Insane Difficulty: Why does 1.3 have XP? - Insane Difficulty

Bear with me on this, I'm a long-time lurker, long-time 1.3 player, first-time poster. Before I say anything else, let my express my admiration for the strategic genius and generosity of the community members here. And above all, thank you, Archael, for all the hard work it must have taken to give FFT a second life.

So, my question is this: in 1.3, what purpose does XP serve? Why is it in the game?

Seriously.

Insofar as the relative power for an otherwise identical action, compared between the player and the enemy, is fixed in 1.3, XP doesn’t serve the purpose it once did in vanilla, which was to give the player an advantage in numerical power. JP for options, XP for power.

That’s fine, the reason I don’t enjoy 1.3-content is because the option of out-leveling the enemy exists.

But JP is linked to XP, and you always want more JP. So you either take your JP naturally, and watch as the enemy counters your new job class by donning thief hats, or you employ bizarre and unfun grinding schemes such as keeping Ramza out of the fight and crystal-eating your generics to feed new hires.

Arc has said XP scaling is to prevent grinding from giving a power advantage, and gear scaling is to balance the options that new jobs/skills give you with increased enemy potency. Sounds good so far.

But the conventional wisdom in 1.3 is that you either try to slip through the game as close to level 1 as you can, or you level to 99. The reason for that is because mid-level play is excruciatingly difficult, because that scaling function gets out of control too quickly, and also because bosses can take hours to beat.

The ideal goal would be to be able to play the game naturally, without grinding, picking up skills and jobs as you go, exercising discretion in what you unlock. And yes, you can do this with some playstyles. Specifically, by dropping meltdown and meteor and killing your own casters so they don’t get XP, or using reactions to kill people. But you can’t do it by making a defensive sandbag team that slowly eats away at the enemy. Both teams can win the battle, but only one can win the game, because the defensive team would net you too much XP along the way and then out come the thief hats.

So in an attempt to do away with level-grinding and compel the player to use creative strategies, 1.3 has introduced equally strange and un-fun types of JP-grinding, and then dictated that certain strategies, while viable, are actually traps because they produce the side-effect of excessive XP. How many times have you given a novice the advice, “you’re probably better off just restarting and trying to keep your level down next game.”

In case you can’t year how that sounds… that’s insane.

1.3 is a difficulty mod at level 99. At any lower level, it’s an anti-XP game. It’s a game within a game where you try avoid something the game is designed to reward you with in any desperate way you can, and if you fail, you’re punished by playing the game at a severe disadvantage. Worse, if you slip off the low-XP curve, battles take longer and require more actions, and the spiral accelerates.

I think this happened because balancing the abilities of the enemy against the potential increases in player potency when they have more JP-given options is really hard. So Arc probably erred on the side of caution, and made sure grinding wouldn’t give any advantage at all, under any circumstances, by just making the scaling quite steep. That’s understandable.

But the solution from the community is to either grind a different way, play weird strategies only, or play at 99. And in that case…

What is the purpose of XP?

Getting to 99 so you can attempt the DD.

Anyway, I suppose I see your point. And I think you tried to cover all the tedious grinding ways possible but you went from the extreme of killing yourself off or using reactions or eating crystals as you go (personally, the first one sounds more fun, as exemplified by one of our most notorious 1.3 players). You can always just grind effectively by taking repetitive actions and going for the spillover WITHOUT the need of ditching the units later by eating their crystals.

I suppose you can think of exp as a way to keep you in check of how you handle battles. The more efficient you are with your strategy, the less exp you earn once you're done with the battle. Less actions, less experience taken. This of course kind of requires you to have unlocked a series of jobs and skills prior to the battles, so you can attempt a battle with the best tools at your disposal, given that you're planning to earn the least amount of exp possible so you won't grow too much in levels. You can also pick up crystals from the story battles so you can spend less time on that. Exp and levels are there to keep you in check as to how you're performing and how the mod responds to your progression. Truly, it can become unforgiving in the "twilight zone" of the spectrum, and I would have to agree with you there when you say that it's a lot less troublesome if you try to keep your levels low enough or go directly to level 99.

In a way, the game can become easier if you keep yourself in really low levels. The right set of equipment can give you a tremendous edge over enemy units that haven't had their growths kick in because of how you've been stalling your levels (also because not every single one of them has their equipment set, instead, their level of equipment goes with your team's level, so rare equipment [from clearing battles or poaching] can give you quite an advantage). Exp is there to make sure the game progresses as you progress. It's a measure; which can be smooth if you know your way around, but proves to be harsh when it's your first time around or if you're not very familiarized with the mod.

