The Shrine

http://kotaku.com/5621786/final-fantasy ... -explained

A game mechanic that drops the amount of experience points earned after a set amount of play time has Final Fantasy XIV fans in an uproar. Game director Nobuaki Komoto explains the eight hour a week limit.

Fans have been railing against the Final Fantasy XIV experience limiting system for a while now, but Komoto was too busy getting interviewed at Gamescom in Germany last week to respond. Now he's back in Japan and has issued a statement regarding the system on the Japanese beta test website, translated by FFXIVcore's Savalithos.

Massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft have systems in place to reward players for taking a little time away from the game, but few if any have directly penalized players for playing too long. That seems to be exactly what the Final Fantasy XIV game mechanic is doing. Komoto's message begins with an explanation of why this system is in place.

First off, the main concept behind FFXIV is allowing those players with little time on their hands to play effectively, and game balance is based off of that. Furthermore, it is being designed to not give those with more time on their hands to play an unfair advantage. Because of that, systems such as Guardian's Favor (a bonus to Guildleves) have been implemented to make leveling in the short-term easier than leveling in the long-term.

He says to think of the experience limiting system as a counterpart to real-world fatigue. "No one could train ad nauseam in the real world with no ill effects." That's true, of course, but we don't play MMO games to be burdened with real-world limitations, now do we?

Here's how the whole thing works. Once you begin training in a class, you have eight hours in which you can earn full experience. Once those eight hours is up, the amount of experience you earn will lower over the course of seven hours. At the end of those seven hours you will no longer be earning experience.

Final Fantasy XIV's job system allows players to switch classes on the fly, however, so if you begin to approach the threshold on one class, you can switch to another class and play that instead. The system is on a weekly timer, so seven days from the time you begin training your skills, you'll be able to start again with full experience.

OF course this is all still being tweaked and tested. Komoto says they are still looking into tweaking the rate at which experience points begin to drop off to make the system a little bit friendlier.

I can understand how players could be outraged over such a system. It effectively limits one class to an hour and change per day of full experience in any given week. That seems awfully low, and won't sit well with players hoping to focus on a single class.

Asking folks to pay you a monthly fee to play your game and then dictating how long they can play their favorite class without penalties seems like a very bad idea indeed.

It works out for me, though. I'm going to have to review this beast, and get a taste of every class while doing it, so chances are I'll be switching up so much the system will never touch me.

But for your average MMO player? This could be a deal breaker.

We've contacted Square Enix for comment on the mechanic, and will update should we receive further information.

Surplus and You: Komoto Speaks! [FFXIV Core - Thanks Steven!]

Send an email to Michael Fahey, the author of this post, at fahey@kotaku.com.

To be fair originally in WoW you get normal XP and after a while you go down to half XP. People complained so they doubled the XP you need for everything and you get 200% XP going down to 100% XP after a while, so the underlying system isn't any different.

But I've never heard of any game going to ZERO XP after playing it long enough. I don't care if they don't sugarcoat it with the way WoW does it (though it's stupid to not sugarcoat it since people think they get a great deal in WoW) but to have it go to 0 is just ridiculous.

I'm also hearing Sqix is hoping some fan sites will explain how the game works for you since the game's tutorial is totally lacking, so hopefully someone will write up an equivalent of a strategy guide for them. I mean seriously? I don't mean like a guide like "How to be awesome in WoW" here. They're hoping someone will explain say how to mine minerals because the game is totally unintuitive (no one is still very sure how to mine anything successfully). Some people are saying FF14's designed such that using a mouse & a keyboard give you no advantage over a controller. Seriously? You'd think having access to a hundred keys and a mouse ought to give you some advantage. It's one thing to make the gamepad playing tolerable but to purposely hamstrung PC players by making mouse/keyboard useless?

And I have it preordered too because I figured nobody could be this stupid... might have to cancel my preorder like Hitler did with Starcraft 2!

Err, WoW's experience system has never been like that Don. >.>

WoW's experience system assumes everyone is at 100% all of the time, if you take a break you get 200% exp bonus, but it takes 14 days to fill 2 levels worth of bonus, it's almost a non-factor unless you only play twice a month, it doesn't assume that you need 200% and there are enough quests per leveling zone so that you get by without it. You never had to grind out those last levels on random world mobs, there were always enough quests even in Classic.

