Asura Inflation - What's Going On?

I can't believe we're still talking about incentivizing people who have V25 clears to help those without to get theirs, as though somehow there's a shortage of people who need V25 clears, and they NEED someone with the clear to help them get through it.

I understand trying to create an incentive for V5, V10, V15, but if you think Asura doesn't have enough people in need of V20 or V25 clears to put together a party, you're insane.

First time clear bonuses would be in the right direction.

The ones with clear get a bonus for the assist to one without the clear. But it would have to be so substantial to outweigh zero effort RP from cheesing that it would be broken.

The premise being argued is that if there was some incentive to help people get clears, then the R30 crowd would be lining up to carry people through T3/4 v25's, and that's chocobo plops.

It's not bad design if the hardest difficulties require a static group with fixed time commitments. This is true even in casual friendly games like XIV and WoW, much less XI. If a player doesn't want to commit the time and effort required, that's their choice.

You're being dogmatic, religious and plain ignorant. It's an MMO. All content needs "replay value", period. Regardless of being 1% or 100% done with Odyssey, all players need a reason to go back.

If Ody V25 dropped items that convert an Old Case +1 to an Old Case +2.... that's still something.

Another Maletaru hot take:
It's fine if you don't want to try hard FFXI (or anything in your life). I won't judge you for that, and nobody else should. If you don't have time to commit to a group dedicated to developing strategies, working on teamwork and coordination, improving your RP, etc. no big deal. Just sit on your R20 or R25 gear and enjoy your casual playstyle.

...But you probably shouldn't expect the same results as the try hards if you don't, and asking for a game to be re-designed so that the try hards have a reason to come help you get to their level, is a bit much for me.

You can't be surprised if your income isn't that high if you never took an advanced degree, vocational training, or did any kind of self-improvement. It's fine if you live a modest lifestyle and don't need to go on 6 vacations a year in your yacht, but don't ask the government to force them to train you in their discipline so that you can achieve the same success as them. Just enjoy the relaxed lifestyle you chose, it's fine.

It's like going to the gym for 30 minutes and wondering why you aren't seeing the same results as the guy going for 4 hours a day. You get out what you put in; the person logging in for 1 hour a night to do a single PUG seg farm and 1 attempt at a V25 is not going to get as much progress as someone spending all day discussing strategy, watching videos, acquiring new gear, running tests, and then spending 2 hours repeatedly farming the same NM with the same group of people every night.

I guess the problem is SE not encouraging people to carry though. Or maybe the fights are just too luck dependent, or they had dust in their eye or their controller is broken, who knows, could be anything.

Am I? What's the replay value of a Master Trial, then?

Seriously, though - with most MMO content you run it repeatedly because drops are RNG. Run it long enough and you'll eventually get all the drops, though. Gaol has no drops, but you have to climb repeatedly, and the higher difficulties include RNG elements in getting the win instead of RNG in drop rates.

Being done with v25's is no different than getting 100% drops from any other content.

I tried to kiss the ring but ended up kissing ground.

The 900 people who need clears is enough. The 14 of those people who are capable of building a successful group is not enough.


I do agree that any incentive should drop off midway through. Drive people to the base and let them climb.

hey I'm with y'all- there should be some sense of "these folks were willing to go psycho on the content, so their gear is now better than yours"....but we're gonna hit a point where us try-hards can't fill a damn party because the numbers have dropped off so much- and part of that will be our own fault for not fostering the growth of the community.

Yeah, there's plenty of people who need their v20/v25 wins to form up parties; and they're not gonna form up on their own. There does come a point where you can't carry someone any further without their active (and quality) participation in 6man content, and having a couple old heads as friends to help with proper group assembly and strats is a massive advantage. It doesn't always mean that NewGuy didn't work for his clears. It just means maybe NewGuy couldn't find 5 other equally new people to team up with and share the same motivation, and fit in to an existing group.

I'd rather help out some people who didnt' have the advantages I had regarding Odyssey and beef them up than never be able to find a fill-in for Sortie Runs.

Just to confirm something:
If you got carried through your V25 runs, as in you never killed V0/5/10/15/20, you cant lead a run into V25, correct?

No, you can skip V0/5/10/15/20 and just get V25 and pop it. As long as you have the NMs below it.

