1up is reporting a guild’s effort to defeat FFXI boss Pandora Warden. After 18 hours and 20 changes in the AI, the guild decided to call it off to avoid becoming another statistic.
The most obvious problem here is the developers’ total lack of respect for their players. Contrary to their reputation for consuming addiction and leaving dead gamers in internet cafes, MMORPGS are remarkably casual friendly. Persistent progress means that you can nickel and dime your way to victory in a way that other gaming genres don’t provide. However, despite saved progress in instances, enduring backpack contents, and persistent quest progress, combat has never been a durable achievement. If you are overcome in battle, you can’t nip right back to finish your foe off a la Bioshock, and even if you could, enemies respawn every ten minutes or so. If this guild ever returns to Pandora Warden, they have the same 20 hours waiting that they did before, which is tantamount to the developer saying, “Yeah, we’re not really gonna let you win this one without debasing yourself.”
More subtly, this boss raises the point that FFXI has been balanced in such a way that it’s possible to achieve equilibrium. When was the last time you fought a boss battle in World of Warcraft and decided to call it a draw? Most MMORPG combat follows an attrition model; the side with the most ample resources or the slowest loss of those resources tends to win. An eighteen hour boss marathon means that the healers aren’t just keeping the rest of the party healthy, they’re recovering their mana faster than the boss can deplete it. Since the boss has a nearly insurmountable number of hit points, neither side is going to lose.
Finally, it may be that Pandora Warden can’t be killed using conventional attrition tactics. Unkillable bosses are a fine RPG tradition that has stretched across the years. It encourages puzzle solving instead of workaday combat and livens games up. It’s a mechanic that hasn’t been particularly emphasized in MMORPGs, and it may be due. If that’s the case, however, the communication of those expectations to the players was clearly inadequate.
In any case, it’s very disappointing.
