[Dev] Voidwatch: Response To Feedback

Okay, so you admitted both that your shell had a strong monopoly on HNMs (apparently because you're awesome) and that it was towards the end of people giving two shits about HNMs.

I mean, if you server transferred, waited for a shell to die, server transferred, waited for a shell to die, server transferred, waited half a year for N.legs then 5 months for D.ring and then 3 months for E.body then we're looking at least 2 years of HNMing and (unless I'm off the mark here) likely over 3. That's three years of irregular sleeping habits for N.legs, D.ring, and E.body.

You think THAT system is preferable to Voidwatch?

Restricting content in a game we all pay the same monthly fee to people who only have the time and resources to do them is where I feel the previous systems in this game failed. I often keep wondering why those sympathetic to the HNM system relate claims to skill/effort or any form of competition. It isn't. It's a coin toss on who can hit Enter the fastest or who had the best bot. The challenge should lie in the kill itself, not the means to access the fight in the first place.

I will totally agree that people should work for their drops and if you don't have the motivation and skill to achieve the objectives given to you, then you don't deserve the item in question.

Events like Nyzul, Salvage and Einherjar were ideal for this purpose, They required some amount of skill to do consistantly while at the same time not artificially putting roadblocks in place so that a minority of players had access to said content. The same could've been said for AV and PW back in the day also. SE retardation aside, those drops meant something when those two mobs went down.

Either way though, the game is a total mess at the moment and ultimately, it's going to take nothing short of a miracle to see any kind of relevant fix to any of these kind of arguments any time soon.

The skill barrier comes through the fight itself. This was previously discussed in the eight or so hours this thread has been going. At the time Fafnir was released, he was pretty damn hard. HNM content scaled as the game progressed. Would you really argue that Tiamat wasn't harder than Fafnir?

Even at the end of the 75-era, I saw enough newbies trying Fafnir and wiping to say with complete resolution that he was probably harder than 85% of the Abyssea content (relative to level caps) and all of Voidwatch (it does not take skill to use temp items and spam through WS/spells to proc)


I have also previously argued what HNMs were better than other 75 content due to the competitive elements. However suffice it to say, any of these systems was far far superior to Voidwatch/Abyssea.

How is what you described in any way different from Voidwatch? Voidwatch has been out for like 6 months now (compared to your 3 years). Do you think you could get Toci's Harness if you "camped" Pil 3 hours a day for 5 months?

This system guarantees Player As a fair shake. The problem (if you want to find a problem with it) is that the drop rates on rare items are too low to "force." You can never be guaranteed a drop. The odds of doing 500 Pils without a harness is the same as the odds of doing another 500 Pils without seeing a harness. In that sense it is more daunting than HNMs, where X% claim rate and Y% drop rate and Z spawns per day could more reliably be turned into an average amount of time before you received whatever you wanted.

Fafnir was hard when it was first released, of course. Plenty of idiots have wiped to it over the years, also, this is true. My question still stands, though. If the fight is hard, why do you need to justify the additional competition in claiming? Idiots will wipe to the mob and never get the drops, while the more skilled players will get them.

It links back to what you said on the previous page - how is someone who got an E-Body from Odin supposed to be less proud than one who gets one from Nidhogg? The skill element is there in both instances, no?


In terms of the fights themselves, I would agree with you. The means to actually fight the mobs, not so much. Say what you will about claiming but there is no gratification or skill in being able to hit a macro slightly faster than another guy.

I guarantee you if Voidwatch was world spawns, the people right now who have Toci's would be a completely different player set.


And my point is that Player A got that fair shake in the HNM system. If he lost to Player B, there was a reason for it. Player B put in more work. By very definition that means Player B deserved it more.

And the drop rates being so low, combined with the personal drop system and the shout-group nature of Voidwatch, IS the very problem. Gear is completely arbitrary.

I would prefer to know that I would eventually get something so long as I put in my hours when I could. Even if that means three years. The time sink required may seem extreme, but WAS completely justified at the time. King items were presumed to have infinite shelf-life and were top-of-the-line. Had the game stayed at 75 cap with these items retaining their worth, I would not regret what I did one single bit. I only regret it now because it is such a waste with how SE ruined the game.

Zero-sum competition between the player base is good. It drives the player base to work harder to top each other, it increases the fun of the game, it increases the value of accomplishments.

Moreover, it is a way to introduce rarity where effort will have a direct effect on reward rate. The claim system rewards the group who brings the most people willing to actually pay attention. That sounds pretty fair imo.


If we are talking about gratification, how about this.

