Suggestions for future updates

[Nezkeys79]

I'm relatively new to this game as in I just completed a free trial and decided to pay for 30 days since I enjoy the game enough, and am a lifelong Final Fantasy fan (and Dragon Quest for that matter). I really hope you read the following suggestions and take them seriously.

1) Controllable sea and air mount. Obviously it would be impractical to give players control over the boat or ship lol so I propose give the chocobo the ability to swim and fly. If it can free roam on land there is no reason why we cant have the ability to free roam the sea and sky. Naturallly there would be some quest to obtaining this privilege, maybe a BST only privilege (although i would prefer it to be available to all jobs). Maybe you could breed chocobos like in FF7 until you got a certain colour which could swim, then fly, or both. (Eg the gold chocobo from previous ffs). Maybe you could level the chocobo to 99 and it learns to swim at 30 and fly at 60? I suppose this is purely from an aesthetical point of view of how cool it would look and the fun factor, but they could also create an expansion with cities in the sky, or places in sealed mountain ranges etc to make it have more purpose. All the previous ffs did this via a controllable airship late game. Imagine how cool it would be with the graphics and world of this game to free roam the sea and sky with your chocobo.

2) Change jobs on the go please. Maybe place a mog at the entrance to dungeons which allow this, or just have the option available on the view house menu when outside towns. I might want to teleport-dem myself (instead of shouting for it) and then change to mnk/war straight away. Obviously all buffs would reset etc. They did it with accessing items on the go so I dont see why they couldnt with this

3) Voice Acting. Cutscenes in any game are odd without voice acting. Imagine a film with no sound its just stupid. It kind of lessens the experience for me.

4) Make the quest logs more detailed. Some of them are really vague and its very easy to forget what the finer details of the quest were if you flagged it days, or months ago.

5) Have more slots on the Auction House. 7 is pathetic. Maybe 20? Obviously this would increase the delivery box too but that would be a good thing. Also include a search function so you dont have to trawl through the lists searching for some item. Also increase the amount of items you can sens to another player to 20. Maybe you could create a series of quests similiar to the gobbiebag ones to obtain more slots for these things?

6) Make it possible to trade as many stacks as possible all at once to the guy in selbina (millioncorn, la thiene cabbage, boyahda moss). It takes far too long and is tedious as hell trading him millioncorn

7) Have a home point warp on all field manuals, not just dungeon ones. A little annoying I have to go to home nation when I want to go to Home Point

8) Include a Beastiary. Would be great to be able to check detailed info on monsters regularly. Also give us a feature to freely listen to the music of this game. Maybe have a BRD quest to unlock the various pieces from your homepoint on a grammaphone or something lol, or just even simpler once youve visited an area its unlocked.

19) Crafting. When you join a guild have the npcs sell recipe scrolls or quest them. There is absolutely no clue in the game how to craft anything and i find it strange as a player youre forced to read a faq to find this out.

10) Include more chat commands. There are several emotions etc ive tried that dont work because obviously theyre not programmed in to the game. This would be more fun


I hope to hear from you soon,

Nezkeys

[Economizer]

I'm relatively new to this game as in I just completed a free trial and decided to pay for 30 days since I enjoy the game enough, and am a lifelong Final Fantasy fan (and Dragon Quest for that matter). I really hope you read the following suggestions and take them seriously.

Welcome to Final Fantasy XI. I'm going to respond to your post point-by-point to explain some things. Hopefully this will help you to understand some things about how this game is made and on being a better player.

1) Controllable sea and air mount. Obviously it would be impractical to give players control over the boat or ship lol so I propose give the chocobo the ability to swim and fly. If it can free roam on land there is no reason why we cant have the ability to free roam the sea and sky. Naturallly there would be some quest to obtaining this privilege, maybe a BST only privilege (although i would prefer it to be available to all jobs). Maybe you could breed chocobos like in FF7 until you got a certain colour which could swim, then fly, or both. (Eg the gold chocobo from previous ffs). Maybe you could level the chocobo to 99 and it learns to swim at 30 and fly at 60? I suppose this is purely from an aesthetical point of view of how cool it would look and the fun factor, but they could also create an expansion with cities in the sky, or places in sealed mountain ranges etc to make it have more purpose. All the previous ffs did this via a controllable airship late game. Imagine how cool it would be with the graphics and world of this game to free roam the sea and sky with your chocobo.

