Playing experience of 14 Day Trial account

[Gries]

Hi guys,
My husband and I recently started playing FFXI. I am a returning player and bought the whole bundle and am currently using the 30 day free play period, while my husband chose to use the 14 day trial first.

Now, either I am missing something or the 14 day trial experience is really limited and not really representing the game very well. I understand that gilsellers need to be kept at bay and all, but why can't I send or trade stuff to him, and why can't he use the AH to buy things (not sell)?

Please tell me that I am just blind and he can, in a way do this. If not, we have the problem that he sits on 4k gil, has no way to make money other than NPCing stuff (or doing the 150gil reward quests, yay!), and, what's worse can only buy gear from the NPC which gets too expensive quite fast if there is no income. :-(
I have been selling crystals and onions and quite easily made 100k just leveling jobs up to 10, which for our level is more than enough to get geared properly, but I can't help him out...
or can I?

Any help or advice would be appreciated...

[RalphTheGalka]

I found the 14 day trial is pretty much worthless for anything other than being powerlevelled on FoV pages for the reasons you described. Couldn't afford gear from NPC, there was almost no gear available for purchase from NPC, and the AH was off limits due to being the trial. Only by leeching FoV pages was it able to get enough gil to buy equipment for the low levels.

[Dragoy]

Teegrins, Gries!


That is correct, the free trial is heavily restricted.

See details here:
How do I join and play the FINAL FANTASY XI Free Trial? (http://support.eu.square-enix.com/faqarticle.php?kid=60224&id=455&la=2&ret=faq&pv=10&page=0&c=0&sc=0&so=4&q=free+trial)
And here:
Are there any restrictions placed on a free trial account? (http://support.na.square-enix.com/faqarticle.php?kid=60245&id=20&la=1&ret=faq&pv=10&page=0&c=0&sc=0&so=4&q=free+trial)
Two links because they differ a little due to the Knowledge Base inconsistencies, both articles adding to each other a little.


I hope this helps~
Good luck, and have fun!

[Mirage]

Well the best solution would be to just upgrade to a full account right away, but I do agree that the trial account is too limited in terms of actual fun.

If trial players are not meant to be able to make any significant amount of money, then there should at least be an alternative way for them to get gear. Such as for example fixing the Conquest Points system and make it so that GoV and FoV pages grant CP that in turn let the trial players buy gear this way. NPCing this gear for money is not an efficient way to make gil either, so you wouldn't have to worry about RMTs too much, and if it did lead to a problem, just let trial accounts get different versions of the same conquest gear that they couldn't NPC. That would solve the "can't afford gear" part, and let the players use the remaining gil on other stuff, such as spell scrolls, transportation and consumables.

I seriously do not understand why SE has neglected Conquest like they have. It was a very nice way for new players to get their hands on some leveling gear back in the day, but nowadays,the only people with a significant amount of CP are people who do no longer need it.

As an example, leveling blu and rng to 75 outside of abyssea gained me about 2000 CP for bastok, while i have something around 90000 on windy from when I leveled war, whm and thf before FoV and GoV was implemented.

2000 cp isn't enough for more than one single lv20 piece of gear, and that's what you gain leveling two jobs from 1-75. Had new players gained CP at the same rate as oldschool-leveling, they would have been able to afford something like 2 new pieces every 10 levels or so from CP alone.

In the current state, CP could just as well be erased from the game entirely. Well, as long as I was told about it in advance so i could use up all my CP on voiddust first!

[Gries]

Thanks for the replies.

In that case I have to say that the trial account is very disappointing. My husband has not played FFXI before, and the trial account is turning him away from the game more than hooking him, which I suppose should be the reason to offer a trial account. :(
Quite sad and unbeneficial situation *sigh*.

I'm not convinced I can talk him into testing the real game since he is already saying that FFXI doesn't seem to be a game for him, though I believe this is the result of running around in Startergear at Lev 20 and hence having more problems with mobs than should be. ^^

Ah well. In any case, thanks for the input.

[Dragoy]

Gries,

All in all, even though it is very restrictive, I think it should give a rather good idea of the game and if it's really not for them, they might be able to say it from that already. Usually one either likes FFXI, or they don't (well I guess that goes for anything, really). ^^;

Even so, I would likely encourage anyone to actually buy the game instead and try with the 30 days of free time. You can get the game with all expansions and add-ons for 10-20€ so it's not like it is as huge of an investment as it used to be.


Mirage,

Indeed, a lot could be done with it, but it's sort of the way things always went; new content is introduced, old is left to die either broken or in a state that with some tweaks could be changed into something great.

Of course, we have seen some change in this during the recent years, and the developers have expressed their wants on improving even more old content (such as Campaign, and the Evolith system), but priorities are priorities, and with the funds and crew that they, we, are provided with, it will take time.

Conquest Points, and others alike could be one of the features that could be improved upon, so perhaps one should create a thread listing things they would like to be done with it. ^^

They did, after all, slightly modify some items and such that are related to it already.


Blubb.

[Mirage]

Yes, I realize that old content is obsoleted in favor of new content, but if you want new people to join your game, the first 50 levels can't be a barren wasteland as far as gear goes. Keeping CP gain at what it used to be would have solved this, but they didn't bother looking into that at all, and did not add anything new to take the place of CP as a low-level gear dispenser.