And while it was jokingly, I also meant it. You'd rather be lvl 99 if you want to attempt the DD. As for the main story, yeah, you don't really need the levels, so much as you need JP, but they go hand in hand (unless there's a hack so that you can gain JP and not exp). But I still see exp as the ruler with which the mod measures your growth, and responds accordingly.

I don't have that much experience with the mod myself, but it's what I've gathered from my second and most recent playthrough.

XP it's the meaning of life........... Or so I like to think. It's like that hidden difficult setting: You don't like the odds? grind some XP so things are more on your favor. Sadly, 1.3 doesn't reward that kind of thinking and that's good..... partially.

Because you're force to play in a semi-LLG kind of way, you're also missing an essential part of an RPG: Use your own judgement to get out of a dire situation without relaying on a scripted strategy all the time.

Let's put the FE franchise as example: Of course, you can decide to grab a guide and be aware of all the enemy spawns and reinforcements or if you're against it, you can completely avoid spoilers and get yourself across the battlefield and deal with the problems at the time. The RNG can screw you over? Of course it can. You will play a map more than one time before beat it? Yes, you will and be grateful because you're learned something while playing the first time (not put certain character in a specific spot for example) and you're improving your skills. This kind of RNG can be torelable.......If you don't exploit that mechanic too much (Sadly, 1.3 doesn't respect that)

Something like tone down the XP gains (5 per action and 20 per kill) would do wonders to players who likes defensive strats and play blindly. Of course, that's not my call

Not a bad question,and here are some additional things might be considered:

XP still serves some macro-scale functions other than those mentioned by Laith, that shift the dynamics of the game by:

-Making growths matter more. At low levels, there is less difference in power between different job classes. On the macro-scale, XP (/growth) serves to accentuate the differences between classes. So XP serves to specialize your units somewhat. On the other hand, it makes dark/green/boss chocobos, and many other enemies, into beasts.
-Another side effect of this is that wizards, for example, are less powerful late game.
-Creating variety by changing the effectiveness of certain weapons/attacks at certain times. The chocobo gun, for example, is great at low levels, but gets upstaged at higher levels. Punches, on the other hand, become more effective at higher levels.

But yes, I get the contradiction between what XP used to be (and still is in most games) - a reward for action - and what it is in 1.3, which incentivizes minimalism if you're not at level 99. Which is not to say that you can't play through at any level - the advantage enemies have by being +5 is not that significant (except with regard to better equips or skills mastered, but even so...)

In a small way, XP still serves its original get-ahead role (to a lesser extent) by putting the DD within reach (as has been mentioned), which can make the player more powerful, but this only applies endgame.

The better question is "why does FFT" have levels? Its spiritual prequel "Tactics Ogre" had a reason for this. Levels were directly tied to your stats, and as a result, were tied to your ability to unlock new classes. Plus, your stat growths actually mattered, leveling up 20 levels as an exorcist and then suddenly becoming a knight meant that you'd be a fairly lousy knight. In FFT, there's no real reason for levels outside of getting 1-2 of some stats every so often, and even the multipliers can screw that up. So the reality is that levels serve very little purpose in Vanilla. In 1.3, they only matter because the enemies have absurd growths with outlandish multipliers in Ch.4. Ch1 - 3 your level barely even matters, and by Ch. 4, I'd say that being 99 is more of a boon than anything else because enemies go from 1-2 HKOs to 1-2 HKOs. At the final stretch, if you're at 75 for instance, just level to 99, because the slight bonuses in stats you get help even a little bit.

FFT really only needed JP scaling. And even then, I am of the opinion that the game would have been better if they had JP earned as a reward at the end of a story battle for everyone including people that didn't participate, the game would have been better for it. That way, you get an idea of what the relative power is for jobs and even the Soldier Office could have kept up by giving you units that have relevant power even if you recruited them later based on JP scaling.

As of why it now has leveling? Couldn't tell you, as it's a strange compromise for certain. You'd honestly have to get Arch's full thoughts on it, because I don't have a clue. Because the scaling on it is... Well, let's just say that the scaling is similar to many FFT modders' struggles with Punch Art and Martial Arts in general.

Levels are still useful for scaling enemy gear, as well as awarding gil based on the level of enemies defeated in a battle. A minor role yes, but useful.

A simple answer - fixing the game such that all the scaling issues you addressed requires a fair amount of ASM. At the very least it requires custom formulas, freezing speed or scaling spell CT with character stats, a better system for character growth, and/or capping level.