In an LS, I had a vested interest in seeing my LS succeed. To that extent, I was more than happy to pass drops such as Ridill to members. On top of enjoying the competition, there was incentive for me to camp after I got my own gear for the sake of LS success.

There is none such for Voidwatch. I will never do a Pil after I get my Toci's. I do no shout groups other than ones in which I need kill credit or if it has drop I want. If there was an option to pool gear from my chest to the general group, quite frankly I would not do so unless there was someone specific I wanted to give a drop to and could be assured they would get it. I have WHM but I never go WHM to groups because it is just not worth the effort of playing WHM to see random people succeed. Comparatively I was nothing but WHM, a job I loathe, during HNMs. And I loved every second of it because it was about doing my part for the group to win.

Voidwatch is me against the random number generator. And sometimes trying to see how much I can win on the parser by.

The multiplayer aspect has become a hassle to the objective, rather than an integral aspect which I enjoy. That's a hallmark of poor design, and it culminates in the game being a negative experience

Yeah, Toci's would be owned by botters and botter's friends who are able to schedule their sleeping habits around "Pil's pop times."

The HNM reward structure in the "fairest" shells came down to whoever put in the most hours. The only skill it relied on was skill with the alarm clock to wake you up and remind you when windows are. If you claim otherwise, you're pretty much full of ***. None of those fights were remotely challenging and plenty of the hardcore Player Bs on my server were totally incompetent and horrible at their jobs. I saw more Seiryu's Sword+Ridill E.body WARs than I care to think about.

I don't think incompetent players deserve to get the best gear, but that's why I liked Salvage and pre-linking patch Einherjar. The HNM system rewarded incompetent, high-playtime players with good gear. Voidwatch rewards incompetent (and competent) players with good gear and the higher your playtime is the more likely you are to see a reward. They both have flaws, but I don't think it is hard to make the argument that the HNM system was more flawed.

Well, doesn't that say a lot about camping system in general? A hell of a lot of wasted time?

While I think the king adjustments were mind-bogglingly HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE, I got all my Abjurations from Einherjar in less than six months going for 30 minutes twice a week, and my BB items by doing KS99s.

I'm more than happy to say I made the most of my time doing things that way rather than spending hours/days/months/years with my thumb up my *** in the Aery/Behemoth's Dominion/Valley of Sorrows.

The whole PvPvE thing with claims did nothing but bring out the worst in the playerbase, at least in my experience.


And how is that kind of LS loyalty and team play relevant to just kings and claiming? I've been killing mobs and passing items to see my LS get Empyrean weaps and +2s for the last year, and they've passed Dynamis currency to me for the sake of getting my Aegis.

In regards to Voidwatch, I will totally agree. All sense of that kind of team play is thrown out the window, but guess what - everyone else hates it too.

Not even going to bother repeating the statistics on botting. But I will give you an extensive argument as to why the solution to botting is not to remove world spawns.

Think about it like tests in school. Kids cheat. But holy ***that doesn't mean we get rid of tests. Why? Cause there are things testing accomplishes that are worth preserving. So we just proctor kids better. It's the fault of the teacher if he's dumb and leaves the room and the kids cheat. Likewise if people botted, that's a flaw of SE's policing/enforcement, not of the system.

I don't like botting at all because I think it interferes with the purity of the competition and it removes dedication from the equation (don't need to get up to camp; leave your toon overnight to claim and your shell can boot you). But there are numerous reasons world spawns are still best in spite of this, numerous things SE could AND SHOULD HAVE done to fix botting. Again, it's like cheating in schools. You won't get rid of it completely. But you have to settle for doing the best that you can because there's an intrinsic good that can only be accomplished through testing.

They could have downloaded bots and coded the game specifically to break the bots or flag users with the bots. They could have prosecuted bot makers (I don't believe for a second that App was shut down by SE, that was a cover excuse because the guy already got his 100k selling NASA in each server).

My personal favorite? They could have set up a mole faction of employees with fabricated characters; they apply to HNMLS and when they get in they collect info. Then SE bans the shells that are botting. Imagine a Salvage style mass banning slaughter with SE announcing they had moles in HNMLS gathering data on who was using third party programs. At the very least these sorts of things would have instilled the fear of god into people and made botting much more of a secret thing between a few people in an LS vs. people having their whole LS link-camping or using NASA.

SE was just really stupid about third party tools and going after stupid ***like Windower. I hate WoW, but Blizzard knows how to manage their ***. Blizzard was at least rational in delineating harmless add-ons, and even sanctioning them, vs. bots. This allowed them a lot more control over what tools got out there and how users employed them. Then they went after a bot maker in court to prove they were serious about eliminating cheating and protecting the integrity of their games.


