fights and has every bit of gear already, you need a group that matches your time and is willing to learn the fights and get what they're missing.

I'm not chasing any primes. I spent something like 4m on armor (on 2 chars) and then saved up another 1m and gave up the chase.

Better hope you don't clear all the V25 odyssey bosses then, because after that you'll have *** all left to do in the game and will quit.

Good thing SE didn't remove the luck elements or make it easier, I guess, or they'd be down a player and all the other people in your situation would have one fewer person to group up with for their clears.

Or they could add loads of content easily by changing a few variables and making them lv145 content.

V25 is too hard and no one fights it outside of initial clear, so you want them to add V30?

I think he's suggesting that you can just copy/paste all old content and change an 80 to a 145 and BAM you'll have a new, perfectly balanced version of Salvage, Limbus, Campaign Battle, and all the other defunct systems.

People really think that game design is this simple, and nobody at SE has figured out they just need 1 SQL Update statement to generate thousands of hours of content. They need to hire these guys as consultants STAT.

That explains why SE has lost 10 billion dollars last year.

Depends on your definition of "lost money" because (it seems from a quick Google, I'm not really up-to-date on their financials) they made a profit last year, but lost valuation because their stock went down. It's not as though they lost billions of dollars of cash by selling games at a loss or something.

It is that simple; "Good enough for who it's for" doesn't need to be new and creative and interesting it just needs inflated stats and a tasty carrot and you're golden.

(and an obligatory purple reskin, of course)

They'd fight a literal purple lump of ***that farts as it's attack as long as it drops something with more STR than the currently have. Easiest to please most predictable people ever. They'll complain but they'll do it. That's all that matters. Look how many morons did 1000+ shinryu. You take Fe'e and make it 149 and drops KC+1 they'll queue up for *** years.

You got your sky/sea already through escha NMs, and they already did limbus(barely)/salvage/nyzul at 99, and then re-added all that gear again via ambuscade.

They could toss out re-colors again, nothign new there but as they've already done that before there's low incentive to do it again, plus they're a 3rd/5th of a staff and have to account for the insane ramp up of player's power, providing varied objectives, and decent rewards.

You'd sooner see a random HTB(bahamut please guys) than anything like full content from this current group, game had a good run but maint mode sounds about right for its current state

Not any time soon.

Skirmish would be easy, for example, regardless of how hard Maletaru thinks it would be.

Every developer and designer in the world just felt their skin crawl and the dead ones are rolling over in their graves right now.

The idea of "just inflate the stats" and "add a tasty carrot" as if this is like a single lunch meeting is asinine. You can't just poof new rewards into existence in a game with thousands of items and dozens of equipsets per job for 22 jobs. It takes a lot of intentional design and thought to come up with a single piece of armor that will be useful to a single job for a single set, especially if you want people to actually give a *** about your content. Coming up with equipment that effectively motivates people who play only WAR and also people who play all 22 jobs on one character...is not a simple task.

The idea of "just bump up the stats" of every mob in an entire piece of content is also laughable. What level should the trash mobs be in Einherjar? Is that balanced for a single player and also for an alliance of 18? How? What level are the Slave Globes? How does the level of Olla Pequena compare to that of Olla Grande? How important are stat unlocks in Salvage 145 compared to Salvage 75? Are there bosses which have had their difficulty changed by the existence of GEO and RUN?

You can't just blanket increase every mob to an arbitrary level and call it content, you have to make intentional design decisions and modify things so that they make sense. You also have to consider the many ways in which the game has changed since the content was originally designed. Tons of new spells, abilities, jobs, and gear have been added which have radically changed the way the game plays.

This, and designing and implementing the new items you're adding to the game as the carrots, take employees time to do, and you have to pay them for their time. This is not something you flick a toggle for and it goes live.

You also have to implement the entrance system for this new version, how are you going to handle that? Are they going to share instances with the original content? How? Is there a time limit/KI? Add that.

Don't worry, their janitor/programmer should have it done by tomorrow, it's just a quick update to the level of the mobs, and throw in a carrot for good measure.

I'd like to say I'm not this sadistic but I did 300+ Lilith E for 5/5 x2, 300+ Gin and probably 300 Kin so far.

Lilith BC takes 10 devs 3 years and $1m to develop though right?

