Reasons Why FFXI is Declining

[Daemon]

Not only did they eliminate it, they managed to eliminate most of the reasons the zones said levels existed for in the process. And the reasons people even hung around in the starting cities.

I mean, I regularly have to explain to newbie people capped at level 50 why fame matters or how to get to anywhere save Gusgen Mines and Crawler's Nest. The incentives to explore, to actually be in the game world were obliterated with Abyssea. Because little blue boxes and a L30 entry limit.

And the way I see why these areas were eliminated was because people complained they weren't getting invites to 6 man parties and failing to exp was killing the game so in order to keep leveling interested was to expand the limit to 18 man alliances which would make certain areas popular and full bringing the majority of the player base to certain areas.

Just the same as I mentioned before the rope has 2 sides, if the adjustment is made for a good cause a sacrifice is always made.

Speeding the leveling phase to less than half a day made most auction house gear irrelevant.

Allowing 18 man alliances and GOV pages sacrificed leveling at old maps and 6 man Skillchain groups.

Adjustments are made based on a general view of what can benefit the majority.

Most events today is based on keeping big groups and the majority of the playerbase together than fall apart.

[FrankReynolds]

Only if the DEV team had enough time to produce rich content. Game programming is a race between players and the team creating the content. We are playing a game of cat and mouse nonstop because this is a never ending MMORPG.

These repeatables, time limited events, horrible drop rates and tough progression standards set within the game in reality are excuses to stall you.

Right, but here is the thing: If you make leveling take forever, people will only level a few key jobs in order to ensure a place in end game, then they will stop leveling and concentrate on endgame. This creates a situation where in new people only have other new people to level with because older players have effectively quit leveling. That's where the game was at before abyssea was released.

The problem with creating end game content in this situation is that you can't create end game events that require job diversity because most people only have a few jobs leveled and most of them are the same jobs. They aren't willing to spend months years leveling for one event. Even if they are, you are looking at months / years lag time before your end game event picks up in popularity (if ever).

As they add more new jobs, this problem becomes worse and worse because they have to give those jobs a reason to exist beyond just the leveling phase and creating mid level content is problematic because the usefulness of the rewards is short lived and level capped players don't like playing at lower levels.

They solve this by making it incredibly easy to level jobs by having higher level players help you. This way, lower level people aren't stuck sitting with their flags up all day doing nothing and the devs can build content around any jobs they want because everyone can reasonably access those jobs.

They could have easily brought back the six man party system by adding a point system that revolves around killing things outside of abyssea and is most efficiently done in groups of 4-6 by making it scale like exp. does. They could have tied it to merits as a form of progression. They could have done this with reives by simply making the bayld received scale based on party size.

There are a million things they could have done better than what they did to keep people playing and none of it had to involve going back in time and removing fell cleave parties or building a new game engine.

[Daemon]

Right, but here is the thing: If you make leveling take forever, people will only level a few key jobs in order to ensure a place in end game, then they will stop leveling and concentrate on endgame. This creates a situation where in new people only have other new people to level with because older players have effectively quit leveling. That's where the game was at before abyssea was released.

The problem with creating end game content in this situation is that you can't create end game events that require job diversity because most people only have a few jobs leveled and most of them are the same jobs. They aren't willing to spend months years leveling for one event. Even if they are, you are looking at months / years lag time before your end game event picks up in popularity (if ever).

As they add more new jobs, this problem becomes worse and worse because they have to give those jobs a reason to exist beyond just the leveling phase and creating mid level content is problematic because the usefulness of the rewards is short lived and level capped players don't like playing at lower levels.

They solve this by making it incredibly easy to level jobs by having higher level players help you. This way, lower level people aren't stuck sitting with their flags up all day doing nothing and the devs can build content around any jobs they want because everyone can reasonably access those jobs.

They could have easily brought back the six man party system by adding a point system that revolves around killing things outside of abyssea and is most efficiently done in groups of 4-6 by making it scale like exp. does. They could have tied it to merits as a form of progression. They could have done this with reives by simply making the bayld received scale based on party size.

There are a million things they could have done better than what they did to keep people playing and none of it had to involve going back in time and removing fell cleave parties or building a new game engine.

Its hard to expect a small team to focus on every aspect of the game at all times. Everything the DEVs do is based on the moment and where the majority is at.

The system made at the start wasn't broken. It's until after people passed it is when the system became different.

If players went back and helped everyone progress then its good but at the current state people have too many priorities setting themselves first before others.

Then again how do you go back and alter the game based on the momentary interest without changing the storyline?

Adding new jobs is what ties into the story of each content. Look at other jobs and how they all relate to the storyline.

Do you want to suffer finding people to level with and do no events or spend all day finding parties to get your gear?

Its risky at this point because what if there is not enough players sharing the same interest? Will it be possible to make groups happen?

Leveling phase was fun I admit but the main thing I learned in game development is the difference in level range.

The more levels you get, the more power you gain, which require harder content upon harder content but at a certain point you will start to struggle keeping people busy long enough to work on development and that's why these typical repeat me a million times, wait 1 day to gain access and play for 2 hours, horrible drop rates exist.

I know we argued a lot in WR thread but look at the conditions. Allowing anyone to join instead of limiting the event to 18 people seems like it was meant to keep the majority of the community together than everyone lose interest in SoA.

SoA was failing upon release. 1 mistake can ripple through the entire game like an aftershock from hell.

Which is what Delve and Skirmish did. Instead of spending time moving forward, time gets spent correcting issues.

I also said it maybe too quick to judge the content of SoA bad if the full vision of the expansion has not been realized.

We are only looking at segments upon segments being implemented right now.

[Daemon]

They could have easily brought back the six man party system by adding a point system that revolves around killing things outside of abyssea

Frank as I said before, the interest is focused on the majority of the playerbase. Certain things are implemented for a reason. If only 2,000 players existed on the entire server and 200 of the players are duel box, bazaar, mules and most of the day ranging from 500-800 people, do you think directing people's attention away from popular areas is going to help if the goal is to keep everyone interested in the current event?

How does that help you find parties to do things like Abyssea, quests, missions, trials, events if there are too many things added on to your to-do interest list?

How would people get things in Abyssea done if several hundred players decide they want to level outside of it?

That's why I said it doesn't make sense to implement REM and draw everyone to do that after SoA expansion was released. Then how will people find enough people interested in Delve etc?

This is the thing about analyzing results over time and making adjustments according to the moment.

Which is why I said Game development is about shifting the crowd from one area to another.

[Daemon]

Now to conclude everything I've been explaining in my responses:

I just think the DEV TEAM intentionally decided to kill off all other content to shift the crowd over to SoA fully by adding in over powered items and gear to make the new expansion a success than lose face by charging almost $40 to every single person who bought it which would make the crash of this game worse than when FFXIV was released.

Atleast now they can continue to add more on top of it and fill in the gaps along the way.

People were bound to quit anyway, atleast their strategy kept the crowd that's left over. And that's why you have as many people as you do now.

Magic is about drawing attention to a specific thing with the intent of distracting you to accomplish the success of the trick you are doing.

Its obvious the items of the game would draw everyone's interest like a magician wowing you with the glamor of the illusion being performed.

And this is why I see the game different than you.

If you guys weren't so busy focused on a single task arms flailing in the air sky is falling run to the forums and let everyone know the world is ending thinking only about simple things like "How do I get my item" then maybe you would see things beyond the box rather than be left stuck in it.

My last 2 cents I leave for you on the table.

[vienne]

Great news! XIV sucks i'm comming back here and i'll forget about all the flaws this game has cause its still 9999999999 times better then that monster which is XIV.

[Daemon]

Great news! XIV sucks i'm comming back here and i'll forget about all the flaws this game has cause its still 9999999999 times better then that monster which is XIV.

Lol I'm waiting to see how many others are coming back when that free one month ends and when others realize that FFXIV is not FFXI leaving behind a game they already spent so much time building their characters earning their items which is enough reason not to drop the game entirely.

Which is also a good reason to "analyze" things over time before making adjustments right away.

[Kuvo]

Great news! XIV sucks i'm comming back here and i'll forget about all the flaws this game has cause its still 9999999999 times better then that monster which is XIV.

Just wondering why u feel that way and what u don't like about it? I've heard that from a few ppl but imo I am having fun playing xiv. Its fast, there's a ton of things going on, lots of people, and it is beautiful. I like the controls and the game play customization. My only complaint right now is that it seems way too easy, not just leveling but everything I experienced so far hasn't proven to be a challenge. But yet im only lvl 14

[Daemon]

My only complaint right now is that it seems way too easy


This is why i lost interest.

I understand making the game easy to understand. Making it too easy as if the game is doing everything for you is a different story.

Part of playing any RPG game is about exploring. This game shows you where NPCs are telling you where to go just by looking at the map and in 1 hour you can finish talking to several quest npcs and complete things with the impression of "go talk to this NPC, go pick up this off the ground in front of me, walk over there and examine this, go dance in front of these people"

I just think they went overboard on the easy mode.

In a way it just felt as if it was done intentionally to avoid the problem that happened on the first release. Lose customers who don't know how to do simple things on their own.

Sort of like someone nagging you that the Internet doesn't work when they didn't even type in the web address. So they expect you to do it for them.

That's how easy the game seems.

[vienne]

My only complaint right now is that it seems way too easy

That^ i lvld MRD to 34 LNC to 22 and a couple of things more, i tried crafting (and in 1.0 i did quite alot of botany which i really liked doing but they dumbed it down in ARR) and its just... where's the challenge. I want a game where i can play for longer then 3 months. The fate thing is a copy of GW2 and badly implemented. crafting is pointless since almost every quest hands you a piece of gear, gathering is pointless since that marketboard is just hilarious. i said it on the the xiv forum and i'll say it here too, they're trying way to hard to make xiv not be like xi so they also didnt implement anything which was actually good about xi.
in short, its a shiny game with little content.
Its like a really nice looking bra, but the moment you put it on you notice it doesnt fit well and is made of only 5 parts instead of the must have 50 parts

[Afania]

That^ i lvld MRD to 34 LNC to 22 and a couple of things more, i tried crafting (and in 1.0 i did quite alot of botany which i really liked doing but they dumbed it down in ARR) and its just... where's the challenge. I want a game where i can play for longer then 3 months. The fate thing is a copy of GW2 and badly implemented. crafting is pointless since almost every quest hands you a piece of gear, gathering is pointless since that marketboard is just hilarious. i said it on the the xiv forum and i'll say it here too, they're trying way to hard to make xiv not be like xi so they also didnt implement anything which was actually good about xi.
in short, its a shiny game with little content.
Its like a really nice looking bra, but the moment you put it on you notice it doesnt fit well and is made of only 5 parts instead of the must have 50 parts

SE's broke, they can't no longer afford to make another mega sized MMO and take risk of failing again. So they have to focus on 1 single aspect, make it small, make ppl satisfied, so that buy them time and money, at least they got some box sells.

I agree with what you said though, I want more than just "go to dungeon and fight the boss, beat it, so I can do next dungeon" MMORPG. But I guess no company is ambitious enough to make anything more than that.

[Afania]

Just wondering why u feel that way and what u don't like about it? I've heard that from a few ppl but imo I am having fun playing xiv. Its fast, there's a ton of things going on, lots of people, and it is beautiful. I like the controls and the game play customization. My only complaint right now is that it seems way too easy, not just leveling but everything I experienced so far hasn't proven to be a challenge. But yet im only lvl 14


It really depend on what you're looking for in an MMORPG.

XIV is linear, very straight forward, and the game scope is small. It often give you tons of things, quests/fate/dungeon to do, and dungeon mechanics are fun for the first time.

The issue is not every players are looking for this kind of linear experience. I think being "immersive" is one very important aspect in MMO. MMO is supposed to be a 2nd world for players to live in, with strong social aspect and sense of living in the world, not just a game where you quickly beat 1 thing to do another.

XIV has very small but pretty map, at first it's new and fresh to look at every pretty locations. Until you keep playing and realized every map in the game doens't feel real....desert is small and full of stuff, but in reality desert should be something like XI, where you walk forever to one place to another, seeing nothing but sand ._. Snowy field is the same. It's supposed to be something like XI, long walk, no camp, no city, where you get lost and actually feel cold. XIV is not like that, you get a snowy field where each town is 2 min of bird ride between each other, and 1000 players killing FATE pop in the middle of the road. In the name of "accessibility and fun", you can head to 1 location to another in a 2m ride and the sense of adventure is completely gone.

Same for character customization, in MMO you're supposed to play however you want, live however you want. In XIV the entire game been telling me where to go next, what to do next, what my job role is. And I can't do things I want to do, until I cleared previous content.

Plenty of players said XIV is fun, because it really tried really hard to give you tones of things to do in very short amount of time. Exciting dungeon bosses one after another. Fate is fast, quests only need a few bird ride/teleport and you can finish many of them in 5 min. But for some reason, I feel I'm disconnected to the game, there are no immersion, just instant gratification. All there's left in XIV, is "What's the boss mechanic of next dungeon?" or "I need to get an Ifrit weapon so I can do Garuda, next exciting boss yeahhhh!".

The more I play XIV, the more I miss old XI. I wish dev can bring old XI back ._. Ppl need to stop bashing designs that doesn't bring instant gratification, because instant gratification isn't necessary zomg awesome, especially for games like XI, which already has another instant gratification competitior.

[vienne]

Afania, you wonderfully worded how i feel about xiv < > xi

[Kuvo]

Afania, you wonderfully worded how i feel about xiv < > xi

I agree, afania has a lot of great points and it made me see them in the game too. I honestly wanted xiv to be an extension of xi but I need to look at xiv as a completely different game. I will continue to play both and see how xiv develops but all your points are very valid.

[Daemon]

Instant gratification games, designs, objectives only serve the purpose to stimulate the serotonin levels of a player. Sort of the same as a drug addict getting a temporary high only to waste their time altering their mind only on the high itself and forget about the harm it's doing them and how they are ruining their life around people who care.

Although that example is several times more hardcore than a game. It's still the same concept just slower and more subtle that people can't see right away.

[Afania]

I agree, afania has a lot of great points and it made me see them in the game too. I honestly wanted xiv to be an extension of xi but I need to look at xiv as a completely different game. I will continue to play both and see how xiv develops but all your points are very valid.

Perhaps my biggest gripe with XIV is disconnect feel when it comes to character development, since it's vertical gear progression like SoA XI. In pre-SoA XI your character gets stronger by doing tons of content and collect gears and build tons of gear sets. The longer you play, the more gears you can use for different situations. When I played pre-SoA XI, every new gear set I made, there's a sense of satisfication because I really feel my character/job gets stronger, as every new piece of gear are part of my strength to deal with difficult situations, most of them are not replaced, nor replaced easily, they're part of my arsenal that made my character/job strong. That's the real reason why I'm willing to play XI for years and grind gears doing same content for years, because my character feels more than just another avatar in a virtual world, it's a character with a story, and gets stronger as life goes on.

In XIV, at least current XIV, I feel I'm just collecting X gear or Y gear to bypass the gear check so I can do next content after next. Once you pass gear check it's time to toss the gear for better gears. Grind primal weapons for titan HM because there's DPS check on titan, and need titan clear to continue relic quest, once you pass that stage previous primal weapons are just nothing but a stepping stone. Grind Darklight because there's HP check for X content, once you get AF2 time to replace them.

In pre-SoA XI, I feel like I do content and grind gears because I love my character/job, and I do them to make my character/job stronger. There's a feel for character progression. I value immersion when I play RPG, and pre-SoA XI really delivered it when it comes to character development.

I XIV, I feel like I do content because I need X gear to do this content, so I can do next content. And why do I need to do next content? Well, because it's pretty much everyone's doing and only thing you can do after you hit lv cap. It's more like linear content progression than character progression.


At first I was expecting XIV to be an extension of XI too, until I realized they're completely different game with different design philosophy. It's probably easier to enjoy XIV by just accepting what it is. Although I still wish XI can go back to pre-SoA direction, that's the time I enjoyed XI the most, and IMO, better game direction for XI.

[Kuvo]

I haven't done much of anything with the new expansion except for unlocking the 2 new jobs but ill tell u that I think I will now. All that new gear and weaponsre so amazing. I love playing the old content still and that gear and weapons would be perfect for the type of gameplay im looking to do..... also me and 2 other friends have been leveling a bit old fashion. We have been doing FoV in all different areas matching our levels. Like the other day we partied in the jungle killing mandies outside kazham. I bit slow in leveling but capped all our skills and its been fun doing so. Started to bring back the low level adventure again.

[Damane]

i played now FFXIV for 3 weeks aaaaand while the game is fun, i cant fathom the community there. so unless my friends of FFXI gather on one server to play in 14, i will pass on that one ¬.¬

[Kuvo]

i played now FFXIV for 3 weeks aaaaand while the game is fun, i cant fathom the community there. so unless my friends of FFXI gather on one server to play in 14, i will pass on that one ¬.¬

Ya, to your point I was doing some random quest and saw 2 other people starting the same quest. So I asked them if they want to join together and do the quest. They said why bother because you can solo 99% of these quest lines. So I get your point about the community. I just wanted to try and meet new ppl but it makes for a good point. On ffxiv there is no reason (thus far) to develop in game friendships based on content.
Xi started to fall apart in a similar fashion. Anything before aby, no one wants to be apart of so no one wants to help or adventure together anymore. Luckily I have 2 close friends that still play xi otherwise I would be gone.

[Byrth]

There has been a 50% drop in NA player logins within the last six months. Several factors are likely to be at play:
* Aging-game syndrome
* Developmental decisions (including the horizontal-to-vertical progression switch)
* The presence of competing games (like FFXIV)

I think that it is not wise to underestimate either of the last two factors, though the first factor cannot be ruled out totally. Based on some data from a mysterious source, I would be unsurprised if the majority of the effect was due to Dev decisions and if FFXIV was a minor effect.

[Damane]

There has been a 50% drop in NA player logins within the last six months. Several factors are likely to be at play:
* Aging-game syndrome
* Developmental decisions (including the horizontal-to-vertical progression switch)
* The presence of competing games (like FFXIV)

I think that it is not wise to underestimate either of the last two factors, though the first factor cannot be ruled out totally. Based on some data from a mysterious source, I would be unsurprised if the majority of the effect was due to Dev decisions and if FFXIV was a minor effect.

FFXIV had a rather huge effect, considering over half of my LS is gone playing it scathered around different servers :/

[Byrth]

I am not so sure. The decline looks fairly linear here:
http://i.imgur.com/l54n8OL.png

There is a bump for the login campaigns and it tails off a bit early at FFXIV's release, but FFXI was already headed downhill pretty dramatically in June (right after the horizontal-to-vertical switch in May).

