Petition for level 75 cap server

[OmegaFFXI]

Pretty sure that was less to do with what was going on in XI and more to do with the advent of XIV.

You mean a game that the community thought so poorly of that it had to be completely recreated and (forgive me) reborn? I might believe that if people left for FFXIV 1.0, experienced what it was, and then came rushing back. But not many did. Instead, both of SE's MMOs took massive hits.

There probably wouldn't be a Square-Enix today if they hadn't recreated FFXIV successfully.

[Alhanelem]

Pretty sure that was less to do with what was going on in XI and more to do with the advent of XIV.

A lot of people like to blame WOTG or abyssea, but that's a load of crap. The game was beginning to decline in population before any of this.


If abyssea did harm the game in any way, it's because of its nature as a power playground- which upon completing it all, left you feeling weak when you did regular content outside of the abyssea areas. Some content like Voidwatch tried to bring some of this back, but basically, when you make people feel powerful and then indirectly take it away, it may have left a sour taste in some mouths. But neither of these things "cost the game 90% of the playerbase." There were a lot of factors at work, from already declining populations to content issues, to the advent of FFXIV (dulled by its initial failiure, though), to PS2 limitations getting in the way of needed improvements, and so on. There were a lot of things, it wasn't just any one thing.


It is however true that SE was in a bad spot after FFXIV 1.0 bombed. They had a lot of other things also performing poorly at the time as well. It was a huge risk to them financially, but at least in that respect, the remaking of the game proved to be a good decision.

[Ketaru]

If you think this is worse now than it was back in the day, you clearly haven't played the game. My main jobs were Summoner (my character is galka btw), scholar, and Puppetmaster. I got crap for summoner mostly because of my race, but the others were just not that popular. WHenever a new job came out, I inevitably fell in love with the least popular one and had a real hard time getting parties. It was true at the beginning of the game, it was true at the peak of 75 content even more. If anything, it's less true today than it was back then. All the jobs I play that were always unpopular now get to see use in a lot of content. I have far less difficulty being accepted for content now than I did back in the 75 days. And that's with a smaller commounity too. So you're dead wrong here.

And that is one of the reasons why I cannot support any sort of resources being diverted away to a stripped down version of the current Final Fantasy XI, especially any that aims to stop at ToAU. I remember the hostility that WotG received from a very particular subset of players at that time, particularly about Campaign.

Yes, Campaign was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But it was first time in the game's history where it felt like it gave players the opportunity to pick-up-and-play on their own terms. People were hostile to it because they felt it degraded the quality of skill and that it siphoned potential candidates for parties away from the Seek pool. And yet I've yet to see anybody reckon with the question "What is making these people choose to make 3K/hour limit points over 10K/hour limit points?" Frankly, I read any attempt to stop at ToAU as an attempt to once again remove the low barrier of entry from the game.

I play jobs that fulfill many different roles in parties now and, for the most part, I can identify areas where some will excel over others, and in a far more egalitarian way than back pre-75 cap. If there are still players making blanket exclusions of jobs across content, that's not a product of the current game. On the contrary, that is part of the pre-75 increase's exulted "legacies".

Personally, I prefer much of the game's designs before all this lunacy about iLevels, and yes, I miss the way gear was made to last pre-75 cap. But that's only one aspect of the game. If there are no concessions made for retaining some of the quality of life enhancements that have made the game less of a slog and less of an exclusionary experience, I can only conclude that the people who want legacy FFXI the most are sociopaths who enjoy getting to decide who leaves Whitegate and who doesn't.

[Alhanelem]

I'ts pretty obvious why I wouldn't want to go back to "classic 75 era" when the jobs i loved were reviled and not accepted for content.
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[Ketaru]

A lot of people like to blame WOTG or abyssea, but that's a load of crap. The game was beginning to decline in population before any of this.

The only thing I truly fault Abyssea for is introducing a way of leveling a job from 1 to 99 essentially by following somebody around. This continues on into Escha, as we know. If they had never done that, the game would not feel as centralized as it does now. The rate of leveling by fighting appropriate mobs actually feels comfortable now, and you would see more people spread throughout, making use of zones that are largely going to waste now.

It was really the only major step into absurdity that I found unforgivable. More the pity now especially since you can level at a pretty brisk and tolerable pace without rushing to 99.

EDIT: It's easy to oversimplify this and say "There were hundreds of thousands of subscriptions to FFXI prior to WotG. So something must have gone wrong when WotG was introduced."

If the criticism is that Abyssea and WotG were reusing too many resources, then the argument for a legacy server makes even less sense. Rather, back then, the criticisms of the game were about how top-heavy the playerbase was becoming. Most of the playerbase was stagnating at level 75. Additions like Fields of Valor, for example, may have been a step in the right direction for accommodating different playstyles. But there was little willpower to shake up the hierarchical structure the game had always been built upon. There was no low level content that was worth doing if it didn't somehow add value to your character at level 75, then 99, and now 119.

