Thread: Tanaka tires of "Fatigue" rumors.

Someone else posted this and thought I would bring it to people's attention here with disregard to the new "Fatigue system.

Tanaka Tires of "Fatigue" Rumors :: Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) :: ZAM

Surplus points, a new feature recently introduced into the Final Fantasy XIV beta, has had testers and fans on the outside quite confused. Most people consider it akin to "fatigue," where a character is beset with limitations after a certain amount of play. With no official announcement or explanation on how these points work, fan sites and forums have been struggling to figure them out -- often leading to some harsh criticism of the game. Now, Producer Hiromichi Tanaka seems to have built up some "fatigue" of his own, and lashed out at foreign sites on Twitter today, calling them full of rumors and fabrications.


"Foreign sites have lots of false rumors. They throw together words and fabricate remarks. Then Japanese sites take this and further [falsify it through] mistranslation. The fatigue point criticism has absolutely nothing to do with the actual [system] and is just full of wild ideas."

The source of Tanaka's dismay appears to stem from this interview with Famitsu from Gamescom. In it, the developers admit the existance of a fatigue system, claiming it was designed to benefit players with comparatively little time to enjoy the game. With the details left unclear, "fatigue" has become a source of speculation across the Internet and some articles have made shocking claims regarding its function in limiting player growth and freedom. The situation has reached a point where Tanaka believes that what people are criticizing is nothing like the system as it is in the actual game. Furthermore, the last line states that he believes too many people are just coming up with what they think fatigue might be and making the situation even worse.

Sure, wild speculation is not hard to find while wading through any popular forum, but the assertion that this is the fault of foreign sites is a little harsh. A quick glance at a thread on the JP Beta tester site dedicated to understanding this system reveals pages of baffled testers trying to figure out how exactly it functions. Several replies from Japanese fans also point to the lack of any official explanation as exacerbating, if not outright causing, the issue.

At least we know the producer of the game has been apprised of the issue. As mentioned many times, the entire testing process was based on building the game in accordance to player feedback. Will it be received and implemented into the design process, or continue to be dismissed as wild delusions? Hopefully, we will see a more measured response in the coming days.

You know, anything that SE puts into the game, I will have faith that it will work out. I am sure they wouldn't want to do anything to steer you away from the game.

Yeah, I love how every beta tester and their dog, know every little nook and cranny of the system already, and spout it off wherever they feel like it.

Something truly terrible, like the UI, ok we get it. Outside of japan ppl don't really use gamepads much normally, who knew? As for the rest of the systems, everything out there is pretty much just speculation, until there is an actual RC, not just a beta build, there is 0 point getting all bent out of shape over what may/may not be in it.

Everything us testers have seen could just be "place holders" for the real systems (i.e. all the mobs could easily be from various different parts of eorza, just jumbled up and put in one place for testing purposes). We are testing the nuts and bolts of the system, not the assembled steamship. Too often we forget that.

NOTE: These are generalized statements responding to the original post, not the above poster, Truvy, that's really interesting, do you still have the source for that?

The developers actually released a statement explaining thoroughly about the Surplus system. Some people are translating it now, and this is not official, but this is what people are getting so far, and do know this is not 100% accurate yet since the translation is not done.

"The hasty translations right now say the surplus is a weekly bonus exp, which decreases over time until you get 0 bonus exp = normal exp. After a week the bonus is reset to 100%. The bonus isn't class shared, so you can switch class and will have the full bonus again for that class, instead it's shared for the pg level."

If this is true, then I am 100% for all this. But this is not official yet, I will keep a lookout for when the official one does come by and post it.

Wait... Can someone explain this to me? I've missed something, and I never actually got a character high enough to really suffer the surplus issue. The way I understood it is if you hit the 0% mark, you're not getting any xp at all.

From the developers.

We’d like to thank all the beta testers out there for their hard work and support! We’re applying all those ideas you’ve sent us to make for the best possible Open Beta test and official release.

Now we’d like to take a moment to answer the many questions we’ve received about character balance in the current B3 phase.

First off, the main concept behind FFXIV is allowing those players with little time on their hands to play effectively, and game balance is based off of that. Furthermore, it is being designed to not give those with more time on their hands to play an unfair advantage. Because of that, systems such as Guardian’s Favor (a bonus to Guildleves) have been implemented to make leveling in the short-term easier than leveling in the long-term.