[Damane]

I am not so sure. The decline looks fairly linear here:
http://i.imgur.com/l54n8OL.png

There is a bump for the login campaigns and it tails off a bit early at FFXIV's release, but FFXI was already headed downhill pretty dramatically in June (right after the horizontal-to-vertical switch in May).

yeah that looks like the decline started when delve hit the shelves it seems, basicly when RMEs got useless and all other previous gear got pritty much bombed due to Delve. I hope the RME update and the hardmode update bring some players back in november, but I really doubt so :/. Seems like the vertical gear progression really was the thing that killed it.

[geekgirl101]

Forget it, my 2 cents would get dissected and criticized anyways.

btw we are all part of a big experiment. All the ideas we came up with to improve this game were taken on board by SE, instead of applying them here they decided to make a new game with all the ideas we came up with and thus created.... FFXIV :P

[korn16ftl3]

Opinion:
It would appear to me that around the time that FFXIV (NOT REALM REBORN) was about to release and during the duration of that year they started doing things to make the game more soloable, in theory this is fine due to the fact some of the XI population would obviously like to at least check out the new FF MMO, completely expected. Now in the process of preparing for the new release of XIV they were also trying to keep people engaged in XI (perhaps to collect $25 a person for those that wish to play both games?) and thus adding or building up the releases of aby the way that they did (if i recall corectly and feel free to correct me if i am wrong the last aby add on was released during beta phase of XIV original).

In the attempt to make the game soloable they completely nullified a lot of what the game revolved around...community, there still is a great community but look at the economy in your server...you cant even sell that good low lvl gear you have because of how soloable the game actually is. Some how on the journy to 99 as soon as we hit level 30 people jump into aby and are just lazy and level to 99 (i wont lie i myself am guilty of this just for cretin attributes of X job)....This further hindered the player base by adding a bunch of 99's that haven't even been to kaz yet.

Further more they removed things such as CoP level caps and things that made the game a challenge....its fine if they want to remove the caps and perfectly acceptable in given situation...but what about us that might WANT the level caps there to relive the experience or have a different one all together? I myself never got to experience the CoP with the level 30 cap even being an on and off player since about 07, tho i wouldn't mind playing it capped at lvl 30 just for a more challenging experience.

In addition to the above old end game is freaking soloable....me as PLD/DNC and an LS mate as BLM/WHM duoed the Ark Angels....WHY?

When i started playing i dreamed of the day i could fight gods and be a lvl 75 in an alliance fighting dragons for an hour only to be wiped out....it was something i had looked forward to for a long time...i have only recently been able to reach that goal (due to my on and off game play as i stated previously) and was HUGELY disappointed when i did a CoP dragon fight as well as the Ark Angel fight....mostly because i remembered my firs BCNM for the nation missions...it literally gave me chills i was so excited and the fight was intense even with a full party, it was something i enjoyed the heat of the battle and the pressure to defeat the dragon...i have been robbed of all of these experiences due to the 99 cap and every thing being dummed down

Conclusion:
Adding choices appeals to ALL players as you allowed to choose a path to take and inevitably your own experience. The way i would best resolve what i have stated has disappointing me the most...make caps an option...make some of the old beaten content repayable in a HARDER mode or with an alternate mode (perhaps just no rewards aside from XP to replay it?). At the beginning of CoP offer the option if you want to be capped or not, either beef up the gods and end game of the older content to give the players the experience back they desire, offer a cap option do something make them gods again dont just let the aby zone boss's be better than something thats supposed to be a god...where is the logic behind that?

MOST IMPORTANTLY RAISE THE ABY ENTRY LVL CAP, make players at least learn the core basics of their job and have a weapon skill of 200 in their jobs weapon proficiency before being able to enter aby, may the entry LVL 50 so there is a bit of experience and skill behind a player......make us reunite as players again and get to know each other...rather than go to work and come back a 99 X job.

as a final note why in the world is so much gear rare/ex....how are we supposed to make any gil or keep some kind of economy established when we cant even sell the good treasure we do find because its rare/ex? Its not bad enough that almost no other older gear sells on the AH (at least on fenrir its a terrible economy there) the spells are getting crazy low (I bought about 10 spells for whm from the AH ranging from lvl 30+ spells for under 200K) how are we supposed to even attempt to survive or buy any thing when were only making 10K a crack...and that stupid phalanx spell has yet to drop for me on royal jelly BCNM in at LEAST 15 runs......it just does not make sense....if something is mine in RL can i not sell it? I also ABSOLUTELY HATE the 7 items on AH limitation...if ure going to rare/ex every thing at least find a way to lift the 7 item limit from the AH so we can sell 10000 things only worth 10K

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

Some how on the journy to 99 as soon as we hit level 30 people jump into aby and are just lazy and level to 99

People skip leveling wherever possible because it's not fun. It's never been fun. The game was enjoyable despite the soul-crushing grind, not because of it.

I'm at the point that I think it's ridiculous to call these newer players "lazy" for wanting to actually be entertained by a game they are paying for.


Further more they removed things such as CoP level caps and things that made the game a challenge...

Nobody actually liked the level caps. Nobody.

Want to know how I know? Beastmen's Seal battles, ENM battles, ISNM battles, Expeditionary Force, Garrison, Eco-Warrior... they all still have level caps. And nobody does them any more, because they still have level caps. Hell, we wouldn't even have seal storage NPCs at all if people actually wanted to do the fights, but even back then people hated level caps enough to drop Beastmen's Seals as fast as they got 'em.

Level caps were a cheap kludge thrown into CoP shortly before its release and it shows. S-E recognized that nobody would go through that nonsense at low levels if they didn't have to. The end result were a whole mess of players stuck at Chapter 1 because they didn't have exactly the right job and exactly the right gear (which is certainly a theme that hasn't gone away).


In addition to the above old end game is freaking soloable....me as PLD/DNC and an LS mate as BLM/WHM duoed the Ark Angels....WHY?

Why the hell not? Are the stats on the Divine Might earrings too game-breaking? There's a whole new expansion out there for "teamwork" and "strategy," complete with relevant gear as rewards.

I personally welcome changes like this because so much of S-E's philosophy with older content is "abandon in place." So much content was and still is broken since its inception (e.g. Ark Angel EV's Spirits Within), but S-E focuses on replacement rather than repair, so having the opportunity to "throw more levels at it" is the only opportunity for many players to experience the expansion pack they paid for.


When i started playing i dreamed of the day i could fight gods and be a lvl 75 in an alliance fighting dragons for an hour only to be wiped out...

<Wildskeeper Rieve> <You can have this.>


make caps an option...

No real reason not to do this, so long as you ignore the fact that nobody will use it. Level Sync works just fine in Promyvion and, while you can't use that in the mission fights in the Spires, there's still ENMs in those same zones with the same old level caps that nobody is bothering with.


MOST IMPORTANTLY RAISE THE ABY ENTRY LVL CAP

Aside from the fact that that ship has sailed, in case you've forgotten S-E still charges money for the Abyssea add-ons. There are apparently enough people who haven't bought them yet to justify a months-long free-access campaign. Nobody will spend money on an add-on they can't actually use.


I also ABSOLUTELY HATE the 7 items on AH limitation...

The problem isn't that you can only sell 7 items at a time. The problem is that 99% of drops are completely useless to 99% of the population to begin with.

And to try to shoehorn at least one constructive comment in my wall of text, what S-E needs to do is have a dedicated team go through all the old content, all of it, and make sure the challenge-to-reward ratio for it all actually makes sense. For example, why are there still level caps to begin with? Why is Ark Angel EV's Spirits Within damage uncapped (unlike players)? Why is the Seed Crystal... well, still the Seed Crystal? Why must it take so long to climb Mercenary Rank? etc. etc.

[nyheen]

People skip leveling wherever possible because it's not fun. It's never been fun. The game was enjoyable despite the soul-crushing grind, not because of it.

I'm at the point that I think it's ridiculous to call these newer players "lazy" for wanting to actually be entertained by a game they are paying for.

and this is one of the reason why it declining because everyone is burning to 99 at super sonic speeds because of lvl 30+ abyssea. it what killed the whole low/mid lvl pting as you can see, and on top of that SoA killed off all the older events with it broken easy to get skirmish gear. so is this what you wanted? because at this point it started to be unplayable. things was at the safe zone before. now it just broken. loging in with just 500 people is just sad and it gonna get worst;;

[vienne]

Although yes its a horse thats been beaten to death a gazillion times, but I'll give my two cents.
Yes I enjoyed the game more pre-abyssea, the idea of abyssea was ok, the idea of lvl 99 was fine, SE just implemented it wrong (again, they're really good at having a good concept and messing it up)... But that was when? 2 years ago, to late to turn back now right? asking for a lvl cap in abyssea wont fix the real issue.
On the other hand, Back in ye olden days when you were forced to team up with a group of weirdos you totally didnt know, Although a grindfest it did have its advantages.
Most of the people on my flist (the very short one atm, I'm in need of more people to talk to so I can whine less on the forum) are people I met during old school pt'ing, I got my one and only serious long time linkshell (which sadly enough doesnt exist anymore since FFXIV ARR, yes doomsday is comming) through old school pting...
Then came abyssea, SE's idea of opium for the masses. I can honestly tell i never met a friend in abyssea pts, just people trying to lot what you need or stealing your NM's, at the end of the road our ls split up in these kind of cliques (or w/e the english word is) and they all worked with 3~6 on what they wanted/needed and even the group feeling of being in an ls got extremely vague at that point.
So to summarize: abyssea wasnt the carrot on the stick, it was the carrot straight up your derrière.
Lets forget about it, its the here and now, give us R/M/E, give us challenging content, give us a playerbase to buy our goods, gimme someone to talk to gdmi, I want the old community feel back!

[kylani]

People skip leveling wherever possible because it's not fun. It's never been fun. The game was enjoyable despite the soul-crushing grind, not because of it.
Yes it was fun. It was made better by level sync. It's not necessarily 'FUN' for everyone, but it is FUN for some.

I made many friends in exp parties, and we had a good time. Those that left don't talk about missing Abyssea, and in fact most left AFTER Abyssea. They miss the fun we had partying, accomplishing things as a group. Not sitting in a party getting exp while AFK.



Nobody actually liked the level caps. Nobody.

Want to know how I know? Beastmen's Seal battles, ENM battles, ISNM battles, Expeditionary Force, Garrison, Eco-Warrior... they all still have level caps. And nobody does them any more, because they still have level caps. Hell, we wouldn't even have seal storage NPCs at all if people actually wanted to do the fights, but even back then people hated level caps enough to drop Beastmen's Seals as fast as they got 'em.

Hard to believe anyone would even say this. The BCNMs are great fun. If anything, the people I know are wanting more seals. It was always fun even if it was sometimes annoying to get to the fights, but now that gear level syncs and after the 95 fight you can teleport to the battlegrounds it's better than ever.

There are good things about the new content too. FFXI has so much variety of content, it's amazing to me. But the old content was good and has improved with time. If the initial content were 'so bad' that no one would want to do it, why have folks kept playing this game over 11 years.

More has been added so more playing styles can enjoy the game, and I enjoy Abyssea and Adoulin, etc. But it doesn't mean that no one enjoys the old content. I was fortunate enough to enjoy COP with friends and that's probably what we remember fondly more than anything else, but it doesn't mean I don't understand how frustrating it was for others. People are different, but that's why this game is so awesome. Things improve over time, and new stuff is always being introduced. It may be hit and miss at times, but I think it's better that content is added then tweaked vs. not changing at all. Mistakes may be made, but hopefully, SE will fix them. Folks may leave, but many come back after realizing no game has all that FFXI does.

[detlef]

Leveling may have been fun sometimes, but the sheer amount of time spent XPing to level a single job took the shine off of it for many.

[Rustic]

Leveling may have been fun sometimes, but the sheer amount of time spent XPing to level a single job took the shine off of it for many.

Even with GoV/FoV, I'd easily polish off half a dozen or more levels in the time it'd take me to get 1-2 of them in the old days.

Abyssea just went into full derp mode by going still faster and allowing people to exp level 30 characters in zones where an even fight would be 75+. And then put a "GoV" bonus on top of that in some zones with Dominion OPs.

Why an expansion clearly designed for post-Dynamis players (newbie armor L78, after all) had such an insanely low level limit other than to eviscerate midgame is unthinkable.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

And the thing is... the level caps used for rank 2 and 5 missions worked very well. There was a ceiling, but you didn't need to be at or above the cap, and you didn't need to go with a full party. The caps were just low enough to require you to bring friends.

Everything else just feels so broken in comparison. For CoP, full parties at or above cap was the bare minimum required; you'd also need all the "homework" rare/ex items needed for that particular fight, not to mention very particular job balance requirements. With other content like Expeditionary Force, realistically you'll have to take advantage of the fact that buffs don't wipe.

So instead of a roundabout way to require team play (instead of the flat-out minimum member requirement introduced with Assault), we are given the situation where players whose highest level is X is in no way capable of participating in content capped at level X. Content capped at level X is best left to players with at least one job at 2*X.

If the CoP level caps had simply been raised 5 or 10 levels I think most players' issues would have been resolved.

[Richwood]

Thought I would comment and make this big long post that sounded really thought out and cool. THEN, I realized I am just sad that FFXI is dying. Even sadder that I am playing FFXIV and not really enjoying it as much as I hoped. I been playing every game in the Final Fantasy Series since the 80's; the overwhelming sensation that something I have loved for so long has turned into a bad relationship heading for divorce, just depresses me.

[Spellcaster]

why they take so long to do a server merge... the game is almost unplayable because all servers are empty/not enough players to do current content

[Renaissance2K]

Nobody actually liked the level caps. Nobody.

Want to know how I know? Beastmen's Seal battles, ENM battles, ISNM battles, Expeditionary Force, Garrison, Eco-Warrior... they all still have level caps. And nobody does them any more, because they still have level caps. Hell, we wouldn't even have seal storage NPCs at all if people actually wanted to do the fights, but even back then people hated level caps enough to drop Beastmen's Seals as fast as they got 'em.

The only purpose the level caps serve now is to artificially inflate the difficulty of the battles in question. If any Joe could just run down and do Royal Jelly, Under Observation, or Up in Arms at the drop of a hat at Level 99, the few valuable items that drop from those battles would be worth next to nothing because they'd be as common as dirt. Throw this on top of the fact that, in the current economy, nobody seems to care what they wear for the first 99 levels, so the value of those rewards is deflated even further.

Blaming the level caps for the unpopularity of those events is like saying the Virtual Boy failed because it was red. People don't do those events anymore because the rewards aren't worth it for the amount of effort they require. Expeditionary Force is probably the worst offender. Let's get an alliance together, fight waves of difficult baddies, and be rewarded with... Conquest Points. To buy gear that we'll outlevel in five minutes. Nah, let's do Eco-Warrior instead and get... a Dragon Chronicles page, even though we can go to Gusgen Mines and get twice as much EXP in five minutes. Ditto for ENMs and ISNMs - they require time to assemble a team, and the rewards are either worthless or too niche to be worthwhile.

Garrison's an interesting example. Some people still do the uncapped Garrison in Vollbow. Not because the Garrison is uncapped, or because the rewards are worthwhile (they aren't), but because it can be soloed. We're about to see a whole bunch of these existing battlefields get high-level versions, but if they still require six able-bodied heroes to complete, and if their rewards can't hold a candle to the Delve and Skirmish drops, interest is going to fizzle quickly.

Saying "nobody liked the level caps" (note the past tense) is pretty easy to do now when it's virtually impossible to do anything worthwhile in the game until you have a job at 99. (It's really silly that we call that Endgame, considering it's really more like the Begingame these days, right?) Level caps means I could participate in "real" content without having to grind, grind, grind my way to the top, and it also meant that I wasn't being a leech just because I was playing with a half-dozen other people with blue job levels. If I had to kill crabs for a year before I could fight in anything that really felt like it belonged in the scope of a Final Fantasy game, I probably wouldn't have stuck around. But I could go to Promyvion from the moment it was released, and the place gave me the creeps, as it should. I could do an Eco-Warrior when I saw a shout and beat up some big, blobby newbie eater without being forced to sit and watch. I could do a Garrison (and I did... hundreds of them) and fight off waves of mobs at once; something that only otherwise happened if you had a bad puller, a band camp, and lots of bad luck. And you know what? When I finally got to 75, and I was participating the large scale battles that we take for granted these days, I had half an idea of what to expect. Compare that to today, where people get to 99 today in a matter of hours, but all they know how to do is open presents.

If leveling had always been as easy as it is now, you're right that level caps would be pretty silly. (Although leveling is pretty easy in FFXIV, and there don't seem to be many complaints about the level caps you encounter along the way, except for the usual band of "WHY CAN'T I BE AWESOME ALL THE TIME RAWR" content bingers.) Saying that they were always a bad idea may be a little lacking in perspective; they were only implemented in cases where the consequences would be beneficial in some way, either by making rewards more valuable or by allowing new players to be acceptably included. Saying everybody hated them is flat-out wrong.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

The only purpose the level caps serve now is to artificially inflate the difficulty of the battles in question. If any Joe could just run down and do Royal Jelly, Under Observation, or Up in Arms at the drop of a hat at Level 99, the few valuable items that drop from those battles would be worth next to nothing because they'd be as common as dirt.

OK, that's three examples. What about every other Beastmen's Seal battle. Screw everyone who might want a mannequin because someone, somewhere might get a Kraken Club?

Besides, you can't do the battles if you don't have the seals, and you can't get the seals if you go from 30 to 99 in Abyssea.


Saying "nobody liked the level caps" (note the past tense) is pretty easy to do now when it's virtually impossible to do anything worthwhile in the game until you have a job at 99.

I pointed to the example of the addition of seal storage. Storing Beastmen's Seals with an NPC only makes sense if you have more than 99 (anything less takes up one inventory slot regardless), and you're only going to get more than 99 seals if you don't actually use them. There was a need for S-E to add seal storage because players were more likely to drop seals than spend them.


Level caps means I could participate in "real" content without having to grind, grind, grind my way to the top,

You apparently missed where I pointed out that a player who's highest level is X cannot realistically participate in any content (still) capped at level X. Someone who's hit level 20 for the first time has no hope of winning a Cloudy Orb battle. These battles require capped skills, top-notch gear (particularly gear dropped off of NMs), and the resources to acquire them, which effectively means having to level to ~40 first. And this is ignoring the fact that someone who's only just hit level 20 only has six jobs.

This has always been the case. A player fresh from Valkurm Dunes was never ready to win a mannequin piece, and a player fresh from Yhoator Jungle was never able to clear a Promyvion.


But I could go to Promyvion from the moment it was released

... says the Summoner...


I could do a Garrison (and I did... hundreds of them) and fight off waves of mobs at once

Success with a level 20 Garrision requires a Bard (need level 30 to unlock) with Horde Lullaby (not attainable solo at level 20).