Way back in WoW beta it used to work like this. Let's say mob gives you 2 XP and you need 200 XP to level. You'd get 2 XP for your *rest* period which back then was called 'normal' and then you get 1 XP for your *normal* period which back then was called 'fatigued' (or something similar.

People didn't like that idea so in the beta it was changed so that you'd now get 4 XP for the *rest* period and 2 XP for your *normal* period and you now need 400 XP to level.

Of course those two are exactly the same thing but originally WoW was 100% = standard, 50% = fatigued. They doubled the numbers on everything which is the same as changing nothing but because numbers are bigger people thought it's a totally different system (kind of funny really).

Going from 100% to 50% is exactly the same as 200% to 100% since the game maker controls the total XP needed to level, so in this sense it's not a big deal that your XP rate declines, though it's pretty foolish to actually say it is a decline because people perceive things differently depending on how you phrase it even if the underlying system is exactly the same.

It would all be alright to put a limit like that if you didn't charge people a monthly fee to play the game. One of the biggest issues with MMOs and multi FPSs is the enormous barrier to entry for the people who have lives but still want to play them a few hours a week. This sounds like a decent way to curb that a bit. But to actually limit the amount of gameplay for someone paying you a monthly fee to play that game? That's the equivalent of GB caps ISPs put on your bandwidth so they can lessen the demand on their servers in order to oversell capacity (actually stealing from their customers to sell the same bandwidth again). It's like only being able to use your cable TV or telephone from 7am to 12am (midnight) and the company diverting that resource elsewhere to another customer for an additional charge. It's the worst kind of thieving practices technology companies can employ. Bullshit in the worst way.

It's pretty hilarious that they charge you $15 a month and then limit that time to make progress. It's like a double whammy on stupid.

I actually didn't have a problem when Blizzard put limited attempts on Icecrown bosses, because then my retarded guild couldn't force me to throw myself at a brick wall over and over and over again, but just basic leveling having a limit is beyond retarded.

The limited attempt bosses was because otherwise people would definitely beat them in under one week if allowed unlimited attempts unless it was physically impossible (due to gear check mechanism usually). It's not like all but the most hardcore guilds were going to run into an issue with the limited attempts before it reset anyway.

I thought having Guildleves on a 2 day cooldown is a good way to help people without much time catch up. If they want to go something extreme they could do Guildleves on 1 week cooldown (could've swore that was what they were at one point). But make you physically can't get XP is just retarded. Sqix needs to talk to the psychologist or whoever in Blizzard that told them it was a bad idea to label something as a penalty for playing the game more. The rest system was originally called fatigue in WoW and it's clearly not a bad idea (since it didn't actually change at all between beta and live), but you NEVER want to tell your players that they're being punished for playing the game more, but make no make mistake you didn't have a system originally called fatigue that's not designed to make people play a bit less than they otherwise would. In WoW's case they just changed a few names since the underyling system was actually sound (there was always enough quests anyway making the fatigued portion of the XP bar mostly irrelevent). In the case of FF14 they'd need some pretty hefty changes because the underlying system is definitely not sound.

I still think the UI issue will hit them harder than even a retarded XP system. My experience is that people can put up with a lot of inconveniences but it is absolutely crucial your interface doesn't suck, and right now FF14's interface is horrid. For example you got to go menu and select 'open' to open a chest, instead of clicking on chest. You got to do the same thing to mine a node, instead of just clicking on the node. Sometimes I wonder if the game is not intended to be played without a mouse. Even when you got really good targetting system like EverQuest or WoW it's hard to imagine playing the game without a mouse, and FF14 does not have a good targeting system.

I just noticed that this XP stuff is measured by time, so it's not even like WoW where it's a portion of your total XP, so if you started getting XP with one class and then had to go somewhere else and forgot to log off you could have used up all your allotted time for that week? I assume the timer has to start as soon as you kill something because otherwise it'd be impossible to know how often you were playing that class.

i hate that it is by time. I dont want to be forced to speed level! If it was capped at some amount of experience per week then im pretty sure i could play everyday and still not be bothered by it since, when i rarely do play MMO's, i like to run around towns and do side stuff. If i kill a few monsters, then go fishing for 4 hours, did i just waste 4 hours of time i should have been leveling?

