Newest interview (abyssea was a mistake?)

[Sharnak]

That was sarcasm.

If like that i apologize for misunderstood. m(_ _)m

[Luvbunny]

That was sarcasm.

The point is that there are plenty of non-abyssea content that can be updated, refreshed, revised, retweaked and revamped to bring back some interests. From sky, sea, limbus, all the mini contents of ToAU, existing BCNMs, etc.. They did do some refresh on dyna and walk of echoes - but all the effort was a bit of half ass job. Can they revamp these older content to be on par with Abyssea? Probably - but they just do not want to do it - or not have enough manpower. Yet they continue to invest on FF14 and put as little as possible to 11, the one IP that has people PAYING monthly fees (and let's not mention the whole Click and Buy fiasco over the summer....).

[Sharnak]

The point is that there are plenty of non-abyssea content that can be updated, refreshed, revised, retweaked and revamped to bring back some interests. From sky, sea, limbus, all the mini contents of ToAU, existing BCNMs, etc.. They did do some refresh on dyna and walk of echoes - but all the effort was a bit of half ass job. Can they revamp these older content to be on par with Abyssea? Probably - but they just do not want to do it - or not have enough manpower. Yet they continue to invest on FF14 and put as little as possible to 11, the one IP that has people PAYING monthly fees (and let's not mention the whole Click and Buy fiasco over the summer....).

Actually I hope more that will no any old content revamp under Mr.T production.
I see it more than enough on WoE revamp round 2. I must say it's fun to play with many ppl like campaign. But it's ignore the fact
that It's require too much ppl to beat it, it's incredible for lowman and end up will not enough ppl to do.

It's already happen when WoE first release, if you can recall, when start got many ppl do it and it's lower and lower until it's almost totally empty. So it's got round 1 revamp, make it that you can go in and farm some coin for make fake emp. at least even you not win
but you still can spend some little time to farm it. So it's may not much higher player intention since moslty play intent to do real emp more than fake one.

So now it's round 2 revamp on WoE, now under Mr.T, how to make it? easy! put some useful item, scroll on them!, make it's drop rate super rare, so can lure ppl do it for a while until thy got it (He not even understand word "gurantee drop" I'm so sure that gurantee drop 1 all type random coin each run will not destroy much on his tortune plan even i'm not want any of it). Sound like very old plan become once use again, almost same to 1st version WoE just change form dyna like with drop pool keep drop on kill (which too easy in Mr.T idea) change it to open chest on end.
So it's call revamp... oh I must say got auto reraise is may best thing we got form this revamp.

So I start to fear to see anymore old content "Revamp" on his hand really.

[Luvbunny]

Well I was hoping more revamp in the style of Abyssea where you can get little content here and there that can be accumulated for bigger payoffs at the end - but everyone get a little of something. They can also do it as point systems or currency that you can trade off for items of your choice - which exists on the older content (example: Assaults, Nyzul, Einherjar, Moblin Maze, etc). Knowing Tanaturd, he will make the points impossibly high so that everyone will have to play for years and years for very little reward. It does not matter anymore, Tanaturd mission is to burn FFXI to the ground so that everyone quit and move on to FF14 - I think so far he is doing a great job with this little "insightful" interviews giving us a taste of what is to come.

[svengalis]

The point is that there are plenty of non-abyssea content that can be updated, refreshed, revised, retweaked and revamped to bring back some interests. From sky, sea, limbus, all the mini contents of ToAU, existing BCNMs, etc.. They did do some refresh on dyna and walk of echoes - but all the effort was a bit of half ass job. Can they revamp these older content to be on par with Abyssea? Probably - but they just do not want to do it - or not have enough manpower. Yet they continue to invest on FF14 and put as little as possible to 11, the one IP that has people PAYING monthly fees (and let's not mention the whole Click and Buy fiasco over the summer....).

They are doing a revamp for Limbus, Nyzul, Savage etc... they have already said it and it won't come for another 5 months or so.

[Luvbunny]

The people who are taking in 30ish jobs to level them aren't taking the time to level them correctly and learn the job, creating a whole new slew of problems. Then you get players who are doing events with under leveled skills and no idea how their job even works.

Another problem is that while people are comfy and warm in abyssea, outside, it's turned into a cruel, unforgiving place. Stuff you could normally do in abyssea, you can't do outside, because we've grown so accustomed to the abyssea system, we've forgotten all the work it takes to do endgame.