When I finally got to 75, and I was participating the large scale battles that we take for granted these days, I had half an idea of what to expect.

Yeah... I'll remain silent on this one and see if anybody else can say they shared your experience with/as new members starting out in a Dynamis linkshell for the first time.


Saying that they were always a bad idea may be a little lacking in perspective; they were only implemented in cases where the consequences would be beneficial in some way... by allowing new players to be acceptably included.

That. Never. Happened. By the time they had the proper main job, support job, gear, spells, combat/magic skills, and gil to spend on consumables (let alone a synth to make their own) to actually make a difference in that content, they were hardly "new players" any more.

[Renaissance2K]

Again...


Nobody actually liked the level caps. Nobody.

You're wrong. I bet everybody hates them now, but when they were first implemented, they served a very valuable purpose, as I explained, much to the chagrin of that loud top 3% of FFXI-dom that never seems to be happy about anything. The group that complained about level caps then is probably complaining about their RME weapons now.

Everything pre-Adoulin (save for select sections of Abyssea and Voidwatch) is so irrelevant now, I wish they'd uncap your laundry list of content if only so I could play around with some of that weird or awesome gear that I never got a chance to use back in their hayday. But back then, it made perfect sense. The population wasn't nearly as top-heavy as it is now, and the game's economy didn't begin and end with strips of Dhalmel Leather used to get Watercrafting. And Meatballs.

Want another history lesson?


... says the Summoner...

I don't know if it was because I hadn't leveled SMN to 30 yet or because it was during that era that everybody assumed SMNs were useless, but when I was first invited to Promyvion, I came as a RDM, we took a full alliance to the top, got lots of aggro on the way ("What do you mean 'True Si-WHAM"), and got our ass kicked. Promyvion still creeps me out, and CoP is still my favorite expansion pack.

Seriously, though, I'm the last person to which you want to snark about preferrable jobs. My winning party for CoP 8-3 (back before they nerfed the difficulty and added rewards) had a PLD/DRK, two RDMs, and an underleveled WHM (me) in it. I love SMN, and have wanted to cap out on SMN since I started playing the game, but every time I'm ready to buckle down and gain some levels, Square-Enix releases new for the job that makes me need to leapfrog with another job to make any progress. But that's another story.


Success with a level 20 Garrision requires a Bard (need level 30 to unlock) with Horde Lullaby (not attainable solo at level 20).

I actually laughed when I read this. I know everybody loves to throw BRDs at things, but seriously, you don't need Horde Lullaby to beat a Garrison; not at Level 20, or any level.. You don't even need any form of sleep. I guess it can work if you're fast enough, but why would you want to sleep a bunch of mobs that can be so easily woken up by that mob of NPCs that you don't control? Especially when the mage NPCs open with Diaga so often!


That. Never. Happened. By the time they had the proper main job, support job, gear, spells, combat/magic skills, and gil to spend on consumables (let alone a synth to make their own) to actually make a difference in that content, they were hardly "new players" any more.

My mistake. I should have said "low-level players" when I actually said "new" players, though relative to a lot of the veterans doing most of the complaining, "new" is still a perfectly acceptable way to describe them.

I'll remind you, though, that keeping up with that laundry list of things you mentioned was part of the leveling process; not the "some waste of time I'll get to once I ding 99 in a few hours" that it is now. Eventually, if you never brought your Oils to get to {Dangerous Camp A}, or if your {Stabby Weapon B} skill was underleveled, or if you still hadn't bought {Impressive Spell C}, it'd get in the way of your progression; either because your reputation caught up with you, or just because - hey! - things go a lot faster and a lot more smoothly when you do that properly.

===============

Arguing about the past is really a bit silly, though, because the point you were trying to make and the point of this thread is to talk about current issues with FFXI. Ideally, in a perfect world, Square would be updating all of the game's content to fit the game's current environment. Sure, level caps had a place back in The Before Time, but now, they're just holding us back from content that currently is little more than decorative time wasters.

That goes for Eco-Warrior, Garrison, BCNMs, ENMs, Assault, Salvage I, Einherjar I, and pretty much everything other piece of content that 99.99% of the FFXI population doesn't care about. If I want to blow an afternoon trying to get an Inventory -1 from some XYNM that nobody's ever heard of, that's my beef, dagnabbit.

[Spectreman]

Drops could get a bit better for new ppl. Honestly who farms BCNM/KSNM nowadays to make gil?

Still i can't imagine how painful it should be for a newbie to get phalanx and utsusemi:ni without money and limited seals. Its just another mechanism of torture that SE forgot to remove.

[Damane]

Drops could get a bit better for new ppl. Honestly who farms BCNM/KSNM nowadays to make gil?

Still i can't imagine how painful it should be for a newbie to get phalanx and utsusemi:ni without money and limited seals. Its just another mechanism of torture that SE forgot to remove.

in all honesty they should have gotten rid of the bcnm lvl caps when the lvl 75 lvl cap was lifted on chars. i would do some BCNMs solo just for some things, but the lvl cap on those is hindering me and I dont want to bug the few friends left playing FFXI with such tiny bullshit like BCNMs that drop crap :/. all BCNM drops are garbage for nowadays standarts, EVEN kraken club is garbage it was allready pre adoulin but now with the new ilvl weapons its total utter shit. its only purpose is now if you have some WS quest open you need to collect WS points for (and thats only for singlehanded WS quests! or ranged ones!)

considering the current population i am facing during EU prime time SE needs to do somethign about:
- Remove BCNM lvl caps so they can be solod by high lvl
- Remove Salvage entry restriction of 3 people
- Remove Assautl restriction of 3 people
- Remove Einherjar entry restriction of 6 people.

its so bad atm that you cant find 2 additional people to enter somethign that requires 3 people :/

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

Mannequins are given out free now with login points. So are Bseals.

Event's over.


And Kclub bcnm is...

With the right job, the right gear, the right skills, the right consumables, blah blah blah...

The question isn't "Can it be done?" but "Should it be done?" Is the reward worth the effort/challenge? For most players in most situations, the answer is undeniably "no," and I'm not convinced it was ever any different.

Erase and Utsusemi: Ni wouldn't command such high prices on auction if the purchasers didn't feel the price was worth the avoided effort. And they have always been expensive.


You can convert the KC/HKC you get in Aby into beastmen's seals in PortJeuno. Or take your level 99 and go kill the mega low-end EP mobs which still drop bseals to you at 99. The flys in meriph[s] etc. drop lots of bseals and kseals at 99.

The only way to reliably and consistently get Beastmen's Seals is to EXP on monsters low enough to drop only Beastmen's Seals, rather than monsters for which the once-per-5-min lottery is competing with other flavors of seals. If the person I was responding to really wants a metric that keeps the "Aby burn" crowd out of BS battles, Seal farming alone should be more than restricting enough.

[Spectreman]

in all honesty they should have gotten rid of the bcnm lvl caps when the lvl 75 lvl cap was lifted on chars. i would do some BCNMs solo just for some things, but the lvl cap on those is hindering me and I dont want to bug the few friends left playing FFXI with such tiny bullshit like BCNMs that drop crap :/. all BCNM drops are garbage for nowadays standarts, EVEN kraken club is garbage it was allready pre adoulin but now with the new ilvl weapons its total utter shit. its only purpose is now if you have some WS quest open you need to collect WS points for (and thats only for singlehanded WS quests! or ranged ones!)

considering the current population i am facing during EU prime time SE needs to do somethign about:
- Remove BCNM lvl caps so they can be solod by high lvl
- Remove Salvage entry restriction of 3 people
- Remove Assautl restriction of 3 people
- Remove Einherjar entry restriction of 6 people.

its so bad atm that you cant find 2 additional people to enter somethign that requires 3 people :/



Jesus yea, SE could just remove the assult requirement of 3 ppl cause ppl that restarted from scratch like me cant find anyone to bother with assault anymore. They could create a separte area just for soloing assault so it shouldnt cause lag to others.

[Tennotsukai]

Pretty sure a good reason this game has declined is because there are several things broken in the game they neglect to fix. Fix Tourbillion, please!

[Arcon]

[..] the grind spirit is notably absent now.

The "grind spirit" was never there for any reasonable person. Grinding is stupid and always has been. The only reason why people did it back then is because they had to. The good content was at 75 and people did what they had to do to get to 75. And guess what, they didn't always do that either. Sometimes the grind was just too boring and tedious. That's why many people had one main job and maybe one or two others. Having more than three out of twenty jobs was just a horrible experience, hence people did not want to put up with it. Now think about how ridiculous that sounds. The game offers you 20 jobs (WotG era, but the same reasoning can be applied to the 18 in the ToAU era or 15 in the CoP/RotZ era). Of those 20 you can only play 3 without losing your mind (some could take more grinding, others less, I did with one job for about four years), because the game does not give you access to the others without sacrificing days of effort with no personal gain whatsoever. In what universe is that not fucked up?

"Grind spirit" has to be one of the most ridiculous terms I've ever heard on these forums. Grind is by definition repetitive, mindless content. Content you can clear with one set routine, with no physical or intellectual effort whatsoever. How can any sane person like that? It defies human reasoning. The human mind looks for new experience, grind is by definition the exact opposite. Hence, if you like grind there's demonstrably something wrong with you.

[nyheen]

The "grind spirit" was never there for any reasonable person. Grinding is stupid and always has been. The only reason why people did it back then is because they had to.
"grind spirit" was working pre aby. because they had to . they had to LFP (without keying or leeching) or start up your own exp pt. the whole pt system was working fine like that. but now it a big mess. so i guess this "new experience" you looking for is how things are now?

[Arcon]

I really could not care less for easy games. While difficulty is not an essential quality I'm looking for in a game, I do favor games that possess a significant degree of it. That is not this game. FFXI has a lot of problems (and a general lack of difficulty is one of my problems with the game), but that is entirely unrelated to grind. Grind is not difficult. I've leveled three jobs to 75 back in the day (over a total of 5 years). None of it was difficult. Slashing away at a crab for hundreds of hours is not difficult in the slightest. It's true that when I got to 75 I was very happy, but it had nothing to do with how hard the journey was, because it was piss easy. It had everything to do with finally getting to access the main content of a game I've been paying for for years at that point. I've been in a linkshell where everyone was doing events like Dynamis, Ouryu and B2, Limbus, sea/sky, etc., all of which I couldn't join because I hadn't met my crab quota yet. That was why I was happy. Not because I felt I achieved something, but because I could finally enjoy the game with my friends.

I had the exact same feelings of happiness when I leveled jobs to 99 in Abyssea. I could finally bring BLM and SCH to events (disregarding the fact that BLM and SCH lost most of its usefulness at just about that point, which wasn't really related).

People like you continually assume one thing, and everything you say is tainted by that assumption. You assume that leveling is an important part of the game. Some people of your persuasion even assume that it's the only part. "Why even play if you can get to 99 without lifting a finger?" I can't count how often I've heard that question, and its only effect is to illustrate that you have no idea what our position on the issue is. The game is completely unaffected by the leveling part of it, because the real game starts afterwards. Simply by the number of events (even disregarding the time you can invest in any of them) the endgame part vastly outweighs the leveling part.

And yes, you might actually like it. There might be others, too. But regardless of how much some people like it, the fact is that if most people did like it, they would still do it. The fact that they choose to skip it shows how unimportant it is to the majority of people.

That has no effect on people's perception of difficulty. Leveling is not difficult in the slightest. I like difficulty. FFXI used to have a few somewhat difficult events in the past. Compared to leveling, all of them were, and by a huge margin. You can't tell me a linked crawler is as tough to deal with as the Dynamis Jeuno AH pull (or really any pull, for that matter). Well, you can, but that won't make me take you any more seriously.

Edit:

"grind spirit" was working pre aby. because they had to . they had to LFP (without keying or leeching) or start up your own exp pt. the whole pt system was working fine like that. but now it a big mess. so i guess this "new experience" you looking for is how things are now?

Very much so. I've leeched several jobs to 99 and I like them and play them as much as the ones I've done before. This leveling system is pretty much perfect for me. The rest of the game is still horrible, and even the massive improvement in leveling doesn't help it at this point.

[vienne]

Arcon just wants to start a game and be 99, without leeching his job, he neither wants to grind. He just wants to start playing and do endgame/challenging content (with shinies) without the years/months of work.
Although the grind was there for all the time he was an active player it never kept him away from logging in almost every day(which to alot of people didnt feel like a grind neither did it to me).
The grind isnt the problem with this game, its far more diverse then blaming it just on that.

[Afania]

The "grind spirit" was never there for any reasonable person. Grinding is stupid and always has been. The only reason why people did it back then is because they had to. The good content was at 75 and people did what they had to do to get to 75. And guess what, they didn't always do that either. Sometimes the grind was just too boring and tedious. That's why many people had one main job and maybe one or two others. Having more than three out of twenty jobs was just a horrible experience, hence people did not want to put up with it. Now think about how ridiculous that sounds. The game offers you 20 jobs (WotG era, but the same reasoning can be applied to the 18 in the ToAU era or 15 in the CoP/RotZ era). Of those 20 you can only play 3 without losing your mind (some could take more grinding, others less, I did with one job for about four years), because the game does not give you access to the others without sacrificing days of effort with no personal gain whatsoever. In what universe is that not fucked up?

"Grind spirit" has to be one of the most ridiculous terms I've ever heard on these forums. Grind is by definition repetitive, mindless content. Content you can clear with one set routine, with no physical or intellectual effort whatsoever. How can any sane person like that? It defies human reasoning. The human mind looks for new experience, grind is by definition the exact opposite. Hence, if you like grind there's demonstrably something wrong with you.

If you don't like grinding, then RPG isn't for you.

Can you please explain exactly HOW to keep players around without having to grind in an RPG game?

Grinding is part of RPG genre, period. Ever since 1980 era RPG is full of grind, and mostly about grind, now it's 2013 and it's still grind in past 30 years. You grind level, you grind gears, and you feel satisfied after you got to the level you want or gears you want, THAT is the fun of playing RPG, character development that needs time, something you can't experience in FTG RTS FPS etc. I've yet to play one RPG that has 0 grind element. Some RPG needs to grind longer and some needs to grind less, but grind is the core of RPG even if it's less grind. XIV has way less grinding than old XI, that doesn't mean grind doesn't exist in XIV, it's just less grind and less satisfaction after you hit level cap/obtained gears.

I also have to point out, for MMO like this, where the main purpose is to beat boss and obtain gears, you can't keep players around with 0 grind element. You just can't.

If you ONLY want action or strategy but 0 grind element, there's FTG, there's RTS, and there's chess, which doesn't need grind to play with other players. Take away the grind element RPG isn't RPG anymore. And yes, ppl enjoy grind for past 30 years, don't deny it. There's a reason why most JRPG has to add secret boss/secret item or some sort, for players to grind.

And if someone want to make progress without killing braincell, let them grind. I don't enjoy every kind of grind, but if the result of the grind is rewarding, I usually enjoy it. I don't always want 1000 action, because I'm not always in the mood to play FTG/RTS/chess game w/e, grind style gameplay= I can always make progress by doing easy things, as long as the reward is worth the effort.

[Arcon]

If you don't like grinding, then RPG isn't for you.

Wrong. I love RPGs and I've played many for as long as I've been playing games (which was pretty much my entire life).

Most of your argument is about grind in general. I'll say something about that in a bit, but keep in mind that we're talking about old school FFXI leveling here.


Can you please explain exactly HOW to keep players around without having to grind in an RPG game?

How did I manage to keep playing a game for years despite having all the jobs I cared for at 99? Mainly interesting events. Difficult events that require multiple attempts and change in strategy to eventually complete and that can be interesting and intense despite having done it multiple times.

In non-MMOG RPGs you can (and many games do) extend their life time through an engaging story, interesting support characters, involving gameplay, many side quests/missions to complete and a big world to explore. All of that is part of an RPG and none of that requires repetition at all, let alone grind.

That said, the term "grind" itself is not very clearly defined. People use it to describe anything repetitive, but that alone does not describe my idea of the word. Personally I wouldn't call it a grind unless it also didn't require any effort. If the process has been spiced up, it can be interesting despite repetition. However, that almost requires some difficulty attached to it. Dynamis was like that, which is why I didn't mind doing it for years. It required everyone to pay attention and bring their A-game every time or it would result in shitty rewards in the best case and wipes all around in the worst case.

Leveling isn't anywhere like that. It's absolutely mindless. I could literally do it blind, and I could already do that after my first few hours of it. That's what I call grind, and that's what games can most definitely do without. See blow.


Grinding is part of RPG genre, period. Ever since 1980 era RPG is full of grind, and mostly about grind, now it's 2013 and it's still grind in past 30 years.

Wrong. Grind wasn't part of Baldur's Gate 15 years ago, nor is it part of Skyrim. I don't know how it was like before then because I didn't play any RPGs from back then, but I at least know it wasn't part of pen and paper RPGs, ever, and those date back further than any video game RPG.


You grind level, you grind gears, and you feel satisfied after you got to the level you want or gears you want, THAT is the fun of playing RPG, character development that needs time, something you can't experience in FTG RTS FPS etc.

I love character development. Characters don't just progress through levels though. That definition never described FFXI (at least not after the level 50 cap increase). Character development also encompasses skills, spells, abilities and equipment, among which FFXI most prominently features the latter in its end-game state.


Take away the grind element RPG isn't RPG anymore.

Wrong. Grind is not an essential part of RPG. Take away the grind and you get a good RPG. There are RPG with no grind and there are non-RPGs with a lot of grind (racing games, RTS, even FPS, just look at CoD's player progression model).


And yes, ppl enjoy grind for past 30 years, don't deny it.

I don't know of a single person who does, and I would bet good money that even you don't. Every time you grind to do something it's time wasted that could be used to do something new and exciting instead, and even if you won't admit it to yourself, that's something you would rather do. What you enjoy is not the grind but the reward for the grind. And you use that to justify the grind itself, but that doesn't make it good. Where you enjoy hitting a button fifty thousand times to feel good about something you acquired, I'd prefer acquiring it through a good strategy that I took a while to perfect. And when I do acquire it in the end, I feel more satisfied than killing a million colibris.

I don't mind investing the same time as someone who grinds their fingers off, even more, as long as the journey to get there is involving and entertaining. Leveling was never that, in all the time I played. If it was to you, congratulations, because FFXI must have been one hell of a game for you. I wish I felt the same way, I would be much easier to please. Instead I'm here demanding fun of my games.

[FrankReynolds]

Old school leveling is still there. The people who want to do it are not. Case closed. Abyssea burns would have never taken off if people had preferred the grind. Never. Only RMT would have ever done them.

[Camiie]

Opinion: Complete, total, and utter lack of job balance.

Reason: People fall in love with the look or play style of a job and pour their heart and soul into it. Then they realize that job is not needed or welcome in any sort of serious activity no matter how hard they try. They can't even outdo other jobs even when those jobs are not played or geared nearly as well.