This would as you say, take an expansion due to the need for not only new zones, but remapping of old zones (none of the current zones we have were really made for flying in, and the airship and ocean maps we have are special select routes). And while I'm sure this would be totally popular, it would take a lot of developer time, which the devs of FFXI don't have a lot of.

2) Change jobs on the go please. Maybe place a mog at the entrance to dungeons which allow this, or just have the option available on the view house menu when outside towns. I might want to teleport-dem myself (instead of shouting for it) and then change to mnk/war straight away. Obviously all buffs would reset etc. They did it with accessing items on the go so I dont see why they couldnt with this

It would likely have to be done via a Mog at the entrance to select (read: not all) zones, or more likely, as summonable via the books there for a cost in tabs, if your suggestion got any consideration at all.

The reason it is not likely at all to ever be changed to be on-the-fly is because the game isn't balanced this way. Players aren't supposed to be that versatile on the field (for an example of this, check out how Blue Mage, Puppetmaster, and Scholar change their roles with their more limited options).

3) Voice Acting. Cutscenes in any game are odd without voice acting. Imagine a film with no sound its just stupid. It kind of lessens the experience for me.

Cost of paying voice actors, tons of dev work to implement and sync voices, tons of translation work between four languages, and large hard drive requirement. Online updates that add minor cutscenes would balloon in size, and would take longer to implement due to needing to wait for voice actors.

4) Make the quest logs more detailed. Some of them are really vague and its very easy to forget what the finer details of the quest were if you flagged it days, or months ago.

While this would be nice, especially going forward, it would likely take too much time as devs would have to go back and change the quest logs for thousands of quests. This time could be better spend doing other things. Additionally, part of the philosophy that the game designers tend to embrace is that players should either find things for themselves or ask other players for help.

5) Have more slots on the Auction House. 7 is pathetic. Maybe 20? Obviously this would increase the delivery box too but that would be a good thing. Also include a search function so you dont have to trawl through the lists searching for some item. Also increase the amount of items you can sens to another player to 20. Maybe you could create a series of quests similiar to the gobbiebag ones to obtain more slots for these things?

This would be incredibly nice, but every time they've tried to increase the AH sell space, it has brought the servers grinding down. Would it be nice for them to fix the AH system? Yes. Is it likely with the limited amount of dev time they have? No.

6) Make it possible to trade as many stacks as possible all at once to the guy in selbina (millioncorn, la thiene cabbage, boyahda moss). It takes far too long and is tedious as hell trading him millioncorn

It would be great if /item allowed you to trade multiple items with an NPC at a time so you could go the Millioncorn route, but if you are really desperate for quick and lazy fame, you're stuck with /item "Boyahda Moss" <t> when doing Only the Best.

7) Have a home point warp on all field manuals, not just dungeon ones. A little annoying I have to go to home nation when I want to go to Home Point

Carry a Scroll of Instant Warp at all times, they're cheap. Also consider carrying a couple Warp Cudgels if you need multiple warps.

But yes, this would be a nice change.

8) Include a Beastiary. Would be great to be able to check detailed info on monsters regularly. Also give us a feature to freely listen to the music of this game. Maybe have a BRD quest to unlock the various pieces from your homepoint on a grammaphone or something lol, or just even simpler once youve visited an area its unlocked.

The Bestiary thing falls under the FFXI philoshopy of finding things out yourself or asking other players. Learn the community websites well (FFXIAH, BGwiki, FFXIclopedia, FFXIDB), and look up stuff while playing.

Your second suggestion might get looked at I suppose, but you could always change the game music to 0 volume and then get a media player with the game soundtrack running in the background. SE is actually working on a new optional user interface for the PC, maybe you could find threads on that and ask for this or other UI features you'd like.

