Dev Tracker - Discussion

jp players are pissed about that post. It's nice to see someone at least give them the tiniest bit of pushback instead of asskissing.

It is a pretty bad thing to admit to, though thankfully they did at all. Reminds me of when bubbles were "working as intended" until "oops, actually they weren't sorry!"

Welcome to programming in 2022, where the end user is the beta tester.
This unfortunately isnt anything new. Why pay people to test things out when you can have paying customers pay you to test their stuff?

Remember that PS4 patch that would brick your PS4?
A windows update that would delete files?

Its all about squeezing as much profit out as possible no matter what.

So wait, they are saying that the WS wall was always a bug?

This version was a bug.

But absolutely look forward to the next content where it is intended.

Bloodpact nerf is probably broken too. (Honestly) ((It should only nerf the same pact, not all pacts entirely))

BLM nerf might be broken too. (Unlikely) ((It should only nerf the same spell, not the same element entirely))

There's "repeating the same action is nerfed" and there is "repeating the same type of action is nerfed"

This ws wall was type 2, it was meant to be type 1. SMN is type 2. Elemental magic is type 2.

I just can't even imagine releasing things they haven't tested or beaten

Just hire one guy to test the stuff even. Cmon.

If there are no repercussions, why the *** would they.

Just throwing away money.

My expectation is that the dev team beat it as intended, but they rolled out the wrong version and the QA team doesn't actually beat stuff, just verify that it works as intended. They didn't understand how the wall was intended to work and thought it was good to go. It's not the first time they've rolled out some janky test version of something and had to fix it.

It's also likely rushed. They specifically mentioned the intended VR updates were delayed a month, so my feeling is they swapped the intended release of v25 with VR


Is that what they are saying with this?


I'm unclear what they mean by "not be simply standard equipment", unless they are saying you just can't zerg it down.

and yea, I fully expect there will be a similar feature in the future, just maybe a little more balanced out....right? they'll balance it, right?

Dev team didn't beat ***lol

Yoshida said to the staff "and add that repeated ws damage reduction"

But they don't know what that means, cause they don't play. So they "reduced all ws damage" instead of "the same ws damage"

The same way they didn't know geo was broken. The same way they didn't know how wsd worked. The same way they don't know how magic works. That's what happens when you just grab random *** from another project and say do this.

I'm guessing this was translated on Google, but the meaning of 標準装備 here is "standard feature" rather than "equipment."

Basically they're saying that a mob's ability to resist everything won't become some baseline feature of future enemies; instead it may be used to encourage certain strategies or as an occasional gimmick mobs can take advantage of.

WS's needed nerfed i hope they leave it like it is.

Basically they may introduce that 10s wall effect but only as a battle mechanic not as a universal "screw you" ability. Think like auras / fetters/ phases / etc.. where it behaves that way until the players do "something" to break it.


Like what? It's the Dyna Wave3 boss mechanic which we already know how to deal with. WS's were not nerfed in the slightest, they still do exactly the same amount of damage. Repetitive use of the exact same WS creates a wall, which can be overcome by just not having everyone repeat the same WS over and over again.

You give them too much credit.


This is far more likely the case. I doubt the devs play tested this new content at all, and I don't think they knew beforehand whether it could even be cleared or not. They probably figured that if it was too hard they could just roll back the difficulty later and just assumed everything would work out fine. I'm not saying that it can't be tackled here mind you, just that the level of quality assurance you assume is built into the content isn't actually there. It's not possible for them to have playtested this content and NOT known how the weaponskill wall was working at launch. They can lay out an apology and make excuses all they want, and they can provide the technical reasoning behind what caused the bug in the first place. But the fact that they didn't know it existed and launched the content anyway is proof that they didn't test it. I don't buy their story about the two different teams not communicating with each other. That's just corporate higher ups running damage control and putting on an act to appease the end user base.