Conclusion: People get discouraged that they have to gear other jobs to support the one they love and know that they will never get to use their beloved job on high-end content no matter what they do. They find fewer jobs that are even worth leveling and thus have less content to keep them occupied.

Solution: Don't be afraid to boost the offensive/defensive/support power and useful abilities of jobs that don't currently have anything to offer in high end content.

[geekgirl101]

I totally agree with you Camiie. I love playing RDM but there's almost no use for RDMs. It was my favourite job pre-Aby and I was gutted when I was told its only usefulness was for FC parties. Then when the hype for skirmish/delve started everyone wanted COR or BRD only. It's disheartening when all the jobs I've worked hard on are being shunned in favor of specialized jobs that only have 1 good use.

[fernando]

I have one reason,and that is i have payed for this game,had to reinstall,and still cant play!!! 10 years and SE just makes it as hard as ever to play the game...just sayin.

[Kuvo]

Please SE merge the servers.... less then 300ppl on bismark for over 6 hours today when it used to be well over 1k. I have an idea... why don't we all switch servers on our own? we pick 4 servers list them here and everyone just moves on their own. sure it will cost some money to do so and SE would love us for the extra cash flow but we will have populated servers again and maybe they will actually do something useful to support XI with the new found cash..... what am I saying, no they wont.

[vienne]

Totally agree with you, they need to build endgame events around a more flexible alliance-build. They also need to patch the pre-SoA magians/RME's/af3+2s etc. so that people can use their stuff that they worked hard the last 3+ years to build. The fact that your lvl 99 magian weapons can't hit mobs at all in SoA, or your af3+2 that is full of very useful job-specific bonuses, is useless in SoA, has led to everyone using only SoA gear, which is dumb (and very boring when everyone gears the same stuff) and makes a lot of people feel their efforts in building armor & weaps that are lvl 90-99 were completely wasted efforts. If you are a lvl 99 job, why should you not be able to use your lvl 99 magian weapon or your af3+2 set in events, which is either lvl 99 only a few lvls lower than 99.

this^ I came back after 8 months only to hear that my hard worked magian gear is worthless, I think lots of people would say screw this

[nyheen]

As has been said before, most people will take the path of least resistance and the quickest option. But that doesn't mean the quickest easiest option is good for the player or the survival of the game itself. I still lvl up in Aydeewa sometimes, but its hard to find other ppl who even know where it is.
Also you neglect to mention new players, players who never did any of the oldworld partying, join FFXI and you say to them choose between "get lvl 30-99 in one single day, while asleep, in dom ops, or work really hard for a year in lots of challenging fast-paced & effort-based battles allover Vanadiel, to get those same levels" and those new players are going to go with the first option.
Its the fact that in the old game we only had the option of legit partying, which made us do it, and while doing it we got good at the game mechanics and made friends etc. And perhaps more importantly, we stayed subscribed to FFXI billing for years because that is how long it took us to achieve things. Now you can get all jobs 99 while AFK, in a month, and uber SoA gear in a few weeks that is 100x > anything else in Vanadiel, you have a lot of new players who have only been in game for a few months and feel they 'beat' the game and don't know why they should bother with any content. That problem did not exist when you had to build levels, skills, and weaps/gear VERY SLOWLY, those were the 2k/server days and people were logging in to complete their longterm goals. Today is 400 people on my server, and the reason for that is they have no goals left, they outgrew the possibilities offered by Vanadiel in just a month. In the old game we played for over five years and still didn't finish all the jobs and gear we had set our sights on.
Analogy : if you give some kids the keys to the Sweet Shop and tell them to have everything right now, don't expect to see them coming back next week to buy sweets from you, because they've already got all the sweets they need. Deferred and gradual gratification = longtime returning customers.
:p
^
this. That Pretty Much Sums It Up. the reason why FFXI is declining

[Rustic]

this^ I came back after 8 months only to hear that my hard worked magian gear is worthless, I think lots of people would say screw this

It's hardly worthless, but I'd laugh at you if you went to current endgame in it.

The problem lies in when people fail to realize that gear isn't forever. People don't wander around in Kirin's Osode anymore and expect to be uberpowerful in Abyssea, any more than now people in Magian gear are uber in Adoulin.

Despite our level counters not going past 99, in effect we're becoming L100+ in Adoulin, or L110+ with Skirmish/Delve gear. That's what Adoulin is right now. "Levels" 100-119, with more to come. Magian gear isn't worthless, but it's effectively "newbie gear" for Adoulin- good newbie gear, but it's what you wear expecting to graduate to Bayld, Skirmish, then Delve equipment.

I've had plenty of folks coming back in at this point. When they realize that they don't have to carry twenty different bits of armor because sidegrades are essentially kaput, it's generally a JOYFUL response, not a "screw this I quit". Entitlement syndrome just gets you bad players who didn't want to adapt and used "buuuut new gear!" as an excuse. I was frickin' seeing that back in ToAU when folks were whining about getting a Yigit set!

[Anjou]

As my first 'official' post of 'knowledge' (Because in the arena of knowledge, I fight unarmed) since my week -ban- for Spiderman goodness...I will say this.


Until ToM gets meshed into SoA content, shelf your magian gear, it's not gonna help you in SoA, it will not help you in SoA, and until something happens, it will never help you. This time you spend whining you could be using it to get new gear, and you'll see why people prefer the new stuff over magian equipment.

I won't stoop to telling you to quit, but more or less to get in gear otherwise it'll drive you bonkers and you'll end up quitting out of frustration. The reason FFXI is truly declining is the huge wedge in our community, the elitists and everyone who thinks differently than they do. This whole "I am king Sh*t of F**k mountain, WHY WOULD YOU F**K WITH ME!?" mentality is a cancer in FFXI, and you can always keep your equipment if you have too much sentimental value to it. I personally wouldn't dream of tossing my old Koenig armor for my PLD, although it's horrendously outdated and I obtained most of it from Nidhogg/King Behemoth and one in Einherjar, I won't ever throw it away because I worked for it. Sometimes if I wanna be a head turner I'll wear my gear in town, I get good comments from people who know what the armor is, and right now to really become a turner, I'm getting Amir armor.

Is it effective for my spare time? Maybe not, but hey it's fun to do than sit on FFXIAH or this forum talking about not wanting to throw my stuff away. Bite the bullet, life isn't always fair everyone, I had to recently toss my Isador due to inventory issues, and that thing was like my prized possession when I got it.

[vienne]

I've had plenty of folks coming back in at this point. When they realize that they don't have to carry twenty different bits of armor because sidegrades are essentially kaput, it's generally a JOYFUL response, not a "screw this I quit". Entitlement syndrome just gets you bad players who didn't want to adapt and used "buuuut new gear!"

Its this situation, I dont play much, glad to squeeze in 5 hours a week of normal playing (thats when i'm not trying to combine grinding a job while i'm ironing thats a different story) but a huge chunk of my already limited playtime
went into making the magian trial staves for my blm and also the cure one for whm. Now yesterday I was asking around about the current needed gear opposed to the gear I have atm. Only to be told that the better staves are those that drop from some SoA content, the ones for blm.
Its very overwhelming to see that most of your gear isnt needed anymore, I worked hard for a long time to get my gear since i do everything slower then most. Having to start from scratch almost all over again isnt exactly motivating... SE could have been more subtle in the change from pre SoA <-> post SoA gear.
I guess atleast now i know what to do the comming months till next update.

[Anjou]

Replying to both of the previous two posts.
Number one. Kirin's Osode was lvl 75. It was a single drop. I got mine in like under an hour. Thats less than 60 minutes work. Magian 99s are lvl 99, not lvl 75. And they take weeks-->months depending on your available game time.
Number two. When SE announced the lvl cap was rising from 95-99, they also had an interview saying [to paraphrase] ; "We had always intended to raise the cap to 99, ever since the beginning of the game. And we have always intended this to be the final cap."
So people went out and built lvl 99 magians, RME's and woepath empys, assuming that the finished 99 weapon would be a decent weapon to use in future events. On account of SE saying the cap wasn't rising above 99 ever. We all accepted that our magians and WOE-empys were not as powerful as RME's. But we also felt that our magians/woe-paths were perfectly good weapons which we were proud of, and in some cases took over a year of farming single drops in WOE to build one 99 weapon.
Then SE bring SoA. And while everyone expected the new expansion to have the most powerful gear in the game, nobody expected the SCORCHED EARTH policy that came along with SoA. Of making everything preceding it, including lvl 99 magian/WOE weaps, completely worthless. And don't kid yourself, they are worthless. I have died in SoA because my magian99 weapon couldnt hit the mob so I couldnt get tp for cures and died. This despite having capped skills and merits and a lvl99 weap that took like 6 months to build. I returned to the same mob with a bayld conquest-ponts lolweapon and it died superfast. Travesty. This is scorched earth policy. And what really ***** me off is that SE added SoA conquest-points (bayld) weapons that can be farmed in 20 minutes and are 2x as powerful as the lvl99 magians and woepaths we've got.
To all of you who are joking and saying "oh just stop crying, quit the game, you can't deal with change, w/e blah blah blah" ; infact you are blaming the playerbase for what is a HUGE mistake by SE development dept. It is not the players fault, "for being too weak to adapt" <etc. insert bs here>, please I am 40 years old and been a gamer for 32 years, I don't get busted up over games, but I'm old and smart enough to see that SE ballsed this SoA gear system up. Can't you see thats its an insult to RME owners that a bayld conquest points weapon is far more powerful than their RME/magian/woepath. How is that such a big difficult thing for you to grasp.
If somebody is lvl99 and spent ages building a lvl99 weapon, for the developer to turn around and say ;
"oh well, we're adding lvl 120 weapons, which is technically impossible for a lvl 99 person to equip, and we forgot to mention this 3 years ago when we announced the lvlcap would never go over 99, and that your woepath lvl99 which we made you flux in and out of Xarcabard[s] and battle endless woe bosses, over 1000x, to get......well that weapon is now less powerful than a conquest points weapon."
You should actually stop and think about the effort people put into magians, RME's and woepaths, stop and think before you post this nonsense about kirin osode's and other single-drop one-hour sky run junk. This is about *time invested* and *level 99* items, which got scorched by SE for no reason and against all sanity.
:mad:

Things happen, and the problem here is that most people are accepting the change for what it is. Crying constantly won't do anything sadly, I wish it would because then the stuff that is never seen anymore would at least make a comeback. ffs the Amir armor set had some -great- looks to it in terms of appearance, stats-wise meh but come on. 20k assault points for each piece? That's a big whoop de do to some people, but others will appreciate it.

I'm not sure what you were fighting when you died to not hitting, but as a 99 BLU with an Isador and Tyrfing, and even then I was dishing some decent looking damage on melee attacks.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

Why is FFXI declining?



The cap on experience gained is now higher for players who have equipment with item levels displayed equipped.


Because the developers still think this is a relevant thing.

[Babekeke]

I died to a Tulfaire on war99 using 'Telamon' magian 99 PDT13 gaxe, full Gorney Set, capped skills, capped merits, accuracy+80~, MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS DEAD. Went back with a Forefront Labrys and killed it easy. Except I like my Telamon. It took me ages to build & I like the VIT spike for upheaval. But it seems like that kind of giving a **** about your gear is so passe, right. Lets all move on.

I had a similar issue back at level 75 when I went to solo Kirin on WAR... got my ass kicked too!

Only joking, I'm not that stupid, but that's basically what you've done there. ^^

Oh and if it's only the acc that you were short on, you could've tried using this stuff called food! In particular the sushi range.

[Camate]

Hello,

Below is a message from Akihiko Matsui.



Matsui here.

Apart from extremely unreasonable requests, we are really happy to see so many positive suggestions and feedback being made as it stimulates the community.

With that said, game development, especially online game development, is organic and constantly changing, and there are cases where what is currently impossible becomes possible, so there are situations where you won’t know whether the suggestion is unreasonable unless you try it. On the other hand, there are cases where what you think should be possible is actually not possible.

However, I’d very much like to respond to all of your suggestions, but as I cannot always answer them with a positive reply, there have been times I have not been able to reply or the reply was late.

With that said though, moving forward I will be making sure to let you all know when something is not possible and cannot be done. Likewise, I will be continuing to respond to your feedback and suggestions as well as letting you know new information while making sure it is accurate.

Thank you very much.

[Malthar]

Give Yuley his TH3 back, please. Is that possible? :-)

[Lynxis]

Thank you for the message, not that I feel it relates in any way to the content of this thread. That said, I think the biggest killer has been the shift in gear progression from a horizontal progression to a vertical progression. I remember when I started, ToAU expansion was just released. Back then, there were 4000-5000 people on during NA primetime with well over 1500 on during off-peak hours. I think ive seen over 6k on during JP primetime back then.

Back then, there was always a hole in your gear sets and a very wide variety of events to take part in and you needed to do them all in order to max out your character. You had HNMs, Sky, Sea, Dynamis, Nyzul Isle, Salvage, Einherjar and Limbus and each event offered something different for your character. Back then, a new event would be introduced which would provide mostly sidegrades and even some downgrades for most of your slots but there were always a few truly upgraded pieces. This is how vertical progression occurred, in tiny bits at a time. The sidegrades made people who were at a lower standard of gear have a reason to show up and the new top gears gave the top players a reason to show up too.

Then Abyssea came and changed all of it. The only event between level 75-90 was abyssea. There were no sidegrades, nearly everything was an upgrade. A single piece of gear would completely obsolete several others. Maxing out gear for a single job could be done in a few weeks where before it could take you years.

You also no longer had 1-3 jobs max level, you had 8-20 jobs max level and by the end of abyssea, perfectly geared.

Then you got Voidwatch from 90-99. Beyond repetitive with garbage drop rates on the top end stuff. At 99, they continued the vertical path. Neo Limbus and Neo Einherjar aren't worth doing, Neo Salvage had good situational upgrades and Neo Nyzul had the top level gear and after that, we have the iLevel crap.

The game has gotten to the point where the events are laughably easy for veteran players but the barrier for entry for new players is too high. You have people leaving because they aren't being challenged with a variety of meaningful content and they aren't being replaced because new people are turned off when the areas they arrive in are dead.

At this point, anyone new will go to FF14ARR instead where at least they aren't alone.

[Rustic]

I died to a Tulfaire on war99 using 'Telamon' magian 99 PDT13 gaxe, full Gorney Set, capped skills, capped merits, accuracy+80~, MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS DEAD. Went back with a Forefront Labrys and killed it easy. Except I like my Telamon. It took me ages to build & I like the VIT spike for upheaval. But it seems like that kind of giving a **** about your gear is so passe, right. Lets all move on.

Yep. Because right now, that's a L99 weapon vs. a L106 one. That is, with your Telamon right now you're effectively 7 levels lower for adjustment purposes- enough to take a mob from EP to IT.

When they do the RME updates, odds are you'll see them get an item level boost, making them useful again. Until then, nostalgia doesn't keep you from being eaten by a ticked-off bird.

[elqplau]

my opion ...i am a rogué RDM and a soloist the game started player decline when some abilities were cut for example when i started RDM was next to PLD on the goto jobs ...now the only reason i can solo effectively is because im lvl 99 abysea and audilin are a lost cause to me bbecause i die to fast and get almost no rewards from it ....spending 3 hours in a place to get 3 k in balyd is a waste of time

[Vivivivi]

I'm curious as to what the five-year ten year plan looks like for Final Fantasy 11. I completely understand if this information is sensitive and not for the general public to consume, however I would love to know if the games intent eventually is to be shut down completely or continue operating with no new content. Of course the diehard FF 11 fan in me would hope that the game receives the same sort of treatment that Final Fantasy 14 received with a realm reborn. A new graphics engine updated gameplay mechanics, streamlined user interface- which by the way it looks very promising on the test server.

Or is something completely different in the works for long term plans? Will we maybe see a potential to the remake of the game as a single player experience? Will it be integrated into Final Fantasy 14 somehow? Or don't we know yet is it that the game is just continuing to be successful and the development team only plans 6 to 12 months out ahead of time? I will admit most of my gaming time has been spent playing Final Fantasy 14 since it was released however as I reach endgame there I'm kind of itching for new final fantasy 11 content and I'm looking forward to the updates planned for October and November. As wonderful as the new Final Fantasy 14 a realm reborn is- conducive to casual players looking to knock something out in 10 to 15 minutes or an hour or two hours, there something special about the difficulty of Final Fantasy 11 and being able to organize groups of 18 people working together in the strategic manner for content like void watch and delve that is still appealing and makes me want to log back into Final Fantasy 11. I would love to know what the development team have planned for the long term. It's still my favorite video game of all time :)

[Battletree]

Mean "Leetist" players who cant treat people with respect and courtesy who think they are gods gift to FFXI.. if your passing judgment on the "playerbase" then this might be you. some people just take this game too seriously and the returning players since Adoulin addon have left already from being treated as sub par players because they have been gone for 5 years. so next time your mean to someone remember its YOU who is ruining the game... relax already.

[Battletree]

game needs a new fight format.. a new battle type. say like storming a castle or city ect. not some tiny area like dynamis bs. something where mobs attack you. like a real battle format. in a large well done area.. also a new graphic engine for sure.. ive tried playing 14 and its way too weak.. players are already leet in a
month one.. its a joke.

[Battletree]

I'm curious as to what the five-year ten year plan looks like for Final Fantasy 11. I completely understand if this information is sensitive and not for the general public to consume, however I would love to know if the games intent eventually is to be shut down completely or continue operating with no new content. Of course the diehard FF 11 fan in me would hope that the game receives the same sort of treatment that Final Fantasy 14 received with a realm reborn. A new graphics engine updated gameplay mechanics, streamlined user interface- which by the way it looks very promising on the test server.

Or is something completely different in the works for long term plans? Will we maybe see a potential to the remake of the game as a single player experience? Will it be integrated into Final Fantasy 14 somehow? Or don't we know yet is it that the game is just continuing to be successful and the development team only plans 6 to 12 months out ahead of time? I will admit most of my gaming time has been spent playing Final Fantasy 14 since it was released however as I reach endgame there I'm kind of itching for new final fantasy 11 content and I'm looking forward to the updates planned for October and November. As wonderful as the new Final Fantasy 14 a realm reborn is- conducive to casual players looking to knock something out in 10 to 15 minutes or an hour or two hours, there something special about the difficulty of Final Fantasy 11 and being able to organize groups of 18 people working together in the strategic manner for content like void watch and delve that is still appealing and makes me want to log back into Final Fantasy 11. I would love to know what the development team have planned for the long term. It's still my favorite video game of all time :)

i am curious too. i hope the game stays around but needs a new engine. 14 is freaking pretty.. but way too weak and easy.

