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Warren Castille · **12-04-2015, 05:30 PM**

"Please troll us."

God damn, SE, the fucking STATE of your servers right now.

Lydia Lightfoot · **12-04-2015, 05:39 PM**

This isn't surprising. They'll probably just remove the function for being able to queue for something other than solo and full group. It fits with their agenda of removing the MM from MMO by forcing players into numerous solo duties over the course of their questing, rather than making those duties scale by party size and allowing players to complete them in a duo, trio, or light party if those players prefer to do their questing with friends.

Melkire · **12-04-2015, 05:39 PM**

Yyyyyeaaaaah, think they might've goofed with this announcement. Usually for issues of this magnitude, developers will just state, "We've identified the cause and we're working on a solution, please stay tuned" and leave it at that. Prevents malicious users from deliberately exploiting and/or impacting the game in a harmful fashion.

...good to know though, I suppose?

EDIT: That said, I don't see a conspiracy here to cull "massively multiplayer," just a genuine, honest-to-God issue with... dun dun dunnnn... their infrastructure.

Caspar · **12-04-2015, 06:50 PM**

I just read from all this "squaresoft please give our team money so we can improve our server infrastructure and hire some more programmers." ;_;

***Teadrinker*** · **12-04-2015, 08:35 PM**

(12-04-2015, 06:50 PM)Caspar Wrote: I just read from all this "squaresoft please give our team money so we can improve our server infrastructure and hire some more programmers." ;_;

From the small team they've got the amount of issues that DON'T make it live is pretty damn amazing.

These guys have to be working themselves to the bone.

Warren Castille · **12-04-2015, 09:18 PM**

(12-04-2015, 08:35 PM)Teadrinker Wrote:
(12-04-2015, 06:50 PM)Caspar Wrote: I just read from all this "squaresoft please give our team money so we can improve our server infrastructure and hire some more programmers." ;_;

From the small team they've got the amount of issues that DON'T make it live is pretty damn amazing.

These guys have to be working themselves to the bone.

On the one hand, my hat off to them.

On the other hand, you don't get to brag about having five million accounts and then complain you have no staff. You're either successful or you aren't.

Quote:I am but a humble caveman lawyer, who doesn't understand how to do server infrastructure.

Ryanti · **12-04-2015, 09:25 PM**

(12-04-2015, 08:35 PM)Teadrinker Wrote:
(12-04-2015, 06:50 PM)Caspar Wrote: I just read from all this "squaresoft please give our team money so we can improve our server infrastructure and hire some more programmers." ;_;

From the small team they've got the amount of issues that DON'T make it live is pretty damn amazing.

These guys have to be working themselves to the bone.

They probably are. IIRC Yoshi had a little moment in one of the recent Live Letters in which he made a passive aggressive comment about being understaffed that caught a lot of people's attention. There's been a lot of rumor about that recently. I'm starting to believe a lot of XIV's revenue is not going back into XIV. I don't understand why Square isn't re-investing back into the game. XI wrapped up all new content, how about putting some of them on XIV's staff?

(12-04-2015, 09:18 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: On the one hand, my hat off to them.

On the other hand, you don't get to brag about having five million accounts and then complain you have no staff. You're either successful or you aren't.

It's not so much Yoshi being a hypocrit as much as it is the Marketing Department trying to do their job. If I was working in that department I'd definitely be trying to emphasize the game's success and mask the failures. Trailers and such are marketing tools after all.

Warren Castille · **12-04-2015, 09:35 PM**

I didn't mean to imply hypocrisy; I believe both statements. I'm just frustrated that SE has a hit on their hands (maybe?) and are letting it languish on shitty servers.

Ryanti · **12-04-2015, 09:40 PM**

(12-04-2015, 09:35 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: I didn't mean to imply hypocrisy; I believe both statements. I'm just frustrated that SE has a hit on their hands (maybe?) and are letting it languish on shitty servers.

It really makes me frown when I realize that this MMO has gone from an inspiring Cinderella story of redemption to a game in which the dev team has lost their way in regard to their own audience in the matter of a single delay and a single patch. The populace of XIV have shifted to such a pessimistic stance since 3.0 got stale, especially since 3.1. Who can blame them? I'm starting to feel it.

To be fair they made some design mistakes, not just technical ones.

It's starting to feel more and more like Square Enix five years ago to me.

This technical crap on top of an already disappointed fanbase is not good. Not good at all.

I don't want to say that the fanbase is abandoned the game, but XIV has been bleeding subs for months. 3.2 Needs to fix a lot of this shit or else it's going to continue.

Warren Castille · **12-04-2015, 09:44 PM**

(12-04-2015, 09:40 PM)Ryanti Wrote:
(12-04-2015, 09:35 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: I didn't mean to imply hypocrisy; I believe both statements. I'm just frustrated that SE has a hit on their hands (maybe?) and are letting it languish on shitty servers.

