Whats next?  People falling into comas from playing MMO's?  

I keep hearing about this ridiculous incident. As a designer, it drives me crazy that players have been conditioned to think like this. Why should players be the absolute top of the foodchain in any game? Having some insurmountable (or at least incredibly difficult) enemies gives a sort of balance that is generally missing from most games.

This is, to me, one of only several issues that prevade common design principles that are holding back games from progress. (MMOs in particular are terrible for design, as far as I'm concerned)

 

"..what exactly the game's developers, Square-Enix, expect out of their devoted fan base." -- Perhaps they *don't* expect you to win? Would that really be such a shocker?

This reminds me of the WoW south park episode.  "Bathroom!...BATHROOM!"

 People have died while playing MMO's.  As I write this I am playing EQ2, but I am not about to die or lapse into a coma.  I can remember playing Everquest when the Sleeper was unbeatable.  It was eventually killed by 3 guilds, and I don't know how long it took, but if you are willing to sit in front of a PC for 18 hours trying to beat a boss then you are already beyond the point of worrying about the rest of your life.  I see nothing wrong with creative content that is especially hard, but it would be wrong to create content that requires you to spend more than a couple of hours at your PC at a given time.

(whistle) Cripes.  I've been known to play CoH/CoV from time to time, and I thought Strike/Task forces were bad.  Generally you don't want to commit to one unless you have at least five hours free to play.  I can't usually go more then 12 without my eyes trying to crawl backwards into my head and I usually have to go someplace and get a cheeseburger/read a book or something.

If spending 18 hours trying to beat something and not even winning isn't a giant neon sign that says it's time to pick up the phone and cancel your subscription - I don't know what is.

What else do you expect from Square-Enix? They are the kings of unbeatable/nigh unbeatable bosses. Do you really think they wouldn't do it in their MMO?

Grab a few hundred otehr players and fight the thing in shifts and get over yourself.

E. Zachary Knight
http://www.editorialgames.com
Oklahoma City Chapter of the ECA
MySpace Page: http://www.myspace.com/okceca
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1325674091

"We decided to end it before we risked turning into a horrible news story about how video games ruin people's lives."

Too little, too late.  It never ceases to amaze me how people will devote themselves to an MMO.

M. Carusi

Capitol Gaming

http://capitolgaming.blogspot.com

This is why im glad i didnt buy FFXI when i had to chance. (also the ridiculous limit on number of playable characters allowed. 1 per account!? Buy more? Grrrr) 

 

I havent dared enter the world of raiding in WoW due to worries about the length of them.

Sounds like a case of sour grapes. 

Translates to:  If Square-Enix had not made the Mob unbeatable (extremely difficult at least) then we would not have needed to spend endless hours and risk public spectacle. 

News flash for you bubby.  No one to blame but yourself.  No?  You knew what you were getting into and that the Mob was hard.  You showed signs of knowing or how did you know to need/want to gather all the people you did.  If Square was really responsible for not letting your hurt yours (hows that?  They are responsible for your being an idiot?) they could always put in a timer that kicks you if you play more then XX minutes on a single log-in and will let you relog for xx hours.  The screams from the player base would likely fighten the Pandemonium Warden to death.   

Bet you would not have complained if you had won.   But no you spent all that time and lost and complained.  Pitiful. 

Have to wonder what kind of epic/uber loot a mob like that would drop though.

 

I don't play FFXI, I stick to WoW and LOTRO for my MMO fixes.  But I wonder, would it be possible to design encounters like this to be taken in "waves" or shifts.

For example, and I'm just throwing out numbers here, say you have a 45 person group.  Would it be possible to have to take this boss in shifts of say 9 players each.

So group A attacks for 3 hours

Group B for 3

Group C for 3

Group D for 3

Group E for 3

and then Group A comes back in and starts to cycle over.  Obviously, the idea being that no group of nine players is stuck doing an ENTIRE 18 hour boss fight, which is pretty ridiculous.  All boss' should be beatable within 12 hours if you're going to make one group do the entire thing.

I don't think this takes away from the Difficulty.  It still means finding 45 people who are capable.  IMO it might even add to the strategy since you need to create 5 effective fighting groups, since if one group gets wiped out the raid fails.

Just an idea.

There are a few points of information that commenters on this post need to take into account before spouting uninformed opinions. Mind that I'm not here to argue for either side of this "issue."