How is that not fair? Person at work who puts in more hours gets paid more.

(inb4 stupid "managers get paid more than unskilled labor" argument against the analogy; in an LS you are generally all considered equals -- leaders who rewarded themselves first are considered bad leaders)


If you sucked ***, you should be kicked before you get anywhere near a Ridill and E. Body. I don't deny there were WARs out there who could have used the gear better that never got it. But if you took a random sample of all Adaberk/Ridill WARs and pitted them the general population of WARs standing around Whitegate, I am 100% sure that the Adaberk/Ridill WARs would win.

That was difference between Zerg and my other shells - dead weight. Maverick in Asura, a shell I founded, was just too full of dead weight from its origins as a casual shell. People weren't there for windows, people who couldn't *** stand on the feet and flailed Fafnirs. Hell, even people crafting during windows. We didn't claim very much because quite frankly we didn't deserve to.

Also, the Seiryu/Ridill thing was usually to show off. It was done to show the Ridill wasn't fake because so many WARs tried to pass off as having one by equipping their Seiryu.

And also any shell worth its salt isn't going to give a Player B an item if they suck ***if that Player A has significant seniority and can use it better. Most likely because such players would have been kicked. But even so, vetoes happened all the time. That's where all the favoritism accusation comes from. And I have people in my shell, grandfathered in, who know outright they are not allowed to lot on certain items because they would be a waste.

This gets a BIG DITTO from me. Ive had good and bad HNMLS. The good one had almost everyone quit and disband the year before abbysea. I put in my time with +270 events in Sea/SKY/Limbus and got everything I could wear at the time (but Heca-body and didnt really need that for DRK) We never got enough drops in Einherjar and my jobs didnt need anything from there anyway. Dynamis I put in +200 events and had 5/5 sets for every job I had at the time and some extras drops on mannequins.

Now............. I missed the boat on VW and still need city wins, and since I dont have the balls to make a shout group Im left out. I think Im a decent player with great dedication but this game doesnt go down that path anymore. I would even like to do all the WOEs but got in half way on that and only seen wins on 7-11.


Its probably impossible to program this crap but its like the game needs a sliding AI that can adjust difficulty level according to the number of players in party AND then guage thier abilites as the fight progresses. (are they screwup newbs) and cut them a break and make the mob do less TP moves or something.

THEN Make the drops more luck based for these guys and drop rates better for bigger groups with more procs and skillful wins.

Dont bash me too hard. Im just spouting crap here and wishing everyday I read these forms and check for updates and messages that something will spark a change for the better. It would be so nice to have a "static event and or group" that I could look forward to during the week rather then some lame new goal of lvling my NPC the last 14 lvls while my mule sits in Jueno waiting for that "OMG Party shout for something fun" Thats about all thats left since I have have 12x 99 jobs all merit capped with gears out my arse sitting on NPCs.

PS I know something is wrong with the game cause I have been on game alomost every day for at least a couple of hours to upwards of +12 on weekends since PS2 release and I have not logged in at all for 4 days out of the last week or so and the 3-4 I did was only for a couple of short excursions or muling loot.


Eca

It's a waste of time because the camping was done under the presumption that the gear would have infinite shelf-life, and then Abyssea came along.

That's not a fault of camping, that's the fault of the game shifting from a model that rewarded hardcore competition to coddling casuals.


If a model promotes the playerbase to organize in a particular positive way, that is a plus for the model. Kings were pretty much impossible to shout. It just wasn't a practical model of organization. It promoted Linkshells which was good because it promoted certain aspects of play. Groups got to improve their collective play.

Abyssea promoted lowmanning, not Linkshells. I've already made extensive arguments as to why large Linkshells is a superior model for the game than lowmans. But I will grant you that same type of loyalty can be generated on smaller scales, however I would argue that it is much stronger in a competitive environment when it's your group vs. others in a zero-sum environment.

I wish you had been around to tell them that! Ridill stopped being a sign of a good player after the 2H patch hit.

Counting them out, I think about half of the Adaberk owners I know were decent players, which does beat my standard FFXI assumption that 90% of the players are functionally HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE. Unfortunately, many of the good player's Adaberks came from Einherjar so it doesn't say much for HNMs.