Double accolades again, Christ. 4 out of 6 in a row.

the dev team is 6 people, and we've seen short insights into how they play personal characters and their knowledge of game mechanics enough to know they are not all top tier players(if any are, which i personally doubt)

if the best players we have to offer, with the best cheats they can justify, haven't even gotten to bumba in 2 weeks, do you really think the dev team cleared all these fights? they're not spending weeks of work hours on just playtesting, and they aren't better players than the best of the userbase

never mind that they obviously wouldn't be allowed to use gearswap (much less react, etc..) in a testing environment, so they're working with much less than most players are

Yep. Unless they test with their dev tools on, dev team doesn't have anchor, dev team doesn't have gearswap, dev team doesn't have autows, dev team doesn't have react, etc etc and you'd be foolish to think that a lot of the "top tier" players aren't loading up with all this ***for an advantage. A lot of the time the most boisterous players who think theyre a cut above the rest are using just about every automation and augmentation they can to help get ahead.

Also I'm late but I doubt Yoshida has anything to do with the actual development of XI. Might throw in suggestions about general ***like the linkshell concierge but there's dead *** no chance he's mandating granular ***or even understands what a weaponskill wall is.

Exactly. The devs merely designed the content based off what they thought we'd be able to handle. I'm sure they based stats and mechanics off of formulas and algorithms that they were confident in, but there's no way they actually cleared the content themselves. If Veng 25 ends up being successful they merely got lucky. And if they have to make adjustments to difficulty some point in the future they'll just make some lame statement to scapegoat the blame toward anything other than themselves. In fact we've actually seen the difficulty scaled down in the past. Do you remember the original iteration of Vengence 15 Mboze? He got scaled back pretty notably because Timbeeer was just killing everyone flat out.

All fair, you are both right.

I guess I struggle to wrap my head around something this obvious was overlooked. It's not that complex of a mechanic, you would expect anyone, whether they won the fight or not, to immediately notice the fact that WS damage was cut by 90% regardless of what you used. It's such an obvious thing that it is shockingly incompetent that it was missed by anyone with any understanding of the game. Even if you didn't win the fight, it'd be clear in a matter of less than a minute something was fubar. That's all assuming it actually was a bug and not an intended mechanic, which even in that case it feels like even a minor amount of testing would show was dumb.

...but you are right, it shouldn't be a surprise. They've had to roll back bosses over the years due to absurd mechanics and even admitted some recent ambuscades were a shitshow they obviously never bothered to fully test. It shouldn't be a surprise, but I guess it is still sometimes when it's something so dumb.

I wasn't doing much Odyssey when v15 was released, what did they change with Mboze?

Idk if they actually beat the game during the test but realistically there is no way that they have less than the playerbase.

1) During the AV incident years ago it's already proven that their internet speed in the testing environment is much faster than the playerbase. So they can design AV mechanic and beat it in the testing environment but players can't.

In other words, they don't need cheats to do what cheats can do. If they design a mechanic that has to be stunned or turned to avoid, they probably don't even need react to do it in the testing environment.

2) They should have access to every gear every job at max mlevel. But I doubt even the most hardcore group has 18 jobs at max level and max gear spread between 6 person perfectly.

In other words, if they make the NM beatable with 3 KI and 18 totally max jobs, playerbase will have difficulty forming a group with this many top end jobs. But devs totally can by simply changing values of their characters when they test it.

Their actual playskill doesn't matter that much as FFXI is still mostly stat based rpg.

I mean that's just not true. Most of the most overwhelming mechanics in Gaol can not be overcome by simply boosting your stats and MLvl. Using Anchor as an example again, it affords a group willing to use it an extra 15-30 seconds to fight before fetters+denounce as they don't have to pull it into position before engaging. There's no piece of gear or stat that can do the same thing, and there's absolutely tons of players using anchor even if they won't admit it.

Player skill also has a lot to do with beating all of these fights. You can give someone the best gearsets and a capped ML50 character and it doesn't mean ***if they don't know how to do skillchains and magic bursts or exploit rayke windows, stack INT debuffs, etc. If you go into any V20 without a backline that understands how to use -DT gear, a BRD or RDM that cant control an add, etc. you're going to sip ***real quick

I know that if I was tasked with completing these fights at any cost and had to choose between master levels and addons, it wouldn't be a hard choice. Never mind that we're not talking about average groups, the best groups have yet to clear all of T3 in weeks, and they do have most of the jobs they're actively using at a relatively high mastery level. Getting to mid-30s is pretty trivial and reduces the stat gap substantially, even if fully maxing it is a considerable grind. You don't even get subjobs, so you're talking about a piddly amount of combat skill and a few points of base stats.

Frankly, I'm not even ready to accept that devs would know how to max 18 different jobs with the ability to create items out of thin air. At least, not to the level that the addon utilizing side of the playerbase has.

