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The Mog Log: FFXIV lessons from Final Fantasy XI
Final Fantasy XIV is in the final push to launch now, with phase 4 right around the corner and early access shortly after that. This is good news for me, since it means I can get back to actually playing the game that I write about every week after nearly a year. And, you know, the game is pretty awesome, so that's a bright point as well. It also means that the future isn't what it used to be. The relaunch has been The Future for a very long time, but now the relaunch is The Almost Right This Second, and The Future consists of patches and expansions and new classes and the like. All good things, all welcome, and all things that could take a few lessons from Final Fantasy XI. I've said before that Final Fantasy XIV was designed to fix some problems from Final Fantasy XI that it never was going to have, but that's not what I'm talking about. Instead of talking about preventing players from leveling consistently or hunting the possibility of RMT with McCarthy-level vigilance, let's look at some simple lessons to internalize in the future.
Breakfast Topic: Does gender influence class choice?
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. A while back I ran a survey for a course I was taking and I enlisted the help of the WoW community. One of the more interesting results that came out of the survey was what classes the different genders played. From most played to least played, the classes were: Men paladin, druid, shaman, warrior, death knight, priest, mage, hunter, rogue, and then warlock Women druid, priest, paladin, shaman, hunter, mage, warlock, death knight, warrior, and then rogue What you might notice is that men prefer the three-role hybrids, then the two-role hybrids, then the pure DPS classes. For women, the order of popularity is classes that can heal, classes that do ranged DPS, then the pure melee classes. The results of the survey would seem to imply that women and men have entirely different ways of approaching class choice. Men seem to judge a class based upon how much utility it provides or how flexible it is, whereas women seem to be more focused on what they'll be doing and where they'll be doing it.
Observations from running a Naxx-25 PuG
I'm very "up" on PuGs. I started my career as a PuG tank and met a lot of great players that way, many of whom I still raid with today. I've always been a stout supporter of throwing caution to the wind and joining LFG for an afternoon to see where it'll take you; it's been my experience that random players on your realm can and often will surprise you. Once you master the art of the 5-person PuG, the ultimate risk is a raid PuG. One-shot the instance, or spend the night wiping? You won't know until you try.I used to run Hyjal PuG's in late Burning Crusade and got to be the person in charge of arranging healers on Anetheron, explaining where to die on Azgalor, and uttering a hollow laugh at suggestions on whether or not Archimonde was in the cards (answer: hell no). I wasn't around for my guild's Naxx run one of these past weeks, and a few guildies were interested in gearing up their alts, so we thought -- PuG a 25-man Naxx? Why not?
Arena Junkies looks at some Gladiator statistics
You have to be real careful about how you put together statistics. As Gregg Easterbrook said, "Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything." So, grain of salt, people. That being said, Arena Junkies has put up a pretty interesting compilation of numbers. They took a look at their (fairly substantial) membership, and figured out the approximate class makeup of each Arena season's Gladiators. The results aren't exactly a surprise, which supports the analysis's validity. Warlocks -- once the Arena juggernaut to the sounds of much QQ -- have lost 8% of their dominance in the Gladiator ranks. By comparison, Rogues have picked up 6.5%. Druids are the big winners, though. Only 7.5% of Season 1's gladiators were druids, compared to 16% of Season 3's. And yeah. There's a lot of metagame interpretation that could be done regarding these numbers. Melee have slowly risen in power over the span of three seasons, and Paladins -- once the bubbling unstoppable -- have really dropped in performance. Druids used to be unremarkable, but now the "science" of Line-of-Sight and Mobility has taken the day. Arena Junkies promise to further update their analysis when the Hall of Fame is updated for Season 3. But I agree with Tyveris: I think the current sample is indicative, and we're not going to see any huge differences between these numbers and those.