If you put good items on monsters that can be beaten with alarm clocks, people with alarm clocks are going to get the good items. Not people who are skilled at their jobs. Being willing to disturb your sleep cycle for a year does show dedication to your job, but dedication to your job and skill with it have never been very strongly related in my opinion. (See: Relic weapons)


I can use my fingers to count the number of people I would have done Salvage with at the time and only two of them were from HNM shells. That's because Salvage used to take teamwork and basic sense, which is a different skill set than HNMs used.

You could argue that maybe the intention of the devs was to promote Linkshell play through Voidwatch again, but of course, with the drop/temp system being how it is, the dev team have pretty much killed that incentive to form one straight out when you can kill most tiers with 17 other random people, morons or not.

The playerbase seems to have long outgrown the idea of big LSes now and yes, Abyssea is pretty much the big reason for that. It makes my heart sink somewhat to see the amount of 2-boxing that takes place these days and by extension, the lack of LS teamwork and bonding.

Like I say though, I feel that kind of LS loyalty would be just as prominent if there was an environment available to nurture it. Pre RR/Scars Abyssea was still very much LS-centric, after all, since not many things could be lowmanned at that stage. You give Voidwatch a more traditional drop system or even just an "add to pool" option, and people'll be forming LSes and going with their friends again faster than you can say "I got another bloody Mantis Eye! ._."

If we are going to toss around personal anecdotes, let me share mine.

Joining my first HNMLS and tanking Cerberus that very day, the level of play from the support crew was like night and day. I didn't have to spam /p for Paralyna. I got haste every three minutes without asking. I could switch gear to cast and use JAs without them bitching about blinking.

In the entirety of my experience in FFXI since NA release, there are exactly three people I have played who I did not meet in an HNMLS, were not in another HNMLS, or who did not eventually join an HNMLS, who I would count as a good player.

That's not to say there weren't bad players in some of my shells. But I would put the median/mean player of the worst of my HNMLS experiences far above the median/mean player of my average shout group any day of the week.

In fact, let me say this. Ridill did become obsolete. However, pre-80, I would STILL pick the average Ridill WAR against the average GA WAR every single time. Because the people that cared most about WAR likely put in the time to get a Ridill beforehand, and while it's not perfect, there was definitely a correlation between that effort to get a Ridill and skill.

excuse me but what the hell are you talking about?
I think you drove your wagon a bit too far outside by comparing a Bot to a cheating paper in a test greenhorn.

Abyssea was about lowmanning? how come i went into abyssea with a whole alliance almost everytime and we got a lot of ***done and it was fun (oh my).

If you seperate the ideal of certain types of ls needed for certain types of events then you are clearly still living in 2007.

You were still going into Abyssea with a full 18 past Heroes?

notsureifserious.jpg


No my ideal is one LS for everything, the HNMLS.

Go read the other posts in the past 12 hours.


The argument is simply that cheating isn't a reason to change a system, it's a reason to police it better. People bot, you crack down on bots. You don't get rid of HNMs. Same way that you proctor kids when they cheat on tests instead of getting rid of tests.

i am serious. 3 different spots held and killed various nms for +1 and 2 items empyrean etc.
Exchanged members when needed for certain pops etc.

WHAT!?!?! YOU FOUND MAGES THAT CAN READ THE CHAT LOG!?!?!? WHERE ARE THESE MYTHICAL CREATURES??????

Your mistake in the past was playing with idiots, not playing with non-HNM players. People that aren't idiots tend to recognize each other and band together.

I did this for a while too.

Then people realized, *** LS and their item lines, this ***is easy enough to do with just a few people. If I go off with my friends, I can do only the ***I want and not have to help others.

Combine that with all the people that quit because they realized "Hey this game *** sucks now."

Then I didn't have enough people to go with 12. But lucky enough, Abyssea was ezpz and you could still get ***done without that many people.

And my point is that there is an exceptionally strong correlation between idiot and non-HNM player. Not 100%, but exceptionally strong.


Such groups were called HNMLSes.

here:

1) You didn't find competent socials.
2) Competent people band together.
3) HNMs are willing to accept less competent people in exchange for high playtime and/or botting.

Things don't look good for you brah. If you seriously believe what you have been saying there is a good chance that the competent non-HNM players on your server were actively hiding from you.

1. Socials are infected with people who can't get into an HNMLS but attribute that to elitism rather than the fact they suck
2. As groups once called HNMLS.
3. But who must still meet a minimum level of skill that is far far far far higher than that of the average player sitting around in Whitegate or Port Jeuno.

ITT: If you were not in a hnmls you were an idiot.

edit: I'm an idiot ._.

A 80% chance.

As I said, not perfect, but exceptionally strong correlation.

I'd put it at 90% but apply it to the entire server population.

do we play the same game?