Phase 1's schedule shifted throughout and started similarly; it seems like they're trying to make sure that any given testing phase doesn't revolve around one particular regions schedule.
Wooden SpoonGreat for SaucesRegistered Userregular
I told my wife not to make any plans for us this weekend. I cited a moral obligation to fulfill my sacred duty as a beta tester. She loves it when I say things like that.
Well, given the player sentiment on the ARR forums, I would wondering just how much XI and XIV overlap there is in the playerbase.
More than screaming crybabies would probably lead one to believe.
I have a theory that the "zomg 1.0 was better because it wasn't WoW 2" are the same 'hardcorez' that screamed bloody murder that Abyssea ruined FFXI because now the plebs could have their precious level cap and taking it up the ass without the courtesy of reacharound was how they did it and everyone should have to suffer!
Well, given the player sentiment on the ARR forums, I would wondering just how much XI and XIV overlap there is in the playerbase.
More than screaming crybabies would probably lead one to believe.
I have a theory that the "zomg 1.0 was better because it wasn't WoW 2" are the same 'hardcorez' that screamed bloody murder that Abyssea ruined FFXI because now the plebs could have their precious level cap and taking it up the ass without the courtesy of reacharound was how they did it and everyone should have to suffer!
Buuuuuut...yeah.
I think they learned not to listen to those people due to how terrible 1.0 was.
It makes me sad that there is a vocal minority of people clamoring for the HNM system of FFXI. I used to camp the 2hr NM's for gear that had abysmal droprates before I quit (never got to experience the 24/48 hour pop ones) and that alone was enough to piss me off.
FFXIV Petra Ironheart Infinity Mog 21 and over Free Company Sargatanas Server. Recruitment currently closed.
I'd be lucky if I ever have 2+ hours over gaming time for the next 10-15 years. If any MMO is not enjoyable for people don't have time to make it a full time job, then I'm afraid I'll have to pass.
Since my youngest was born, I've played single player game that allow me to pause and/or quit at anytime depending on which of my rug-rats needs me in the middle of the night.
It makes me sad that there is a vocal minority of people clamoring for the HNM system of FFXI. I used to camp the 2hr NM's for gear that had abysmal droprates before I quit (never got to experience the 24/48 hour pop ones) and that alone was enough to piss me off.
I'm also a fan of the ones that call doing quests and dungeons "mindless and lacking in depth" but are all for giving more experience to open world creatures so they can just grind killing them for levels at a time. Rose colored glasses and all.
0
Wooden SpoonGreat for SaucesRegistered Userregular
Those comments are fun because they all completely ignore the commerial aspect. A game that plays the way they're asking won't sell, and certainly won't generate subscriptions. Then again, I suppose the type of person asking for these things doesn't have a really solid grasp on commercial viability.
It really is the same people who 'enjoyed' being brutalized by XI's leveling/end-game stuff years passed; and yeah, they have no grasp on actually making a game that is marketable and can sell copies. So the idea that 1.0 was 'better' because all there was (until very late in the game) was the grind and then...grind...makes sense to these people.
There's nothing wrong with throwing a party together and grinding out crabs for awhile. It can be fun, and depending, it can actually be intense in its simplicity. I enjoyed it a lot in XI (and still do), but would I trade it for more modern systems of leveling, parting, etc; even the changes they've made in XI? Hell no. Because you can still do that in XI, and I imagine you could still do that in ARR should you really want to. In WoW, you could just put together a party, and grind to level 90 on elite mobs, ignore the 'depth lacking' quests and dungeons and just kill faces non-stop.
Sometimes people forget that simply adding other options doesn't take away options. That you can do dungeons doesn't mean you can't grind crabs for 20 levels.
But, really, it's not what the bitching is about. If you could get those people to be complete honest, it'd boil down to wanting a game that is only for them, and no one else, something they can hang on their wall to say "look how elite I am, I do this thing no one else can do", always ignoring that it's not that no one else can do it, it's that no one else wants to do it. It's actually how I feel, in general, about the rash of brutally hard games these days, but that's another subject I suppose. It's fine that some people want difficulty, want to lord their accomplishments over others...but the idea that they must do it in exclusivity to anything else is just idiotic.