[RalphTheGalka]

While it might be fun to make conquest point relevant again, I don't think it's the solution unless they do a complete overhaul. Each nation only has certain types of gear and there's huge gaps in the levels, so if you're leveling a WHM in Bastok you're out of luck. Plus the gear is tied to ranks and only available when the nation is a certain conquest ranking.

Trying to convince people to craft and put stuff on the AH is pointless, most people aren't going to be willing to tie up most of their 7 AH slots on low level gear that doesn't have much of a profit margin.

It would be far less work to add NPCs to each nation that offer a reasonable array of low level gear.

[Mirage]

So it'll encourage them to do missions too! In the OPs example, it wouldn't be too difficult to do the first few missions for that new player.

I wouldn't say you were entirely out of luck. As a new character, it's not that bad to not have a complete updated gear set every 10 levels. I didn't mean that increasing CP gain back to a decent level would fix everything and let you have pimped out gear all the time while leveling, but it would certainly allow you to get a few pieces here and there, saving you some money for use on other items, such as gear pieces you couldn't get from your own nation's guards.

And yes, another thing that would help a lot was if you could leave gear up on the AH for a lot longer than now, especially for gear that sells relatively slowly. Perhaps the AH should allow gear below lv60 to stay on the AH 3 times as long, and not consume any of the 7 slots currently available. You could have 10 slots, where 7 are short term (the ones we currently have) and 3 are long term, low/slow-selling gear, perhaps.

Another idea could be to add a recycling-conquest guard or something. It would work sort of like a guild store, I guess. but after buying conquest items and using them, you could trade them to that guy and get back 50% of the conquest points you bought them for, and other players could buy these recycled items for 75% of the normal CP cost. Unlike the AH, this would not have a limit on how many items you could sell to the guard, and the items would not have a time limit on them. They would stay there forever, until someone bought them.

[Gries]

We did the first few missions and are currently rank 2 - Rank 3 before Level 20 is not such a good idea, because we don't have Sneak/Invis before that and without it it's a bad idea to go into the Shakrami Maze (Windurst Missions, obviously).

However, at rank 2 it's not like the Conquest Point NPC is overflowing with gear, and at that not even for every class, so yeah it would be really nice if they would offer more gear. Or put more affordable low level gear on other NPCS. Or.... anything...

@Dragoy
I know that people either love or hate FFXI, and that's fine of course, buuut I would like them to be able to actually form an opinion by experiencing it the way it is, and a pretty big motivational factor in the low levels is improving gear and killing mobs more easily, as in most MMOs. Running around in Starter gear (well, he did buy new slops at level 6) for the whole time is boring... FFXI has some nice missions and a few fun quests to do at these levels, which is good, but people like to see progress.
I disagree that the 14 day trial does a sufficient job at that.

[Dragoy]

I certainly agree, that it lacks in being anything but a tiny peek. I don't think it offers a great gaming experience either, but that's probably not what it is intended for.

It is a little bit difficult for me to think myself in that position now, but I do remember that when I started some 6 years ago, I did run around in 'starter gear' for well over level 20. Obviously leveling up was a lot different back then too, and I didn't do partying at until a lot later (even though soloing was practically impossible), and after being able to do Campaign and all, I haven't done it ever since but maybe a few times, total.

Point being, my situation back then probably wasn't much different from the free trial actually... heh, didn't notice how much so until now. So with that said, it is only a 14-day trial and I wouldn't really expect much more from a game during that time, though I may be getting old in that sense... a lot... heh! I certainly didn't have 100k for months, nor was I properly geared, so it could always be worse! (Tell that to your hubby...)

So in the end, while I probably wouldn't restrict it that heavily, I do think that the free trial should be able to give a person at least the basic idea, and the incentive to buy the game to try it with full features.

In the end, the game itself did have something for me, that kept me trying it out for more, even though it felt horribly awkward and clumsy to me as I had been used to things that are very different. In the end, even though I enjoyed each and every mission and story, the people, that is, mainly the friends I met during my journey are what have kept me playing. Not the game itself. The game lacks in so many levels which do not belong into this thread, so with all that said, perhaps you should start thinking of some other ways of hooking him · · · ^^;


Just some thoughts~

[Gries]

:)
You are right, back when I started the first time (2005)... I didn't have any gear either... and first 100k, phew I don't even know when I got that, but it took considerably longer. I quit in ~2007 btw before starting over from scratch now.
Starting out now, gearing up is much easier - if you don't use the trial account ;). I guess it depends on the player. Browsing the AH and buying some armor that looks better than your old armor... Finding a bunch of gil in the delivery box... just adds to the experience - but who am I telling this :-)

Maybe the intention of the trial is to make the player curious on how much better the game would be IF he could use the AH, trade with people etc. I mean I keep telling my husband that it would be much better if he could buy/get this and that... So I suppose a lot of times people buy the game to see that. I suppose this strategy works too, it's just rather unsatisfying for the player at first.

[Aarahs]

Iirc the free trial used to be the full experience, but it was being heavily abused so they restricted it. Maybe if SE created a trial character server with no transfer option they could open all content for them. Let them run around on a job locked to level 60 with full AF and spells for that level. Gives them a taste of the jobs and game. Only downside is they have to start over when they get full account.