19) Crafting. When you join a guild have the npcs sell recipe scrolls or quest them. There is absolutely no clue in the game how to craft anything and i find it strange as a player youre forced to read a faq to find this out.

You can actually ask the NPCs in the guild for recipes, but then you have to remember or write them down.

This also falls under the FFXI philoshopy of finding things out yourself or asking other players. Learn the community websites well (FFXIAH, BGwiki, FFXIclopedia, FFXIDB), and look up stuff while playing.

10) Include more chat commands. There are several emotions etc ive tried that dont work because obviously theyre not programmed in to the game. This would be more fun

You'd have to give exact suggestions for commands you want.

But as a bit of help, try /? to see what commands exist, or if you want a custom emote, /em does and action. to have a custom emote.

I hope to hear from you soon,

Nezkeys

You aren't likely to hear a detailed response, let along a response from the community reps especially not with a laundry list like this, unfortunately. But hopefully responses from other players will help you out.

Edit: Just realized you're on Valefor. I'll try contacting you in game soon.

[Nezkeys79]

cool thanks for your reply (even though you did shoot down in flames practically every suggestion).

I'm about to log in in the next few minutes so hope to hear from you soon. I could do with some help to be honest as just coming off a free trial sucks, especially for gil

[Arcon]

I almost feel bad posting here, but much of what you suggest here is wishful thinking and will never happen. I don't wanna shatter your hopes here, but it seems you don't know SE as well as some of the older players do, so I'll give a short commentary on these. Generally it seems like you expect FFXI to be on the level of a modern MMORPG, judging by some of the features you requested, but remember it's been released over a decade ago by the most inflexible game developers that have ever lived.

1) Controllable sea and air mount. Obviously it would be impractical to give players control over the boat or ship lol so I propose give the chocobo the ability to swim and fly. If it can free roam on land there is no reason why we cant have the ability to free roam the sea and sky. Naturallly there would be some quest to obtaining this privilege, maybe a BST only privilege (although i would prefer it to be available to all jobs). Maybe you could breed chocobos like in FF7 until you got a certain colour which could swim, then fly, or both. (Eg the gold chocobo from previous ffs). Maybe you could level the chocobo to 99 and it learns to swim at 30 and fly at 60? I suppose this is purely from an aesthetical point of view of how cool it would look and the fun factor, but they could also create an expansion with cities in the sky, or places in sealed mountain ranges etc to make it have more purpose. All the previous ffs did this via a controllable airship late game. Imagine how cool it would be with the graphics and world of this game to free roam the sea and sky with your chocobo.

Impossible to do, because there's no open world, and they'd have to redesign areas completely unless you wanna see empty landscapes everywhere.

2) Change jobs on the go please. Maybe place a mog at the entrance to dungeons which allow this, or just have the option available on the view house menu when outside towns. I might want to teleport-dem myself (instead of shouting for it) and then change to mnk/war straight away. Obviously all buffs would reset etc. They did it with accessing items on the go so I dont see why they couldnt with this

I'd love this, personally, but SE is very inflexible about this kind of stuff. I doubt it's ever gonna happen.

3) Voice Acting. Cutscenes in any game are odd without voice acting. Imagine a film with no sound its just stupid. It kind of lessens the experience for me.

Never ever gonna happen. The amount of work they'd have to put in is immense, especially for an aged game like this. And I'm not sure if many people would appreciate it as much as you. It would have to feature dozens of hours of voice acting with hundreds of different characters and situations, which would also increase the game size by a large amount. Many people play without sound at all, so they'd gain nothing from it.

4) Make the quest logs more detailed. Some of them are really vague and its very easy to forget what the finer details of the quest were if you flagged it days, or months ago.

Would love this, and would have loved it even more before wikis were about. These days the situation is not too bad though, due to community sites.

5) Have more slots on the Auction House. 7 is pathetic. Maybe 20? Obviously this would increase the delivery box too but that would be a good thing. Also include a search function so you dont have to trawl through the lists searching for some item. Also increase the amount of items you can sens to another player to 20. Maybe you could create a series of quests similiar to the gobbiebag ones to obtain more slots for these things?

