Item Levels

[Rwolf]

It's completely unnecessary as Abyssea already changed the nature of experience point gain. All this does is make it harder on any trials you want to complete as I'm assuming by this meaning you can potentially go to 0 exp gain if your weapon or gear is too high, even if it's a macro swap. And some trials don't have alternative locations, especially doing Relic+2 augmented in Dynamis. Also removes the fun of completing Fields of Valor/Grounds of Valor pages while skilling up, etc. because a piece of your gear might change your level to the point of too weak.

Just seems like a completely unnecessary change to me.

[Olor]

This is a terrible idea. Please stop worrying about experience points and spend time thinking about ways to make the game fun.

[Keyln]

It's completely unnecessary as Abyssea already changed the nature of experience point gain. All this does is make it harder on any trials you want to complete as I'm assuming by this meaning you can potentially go to 0 exp gain if your weapon or gear is too high, even if it's a macro swap. And some trials don't have alternative locations, especially doing Relic+2 augmented in Dynamis. Also removes the fun of completing Fields of Valor/Grounds of Valor pages while skilling up, etc. because a piece of your gear might change your level to the point of too weak.

Just seems like a completely unnecessary change to me.

A question here, but does it really matter in this case?

Right now, the only part of the game that requires high level gear is in Seekers. If you're at a point where you care about getting XP, then the solution is to where lower level gear.

[Raksha]

How about stop wasting time on retarded stuff and start fixing the crap that needs fixing.

Every man hour thats wasted on this could be spent revamping RMEs.

[SpankWustler]

I'd really prefer Item Level just be a way to show advancement visibly.

Having Item Level actually do anything when almost every single piece in FFXI is best used for a certain action or situation just seems incongruous to me.

[Alpheus]

If item level is gonna affect exp rates (again kinda redundant since u have to be at lvl cap to even wear them) just uncap the lvl 99 cap and stop trying to split the difference. Yes there will be some re balancing and such and maybe a call for more JAs and the like but honestly it seems we're getting all the downsides and none of the upsides of getting stronger. Which admittedly is very weird to say and even comprehend but you guys are doing a good job of making such a concept a reality.

Edit: I can see the only reason to do this would be so we don't use our super awesome super kewl leet gear to get all the merit points for the merits the dev team will implement at such a fast rate but..... well that's a very narrow of a concern to have to be honest.

[Demon6324236]

I know Matsui did not beat Maat till after he took lead if he even has beat him yet, but please tell me he at least gear swaps, because this idea... makes it sound very non-gear swap, and thus, a whole~ lot of players will get nothing from the /check changes except problems.

[Yinnyth]

This almost sounds to me like they're trying to make exp relevant again, and perhaps future merits will require inordinate amounts of exp. I'm curious to see how this screws over newbs though. Leeching abyssea has always been an option after level 30, but what happens to that when everyone you could possibly hope to leech off of is getting 0 exp per kill even after building kill chain?

And what about aggro? If we're going to start getting less and less exp from enemies, isn't it about time for level 61 enemies to stop aggroing us?

[Alpheus]

Sounds like you'll need to exp in Abyssea w/ anything from before Adoulin (pending on how penalized you are for having just a delve weapon and all pre aodulin gear in the rest of your slots as an example) which is a interesting way to dissuade people from roflstomping GoV pages to burn up friends or mules.

Which strikes me as dumb because then you'll force people who are down to help others, to have a separate load out of gear just to help others. Sounds a lot like having a bunch of level sync gear on hand >.>;

Edit: Granted I know I'm taking it to quite an extreme but, outside of that I fail to see what the Development team is trying to achieve here.

[Zhronne]

The /check command is to find out the monster strength in relation to your own. They can easily just make it say "Tiny Mandragora - Level 5" right above a monsters head.

Not sure this will work out.
I mean *of course* serverside there is data concerning monster level and a whole lot more of data.
The thing is that such information is *not* sent to our clients with the rest of the data that gets sent on communication packets, which means our clients will not be able to display monster level. It's not like (it's the case for several other info, for instance) it's part of the plenty information that DOES get sent but it's just not displayed.
Monster level just isn't sent.
The only moment when such info is sent to clients is when you use the check command, hence unless they change packet data (but in the past they already said they had no intention to do so for other things) that's not a kind of information that they'd be able to let us see just by flagging it as "viewable", they would have to change more core stuff for that and honestly I don't see it happening.

Changing the message while we check to a "The monsters looks to be level XX, it's a decent challenge!" is instead quite possible, and as a matter of fact you can already do that with third party addons, which implies it wouldn't take them more than 30 minutes of single person work to do that.