It really makes me frown when I realize that this MMO has gone from an inspiring Cinderella story of redemption to a game in which the dev team has lost their way in regard to their own audience in the matter of a single delay and a single patch. The populace of XIV have shifted to such a pessimistic stance since 3.0 got stale, especially since 3.1. Who can blame them? I'm starting to feel it.

To be fair they made some design mistakes, not just technical ones.

It's starting to feel more and more like Square Enix five years ago to me.

This technical crap on top of an already disappointed fanbase is not good. Not good at all.

I don't want to say that the fanbase is abandoned the game, but XIV has been bleeding subs for months. 3.2 Needs to fix a lot of this shit or else it's going to continue.

I don't think they know how to hold their fans right now. The casual content is okay, but making it the focus is a mistake. Conversely, there's not enough people digging into raid content to make it more than it is. So what now? More Lords of Verminion, an aside that can be experience entirely by a level 15 character? More Alex divides, which don't really lend to one another?

Making an MMO appeal to wide groups is an unenviable task, but they're doing what they can. Me? I just want the fucking roulette queues to work.

Ryanti · **12-04-2015, 10:02 PM**

(12-04-2015, 09:44 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: I don't think they know how to hold their fans right now. The casual content is okay, but making it the focus is a mistake. Conversely, there's not enough people digging into raid content to make it more than it is. So what now? More Lords of Verminion, an aside that can be experience entirely by a level 15 character? More Alex divides, which don't really lend to one another?

Making an MMO appeal to wide groups is an unenviable task, but they're doing what they can. Me? I just want the fucking roulette queues to work.

I'm loyal to this game, so yeah that's my only concern right now. Because I really think a lot of this stuff can be fixed with the right communication.

I'm gonna make a case here as to why I think people are being alienated.

I think LoV should have been delayed until the fanbase felt like there was enough content to go around and they could be happy with 'misc' content. When the Gold Saucer came out, there was a lot of positive reception for it. But that's because it came out right in the middle of a huge content surge, right between parts 1 and 2 of 2.5 which IMO was my favorite patch cycle.

But because it came out right now when the fanbase is begging for straight up relevant content, not side content, it's become a symbol of the devs not knowing what the people want.

They have shifted their focus more towards casual content since Heavensward, and I think they've gone too far in that department. It alienates the legacy players, it alienates raiders, and it alienates what I believe are the majority of Square's loyal, consistent people who sub (And inevitably provide long term health to the game): midcore players.

They have really screwed midcore players with Heavensward. Dividing the audience between super casual and super hardcore is a very, very bad idea. In 2.0 we had Ifrit, Garuda, Titan Hard which were excellent midcore bottlenecks. The first half of Coil were great midcore bottlenecks.

Coil itself was a great midcore bottleneck because unlike Alex Savage, the difficulty spikes were never extreme. A compelling story motivated players that might not have tried that stuff before to pull their pants up. There were no ridiculous DPS checks where tanks had to go full out STR gear to meet. Coil also was great hardcore content too because usually the last fight in the series was THE hardcore fight.

And then in later patches, the extreme primals became great midcore content.

I feel like Heavensward was supposed to have great midcore content in the form of Bismark and Ravana. However, Bismark was dead on arrival because of i180 upgrade hunt weapons. Which left Ravana.

Since Alex Savage wasn't out yet, all the super hardcore just congested Ravana and Ravana became a scenario where a lot of midcore players felt like it was the only fight they could do, and they had to mingle with the hardcore players.

Since then, we've had exactly two pieces of mid-core content. That and Thordan. All of the other midcore content is completely obsolete now. Hell even Ravana is obsolete now. So all midcore content players have to do now is Thordan. That's a far cry from launch.

Midcore content has gone from being the majority of the content to the extreme minority.

Warren Castille · **12-04-2015, 10:11 PM**

I'll contest that. Primal Hard Modes were stepping stones to your Relic Weapon, which at i80 was better-or-equal to anything you could get besides. Upgrading a relic to i90, the top of the heap, was simple; Do your dungeons at level 50.

The midcore hasn't ever really been catered to: Any primal weapon lagged behind the casual relic weapons, and raid content DID have a steep jump: Groups able to clear T2 before the Enrage "strategy" still ran into trouble in T4, which had a very clear DPS requirement. That doesn't even touch the multi-phase gauntlet that was Twintania.

I think Heavensward is very young right now, and it shows: Alexander was useful for a while, but right now as an unlocked encounter it means 1) the only people doing it need it and 2) that means you're getting 8/8 lots on every drop. This makes the encounter unfun and extremely unrewarding.

