I’ve had a very good time with Final Fantasy 14’s new Beastmaster, and I’ve very much enjoyed the Crucible of the Unbroken—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems. While the first few boards are a great time, problems start to pop up when you try to be competitive.
Those problems have grown so numerous, in fact, that Square Enix has postponed the first season of the Crucible of the Unbroken’s ranking system, as posted on the game’s official site: “Since the release of beastmaster, we’ve seen many players enjoying the new limited job and tackling its challenges.
“That said, we have also received considerable feedback on Beastmaster’s combat balance, as well as reports of issues with certain gameplay mechanics, which we are working to address. If rankings were to begin under these conditions, it would be difficult to determine whether the results reflect the intended balance of the job and its mechanics, impacting the fairness of the ranking process.”
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As for what the problems are, it’s a little complicated: In order to get on the leaderboards for the Crucible’s ranking system, you need to beat a board on the “third degree”, which is, to put it plainly, really hard. But required, if you want a Tourmaline Golem Mount, which would only be given to people who land in the top few hundred players (this varies based on region size) when the season ends.
This clashes up against the scoring system itself. In order to get more points, you need to get board bonuses.
Some of these bonuses make sense—things like not failing mechanics, taking damage, and the degree bonuses themselves. Others, though, are a bit of a headscratcher: You get more points if you use only three familiars (rather than the permitted 15), don’t use campsites, feed, spend coins, or get gear, and stick to a single familiar type.
If you want to place on the leaderboard to get that mount, you have to basically not engage with the systems that make the mode interesting to begin with—that is, tailor-fitting a roster to each fight. This’d be a little like, if in World of Warcraft’s Mythic+ system, you got more points by not using your talent trees.
As a result, players have been trying to figure out ways to cheese stuff: Harsh conditions are known to prompt min-maxing, after all. Which, given there’s a mount with a little FOMO added, is a recipe for the kind of player dissatisfaction that sinks systems. Which I think would be a great shame!
Personally, I think the Crucible could do well to take some more pages out of existing roguelike’s books—like Hades’s Heat system, for instance, where players get to pick and choose what modifiers they need to play under, rather than systematically mandating that players drop a bunch of interesting mechanics to chase a high score. Scrapping the reward being tied to landing on the leaderboard (something which would force players to min-max even if they don’t want to) seems smart, as well.
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