Dev Tracker - Discussion

Buy moogle amp, pay 2 win.

Too soon?

Gotta win first, may RNGJesus have mercy on your soul.

The only reason you'd say it doesn't feel casual is because skill and effort don't correlate to +2s. And certainly not ones that are for the jobs you want.

In that sense, how could it be anything but casual before they really put Prime Weapons into the mix?

If you find it casual and relaxing, I don't need to argue an opinion. I just don't share it.



Ultio Grip......<.<;

You have to drop TP, but otherwise, no real penalty

Don't want to force you to change your mind, but a lot of people seemed to share the fact that, despite many legitimate criticism it received for several aspects, it was perceived as very relaxing compared to Odyssey.

In Odyssey you have very little space for error, you need to beat the opponent, you have a plethora of limitations (no same job, no subjob), a lot of gating (bound behind segments), requires very specific setups and quite frankly despite what many of us expert players may boast while flexing, several of those fights are quite hard, at least compared to the rest of the current game.

In sortie you have a single gating with no external requirement, an additional KI to lessen the effects of that gating, no limitation whatsoever, there's plenty of setups you can go with, don't even need a full party, there's plenty of space for errors and so on.
Yes people who were able to do 8 bosses before Prime Weapons could complete Empy+3 in less runs, but so what? Big deal. I was able to get >40k per run (6 bosses) by shouting and getting pt members through PUG. Try to do that for Odyssey T3 and so on.

Of course a lot of people was perceiving that as more "relaxing" than Odyssey. It's because it is more relaxing, less stressful. Actually a lot of people was calling it "boring".

Now with the Prime Weapons being there and the incredibly high amount of grind required, every single bit of Gallimaufry matters, making the event being perceived as more "stressing" I guess?
But it's still nowhere close to Odyssey.


The one and only aspect I can concede where Odyssey might feel "less" stressing than Sortie is maybe the time constraints.
Every sortie run lasts 1hr, whereas Odyssey has a variable time that goes from <15 mins to how much you want according to how much segments you have gathered before.

They fixed the Lusterless Scale drop in Sheol: C immediately. Literally Day 1. Absolutely no shot that the Amplifiers aren't working as intended. Say what you will about the XI dev team, but one thing they will not tolerate is the player base getting an unintended benefit.

I echo this sentiment. I want to supplement it by adding that SE also influences our strategies by some very subtle, allowed mechanics. For example: (1) You can enter Ody Gaol with Entrusted GEO bubbles. (2) You can also enter Sortie with "Sublimation: Complete" status effect.

These aren't massive effects, but certainly SE's way of saying some mechanics are still relevant, even if a particular job is under-utilized in that specific content.

TLDR: Working as intended.

These imo are quite very possibly an oversight, probably due to the functions they use to dispel you on entry (doesn't dispel amplifier buff, potpourri, sigil, entrust, etc), but one that they most definitely went "huh, you know what, that's fine", way more than the "amplifier giving a fixed bonus!!111!!eleven". Which seeing all the math involved, and the fact that you don't consume it unless you deal at least 5%, and you gain RP in increments of 5%, I'm really convinced, I am 110% convinced is all on purpose.

This is 200% unexpected behaviours that they don't bother/can't fix. It has been a growing issue everytime something new is implemented and they only fixed it when it was game-breaking (the WS wall in Gaol, primeval brew for Shinryu,...)

They took their good time to fix the Shinryu thing though. 2 months? 3? Altough that's from when it became widespread. That bug has probably been there since the beginning but only a select few knew about it.

In the case of Gaol amplifiers I think it's a mixture of them finding out too late + people being very upset/unhappy about Gaol, and they thought their unaccounted "exploit" wasn't too bad and was good enough to keep a large amount of people "happy" without them having to do extra work to fix it and do something else to ease up Odyssey stuff.

But, like I said before, we'll never know the truth. I still seriously doubt that they designed it on purpose to work that way to offer people an "easy" way to solo/lowman RP. If they meant it to be that way, they would've probably promoted it that way and/or would've thought about a less convoluted way.

It's a *** up but it's not an "error". It gives the right amount but they didn't realize how big of a mistake it was to do it that way.