[detlef]

game needs a new fight format.. a new battle type. say like storming a castle or city ect. not some tiny area like dynamis bs. something where mobs attack you. like a real battle format. in a large well done area.. also a new graphic engine for sure.. ive tried playing 14 and its way too weak.. players are already leet in a
month one.. its a joke.How about an event where you defend something from invading enemies. Maybe like a tent or something.

[Byrth]

How about an event where you defend something from invading enemies. Maybe like a tent or something.

Ooh! Yeah! But lets make the monsters weak and the supply of them weaker.

Then we'll give it rewards that surpass harder content!

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

Seriously, I'd like to see some sort of explanation for why the per-battle EXP cap for level 99 players was adjusted. Are the developers unaware just how many characters are parked at 30 merit points and 9999 limit points simply because they have nothing else to spend the points on?

[Spectreman]

How about an event where you defend something from invading enemies. Maybe like a tent or something.

I have something better. Wait 8-24h doing nothing in the same area waiting a HNM to pop and then losing claim to a bot. yea, i bet you miss that, unless you were in the LS with top claim bot. Sucker.

[detlef]

I have something better. Wait 8-24h doing nothing in the same area waiting a HNM to pop and then losing claim to a bot. yea, i bet you miss that, unless you were in the LS with top claim bot. Sucker.Outside of popping Honey Wine and Sweet Tea, I've probably spent less than 6 hours lifetime in the Aery. Personal attacks don't really help your argument (if you have one). Yorcia Skirmish sucks, try reading the responses to this thread over here:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/37311-Congratulations-FFXI-team-for-Skirmish-2.0

Being better and more rewarding than old HNMs does not make Yorcia Skirmish a successful event.

[Xantavia]

Seriously, I'd like to see some sort of explanation for why the per-battle EXP cap for level 99 players was adjusted. Are the developers unaware just how many characters are parked at 30 merit points and 9999 limit points simply because they have nothing else to spend the points on?

As some players have been hammering on about, most likely because the mobs are lower level thanks to ilvl gear. Getting the same xp from a mob whether you are 99 or ilvl117 would be like getting the same xp whether you are 50 or 68.

[Babekeke]

I solo'd the same mob 5 minutes later on my same WAR, without sushi. Using a bayld forefront POS conquest points gaxe. That is my complaint. That these trashy SoA mercenarys-knife type weaps can hit mobs, but lvl99 magians can't. My war solo's Itzpapalotl etc in Aby using magians. Theres nothing wrong with my War. Or my weaps. Or the food I use. Its that SoA mobs require the SKILL+ augmented weapons, and SE forgot to patch this magical airy-fairy lvl100+ SKILL+ nonsense onto existing RME/woepath/magians, but somehow SE managed to patch that onto some cheap nasty conquest-points weaps just because theyre from Ulbuka.

:p

No. Abyssea made us forget what it was like to need acc. Pre-abyssea everyone geared for as much acc as they could get, especially on a mob that was many levels higher than themselves. The forefront weapons give ~80 acc, because they are effectively making you much higher level. Going back to fight the same mob after getting a forefront weapon is like going back to fight it after gaining another 10 levels, but you're surprised that it was easier!?

[Kraggy]

So, in [almost?] every other MMO an expansion comes along and obsoletes all the BiS gear around but FFXI shouldn't? Why should gear be made future-proof just because it took a bit of effort 'back in the day'?

[Xantavia]

So, in [almost?] every other MMO an expansion comes along and obsoletes all the BiS gear around but FFXI shouldn't? Why should gear be made future-proof just because it took a bit of effort 'back in the day'?
Because before the expansion, FFXI didn't obliterate old gear. If it had been a vertical progression since the beginning I don't think anybody would be complaining. But to suddenly shift gears after 10 years leaves a bad taste in some players mouths (myself included) and makes you wonder if it is even worth it to acquire the new stuff when something better is likely to come along at the next update.

[Traxus]

So, in [almost?] every other MMO an expansion comes along and obsoletes all the BiS gear around but FFXI shouldn't? Why should gear be made future-proof just because it took a bit of effort 'back in the day'?

Because FFXI expansions (especially SoA) don't have enough content to support this model.

[Leylia]

I hardly ever write in this forum, because of the fact that what we write mostly seems to matter squat to SE 99% of the time, which is indicated by responses not even touching the threads actual topic or the lack of responses to start with.

I however feel that I should also voice my discontent about this new Seekers expansion. In my opinion it is as much of a fail as FFXIV 1.0 if not even worse.
The marketing was horrid, inlcuding advertisement (did anyone other than actual FFXI players knew about this expansion?) and availability (You couldn't even get the damn thing until a day or two before release in Europe) as well as price/content mess up (30€ really??? For a lousy amount of new copy/paste areas, new monster models countable on one hand and the same music for the entire ulbukan continent). I know we haven't gotten all that is supposed to be released with the expansion but what we actually got wasn't even worth a dime in the beginning and all at the cost of nothing else being ever done. The new interface, which we might finally get soon was supposed to be here way sooner, things like the new avatars promised 2.5 years ago have gone so low in priority you got to ask yourself if they ever get implemented within this century.

I believe FFXI had the chance to win old players back and even gain new players with this expansion if it simply would have been handled correctly. Yet instead we got a drop in players by at least 1/2 within a mere set of weeks after the initial "oh new expansion lets check it out hights". The problem: I haven't even started talking about how bad the actual content is we got so far but, it did not only try to change how the game has worked for the past decade, which naturally will upset players content with the style of the game so far, no it also invalidated any content before itself. I ask myself: why did they waste their time and bothered to make Nyzul 2, Salvage 2, Einherjar 2 and Limbus 2? For what reason did they overhaul previous engame events, just to have them being 100% worthless a few months later because the gear they provide is crap compared to the unmotivated level 113 crap we have now.
Why was it necessary to bring out skirmish as event with superior loot but no accessability just to bring out something else a month later making skirmish useless already and why are we still stuck with this event? At least the latter is easy to answer: there is no other content in this expansion and this expansion killed any other content but itself.

As a result people don't do other things for gear anymore, cause there is no other gear that still counts and people being able to finish fracture also don't do fracture anymore because they have beaten it enough times so they don't need anything from it anymore simply because it only offers a very few rewards to start with (why does everyone nowadays look the same I wonder...).

I understand that there needs to be incentive for players to do the new content so obviously the gear needs to have perks the older gear didn't have. However, was it necessary to drastically wipe up the floor with everything else? Just take the Phorcy's Korazin, add a mere 5str to it and keep all other values the same and people would go for it, cause it would have been the best item for the slot. Just look at the stupidness of the duplus grip. 1% more DA just ONE percent and on the one hand people went crazy about it while on the other it still didn't make the pole grip a crap item.

In my opinion it cannot be that say a Samurai that has played the job for over 5 years, put effort into gearing the job and pulled awesome feats with it but has no Tsurumaru, can be beaten by a person who leeched Samurai from 1-99 got lucky on a Tsurumaru drop, got otronif for his MNK and now tries playing sam for the first time and yes, the difference between Tsurumaru and the R/E/Ms is big enough to warrant the "newb SAM" to be better. If the gear was only slightly better, this wouldln't be possible and it would still have an appeal to it (and no for anyone who comes and says "well go get Tsurumaru then", I have that stupid weapon and I am disgusted by it)

I know this is a way too long post and maybe also missing a red line going through all of it but at least it has an answer to the OPs question. Granted it is my personal answer for the question, but I am sure that while some might disagree, many will actually agree with me. There is more that I could rant about but let's give it a rest here^^

Sincerely, Leylia

[Demon6324236]

One of the reasons I have continued to play this game is because of its horizontal progression. During all of my time playing there were very few times I knew 1 item was so powerful I had to have it in order to play my job effectively, most of the time, that was a RME, due to things like RME requirements during the VW Era. If I wanted a game with Vertical progression, there were many other options out there for me, but I did not. FFXI changed everything in the blink of an eye to a completely different style without any warning, which took that away, and out dated everything.

You ask why an expansion shouldn't? Why its different? RotZ, CoP, ToAU, all were made at 75, they all worked, we played for years with those, at the level 75 cap, doing things like Sea, Limbus, Sky, Dynamis, Assaults, Salvage, Einherjar, and so on. It worked because everything had a place, every event was useful to something.

The problem with what SoA did is it was poorly timed, and it was to late. Had it been done earlier in FFXI's life, not as much an issue, as other have said, it was a well established horizontal progression system in the game. The other reason is because it simply came at the worst possible time, when people would already be leaving the game, and the dev team is smaller than ever before, which means that the sudden change can push more people to quit, while the smaller dev team can not put content out fast enough to keep up with us beating it down. The killed everything old, but can hardly offer us anything new, I mean in all honesty, who can tell me you want to do Skirmish every day all day, since you did everything else Adoulin had to offer when they were implemented? I don't, even if I did, I would be done with it in no time, and it would leave nothing to do, that's why its flawed.

[Traxus]

The problem with what SoA did is it was poorly timed, and it was to late. Had it been done earlier in FFXI's life, not as much an issue, as other have said, it was a well established horizontal progression system in the game.

It never would have worked, SE has never put out content fast enough to support it. Imagine if a few months after ToAU came out, 99% of sky/sea/dynamis/limbus/hnm/enm/ksnm/etc stuff was made obsolete by assault and ISNM gear. Than that gear is later made obsolete by nyzul isle and salvage, than by einherjar, than by ZNMs. Regardless of when vertical progression was implemented, it would have always had the same result: players not having anything to do except 1 or 2 current events, that aren't enough to keep players busy/interested/subscribed on their own.

FFXI stayed alive by keeping legacy content relevant, so players had a wide array of events and goals to work on that only increased over time. Somehow the people currently in charge of the game don't understand that.

[leorez]

Its pretty clear especially reading that pathetic excuse for a dev response that the few people still working on the game have no idea what made this game work for so long and have no intention to fix it. Its a damned shamed because me and 3 other people just subbed this month (2 to buy new copys of the game on top of that).

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

Getting the same xp from a mob whether you are 99 or ilvl117 would be like getting the same xp whether you are 50 or 68.

But who actually cares about EXP at 99+?

[Spectreman]

Outside of popping Honey Wine and Sweet Tea, I've probably spent less than 6 hours lifetime in the Aery. Personal attacks don't really help your argument (if you have one). Yorcia Skirmish sucks, try reading the responses to this thread over here:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/37311-Congratulations-FFXI-team-for-Skirmish-2.0

Being better and more rewarding than old HNMs does not make Yorcia Skirmish a successful event.


Sorry but all that Skirmish needs is to be made like cirdas so its fun and rewarding. HNM was a waste of life for those who wanted to have one.

[Byrth]

In case you missed it, he wasn't defending HNMs.

Yorcia Skirmish is the most boring event that has ever been introduced into FFXI bar none. My linkshell manages to do 1-2 a night before it makes us all get tired and go to bed at ~10PM. On the upside, at least I have been sleeping a lot more lately.

Well, maybe not bar none. Yorcia's only competition might be Monstrosity, if you consider that an event, because soloing a few dozen monsters to 99 is pretty freaking boring too.

[Infidi]

Give Yuley his TH3 back, please. Is that possible? :-)

Only if they give us Cait Sith at same time. :D

[detlef]

Sorry but all that Skirmish needs is to be made like cirdas so its fun and rewarding. HNM was a waste of life for those who wanted to have one.Oh, so all that Yorcia Skirmish needs is to be completely different from what it is. That's like saying that Legion would be great if it was like Limbus.

And no, I'm not defending HNMs. Please stop referencing a bygone era of misery that is irrelevant to today's content.

[Jerbob]

I've essentially stopped playing XI since the item level and vertical progression announcements. I found that I was spending more time stressing out about bad management decisions than I was actually enjoying the game, so I took a break (my first ever) back in July. Aside from a couple of weekend visits to see old friends, I've not been back.

It's difficult to make sense of the state of the game at this time, really. SE has always loved to ignore its playerbase and rush headlong into pointless endeavours, but never on this magnitude. It's odd because, somewhat paradoxically, I want to want to play the game, but SE is continuously challenging that as if we're all playing some sort of bizarre metagame of "how long can you tolerate playing XI", with no-one quite sure whether quitting is winning or losing.

I think the true impact of these changes on the playerbase is difficult to gauge because of XIV. People say that population has declined because of XIV, but with the supposedly coincidental timing of XIV's release and XI's sudden drop into (further) insanity, how many of those people would have quit anyway? I took a break with no intention of playing XIV, but so many of my friends went over that I followed, somewhat against my better judgement. It's quickly becoming clear that XIV is going to be vertical progression + item level based from the ground up, so I'm regretting it to some extent already, but the real point is that with the new developer direction there's nothing here for me in XI either, no matter how much I want there to be.

It's not too late for SE to salvage XI. Please, just dump the item levels and dump the vertical progression model. No one wants it. Seekers suffers to some extent from the same crippling lack of resources that plagues the rest of XI, but it's not broken beyond repair. Rip out the new rot before it takes root, and rebalance jobs properly to let people do content on jobs they enjoy. Maybe even invest some money into the game! Just do something before everyone is gone and there's nothing to come back to.

[Shaiera]

I honestly have to say anything that made FFXI an awesome game is completely gone. I remember playing in parties where you did Skillchains and timed spells to create Magic Bursts and Exp Chains and if you all were a skilled party you could really, really Exp well. Raising you’re skills took time invested in the job, something like Guard and Parry skill being capped at max level was something you could honestly be proud of. The missions were very challenging CoP, ToAU, WoTG, and don’t forget Assaults; Cpt. Rank at 75 cap was not easy. All in all, a ton of the content was needing actual teamwork and skill, Limbus, Einherjar, Dynamis, Sea, Sky, Salvage, and KSNM99 just to name a few; I could go as far as to say early Abyssea as well, upon release when there wasn’t level 99 cap.

Now you don’t level and actually play you’re job, you head Zeruhn Mines, Kuftal Tunnel or wherever and get power-leveled to 30; you then enter Abyssea and get 99; this is done in less than a day, ask most Rune Fencer’s. Then rather than hours of skill-up on Parry or Guard like it was in the old days, just grab some Atma and pull a train of mobs and have those capped in couple hours, tops. Finally solo your missions by yourself for some obsolete zone access and gear (cheer). Nothing actually takes skill and effort anymore; there’s a massive huge world and only SoA is relevant. How hard would it really be to up the level on mobs and change out the lot tables on Campaign Battle and Besieged to make the content relevant again; clearly too much.

My point with all this… There is nothing you can have on or about your character at this present date you can actually be proud of; nothing Joe-Shmoe couldn’t do in a weekend. Even Relic, Mythic, Empyrean are garbage to the new gear and system (Delve). Months to get my Faith Torque (+7 H2H) at 75 cap to have a H2H weapon have over +60 H2H Skill on it!? (derp)

It isn’t a question of getting back on track with the game, it’s already too late; I’d rather actually be playing WoW than this cheap knock-off of it - World Of Warcraft. I thought FFXIV was bad; they stole most of WoW’s default buttons and hot-keys. What other game has “!” and “?” over quest giver and turn-in’s heads? What other game has rested when not playing for a few hours while logged off in a town? FFXIV is a huge WoW rip-off for the game-play and mechanics. I’m truthfully surprised Blizzard hasn’t tried to sue.

What’s worse is destroying a once amazing game to try and make it into WoW as well; do the developers really have no ideas and suck so bad they are just coping stuff from they’re favorite game to play on the weekend – World Of Warcraft.

All these questions aside, this post doesn’t really deserve or warrant any real responses; this is probably is my last post ever anyway, I just really had to call it out as I see it, which my come off as a lot of complaining, but it’s TRUE, all of it! FFXI was in my honest opinion the best MMO ever, the moment development started raising level cap and trying to change it into something it wasn’t – World Of Warcraft. It was all down-hill; not even down hill; it was a flat out jump off a cliff!

FFXI was truly amazing and unique, now it’s just someone’s ugly cousin. My it R.I.P.; I doubt it’ll be more than two years before the mass emails get sent for having discontinued service from lack of patrons. I can only finish this post with one helpful piece of advice; pull your heads out of your asses development; vulgar or not, you, as a group, really need to hear it from someone willing to speak up.

[Babekeke]

What's really funny is that everyone b1tched and moaned about how bad the drop rates were in VW, and now again in WKR.

But, the terrible drop rates and low chance of obtaining gear kept them doing the events, just like SE (I assume) had planned.

Since Yorcia Skirmish was released, just about all gear from the first 3 WKR is completely obsolete. Most VW gear has been obsolete for a while now, and only a few people continue to do the event in a vein attempt to complete their empy before the new update to them is released.

That leaves the majority of the people doing 3 things:

1) Yumcax and Hurkan

2) Delve Boss fights - but never the bee, or so it seems on Phoenix when I'm on. >.>

3) Monstrosity - Some have made reference to it being boring, but it at least has progression. Level 1 mob to unlock another. Find the best strategies to kill as many mobs as quickly as possible. Unlock new Instincts, etc.


Yorcia skirmish does have it's good points of course:

Newly returning players aren't instantly excluded from any content that allows them to progress, because it's so easy to do the initial skirmishes to get an upgrade weapon from 99, and you collect some bayld in the process to get some bayld gear.

You don't need to be particularly well-geared to do yorcia, because it's fairly easy once you've got the hang of the map and the strategy.

Once you've done yorcia and got some gear and upgraded a weapon, you're at a point where you can go off on your own and be semi-competitive in the rest of adoulin's content.

[predatory]

Well I have an idea, how about instead of the constant vertical gear climb, you give us some JSE for our respective jobs? Then give us the horizontal gear progression back? You know, how about some events we have to do to become well geared? Before you guys gave us seekers we actually had JSE and could tell one job from another simply by catching a glance of the character, now all the heavy armor types look the same, as do the other armor types. Stop giving us crap content, and give us something we need for our respective jobs

[ScreamingInDigital]

I'm actually coming back to the game. I stopped playing it back when I realized someone at SE decided to change the focus/direction of XI, and turn it more into a "level quickly and then grind end-game" deal, rather than the steady-paced adventure-driven experience it had been for so long before.

Even with the launch of WoW and all the resulting "me-too" follow-ups from other developers, SE stayed the course, understood its playerbase and realized the kind of people playing FFXI were playing it because of the game it was. They maintained a loyal population for years because of that focus. They continued on with what made the game great. They had some mis-steps, of course. They implemented some systems that would fall flat, sure. But they kept the FFXI experience intact. And for that, they maintained what... ~500k players over 7 years into the game's life cycle? Few new MMOs in the last 8+ years can claim those numbers even after their first few months. The reason is, while there's been plenty of MMOs built from the WoW mold, there were very, very few similar to FFXI. And I'd go so far to say that XI was quite unique from any of them, outside of the standard features and functionality that makes a MMO a MMO.

