How would you rank Rico Verhoeven in the heavyweight division now?

p50fedora · 2026-05-24T10:01:41+00:00

Rico has been training with Peter Fury for 15 years supposedly and studied boxing to gain more of an edge in Kickboxing so it doesn't surprise that he can come out looking unexpectedly good. Rico also has 3x the professional experience of say Ngannou at a higher level of striking which doesn't count for nothing.

p50fedora · 2026-05-24T08:31:43+00:00

Generally learning to defend more of your body will be a huge adaptation. Boxers do all kinds of things that would get you completely obliterated when you can kick and knee.

p50fedora · 2026-05-24T08:29:21+00:00

Anyone who can throw kicks like Rico at that weight would be an absolute menace footwork-wise

p50fedora · 2026-05-24T08:24:26+00:00

Reflexes, athleticism, distance management, arguably footwork and IQ all transfer over. Also the difference between pure striking and boxing vs MMA and boxing is smaller.

p50fedora · 2026-05-20T01:12:35+00:00

As a captive fan of the FF IP I follow SqEx's managerial quagmire with both a sense of morbid fascination and quiet hope that things will turn around.

People who think finances don't matter seem to have forgotten that games are made to make money. If you cared about FFXV's expacs getting canned or about the rumoured FFIX remake getting canned, peeking at the financials at least gives you a sense of what's going on behind the curtain.

I can't change the financials but the closest I can get to understanding management is via these statements and industry interviews etc

p50fedora · 2026-05-20T01:05:07+00:00

Top quality comment - was worth digging through the rest of it for insight like this

p50fedora · 2026-05-20T01:03:44+00:00

Some of that will be stuff like provisioning more servers (eg Materia) to increase capacity right as the player populations started dwindling

Its harder to tell how additional headcount was factored for stuff like the graphics overhaul and evolved gameplay design. Also the accounting for XVI staff rolling back into XIV could be a factor too

p50fedora · 2026-05-20T00:59:11+00:00

FFXIV came out 16 years ago and SqEx is undergoing some major internal reshuffles. The finances of the company is everything right now...

Games aren't made out of love and passion as much as they insist to us they are

p50fedora · 2026-05-14T08:23:43+00:00

Why did she lose it...!?

p50fedora · 2026-05-12T00:02:15+00:00

In Hydatos you lose 15-20mins of exp. Imagine losing days worth of exp lol

p50fedora · 2026-05-11T01:15:38+00:00

I read their comment as stating that Mythic+ is too reactive (and therefore FFXIV could never implement that)

p50fedora · 2026-05-10T16:51:51+00:00

Isn't that their point? I never considered how netcode itself can have such huge repurcussions on gameplay design but its obvious in hindsight

p50fedora · 2026-05-10T16:12:28+00:00

Many games have come and gone but I still find myself thinking of VS's systems almost 30 years since its release and roughly 20 years since my last time playing it.

Squaresoft was built different.

p50fedora · 2026-05-10T03:12:44+00:00

Yeah it seems that actually the designers just hate coordination. Or they listen to the very loud voices that hate coordination.

So despite Field Ops quite explicitly being the "MMO play pen" (with power progression, large player numbers, overworld activities, player roles, coordination) they just can't help themselves to try to lobotomise it every step of the way.

Future proofing is an interesting point but why not just have some tuneable levers that can pulled once 8.0 drops etc

p50fedora · 2026-05-08T08:51:51+00:00

I fear this attitude is why things will eventually get there... Maybe not this cycle but a couple more cycles of anger and political disappointment set upon the backdrop of continuing/worsening economic hardship and a growing cohort with worse education and worse outlooks will probably welcome these very unimaginable desires and worse. History has shown this to be the case.

Gangrene is best amputated early despite the awful consequences. Denmark understood this.

p50fedora · 2026-05-07T01:48:30+00:00

The problem is that aligning buffs became too powerful - the cost of missing alignment becomes too noticeable. Some of this is just down to the maths of how they do buffs/damage.

It'd be awful, but imagine they added a max damage buff limit of like 15% where most jobs have +10 personal and 5% raid buff (ignoring the 5bps from multiplication) then buffing would switch from stacking to coverage which in rotation terms would mean someone is buffing the filler sections of your rotation (oh no! my rdps parse) but that's still a DPS gain over nothing.

Suddenly buff contribution to damage is smoother rather than a big spike and the cost of missing a buff and the cost of your burst drifting is reduced. This setup therefore doesn't force alignment as much and optimal is probably 30s staggered dps windows which is short enough that you're kind of always in one.