What a great way to make finding/creating a group even MORE difficult.

Player1 to Player2: LFG?
Player2 to Player1: Sorry, I can't earn any xp right now due to the timer, otherwise I'd love to.

How many of you were planning on playing this game any way? Don't you remember the giant cluster fuck FF11 was when it was first released? Not trusting these guys again for a second MMORPG. Especially with TOR due out next year.

Shrinweck wrote:How many of you were planning on playing this game any way? Don't you remember the giant cluster fuck FF11 was when it was first released? Not trusting these guys again for a second MMORPG. Especially with TOR due out next year.

Yeah im not buying this game anyway. I'll just SC2 myself to death until Diablo 3 comes out. Blizz owns my soul.

Shrinweck wrote:How many of you were planning on playing this game any way? Don't you remember the giant cluster fuck FF11 was when it was first released? Not trusting these guys again for a second MMORPG. Especially with TOR due out next year.

I had this extremely mild interest in it, but now it's just another retarded Asian MMO with shit only people in the East would like.

I preordered it because my brother told me it'd be good! In FF11 I managed to kill a bat and then can't figure out how to regenerate my MP so I deleted the character and never played it again.

It looks like this game is still developed in a Japan-centric viewpoint. US based guys are complaining a ton about mouse (says they're not using hardware mouse whatever that means) but apparently Sqix don't care because they don't use mouse in Japan. Someone must have forgot to tell them that Japan is no longer the center of the gaming universe and it never has been when it comes to MMORPG (mostly supported by the western world, plus Korea and China). I'm hearing some people saying the translation was wrong because fatigue regenerates over time, though I'm skeptical because I know what a wrong translation looks like and it's hard to be off by this match. If fatigue regenerated over time, it must be at a rate that's still irrelevent compared to the speed you play the game because otherwise it'd be pointless.

I heard when you're getting no XP they actually tell you that you could've gained this much XP but you're getting 0 instead.

Looks like the system is based on a value instead of time, so just imagine after you run out of your rested XP bar in WoW you can no longer get any more XP. In some sense this is almost worse because if it's time based you might be able to say find your 14 other super friends to have some mega XPing session for 8 hours and then come back next week. This would also mean if you're actually good at playing this game you get to stop playing it sooner, not because you've beaten it and ran out of things to do but because the game won't let you continue.

It's an interesting new concept, but I would be extremely put off if they did all that and still expected me to pay them a monthly fee over $5.

Shrinweck wrote:How many of you were planning on playing this game any way? Don't you remember the giant cluster fuck FF11 was when it was first released? Not trusting these guys again for a second MMORPG. Especially with TOR due out next year.

I wouldn't call FF11 a clusterfuck. It had some innovative ideas, even if the MMO itself wasn't executed well.

SineSwiper wrote:

Shrinweck wrote:How many of you were planning on playing this game any way? Don't you remember the giant cluster fuck FF11 was when it was first released? Not trusting these guys again for a second MMORPG. Especially with TOR due out next year.

I wouldn't call FF11 a clusterfuck. It had some innovative ideas, even if the MMO itself wasn't executed well.

I had it pre-ordered - the original patch cycle was ridiculous and took me over eight hours just to get into the game where there were too many people in the starting area to do jack shit. I call that a cluster fuck.

Shrinweck wrote:I had it pre-ordered - the original patch cycle was ridiculous and took me over eight hours just to get into the game where there were too many people in the starting area to do jack shit. I call that a cluster fuck.

I call that a standard MMO launch.

This was worse than that and I played a great deal of the older MMOs at launch.

Shrin has wasted a lot of money over the years on pre-ordering most MMO's that hit the market, I can attest to that

Not so much any more but there was a time when I'd spent some time with nearly all of them. And I'd hardly call it wasted. Time-wise I've gotten my moneys worth on basically all of them.