Then, somewhere along the line, they lost that focus. They decided that, rather than stay the course and continue expanding the game as they had been, they would lean more toward the WoW side of things.. faster leveling, easier progress, more soloability, etc. etc. And it really changed the game, especially the way it was played. While many argued at the time that it was for the better, seeing where the game is now... I'm not so sure I would make that claim anymore.

Considering what they'd done with 75 levels, when they announced the increase over time to 99, I thought "wow, think of all they could do with that extra 24 levels?" I was thinking in terms of them expanding on it similarly to how they'd been with the 75 levels already in-game. What I didn't realize was that they'd trivialize those 24 levels - and the rest of the game along with it - to the degree that they did. They took everything they'd spent years creating, and all but obsolesced it in the course of a few major updates.

Now, apparently, they've gone the route of changing it to a purely vertical progression. And, no surprise, the complaints about it now are falling more in line with the complaints people have had about all those other MMOs that SE made it a point to not emulate. New gear is out-done by newer gear only a short time later, racing to the end-game, etc.

So, what has caused FFXI's decline in my opinion?

SE lost their focus, forgot what it was that made FFXI the long-lasting and awesome experience it was, and tried to hop on board with the rest of the genre. They tried to mix oil into water, and the results are self-evident.

As for me returning..
I have a few friends I know who still play, and I'm going to be taking my time. I'm not doing the race to 99 ordeal. I'm going to duo, or even solo, or perhaps get a full group together if/when it's possible, and enjoy this game as much the way I always have as I can. I know it can be done, because others I know are doing it. It's not the popular path, and I know I'm gonna be heckled for not hopping on the speed-leveling bandwagon (I was last time I played), but I don't care. This "new way" of playing FFXI holds no fascination or interest with me. It looks extremely boring, and all I'm seeing for it are a lot of seemingly disappointed players at the end of it. Why would I want to rush into that? I've got plenty more to do that I will enjoy.

[Afania]

I've essentially stopped playing XI since the item level and vertical progression announcements. I found that I was spending more time stressing out about bad management decisions than I was actually enjoying the game, so I took a break (my first ever) back in July. Aside from a couple of weekend visits to see old friends, I've not been back.

It's difficult to make sense of the state of the game at this time, really. SE has always loved to ignore its playerbase and rush headlong into pointless endeavours, but never on this magnitude. It's odd because, somewhat paradoxically, I want to want to play the game, but SE is continuously challenging that as if we're all playing some sort of bizarre metagame of "how long can you tolerate playing XI", with no-one quite sure whether quitting is winning or losing.

I think the true impact of these changes on the playerbase is difficult to gauge because of XIV. People say that population has declined because of XIV, but with the supposedly coincidental timing of XIV's release and XI's sudden drop into (further) insanity, how many of those people would have quit anyway? I took a break with no intention of playing XIV, but so many of my friends went over that I followed, somewhat against my better judgement. It's quickly becoming clear that XIV is going to be vertical progression + item level based from the ground up, so I'm regretting it to some extent already, but the real point is that with the new developer direction there's nothing here for me in XI either, no matter how much I want there to be.

It's not too late for SE to salvage XI. Please, just dump the item levels and dump the vertical progression model. No one wants it. Seekers suffers to some extent from the same crippling lack of resources that plagues the rest of XI, but it's not broken beyond repair. Rip out the new rot before it takes root, and rebalance jobs properly to let people do content on jobs they enjoy. Maybe even invest some money into the game! Just do something before everyone is gone and there's nothing to come back to.

I wish I have 10 "Like" I can use for this post. You summerized everything I feel toward XI. XI population had been dropping before XIV launch, it's not like it's suddenly drop a ton after 8/27. That hinted SoA game direction doesn't work.

In fact it's still dropping, 1.5 months after XIV release. I still log in and check server pop, and every week it seems to get lower. Surely those who wanted to play XIV should already been gone 1.5 month ago, so where's rest of the ppl? Not everyone that cancel account because of XIV. I'm pretty sure many ppl are willing to sub both if XI is still as good as pre-item level era.

[Afania]

So, in [almost?] every other MMO an expansion comes along and obsoletes all the BiS gear around but FFXI shouldn't? Why should gear be made future-proof just because it took a bit of effort 'back in the day'?

Because almost every other MMO following this model that's not World of Warcraft has even lower staying power than pre-Abyssea/pre-SoA FFXI. FFXI is not WoW, so it's destined to fail if they follow the same model. That's the reality.

"Modern" MMO model are bad, with avg 3~5 years of life span and go F2P after 2 years. FFXI switch to same model= killing itself period.

[Afania]

Sorry but all that Skirmish needs is to be made like cirdas so its fun and rewarding. HNM was a waste of life for those who wanted to have one.

If you don't like HNM, don't do it and save yourself some time. Old FFXI never force anyone do HNM, you still have plenty other event to do if you don't like HNM.

There are ppl that liked HNM, just let them like it and do it, it's their life not yours.

[leorez]

If you don't like HNM, don't do it and save yourself some time. Old FFXI never force anyone do HNM, you still have plenty other event to do if you don't like HNM.

There are ppl that liked HNM, just let them like it and do it, it's their life not yours.

Thats what made it great, you were never forced to do content so you could get to the next, you could pick and choose what you wanted to do because there was great gear in just about every event, the "best" piece was never secluded to one event either. For those reasons people are fond of FFXI and say how it has "so much endgame" when really it doesnt have a ton more than other stuff, it just makes all of it viable so people dont just pass through each event and never go back.

[Babekeke]

Because almost every other MMO following this model that's not World of Warcraft has even lower staying power than pre-Abyssea/pre-SoA FFXI. FFXI is not WoW, so it's destined to fail if they follow the same model. That's the reality.

"Modern" MMO model are bad, with avg 3~5 years of life span and go F2P after 2 years. FFXI switch to same model= killing itself period.

The main difference between most other MMOs and FFXI now, is that FFXI will never go F2P.

There will be people out there who never cancel their subscriptions, and even if SE abandon all support for it, they'll keep the servers open as long as enough people are subscribing to cover the cost of powering the servers.

[casual]

Linear progression isn't a bad thing, the problem is that the team working on FFXI now simply hasn't the man power to keep up with the demands it creates. It very well could give FFXI the final killing blow, I've never seen such a bad population drop before.

[Teioh]

Why not just make the game free to play and implement various micro transactions like several other dinosaur games that were failing? There are 700 people online on my server which is the second most populated server in ffxi. 40-50% of these are afk in various places with their bazaars up.
I want what most other paying customers want, for this game to flourish and in the direction the game is currently going this game is taking a turn for the worse. In order for ffxi to flourish we need more players. The various word of mouth recruitment campaigns have done very little to populate in-game worlds and those that come back to see if ffxi has gotten any better were severely disappointed and cancelled their subscriptions a month later. The game just isn't able to compete anymore with paid subscription games like World of Warcraft(incoming flame war) so why not implement a new structure that has been tried successfully by many other online RPGs?
Everquest, Lineage 2, SWTOR, LOTRO, and many others have gone from a non-viable business model to a game that actually makes money by implementing micro transactions and doing away with the monthly fee.
Also make Abyssea 75-99 and make it and a few select jobs subscription only, that should bring in some revenue and more importantly some customers.

[Afania]

Why not just make the game free to play and implement various micro transactions like several other dinosaur games that were failing? There are 700 people online on my server which is the second most populated server in ffxi. 40-50% of these are afk in various places with their bazaars up.
I want what most other paying customers want, for this game to flourish and in the direction the game is currently going this game is taking a turn for the worse. In order for ffxi to flourish we need more players. The various word of mouth recruitment campaigns have done very little to populate in-game worlds and those that come back to see if ffxi has gotten any better were severely disappointed and cancelled their subscriptions a month later. The game just isn't able to compete anymore with paid subscription games like World of Warcraft(incoming flame war) so why not implement a new structure that has been tried successfully by many other online RPGs?
Everquest, Lineage 2, SWTOR, LOTRO, and many others have gone from a non-viable business model to a game that actually makes money by implementing micro transactions and doing away with the monthly fee.
Also make Abyssea 75-99 and make it and a few select jobs subscription only, that should bring in some revenue and more importantly some customers.

F2P model is for casual/come and go players. FFXI needs dedication, F2P isn't going to help much.

[Krashport]

Well the item mall is here already... Yeah its a lowball mall, but still it's a mall. $12.95/mo, then keep login'in to participate. Though they do like to call it;
The Repeat Login Campaign!
http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/campaign/11th/login04.html

f2p might not be that far fetched, seeing not many have realized that an item mall is here already...

[predatory]

when a game goes f2p it is dead, any moron knows that, The idea isn't to kill the game, its t get the game designers off their lazy fucking asses and get to work. They seem to think that they can ignore what the population of the game wants, and for there to be no repercussions, how about this for a repercussion, I buy 1 share of stock in the company then go to a stockholders meeting and tell them exactly why ffxi is falling flat on its face. The reason this game is failing is the dev team is weak and lazy. in Japanese terms they have no honor and should be replaced, especially the head developer. Get your shit together SE because you have lost the driving force in the game world, and that is simply imagination and ingenuity, us in the player base can only carry your lazy asses so far

[Kormak]

I believe FFXI had the chance to win old players back and even gain new players with this expansion if it simply would have been handled correctly. Yet instead we got a drop in players by at least 1/2 within a mere set of weeks after the initial "oh new expansion lets check it out hights". The problem: I haven't even started talking about how bad the actual content is we got so far but, it did not only try to change how the game has worked for the past decade, which naturally will upset players content with the style of the game so far, no it also invalidated any content before itself. I ask myself: why did they waste their time and bothered to make Nyzul 2, Salvage 2, Einherjar 2 and Limbus 2? For what reason did they overhaul previous engame events, just to have them being 100% worthless a few months later because the gear they provide is crap compared to the unmotivated level 113 crap we have now.
Why was it necessary to bring out skirmish as event with superior loot but no accessability just to bring out something else a month later making skirmish useless already and why are we still stuck with this event? At least the latter is easy to answer: there is no other content in this expansion and this expansion killed any other content but itself.



Since all previous gear is obsolete, would you mind telling me what body piece MNK's use to TP in? What body SAM's use to WS in? There are several such examples in mage gear sets not to forget most Nuking + WS rings are from old content and the highest STR ammo piece is lvl88. And of course, arguably the best ring in the game is lvl70.

I am not going to argue that it hasn't allowed 1-99 burned jobs the ability to come close to veteran players but there is still so many pieces of old gear that is still relevant, just not the weapons.


Now as for the topic, the people who have defeated the hardest content before the update are completely bored with it and the rest of the playerbase doesn't want to level support jobs to beat the hard content. And you don't need emp/relic brds or even swaps to beat the new content, that has been proven.

This will just end up back at " Why should I have to level <job> to play the game? I have a perle BST that I enjoy playing with, I should be able to come that .... blah blah blah"

Anyway, I understand both sides of the argument but I personally like the new content as well as the old content.

Regards,

Kormak

[nyheen]

Since all previous gear is obsolete, would you mind telling me what body piece MNK's use to TP in? What body SAM's use to WS in? There are several such examples in mage gear sets not to forget most Nuking + WS rings are from old content and the highest STR ammo piece is lvl88. And of course, arguably the best ring in the game is lvl70.

I am not going to argue that it hasn't allowed 1-99 burned jobs the ability to come close to veteran players but there is still so many pieces of old gear that is still relevant, just not the weapons.


Now as for the topic, the people who have defeated the hardest content before the update are completely bored with it and the rest of the playerbase doesn't want to level support jobs to beat the hard content. And you don't need emp/relic brds or even swaps to beat the new content, that has been proven.

This will just end up back at " Why should I have to level <job> to play the game? I have a perle BST that I enjoy playing with, I should be able to come that .... blah blah blah"

Anyway, I understand both sides of the argument but I personally like the new content as well as the old content.

Regards,

Kormak
lot of the past gear is obsolete now. sure it some that ok but what the point at this time?. with Skirmish weapons/gear alone it broken as F#$% no one going to wanna do past contents for X gear if SoA gives broken gear in hours. you can literally 1 shot almost any past content without even trying. it feels like using a gameshark code on FF7 to kill anything in the game. even if they updated R/M/E SoA already did the damage to this and sadly people been dropping out of the servers fast. 200-400 is starting to be normal:(

[ScreamingInDigital]

Why not just make the game free to play and implement various micro transactions like several other dinosaur games that were failing? There are 700 people online on my server which is the second most populated server in ffxi. 40-50% of these are afk in various places with their bazaars up.
I want what most other paying customers want, for this game to flourish and in the direction the game is currently going this game is taking a turn for the worse. In order for ffxi to flourish we need more players. The various word of mouth recruitment campaigns have done very little to populate in-game worlds and those that come back to see if ffxi has gotten any better were severely disappointed and cancelled their subscriptions a month later. The game just isn't able to compete anymore with paid subscription games like World of Warcraft(incoming flame war) so why not implement a new structure that has been tried successfully by many other online RPGs?
Everquest, Lineage 2, SWTOR, LOTRO, and many others have gone from a non-viable business model to a game that actually makes money by implementing micro transactions and doing away with the monthly fee.
Also make Abyssea 75-99 and make it and a few select jobs subscription only, that should bring in some revenue and more importantly some customers.

EQ, SWTOR and LoTRO still offer a subscription option. As long as they maintained a sub option (in the event of such a switch happening, which I doubt at this point... but who knows, SE has been known to go from one extreme stance to another before), I think it'd be okay.

They need to stay the hell away from NCSoft's "Truly Free (to nickel and dime you to death)" setup. It's an abomination. I used to be a huge Lineage 2 player, for several years, and loved the hell out of that game. Then they did the whole "Goddess" expansion, switched to a fully F2P/Cash Shop model. They lied through their teeth in their lead-up PR, claiming that only non-game/stat effecting items would be sold (claiming they understood how such items in a PvP setting like L2 could be disastrous). They then proceeded to start selling such items almost from day one, changing their logic from "won't happen" to "well, they're optional!" They said this full knowing that in a competitive game like that, people will spend money - lots of it - to get an advantage over their rivals. People had been buying Adena, for just that reason, for years already in that game, so they didn't even have to 'test the waters' to find out.

They knew exactly what they were doing when setting up the F2P model for that game, and "Heavy Handed" doesn't even begin to describe it. Worst P2P to F2P transition I've ever seen. It went from being a game I played and loved for years, to "get the hell off my computer" in less than a week.

They did the same thing with Aion.

I don't believe, at all, though, that FFXI needs to go F2P. What FFXI needs is some serious thought and reconsideration of the direction they've chosen to take it. Trying to go with the vertical progression approach is just not going to fly. It's been proven time and again that developers can not crank out new content fast enough to stay ahead of players. Developers repeatedly underestimate their players and think they can somehow "stay ahead". It never works. SE's model of long-term progression with a "lateral" approach, rather than "vertical", served FFXI wonderfully for years. Yes, people complained about it... but they kept playing and the game maintained a healthy population for over 7 years before any kind of a noticeable decline began, which I would contend had more to do with the game's age at that point than anything else. Even then, XI's population decline was far slower than most any other comparable MMO out there (sub-based, etc).

SE could have stayed the course, continued creating content the way they did, and I believe the game would have remained healthier and the population wouldn't have dropped as it did. Instead, they decided to hop on the "mainstream MMO" bandwagon and start changing the game to be more like others (which they'd successfully avoided doing all those years prior). As I said in my last post, they decided to mix oil into water, and the results have been self-evident.

The population is at perhaps its lowest ever, and I don't think I've ever seen so many people as disappointed and upset about the direction of the game in all my time playing it.

They can't go back to Abyssea. They already raised the cap to 99 and, other than the "faux levels" granted through gear, there's only so far they can go in that direction.

I think they need to go back to their roots, look at what they did in those past expansions that kept people engaged and loyally playing for years. One thing I can guarantee they'll find is that their focus was far more on community, on lateral progression and on giving players challenges that weren't outright grinds, but that still took time to accomplish because they were difficult to do. Make old content relevant again for its own sake.

For their part, the playerbase has to get off this gear obsession they've been on. Every other complaint I see sometimes is something to do with getting new gear. This is the product of SE trying to turn the game into a vertical-progression setup. As Stompa said perfectly earlier in the thread, the fun of playing FFXI used to be playing FFXI. SE needs to look back to their own past, see what they did right, find a way to bring it to the present, and get themselves back on the right track. They're just getting deeper and deeper into the weeds with the decisions they've been making over the last few years.

FFXI was originally envisioned as a grand adventure, not a race to "end game". They need to return to that vision.

My 2 gil, and of course, my opinion.

[predatory]

EQ, SWTOR and LoTRO still offer a subscription option. As long as they maintained a sub option (in the event of such a switch happening, which I doubt at this point... but who knows, SE has been known to go from one extreme stance to another before), I think it'd be okay.

They need to stay the hell away from NCSoft's "Truly Free (to nickel and dime you to death)" setup. It's an abomination. I used to be a huge Lineage 2 player, for several years, and loved the hell out of that game. Then they did the whole "Goddess" expansion, switched to a fully F2P/Cash Shop model. They lied through their teeth in their lead-up PR, claiming that only non-game/stat effecting items would be sold (claiming they understood how such items in a PvP setting like L2 could be disastrous). They then proceeded to start selling such items almost from day one, changing their logic from "won't happen" to "well, they're optional!" They said this full knowing that in a competitive game like that, people will spend money - lots of it - to get an advantage over their rivals. People had been buying Adena, for just that reason, for years already in that game, so they didn't even have to 'test the waters' to find out.

They knew exactly what they were doing when setting up the F2P model for that game, and "Heavy Handed" doesn't even begin to describe it. Worst P2P to F2P transition I've ever seen. It went from being a game I played and loved for years, to "get the hell off my computer" in less than a week.

They did the same thing with Aion.

I don't believe, at all, though, that FFXI needs to go F2P. What FFXI needs is some serious thought and reconsideration of the direction they've chosen to take it. Trying to go with the vertical progression approach is just not going to fly. It's been proven time and again that developers can not crank out new content fast enough to stay ahead of players. Developers repeatedly underestimate their players and think they can somehow "stay ahead". It never works. SE's model of long-term progression with a "lateral" approach, rather than "vertical", served FFXI wonderfully for years. Yes, people complained about it... but they kept playing and the game maintained a healthy population for over 7 years before any kind of a noticeable decline began, which I would contend had more to do with the game's age at that point than anything else. Even then, XI's population decline was far slower than most any other comparable MMO out there (sub-based, etc).

SE could have stayed the course, continued creating content the way they did, and I believe the game would have remained healthier and the population wouldn't have dropped as it did. Instead, they decided to hop on the "mainstream MMO" bandwagon and start changing the game to be more like others (which they'd successfully avoided doing all those years prior). As I said in my last post, they decided to mix oil into water, and the results have been self-evident.