You do realize that 6 man party style never goes away and it is made much much sweeter and rewarding with the huge xp bonus and auto repeat FoV/GoV and exp ring. There are tons of old style camps that are now very rewarding with the mini atma bonus of GoV - and much easier grind to kill even match - tough mobs while getting skill ups at the same time. Boyahda Tree is a prime example of amazing camp for midlevels to 70s since all the mobs are nearby to each other and require no efforts whatsoever. Ground Tome are still good for people lvl 90s to skill up and the xp is decent. The thing is, most people will not bother doing this, no matter how sweet the deal you offer them.

As for Abyssea making everyone has 20 lvl 95 jobs, on one side, it is amazing that now you can go try each one of the jobs within a few days of leveling - but on the other side, yes so many people have no clue on how to play these jobs properly. I like that now I can get these jobs to 95 and spend a few weeks - months playing it to learn each one and see which jobs are more suitable to my playstyle. The thing with the new style of FFXI is options, now we have so many of them, as in before, we don't really have much of a choices. Most people will take the shortest path and won't bother to learn the jobs properly - this happened even before abyssea and it will never go away. Abyssea just let us have fun and test each jobs at its full potential. Outside abyssea, these jobs are not bad if you properly gear them and know how to play it - things just take slightly longer to kill.

[Amador]

You know, you have to realize that on a "Dev Level" Mr. Tanaka stepped down twice due to having failed to provide an efficient product.

Quite frankly, people were quitting back then, then numbers raised once Abyssea came out and was dissected, and even more so at the release of Voidwatch. However, badly broken it maybe on drop rates. It's still a fresh system. Tanaka and his lackies to say that Abyssea was a mistake and something that shouldn't have been done is very arrogant in thinking he could of done better at the time.

He didn't do better, he destroyed 14 and bowed out. Fresh minds took over 11, and made it better. Same for 14, they're adjusting his mistakes to make the game relevant.

Now this isn't a bash the developer thread, so people should refrain from doing so. Instead defend the idea of what Abyssea is, what it brought forth and what it is.

Tanaka stated that Abyssea was something Final Fantasy 11 wasn't. In all respects of what Final Fantasy is, it's the closest thing on Final Fantasy 11 to what Final Fantasy is. High HP, High Damage, Tough Mobs, Speedy Combat, Auto-Reraise, It's everything that Final Fantasy IS.

Tanaka, your old "legacy" content is currently being revised, being made better, being changed into something you never even thought of it becoming. What can you truly bring us to the table that is Final Fantasy? That's inventive, that's big monsters, scary monsters, big damage, big boosts, ideal strategy planning for ideal job sets, for uniqueness, for individuality, for potential.

Do you as a Producer, review and contemplate on what is in production? What items are being thought of, what formulas are in place to make the game work and function on a tactical level for players on 11?

Do you play yourself?

There's just so much experience you seem to lack in comparison as to what a few people did in two years than something you did not accomplish in the dying 8 years of Final Fantasy 11.

This is not a bash against you, this is a paying customer who was always been very happy with your work. Until you decided to quit because you felt you could not provide what was expected of you. Now that new faces have brought light to the game, you say it was a mistake and lacks balance and all this and that? At this point, who are you to rain on someone's success?

Instead of having made such an arrogant comment towards to the future of Final Fantasy 11, you should have looked at it in a positive manner, and be able to see what you never provided and what you can look towards providing. Maybe you don't want to accept the fact that Abyssea had more good than it did bad, but at this point you can't fix and balance as you wish. You quit, you lost your say in that. Abyssea, is not your legacy, it is the legacy of those who actually had insight, and it was great insight.

Move forward with your own content and provide to the people of Final Fantasy 11, something that is expected to be innovative and fun while still having "bite".

[Sparthos]

Proven to be the worst? If that was the case, why did you keep playing for years? And if everyone hates it why are you arguing against other people in this thread? Shouldn't everyone agree with you?

I think I've already explained that my reasons for playing XI as long as I have rested on my LS mates and GF coupled with some level of obsession present during the great age of kings. It's really that simple.

Fortunately, SEs incompetence coupled with my own maturity has enabled me to see the disaster of old XI for what it was - poorly implemented loot distribution systems coupled with blatant player contempt on behalf of the FFXI developers. Any system relying on solely on the random number generator even within the bounds of an MMO shows laziness on behalf of the developers to keep people playing the game.

There are better ways to build a Skinner box in short, if we're solely concerned with keeping people playing the game.