I feel like the voidwatch campaign is every other month now, too. I mean, that’s checkable, but I’m not gonna go check on my phone since their website is kind of crappy for that.

They’re really throwing the best goodies at us non stop. Wasn’t statue crusher incredibly rare in the past?

I highly doubt fetters+denounce is designed to be bypassed by Zerg to begin with. Just that players choose the Zerg method, it does not meant it's intended design.

Keep in mind that Devs advantage here isn't just stats, they also know the "real answer" to solve all the mechanics. Which playerbase will need time to find. Therefore it's normal that the best players will need time to beat the hardest content in MMO. Most MMO probably, not just FFXI.

Personally, if there are 6 copies of myself and I am tasked to beat the game as fast as possible, and I get to choose between "play normally but with cheats" or "access to everything a dev has, including all jobs at max level, all gears, unlimited entrance without the need to farm segs" I'd certainly pick the 2nd choice.
So I can have the resources to use the "right" strategy that's intended to be used in a short time until I beat it. I personally dont see cheats being a bigger advantage than free access to everything in game.

Which is why they deserve to be called out on it. Whenever the devs provide us with content that I enjoy I praise them for it, and I'm as much an avid fan of this game as anyone else. But I won't white knight them blindly and when I see BS I'm willing to call them out on it. They deserve the criticism they get when they screw up. Its obvious they put minimal effort into development. And while I'm glad we're still getting new content, and I do appreciate the effort they're putting into voracious, sortie, and oddy, it's only fair to point out their flaws.

Voracious is a neat story addition and I'm enjoying it well enough, but let's be honest, the writing leaves to be desired. It's nice and the handouts it gives are actually pretty good, and it's building up to a new content down the road in valhalla, but there are moments you just want to /eyeroll at what you're seeing and you know it!

Sortie is a fun little diversion and I actually think all the different objectives is a nice touch. Optimizing runs is fun and I like the event overall. It's nice to see manaburn strategies and I think the empyrean +3 rewards are more than sufficient compensation for the time invested. Some pieces are extraordinarily useful. But the earring system is one of the most garbage things I've ever seen and they should be ashamed of themselves if they call the old case system "content". And beyond the armor sets the event has limited longevity.

And in this new wave of Odyssey content they may very well have set the bar too high. They don't know what players will be capable of any more than we do. It's still too early to make any real assessments, but I question how viable Mboze and Arrebati are going to be from my minimal experiences with them. I also question how viable Bumba will be with his 3 minute enrage timer. Again.... we'll have to wait and see.

There were a number of changes they made to Oddysey that I can recall for you

• When Odyssey was first released Moogle amps were bugged. They used the same copy/pastega code they originally implemented with the ambuscade seals. The issue was that when a player died the moogle amp buff vanished into thin air. This was unintended and a huge problem that got patched in an emergency maintinence. They took the zone down for 15 minutes to push out the fix.

• There was another bug where the DoT effects from the Tier 3 bosses fetters carried over even after you died. If you fought Kalunga and the fetter applied burn to you you...and you died... even after you got a raise the burn effect was still active and could kill you a second time. If you took a home point deathwarp to lower jeuno.... the burn effect would still kill you if you didnt immediately zone to your mog or use a panacea. This was unintended and patched out when they realized they screwed up. And only happened in the
  June 2021 Update, which was four months after the initial Tier 3's release

• There was an issue where ALL buffs applied in the lobby entered into the main battlefield, which allowed people to abuse asylum. I forget the exact specifics of how asylum allowed you to break the combat system, but it had to do with the way asylum applied itself as a buff and how debuffs worked. This was also patched out in June. The devs also threatened account bans to players who knowingly abused the bug before the fix was implemented.

• The original damage from Timbeer was based not on party total HP but player max HP, and always scaled to "player's max HP + some small percent", so no matter what you did, it was impossible to survive timbeer under any circumstances. This was rectified by s-e when they scaled Mboze's stas down and reworked Timbeer so that it didn't flat out one shot everyone. It allowed pets to absorb damage and prevent insta Ko's to the whole group

You could also argue that the way moogle amps calculate their bonus RP to work for 6% damage counting as 2 full kills worth and then some as yet another bug. It was reported and accepted on the official forms...but they never acted on it.

