Absolute Virtue is Absolutely Unscrupulous
There’s a raid in Final Fantasy XI that is intended to take 18 hours to defeat. It’s called Absolute Virtue. This is, at best, a very ill-informed design flaw, but I believe it to actually cross the line into being truly unethical and outright dangerous. If that wasn’t enough, there is also a more difficult raid involving the Pandemonium Warden that takes even longer.
I’m not making this up. Final Fantasy XI Global Online Producer/Lead Game Master Sage Sundi says that the Absolute Virtue battle takes ~18 hours.
A linkshell (the FFXI equivalent of guilds) called Beyond the Limitation has defeated Absolute Virtue, and they’ve tried to take on the Pandemonium Warden. But, in the latter case, they had to quit after 18 hours of non-stop battling because their members were literally becoming physically ill. That’s right, they were passing out and vomiting because of a terrible design decision.
I’ve honestly never seen anything so negligent on the part of a game developer, which is why I’m calling out Square-Enix on this one even though I usually don’t comment directly about the actions of other MMO developers.
I implore you to change this, developers of Final Fantasy XI. Do it for the health of your customers or, if you really are immoral or incapable of understanding how contemptible an 18 hour raid is, do it before you get sued.
I’d suggest that you allow for a save state each time the raid mob changes forms, or each time any kind of stage is completed. Let players complete this massively long raid over the course of a week or more instead of playing to the brink of hospitalization.
How long is too long? Personally, I think more than 4 hours is too much, and that raids should really be kept under 2 hours with rest periods. Then again, I care about my players, and I personally lose interest after an hour or two.
I just can’t get over how despicable it is to create a raid that is supposed to take 18+ hours.
UPDATE: They’re changing this encounter, as well as a couple others. Hoorah!
http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/polnews/news13981.shtml
The past two weeks have seen considerable feedback from players regarding the amount of time required to combat the Pandemonium Warden, a recently implemented Notorious Monster (NM). Discussion has spread significantly throughout forums, and it has become apparent that this is indeed an issue of major unrest in the community.
We would like to assure players that the development and management teams place a high value on their feedback, and the issue has since been taken under serious consideration. Together with Absolute Virtue, it has been deemed that the combative techniques for weakening these NMs are too difficult. As a result, some players have engaged these enemies using unanticipated methods which led to extended battle times. It is by no means the desire of the development team to see players involved in encounters that require an excessive amount of time and effort to complete. It was for this reason that previous measures were put into practice which prohibited NMs from being held in battle for prolonged periods. In response to these events, we have determined that further alterations are required to prevent such battles from exceeding a certain predetermined length of time.
Included in the version update scheduled for early September will be modifications to the degree of difficulty of Pandemonium Warden (and associated pets), Absolute Virtue (and associated pets), and Jailer of Love. The aim of these changes is to create battles where a decisive outcome may be reached within a shorter period of time.
The development and management teams would like to take this opportunity to express their commitment to a healthy and wholesome game environment for players everywhere to enjoy, and to thank them for the continued feedback.
I suspect their goal was that people would rotate in for the battle over time and not that the same people would be participating in it continuously. While this may not have been practical or even achievable I’m inclined to think they were overly optimistic rather than actually expecting their subscribers to play that long.
I have to agree. This is just terribly negligent design. It is totally unnecessary and goes far beyond any sort of cry from players for “big battles”. It feels more like a PR hook than a gameplay hook and it doesn’t even sound like it displays any sort of design innovation. In any MMO format you can pad time as much as you want as a designer. I’m not saying that adding 50 more waves of mobs or just adding 100 billion HP to a boss is going to naturally play well, but they are very elementary throttles to just make it take longer.
*sigh*
Much like they took it too far, so are you. Negligent? Contemptible? Or my favorite, immoral? It’s bad design no doubt, but no one strapped these people down to a chair, clamped open their eyes, and made them raid this boss while playing a bit of the old Ludwig Van. These people freely and willingly decided to do something knowing that was going to take 18+ hours. Hell they beat the 18 hour boss and decided they liked doing that enough to try the 18+ hour boss.
Should it have never been designed and put in the game? Absolutely, it’s a terrible design decision. But asking them to change it on the grounds you site is like me demanding the Discovery Channel not air 24 hours of shark week programming because I’m too weak willed not to stay up and watch it.
