Komoto discusses Fatigue

Some interesting information from the Japanese Beta site (via FFXIVCore):

Quote :

We’d like to thank all the beta testers out there for their hard work and support! We’re applying all those ideas you’ve sent us to make for the best possible Open Beta test and official release.

Now we’d like to take a moment to answer the many questions we’ve received about character balance in the current B3 phase.

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.

To achieve this balance, the amount of possible skill/experience points earned after a certain period of time has a threshold. Think of it as real-life “fatigue” from working at improving your skills via battle *(aka. No one could train ad nauseam in the real world with no ill effects).

Within the first eight hours of play, you can earn 100% experience. The seven hour period following will see your possible experience gradually approach zero.

This system is on a weekly timer. After a week has passed since you began skilling that particular weapon, the timer will reset. It will start anew when you skill up again.

Any experience earned past that point is saved as “surplus.” There is surplus for each class, and if you begin to see it please consider playing another class and adjust accordingly.

However, experience points are not specific to any class and therefore the decrease in experience points is not affected by changing classes.

That’s how the system stands as of right now.

Also, this system wasn’t implemented just in B3 but was set in motion from the very start of beta. Despite this, we have received many opinions regarding it in B3. There are a few reasons why:

-B3 allowed for longer sessions in single sittings.
-In order to promote party play, skill/experience points earned were greatly increased.
-The skill/experience earned from weak enemies was lowered, but had failed to pop up on initial bug reports (and was later fixed via maintenance).

According to the last bug report skill/experience able to be earned was above what had been planned, therefore people hit the limit much more quickly than hoped for. That is the biggest cause. Yet another problem was that we were unable to adjust guildleve experience and the experience-earned limit at the same time.

Our lack of explanation regarding all of this was a mistake, and we heartily apologize.

This all is still currently under development, and we have plans to make the limit more palatable in answer to all the tester feedback we received concerning this. In particular we would like to address the speed with which experience begins to drop off and are already looking into it.
Also, since experience points fatigue carries over despite changing weapons, we plan to make it not so harsh.

At the very least, we promise to not have people hitting these limits in a short period of time, such as during the start of B3.

We would also like to make an announcement regarding something else.

The decrease in earnings when gathering is based on your actions taken with that class and is unrelated to the aforementioned limits. This is also currently under review and is planned for adjustment in accordance with many testers’ opinions.

Surplus experience is currently not being used. However, we have received many comments suggesting some sort of reward be put into effect regarding it, and we think that’s a pretty interesting idea. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, though, and we’re currently investigating the possibilities.

Open Beta will not just see changes to the issues stated above but will also see adjustments made to encourage party play even more (such as an increase to skill points), which the team is currently hard at work on adjusting. We hope you’ll all test it out when the time comes.

Finally, we would like to apologize for the lateness of any developer comments due to my attendance of Gamecom this past week. In my absence much fuss was raised over speculation, old information and some mistranslations on overseas fansites *(what?! /panic. Though I wonder what that’s in reference to in particular). I hope to avoid this from happening again by delivering developer comments as promptly as possible. Thank you all for your understanding.

And thanks in advance for your hard work to come in Open Beta!

Final Fantasy XIV director
Nobuaki Komoto

So you can effectively play a class for maybe 10 hours A WEEK

I'm trying to decide if thats good or Bad, with a good MMO @I'm pretty sure a Weekend will consist of well more than 10 hours of gameplay..............

Also, what happens if you AFK for an hour and stay logged in, that deducts another hour of your effectiveness!

Toeol Leonheart wrote:

So you can effectively play a class for maybe 10 hours A WEEK

I'm trying to decide if thats good or Bad, with a good MMO @I'm pretty sure a Weekend will consist of well more than 10 hours of gameplay..............

Also, what happens if you AFK for an hour and stay logged in, that deducts another hour of your effectiveness!

I suspect it only kicks in during active EXP time. So if you EXP for two hours during one day and then take a three day break, you should probably still have six hours left on your fatigue timer.

Within the First eight hours of play......


What I mean is, if you stay Logged into the game, is there some way of it realising your not acively adventuring.

i suppose the easy way to combat that is to equip a weapon you have no intention of leveling...........

Toeol Leonheart wrote:

What I mean is, if you stay Logged into the game, is there some way of it realising your not acively adventuring.

I would hope this is the case. It would be waaaaay too punishing otherwise.

Im sorry, but this sounds like the stupidest idea ever. It sounds like they are intentionally trying to make their game fail. Perhaps its ok over in Japan to play for 8 hours a week at normal xp, and then go into grind-mode if you want to keep playing the same class the rest of the week.

I dont want to play Lineage 2 with better graphics and no pvp.

Nimarhie Stardancer wrote:

Im sorry, but this sounds like the stupidest idea ever. It sounds like they are intentionally trying to make their game fail. Perhaps its ok over in Japan to play for 8 hours a week at normal xp, and then go into grind-mode if you want to keep playing the same class the rest of the week.

I dont want to play Lineage 2 with better graphics and no pvp.

It all depends on how this shakes out. If it is like Khalus says and starts at 200% XP for a single Job and then tapers down to 100% XP over the course of 15 hours then this isn't a problem because at that point it really is just another way of doing a "Rest XP" system. Rather than accumulating points based on time spend logged off, it would reset for each job you are training every week.

If it now tapers down from 100% XP to 0%... Yeah... That's kinda lame because at some point you'd stop making progress with a Job at all. I rather my system encourages me to play different Jobs rather than punish me for playing the same one, if you can understand my point of view. It's all relative really based on how much you consider 100% to be, but 0 is always Zero.

It sounds to me that you will lose XP over time if you specialize in just one class. It did say "one partcular weapon", so I would assume that if I change classes to something else then there is no XP loss.

