A lot of the recent hacking has brought up some of the fundamental flaws in the Final Fantasy XI game.
For starters, the Notorious Monster system is horribly broken. I would say it is broken to the point of being impossible to fix without an overhaul of the entire game system.
Lets look at the problems. Many monsters have extremely long spawn windows. As annoying as rare-spawn monsters are, 21-24 hours is not nearly as bad as something that is 4-8+ hour repops. That means, the monster will spawn more than 4 hours after it last died, with no end to the window. Other monsters are 9-12 hour repops, with Charby at 8-12 hours.
What this means — someone with ‘a life’, with kids, a casual gamer, or someone who has to, you know, work to pay for things, has no chance of keeping track of Time of Death (or ToD) without help. And then, even if they can get ToD, there is little chance of being home to get the kill.
Even a 21-24 hour repop is hard to keep track of for more than a couple of days without the aid of a college student, an unemployed person, or a person with odd work hours helping out.
And then, if you get the people together, and get the kill, there is no guarantee of getting the drop.
The effort to reward ratio is very skewed here. Tons of effort of possibly more than one person, with a reasonably large chance of no reward. At the same time, there is a chance of accidentally running into the monster and getting the drop without any problems. In the case of monsters like Sirocco Kukri monster, it will despawn if not claimed. I don’t know of any other monster like that.
However, this does show a difference in Western vs. Eastern thinking. Since FFXI is a Japanese game, it shows a lot of Japanese thoughts. The Western (American) thinking is to prefer to know the effort to reward ratio for things. The Japanese is different. The thought process is to do what ever it takes to get the job done and get the reward. American thinking focuses on individual effort that the individual reaps the reward from. Japanese thinking focuses on the group, and the individual’s success is the group’s success.
As the game got older, we can see a shift towards Western thinking from Eastern thinking. Older monsters were not changed, but newer activities were. Limbus is an example of this change. The drops from the Proto-Omega and Proto-Ultima fights are usually decent. While there is still a large randomness, it is known that there will be 2-3 items that people generally want per fight. This is a good thing, and Limbus overall is a good compromise between the two styles of thought.
Then, Assault was introduced. With assault, there is a very known effort to reward ratio. For example, 20 times through Golden Salvage is enough to get the Pahluwan Khazagand, or the Amir Dirs, or the Yigit Turban. Known effort to reward is GOOD, and attracts (and keeps) the casual gamer.
I really believe this is why WoW (World of Warcraft for those living under a rock for the past couple of years) is so popular. They have a very well known effort to reward ratio. Drop rates are very well known for all items. It is also well known where they fall. This is thanks to allowing 3rd party plugins. An early one was the ThottBot (which I won’t link to because it was recently attacked for the purposes of stealing accounts and passwords, like somepage). ThottBot gathered a lot of data about what drops where and how often. Also in WoW, there are very few monsters that spawn rarely. All of the decent items are called "random world drops", which means that just about any monster can drop just about any item, or, they fall from instances, where every group has an equal chance of getting any item that falls from that instance.
Or, the item requires gaining a certain amount of fame (reputation), then are purchased. These, while annoying, still are better than a 21-24 hour repop where you might not get claim, and even if you do get claim, you might not get the drop.
At the same time, for the hard-core person who is used to FFXI, the burn-out rate for WoW is quite high. Someone used to camping monsters all day could tear through the content in as little as 6-8 months. WoW counters this by making gear obsolete quickly. The best sword from today is not the best sword from 2 years ago in WoW, while in FF, it is (arguably). It is a fine line that needs to be walked, but without changing old content, I don’t see this problem being ‘fixed’ anytime soon.
Anyone else have thoughts?
-pyra