So if you kill V25 Gog, you can pop V25 Gog.

If you kill V25 Aristeus, you could pop it, so long as you've killed V20 Dealan-Dhe, Sgili, U Bnai, and Gog. Even if you've never killed Aristeus before the V25 you killed

Ah ok
So much for hoping for drama when a V25 group with 5 people who were carried has their leader take a break.

Granted that advancing in FFXI only takes 2 things - scheduling your life around it and more play time, I love how ironic your comparison to real life is. They are literally inversely proportionate by design.

I don't think you can actually carry people through a V25 clear at T3+. T20 you can probably carry 1 person on Kalunga and maybe Mboze if they are a roll COR or something, but even then you can't really purely carry people on T20/25.

Except, it doesn't actually need more play time, it needs more efficient or consistant playtime. If you played an hour every other day with the same static since odyssey came out, and all of the members were at least bare minimum intelligence and willing to improve, you'd have everything you want capped today. 'Scheduling your life' around a hobby isn't that unusual, either. Plenty of people have a weekly MTG meet, sports meet, DND meet, football viewing meet, etc..

You can't carry a completely idle person, but you can definitely carry the type of person who wants to buy a clear and has already bought all their other gear if you put them on a basic role and give clear instruction. This goes for everything except maybe Arebati/Bumba25(and those are only tougher because they need 2 compatible jobs). The hard part isn't being geared enough and learning your own role, it's assembling 5 other players willing to do the same.

The life scheduling thing more applies to pre-aby days where you had long respawn windows/lower rates/slower movement+less fast travel options, with almost everything being instant/easy to get to/time limited its not hard to be able to get 2-3 things done in a 2~ hr window, and you can choose whatever that window is that day/week/month and higher drops tends to lead to quicker progress made over time unless its something very rare like an omen body.

Really just comes down to you being able to make friends of a similar schedule, most time consuming part of xi/mmos is getting everyone together and on the same page

Gaming has more of a anti-social image contrary to the hobbies you've listed. People who do those activities want that social aspect while gamers often do not or at least not to that extent.

People you meet online aren't your friends, they are just strangers who happen to have a interest that overlaps with yours, as soon as that common denominator is gone the "friendship" is too.

On the lower tiers, the GEO can largely be carried, but that stops being a thing at V25. V25 is ridiculous with how little margin for error there exists, which is why I said it was pain with little reward.

It is extremely telling that you think this. I've gone to the weddings of more than one friend I met on FFXI. I've had at least two over to visit my home, and I've gone to the homes of a few as well, including traveling many hours to visit them. We tell each other about what's going on with our lives, confide in each other, share stories, help each other through the hard times and celebrate the good. We're absolutely friends by every measure.

The problem with content requiring a static is how volatile statics can be. In the time since v25 started, it seems like I've seen a number of statics come and go, either that I was involved in or knew people in, all for varying reasons.

Some lasted 2 runs because one person wasn't willing to learn or try new things or was just an ***. Some lasted a few weeks or months, but split up because people were banned, quit, or burned out. It only takes one person to break a static, especially when most other experienced, well geared players capable of being in one already are, a problem that's only going to get worse. Then IRL stuff come up. We're all at least mid 30s, most probably in their 40s and 50s, life at this age can change rapidly and with no warning sometimes for weeks at a time.

I'm not advocating SE change anything anymore, not that they would anyway. At one point I thought v25 could use some balancing, but I think I'm coming to see what Thorny has said several times about the prng factors in v25 is right and, at least for me, that volatility and randomness is what makes it engaging and interesting. The problem is it does require lifestyle commitment to keep trying until you win, that's easier said than done and is easily disrupted. If you keep at it regularly, eventually you'll win, but keeping 6 people together long enough to do it seems to be the real challenge. So there may be a huge pool to pull from that "need" the content, but when you narrow it down to capability, timing, commitment, and then things outside their control, the pool gets a lot smaller.

5 people with a regular schedule not interrupted by RL that also need the content and are capable and geared enough to do it? Yeah, that's kinda the hard part. I know I'd get more done if I stayed awake 1-3 AM NA peak hours, but can't.

