Eorzean Evening Post: Diadem Loot Drama .

One highlight of Final Fantasy XIV’s 3.1 patch was a new kind of content where Free Company airships take players out on exploratory missions. This is now better known as the Diadem.

Hearkening back to old school MMO content, the Diadem falls somewhere between grouped instanced dungeons and open world FATE parties and hunts. To break it down, you get a group together, and the group flies to a new map with several floating islands. Your group, and other groups on the island, spend a finite amount of time killing monsters, completing small objectives (sometimes), and spawning larger monsters to fight for better rewards.

So what it amounts to is several groups of people sharing islands and killing mobs on a timer. Each mob drops a chest with rewards that the group can roll on. Larger and more dangerous mobs have a better chance at dropping a better chest. The amount of contribution you make to the fight also determines the quality of the reward.

Rewards are mostly pieces of armor, with the possibility of earning the highest ilvl armor in the game – ilvl 210. However, the stats on each piece of armor is highly RNG, which means even if you did luck out to find an ilvl 210 item, and it did happen to be for your class, there’s still no promise that the stats on the item would be worthwhile.

You can trade in the pieces of armor that have no worth to you for tokens. These tokens can be traded for other items, such as the new Pegasus mount and high level materials. And, honestly, that about sums up the Diadem in a nutshell.

 

An Experiment

This is the first time end game content of this type has been introduced to FFXIV. Usually, players earn their end game gear from a combination of gathering tomes (from dungeons and daily roulettes), earning trade-in drops from smaller raids (like Alexander Normal), or weekly gear drops from larger 24-man raids. You can often use open world hunts to earn seals to trade for yet another item to further upgrade armor… and yeah. It can get just as crazy and convoluted as it sounds.

When I first heard about the Diadem as a new kind of end game content, I cheered. I mean, the more variety of end game activities players have, the better, right? Plus, I am no fan of running dungeons and raids day after day, so a little semi-open-world content sounded good to me. And on paper, it did look good.

After experiencing the content, I still think there’s a lot of potential for the Diadem. However, I also think it fell short for players in many ways. This has amounted in more than a little drama among the community.

 

The PUG Problem

I feel the biggest problem with the Diadem stems from the fact that the Easy and Normal modes allow players to use the Duty Finder to enter the instance as a PUG.  Now, I want to be somewhat careful about how I discuss this, because I see it both ways.

First, I understand why the Diadem allows PUG groups to enter. It would be a huge bummer to gate end game content behind the requirement that a player must be a part of a Free Company, and that FC must 1) own a house 2) with a workshop and 3) have built an airship. That’s a pretty tall order considering the rough state that housing is in.

On the other hand, limiting the Diadem to FC airships alone would have facilitated a different movement within the community. Not only would it make joining a FC more attractive – let’s face it, there’s so few perks to being in a FC that no one feels they have to be – but it also could have built up Diadem Linkshells or FC alliances who would work together to ferry folks to the Diadem.

You also wouldn’t have the situation that you have now with the community. Because, face it, anytime you join a randomly formed PUG, you never know what you’re going to get. In the Duty Finder especially, you always have the chance to get “that guy.” You know the one. I don’t need to go into details.

 

Divided Interest

The Diadem is an end game experience that provides content to those who wish to adventure and fight monsters, as well high level gatherers who want to score the newest and rarest materials. The official FFXIV artwork for the Diadem depicts happy fighters clearing the island alongside of the happy gatherers in an idealistic sort of euphoria.

Needless to say, that’s not really how it worked out. Especially in Duty Finder groups.

For example, we have Bob. Bob is a miner who wants to gather new mats from the Diadem. But he’s not a member of a FC, or maybe his FC doesn’t have a house, and therefore has no airship. Maybe he doesn’t have time to set up a Party Finder for the Diadem, so he falls back on the quicker option – the Duty Finder.

Bob is thrown into a random group of folks, most of which want to clear mobs for treasure drops. Once they get into the Diadem, and they’ve unlocked the currents to fly, party members can go anywhere and do anything they please.

Most of the party goes to farm monsters. Bob, however, wants to mine. So he breaks off from the party to mine, yet, he can still roll on the loot from the chests dropped by the monsters that his party is farming. Even though he’s not contributing to the damage output.  And now his party is a bit steamed about his lack of contribution to the party.

He gets a bit steamed back because he didn’t come to the Diadem to fight, he just wanted some of the new mats only available on the island. But there was no way to specify this from the Duty Finder – it just lumped everyone into a party no matter what their needs were.

The party can’t vote dismiss Bob. They also can’t vote dismiss Fred, who has decided to go “AFK” for whatever unknown reason. Because vote dismiss doesn’t exist in the Diadem.

Yoshi-P talked about this in an official response post on the forum. He noted that the team chose not to allow parties to vote dismiss members because they were afraid that the party might dismiss someone when a really good item dropped, to prevent that player from rolling on the item. I can understand that issue, but now there’s a completely different issue at hand.

When the community complains about players like Bob, who is simply there to do his own thing with a different objective from the party, the response is less than pleasing to some folks. Yoshi-P pretty much said nothing would be done about this. That players need to learn to communicate in the party for a more harmonious experience (in a PUG group, that’s a high order!), or create a Party Finder group to gather like-minded individuals.

 

Other Issues, Some Nerfs

The Diadem has other pressing issues aside from the division of fighters and gatherers. Apparently, there’s a thing where whoever pulls a mob is guaranteed a reward whether they stick around to finish the fight or not. That’s a pretty crummy move, but (sadly) to be expected. The team is considering ways to approach this, but it’s a bit more tricky given that this requires them to change the whole battle-reward system for FFXIV.

Another issue came with parties who just sat and farmed specific mobs at specific areas. Considering the Diadem is timed content, people want to kill as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, the team seemed to underestimate the amount of high level gear drops these farming parties could produce.

Due to that, we’ve already seen a reduction to the respawn rate of farmed mobs in a previous hotfix. They’ve also changed the spawning conditions for notorious monsters – I’m assuming to make it slower to spawn them. On top of that, they nerfed the amount of Tomes accumulated in Easy and Normal Diadem runs, which I really feel wasn’t necessary. Having an alternate way to get Tomes (aside from dungeons and raids) was a nice thing.

 

Not for Everyone

I also want to note that the type of content provided in the Diadem is not for everyone. I went in with members of my FC, and we did complete the Eso Tome goals as well as did a little hunting and exploration. The Tome goals are really the only explicit goals in the area, which means players are the ones who have to choose to make their own fun.

For some, farming and killing mobs, even despite the reward for each one, is more monotonous than fun. A friend admitted after our first exploration that they found the Diadem to be a little boring.

“All we do is kill monsters?” they asked.

I tried to explain that it was a flashback to older MMO times, before quest hubs and raids and missions. Back when you went out and killed hundreds of monsters in a group to level up… and you liked it, darn it! Because that was what there was to do.

After the newness of the Diadem wears off and folks get their Pegasus mount, will this style of content still be enjoyed? Maybe I’m a bit old-skool because I don’t mind doing this in short bouts, and even find it fun. But I do recognize for the more modern MMO players, the Diadem may need to change and even evolve into something beyond what it is now.

I think the foundation for it is there if the team can work out how to handle the unexpected issues and the drama that has spawned from it. I would sure like to see more open-ended experiences built into my MMOs. But I’m just not sure the random PUG me-me-me-mentality is ready and able to come together as a true community to make it work.

Related: Column, Eorzean Evening Post, Final Fantasy XIV, MMORPG