If your first example is how it is going to be, then I dont have a problem. But I am not going to play a game that punishes me for liking a particular class.

Keep in mind that Fatigue probably only affects Physical Level, and Surplus EXP affects Discipline Rank. So it seems that you'll probably be able to rank up without any problems, but you'll hit a physical level wall after fifteen hours.

At least this is what most people are speculating at the current moment.

A lot of the speculation is what's causing the misinformation about how this mechanic works. It all started with a botched translation and has blown completely out of proportion.

As I read it in all the clarifications being posted, it acts like a bonus xp that decreases the longer you use a single discipline, down to 100% xp. So, you're still getting xp for grinding, just not as much. Most all of us are planning on playing more than one class (I'll be doing at least 3, one war/magic, one hand, one land). Given the amount of time I can devote to the game, I will likely never see my xp down to 100%

It's like rested XP in WoW.... you still get XP just not as much. If you switch to another discipline, the timer resets for that discipline.

BTW... I've not seen anything that would tell me XP gains will decrease to zero (except for the troll posts on mmorpg).

All blown out of proportion. I got my Gladiator to lvl 20, mining lvl 18, goldsmithing to lvl 15 and botanist to lvl 9 in the span of a week.

Can you imagine if XP was any easier to get? I was never hit with anything more than a 10% surplus, so I really son't see what the fuss is about.

http://www.eorzeapedia.com/2010/08/25/tanaka-foreign-sites-making-up-things-about-a-system-we-released-no-information-on/#more-4892

Tanaka being a condescending putz... honestly, I think I like Korean developers better. Even NCSoft as kinda-sorta shady as they were with Aion seem to get the NA/European players better.

All I see on the western boards is a lot of crying and speak of impending doom.

I can't blame this guy for being frustrated.

ditto^

Nimarhie Stardancer wrote:

Tanaka being a condescending putz... honestly, I think I like Korean developers better. Even NCSoft as kinda-sorta shady as they were with Aion seem to get the NA/European players better.

That's because NCSoft hired a Western PR firm to handle press releases in NA and Europe. If SE had done this, the botched interview translation may have been caught before going to print, and there wouldn't be this sea of misinformation.

As for Tanaka sounding condescending... I think it's a Japanese thing. I have a Japanese customer who's been a long-time client, and he comes off sounding condescending, though I know he means well.

i personal wish i could see it 1st hand. to see how it really works oh well, i think it is sort of neat idea in a way. I think there trying to slow the game pace down so people will stop and enjoy that game and not just hardcore it to max and do the raids and stuff. where there social skills are yelling MORE DOTS followed by nerd rage.

The best part is there is no end-game...yet, and may not make an appearance for up too 2 years; reminiscent of FFXI's release time table. Just read up on it and watch all the videos from all these sites asking about it in interviews. SE hasn't once given a straight yes or no answer and skip around the question with answers like:

• we plan to have harder encounters through guildleves and monsters you can't yet beat even at the cap.
  
• in the JeuxOnline video from gamescom crafting was specifically asked about and SE responded that the whole of the game relies entirely on players crafting their own gear even at the cap, those hard monster mentioned above drop materials to craft the good gear.
  

And seeing as how their version of dungeons are identical to that of FFXI, non-instanced and open to as many PTs that wish to enter them, this won't be an armor-farming-fest like all other MMO devs think is an exciting feature.....BORING~!

I say stop tryin to read into it too much and tryin to explain it in your own ways and just wait and find out when the time comes to.

This was a serious slap in the face for me, how can they say "well, we want to be fair for everyone so we're going to cut off everyones dominant leg". People have an idea of what they want to play, how they want to play it, and why they want to play it. Most of all, they dont want to have all that, then told they have X amount of time to play that, then it stops progressing, and now your forced to do someting you didnt necessarily want to do. The biggest thing is a "weekly" timer, a week? why not make it every other day, which would be more acceptable. that way you can alternate say odd days you level your melee and even days you level your healer?

Give it a try in open beta people. There's a lot of misinformation and fear mongering going on at the moment.

Conclusions should not be reached until as close to launch as possible, at the very least.

I agree there... my biggest miff was Tanaka's attitude. I can understand him being upset, but to make it sound like its our fault and then coming up in a few weeks with "buy my game! play it, subscribe!" Apparently they gave the Japanese a good explanation about the whole deal - the players there - so the article goes - dont know whats going on either.

It just annoyed me.

Nimarhie Stardancer wrote:

http://www.eorzeapedia.com/2010/08/25/tanaka-foreign-sites-making-up-things-about-a-system-we-released-no-information-on/#more-4892

Tanaka being a condescending putz... honestly, I think I like Korean developers better. Even NCSoft as kinda-sorta shady as they were with Aion seem to get the NA/European players better.

I beg to differ NCSoft is by far the WORST company I have ever dealt with. I will never again play any of their games.

Wow, this seems to be getting blown out of proportion. This does not really affect me all that much since I am truly a casual player and not hardcore. On the other hand, how many hardcore players end up playing another class when they hit level cap anyhow?? Is doing it this way any different? No, the complaining about "being forced to play another class you don't want to play" is just bologna. Those hardcore players WOULD be playing another class after level cap.

Roan Varuna wrote:

All blown out of proportion. I got my Gladiator to lvl 20, mining lvl 18, goldsmithing to lvl 15 and botanist to lvl 9 in the span of a week.

Can you imagine if XP was any easier to get? I was never hit with anything more than a 10% surplus, so I really son't see what the fuss is about.

Hasnt it already been stated somewhere that the Current XP rates have been ramped up significantly in order to facilitate addequate testing?