As a very flimsy example, look at like Etrian Odyssey or Fire Emblem for the 3DS. Not unheard of games, but both games in their latest iterations have added a 'casual' mode and boom their audiences expanded many fold. There's still the hardcore options, go at it...but the 'hardcorez' sometimes forget that many people want to be leisure in their leisure time.
Wooden SpoonGreat for SaucesRegistered Userregular
edited April 2013
I think you nailed it in pointing out the difference between not being able to do something and not wanting to do it. As I've gotten older, I've learned to budget my time differently, and if something is beyond a certain level of difficulty or tedium, I'll move on to something else. There are just too many things I'd enjoy playing to spend time trying to enjoy something.
There's nothing wrong with throwing a party together and grinding out crabs for awhile. It can be fun, and depending, it can actually be intense in its simplicity. I enjoyed it a lot in XI (and still do), but would I trade it for more modern systems of leveling, parting, etc; even the changes they've made in XI? Hell no. Because you can still do that in XI, and I imagine you could still do that in ARR should you really want to. In WoW, you could just put together a party, and grind to level 90 on elite mobs, ignore the 'depth lacking' quests and dungeons and just kill faces non-stop.
Eh, I think it really depends. I think the big thing with grinding parties was that a) it was the only option, and b) the focus was always on efficiency and xp per hour. If you add a quest system and (assuming you know what you're doing) it's faster than mob grinding, obviously people are going to gravitate towards the path of least resistance (especially if it's less mind numbing).
I think it would be really tricky to balance the experience you get from mob grinding vs. quest grinding. My inclination would be to make them comparable if possible, and always incentivize group play without making solo play either impossible (as any job, I think) or so horrifically slow that it's a last resort.
It's actually how I feel, in general, about the rash of brutally hard games these days, but that's another subject I suppose.
How many/which games are we talking about here, out of curiosity? I can't think of many recently that throw their difficulty in your face without giving you any kind of an out - your examples, for instance, plus XCOM, have worked to make traditionally hardcore games more accessible, and I'm inclined to say that's really the way things are trending. Most games "super hard omg" modes have to be unlocked as it is.
I mean there's Dark Souls, but that's really all I can surface at first thought on the whole "this game is too hard for you, go away" front.
So, I'm going to be the beta forums right now, just to give everyone else a taste of what they are like. It should be noted the opinions expressed below are not mine. (Spoiler'd because you might be able to argue some of it breaks NDA? Not entirely sure.)
Those comments are fun because they all completely ignore the commerial aspect. A game that plays the way they're asking won't sell, and certainly won't generate subscriptions. Then again, I suppose the type of person asking for these things doesn't have a really solid grasp on commercial viability.
Dude, don't say it can't be successful. XI was successful. In fact, it's SE's most successful game ever. They are just selling out and screwing over their fanbase and dedicated players by turning this game into a casual snooze fest without any depth or content.
It really is the same people who 'enjoyed' being brutalized by XI's leveling/end-game stuff years passed; and yeah, they have no grasp on actually making a game that is marketable and can sell copies. So the idea that 1.0 was 'better' because all there was (until very late in the game) was the grind and then...grind...makes sense to these people.
There's nothing wrong with throwing a party together and grinding out crabs for awhile. It can be fun, and depending, it can actually be intense in its simplicity. I enjoyed it a lot in XI (and still do), but would I trade it for more modern systems of leveling, parting, etc; even the changes they've made in XI? Hell no. Because you can still do that in XI, and I imagine you could still do that in ARR should you really want to. In WoW, you could just put together a party, and grind to level 90 on elite mobs, ignore the 'depth lacking' quests and dungeons and just kill faces non-stop.
Sometimes people forget that simply adding other options doesn't take away options. That you can do dungeons doesn't mean you can't grind crabs for 20 levels.