- The boss WAS fought in shifts. A large Linkshell can bring enough members to a fight to rotate people in and out on a 3-ish hour schedule. (The fact that they're used to something like this tells you a bit about high-level encounters in FFXI.)

- The boss DID show visible signs of progress; the problem, as alluded to by a previous commenter, was that the signs were illusory. It's the old carrot-on-a-stick tactic; basically the boss says "you ALMOST have me!" for 18 hours.

- Yes, of course, these players were geared to the teeth, highly coordinated and strategic, and prepared for a long encounter.

- No, they were not "required" to do it. However, adding in nigh-impossible bosses has become SE's *only* method of keeping the game interesting for top-end players. Pandemonium Warden was likely the only thing left to do in FFXI for most of these players, and before you quip that they should just quit if that's the case, consider how you might feel if you had poured that many months into your FFXI character. Probably not inclined to cut and run.

- In light of the above point, it's should be clear that it's cheap psychologism to deride these players as being concerned solely with bragging rights / their collective e-peen. Think of it this way: SE gave them a puzzle to solve. They're trying to solve it. Last time there was a puzzle like this (a boss called Absolute Virtue), it was so hard that players tried and tried until SE went and dropped hints about how to beat it. They put out a video showing how to win - using characters that were impossibly overpowered. Finally Absolute Virtue was downed. Players were not overjoyed or bragging; they were upset, at the end of the whole thing. They felt cheated by SE.

- To add insult to injury, bosses like these have a history of dropping one single poor-quality item.

- Commenters have wondered what else Square-Enix is supposed to do - make the thing beatable? (Note that talk of "unbeatable" here is a stand-in for "ridiculously hard to beat, requiring insider knowledge from the game devs.") They clearly aren't familiar with satisfying, well-designed high-end content as it appears in other, better MMOs.

- Nobody's denying that it's partially incumbent upon the players to uphold SE's advisory not to neglect your family, friends, school, and work. But when the designers fashion an encounter that, under ideal circumstances (clairvoyance into the minds of the boss developers so that you can know the silly "trick" required to beat the boss) would still take the better part of a full day to beat, that is at cross-purposes with their own recommendation. That's like giving a crack addict a pipe and $500 and dropping him off in the inner city. Sure, you can say it's his fault for being a crack addict, but are your hands really clean in that situation? Why didn't you give him methadone?

- Just to be clear, when the phrase "silly trick" gets thrown around, well ... in one case, there was an FFXI boss who was pretty much unbeatable until players figured out - with no hints - that you had to do a /kneel emote before one of his attacks. That's the kind of thing we're talking about here. No surprise that it could take you well over 18 hours to figure out something like that.

I think a lot of you probably don't understand these games.

1. No the boss shouldn't be unbeatable. For the (redacted) that think that it is normal to have an unbeatable boss, go away, you don't understand these kinds of games. You remind me of the snobby artists who would put out a blank canvas and say that is the statement they want to make and if you don't appriciate their art then you just aren't worthy of it. In these games, mobs aren't meant to be invincible. The theme is that you can overcome anything with planning and teamwork. Throwing that theme away is what has the players feel betrayed.

2. Likely this was a simple glitch. I'm was playing AoC until recently (canceled this morning) and glitches like this happen all the time. There was one raid boss that would randomly refill to full life occasionally. He was invincible until they fixed him. Likely a new update will come through, they will realize they slipped an extra 0 into the mobs heath and the problem will be fixed.

3. MMO's aren't like playing a normal game, they are more like a flower garden. Some of us would consider tilling, weeding, fertilizing and planting a flower garden a lot of work and a huge waste of time and money. Others really enjoy it, it is their hobby and they will spend as much time and money as they want to play out in their garden. You could say that they are wasting their time, the flowers will die in the winter, they could be reading a book, and all those plants and tools cost a lot of money. Or you could just let them have fun.

In the end, it is what they get out of it that is important. Some get leadership training, others learn skills such as following instructions and working as a team. Critical thinking is important as well as math. Which increases your survivablity more, a 10% increase in damage or an 12% increase in your chance to dodge?

What has the group up in arms is that this is a glitch they find unacceptable. The media has tried to turn it around to say that people are spending too much time on this. When they say that people were becoming ill, they weren't referring to ambulances being called, just likely headaches and stress that any event would cause after 18 hours. It was a glitch and the players want it fixed. Stop making a mountain out of a molehill.