Main problem you mentioned is a combination of linear magic vs. quadratic physicals, gear progression in shops vs. on enemies by lv, and the speed vs. ct scaling issue. Keeping lv artificially low by killing self with Meteor works because an artificially low level character gets access to better gear than his level would suggest, because a Meteor at low levels is both reasonable to cast with characters' speed and does an insane amount of damage vs. characters' HP. This is further perpetuated because it's possible to end one's own life in the meteor cast so that he doesn't gain xp for the action. When you get to higher levels, because meteor is a linear scaling spell with static CT cost, characters will not do enough damage with it vs. hp of enemies and it'll become harder to cast because it still takes the same amount of time to cast but characters will be faster. It'll gradually go from stupidly OP to not worth the action to cast.

Level 99 is easier than mid levels because it removes the level advantage of up to +25 that enemies could have, and in that gap you'll gain a few points of stats. You are also past the gap where magic falls out of use. Physical attacks and some special characters' attacks are quadratic, so gaining even a few points of stats (PA, Speed, and MA for Rafa/Reis) helps here.

Now it is possible to balance a lot of these issues, but it takes a lot of technical work (ASM), which not everyone has the desire or dedication to learn. My guess as to why they weren't addressed is because of requiring loads of ASM, and because it'll remove a lot of the "hard vanilla" feel that 1.3 was going for.

On a side note, welcome to ID! Feel free to stop by Discord.

Tabeguache, on 06 December 2016 - 03:59 PM, said:

Welcome to ID

I found that this is exacerbated by the fact that if you spend the JP you get a certain way you won't have enough JP for other abilities that you might want or need for a certain battle. Need is a strong word I guess since in theory there should be enough strategies for battles that you shouldn't have to learn a huge amount of abilities right away. I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole since it is another discussion entirely.

I don't know about your experience but mine was one of grinding JP just to be able to have more options in battle, gaining a lot of levels was just a side effect. I get the reasons why it is gated this way but it is an unfortunate situation from a balancing perspective.

With all that being said Emmy put it best, ASM is the way to go if we really want to try a better system with reworked or removed XP. It's probably far easier to balance a game around the current system judging by the fact that it is what everyone is doing. Mods like Monster Tactics are shooting for a more reasonable difficulty where playing through the game and making certain choices won't necessarily punish you so much you feel like you need to restart your game.

Ansehelm, on 06 December 2016 - 07:56 PM, said:

That definitely works for Vanilla, but in 1.3, it's still a problem.

What we have now is that it's still kind of useless overall and actually hurts the game more. Staying lower in level means that the enemy gear progression will be less than or equal to what's currently in the stores, which means that the enemies are weaker, which in turn makes for the characters to be able to kill later enemies easier. Versus a person that "over levels" will still have a harder time because there hits points in the game where enemy levels will cause the gear to outstrip anything that can be bought from stores-- which makes the enemies more difficult than being lower in level.

Levels themselves end up being nothing more than an issue for the game, especially for 1.3 gear progression. The same problem happens for any game with gear progression, as in Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth, this problem persists as well. The best strategy is to level up coins (that's how you learn spells) and then kill your generics so they revert back to level 1, which causes the gear on the enemies to follow suit. It would have been better in the Vanilla game to simply have the enemies able to choose gear based on what was in the stores and occasionally have other items that were rare.

I suppose that you COULD ASM hack the game so that EXP gained when you are higher in level than an opponent would result in 0 EXP gained, but that seems more annoying than anything else. But then again, it does make a great way of saying "HEY, YOU DON'T NEED TO LEVEL ANYMORE." Combine that with static levels, and that *might* make levels something the player doesn't want to avoid at all cost and still leave gear progression tied to levels.

Wow. That was your first post? Looking forward to hear more from you in the forums.

You know what? I agree 100% with what you've said about the consequences, but not about the cause.

I believe that you're right in the sense that in 1.3, metagame has been denaturalized into a meta challenge of progressing through the game, while evading the enemy growths, all while getting the necessary JP for the skills that you'll need through the game. That's pretty much a good sum up of what you're trying to explain, right?

However, there are benefits to the level system, which are 1. Having customized characters with the growth system, and 2. Having different experiences with different levels, without it affecting the feeling of "balanced", but varying the usefulness or roles within the battle of the different elements that compose it.