They don't know the difference, lucky for you. They coded it in correctly, without knowing what it means.

What they thought would happen far underestimated what actually happened. Intent error, not mechanical error, if you need an eli5.

I feel like we reached the lowest in this serie of interesting topics to discuss.

Unless, of course, within their mix of spaghetti code, they couldnt figure out HOW to fix it.

You really think "deal 5% damage, time out, get full credit" was the intended result?

The amplifier is what complicates their intentions since its a 50% penalty to use one. You can't just go in do 5% and get decent RP, you need to spend the segments on the Amplifier.

There's nothing to fix, this is intended behavior and I don't think it's that out of balance. You also aren't getting full credit, you are getting partial RP and no credit for the kill, which is required to apply the augments.

As was pointed out above, taking advantage of this requires considerable effort. Doing the climb even at v20 is not trivial and out of reach for many players with the combination of jobs, gear, skill, and group required, as well as the # of segs required. That has to be done by someone to get this done, then you have to be geared for the fight need the kill for. Even at v20, a mistake early in the fight can cost you the run, there are several mobs at v20 and higher that could wipe a group in the first 5-6% if they aren't prepared or someone makes a mistake, Mboze being the most obvious example. Doing these as a low man solely to get RP is also somewhat dangerous even with the t3s at v20, a 2-3 man group with trusts could pretty easily wipe if they weren't prepared before hitting 94%.

I think their intent with this was to recognize that these fights can be volatile, require specific mechanics, and can be lost very early on with people making mistakes. So they gave people a big chunk of RP to soften the blow when this happens. The way it is now encourages participation, experimentation, and learning, because "at least I still get RP".

They could have made it more punishing by requiring players to complete the entire climb at the level they want to augment at, something I have no doubt they discussed, but they rightfully figured it would limit participation further than it already is. They also could have made a 1:1 relationship to your % of HP done to the boss, but people would complain then that it was too punishing given how volatile the fights can be based on various factors.

I think they likely expected people to lose, then wait for a timeout to get RP after legit attempts, because it's pretty obvious how restarting is basically impossible with the 2hrs required. The part I don't think they anticipated was people using Arthur to cheese Bumba and Kalunga down by 10%, then never doing any Odyssey again. I agree that's cheesing, but I don't really think it's worth addressing at this point. I also think it's a bit of a cheese that you can charge at t1, then apply the charge to a t3, but I expect they don't know or have the ability to make it different.

They could easily fix entrusted geomancy bubbles by just adding a "confrontation" icon the moment you zone into the Gaol bosses. It's why Unity farming with a GEO is annoying because the bubbles drop every fight. The entrust buff is so minor in Gaol, though, they don't care to fix it. But when people were full blown using Asylum to stack every possible buff before the fight, that got patched quick. They're at the point there's some bugs they are willing to allow and others they can't possibly let remain in the game

They could adjust the amount of contribution necessary to earn RP up to something that actually reflects contribution. Even groups that are trying to climb aren't timing out with only 5% progress.


I also don't think this was left how it is to accommodate solo players. If it were following the trend of adjustments added to other non-solo content, they'd allow players to unlock vengeance with multiple NM kills, add multipliers to RP and segs when entering solo, ect.

Is it more efficient to get “partial credit” timing out with amps or to challenge the luck gods and farm RP via kills?

Efficiency is based on segs to RP, not time.


Im pretty sure the answer is failure with amps. And were going back to the initial discourse, someone saying they quit because theyre bored of content thats either mundane and not challenging OR entirely luck based. Amplifier cheese falls under both categories.

Hey
Stop
Bring those goalposts back here


You want Bumba RP, is it more efficient (efficient = segs per RP) to:
Farm Bumba V25
Farm Bumba V20
Use charged amplifiers and time out on Bumba

You have to use realistic results from the aura L’s, no “I beat Bba V25 every time”. Feel free to factor in converting RP obtained while charging up amps back to segs.

I understand what Im asking. Im asking if its more efficient to accept failure and time out instead of trying to clear the content. Youre the one suggesting Im implying to stop at 10% and afk while you wait for the timer to end. Obviously you get more RP if you push it further.