This is lame as hell. If you lost, level up your character and try again with a different strategy, and if it takes more than 2 or 3 hours, back out, level up some more, or just say fuck it, and play the other parts of the game. I seriously doubt the boss is genuinely UNBEATABLE. If it really is, that changes things, but to say that SQUENIX is responsible for the amount of time players spend on the game is illogical to me. Whatever though, this kind of stupid shit is why I don't play MMO's.

 

-Entertainment isn't the reason the world sucks. It's the reason we know the world sucks. For information on games and psychology, look up: Jonathan Freedman(2002)Block & Crain(2007)Grand Theft Childhood, by Harvard researchers Larry Kutner&Cheryl Olson

I play FFXI, and I have since it's North American release.

The game has always been exceedingly difficult, it isn't friendly to new players, and does little to hold the hand of solo'ist players (though many have worked around this now). Even at level 75, there are plenty of areas I can't visit on my own, or if I do, I have to be incredibly wary or I'll just eat a death by attracting unwanted attention.

The game isn't there to the individual player like the The One. You're not lord on high. You aren't special. You're a person, in this world, one of many. And like it or not, there are a lot of things a hell of a lot tougher than you. That's constantly in your face as you play the game, you're always reminded of it. It's emphasis on grouping, and socialization, and many over the one is stressed far more than most MMOs.

So it shouldn't be suprising in a game that has normal enemies that can be quite difficult fights, that you'd find a boss like this. It's simply there to be there. It's for those groups tenacious enough to get together and try it to do it, and shit, if they pulled it off? The dramatized claims of people keeling over at the keyboards (I've been up for 18 hours before, I'm not sure what kind of cheeto based lifestyle they're leading, but I can handle it without too many issues) would've been a damn badge of honor for them.

Lol, Pandemonium Warden isn't the only unbeatable boss (HNM in FFXI terms) in FFXI, a mob named Absolute Virtue is the original.  While he has technically been beaten, that was through  a use of an exploit and was rather quickly fixed by SE. He was also beaten by the SE dev team (using the uber cool, fade camera maneuver >.>;).

Only thing is, most people know that AV is , realistically, unbeatable and either run away or just stand there and take the death. Most people wouldn't be stupid enough to stand there and whack away at this thing for 5 hours, let alone 18.But then again, most people aren't as concerned with they're e-peen as blue gartr is. I mean, during that time they didn't even actually hurt PW's true form.

There is without a doubt some obscure way to beat these two, but it's just not worth it for most players, as your stil looking at a 10+ hour fight. They're really just put in as time sinks. They don't even drop things that are that spectacular.

It's ment to be beaten. There is only one place left for the Hachiryu Haramaki to drop and that's PW (the other pieces of the set drop off the lower tier bosses). There are also a number of other very powerful items that were added to the game's data files last update and again, PW is the only place left for them to drop.

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Category:Zeni_Notorious_Monsters

 

This isn't some random monster they added, it's the final boss in a new endgame event system they added last update and it's highly unlikely they would make you go though all that just to fight something that can't be beaten.

 

Details on and pictures of the actual fight here.

http://rukenshin.livejournal.com/17366.html

This is the way I see it, Greg. Making an unbeatable boss: Cool. Not warning the player that said boss is unbeatable: Cool Stringing the player along allowing them to believe said boss is beatable: NOT COOL. The point is not that the boss couldn't be beaten, or that they weren't warned it couldn't be beaten. The point is that the boss makes it seem as if he can be beaten after he is encountered. Hell, making it just automatically rez itself after you deplete its HP is still well into "Cool" territory. But in giving it different forms makes it seem as if the players are making progress. And by creating that illusion it tricks them into wasting time because no one wants to quit after making progress. Imagine it this way. A monster at the lowest level possible who can only inflict one HP damage to you, but every time you kill it, it changes forms. And it has 5,000,000 forms. Nothing is fun about that. It's deceitful and a complete waste of time, but you don't know that until you've spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to make it dead.

Well, looks like all the media coverage got to SE wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/2008_-_%2808/22/08%29_Regarding_Specific_Notorious_Monsters

Note that they say a "decisive outcome may be reached within a shorter period of time." doesn't necessarily scream easier to me, rather, beat this mob in this amount of time or else it kills your group along with everyone else unfortunate enough to be in the immediate vicinity.

 

Also, why the hell are they talking about adjusting Jailor of Love? That thing is already a loot pinata as it is. Making him easier would be a joke because he's already rediculously easy.