But in order for that to happen as I describe it, what I consider the root of the problem should be addressed and fixed, bot the XP system, but the growths, multipliers, and *all* partylvl+ formations. Making enemies stronger by giving them more levels when there is a lvl hard cap is a terrible decision made in 1.3. And that is combined with the enemy growths, what I like to call super growths, which we have explained conceptually so many times as of why they're terribly balanced. Those two elements, because of their own nature, produce the srries of problems described, exponentially related with your current party level. And those two, if fixed, would provide a really different experience for 1.3.

Thanks for all the responses! I don't know why I never made an account here years ago. I guess I never felt like I had much to contribute. Anyway...

Anselhelm, you bring up an excellent point about player-level changing the balance of power between classes and gear. This is something that frustrates me, since I almost always play at level 99 nowadays, and I don't get to experience it. I just don't get to use wizards or geomancers very much, I don't get to have fun with the early-chapter guns, and Orlandu now spends every day hanging out at the bar, drinking heavily to pass the time, wishing I would deploy him. Poor guy is turning into an alcoholic...

The idea of the potency of different options shifting around during the course of the game is good, it adds depth, and is another factor that encourages the player to adapt instead of settling on one trick. I'm sad to have to lose that nuance in order to solve a different problem.

Going further on the idea of trade-offs, I think it's worth considering what Arc has written about his vision for how progression and choices fit into an RPG. I fundamentally agree with his theory, assuming I understand it correctly. You make choices, usually involving a trade-off, and you're either rewarded or punished depending on how effective that choice was. To make this more complicated, choices open up other choices down the road, so when you make a choice, you're required to not just think about the immediate consequences, but the future ones that will flow from that choice. This is obviously a dramatic over-simplification, since choices are usually more than just binary optimization.

But there are three levels to choice in FFT: 1) in-battle choices of actions, 2) team-assembly choices of gear and abilities, and 3) progression choices concerning what you buy and research.

The first two types are perfect. Mistakes in those either make a battle harder than it could have been, which is your "reprimand" for making a sub-optimal choice, or they cause you to fail outright, and the negative consequence is to have to start the battle over and either play differently or re-work your party.

But that tricky third type of choices is where things fall apart in 1.3. This is the "RPG choice", whereas the other two choices are present in other types of games (roguelikes, RTSs, etc.). This kind of choices looks like this: "Oh, I have some JP after this battle. Do I spend it on blizzard so I can nuke Algus down, or do I save it for MA-up which will be more useful later on when I'm a samurai."

That's a well-crafted choice, taken by itself. However, unlike those first two types of choice, screwing it up is permanent. If you goof that kind of choice up once, you have a little fat on your team, and you might be missing some helpful abilities when you wish you had them. If you screw it up badly enough, however, you may need to stop your progress and grind up some JP to undo the mistakes you made in progression. But then you get XP, then they get thief hats, we all know where this goes...

In vanilla, a little delay on story progression was the "reprimand" for making a bad choice. If you bought the "wrong" abilities and couldn't progress, you just did a random battle or two, got a little more JP, and corrected your mistakes. That's a fitting and non-permanent consequence to teach you to think a little harder. It's also fun, because you get to do the best thing in the game: fight stuff! Conversely, permanently digging your save-file into a pit of spiraling difficulty is not a "fun" consequence.

The idea of making strategic choices with your jobs and abilities is great. Using limited resources and planning the narrow path to victory is what FFT is all about. I feel like this is another thing I miss by playing only at level 99. I only get to enjoy the first two of the three types of choice-dilemmas I brought up. I'm not really playing an RPG, the only progress I experience is gear and special characters.

Once again, I have a hunch why Arc set it up the way he did. The vanilla solution to buying the wrong ability was to grind up more JP, but the game also gave you XP, and after enough XP, it didn't matter what ability you used anymore, you just won on the strength of your big numbers.

I've got to be honest, I can't come up good fix to solve all these problems at once. If you railroad the player into a prescribed XP-growth by doling out XP as a reward from plot-battles, but make JP freely gained as it is now, then you set them on a very limited path that is going to look very similar every play-through. I.e. the chocobo gun is awesome for a specific set of battles and never useful again, because that's the range when you're the right level for it to do legit damage, that that always happens at the same time. But at least that way you'd have some progression experience.

If you get rid of XP entirely, by doing as I do and playing at 99, then you lose progression completely, but you do have many more options and strategies for how to be successful. You can be a sage in Sweegy, and you can sandbag with a defensive team if that's how you want to win. Then again, there are a handful of things that are never useful. Like poor Orlandu.

Vanilla Orlandu what 1.3 Orlandun't.