u/otsukarerice

I've sat down and rewatched the information surround Blitzballer several times now, and to be frank, I'm highly underwhelmed by the outcome. Though I can't say I'm surprised because it's almost exactly what I was expecting. I was just hoping to be wrong. So I've been thinking about how I'd do things differently to make something far more exciting and with a lot of reasons to engage with the content. This isn't the normal kind of thing I try to engage with, but I'm feeling a lot of adrenaline right now, so forgive me for letting out a little steam. And hey, if you don't think my ideas are a hot pile of garbage, then maybe that'll be a nice thing to wake up to (but if they are, feel free to rip me a new one. It's what we do here).

Okay, so there were a couple things that I didn't vibe with initially, but with what I have in mind, I actually think are fine: the level 110 cap and balls having 2 abilities; however, this content would be available without the new expansion so even free trial players can engage with it, but there would be some limitations which I'll explain later. For everything else, I took a lot of inspiration from the International/remaster version of FFX because it actually has a fun Blitzball system.

The Blitzballer themselves does not have combat abilities. Only the balls do. Level 1 athletes can be captured without battle, so you can start with some lower level teammates to play with you, but the first huge change is that in addition to the 2 abilities they have innately, you can also equip balls with any job. In other words, you can make your teammates a "striker" or a "goalie" or a "defender" etc. This gives them certain stat boosts and access to a specific set of actions associated with that job. These are static, so no matter what player you make a goalie, they will always get the same actions from it. At higher levels, I'd like to explore more ways of adding actions to teammates like through consumables or perhaps mixing jobs, but I haven't thought that far ahead and think it would be good to hold off until a future update. As for the Blitzballer, the actions you do have are essentially commands or combat tactics. You would have a combat tempo gauge that you could raise or lower with actions, where the higher the tempo the more damage your blitzballer deals and receives, and vice versa. You can also command your teammates to do things like heal, focus target, defend, provoke, etc. Those would be the Blitzballer's hotbar actions.

Now the content would be a blitzball arena type of content with various difficulties set at different levels with increasing difficulty. Also, you are able to summon not just one teammate, but five at once. There would be a static tournament for the story and with static rewards that you'd normally expect from something like the Gold Saucer, which is what all free players would have access to. Beyond that would also be a seasonal tournament that starts to ramp up drastically in difficulty the higher you go with crazy encounters like fighting multiple teams at once with just your team (or maybe not that exactly, but things like that. It should feel wild). Seasons would follow the patch cycle, with new seasons adding new teammates that can be recruited in limsa, eventually expanding the level cap, and netting you a limited amount of rewards that you can spend on a shop full of prizes that feed back into the Blitzballer content. I'm talking about particle auras around your teammates, teammate emotes, particle effect trails, battle effect skins, outfits for your teammates, exclusive teammates that are functionally identical to existing recruitable athletes but are stylish skins of the teammates themselves, adventurer plate cosmetics, maybe even new jobs for your teammates, things like playmaker, midfield, tactician, bench warmer, etc. Every update would add new things to the shop. New seasons can have challenges that encourage you to use different teammates, think up new builds, etc.

Honestly, I could keep going with ideas on how to expand the concept, but really I just wanted to vent some thoughts because really, I feel like the most limiting part about limited jobs is the creativity that has gone into making them and the content surrounding them, and I just wish that would change.

In recent years I feel that have been some posts coming into reddit that seem very off, in that there is a long buildup before the discussion 'actually happens'. They are kinda slow and a bit too 'softly perfect' in some ways- but overall just very weird. This may be happening because they are made by an external studio that 'doesn't play or know the game' (and thus doesn't know the general player rates, which is why they aren't right. They just make the posts in grey studio and maybe are given a basic character creator screen to check them 'ingame'- without the actual game and it many years of 'genuine play' to match it up with.

These are the posts which don't fit with the rest imo, all doomer slop:

• Return to StB and HW game design
• Anything to do with SMN
• FFVII expansion
• Homogenization
• Patch cycle cadence

All of these happen to be the same number of downvotes generally (increasing a small bit over time as they were added), except for the creepy 'return to StB game design' of course. 2 min meta discussion may be part of this too (not ruling out some of the newer short drama 'reaction type' ones either really, hmm).