Abyssea universally lauded? Are we living in the same fucking reality? Did the 3.7 billion of people ragequitting over Abyssea and creating threads complaining about it and the game and easymode and SE's face not tip you off that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't the most welcome of additions to this game? Did you hear anyone at all complain like this about any other expansion ever released (not counting the addons, they practically aren't even in the game, and still not as unpopular as Abyssea)?

My remarks about a 'universally lauded' system referred to the point method of loot distribution in contrast to the favored SE low drop rate, random output method used in Voidwatch. Point systems like the ones used in Einherjar, Assault, Campaign and ZNM often meet with fanbase favor but often are overshadowed by the random pools because SE chooses to put superior items into the RNG systems.

Again, are you just ignoring the fact that FFXI's population is lower than ever? Or are you saying that that's just VW's fault? In which case you're stupid because Abyssea is still around and if people would love it nearly as much as you're saying, they would be playing that. And if you're saying that players were leaving even before Abyssea (which was true), then how come Abyssea didn't stop it? It did stall it, that's true. Some people even came back. For a few months. Which is exactly how long it took to plow through all the new content. Then most of those people (and plenty of others) quit again.

SE had a golden opportunity with Abyssea to bring people back and keep them back yet from this interview we can easily conclude that they don't seem to get that a more casual style of play is conducive to keeping your base. Or maybe they do but simply can't bring themselves to churning out this level of content. So what do they do? The same thing most people do when they're at a crossroads: Stuck to what they were comfortable with.

And what SE is comfortable with is anathema to most players.

Abyssea was easy - almost too easy but you still had players on the hook and all SE had to do was reel them in by creating more content similar to Abyssea with small bumps in the difficulty level. Instead, SE chose to ratchet back up the difficulty, put out no breadcrumbs, return the game to crappy droprates/huge timesinks all backed by the random number generator that may or may not favor you. Middle ground? Who needs that at Square-Enix.

It's really like they learned nothing. Tanaka's solution to VW rates is to make the monsters easier through white !!s all while missing the point that the difficulty isn't what most people are bitching about - it's the damned random drops.

No one argues that (apart from some butthurt relic holders). But they most definitely could have gone about it differently. Do you remember your first reaction to the announcement of Empy+2 gear? No? I do, here it is: "HOLY FUCKING SHITBALLS!!" Guess how I know that? Because that was everyone's reaction. And it wasn't because the gear was better. It was because it was orders of magnitude better. People weren't even mentioning shitballs at salvage gear, even though it was amazing (well, maybe Ares's Cuirass). That's how upgrades are supposed to be. Noticeable, but not massive. Otherwise you end up with the example I mentioned a few pages ago.

And that's how upgrades are supposed to be as it stimulates everyone to upgrade and thus make the new systems popular amongst shouts. Part of why Voidwatch isn't as popular as Abyssea lay in the fact that most of the gear screams sidegrade and can barely outperform +2 Empyreans.

Hell yeah, people did it anyway. And if someone camps a mob 24 hours a day they damn well deserved that Ridill. If people have really grown up now, then you don't have to worry about Japanese people stealing your mobs in your primetime.

I hate hippies. With a passion.

Botting? Backstabbing? What the fuck are you talking about? HNMs, that's it. How did people bot and backstab in Dynamis, Einherjar, sea, sky, Limbus, Salvage, Nyzul Isle, etc.?

Are you just being dense to be dense?

I don't care about how many hours you clocked to get a Ridill, how dedicated a worker you were sitting at Tiamat for 12hours or even how awesome you were holding that KB because it all misses the point that perpetuated a system that went completely against the 'moderation' ethos they claimed to stand behind every time you log in.

SE had a choice to shut down Kings as quick as they patched holes that RMT were abusing yet they never did until the whole system had become obsolete via Abyssea. For years individuals asked SE to make said HNMs ??? pops using Ks99, triggers or any number of other methods yet SE ignored this because it was no secret that the more people they had botting kings, the less work they had to put into making the game better.

The low drop rates in Dynamis coupled with the time investment to build a relic led to all sorts of trickery and dickery from ninja'd Duelist's Chapeaus to Shadow Rings. Where was SE during all this? Giving a huge middle finger to the base because they 'knew better'. For you to say there was no backstabbing or betrayals caused by the obscenely low rates of some drops in this game is simply asinine.

When you'd go 0/100 on stuff like QQTH, Citadel or GG3, it became quite a market to rob people for your own gains or to manipulate others and where was SE during this I ask? Asleep at the wheel developing XIV while doing absolutely nothing to rectify issues the game was having regarding fun for casual players.