No, it's totally different. You don't get enough experience grinding mobs and it's too slow. Plus, the combat is too fast and it's not tactical. They should slow it down so I have more time to chat with my buddies during combat and we can really plan out what we want to do.
But, really, it's not what the bitching is about. If you could get those people to be complete honest, it'd boil down to wanting a game that is only for them, and no one else, something they can hang on their wall to say "look how elite I am, I do this thing no one else can do", always ignoring that it's not that no one else can do it, it's that no one else wants to do it. It's actually how I feel, in general, about the rash of brutally hard games these days, but that's another subject I suppose. It's fine that some people want difficulty, want to lord their accomplishments over others...but the idea that they must do it in exclusivity to anything else is just idiotic.
I'm tired of this "I pay the same amount as you" crap. It's about priorities. I prioritize my gaming over other things and I take it seriously. I spend more time playing and so just because you can only spend an hour or two doesn't mean you should be able to see everything I do. When you take the game as serious as I do then you can. Damn casuals, always trying to ruin my game.
Get off my lawn.
Now back to me. I agree with all of you guys. The genre has moved on. If anything, more recent games that tried to be "hardcore" have only demonstrated that the market isn't there to support it any more (i.e. Darkfall or similar). The reason the older games still survive is a mix of nostalgia and emotion, IMO. Are there some players who love the way those games play? Absolutely. But I would venture a guess that many of the players continue to play not because of the game per say, but because of the fact they've spent 6+ years playing, developing their character, making friends, getting attached to the game. Same goes for WoW. I think if you released WoW right now, it would hit 500k subs and level off there. Maybe 1 Mil, assuming the market was the same as it is now, but all those players are more spread out amongst the games.
As I said in the NW thread, I think your average gamer is a hopper, like many of us have probably become. If a game can hold us for 3-6 months we consider it a success and we move on to the next. Communities are no longer restricted to a game, as it felt in the past. The PA community is an example of that. It's based around these forums and the games are just one way we can interact. But it's not the only and there are many choices of games for that interaction to take place in.
What I find the best is that many of these "hardcore" players definitely want to flaunt, but they don't truly want it to be worthy of an elite challenge. You tell them, "Okay, we are going to up the difficulty by 30%, but only up the reward quality by 10%, so you need to overall be a 20% better player" and they will whine, bitch and moan how unfair that is. However, the ones bitching usually aren't the "hardcore" ones (btw, I hate that word). The people who truly wanted the challenge would be off trying to get it done and wouldn't care that the loot was a bit weaker than the difficulty bump.
I also like to suggest to companies, and have barely seen it yet, parallel progression instead of linear. When you make a "Hard Mode" of something, don't make it a requirement to move on to the "Normal" mode of the next dungeon. Make Normal lead to Normal lead to Normal and Hards to Hards. This way you can tune the Normal, or maybe even an 'Easy' difficulty, so everyone can experience the content, but give the other modes the challenge bumps people say they want.
Okay, that was a long rant. I'll go hide in a hole now.
am0n on
+1
Wooden SpoonGreat for SaucesRegistered Userregular
You may emerge from your hole.
I think you're spot on regarding parallel progression. I know that every argument is different in an MMO, but my brother and I just both finished Bioshock: Infinite. I finished on Normal, he finished on Easy. I don't feel any sense of resentment that he was able to see the same content that I was. With his schedule, odds are good he would never have finished if he hadn't been able to scale the difficulty to meet his needs. Single-player games have offered varying difficulty levels for ages in order to appeal to as broad a base as possible. While an MMO can't have a "difficulty" slider, it can certainly offer up varying degrees of difficulty for group content in order to lasso as many players as possible. It's the "Heroic" model from WoW (I assume it started with WoW; I have no MMO experience prior to) but applied to an entire branch of progression, rather than just an individual dungeon/raid/etc.
Also, you make an excellent devil's advocate. I actually felt like a white-knighting casual fanboy for a second!!!
So do I have to do any fancy voodoo to download what I need for this beta? I got their support to remove my old security token so I could log in and change the password and what not, and activated the beta key, but I don't see any download link or anything.
