Eorzean Evening Post: Final Fantasy XIV Gives Hand Up, Not Hand Out .

Over the last year I have come to love my adopted home of Eorzea. In that time I have managed to experience several different facets of the game, but as a seasoned MMO player you cannot help but compare and contrast it with other gaming experiences. My MMO career started like many people with Everquest and from there lead through a long line of games spanning different genres and demographics. Each game does some things extremely well, and other things it struggles with. However if you follow MMOs there has been a steady evolution towards more “player friendly” design schemes. The early MMOs were designed around keeping players locked inside their game worlds for the maximum amount of time. Everquest for example was originally designed around a pay per hour of gameplay model that was popular in the early online networks like GEnie and Sierra Online. However games are now designed with a realization that the player is spending less time devoted to each.

In game design there is a term called “friction” that denotes the amount of resistance a player needs to undertake in order to accomplish a given goal. If the friction is too high then players feel demotivated to keep struggling to move forward. If the friction is too low, then players do not feel like their accomplishments are as valuable. Modern game design becomes this tightrope act of trying to balance giving the player enough “carrot” to make up for the “stick”. Regardless if we realize it or not we the player are constantly evaluating the risk and reward of every situation. The potential gain has to feel like it is worth the potential risk in order for us to accomplish a given task. This calculus and balancing act thus far has been one of the the shining points of Final Fantasy XIV. Over the last year we have witnessed a series of subtle tweaks that swing the pendulum in one direction or another ever keeping the player centered and directed towards the goals that best serve the community.

In last weeks article I mentioned that I would be writing about how I feel that Square Enix does an exceptional job of giving players a “Hand Up” but not necessarily a “Hand Out”. Before we talk about what works I think it is important to talk about what does not work well. For some time in MMO gaming there has been the concept of “Welfare Epics”, which first came to being in World of Warcraft. The true beginning of the term come from a series that was put in place with the launch of The Burning Crusade, and involved players creating an Arena PVP team, playing three matches a week and getting raid quality gear relatively easily. The system did not require you to win any of your arena matches, just play the minimum amount and each week you would earn a certain amount of currency that quickly added up to enough to purchase the high level rewards.

The issue was that the system did not incentivize players to compete, but instead to simply participate just enough to earn their points each week. Through creating an Arena team and quickly losing your three matches a week you could ultimately end up geared well enough to compete in that expansions raid tiers. The problem was not necessarily that they made the acquisition of gear easier, because in every game there should be a path that allows a more casual player to catch up to the relevant content levels. The issue was that it required next to no effort on the part of the player to get the reward. The friction being too low meant that simply for showing up repeatedly over a series of weeks meant a guaranteed reward. The system lacked any aspirational goals to be working towards, or any real player skill progression. The result was both wildly successful and universally loathed at the same time. There was a sense of obligation to go through the song and dance of “pretending” to be an arena team just to make sure you were qualifying for your free rewards.

While giving away rewards is not the answer, gating them behind multiple players of progression is not either. The pinnacle of raiding difficulty for me will always be the Everquest Planes of Power expansion. This expansion saw the relevant content and gear locked behind the extremely formidable walls collectively known as “Planar Progression”. The system divided up all of the content into broad tiers, and in order to progress from one to the next you had to defeated all of the previous tier. Meaning each individual player had to stay up to date on their planar flags to be able to participate in the latest content. For a brand new player it became this insurmountable task to try and find groups willing to let you “catch up”. This lead to players feeling like they were fighting a losing battle, and ultimately giving up on the game rather than trying to fight against the current.

What we have with Final Fantasy XIV feels like to borrow a term from science the “Goldilocks Zone” of MMO friction. The game combines some of the most challenging raid content at the bleeding edge of the spectrum, in the form of the Binding Coil of Bahamut instances. This content was deemed impossible at the launch of the game back in August 2013 and has somehow managed to stay challenging to new players regardless of gear improvements and echo based nerfs. In part this is due to the fact that the content is based on player skill and awareness checks instead of gear based progression. Turn Five is still challenging today because it requires the entire team of eight players to work together as a unified force, and react to mechanics as they happen. As gear increases it makes the content more forgiving, but does not remove the hard skill checks as required lessons learned to progress.

In addition to the three tiers of Binding Coil that stand as the pinnacle of difficult content, Square has slowly been building a pathway up the mountain of content. With each new patch introduced a new series of three dungeons, each dropping slightly higher gear levels than the one before it.  Additionally through the two tier “tomestones” system it has allowed players to progress towards a goal each week through reaching the “cap” and ultimately earning “near raid” quality gear. Finally with the addition of the Crystal Tower 24 player instances it gave players an additional path to gearing. Rounding out the options are an ever increasing stable of crafting options, and the ability to complete open world hunts to gain gear through the “Allied Seals” currency. As a result each time players have blazed new trails into harder content, Square Enix has carved a few more stairs into the mountain making the first parts of the journey easier to accomplish.

The real benefit of the system is knowing that when you bring a friend into the game, you can give them a clear roadmap on how to get caught up to the point you are at in the content. I’ve watched this several times as a motivated friends have been able to catch up quickly and ultimately eclipse some of the more veteran players. This also has had a strange ramification on the community, in that players seem to be more open to helping others get started on the path, knowing that ultimately they can be a resource later on once they have completed it. The balancing act that has been done of keeping the friction in just the right place has been interesting to behold. The fact that veteran players are rewarded by helping new players however has been the masters stroke.

You can call it “bribing” or “social engineering”, but whatever the case is the system of rewarding players for completing older content has caused content to essentially remain “evergreen”. Many games have a ladder in place for the player to climb on their way to the latest tiers of content. The problem being that unless you are somehow incentivizing players to continue running older content, it still remains a hurdle to leap over. Final Fantasy XIV has managed to keep placing obstacles in the way of the highest progressed players, that require them to go back and do older content… and in essence insuring that the content is being run for the good folks who are actually completing it the first time. The key driver of this process has been the relic weapon quest chain, which more than anything is a matter of pride and bragging rights for the players who have managed to complete it.

In spite of having a significantly better weapon than I can get through the step of the relic chain I happen to be on, I still find myself drawn to the quest chain. The struggle of the relic weapon gives players a shared sense of struggle, a point that all of us can relate to, and in some small way serves as a unifying force to bring different play styles together. When you see a player wielding a “Zeta” weapon, you know precisely what they went through to get it. When you see a high level player out grinding FATEs you know that they are doing so to get their Atmas, and ultimately end up cheering them on in the process. This perfect balance of friction ultimately acts as the glue that binds the community together.  It is my hope that as we move forward into Heavensward they can keep this same surgical precision on balancing the gameplay elements and at the same time figure out a way to move us forward into a new era, without completely destroying all of the challenges that we faced along the way. After all an MMO is far more about the journey taken, than the destination reached.