Most people bailed by mid-TOAU when the game hit the skids for the very reasons listed above.

Backstabbing? As in... MPKing people who claimed your mob? GMable. Enmity stealing to flail them? GMable (and preventable, but still). Ninjalotting? Not preventable by the devs, but by party leaders. Didn't pass after 4min? Kick. Easy as that. Ninjalotting was never possible if the leader paid attention.

So what exactly was your point again?

Lol GMs. You could be MPK'd back during the age of kings, call a GM and promptly get a copy/paste response while the shell that stole your mob banks a couple million gil off your misery if the GM even responded in time. Mobs been dead 15mins when the GM finally responds? Guess what - you're getting told to suck to it up or some bogus excuse that the 'logs will be checked' - lolololol. Give me a break. Unless you yelled racial slurs in Aery, deliberately made it clear you were out to screw with people or made the botting too obvious a GM would never jail you, nevermind take 'action'.

For you to come with the genius advice that solving conflicts was merely a GM call away is just laughable. Apparently me and you were playing different versions of FFXI - you must have had the copies where the GMs gave a shit.

[Luvbunny]

Thanks Sparthos for writing well thought opinion regarding the state of the game before and after abyssea.

[Greatguardian]

lol. Why am I being called an Abyssea Defender? Abyssea gives me a headache, honestly. It's repetitive and boring at this point. The content was strung out for too long. My friends and I are beyond bloody sick of Empyrean weapons. We started an Ochain 2 months ago and still haven't bothered to go finish it.

There are not two extremes at work here, Arcon. This isn't a matter of Abyssea or RotZ Kings and nothing else. There are certain quality of life issues that the Developers have only recently begun to address, and that is in no way a bad thing (Well, aside from the fact that they're only NOW addressing them).

Teleporting to battle areas is fine. There is no real skill involved in seeing who can fleehack their way to Dragon's Aery the fastest.

Force spawning NMs is also fine. I know a lot of people made a lot of money by writing bots, but winning claims has never been an indicator of skill.

Some time sinks are okay. Assault tags? That's okay. Putting in a tag-esque system with Kis refreshing every 22 or 46 hours for new HNMs would result in the exact same time factor, just without the "Who's got the most expensive bot" bottleneck.

Some time sinks are not okay. 0.1% Drop rates? Not okay. I've gone over 0-1/100+ on more NMs than most new players can name off the top of their heads. Does that make me feel skilled? Special? Dedicated? Accomplished? No, it really doesn't. I'm not elated when I get that 1/247 drop off Poisonhand Gnagdad. I'm just less likely to throw my computer out my window. The random number generator sucks. This isn't a single player RPG, or a Korean MMO.

Likewise, this doesn't mean that things need to be Gameshark easy - there are other ways to add difficulty/rarity aside from low drop rates.

You know what SE did well? Einherjar. Einherjar was awesome. It was a quick, fun event that could be done with minimal time commitment. There was a point reward for all comers that was used to buy unique and relevant armor drops. The final boss dropped relevant Abjuration armor, with a minimum loot pool expanded by TH, as well as unique and relevant Odin-specific armor/weapons.

The entry item was used as a gil sink, and the mandatory cooldown in conjunction with the feather system served as a time sink. Einherjar was awesome.

How could SE improve on Einherjar's system? Easy. Add consumables, Temp Items, and/or Alexandrite to the Ichor list. Update the Ichor list regularly (eg, not just when they feel like upgrading Einherjar once every 5 years) with new armor pieces that are actually worth obtaining.

I realize that people used to pride themselves on how "FFXI is so much harder than WoW and thus we are all better players than anyone who plays WoW because easy games are for kids", but that tripe never had any real substance. People really need to learn to differentiate between sincere game difficulty and stockholm syndrome.

People don't need things handed out on a silver platter. I don't mind saving up 100,000 pseudo-Ichor for a Mekira Meikogi. I just don't want the sum of my progress to be either 0% or 100% at any given time. FFXI does not follow the law of averages, it follows the law of large numbers. It is theoretically sound to go 0/1 billion on Ridill and then get the next 11 million drops in a row. That should not happen in the future, and should never have happened in the first place.

I want to say that there's a middle ground here but this isn't really middle ground. A lot of old systems were shit. Some new systems aren't much better. What's in the middle of shit and shit? More Shit. So no, I don't want a middle ground. I want something good.