Wooden SpoonGreat for SaucesRegistered Userregular
So, there are apparently people who are against even having basic tutorial windows for reasons of "too casual." I can't even begin to fathom that. That's not even being "hardcore." It's just mean spirited. It's like the equivalent of pushing someone down the stairs and laughing, just because you can.
So, there are apparently people who are against even having basic tutorial windows for reasons of "too casual." I can't even begin to fathom that. That's not even being "hardcore." It's just mean spirited. It's like the equivalent of pushing someone down the stairs and laughing, just because you can.
My honest advice is this.
PUT THE FORUMS DOWN AND BACK AWAY SLOWLY!
I tease. Not really. The only useful parts of the forums, really, I find is the Dev Tracker and the JP to EN Translation thread, because the Devs don't really reply to English speakers, only JP speakers.
Beyond that, you're just going to end up sick and be unable to play all weekend if you spend too much time on those forums. I hear they carry diseases.
+1
Wooden SpoonGreat for SaucesRegistered Userregular
edited April 2013
I feel strangely refreshed upon leaving the forums. They make me feel like a better human being! I go for the dev tracker. I stay for the self-validation.
I can't wait for the day I can play an entire game through by just yelling at my TV.
Do more things!
TV. Damn console gamers. Ruining my immersion.
I actually read a post earlier on the beta forums with a guy saying he wouldn't play this because when one of his PS3 games are being made cross-platform with a PC it dumbs it down.
I don't really mind the changes they are making to combat and such. More power to them.
I have probably played literally every MMO released in the last 10 years. This is, indeed, including several hours spent on each new throwaway MMO by asian developer A/B/C.
I will say FFXIV does not feel even remotely distinct anymore. The original iteration did, for better or worse. At any given time because of how things went, you knew what you were playing.
I've only put a few hours into the beta but I think if you slapped an auto-walker on there you could pretty much reskin it as any of several dozen MMOs off of MMOhut and you'd not know the difference. It might allow for a bigger initial group by watering it down as they have, but I wonder if it'll have any kind of retaining power when its literally Allods Online with a HD texture pack.
I will play it regardless, because I love me some Yoshi-P and their story crew is pretty awesome, but I do hope they change something or manage to give it a personality of its own before it launches.
+1
Wooden SpoonGreat for SaucesRegistered Userregular
My wife asked me last night what exactly a beta test is. (She is decidedly not a gamer). I told her that it's like jury duty, but offers better benefits.
In related news, I'd love to be testin' right now, but my work schedule disagrees.
Posts
Interesting it's only Friday/Saturday instead of until Monday morning...
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Wooden Spoon on Steam
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Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
More than screaming crybabies would probably lead one to believe.
I have a theory that the "zomg 1.0 was better because it wasn't WoW 2" are the same 'hardcorez' that screamed bloody murder that Abyssea ruined FFXI because now the plebs could have their precious level cap and taking it up the ass without the courtesy of reacharound was how they did it and everyone should have to suffer!
Buuuuuut...yeah.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I think they learned not to listen to those people due to how terrible 1.0 was.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I am pretty happy they carried phase 1's characters over. Now I'll be able to check out the Manor finally.
Infinity Mog 21 and over Free Company Sargatanas Server. Recruitment currently closed.
Since my youngest was born, I've played single player game that allow me to pause and/or quit at anytime depending on which of my rug-rats needs me in the middle of the night.
I'm also a fan of the ones that call doing quests and dungeons "mindless and lacking in depth" but are all for giving more experience to open world creatures so they can just grind killing them for levels at a time. Rose colored glasses and all.
Wooden Spoon on Steam
3DS: 1005-8709-0277
There's nothing wrong with throwing a party together and grinding out crabs for awhile. It can be fun, and depending, it can actually be intense in its simplicity. I enjoyed it a lot in XI (and still do), but would I trade it for more modern systems of leveling, parting, etc; even the changes they've made in XI? Hell no. Because you can still do that in XI, and I imagine you could still do that in ARR should you really want to. In WoW, you could just put together a party, and grind to level 90 on elite mobs, ignore the 'depth lacking' quests and dungeons and just kill faces non-stop.