The population is at perhaps its lowest ever, and I don't think I've ever seen so many people as disappointed and upset about the direction of the game in all my time playing it.

They can't go back to Abyssea. They already raised the cap to 99 and, other than the "faux levels" granted through gear, there's only so far they can go in that direction.

I think they need to go back to their roots, look at what they did in those past expansions that kept people engaged and loyally playing for years. One thing I can guarantee they'll find is that their focus was far more on community, on lateral progression and on giving players challenges that weren't outright grinds, but that still took time to accomplish because they were difficult to do. Make old content relevant again for its own sake.

For their part, the playerbase has to get off this gear obsession they've been on. Every other complaint I see sometimes is something to do with getting new gear. This is the product of SE trying to turn the game into a vertical-progression setup. As Stompa said perfectly earlier in the thread, the fun of playing FFXI used to be playing FFXI. SE needs to look back to their own past, see what they did right, find a way to bring it to the present, and get themselves back on the right track. They're just getting deeper and deeper into the weeds with the decisions they've been making over the last few years.

FFXI was originally envisioned as a grand adventure, not a race to "end game". They need to return to that vision.

My 2 gil, and of course, my opinion.

And the problem with that was, they actually created nothing that I would call endgame, IMO Delve and skirmish aren't endgame. Endgame (except for hnms), always had a progression associated with it. You couldn't do dynamis until you'd attained rank 6, you couldn't do sky until you had sky access, same with jailers and limbus with sea access. There has always been a progression to be able to do endgame activities, along comes SoA and anybody can go in and do a skirmish or join a Delve group, one person completing one WKR so 17 other people can join them in a shout group is definitely not endgame.

I had really high hopes for this expansion, I mean they billed it as the first full expansion in 5 years, but what did we really get? We got Reives, WKR, Delve and Skirmish, that's the best they could come up with in their bid to keep us? Pitiful if you ask me. This is definitely not the grand adventure I was hoping for, and I feel more than a little let down at wasting the money I spent to get the expansion.

[KingShez]

Well, I can't say I'm disappointed with FFXI. I've played this game for over four years and I'm happy with what I got and the people I've met in this game, but all good things must come to end. This game has run its course. Over 11 years great job, but let's be real the storyline is boring, PS2 graphics, and adoulin weapons are ridiculous. The era we live progresses and we need to keep up with the Jones'. Nobody is running around with beepers anymore. We all have IPhones or galaxies. Whatever floats your boat. Stop trying to patch up the game and just come out and tell us you're killing the game! I promise I won't be mad. I'll just switch to ffxiv.

[Damane]

And the problem with that was, they actually created nothing that I would call endgame, IMO Delve and skirmish aren't endgame. Endgame (except for hnms), always had a progression associated with it. You couldn't do dynamis until you'd attained rank 6, you couldn't do sky until you had sky access, same with jailers and limbus with sea access. There has always been a progression to be able to do endgame activities, along comes SoA and anybody can go in and do a skirmish or join a Delve group, one person completing one WKR so 17 other people can join them in a shout group is definitely not endgame.

I had really high hopes for this expansion, I mean they billed it as the first full expansion in 5 years, but what did we really get? We got Reives, WKR, Delve and Skirmish, that's the best they could come up with in their bid to keep us? Pitiful if you ask me. This is definitely not the grand adventure I was hoping for, and I feel more than a little let down at wasting the money I spent to get the expansion.

delve is definitly endgame, haveing prequesites for sky sea etc was just retarded. ANYTHING you do at max lvl to further your gear is endgame. atm its delve and skirmish mostly because old content got irrelevant, in the november update it might be anything again with hardmode and REM updates.

[predatory]

delve is definitly endgame, haveing prequesites for sky sea etc was just retarded. ANYTHING you do at max lvl to further your gear is endgame. atm its delve and skirmish mostly because old content got irrelevant, in the november update it might be anything again with hardmode and REM updates.

This just doesn't have the endgame feel to me. I mean back when there was actual endgame content any number of people could attend, (well not any number dynamis was capped at 64 I think) but at most other events you could bring as many people as you felt you wanted to bring. Now you get to bring 18 tops which equals 1 ochain pld, 2 sch, 1 drg, 2 brds, 2 cors, and the rest mnks or wars, and forget the other 16 jobs out there, that's not endgame, that's just a special event for 6 jobs.

[Nivmizet]

Children are always a problem for their parents at Christmas, because kids want the newest toys, the latest Barbie or w/e even though those same kids already have 50 similar toys, its not good enough for them coz now theres a new toy out they MUST have it, for the sole reason that the toy is new and has extra shiny bits on it. Thats kids for you. But adults don't always go for the latest shiny toy.



What!?! Go to an Apple store on release of a new product! Everyone loves new and shiny things not only kids where did you get this information from? Its misleading!


Its not a complex business model, no crazy physics nor math equation (I am a math major I am sure of this) or the misalignment of the stars.

Reason why FFXI is declining:

TIME

It was has always been declining like all MMOs it gradually declines over time just some declines are steeper than most. But Abyssea was/is the problem not SOA. Imagine how SOA would have been if Abyssea never existed. /seacom "67 GEO LFP You Can have this!!!! Please invite me!!! I would have been logged on with that seacom right now.

[Demon6324236]

Reason why FFXI is declining:

TIME

It was has always been declining like all MMOs it gradually declines over time just some declines are steeper than most. But Abyssea was/is the problem not SOA. Imagine how SOA would have been if Abyssea never existed. /seacom "67 GEO LFP You Can have this!!!! Please invite me!!! I would have been logged on with that seacom right now.So your argument is that time is killing FFXI faster because the game is old, its not the fact that they turned the game upside down in a way that the majority of players seem to hate and a way which seems to be increasing the gap between players, preventing more people from catching up?

No...

Sorry to tell you, SoA and the changes it brought were the strike that did all of the damage this time, that we see right now. Some people liked XP, to them, Abyssea will always be an issue because it effectively killed all later level XP parties. However, just because Abyssea did this, does not mean that Abyssea caused issues in the game, many people hated it, more so than liked it probably, because of the way it was done. Many people do not miss XP parties themselves, rather, the social aspect of it all, something which was seemingly lost on Abyssea, because people do not talk, though really the people to blame for that are the people you are in a party with, who don't talk, when you easily could.

If I was to level GEO years ago, I cant say I think it would get invited often, and I know for a fact RUN wouldn't without being /NIN so it might possibly tank. So yes, you might see '67 GEO LFP' but you would see that all day, without an invite, like many other jobs. One of the larger issues with the old days of leveling was that. Abyssea helped make leveling easy and fast, rather than annoying & slow. Abyssea had issues and flaws, but it was not the main cause of our issues, not even close.

[KingShez]

Thank you! A computer from 1981 are you for real? Floppy disc, pitfall (Atari), and all those other outdated games. Seriously? Do check out the lines outside the apple store. People are more interested in new technology, advanced graphics, and detailed storyline. I'm not saying ffxiv has that, but I'm surely realizing the dwindling numbers in Ffxi are due to people switching to ffxiv.

Let me ask you this.......if you have all the best armor, weapons, and storyline finished what do you then? Sit around at the auction house all day? Fish with your Ebisu fishing rod for sh*** and giggles?

Look, I don't want the game to end, but Square-Enix is driving towards that with ridiculous expansions (Abyssea, SoA) and extreme stats on weapons and armor.

[Demon6324236]

Does age affect the game? Of course, I wont say that the game is unaffected by its age. But that does not mean that all our issues now are caused by it primarily. There have been a lot of new games in the past including FFXIV, and while I know that being what it is, FFXIV is taking some people, I don't think that it alone is causing what we have seen recently. For this to happen so fast, I think it was a combo of the two, but primarily SoA did the damage, FFXIV was just assisting it, because while I know some people who would never quit, they looked at what this is becoming, and saw FFXIV as another FF game which may fill the void, as such, they left.

[FrankReynolds]

So your argument is that time is killing FFXI faster because the game is old, its not the fact that they turned the game upside down in a way that the majority of players seem to hate and a way which seems to be increasing the gap between players, preventing more people from catching up?

No...

Sorry to tell you, SoA and the changes it brought were the strike that did all of the damage this time, that we see right now. Some people liked XP, to them, Abyssea will always be an issue because it effectively killed all later level XP parties. However, just because Abyssea did this, does not mean that Abyssea caused issues in the game, many people hated it, more so than liked it probably, because of the way it was done. Many people do not miss XP parties themselves, rather, the social aspect of it all, something which was seemingly lost on Abyssea, because people do not talk, though really the people to blame for that are the people you are in a party with, who don't talk, when you easily could.

Or to sum it up: AFK people don't talk. Abyssea parties still have about the same level of discussion that 6 man parties had... 6 people participating and chatting.

For what it's worth, I never talked much in 6 man exp parties anyways. They were a boring necessity. I generally joined, did my job well and talked to my girlfriend who was sitting right next to me instead of chatting up the other people (who usually didn't speak English anyways). I didn't really make any friends in FFXI until I joined an end game LS and I didn't really do much leveling with them because we rarely had compatible jobs / levels / schedules to make it work ( I was in several large shells).

This is not to say that I didn't have fun chats and meet a few people in exp parties, but that it was at a negligible level of occurrence.


If I was to level GEO years ago, I cant say I think it would get invited often, and I know for a fact RUN wouldn't without being /NIN so it might possibly tank. So yes, you might see '67 GEO LFP' but you would see that all day, without an invite, like many other jobs. One of the larger issues with the old days of leveling was that. Abyssea helped make leveling easy and fast, rather than annoying & slow. Abyssea had issues and flaws, but it was not the main cause of our issues, not even close.

I wouldn't have leveled it at all.

[RabidInfant]

Hello everyone, first post on these forums by me.

I think the reason(s) why FFXI is declining is purely different for each person.

I can only speak for myself but I have played this game since UK x360 beta release and I still play on the x360 now, in all of that time FFXI has been a drug running through my veins, there have been many many days where switching the x360 on and logging in has been the first thing I have done in the morning and logging off has often been the last thing I have at night, not unlike many of you I suspect.

In all of that time of me playing FFXI I have been a constant player, always subscribed, never inactive and always thrilled to be playing the game and never wanting it to end. But for every light there must be a dark, and here is mine, albeit very selfish and to some maybe even petty...

I finally after many months of work obtained my twashtar 85 around March 2012, I had solo'd and duo'd all of the paths to that point, had many hours of work, many hours of tediousness, many frustrations along the way, I was doing it all on DNC and SMN and had help off a BLU, the amount of mobs we killed with no KI still haunts me, but we carried on when we could, for months.

I wanted the twashtar for my DNC, so on I plugged until I got there, the first time I equipped my level 80 twash I stood in my moghouse looking at myself not wanting to venture into Jueno where others would see I didn't yet have rudra's storm, then finally after soloing all the KI mobs and then Itza some 35ish times I eventually got my 85 twash, and I think for 1 week I just stood in Jueno, proud and content, and at level 85 it sat, quit happily until February 2013 when I got it to level 90... 'that's it' I thought, I was content, I had a dagger that I felt warranted all the effort, I felt good, using the dagger felt good and I actually felt like it was all worth the massive effort I had put into obtaining it.

I looked forward (naively) to SoA release so I could run around and poke mobs with my shiny level 90 twash, I thought to myself I should be able to get into some partys with this dagger, its not the best it can be but it was still very usable (pre SoA)...

So SoA comes, I was not expecting new weapons to absolutely and completely blitz my hard work in the blink of an eye, suddenly my heart sank, I do actually remember the feeling of almost betrayal, like I was laughed at by SE, and everything I had tried to achieve previously was now seemingly all for nothing... I cant tell you how so very very near I was to quiting right there, the game I love so much, I was very very close (and depending on the November update I kind of still am).

Now it is not just all about my hard work on the twashtar, I had slowly been putting together gear for MNK, WAR and a few other jobs, and all of that seemed to get blitzed too, all what felt like over night... I was semi-useful at one point, then I was obsolete, in the blink of an eye...

Part of me will never forgive SE for this, I don't see them the same now, I would not put that much effort into one item again, I know it's only a game but it's a game that does demand many hours of effort for reward, or at least it used to... pre SoA.

So I have a level 90 twashtar, and I still don't know if it's going to be worthless in the November update or not, if it is only level 99 EMR's that get 'updated' then what's the point, 90% (guessing sorry) of all EMR owners do not have them to level99 and probably wont either due to either a lack of funds, or availability of HMP's, there just is not enough on the server to sustain how many people would like to upgrade, even if it was just 20 people looking to go from 90-95 it would still need 30,000 HMP to be in circulation, which is completely insane really, then there's the riftdross...

So for me at least that is why FFXI declined, that's my story... yours may be different but that's how I feel and I still don't know where I will be in 3 weeks time after the next update... I am finding it a little hard to commit fully and whilst it is difficult to put into words how it really feels, I have tried.

Thankyou for reading.

Rabid.

[FrankReynolds]

Your Aby/seacom stuff is also meaningless, because we got LevelSynch which means you can party with friends or anyone at a lower level if you can't get party for your current level. Ffxi would still be a popular game if it had 6-man partying using level-synch to augment available members and available camps. Aby alliances turned people into zombies and then they got bored and quit the game.

:confused:

Level Synch: I saw two things going on with this. People didn't do it because exp was way slower even when you had a good party and the parties were far less likely to be good at lower levels. Low level camps were usually annoying to get to as well.

The biggest use of level sych that I experienced was people synching to 37ish and partying on colibri in past zones. A lot of time, the level synch person didn't have to do anything at all. It was abyssea on a smaller scale.

Gear didn't scale correctly, so not only was the person who synched down frustrated by his crappy gear, but so was the rest of the party. DOes anyone really want to have to carry gear for every level for each job? Nope.

It had very little effect on the problems people faced finding groups.

[saevel]

The only reason you see FFXI subscriptions declining is the player base has gotten older and now has children, careers and lives. Much of the older FFXI content was based on gigantic time sinks that forced you to commit large amounts of time to get anything accomplished due to group focused play. As the game got older the player-base split into two halves, the people who have actual lives outside the game and can only afford to play a few hours per week (per week not per day), and the people who still devote a few hours per day (averaged) to the game. This split has only gotten wider and people naturally leave over time, with no advertising or other ways to attract new players the game's total population has slowly dwindled.

The only reason you see people quitting during expansion releases is that they had already wanted to quit and were simply holding out hoping ~something~ changed. Of course there was no magical land on the other side of the new expansion rainbow and they get depressed, quit and complain about it.

[vienne]

Level Synch: I saw two things going on with this. People didn't do it because exp was way slower even when you had a good party and the parties were far less likely to be good at lower levels. Low level camps were usually annoying to get to as well.

The biggest use of level sych that I experienced was people synching to 37ish and partying on colibri in past zones. A lot of time, the level synch person didn't have to do anything at all. It was abyssea on a smaller scale.

Gear didn't scale correctly, so not only was the person who synched down frustrated by his crappy gear, but so was the rest of the party. DOes anyone really want to have to carry gear for every level for each job? Nope.

It had very little effect on the problems people faced finding groups.

I found lvl sync to be fantastic and exactly what this game needed to make it more accesible and not lose its character.
I dont recall pt'ing always on birds when they implemented it, sure we did but if those camps were taken people always were up for doing one of the older camps (we still did alot of garlaige in that time and also alot in ToAU areas, yes i know it was on birds too, even the horrible dunes were still regularly used).
In the lvl sync era there were other ways to exp too... campaign battle anyone? I got alot of exp there even afer they nerfed skill ups. There just were more options, then go to altepa and do a doll pt.
When doing birds in a lvl sync pt in the past as a thf, you still had to be aware of the most efficient way to pull birds btw, which is a totally different case in abyssea. The fights, although yes at times equally monotones, were more challenging then alliances in aby.
Being frustrated about crappy gear? Happened to me two days ago when i did skirmish for the first time and everyone else had better gear. Thought that was a part of the game >.> Noone brought gear to pt in cause they had to scale down, never have i heared people complain about that, they just came in w/e they had in their inv.
Finding groups was alot easier then before lvl sync, i'm starting to wonder if you ever joined a lvl sync pt...

[FrankReynolds]

I go to abbysea on samurai, swap to blm, swap to bard, swap to dancer etc. all the time. I talk to people in the group and I have a good time. Then, when I get tired, if I feel like staying, I tell the leader I'm going afk and if he wants to kick me, he does.

I really don't get this crap about scenery. Parties never roamed much (trolls was a minor exception I guess).

Traveling to a new camp for the first time EVER was somewhat of an adventure I guess, but after the hundredth time, it's just annoying. There's always that one guy who gets lost, never shows up, falls through a crack, aggros and MPKs the whole group etc. You can keep that crap. I like adventuring when I'm doing missions, quests etc. When I'm going to kill the same mob family 1,000 times in a row, I just want to get there and begin the slaughter.


There are what? 18 possible dominion op camps (random guess)? Name me 18 possible camps at any other level. That's not even counting the hundred other places you can camp without ops which by the way are not the fastest exp and should really only be done if you are specifically trying to leech people in the first place.

All this of course is completely ignoring the fact that if any significant number of people (regardless of what this forum says) actually preferred that old party stuff, it would still be popular... and it isn't.

[Afania]

The only reason you see FFXI subscriptions declining is the player base has gotten older and now has children, careers and lives. Much of the older FFXI content was based on gigantic time sinks that forced you to commit large amounts of time to get anything accomplished due to group focused play. As the game got older the player-base split into two halves, the people who have actual lives outside the game and can only afford to play a few hours per week (per week not per day), and the people who still devote a few hours per day (averaged) to the game. This split has only gotten wider and people naturally leave over time, with no advertising or other ways to attract new players the game's total population has slowly dwindled.

The only reason you see people quitting during expansion releases is that they had already wanted to quit and were simply holding out hoping ~something~ changed. Of course there was no magical land on the other side of the new expansion rainbow and they get depressed, quit and complain about it.

No. You're just using YOUR(or your friend's) experience , and assuming everyone who quit for the same reason.

I've been playing FFXI since 2009, in my past 4 years, there are always ppl quit for personal reasons, new job, new wife/gf, new family, new kids, w/e. There are ppl quit in 2009 due to personal reasons, 2010 too, 2011, 2012, 2013.....there are ppl quitting for personal reasons every year since launch.

I've met high school student/college student every year too, including year 2013. It's not like in 2013 suddenly everyone's 30~40s.

I've been paying attention to amount of ppl online since SoA launch during JP prime time(10pm JPT), in March/April there were easily 2.6k~3k players, in July there are were around 2.4k, when 14 launched there were 1.7k and 1 month after launch only 1.4k left.

2.4k------>1.4k in 2 months. 40% player depopped in 2 months.

