Looking back at 2.1
Felt really bad about the FATE frequency situation when 2.1 first came out. Many people screaming "Yoshidaaaaaa" at him in the game.
Went to the dev's workstation and said "look at all these Yoshida shouts in Thanalan! I can't take it anymore", and Odin just happened to spawn in the game at that moment, many players swarmed it and started saying "I can see! I can actually see it!" And the dev turned to me and said "but look, people are calling you a god over here", and I said "that's something they should have been able to see to begin with! Don't change the topic and do something about this!"
Crystal Tower (CT) was originally meant to be much harder.
-Was CT initially designed to be more difficult?
Y: Yes, people would have wiped no less than 5 or 6 times at that beginning area right after you turned left from the starting point.
-Were the enemies stronger?
Y: No, the mechanics were more difficult. Remember there's a part where alliance A, B, and C have to each stand on a tile to remove certain barriers for each other? The whole place was filled with that kind of stuff. We just felt that was unreasonable, since if even one team was not able to deliver the DPS, it would bring the whole alliance down.
-The current difficulty feel about just right. It's not something you could beat without having some kind of strategy set up, but you could do it with just a bit of conversation.
Y: To use King Behemoth as an example, people know that as long as one Comet remains then everyone can survive, but if they're all gone then people would be like "lol what". When the Meteor message comes up and people look around and see not a single Comet but can still laugh about it, I think that's the kind of difficulty we want to aim for.
-Will future CT contents be similar in difficulty?
Y: That's the plan right now.
-On the other hand, the Extreme primals and The Binding Coil of Bahamut (Coil) remains very difficult. But at the same time, you have toned down the difficulty of the Moogle King fight, and have announced that Pharos Sirius (PS) will be eased as well. What are you basing these decisions on?
Y: For the Extreme primal fights, the difficulty is as we expected. Coil is actually meant to be more difficult, but the players' ability to clear contents have really just been impressive. As for Moogle King, it was simply a matter of it being too powerful for a main story fight.
For PS, it was a matter of it designed to be a place that you can run to farm things, similar to other dungeons. But because of its current difficulty, that's not happening.
Extreme primal and Coil designed to be difficult because the rewards from those are big. Obviously.
-I suppose it wouldn't be good if people could clear Extreme fights easily after one try
Y: That's right. That's why for these fights we have made solid mechanics and have clear themes for each one. For example with Garuda Extreme you'd have to figure out the mechanics relating to where Garuda, Suparna, and Chirada needs to be positioned, and keeping in mind that Suparna and Chirada will buff each other if they're too close together, the players would need to distribute their roles clearly, and on top of that ensure the DPS members share the damage from Chirada's attack, for example. (I think he just gave away the official strategy for the fight...)
For Garuda Extreme, the theme is role distribution. People need to split up and fight in 3 separate places, and even have to account for things like how damage should be taken. But once you're through the clone phase, people can then gather at the center and go "ok we got past the clones, just two more times".
For Titan Extreme, you can clear it with zero miss as long as everyone remembers the entire pattern, so it's almost like a shooting game in that respect. But if your DPS is too high that can sometimes cause the pattern to mess up and it can get scary that way (laugh).
For Ifrit Extreme, the focus is on the healers, who weren't really involved in many fight mechanics up to this point, and requiring the two healers think about their position and cooperate in order to clear. On top of that, the DPS needs to focus their effort on the nails as well in order to win. This is also a type of role distribution, but is a bit different. This fight is about each role putting out their maximum in the battle.
Regarding tanks, the concept of tank swap has now permeated through these Extreme fights, so you can expect future applications of this idea as well.
Looking forward to 2.2 (and beyond)
-You mentioned that the difficulty of the Extreme primal fights and Coil is as you expected. Does that mean you have no intention of adjusting their difficulty in the future?
Y: Correct. The idea is to not change the difficulty of the fight mechanics themselves, but to ease the content by introducing "Echo" to them in future patches.
-This power of "Echo" have also appeared during story quests as well, where it would activate and buff players if they died several times while attempting a quest. What would the "Echo" buff look like for level 50 contents?
Y: Well, if we really want to break it down, we're basically talking about effectively receiving a 25% damage reduction or a 25% HP buff, something like that. We're still in the process of working on this for 2.2. And there will be contents where this will and will not apply.