Sometimes people forget that simply adding other options doesn't take away options. That you can do dungeons doesn't mean you can't grind crabs for 20 levels.
But, really, it's not what the bitching is about. If you could get those people to be complete honest, it'd boil down to wanting a game that is only for them, and no one else, something they can hang on their wall to say "look how elite I am, I do this thing no one else can do", always ignoring that it's not that no one else can do it, it's that no one else wants to do it. It's actually how I feel, in general, about the rash of brutally hard games these days, but that's another subject I suppose. It's fine that some people want difficulty, want to lord their accomplishments over others...but the idea that they must do it in exclusivity to anything else is just idiotic.
As a very flimsy example, look at like Etrian Odyssey or Fire Emblem for the 3DS. Not unheard of games, but both games in their latest iterations have added a 'casual' mode and boom their audiences expanded many fold. There's still the hardcore options, go at it...but the 'hardcorez' sometimes forget that many people want to be leisure in their leisure time.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Wooden Spoon on Steam
3DS: 1005-8709-0277
Eh, I think it really depends. I think the big thing with grinding parties was that a) it was the only option, and b) the focus was always on efficiency and xp per hour. If you add a quest system and (assuming you know what you're doing) it's faster than mob grinding, obviously people are going to gravitate towards the path of least resistance (especially if it's less mind numbing).
I think it would be really tricky to balance the experience you get from mob grinding vs. quest grinding. My inclination would be to make them comparable if possible, and always incentivize group play without making solo play either impossible (as any job, I think) or so horrifically slow that it's a last resort.
How many/which games are we talking about here, out of curiosity? I can't think of many recently that throw their difficulty in your face without giving you any kind of an out - your examples, for instance, plus XCOM, have worked to make traditionally hardcore games more accessible, and I'm inclined to say that's really the way things are trending. Most games "super hard omg" modes have to be unlocked as it is.
I mean there's Dark Souls, but that's really all I can surface at first thought on the whole "this game is too hard for you, go away" front.
Dude, don't say it can't be successful. XI was successful. In fact, it's SE's most successful game ever. They are just selling out and screwing over their fanbase and dedicated players by turning this game into a casual snooze fest without any depth or content.
No, it's totally different. You don't get enough experience grinding mobs and it's too slow. Plus, the combat is too fast and it's not tactical. They should slow it down so I have more time to chat with my buddies during combat and we can really plan out what we want to do.
I'm tired of this "I pay the same amount as you" crap. It's about priorities. I prioritize my gaming over other things and I take it seriously. I spend more time playing and so just because you can only spend an hour or two doesn't mean you should be able to see everything I do. When you take the game as serious as I do then you can. Damn casuals, always trying to ruin my game.
Get off my lawn.
Now back to me. I agree with all of you guys. The genre has moved on. If anything, more recent games that tried to be "hardcore" have only demonstrated that the market isn't there to support it any more (i.e. Darkfall or similar). The reason the older games still survive is a mix of nostalgia and emotion, IMO. Are there some players who love the way those games play? Absolutely. But I would venture a guess that many of the players continue to play not because of the game per say, but because of the fact they've spent 6+ years playing, developing their character, making friends, getting attached to the game. Same goes for WoW. I think if you released WoW right now, it would hit 500k subs and level off there. Maybe 1 Mil, assuming the market was the same as it is now, but all those players are more spread out amongst the games.
As I said in the NW thread, I think your average gamer is a hopper, like many of us have probably become. If a game can hold us for 3-6 months we consider it a success and we move on to the next. Communities are no longer restricted to a game, as it felt in the past. The PA community is an example of that. It's based around these forums and the games are just one way we can interact. But it's not the only and there are many choices of games for that interaction to take place in.
