[Savalithos]

Square Enix posted their version here.

*Addendum: the version I translated apparently had a couple lines added to it at some later time. This addition may be important for some of you. "Even if you reach the XP limit mid-week, your fatigue will recover in the time not spent skilling up. The one week period is simply a guarantee that it WILL recover then no matter what."

Well it looks like Mr. Komoto escaped his shackles keeping him in Gamescom away from working on FFXIV, and he has an announcement to make to quiet all the rampant speculation going on. Taken from the JP Beta Test site and translated by me, your friendly neighborhood Savalithos.


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

[nateisgreat]

*

This post has been edited by nateisgreat: 20 September 2010 - 05:43 PM

[sketchymofo]

according to ff14 news lol Tanaka (FFXIV director) is annoyed with foreign game sites for spreading rumors about how the fatigue system works. Sadly, he doesn’t tell us how it works, he just complains about people spreading rumors

well u know

also they state that the japanese player beta site has been told how it works

This post has been edited by sketchymofo: 25 August 2010 - 10:34 AM

[atsalaz]

I'm going to refrain from commenting on the system itself, since nothing is set in stone, nor is the idea of how the surplus is going to be used. However, I feel that using play time as the measure for when this "fatigue" would kick in is iffy. Is this total time played? Whether my character is idling somewhere or traveling or simply exploring the different zones? There are far more implications than simply XP and skill points earned. I understand the idea behind the design, but the implementation seems to be very short-sighted.

Honestly, you should positively reinforce people to play other jobs, rather than the other way around. It is just a bad idea to make anything look like it's penalizing the players.

This post has been edited by atsalaz: 25 August 2010 - 10:36 AM

[shojikun]

This is very good! now cant wait for open beta! hoorah!

On a side note, is still under development and may change a lot in time. So guys, dont be so afraid of this.. just keep complain and who knows? they took that thing off! xD LOL!

This post has been edited by shojikun: 25 August 2010 - 10:35 AM

[Rockem Sockem]

Seems like he said exactly what we thought....where's the mistranslation?

Not too thrilled by this, but at least I know why I spent three days grinding level 4 blacksmith with no exp.

[xRei87]

From what I understand, we have a 8hr limit on leveling then we are forced to switch into another class, where we cannot change all of our stats at once.

STR/DEX/VIT Mage anyone?

This post has been edited by xRei87: 25 August 2010 - 10:39 AM

[sketchymofo]

WonderPenguin, on 25 August 2010 - 10:36 AM, said:

Seems like he said exactly what we thought....where's the mistranslation?

Not too thrilled by this, but at least I know why I spent three days grinding level 4 blacksmith with no exp.

while i like the crafting but that is another issuse in itself *blacksmith and armorer r *way to dificult to level at the start*

[Wagram123]

Glad they are making adjustments to the system to make it not as harsh.

[Brosephiroth]

So as it stands now you basically get 8 hours of prime leveling with whatever class you want to play per week. I appreciate that they finally spoke up about it but I don't know how this should reassure anyone.

I'm not understanding this notion of players that have more time to play have an "unfair advantage". An advantage in what exactly? And why would it matter to somebody, who only has a few hours a week to play, if somebody else can play longer than them and thus get more stuff in the process?

This post has been edited by Brosephiroth: 25 August 2010 - 10:46 AM

[jrmmcr]

So to all those supporting this system, do you still? It's actually worse than i thought it would be come release.

[Richard]

goodjob SE, way to lose 75% of your fanbase on this.

[FFLeader]

Excellent, so I can play my lancer for 8 hours A WEEK and then it becomes progessively slower in levelling over 7 hours until it stops? And also, it carries cross-class?

Why would you suggest us to play another class if we're still going to be penalised?

This is a GAME-BREAKING feature. People are paying monthly for this game, if we were paying per hour, it'd be different. But we're paying a set fee, and you're telling us that because you want to cater to people with less time, those with more are paying to wait a week to play?