To achieve this balance, the amount of possible skill/experience points earned after a certain period of time has a threshold. Think of it as real-life “fatigue” from working at improving your skills via battle *(aka. No one could train ad nauseam in the real world with no ill effects).

Within the first eight hours of play, you can earn 100% experience. The seven hour period following will see your possible experience gradually approach zero.

This system is on a weekly timer. After a week has passed since you began skilling that particular weapon, the timer will reset. It will start anew when you skill up again.

Any experience earned past that point is saved as “surplus.” There is surplus for each class, and if you begin to see it please consider playing another class and adjust accordingly.

However, experience points are not specific to any class and therefore the decrease in experience points is not affected by changing classes.

That’s how the system stands as of right now.

Also, this system wasn’t implemented just in B3 but was set in motion from the very start of beta. Despite this, we have received many opinions regarding it in B3. There are a few reasons why:

-B3 allowed for longer sessions in single sittings.
-In order to promote party play, skill/experience points earned were greatly increased.
-The skill/experience earned from weak enemies was lowered, but had failed to pop up on initial bug reports (and was later fixed via maintenance).

According to the last bug report skill/experience able to be earned was above what had been planned, therefore people hit the limit much more quickly than hoped for. That is the biggest cause. Yet another problem was that we were unable to adjust guildleve experience and the experience-earned limit at the same time.

Our lack of explanation regarding all of this was a mistake, and we heartily apologize.

This all is still currently under development, and we have plans to make the limit more palatable in answer to all the tester feedback we received concerning this. In particular we would like to address the speed with which experience begins to drop off and are already looking into it.
Also, since experience points fatigue carries over despite changing weapons, we plan to make it not so harsh.

At the very least, we promise to not have people hitting these limits in a short period of time, such as during the start of B3.

We would also like to make an announcement regarding something else.

The decrease in earnings when gathering is based on your actions taken with that class and is unrelated to the aforementioned limits. This is also currently under review and is planned for adjustment in accordance with many testers’ opinions.

Surplus experience is currently not being used. However, we have received many comments suggesting some sort of reward be put into effect regarding it, and we think that’s a pretty interesting idea. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, though, and we’re currently investigating the possibilities.

Open Beta will not just see changes to the issues stated above but will also see adjustments made to encourage party play even more (such as an increase to skill points), which the team is currently hard at work on adjusting. We hope you’ll all test it out when the time comes.

Finally, we would like to apologize for the lateness of any developer comments due to my attendance of Gamecom this past week. In my absence much fuss was raised over speculation, old information and some mistranslations on overseas fansites *(what?! /panic. Though I wonder what that’s in reference to in particular). I hope to avoid this from happening again by delivering developer comments as promptly as possible. Thank you all for your understanding.

And thanks in advance for your hard work to come in Open Beta!

Final Fantasy XIV director
Nobuaki Komoto

Someone needs to translate for me, since I don't really get the fatigue/surplus myself.

I will try to simplify this.

Lets say you are a Gladiator. You go out and start leveling, after 8 hours worth of leveling, the percentage rate starts dropping down and in 7 hours, it eventually goes down to 0. Now when you get to the 0 point, that class cannot progress any further a whole week from the moment your exp rate went to 0%. When you switch to a different class, you have an 8/7 timer on that also.

So basically, each hour after the 8 hours, the exp is dropped by 14.29%, eventually going down to 0.

Hope this helps explain it to those that are a bit confused by it.

I really think they could save themselves some grief if they would communicate with us more. A lot of the team's own headaches come from just not talking about things and elaborating on them. The other thing is, the director REALLY should have been doing weekly updates every week to let everyone know what they've seen the most and what their plans were. I know they're busy working on things constantly, but he could save himself a lot of trouble just by opening some dialog. Not telling people about stuff only causes issues. And lots.

Another things is while it's understandable they want to make things have a more real world feel, the inconveniences of the real world are things we don't want to see in our escape worlds. We don't need to make our characters sleep or eat to survive. Having our gear wear out, or our characters get tired of leveling a class is just... It doesn't work well.