What I find the best is that many of these "hardcore" players definitely want to flaunt, but they don't truly want it to be worthy of an elite challenge. You tell them, "Okay, we are going to up the difficulty by 30%, but only up the reward quality by 10%, so you need to overall be a 20% better player" and they will whine, bitch and moan how unfair that is. However, the ones bitching usually aren't the "hardcore" ones (btw, I hate that word). The people who truly wanted the challenge would be off trying to get it done and wouldn't care that the loot was a bit weaker than the difficulty bump.
I also like to suggest to companies, and have barely seen it yet, parallel progression instead of linear. When you make a "Hard Mode" of something, don't make it a requirement to move on to the "Normal" mode of the next dungeon. Make Normal lead to Normal lead to Normal and Hards to Hards. This way you can tune the Normal, or maybe even an 'Easy' difficulty, so everyone can experience the content, but give the other modes the challenge bumps people say they want.
Okay, that was a long rant. I'll go hide in a hole now.
I think you're spot on regarding parallel progression. I know that every argument is different in an MMO, but my brother and I just both finished Bioshock: Infinite. I finished on Normal, he finished on Easy. I don't feel any sense of resentment that he was able to see the same content that I was. With his schedule, odds are good he would never have finished if he hadn't been able to scale the difficulty to meet his needs. Single-player games have offered varying difficulty levels for ages in order to appeal to as broad a base as possible. While an MMO can't have a "difficulty" slider, it can certainly offer up varying degrees of difficulty for group content in order to lasso as many players as possible. It's the "Heroic" model from WoW (I assume it started with WoW; I have no MMO experience prior to) but applied to an entire branch of progression, rather than just an individual dungeon/raid/etc.
Also, you make an excellent devil's advocate. I actually felt like a white-knighting casual fanboy for a second!!!
Wooden Spoon on Steam
3DS: 1005-8709-0277
Yeah, I've trolled the beta forums a bit too much. Trying to remedy that.
Wooden Spoon on Steam
3DS: 1005-8709-0277
My honest advice is this.
PUT THE FORUMS DOWN AND BACK AWAY SLOWLY!
I tease. Not really. The only useful parts of the forums, really, I find is the Dev Tracker and the JP to EN Translation thread, because the Devs don't really reply to English speakers, only JP speakers.
Beyond that, you're just going to end up sick and be unable to play all weekend if you spend too much time on those forums. I hear they carry diseases.
Wooden Spoon on Steam
3DS: 1005-8709-0277
Infinity Mog 21 and over Free Company Sargatanas Server. Recruitment currently closed.
Wooden Spoon on Steam
3DS: 1005-8709-0277
Keyboards and controllers.
Tools of casuals ruining my games.
If you're not playing with your brainwaves then you're not hardcore enough to participate in this game that SE made for me and me only.
Plebs.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Do more things!
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TV. Damn console gamers. Ruining my immersion.
I actually read a post earlier on the beta forums with a guy saying he wouldn't play this because when one of his PS3 games are being made cross-platform with a PC it dumbs it down.
I snickered.
First thing I'm doing once gamepads are implemented in the beta.
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Wooden Spoon on Steam
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Wait.
Phase 2 starts in the middle of the night tonight I think.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
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FFXIV: Tchel Fay
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Steam: Tortalius
Stream: twitch.tv/tortalius
I have probably played literally every MMO released in the last 10 years. This is, indeed, including several hours spent on each new throwaway MMO by asian developer A/B/C.
I will say FFXIV does not feel even remotely distinct anymore. The original iteration did, for better or worse. At any given time because of how things went, you knew what you were playing.
I've only put a few hours into the beta but I think if you slapped an auto-walker on there you could pretty much reskin it as any of several dozen MMOs off of MMOhut and you'd not know the difference. It might allow for a bigger initial group by watering it down as they have, but I wonder if it'll have any kind of retaining power when its literally Allods Online with a HD texture pack.
I will play it regardless, because I love me some Yoshi-P and their story crew is pretty awesome, but I do hope they change something or manage to give it a personality of its own before it launches.
In related news, I'd love to be testin' right now, but my work schedule disagrees.
Wooden Spoon on Steam
3DS: 1005-8709-0277
Wooden Spoon on Steam
3DS: 1005-8709-0277