There are all sorts of poor design decisions in FFXI, many of which eventually caused me to finally quit the game a few years ago. This though? It takes the cake for sure. I’m absolutely baffled. Reading that blog post and hearing about the effects even attempting (they didn’t even defeat it after 18 hours?!) the raid had on the players is just sickening.
It’ll be interesting to watch and see if the community can force S-E to take action on this. I could see it causing a pretty big stir.
Jeezus.
Got a link reporting players getting sick? I’d like to share that story.
There were raids like this (not as long) in Everquest (Plane of Air comes to mind.) Those you could break up over a couple of days, and we always did.
I can’t fathom a raid that required you to commit to slave-like effort to accomplish. It’s one thing being “epic” it’s something else altogether to be sadistic.
Ah…so we have just tossed personal responsibility out the window have we? Nothing is forcing these people to take on this boss. Frankly, I think it is hilarious that they stuck that in there. It is not the game designers job to babysit the player and tell them “when they have had enough”.
It is just like my Wii telling me to go outside. Fuck you wii, I just came from outside and if you want to remain inside, you will mind your own god damn business and load my game.
I understand you don’t want your players dropping dead and as a player, I can respect that as we both have the same goal in mind. Would I ever take on this boss? Hell no. But would I have tried it back in high school on a summer break? You bet your ass I would. I am all about stupid ass challenges as long as they are not required to pass in order to enjoy the game. Don’t limit the content of the game to the lowest common player denominator. Nobody needs you to wrap your game in foam because you are afraid the player might hurt themselves.
That is absolutely the most assinine thing I’ve read about in MMO land for a long time. Squeenix is out of their damn minds.
And for all of you saying “hey no-one forces you to try it,” don’t be idiots. If they put it in the game, players will try it whether it makes them physically ill or not. That’s like making Russian roullete one of the games at a casino and then saying “we didn’t force anyone to play” when some idiot blows his head off. Folks have played WoW and other MMOs for so long that they have died of dehydration, and nothing in most MMOs (certainly not WoW) takes 18 hours to do. Putting in raids that encourage that kind of behavior is absolutely utterly irresponsible MMO design.
Right. There’s a difference between a player going for a marathon gaming session when they really didn’t have to and this. When, in order to complete content, they HAVE to stay on for 18+ hours (and it is designed that way), it’s simply irresponsible game design.
If I put something in the game that was designed to take even 8 hours to complete without the potential for taking breaks and coming back to it, I would absolutely expect to be fired on the spot, and I would deserve it.
And damn right you should be fired for that. So should the guy who concocted the raid in question. But for bad game design not for negligence. I don’t think anyone here is saying crafting a raid that takes 18+ hours is a good thing. But condemn it on the grounds that it’s not fun or poorly designed not on subjective moral grounds or the notion that the designers are responsible for the idiotic conduct of their playerbase.
I know a couple of people that washed out of college at least in part due to EQ, does that make SOE or Brad McQuaid responsible? Absolutely not, it was their own poor decisions to misprioritize their lives that led to those unfortunate consequences. Personal responsibility has to factor in somewhere.
Seriously, I’ve been sitting around listening to people complain about how RPG’s got soft after FFII and every RPG, be it online or not was just way too easy. Kafka? Down in a round at level 99 and everybody complains. At some point square-enix listened to all of us and decided to make some really hard stuff, Pandemonium Warden. Now that they listened we all whine about how it’s too hard and they can’t really expect us to do such crazily difficult missions.
Man, you just can never please people…
Ok, I agree with Makaze. Yes, 18 hours is bad game design because 18 hours of fighting the same damn thing is just lazy design. Now if there was some kind of instance that too 18 hours and it was new entertaining things from start to finish, I still don’t see a problem in that. As long as something like that doesn’t become the standard in the game, that is fine to do once.
As for the people claiming people will die…serious…I have been on plane rides for 18 hours and done nothing but watched movies and sat (same with road trips)….guess what…you don’t die. Now if you do this 18 hour instance…say…back to back for few weeks straight and make this a regular occurrence, yeah, your body will give out but unless you are afraid of people grinding this thing over and over, don’t be so afraid that someone is going to die just because you read about a couple of Koreans going to the big PC Bang in the sky due to gaming marathons (48 hour binge that did it wasn’t their first). It’s not the one time that will kill you….it is the repeat visits.
Anyways, Ryan, don’t design something like this because I just can’t see it being fun. Don’t condemn it because its dangerous (it ain’t), condemn it because it is boring as Texas.