Once again, we are going back to how this started. “Im quitting cause of boring non-challenging or luck based content”

Im asking about efficiency because “it costs more to use amplifiers”, so its ok to use the cheese. “You only need to kill V25 once, so the luck factor doesnt matter”.

I mean..


But an entire content designed around earning RP based on damage dealt gets a consumable implemented to boost RP earned but that boost is massively disproportionate to damage dealt. I can't understand how that could be perceived as working as intended.

Do 37% damage, get 37% total RP. That's Gaol.
Do 37% damage, use a charged amp, get 37% of total RP x9. That would have been expected.
Do 37% damage, use a charged amp, get 37% of total RP x1 + 100% of total RP x8. Sounds like error to me.

It feels contrary to the whole point of Gaol where the intention was to promote and reward job diversity while prioritizing with creative strategies to push the limits across 3 KI's. Not to allow eeking out 5% with the bare minimum and afk youtube because hey we're already getting a full x2-8 credit and the benefit of that x1 based on damage dealt is meager in comparison.

I have a hard time believing they would intentionally dumb down their newest and most unique content in such a way.

Bug prioritization is always a balancing act:

• What is the impact of leaving the bug unfixed?

• How much work is required to fix the bug?

• Which employees have the minimum skill/experience needed to do the work?

We joke about XI interns, but fixing a bad value in a drop table is probably something an intern can do fairly quickly, and the economic impact of Scales/Hides dropping in Sheol C for a full month probably clears the bar for an e-maint to patch it ASAP.

Ody RP might not have been intended to work the way it does, but if it's not broken badly enough to justify the time and effort needed to change, they're never going to fix it. Look at ye old An Caliber Ring.

They didn't intentionally do it, but it was an unintended side effect. They really were hoping players would do the content the way they originally designed it:

• start low veng as you can clear

• slowly increase veng until you get better at it

• as a result of repeated attempts (failures), you are rewarded some RP, so your gear slowly gets better, making you stronger and more likely to clear harder difficulties
  

• repeat until you can challenge highest veng level possible

The goal was you should be trying to win every fight, every time, so that you develop muscle memory, fight knowledge, and progressively get better at the same boss vs higher difficulty. As an added challenge (and to combat congestion), advanced players could do 3 fights in one visit, but with limited jobs for each successive fight. This is what they assumed players would do, and on paper it sounded good. They eventually added amplifiers to speed up the process of players getting stronger gear, but they still wanted you to follow those steps above. But SE doesn't know their players habits at all, and this is where it all fell apart. So when people discovered you get large RP for simply failing, paired with moves like Purulent Ooze, players literally formed "RP failure groups" to farm RP and afk for 14 minutes, and completely ignored the sliding difficulty system entirely, defeating the purpose of their intended Gaol boss climbing system. They only cared about powering up their gear. SE wanted to reward players with some RP for trying and losing, but they never quite tuned the loss RP properly, so players just decided to kill the boss once on highest veng level and farm RP without trying afterwards, instead of the reverse (starting low and climbing veng levels).

As for amplifiers, they probably knew how bad of a grind the RP farming process was, so they just left it as is, since it still required you to do the content and spend segments/amplifiers anyways, and the 15 minutes per fight wasn't affected in any way, so it still took the same amount of time per fight regardless. Again, I just think SE picks and chooses which bugs are not acceptable and which ones are relatively harmless, and thats why amplifier loss RP was never addressed.

Just need an unintended gallimaufry farming method to deal with how bad that farm is

I know the answer already
I want them to tell me its more efficient to do the cheese method vs risking failure farming V25 Bumba for RP, cause I want YOU to admit the cheese is an exploit that has become the meta, and as such SE can no longer go back on. But saying the cheese is more efficient than risking the 50% luck based "*** you" from V25 is exactly what the OP of this discussion said: they quit because content is boring, not challenging, or luck based.

Remember someone said this was reported to SE as a bug, and SE accepted it as a bug. Its very likely they couldnt figure out how to fix it and/or they just didnt have the dev time allocated to fix it, and it just fell through the cracks.

lmao I didnt even look at the name, my bad.