Would love this as well, but it actually has some economy-related factors, too. People spam selling certain items would flood the market and the price of certain those would plummet.

Also, they wouldn't need to change the delivery box at all for this.

6) Make it possible to trade as many stacks as possible all at once to the guy in selbina (millioncorn, la thiene cabbage, boyahda moss). It takes far too long and is tedious as hell trading him millioncorn

Would have loved this when it mattered, but it's a one-time effort on a single NPC for a single quest.

8) Include a Beastiary. Would be great to be able to check detailed info on monsters regularly. Also give us a feature to freely listen to the music of this game. Maybe have a BRD quest to unlock the various pieces from your homepoint on a grammaphone or something lol, or just even simpler once youve visited an area its unlocked.

The bestiary is not gonna happen, for two reasons. First, they're horrible secretive with everything ingame-related. Second, it's a shitload of work for something that already exists in form of community sites such as the wikis.

19) Crafting. When you join a guild have the npcs sell recipe scrolls or quest them. There is absolutely no clue in the game how to craft anything and i find it strange as a player youre forced to read a faq to find this out.

See above, they seem to like their players not knowing how to play the game. But again, community sites fix the problem they created, so it would be a lot of effort at this point for something that already exists.

[Nezkeys79]

What I am hearing is giving me a bad impression of SE. I dont like this FFXi philosophy/they like you to not have a clue how to play their game. I'm all for interacting with players for help but giving us all these crafts for example and no recipes is just dumb. I think its pointless to play a game and use wikis all the time to help you because you have no other choice. Some of the things I mentioned are minor changes. Even the big things can be done its just pure laziness. I would do some of this stuff for free if I understood computer language. Remember there are new players like me so while the selbina guy quest may not matter to you anymore it does to me, and I hope SE are not disregarding new players. At the end of the day if some new feature is gonna take a lot of hours yet it keeps interest from their customers for a few more years then in my opinion thats worth it. Having miniscule updates assumes there is nothing they need to change about their game which I'm sure no one would say is the case.

Regarding the voice acting I would of course propose a "toggle on/off" in the menu for this. Players who want to play with the sound off can still continue to do so but thats not my idea of immersing myself in a game or film etc and enjoying it to the full.

For me the controllable boat mid game, and controllable airship late game in pretty much every final fantasy i loved. Its such a good feeling to know that at one point you had to walk over the terrain your flying over etc and adds to the progress feeling. Its not impossible to do this at all. Like I said having everybody with a controllable airship or boat that size is silly so thats why I mentioned the chocobo. Its just undeniable how popular a swimming and flying chocobo would be. Its a no brainer to me they should include this.

Regarding the Auction House if thats the case maybe they can easily stop that sort of thing happening by banning you from using the AH for a while if people are doing that lol.

Regarding the delivery box I think its only a good thing if you can send more than 8 items cause obviously you spend less time logging to mules, or trading multiple times to characters.

The quest logs are a joke in most cases there is no excuse for something as minor as this its just lazy.

[Arcon]

What I am hearing is giving me a bad impression of SE.

It's hard not to leave a bad impression of them if you're being honest, as sad as it sounds.

At the end of the day if some new feature is gonna take a lot of hours yet it keeps interest from their customers for a few more years then in my opinion thats worth it.

It's hard to draw a line here. I am very certain that all of your suggested changes together would not keep people playing much longer than they would without. None of them are really content-related, and MMORPGs are content-driven first.

Regarding the voice acting I would of course propose a "toggle on/off" in the menu for this. Players who want to play with the sound off can still continue to do so but thats not my idea of immersing myself in a game or film etc and enjoying it to the full.

Like I said, the effort/reward ratio is way too low for SE to ever consider it. And if the voice acting is anything like FFX's was, people would quit rather sooner than later. Bad voice acting can damage a game more than improve it.