I’m confused. Is this really a raid event or is this an NPC in game that is theoretically “unkillable” that people discovered could be killed if you fought it for 18 hours? Does winning this fight lead to anything else or is it a dead end?
I remember people getting giant raids together to try to kill the Priest of Discord back in the early days of EverQuest, and some of those raids lasted a very long time. The PoD gave little experience, and dropped no worthwhile loot. There was no reason to fight him, and yet, people did. The fight got much easier as the level cap went up and mudflation went through the roof.
Yeah, this is a mob that you actually have to intentionally spawn. It’s a Zeta Notorious Mob or something like that, which is basically a mob that players have to get specific items for and turn in to spawn. It’s not an instanced mob, it’s a mob that spawns in the regular game world.
Travis:
I’ve been on marathon gaming sessions that have lasted for more than 18 hours. But I have never been on an 18 hour marathon gaming session without going to the bathroom, eating, drinking, or taking a break to let my heart rate go down for a few minutes. I’m no doctor, but I’m guessing 18 hours without a break while intensely focusing on something is unhealthy. That guess is based in part on the fact that people were passing out and throwing up from doing it — two things that do not occur unless something is awry.
So glad I quit FF 11… after the first month
I wonder how the people who came up with that are keeping their jobs tho…
Call me crazy but I would be game for giving a mob like that a shot!
18 hours to kill a mob? How is that even interesting after the first hour? Do you get any visual feedback on your progress?
Come on Ryan, having party members pass out is a classic MMO experience. All of a sudden your healer just starts to run through the fight, aggros half the zone, and hits a wall all because he passed out on his keyboard….CLASSIC.
“I did not have time to write you a short letter so I wrote you a long one instead.”
Mark Twain
I did my first Ironman triathlon in a little under 16 hours. This required six months of serious training and a support staff of hundreds at the race to ensure things flowed smoothly with the participants.
Like an 18 hour raider, I mastered the skills of eating with one hand, staying awake during relatively uninteresting portions of the event, and urinating in my clothing as necessary.
Just a correction, It isn’t ‘Zeta Notorious Monster’ Its Zeni, which is a form of points that allow you to purchase items that allow you to pop said monster. The actual flow is this:
>Talk to NPC to learn how/what to do / >Go to another NPC get items / >Go to a place in the middle of nowhere, repeat monotonous action multiple times / >Return to first NPC />Trade Item for Zeni Points /> Trade said points for item to pop tier 1 monster /> Go to monster zone, kill monster, get item /> Return to first NPC trade Tier 1 item for Tier 2 /> Repeat last few steps till you have killed 20~ monsters /> Hope you get loot from tier 4 monster(15% drop rate) /> If loot received from all top tier then go back to first NPC get Pand. Warden pop, If not repeat till you have all said items.
Then, and only then can you actually get the ‘opportunity’ to fight, that.
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Zeni_Notorious_Monsters
Is the in-depth description of it, the entire idea behind it is ludicrous and should never ever be duplicated.
There is a condition called Deep Vein Thrombosis you get from sitting for long periods of time. It’s absolutely life threatening if you get it…. so yeah, 18 hour stretches are possibly very bad for your health.
http://www.med.umich.edu/opm/newspage/2004/hmdvt.htm
Strictly from an industry point of view, the whole thing will give mmo’s a black eye. It’s exactly what we don’t need. It allows people to compare mmo companies to tobacco companies by saying “they know they’ve got a bunch of addicted customers and in order to keep them hooked they tweak the product to make it more addictive.”
And from the human side, it sounds like a few commentors look at addicts and think it’s their own damn fault because everyone has a choice to play or not to play, and maybe they’re right. But many of us look at addicts and think we should do what we can to help them because they have gone beyond the realm of free choice. That’s what addiction is. This 18 hour raid may not be aimed solely at mmo addicts, but these devs know with absolute certainty that what they are doing will materially increase health risks for a segment of their players. If someone dies at the keyboard and the company is sued, it would be impossible for them to pretend they didn’t know their actions were putting people at risk. There have already been well documented cases of mmo-related deaths, caused primarily by complications arising from dehydration, blood circulation issues, and high stress levels from sleep depravation. Unlike ultra-endurance athletic events, there is no way to “train” for those conditions, no way to gradually acclimate the body to endure them. To the contrary, with marathon mmo raids, the more you “train” the more you are risk.