Extreme Primals are a weird spot: They offered a reward in 2.1 that was tantamount to a new relic, but a new relic didn't take that much work in the first place. They buffed T5 weapons to be i95 for a slight edge, but multiclass people could still just fill up on the weekly rewards, or just do new relics.

Defining "midcore" is difficult. I'm someone who has cleared all of Alexander and has zero desire to go back. I find Void Ark unfun and the encounters a bit tedious. How does SE capture my attention? I'm content to just do my Trial/Expert/Daily Hunts and be done with the game. I spend maybe an hour each day playing, and only because I happened to find MCH fun (despite it being not good in specific encounters).

The game isn't too different now than it was in 2.x: Log in, clear <content you prefer>, pass time until reset. The issue now is that the only content "worth" doing are the dungeons, maybe, if you're not raiding, which few are, and if you're not why care about esoterics?

I don't envy them, but right now balancing what is on tap is impossible.

Ryanti · **12-04-2015, 10:42 PM**

(tl;dr at bottom)

(12-04-2015, 10:11 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: I'll contest that. Primal Hard Modes were stepping stones to your Relic Weapon, which at i80 was better-or-equal to anything you could get besides. Upgrading a relic to i90, the top of the heap, was simple; Do your dungeons at level 50.

That's true, but the whole idea was that you did something hard before doing something long.

In order to get any weapon at i90 at launch, you had to do one of two things.

1.) Beat Turn 5. (Doing something hardcore)

2.) Beat the three primals on hard mode and then farm your butt off. (Doing something midcore + time investment)

You had to do something that was not a faceroll fest to get a i lvl 90 weapon. Heaps of people were stuck on Titan. I found the fight to be very challenging in AK gear. I found Coil harder in Darklight gear. This is coming from a guy who eventually led a static through T13, so I'm definitely not a casual.

Relics to me never became casual, even as they shifted away from having to clear hard content to do. They eventually ended up being a little ridiculous. But it all comes down to defining what casual is. I define casual as logging on for half a hour - two hours max a day, doing roulettes, getting your tomes and doing the 24 mans.

It is truly casual to spend months grinding out an ultimate weapon? Was it truly casual to spend loads of time doing atma, then doing all those animus books? Or spend literally millions of gil melding for the steps after? Farming light?

Nah.. I think the Soldiery tome weapons and onward are casual. I think true casuals would be just fine with using 'x' number of tomes to buy that weapon and just be fine with it.

But I see time investment as something that isn't casual. If you're going to invest an extreme amount of time on one thing (relic), even if it's easy to do, that's still a major investment you're making in a video game. Free time is as valuable to me as it's ever been. It's a time sink, much like raiding is, except you get one thing instead of a chance for multiple things.

So, I judge casual-ism to be something that doesn't require 1.) too much skill and 2.) time. I didn't go for the relics after atma. I thought it was too much time investment. I was doing Coil at the time and I thought Relics were just as hardcore!

Why? Because I was a college student with a part time job. But I spent every ounce of my free time RP'ing or learning how to be better at PLD for my midcore static and playing very seriously during our raid times, spending a lot more time learning the hard stuff than a casual would, and doing things like clearing T5.

But, my definition of casual can be different from other people's.

(12-04-2015, 10:11 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: The midcore hasn't ever really been catered to: Any primal weapon lagged behind the casual relic weapons, and raid content DID have a steep jump: Groups able to clear T2 before the Enrage "strategy" still ran into trouble in T4, which had a very clear DPS requirement. That doesn't even touch the multi-phase gauntlet that was Twintania.

Was the DPS requirement because of low item level, or because of lack of skill? Was it because the DPS were bad or because they could not find a way to get better gear besides farming Myth?

So, I can't really form a reasonable angle on arguing against that. However, I will say that in my own experience I had slight problems in T4, but nothing too major that wouldn't take a week or so to conquer. This coming from a group that did the Enrage strat (I in fact didn't do it the honest way until later). Running into trouble is totally midcore content in my opinion. If we classify Titan hard as midcore than oh boy.. a shit ton of people had issues clearing it.

But, at the same time, you could go into a party finder for Titan hard and beat it. You could do a Party Finder T4 run and beat it. It wasn't unheard of. Not common, but common enough to be totally doable if you were geared in Myth and worked with your party to do it.

Was T5 like that? Hell no. At launch, Turn 5 was the fight you absolutely needed a static for.

Nowadays we have two turns of Alex you NEED a static for: 3 and 4. Yet no midcore people are trying Alex Savage 1 and 2. Probably because of the dps checks in those first two turns. Probably because of the horror stories. I dunno honestly! I don't see a lot of PF's for those two turns at all. Why was it that I saw Coil all the time/primal fights all the time in PF in the past and now very few Alex 1 and 2's?