Literally, if Skirmish didn't even have armor and just gave fat EP for Mlevelling it could be fun. Make it stacking KIs and 18 man content or something. Yeah people would sell spots, but RMT sell Mlevels anyway.

OK, open up a brand new solution in your favorite development software and create the Lilith fight and all her drops, including VE, E, N, D, and VD versions of the fight, right now. Let us know when you're done.

It was pretty clearly a sarcastic joke.

Oh, you think Lilith model and TP moves etc didn't exist before the BC was added? oh dear.

Taking RDM AF and making it purple - $5m, 3 devs, six years amirite?

I teach modelling and texturing, animation, rendering, etc. - it's easy as f these days with how many resources there are out there and the power of PCs.

Take a look at this page and let me know if you notice any differences.

Here's what I notice at a quick glance:
-All TP moves changed
-Gyves added to outside of arena
-Cannot be damaged from outside Gyves
-Changed status resistances
-Changed elemental resistances
-Add Dark/Light gyves to TP moves
-Added Spite Wardens, 3 new NMs
-Removed 1hr
-Added new TP moves
-Changed spell list

And then they had to design all the stats on the armor, weapons, and accessories, decide on drop rates, determine how the drop rates will be affected by difficulty, etc.

Or IDK, maybe they just added +50 to her level and changed the color of RDM AF and they were done.

They could have, but they insist on making wine for the juicebox crowd.

That's the part that matters.

Take 50 years or 5 minutes, same result. Over complicate it so you can say "we would do it if" instead of just doing it.

Tell me more what you're saying here... You're saying they made all the TP move animations fresh for the BC? Gyve model existed already.

Are you talking about creating assets or coding the content? Turning off a 1h is deleting a line of code and changing some variables for stat resistances, etc. This is not hard work and I'm not even suggesting this level of effort for new content.

Admittedly I forgot about the wardens, but aren't they just models taken from another Adoulin BC?

The armor was literally a change in hex code, 30 seconds.

I'm talking about encounter design. To create the Lilith HTBF they had to do all of these things.

I think you're looking at this entirely too much from the perspective of a graphic designer. Sure, the warden models may have existed before, but they didn't have HP, MP, STR, VIT, TP moves, elemental resistances, status immunities, etc. before. Even if they appeared in a previous battle they weren't scaled to Ilvl 130, 135, 137, 145, and 150 (or whatever the levels of the HTBF are). They gave them different damage resistances (design decision), made them spawn from Gvyes untargetable (design decision), made a different amount spawn per difficulty (design decision), and had to implement all of this in the code.

I've never looked into the code of FFXI but I would be extremely surprised if removing a 1hr was 1 line of code. Even if it were, you'd still need to make the decision to do that. How does it affect her AI? Did the fight get much easier/harder when she's in Trance mode? Maybe it changed the TP% she started using TP moves at, or forced her to spam TP moves until it was over. These are design considerations you have to think about when removing a 1hr.

Gyve model existed, but they didn't have -meva, zombie, or doom effects in the story mode version of the fight.

See how all these things had to be designed, by a human being, and then implemented, by another human being?

They decided on a 6-second doom instead of 10 second. They chose a 6' radius for these effects. They decided to put them on TP moves instead of making them time-based. They decided to add BP wall. They decided to make her immune to some effects and not immune to others.

Apply the same thing to the Malignance armor, accessories, and weapons. How much DEF should they have? Base damage? What's the appropriate amount of DEX for the pants? Should they have attack or not? Every stat you decide to add to a piece is an intentional decision that has to be made in the content of all the other pieces of gear in the game, so you create an item that useful but not totally broken. They had to decide which jobs to put on which items.

I'm not a programmer but from what I know I don't believe it would be that hard to reuse assets and level adjust it.

What is most time consuing is probably testing, and god knows what the process for that is when they released AV and PW and other things before they were fixed. F it - get the user base to be free testers if that is time consuming or costly, they'll get feedback on how hard things are or what is broken pretty quick.

I don't think it would be hard to add ilvl versions of quite a lot of content like Skirmish, Meeble Burrows, a few HTBF.

Puddings BC is a pile of ***as far as content goes IMO, but they could easily add one to each of the Aht Ughan BC zones with another stolen item quite easily.

If its so easy, why are private servers still all buggy pieces of ***after literal years.