So yes, there have been plenty "oops we didn't mean for that to happen" moments in odyssey already. It's only fair to keep them in mind. The devs aren't immune to making mistakes.

This isn't a fair comparison, because high end groups already have their RMEA, JSE, etc for the jobs they typically play and an abundance of resources to quickly acquire those things for new jobs. The actual difference between the gear a group like Mischief's is using and the gear someone who has literally everything would use is much smaller. Master levels are more recent, so less likely they are fully caught up, especially with how grindy the last 10 are.

The "Right Strategy" is the lynch pin as Afania pointed out. Just being on the opposition here we know red proc option begins after aura, and blue proc closes the window after certain criteria are met. What if every boss had a hidden(to the player base, not to the devs) white proc that terror'ed the boss/adds for 30 seconds and dropped their DT/SDT by 50%/100% enabling huge damage windows even without the "correct damage type".

Everyone is talking about the advantages players have in terms of third party addons/utility that have been enabling players to brute force these fights. But vanilla users with the ability to "correctly" utilize deliberate in game mechanics would win every time even under geared/under leveled simply because they have knowledge of a mechanic or how a fight works better than everyone else.

This is not a huge leap to say the devs have more information about the intricacies of the fights because they have access to the whole fight, from the development standpoint.

In regards to the weaponskill wall and being untested, if you have access to something that no one knows about to completely neuter a boss that doesn't require rapid fire weaponskills to set up are you really going to notice that rapid fire weaponskills aren't working as intended?

The fact that players are clearing without knowing every mechanic or intricacy of a fight means we're obviously working harder, not smarter but it works so no one cares. But now there are considerable road blocks to that and people are up in arms saying they threw something in the game without thinking about it. They knew from the beginning their intended mechanics, we didn't. And slowly they're pushing every player toward those mechanics entirely but the community still has no idea what those mechanics are.

Sortie basement has been out longer than this content. The E metal objective still hasn't been figured out, nor the mega boss seal item, but because people have been able to brute force/play around through them without it no one really complains about it or the fact that they haven't been figured out in 2 months. But these new bosses have, and have always had, mechanics people haven't figured out and suddenly when you can't brute force it or figure out your own methods without that mechanic it's: "untested", or "unplayable", or "unbeatable". If the devs made those bosses unbeatable without their respective seal/mechanic people would spend more time finding the seal/mechanic than saying the fights are overtuned.

If there are hidden mechanics that have never been discovered throughout the V0, V5, V10, V15, V20, and now V25 progression.. that would be a very good point. We do not know for a fact that those exist, and an immense amount of circumstances have happened by pure chance. I don't think it's likely there's a white proc or any mechanic that will completely neuter the boss, but I'll definitely eat my words if one is discovered.

The history of SE's content releases does not lend itself to the idea that these things are meticulously tested and balanced.

Having enigmatic mechanics that could be triggered by any of the thousands of different spells, abilities, weaponskills, and combinations thereof or other *** like the direction the wind is blowing when you crit the mob for exactly 777dmg on a Tuesday is *** dumb to begin with. It isn't the players' fault that the ***is made that way, and then found ways around it.

It's not like people haven't tried to "do it the right way" either. You try to go do Mboze V20/V25 without TP denial, tell us how it goes for you. Even the old PLD Rampart strat doesn't work there because Timber becomes too powerful on higher V levels. Doesn't matter what SE intended as the "right way" if the "right way" doesn't work to begin with.

What do you think they intended? Pet jobs that can't deal enough dmg to win even with 3 moglophones because pet jobs are broken at a fundamental level? Water elemental rings on all 6 members of the team and praying it doesn't Timber again before you can use another one?

To take us back to a potentially useful path, if we want to assume there's a hidden mechanic it's probably not going to be something that would just occur on it's own as a single event, because we would've seen it. If I had to make a guess at an intended mechanic, the obvious choice is the one with a visible display.

We know proc difficulty lasts throughout multiple attempts. What's the highest amount of aura clears anyone has done on a single NM? Do we know for a fact that there's no longer term benefit to proccing a NM multiple times? An alternative group may not be able to damage the NM effectively, but they could certainly rack up several aura clears. Many of the current 1 moglophone strategies we've seen in use do clear aura, but perhaps the amount of aura clears required to trigger [???] exceeds what you would see in a 1 moglophone fight.