For me the controllable boat mid game, and controllable airship late game in pretty much every final fantasy i loved. Its such a good feeling to know that at one point you had to walk over the terrain your flying over etc and adds to the progress feeling. Its not impossible to do this at all. Like I said having everybody with a controllable airship or boat that size is silly so thats why I mentioned the chocobo. Its just undeniable how popular a swimming and flying chocobo would be. Its a no brainer to me they should include this.

It's a no-brainer they shouldn't, because it would not work. It's like wanting to fly in Tetris. It makes no sense in the context of this game. This game was designed specifically with current methods of transportation in mind. It would not even be an advantage over what we currently have, because you can warp to almost every relevant place, or close to it. Hence it would just be a cosmetic change instead of a functional one, and for that it would require massive amounts of work and would not work properly, ever, because the areas are closed off zones, unlike all other FF games that had free flying/swimming in them.

[Nezkeys79]

regarding the voice acting if it had a toggle on off in the menu they can decide to not listen to it. the few that like to play silently are not affected

[Economizer]

It isn't about players not knowing, but instead about players finding things for themselves.

Community websites have been adding functionality SE has been unable to for a long time, since SE has to deal with trying to make the game as equal as possible between platforms (something they're starting to have to give up with the new UI, and I suppose years ago with windowed mode for the PC), and with PS2/Xbox 360 limitations it is hard to implement a full guide into the UI proper.

Between having a windowed mode on the PC and letting players write the guide themselves, things aren't so bad, and you can always ask another player for advice and help if you're totally lost.

I want to reiterate that you can get recipes from NPCs in guilds that are appropriate for your level, the game just doesn't keep track of these things indefinitely for you.

There are a few things like this, such as not being able to check the AH or NPC price for goods wherever you are, but the information being freely available online.

On the NPC in Selbina, if I'm not mistaken there is another NPC in Windurst for the quest Mandragora-Mad, where the NPC does take multiples at the same time, but if you try more than one item, you will only be credited for the item in the first trade slot. So while it is possible, it might also be an issue of fame from quests not being possible to adjust for multiple completions. The code in this game is quite old and has to function on the venerable PS2, so there are always cases of something being hard to fix or implement do to SE's support of older platforms. Actually, if anything, I'd try to suggest the quest allowing players to trade one Millioncorn at a time so that the /item command could be used instead of sorting through the trade command. It might still take some time, but it is much, much faster (I speak from experience here).

I could go on, but basically most changes come down to this being an MMO that is heavily community driven with a very limited dev team working on the title. There are many things that could always use fixing, but the dev team has to focus on their commitments and what is time effective to work on first.

If you really believe in the changes you're asking for, keep suggesting them, but consider the reasons why they haven't been implemented yet.

In the meantime, if I could ask, have you togged windowed mode for FFXI yet so you can play and browse the forums at the same time?

[Nezkeys79]

The swimming/flying chocobo was the only cosmetic suggestion I made, unless they make an expansion or new areas to make it more functional. I dont know what you mean by closed off areas either? If i can walk from bastok to san d'oria etc then I should be able to fly over that too. of course it zones but so what they can make it zone higher up its not impossible however I would prefer a zoneless world map like FFX its just more seamless.

In traditional FF style a chocobo or ship could never land in cities or forests so I guess it would be easier to implement if they kept that same tradition, but personally I think it would be pure awesome to be soaring the skies on your chocobo and swoop in and land in a town (without some cheap cutscene like you get on the boat and ship when arrivng/departing, just seamless). In a world as huge as this with awesome pixelated graphics thats just pure game jizz to me lol

[Nezkeys79]

I tried it but it made the graphics settings worse. when i tried to alter them i was given a very limited graphical config compared to the official ffxi config. Windowed mode made my game lag and I lost the chat function (but it did warn it would have negative effects before applying it).

To be honest its not my idea of a game if i am forced to keep backing out to check a faq or forum. I want sufficient clues/ info in game (but not handheld) to stay there. Not to mention disrupting the flow its kind of like cheating or being helped all the way if i am constantly referring to stuff on websites/forums.