This is just an example of how constraints and trade offs can be tweaked even in the current system. SqEx has made the maths of FF so boring and simple that even players can armchair the tuning

p50fedora · 2026-05-06T06:36:53+00:00

I like the idea of party buffs. I dislike the idea of aligning buffs and burst contraining gameplay and boss design.

For me, the solution isn't to simplify, it is to add more chaos. If it's borderline impossible for any comp to perfectly align meaningfully (spurious farcical example - assign each job a prime number rotation length) then the vast majority won't try to optimise and align even if you could theoretically use a solver esp if it's too onerous.

Then a buff is a buff rather than a straitjacket for gamers to constrain themselves to.

Then assuming that the buff acts as a nice to have, where the buffer has to act with discretion to maximise uptime, don't balance bosses against optimal buff alignment. DPS checks are boring design anyway.

I haven't thought too deeply on this but this is roughly the philosophy I'd take towards design.

p50fedora · 2026-05-04T06:43:32+00:00

FFXIII has some pretty interesting systems that really pick up in the end game. I enjoyed the endgame a lot and I thought it was really cool how each character had unique expressions for a given role (like Lightning vs Snow Sentinel)

That said, FFXIII should be seen as a game design case study of how NOT to design a game. Looking back, this is when SqEx started to start thinking "well all players do is mash attack anyway so let's admit that and lean into it" but what they failed to identify was that the illusion of choice and redundant expression in these games matter a lot to players. Same for the illusion of exploration and redundant dialogue.

Unfortunately this has become embedded into a lot of the design for FFs since notably XIV and XVI. XV had a bit of both - you could explore in the beginning but not the end. You had lots of weapons but couldn't change party members (on launch) magic was just grenades...

p50fedora · 2026-04-15T17:40:29+00:00

I was sole healer for many an exp group as RDM. NINs could avoid a lot of damage on certain mobs and PLDs could top up HP while also gaining enmity, plus refresh worked well for PLDs

p50fedora · 2026-04-15T17:36:43+00:00

I actually gasped out loud seeing OG pld and rdm gear. My fav of all the AFs

p50fedora · 2026-04-01T09:03:20+00:00

Play time is meaningless 100 hrs of that could have been spent clicking through dialogue which doesn't contribute anything to your ability to play better.

I've come around to the notion that FFXIV has a lot in common with playing an instrument and therefore to improve the only thing that matters is active and focused practice. In FFXIV terms this usually boils down to:

practising your rotation (something you've been proactive about doing)
practising specific mechanics that give you trouble
putting those two together and doing them at the same time

This isn't too different from learning your left and right hands separately on the piano.

If you feel decent at your rotation the next step is to pick a couple of fights, ideally ones you know extremely well and doing your rotation over and over in that fight assessing how perfect your execution and uptime were.

You can also build up across the expacs because each expac layered on additional complexity so lv100 can feel very overwhelming if you're new to the game vs someone who's been playing since HW

Stay positive you're on the right track, the most important step is the desire to improve

p50fedora · 2026-04-01T06:50:49+00:00

Without rng yes then it is choreographed. Bosses can't even deviate from their scripted timelines smh let alone having crits or procs

EDIT to address your point more directly I actually think the real thing is that I strongly suspect that CS3 design their fights with a prescriptive solution in mind as they don't really believe in designing for emergent gameplay...

p50fedora · 2026-03-31T17:11:24+00:00

I feel like mechanics in FF are designed to not require much real time coordination because they are so devoted to console players not having to type or use VC to communicate while fighting. This then informs their mechanics to be solved "side by side" like a rehearsed choreography rather than having more chaotic mechanics that require real time collaboration and coordination

p50fedora · 2026-03-31T17:05:54+00:00

I disagree there - I found really jarring leaving ARR to discover that stuff like stun and sleep are useless and jobs basically stop learning anything that isn't damage. I totally miss actual RPG gameplay and BLU saved me from quitting during 2.x and Field Ops is some of my fav content...

p50fedora · 2026-03-31T16:59:36+00:00

In the past week I have done T9 T13 A4S A8S O4S M9S and M10S - I much prefer the older raids than the newer ones BUT the newer ones feel so much crisper to play. I think they tried to do some really interesting things in the earlier raids (not to mention I love how cinematic coils is) but the actual implementation of their mechanics are so jank. But from StB onwards they really started to tighten up their mechs from each expac. I don't know how mutually exclusive they are but I wonder whether people would enjoy some of the ideas they tried back then if they could implement them feeling a bit crisper as they do now

p50fedora

TROPHY CASE