Rather, with Abyssea, they doubled down on making the only worthwhile experience in this game the level capped one. And, to reinforce this further, rather than lessen the EXP requirements to reach cap, they just made it possible to reach level cap without ever having to engage in a battle. They effectively made irrelevant a massive amount of the game's content that simply could have been made less of a slog.

I brought up Campaign because I thought the attitudes about it at the time were very telling. A subset of players were angry about it for the reasons I briefly touched upon- it "dumbed down" the playerbase, it siphoned potential party members away from the Seek pool, it encouraged deviant playstyles. And yet it was clearly meeting some kind of need at the time- people doing Campaign were willfully choosing to forego the clear advantages of a merit party in favor of maybe 3K/hour limit points at best.

I say the FFXI team never had the willpower to shake the hierarchical structure of the game because they clearly had a vision of how they wanted people to play. That also extends to content like Fields of Valor, which was supposed to be an alternative to 6-man parties. But they still wanted the 6-man party to produce the best EXP output by a wide margin, all while retaining the stringent level-up requirements. Yet, the 6-man party just wasn't working for a growing number of players anymore for one reason or another. Nor were they interested in making the jobs more egalitarian- some jobs were unquestionably at the bottom of the hierarchy. They knew this, but refused to take meaningful steps to change it.

[OmegaFFXI]

Legacy servers aren't marketed for or created for current version players. That's not to say that none of them wouldn't at least try it. But these servers are created for old players who aren't happy with the direction the game took.

Everquest is getting it's 25th expansion next week. They started making legacy servers in 2011 and release one every 2 years or so now. 8 expansions have been released since 2011. We could ask Everquest players how they feel about legacy servers "taking away" from current version development and staff.

[Alhanelem]

Legacy servers aren't marketed for or created for current version players. That's not to say that none of them wouldn't at least try it. But these servers are created for old players who aren't happy with the direction the game took.

I'm not saying they are, but it would have some effect on the current game playerbase who may have been holding out for something like this.

Everquest is getting it's 25th expansion next week. They started making legacy servers in 2011 and release one every 2 years or so now. 8 expansions have been released since 2011. We could ask Everquest players how they feel about legacy servers "taking away" from current version development and staff.

If you play MMOs like a single player game, I can see how this is working there. But there can't possibly be enough palyers on each of 8 different legacy servers to play them just the way you did in the good ol days finding parties and stuff. But you'd have to ask current game players about this, not legacy server players.

Also, if only FFXI was getting its 25th expansion....

Honestly however, the discussion is moot, because SE doesn't have a full archive of all old versions of the game (They saw no reason to keep them probably since old versions of the game were immediately unplayable when a new version came out, coupled with the impracticality of keeping that much essentially useless data on hand) and can't realistically construct something like this, other than by faking it by letting the player launch the game with access to specific expansions turned off or unlocked by optional quests. That's basically the only way it could happen. And a lot of purist players might not like the idea of playing 75 content with all the rebalancing the jobs have recieved over the years, much of which may not have been made with lv75 in mind.

[Xel]

Honestly however, the discussion is moot, because SE doesn't have a full archive of all old versions of the game (They saw no reason to keep them probably since old versions of the game were immediately unplayable when a new version came out, coupled with the impracticality of keeping that much essentially useless data on hand) and can't realistically construct something like this, other than by faking it by letting the player launch the game with access to specific expansions turned off or unlocked by optional quests. That's basically the only way it could happen. And a lot of purist players might not like the idea of playing 75 content with all the rebalancing the jobs have recieved over the years, much of which may not have been made with lv75 in mind.

How do you know they don't have an archive of the older versions of the game? Most development teams tend to keep archives of major releases/updates.
Even Blizzard was able to find a World of Warcraft archived version to use for their Classic WoW project, despite the developers original position of claiming to not actually have the assets.

[Alhanelem]

How do you know they don't have an archive of the older versions of the game? Most development teams tend to keep archives of major releases/updates.
Even Blizzard was able to find a World of Warcraft archived version to use for their Classic WoW project, despite the developers original position of claiming to not actually have the assets.

It has been discussed before, and is one of the failings of the original dev team. IIRC the current producer commented on this when the classic server idea was originally shot down as a matter of practicality. You're right, most dev teams keep an archive of their work as they progress. But apparently SE did not keep everything (Not nothing, but not everything).

[OmegaFFXI]

Everquest and old FFXI cannot be played as a solo game, with the exception of a few classes, and that's only for easier content like leveling and farming in mostly outdoor zones. The majority of the game must be played with others. Solo classes can't really just waltz around in dungeons in Everquest either because most of them are designed for pulling multiple mobs at a time.

Not having old versions of server code doesn't matter, because that would also require having the old client. As far as I can tell, most of these companies aren't even using old server/client versions for their legacy servers, they are using the current client. You see legacy and live version servers on the same server list within the same client. They simply add extra lines of code within the same server code, to distinguish between legacy and live content. Also for the record: Everquest's legacy servers require a subscription, the live version servers are free to play, with the exception of I believe the most recent expansion's content.

You call it "faking it" but that's exactly how these companies are doing it... and it's the most time and cost effective way of doing so. Having a separate client and a completely separate server code is utterly pointless for this.