Live Letter from the Producer, 1/12/16Follow

Good stuff in this letter.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/278439-Letter-from-the-Producer-LIVE-Part-XXVI-Digest-%2801-12-2016%29?p=3524617#post3524617

Highlights:

- Alexander SM was too hard, and the difficulty for the next hardcore raid (Alexander Midas) will be between the difficulty of Coil 2 and Coil 3. Based on completion data, Yoshi believes this difficulty will still be sufficient for most players.
- The devs thought about implementing a cross-server raid finder and keeping SM difficulty as is, but they decided the difficulty would still be too much for most players to handle.
- Alexander SM raid iLevel drops will be increased to be the best in the game (he used a comparison of i215 compared to i210).
- More structure/objectives coming to the Diadem, along with a slight reduction of iLevel (i205 from i210 was Yoshi's example).
- Hinted at being able to obtain higher-tiered weapons more quickly through tomes/relic chain as weapon iLevels from hardcore raiding are increased.
- More housing plots coming in 3.3, and after that apartment-style housing in Ishgaard.

I think those were the big takeaways.

Yoshi-P seems to be heading in the right direction with these changes.

Which part of the video are you referring to? I'm aware of the 700k figure from the census (kind of surprised the active playerbase is currently that high), but I don't really want to watch this entire vid.

EDIT: Mr. Happy hates Steam, apparently.

Edited, Jan 12th 2016 9:32pm by Thayos

Yep, sadly and based on unofficial parse (as in parsing actual numbers), 3.0 > 3.1 lost 200k people but 3.1 brought in a lot of fresh blood (free month and steam sale helped), so that along with yoshi stating he's focusing on newer players (still) and easier game content, may as well just get rid of any content that requires some knowledge of your job and how to dodge AoEs and..dare I say, actually work with people. Heck, a lot of people didn't even bother with 3.1's story which proves people indeed are far more motivated when the content requires it or else they won't even bother with it. Whether you liked the story or not, the fact people didn't do even that short trek tells a lot.

While a lot of people are still "sub 60" that's usually the newer people replacing the people wanting content that left the game and the updated "are you an active human player" requirement requires at least 1 mount, which people who make alts immediately get but can't utilize off the bat, so even those numbers are messy. (Since chopping out the bot numbers still produced far lower numbers than the supposed 5 million adventurers.)

So even if the typical comback is "Well it's more numbers than FFXI!!!!1" doesn't mean too much when XI's content base was catered to a variety of players since they knew leveling would make a big chunk of your time investment, so you at least had **** like BCNM/KSNM/ETC, Campaign/Garrison/Besieged/Assault etc that were always relevant for some reason or another in your progression, so even if XI never exceeded 700k for its time, it was stable and the content flow was never continually obsoleted making new and old players likely to return to it and even drop rate wise wasn't a problem, you can literally count with 1 hand how many times you seen a god drop only their elemental crystal and absolutely NO wanted items, since getting "trash items" still were useful to people gearing alt jobs or catching up, you just were more than likely on a DKP system and didn't want to waste 9 points on Aquarian Head and rather save it for W.Legs.

Though what definitely is true, the game has a far steeper decline in comparison to 2.0 - 2.5 where declines and peaks happen, but post HW it's far more severe now based on the Japanese parses and server monitoring.

I was also surprised by the number of new players. XIV seems to have it easy getting new players to try the game, but they aren't convincing them to stay even up to the level cap.

The other thing that shocked me was the amount of players who aren't going through the story content. It wasn't an issue with JP and EU players, but NA players don't seem all that interested in the story of the game. It's not my favorite MMO in terms of it's story, but it's not garbage. It's also just something I'd expect from players of an FF title.

Japanese players are responsible for nearly 80% of the A4S clears. That alone is mind-blowing enough, but what compounds it is the fact that they have half the population of the NA and EU servers. Now we know that JP players do have static groups, but we also know that they're far less resistant to running in pick-up groups. I honestly wonder how much of an impact that makes on these numbers. There really has to be some reason that JP players are clearing content at such an exaggerated rate.

Nothing too interesting with the patch. 2 more dungeons to grind. Another tome grind. More of the same. We'll see what they do with Diadem. If I could could use Diadem to get around needing to cap tomes every week, that'd be great.

If you were current up to the last installment, it would take you less than a day(average play time) to do what's been added. Hell, if you skipped all the cutscenes you could finish in less than an hour.

Kinda sad because there's a clear disconnect between player and content. It's as if the masses wander through the game going through the paces, completely unaware of what Eorzea is, who they are and what they are there to do. I honestly think people just don't care about the story. I can't really blame them because it's not a great story that draws you in, but I think it's a big part of why so many people just quit. They don't feel there's any reason for them to be there.

I wouldn't say "better" in an objective way, some do that simply because of the social contract. I play on a JP server too and I'm in JP LS and I've seen both nice people that were nice because they wanted to but also people that did it because of "obligations".



"Good" isn't a good term to describe it. Sufficiently engaging, for now (but they're dragging the questions for too long), but poorly written and with a "main character" that basically just watches and does nothing (even XI had more "actions" of the player character during cutscenes).

Edited, Jan 14th 2016 7:05pm by xizro

The amount of time it takes isn't really relevant.

What it comes down to is this:

- My time to do stuff is limited
- X gets me shinies
- Y does not

If you don't think that's going to cause Y to get overlooked by many MMO players, you're delusional.



You really have to ask why relic has to be a high priority in a game where new gear consistently becomes useless every few months?

Edited, Jan 14th 2016 3:34pm by Fynlar

I think it's more of a cultural thing. Japan especially, people like to focus on ONE game, get good at it and that's it. Big reason why so much of the population was still on PS2 for FFXI (along with PCs not being all that popular over there.) So I wouldn't be surprised if most of them play this and absolutely nothing else. Asia in general seems to do this with many of there games, Korea with Starcraft, all of Asia with Street Fighter, etc Even in the street fighter community, Asia tends to adapt to things and go with it, North America, complain, complain, nerf, nerf.

Then you also compare the North American general discussion forums...1600 pages of threads compared to Japan's 120ish. 32,000 threads vs 2400, my guess is they complain a WHOLE lot less about most things and just work with what's there.

The amount of storyline added in the last patch was pretty small, and I've heard it's much less consequential than previous story patches, and it's not gating any content.

I do want to do it, but I'm not at all surprised that people aren't prioritizing it, especially when it's so easy to knock out at any time.

Maybe this weekend, if I go through all of my roulettes and have some extra time, I'll get 'er done.

All of this, exactly. The term "obsoleted" is wildly overused. My paladin does all the content in the game except for hardcore raiding, and I'm still wearing a few i190 pieces, and they're totally fine.

EDIT: Whoops

Edited, Jan 14th 2016 9:50pm by BrokenFox

That's a matter of opinion, and I can think of many, many people playing this game who would disagree with you.



It might as well be. You know how when esoterics tomes will eventually go uncapped, no one will care about them by that point anyway because they will be replaced by the next 450/week only tome? It's the exact same idea.

You know how I know that's what's going to happen? Because that's the same thing that happened with poetics, and soldiery before that, and mythology before that. It's basic pattern recognition.



Thing is, if you don't stay on top of it, all you're doing is chasing the dangling carrot.

Look at zeta weapons nowadays. Not very long ago, they were among the best weapons available. But for those that slacked on it and try to build one nowadays, it's pretty much with the realization that you're only doing it for the glamour.