Ridiculous. I was excited for FFXIV until I heard about this. Now I'm considering cancelling my preorder, as are many many more.

What the hell are you thinking SE? Yes, give the casuals a boost (rested exp, to use an example), but don't penalise those who have the time/desire to play more.

I do wonder if this is just a way to avoid people reaching top levels too quickly as there's a lack of content. Unfinished game, perhaps? (inb4 "MMOs are never finished" - Yes, MMOs develop and grow over time, but there has to be some sort of core game at the heart of it)

[afmacd]

where was the misunderstanding? everyone is reacting proportionately to what were being told.
and in what bizarre universe is doing something more often an unfair advantage? that is absolutely a stupid thing to say.

[Finnalie Prelúd]

Brosephiroth, on 25 August 2010 - 10:39 AM, said:

I'm not understanding this notion of players that have more time to play have an "unfair advantage". An advantage in what exactly? And why would it matter to somebody, who only has a few hours a week to play, if somebody else can play longer than them and thus get more stuff in the process?

I've never understood this mentality either. If someone spends 4 hrs on a project versus someone spending 1 hr, it should look and be better. So if I spend 4 hrs playing a game and someone spend 1 hr, my character should be further developed. How is simply having more time to play an unfair advantage? It isn't like we get a buff for being logged in longer. Casuals effin everything up

[Fated]

MMORPGs now being designed for parents who work 100 hours a week.

[Phrame]

atsalaz, on 25 August 2010 - 10:32 AM, said:

I'm going to refrain from commenting on the system itself, since nothing is set in stone, nor is the idea of how the surplus is going to be used. However, I feel that using play time as the measure for when this "fatigue" would kick in is iffy. Is this total time played? Whether my character is idling somewhere or traveling or simply exploring the different zones? There are far more implications than simply XP and skill points earned. I understand the idea behind the design, but the implementation seems to be very short-sighted.

This is exactly what I'm worried about - what determines your fatigue timer? Play time? Does this mean that whenever I go AFK I should stand around as a class that I have no interest in leveling, just to avoid fatigue? Or is it battle time? So people will be pressured to kill things faster?

Or is it based on the amount of experience you can get in a certain amount of time? Komoto says:

"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."

What limit? The surplus limit? But how can you hit the limit FASTER than expected if the system is based on time (i.e. 8 hours = 100%, 7 hours <100%)? I don't quite understand.


Either way this seems like it will be a rather annoying limitation, and no doubt players will be coming up with a million (equally annoying) ways to avoid it, which will probably be forced upon anyone looking to group up with others.

SE needs to do a better job of thoroughly explaining their systems, and doing so BEFORE they're even implemented rather than "as soon as possible afterward". Then there would be fewer misunderstandings, and therefore fewer complaints.


EDIT:
Based on what others have said, it would seem you only have 8 hours of 100% experience regardless of your class. If that is the case (which doesn't make sense given what SE had previously stated about switching classes to play more), then this system is even worse than I had imagined.

This post has been edited by Phrame: 25 August 2010 - 10:53 AM

[Zellot_Uni]

This is the first time i'm actually a little bit worried.

FFXI made FFXIV possible. Can you imagine telling FFXI vets that they could only play their characters 8 hours a week, and then they would get diminishing returns?

I know you can switch classes, but physical level will be capped to 15 hours a week.

This just shows me the game is incomplete, there is no end game content, they want to artificially stall player progress, and they're buying time for ps3 release.

I'm an adult with a wife and son. I don't appreciate being dictated how I should play.

Yeah SE, this your YOUR game and you can place limits on what can and can't be done in game, but this is very very limiting compared to all other mmos.

At least in FFXI, the 18 hour choco quest was disguised well. This is just poorly thought out and quite frankly, arrogant design.

[Fated]

This system screws casuals too, how casual are you to only play 8 hours a week? lol

[sketchymofo]

i think tanaka needs to actly start reading some of these posts cuz hes seems ignorant..