After getting my main char V25s I 2boxed my 2nd char as BRD through quite a few T1+2 to get his V25 clears since I could then enter him. Quite a few are sing and AFK for BRD, and even those you can melee I can 2box 2 melee to WS. I think I could 2box BRD to a few V20 T3 too and Bumba V20 tbh.

The only hard ones to 2box a BRD on are those that dispel and say Ongo to kite the pet.

Once again, noone has really talked about making V25 easier. I think Mlevels have made them a lot easier already. We're talking about incentivising people to do them again if they already have the clear mostly, and making RPing less time wasting secondarily.

They absolutely need to lower the content difficulty, either through direct stat nerfs or preferably through lowering the mechanical RNG BS. This is to make it more accessible to the general population, most games do this when new content comes out.

This will also anger the players who crawled through broken glass to beat the content originally. They had to chew iron and excrete nails so they think everyone else should have to endure the same pain they did. It's a very human and also very toxic mentality as it results in lots of elitism and gatekeeping which just shrinks a community until it dies off. This very thread is discussing the results of SE not doing this. Elite players who walked 10 miles barefoot through snow uphill in both directions not only have zero incentive to suffer through that again, but are incentivized to do the opposite. After all if everyone has a trophy, then no one has a trophy. If everyone has V25 clears, then no one has a V25 clear.

They should eventually, the same way they have other content. The question is has enough time passed since introduction?

SE could also make ml50 more feasible which in turn makes v25 easier a little.

The thing about this is, there's no new content coming out.

You know what one of the biggest differences between people who cleared V25 and people who haven't is? The people who cleared V25 were willing to farm R20 augs at V15, and R25 augs at V20. If you expect to clear V25 before farming R25 gear, you're not being fair or realistic.

It's already been made considerably easier, you can go straight to V25 on your T1-T2. You can farm RP on V25 T3s with only V20 clears. It takes less than half as many segments to get a piece to R30 using V25 RP than it took us to get R20 at V15, then R25 at V20, then R30 at V25. You have Sortie gear and ML50 available to make V15 and V20 clears that much easier. The average gear and master level of the playerbase has increased, including potential to have people with R30 gear help your group. I don't think it needs to be directly nerfed too, I think there's a perception problem where people won't even bother because they can't skip to V25 T3.

It almost feels like Matsui had a more casual approach to the game, and Fujito thinks it should be more like Tanaka envisioned it should be. Cause Fujito actually was in charge well before it was announced to be the case.

It's not based on time but content availability and player groupings.

The leading edge of players, the small group with both the time and skills necessary to complete the content, are going to be the first ones to climb the mountain. Game designers can put all sorts of stumbling blocks in the way, but their going to cross it eventually. Surprise Hard Mode basement bosses and the initial V25 T3 ridiculousness are good examples of this. Even with those insanely unfair gates, the leading groups found ways to get around them.

Second group is going to be the people who have the skills but not the time. These guys want to climb that mountain and are capable of doing so, but real life commitments prevent them from putting in as much time as the first group, and so they end up beating the content just on a much slower pace. This group benefits from watching the first group, since time is limited any amount saved from not having to make the same mistakes is hugely beneficial.

Third group is people who have the time but not the skill, these are the guys that want to beat the content but never developed enough to lead groups or be picked by the second group. They are the ones that have to either be "carried" or put on an "easy" job to get to the top of the mountain. We all have friends in this category and party limitations are the only reason its hard to get clears for them.

Last group is the people without the time or skill. Like the third they want to get to the top of the mountain but it's functionally impossible for them to do so. They also make up the bottom 30~50% of most gaming populations.

So once the first two groups have climbed the mountain, "difficulty" and "exclusivity" stops having any positive effect on the population. The people who can climb it have climbed it. They now need a new mountain to climb and as you introduce that new mountain, you make the older already-climbed mountain easier for the last two groups to go up.

MMO's do this all the time, FFXIV Is notorious about it. Every expansion results in newer level cap and most importantly newer vender purchasable gear that is stronger then the older content's gear. This is how they enable easier access for those bottom two groups, by powering up player stats so that the bottom groups of players can go back and finish that older content. People complain about it "my gear gets replaced every expansion", but it's the reason the game got so popular.

Yes we know you like your trophy and want to keep it special and shiny. While that might be great for you, such things are death sentences to online games.