(12-04-2015, 10:11 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: I think Heavensward is very young right now, and it shows: Alexander was useful for a while, but right now as an unlocked encounter it means 1) the only people doing it need it and 2) that means you're getting 8/8 lots on every drop. This makes the encounter unfun and extremely unrewarding.

Extreme Primals are a weird spot: They offered a reward in 2.1 that was tantamount to a new relic, but a new relic didn't take that much work in the first place. They buffed T5 weapons to be i95 for a slight edge, but multiclass people could still just fill up on the weekly rewards, or just do new relics.

Defining "midcore" is difficult. I'm someone who has cleared all of Alexander and has zero desire to go back. I find Void Ark unfun and the encounters a bit tedious. How does SE capture my attention? I'm content to just do my Trial/Expert/Daily Hunts and be done with the game. I spend maybe an hour each day playing, and only because I happened to find MCH fun (despite it being not good in specific encounters).

The game isn't too different now than it was in 2.x: Log in, clear <content you prefer>, pass time until reset. The issue now is that the only content "worth" doing are the dungeons, maybe, if you're not raiding, which few are, and if you're not why care about esoterics?

I don't envy them, but right now balancing what is on tap is impossible.

I agree on your first Alex thing. That might be why there aren't PF savage parties. Maybe people are just sick and tired of Alex.

Extreme primals, Coil and Alex.. I know I'm making points entirely from my point of view, but the reason is simple. As you said:

(12-04-2015, 10:11 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: Defining "midcore" is difficult.

Yes. Yes it is.

It's hard to explain the in-between. What's easy and what's hard. It's difficult to reason exactly what kind of challenge people truly want when they say things like "I enjoy how this game doesn't hold your hand" and then a month later talk about how the raids are too hard/dungeons too long. Then to have complaints about how easy content is when 20% of the playerbase hasn't even cleared Alex 4 normal.

I just personally think they got it really right at launch, and now it feels so much more unbalanced than it used to. I wanna do Thordan, but I feel like the last three or so phases is too hard for PF. I wanna do something harder than the faceroll dungeons, but I don't want to be in a static anymore. Right now, Thordan is really the only thing that caters to people like me.

But Square says that Thordan is for statics stuck on Alex 2. The way they perceive that content is to help raiders, not provide the non-raiders with challenge. I think that's gonna get them in trouble with the people that play this game every single day and sub every single month, and that's gonna hurt their bottom line.

And yet, ironically...

(12-04-2015, 10:11 PM)Warren Castille Wrote: The game isn't too different now than it was in 2.x: Log in, clear <content you prefer>, pass time until reset. The issue now is that the only content "worth" doing are the dungeons, maybe, if you're not raiding, which few are, and if you're not why care about esoterics?

I don't envy them, but right now balancing what is on tap is impossible.

Truth.

Whether it be more staff, a different philosophy moving forward, further effort of communication, or even changing up the Diadem which fell on its ass when it came out when it probably was supposed to fill in the gap a bit..

Something needs to happen.

TL;DR: Midcore content is hard to define, I don't see timesinks as casual, and with such diverse opinions like this I don't envy Square Enix but they need to do something about the people inbetween casual and hardcore.

Aysun · **12-04-2015, 10:45 PM**

I'm curious why they had to change any of the Duty Finder properties to begin with at that update... I never had problems before other than the usual DPS queues sucking sometimes, but that was to be expected. At least it WORKED. And we could join in-progress parties reliably to help out our friends when people bail. It's all broken now. Sad

And PS Ryanti, doing the three extreme primals to get your i90 weapon 2.x was so not just a mediocre alternative to T5. You have no idea how much pain I had in PF parties til I got my bow. Titan Ex is forever a scar.

Warren Castille · **12-04-2015, 11:42 PM**

It's impossible to determine what's the "right" difficulty" for anything. Clearing the EXes for i90 weapons was truly hazardous because of Titan EX: I was seriously almost driven to quitting because I kept failing the encounter because no one else could hold up this part of the encounter. I did beat it eventually, and I never looked back. The gimme 3-pack of tokens is still on a retainer.

So what is there to do now? Diadem, for one: It can drop 210s and it isn't overly difficult, even if it is a bit grindy. Doing Void Ark once a week gives you a guaranteed 210 piece of Esoterics gear. Grinding your Esoterics every week is fairly standard; Queue, do dungeon, receive progress. It all adds up to a fairly straight-forward progression.

It's par for the course to hit the ilvl cap prior to 3.2, which will give us more Alexander. It's the same progression we've had since Crystal Tower II came out. Hardcore grinding will give you more than two jobs at the cap, casual dailies will push you to 1-2 jobs ready. It's just the motion right now, really: Do chores, receive gear that is more than sufficient. It comes down to the classic argument of progression: If you aren't raiding, why do you need raid-tier gear? Why do you need 210s if you aren't pushing Alex Savage? If you aren't doing Coil, why do you need i90?

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