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Yoshida did say that stats will have a lesser impact on the game than teamwork and performance in ARR than it did in 1.0, which is kind of impressive considering that gear wasn't as gigantic of a performance differential in that game as it was in other MMOs. I believe only Ifrit Extreme and Raven, Nevermore were hard enough to consider having a gear-check.

In the game I'm working on, you build a custom character from about 2000 abilities, so you could say that I'm a customization junkie as well. However, there are still no base player statistics to work with. They're not mutually inclusive; you can have one without the other.

I think your opinion represents a classic paradox in game design-- balance vs. competitive building. Some players like to build competitively, like in trading card games--half the challenge is in choosing an ideal configuration. However, the more important the build is, the less balance there is between players. Superior configurations emerge, players feel forced to use them, other players who had a different type of build in mind become resentful of the imbalance, etc...

It's a problem which highlights just how important finding the fine balance is in games. You can balance everything perfectly and then you leave nothing for the build-junkies. You can create a great game for build-junkies and ruin the balance for the average player. Then you'll invariably have to nerf things when you attempt to balance them. There is an inbetween that can be achieved, but it has to be achieved in the numbers, not the "features", not the concepts, or mechanics, or ideas, etc... it's all in the numbers.

Many games just attempt to appeal to a single niche audience that can appreciate that genrefication, and that's how they find success. If you're trying to appeal to a wider audience, or that large audience that appreciates both elements in moderation, you try to strike a balance between combat skill and build skill, so that players can choose how they want to excel.

2000 abilities sounds like a whole lot of redundancy... unless, of course, you call things like "speed +.5%" as abilities.
Btw, there is a (theoretical) solution to a lot of balancing problems in MMOs, and if you are in the business, it wouldn't
hurt if you consider it: auto-balancing. The more a certain ability is used the weaker it becomes. The less people use
that ability, the stronger it becomes. In the end, all builds will be "equal", simply because the combinations balance out
themselves. The same goes for the "let's only kill crabs or pink birds" problem in FFXI. Instead of manually balancing
those cases, a (surprisingly simple) algorythm like
(current exp yield) = ((base XP yield*t*base regeneration rate X)/(number of kills during the preceding interval t) would
make sure that it actually pays off to explore new regions in a MMO.

It's so ridiculous to see MMO programmers (which are, after all, a special subspecies of programmers) try to MANUALLY
do a computer's work...

I'm not sure if this has has been mentioned/noticed, but at the 3:00 mark of the Exploration video (benchmark one), in the far background behind the trees there seems to be a massive turtle-like creature. I am super excited that we may get to fight stuff like this in ARR. FFXI never really had any grand scale fights, and it was always something I felt it lacked.

As for everything else, I think things are looking interesting. I can't wait to start out in the new world! I still have jobs to level and a lot of AF to get from v1.0, so curious how they have changed some of that quest line

Amazing catch on that, I have no idea how you noticed

I partially agree on this. As much as I love grand scale fights, there does have to be a balance to it. In open world fights like the way FATE battles are designed, I believe there's very little you can do to curb people from gangbanging the mobs into submission with 50+ people. However in instanced content you can scale it to whatever parameters you'd like. 8, 10, 15, 20, 25, 40, etc.

(Slightly off topic:) I pray to the gawds that they can balance the classes appropriately more than anything else honestly. That will also play a role in how they make the fights scale. I think they can do it, it just requires "fine-tuning" and not the overbuffing/heavy-handed nerfing we've seen in the past from SE (as well from Blizzard -_-)

That, too, is an aspect of the incentive structure within the gameplay, what some game designers refer to as feedback loops. A huge part of what makes a game fun is observing your progress towards your goal. When you're not really getting any meaningful feedback about your performance, it's difficult to enjoy the game. That feedback doesn't necessarily have to be immediate, or even good, but it has to come from somewhere. And when you do a good job, you should get a reward as further feedback. But when the reward isn't tied to your level of performance, the game doesn't feel fair or fun.

That's actually one of the reasons so many players prefer to solo... the feedback is 100% based on their performance. This makes them more engaged, and makes the outcomes more meaningful to them. And that's one of the reasons why I rail so hard against trinity-style party systems. They make a large chunk of the feedback codependent, when individualized performance and feedback really needs to be present as well. It's fine to have both, but I don't think we can count on systems that are entirely cooperative to be successful anymore. When they were the only kind of MMO on the market, it was easy to draw out that niche audience that it appealed to. A big chunk of WoW's success was due to the viability of soloing, drawing in an entirely different crowd of players--a much larger audience. But just because the soloer's market has been tapped doesn't mean that cooperative MMOs are going to appeal to those players. If anything, they're going to slam that MMO and give it a bad rap, and those players who might have enjoyed a more old school system are going to be put off by it.

The More You Know