-What are the contents where this will apply?
Y: We're in the middle of discussing whether we'll let it apply to the Hard mode primal fights right now. For Coil, the idea is to introduce a Raid-specific type of "Echo", where it would not apply at the beginning of 2.2, but provide a 10% bonus after 1 week, 20% after 2 weeks, and so on... The idea is for players to become stronger as time passes, and make the contents gradually easier to clear.
-And this will apply to all levels (turns) of Coil?
Y: It will apply to the existing contents.
-So it will not apply to the new contents (new Coil turns)?
Y: It will not apply to the new end-game contents. They're supposed to be the highest difficulty contents, after all. The idea is for more casual players to be able raise their item levels and become stronger, relatively speaking, and combined with the power of "Echo", to allow them to gradually begin to clear contents that may have been previously considered by them to be too hard to beat.
It is possible to manually remove the Echo buff if you want.
-By the way, currently the method of allowing the timer to run out while fighting the boss in turn 2 is quickly becoming the mainstream strategy. Is this kind of strategy within acceptable limits?
Y: Well, at this point I think it's within acceptable limits. When people first told me how it's much easier to do the fight this way, I was like "man how did they think of that" (laugh). I suppose it's a method that is made possible by people having much stronger equipment than what the content is designed for. Everything up to turn 3 is designed to be just clearable if everyone had ilvl90 weapons and the rest at ilvl70. But if everyone had so much more HP and DPS, and healing amount being increased too, then I guess clearing the fight through enrage then becomes a possible strategy too.
-Regarding job balance in 2.1. How are things looking like now? Do you feel there's still a need to make adjustments? Or are things starting to look on track now?
Y: Yeah, I think so. As far as job balance goes, right now there's only a conversation about getting that fairy bug fixed quickly.
Nothing planned in terms of major job balance changes in 2.2 at this point. Besides the fix to fairy behavior.
Putting more effort into adjusting PvP balance.
- While we're talking about jobs, you mentioned in your presentation earlier that new abilities may be introduced in the expansion pack. Let's say summoners will get to summon Leviathan, but what about other jobs?
Y: Well, we'll be raising the level cap at that point too, so naturally you can expect at least 2 or 3 new skills for each job.
-Well, well, not just one but multiple new skills? What kind of stuff are we talking about here?
Y: I don't have anything yet (laugh). And on top of new skills, I'm sure there will be new class and job introduced at that point as well.
-As this is an MMORPG that uses item levels, what would happen to this when the level cap is raised?
Y: Let's say if the character's power is originally 50 and their item is also 50, the character would become 60 and the item 40, so balance is maintained that way. So when the level cap is raised, all that's increased is the character's power.
-So basically, we're talking about an increase in the character's base stats as well as a number of additional job skills?
Y: That's right.
-So that means the rare equipment we have now like the ilvl95 Allagan weapons and Relics won't become junk?
Y: Correct. So when the item level is raised, you'll begin to see very different and powerful weapons.
-Since item levels will continue to rise in the future, how much can we expect it to go up by in every patch or expansion?
Y: I can't say anything about that right now. If I were to say something now it may create rumors or cause players to reach unintended conclusions, and potentially impact the in-game economy and everyone's motivation. I think most other MMOs don't talk about these kind of stuff in advance for the same reason.
Sorry for the crappy formatting. Not sure how to add blank spaces between lines...
Edit: and yes, the ilvl bit near the end was kind of confusing and unclear. He may be trying to say that being at a higher physical level will bring about an increase in character power (via an increase of base stats), but the equippable gear many not increase in item level in the same linear fashion, so your ilvl90/95 lv50 gear will still stay relevant. Just guessing.
BONUS tidbit from the Dengeki Online Interview
Not as many new information from this one except the following points regarding 2.2:
The new Allagan tomestone will be obtainable from the new Coil turns (6-9), Leviathan, new dungeons, etc. There will be a weekly cap imposed, naturally.
Current weekly limit on Allagan Tomestone of Mythology will be removed (along with the lockout for Coil Turn 1-5, as previously announced).
Not quite sure about the CT drop lockout yet.
New top level craftable gear is designed to be used to challenge the latest end-game contents, until people can collect enough new tomestones to obtain the next tier of end-game gear.
There will be voice acting for the new story cutscenes, as well as the introduction of "surprising" new characters.