Do you honestly think 40% of players suddenly got a new job/family/kids in 2 months, out of nowhere?

You argued that ppl quit during expansion release because they were "holding out hoping something changed", if that's the case, we'd see 1.4k player in March/April, because that's when they should quit if they're really waiting for a change in SoA.

But we didn't, so it's safe to say the reason why ppl quit is irrelevant to having new family/job and waiting for a change.

Why players quit, the answer is very, very simple. It's the same reason why every other MMO on the market is declining.

There are not enough content, especially after SoA.

MMORPG is about having stuff to do to keep players around, if you run out of stuff to do, you cancel account. No one can deny this golden rule.


SoA content made all 4 previous expansion completely pointless to do, all you left is delve delve and delve.

Assuming you're a casual player, your pt is just avg pt which takes 40 min~45 min to kill tojil, and you never win lot on Oat so you have to farm plasm for it.

It takes less than 3hr to to get the best weapon in game.

THREE HOURS, in an MMORPG.

Let's assume you're super casual, you can only play 1 hour a week. It's going to take you 3 weeks to get an Oat. Last time I checked, SE doesn't release new content every 3 weeks.

What do you do after you get the best weapon in game? You go to SE account management and cancel sub, lol. It's not like there's anything else worth obtaining anymore since every other content outdated.

Populations are declining, because most hardcore players got Oat in June and quit, then semi-hardcore players got Oat in July and quit, then avg player got Oat in Aug and quit, then semi casual players got Oat in Sept and quit......players are clearing the content and getting best gears, hardcore or casual. And SE simply can't release content to keep up.

If they're making players getting best weapon in 3 hours, they need to release new content every 3 weeks at least. If they release delve 2 in august, delve 3 in sept, delve 4 in Oct maybe we'll still have 1.8k players instead of 1.4k players.


Now they hand out items too fast, and unable to release content just as fast, on the same time outdating 11 years worth of old content.......that's why everyone quit.

I know everyone loves getting gears super fast and easy....but I'm sorry, giving away best gears in 3 hour isn't going to keep a MMORPG alive, it's going to kill it. There's a reason why MMORPG is timesink, because it's the most effective way to keep players around. If you can't keep players around you get empy servers nobody stays.

[vienne]

K, so its storytime.
This week I seem to have adopted 2 totally fresh players, for some reason I was the chosen one to help them out. I gave them a shell, I showed them how to make a voke macro, showed them where to exp, what the FoV books were for and gave a rough explanaton of what they could expect in the near future...
Two days later I log in and I get asked for help, someone ran them to Jeuno while they're lvl18 and told them to put their homepoint in Jeuno >< And if I could please run one of them back to windurst cause they didnt get the mea-crystal KI, they didnt have enough tabs from FoV to get repatriated so they had no means to get back to windurst, they also had no clue about what mobs aggro and what not, no clue on how to play their job in general.
I just can imagine what's gonna happen when they hit lvl30 and do the whole aby-leech thing. It must be so boring and they're not even gonna learn how this game works while doing that!
There absolutely is no incentive to do missions, quests, exploration, learn mob behaviour etcetc. Just rush your way to 99 and go do endgame cause there really is no need to do anything else atm.
I bet in 2 months they'll be bored out of their mind and just quit, cause this game has forced them to be less then average players (and no not everyone wants to watch youtube or read wiki to learn how to play) and the world seems very small, while in fact the world/content/lore is huge.

[FrankReynolds]

Well, obviously you don't see the point, Altep doll ops for lvl 30-99, means you are spending 69 levels in the same camp, watching the same 10~ dolls getting pwned by lvl99 players. There is no music or scenery to speak of and no variety for 69 levels. Lvl 15-75 pre-2010 was hundreds of different camps, allover Vanadiel. The dunes, QI, Yuhtunga/Yhoator jungles, Garlaige Citadel, Crawler's nest, West Altepa, Quicksand Caves, Labyrinth of Onzozo, Valley of Sorrows, Cape Terrigan, then the six main TOAU zones we xped in from 60~ to 75, WOTG campaign battles, etc.. All those zones have unique and interesting scenery, unique background music, unique mobs. If you can't see the difference between all that and 69 lvls of dolls in one single map grid next to the Dom Ops smurf, then you are beyond reasoning with.

And... There are a hundred camps in abyssea. The only difference is that instead of doing one camp at level 15-18 then another at 18-23 then another at 23-30 etc... You are doing one camp on bard, then another camp on red mage, then another camp on ninja, then... Get the point? All that changed was the level. There are still just as many camps.

And again... All those other camps you named are still available.


Yes theres lots of different dom ops camps. I don't have a problem with dom ops camps, for lvl 75+ parties, or solo lvl 85+. I've said lots of times I like the Abyssea expansion, for lvl 75-99 jobs. I have a problem with zombie alliances which are uniformly at Altepa flux 8. Sixty-nine lvls of turning pages in a Dom Ops book in that one single place is totally fail, compared to 69 lvls in fast-paced and fun xp parties allover vanadiel.

LMAO "fast-paced and fun xp parties allover vanadiel."... Yeah, actually at each level range there were maybe three camps where you could get "Good exp" and they were shared by a lot more people back then.

Here's the rub. If you didn't have competition for pulls (And thus a slow paced party), that meant that there weren't many people exping at your level... which meant what? That's right! Building a group was a pain in the arse. LFG is hardly what one should call "Fast paced and exciting".

If you did have competition, that meant what? That's right! You were in a slow party that couldn't pull at a fast enough pace to be considered "Fast paced and exciting".

That's ignoring the requirement that you have the correct jobs. That problem is virtually nonexistent in abyssea.

And to reiterate: Scenery... it's still there. You can see it at any time. It has never been unavailable. Ever. It won't go away. It has no level requirement. It has no time limit. It doesn't care what job you are. It just exists for your viewing pleasure.


"Begin the slaughter" isn't really what FFxi partying was about. It was about party-dynamics, balanced and cohesive teamwork parties keeping xp-chains going against IT++ mobs using game-skills and determination.

None of what you just said describes walking for 30 minutes across a giant map full of recycled scenery in order to get to a camp that may be taken or to which all of your members may not make it. All you did was elaborate on my description of fighting. How is this a valid counterpoint?


Playing your particular job with skill, and working well in the party unit. That FFXI game doesnt exist in Aby ops when you can solo one-shot the mobs and run around with temps and atmas keeping you on 100%hp.
:confused:

So to be clear: You're mad because joey over there is in group with level one gear doing nothing. But, for some unkown reason, YOU can't get in a group unless you are geared / atmaed to the teeth huh? Have you tried it without the atmas? Cuz it sounds like SE put hard mode in the game and you (and everyone else) chose not to do it. :Confused:

[nyheen]

would like to know how SE plan on fixing this. it already broken once they threw the "easy mode" on. sad seeing them numbers staying around 400-500 normal on Bismarck and other servers, rarely little to no shouts happening since everyone in godmode and can one shot all the older area. now it just delve, skirmish and that starting to die down with no one joining.

with the way things are going now and i never said this before and i did not wanted this to happen but.... it really looks like it dying :(. too me it looked like SE wanted this to happen because i cant believe they didn see this coming with SoA

[predatory]

Get your act together SE, and give us some real content and not just a little bit here and there, we paid $30 for an expansion that is damn near unplayable with its lack of things to do, reives, wkr, monstrosity, and delve bfd, we expect a lot more from you than this. You gave us less content on the release of SoA than you used to give us with our version updates when the game was younger, and I'm sure I'm not the only person on these forums that remember those updates. I don't know what you people are thinking, but I spend my real life money to play this game, and it consumes my real life time, the least you can do is give me enough content to make it worth what I spend

[nyheen]

was watching some old ff xp pt videos thinking wow things changed. remember the time when you joined in a xp pt deck out thinking with your job iam so bada$$ owning s@#$! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbA-VV2yoIg) but not anymore if it like this.. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e17AjF_fILU) dont feel the same

[Arcon]

Well, obviously you don't see the point, Altep doll ops for lvl 30-99, means you are spending 69 levels in the same camp, watching the same 10~ dolls getting pwned by lvl99 players. There is no music or scenery to speak of and no variety for 69 levels. Lvl 15-75 pre-2010 was hundreds of different camps, allover Vanadiel. The dunes, QI, Yuhtunga/Yhoator jungles, Garlaige Citadel, Crawler's nest, West Altepa, Quicksand Caves, Labyrinth of Onzozo, Valley of Sorrows, Cape Terrigan, then the six main TOAU zones we xped in from 60~ to 75, WOTG campaign battles, etc.. All those zones have unique and interesting scenery, unique background music, unique mobs. If you can't see the difference between all that and 69 lvls of dolls in one single map grid next to the Dom Ops smurf, then you are beyond reasoning with.

It's true, seeing those places was new, fun, sometimes even exciting. But that only applied for the first time, and honestly, they were more fun when I was exploring them for missions and quests, not getting to spot, waiting up to an hour for the last guy to arrive to kill one mob over and over and usually not seeing much of the zone anyway. The "hundreds" of camps you mentioned are about a dozen. That is not enough to last you several years worth of playing. The music was good, but also not good enough to not piss you off after days of hearing it. All in all, I don't understand this argument in the first place, because you mentioned yourself that you don't have a problem with Dom Op camps themselves here:


Yes theres lots of different dom ops camps. I don't have a problem with dom ops camps, for lvl 75+ parties, or solo lvl 85+. I've said lots of times I like the Abyssea expansion, for lvl 75-99 jobs. I have a problem with zombie alliances which are uniformly at Altepa flux 8. Sixty-nine lvls of turning pages in a Dom Ops book in that one single place is totally fail, compared to 69 lvls in fast-paced and fun xp parties allover vanadiel.

So if the camps are fine, all the talk about music and scenery is useless when it's the mentality of the people that pisses you off. You simply don't want people to do what they like, because it's stopping you from doing what you like, which is slow EXP. You want people to form an EXP party with, something they simply don't enjoy, hence aren't doing it anymore.

Now you go on about how Abyssea leeching is fail, ignoring the fact that people simply don't care about EXP. Then you try to pull some arguments out of your ass to defend your opinion, like the music and scenery stuff above, or calling old EXP "fast-paced" (which is one of the most ridiculous claims I've ever heard) or making up stuff about how old EXP parties required skill, as in here:


"Begin the slaughter" isn't really what FFxi partying was about. It was about party-dynamics, balanced and cohesive teamwork parties keeping xp-chains going against IT++ mobs using game-skills and determination. Playing your particular job with skill, and working well in the party unit.

What you described here is not how EXP parties worked. There was no skill required, at all. The only places where skill was required was endgame, always. And that's precisely the reason why people argue against you that EXP parties weren't important, because that's not where the real game was to most people. It's true that Abyssea parties require no skill whatsoever, but that's about the only thing they have in common with old school parties.

Also, Skillchains and Magic Bursts slowed down party EXP in many cases. The only reason to use that was when the mob was so tough that you probably shouldn't be fighting it for EXP in the first place, i.e. if you chose the wrong camp, underleveled party, horrible gear, etc. If that's something you learned during EXP, it actually made you a worse player for it if you tried to apply that to endgame.

And that's the thing about EXP parties. They did not teach people how to play. That is a horrible misconception that I hear people repeat over and over again in these arguments. All EXP parties taught people was how to play in EXP parties. It's an entirely self-contained system. All of the things required in almost every endgame event were just not covered in EXP parties, and that is not a coincidence. Endgame is all about skill and dangerous mobs and hard gameplay. EXP is all about the opposite and that is not just in Abyssea, that has always been the case, because tough mobs were deliberately avoided for EXP purposes.

In your world people fought tough mobs in EXP parties, but that's not true. IT++ doesn't mean tough. An IT++ crab is still just a crab. It hits harder, but it uses the standard attack most of the time, no dangerous TP moves, no special traits or abilities, no linking. And that makes sense, because people have always sought out the path of least resistance, even in your magical EXP days. Hence they chose mobs that were easy to EXP on. That includes crabs, colibris and crawlers. That does not include any BLM mobs, any mobs with dangerous AoE moves, any mobs with high linking chance or any mobs with high damage resistance. Take skeletons for example. They take reduced damage from slashing and piercing weapons which are the prevalent weapons in EXP parties, hence almost no one EXP'd on them. Who did? MNK burns, why? Because skeletons have actually reduced damage resistance to blunt damage, hence they make it easier than regular mobs for them.

Hence, everything that endgame is full of is precisely not what is covered during the EXP phase. Not just now, but never. I played three jobs to 75 over the course of four years, and here is everything I learned during that time:
- Valkurm Emperor is not an EXP mob
- Voke if you're the tank
- Line up for SATA
- Don't even think about EXP unless you have at least three hours to spare
- Skillchains and Magic Bursts are not worth it

The last one isn't always the case, but the times it isn't the situations are very different (like The Hills Are Alive). And here is what of that applied to endgame back in the day (it doesn't anymore):
- Line up for SATA

And that one was only relevant if you were tanking a sky god or something. All you could really hope for was that you memorized some mob behavior during that time, aside from that EXP was just unrelated to everything else in FFXI. It was its own mini-game with little to no application to the real game.

[Arcon]

That is totally wrong. [...] We disagree fundamentally on this and neither of us will change our minds so I leave this point.

You can disagree on opinions, not on facts. With facts, one person is right, the other is wrong. You're wrong, and here's why:


You played a job relentlessly in slow xp parties, [..]

Relentlessly repetitively.


[..] learned which abilities and spells worked in situations, which could be used in any endgame situation. [..]

Give me an example.


[..] You learned about not overnuking, [..]

You learned that overnuking is bad, but not when you overnuke, because the boundaries are different on weak mobs and endgame mobs. They are even different among endgame mobs and the only way to learn that was doing endgame. EXP did not give you a feeling for that whatsoever, because it was not behaving the same way.

The consequences themselves were also different and much more harmless in EXP. Overnuking in EXP situations was a "dude chill" type of scenario whereas during an event it could mean a wipe.

Not to mention most events did not need to differentiate between regular nuking and overnuking, because the mobs that were nuked were either timed to kill or kited or manaburned entirely, where overnuking is not an issue.


[..] which WHM spells drew the most hate, [..]

No, you most certainly did not. WHM drawing hate was almost never an issue, and at the times it was it was unavoidable anyway, because people had to be kept alive, so you can't just hold back on curing. The strategies involved in curing are not very applicable before endgame, because there's not much variation. There's usually only one healer in EXP parties, so they can't switch that, hate has rarely time to build up, because weak mobs die quickly, there's almost no variation in spells to choose from before higher levels and very little sub job options to consider. The only thing you learned is that Flash can be dangerous and should not be used at the start of the battle.


[..] you learned SC and MB, [..]

You learned to time it, nothing else. You will still have to look up SCs all the time. And those are very rarely relevant in endgame situations (just like EXP situations, only slow and/or bad parties used them).


[..] you learned how to effectively ration MP, [..]

No, most certainly not. First of all, you can't even ration MP at lower levels, because there are not many options to conserve MP before the high levels. Unless your idea of rationing MP is to just not cure people. And even when you get them it's usually straightforward because you are not fighting difficult mobs. You rarely have to choose between removing a crippling status effect and curing a player in the orange, because those situations don't come up. I'm not even aware of any EXP mob that paralyzes. A crawler's slow is probably the worst you can get there.

Second, there is simply no need to ration MP. If a WHM's MP gets low, they say something like "need MP" and the puller goes for a smoke. Yet another luxury you don't have at endgame. After a triple link, you raise people then go on a break while you recover.


[..] you learned about elemental weaknesses of mobs vs summons and nukes, [..]

You generally don't, because most mobs you fight don't have them (unless you solo EXP, that is different entirely and much more relevant to endgame, both on pet and mage jobs).


[..] casting spell while tanking on PLD or NIN, [..]

Timing cures between melee attacks, you got me. That's one thing I did learn.


[..] etc.etc.etc.etc. you learned the fundamental game mechanics of survival.

Again, you learned fundamental game mechanics of surviving EXP parties. Which, in my case, was lots of coke and aspirin.


Also, and this is key to my point, repeatedly playing a job for years, makes you play it as 'second-nature', this allows for split-second decisions to be made, which you can not make if it is your first month in the job.

Very true. Unfortunately you don't play your job during the EXP phase. Every single job plays differently at endgame and you'll have to rethink everything you've learned again. You never kite during EXP parties, you don't do crowd control, assisting people, mob priorities, terrain usage, splitting of mob duties among alliance members, high buff situations, deal with crippling status effects like Paralyze, Zombie or Weakness, deal with heavy AoE damage, conal and gaze attacks, positional attacks and mob positioning, etc.

So the things you did learn were timing related, because that's the only thing that takes practice. Timing SCs/MBs and timing spell casting for tanks. And here's the thing: once you've learned them, what then? Once you spent a whole party doing that, you pretty much have it down. Sure, you can improve a little more with time, but is that why you should spend months doing something you dislike, not just for one job, but over and over again for all other jobs?


Long term goals. We had them. And now we don't.

Also very true. And EXP was never part of any goals. I agree with most of what you said about content itself, only EXP isn't content, it's filler. We're currently lacking a lot of it because SE tries their best to make everything outside of SoA obsolete. But that only happened recently. Even after Abyssea people were still doing almost everything that was ever introduced. Dynamis, sky, Limbus, sea, KS99s, Salvage, Assaults/NI (and more recently NNI), etc. So obviously the lack of content was not related to the EXP increase, because that was three years ago, and it was going fine for a long time, until people slowly got bored of the lack of updates.

So you're saying that the solution to that is to force people to slowly play all their jobs to 99 in zones they've been to a thousand times, with unchallenging mobs they've fought a million times, just so people keep playing more? What's the point of playing anyway then? I wouldn't even call that playing at all. It's the same as calling a person who logs on and idles in their Mog House all day an active player. Because the two things are about just as challenging and just as entertaining.

[Arcon]

If that were true, you would still be level 1 on all jobs.

Level 75 was not a goal, but a requirement.


As a point of note, cure 3 spammed repeatedly drew less hate than cure 4 cast occasionally. C4 carried a heavy enmity load. We learned that while xping. Yes SE have changed enmity dynamics recently, but that was the old system and hence my example of it.

That was never the case and shows just that EXPing for a lifetime will not make you a good player. Enmity has been tested thoroughly (before the changes) and documented. Cure 3 and Cure 4 (and 1 and 2) follow the exact same formula. The only reason why Cure 4 drew more hate was because it cured more HP. If it cured twice as much, it net you twice as much enmity.


We disagree on everything it seems and your points in your last post are totally invalid imho, however I politely said we disagree, which you leapt on and said "no we don't disagree - I'm right and you are wrong" which makes me REALLY glad I don't have to talk to you in real life or socialise with you.

I gave a good reason for that. Disagree all you want, you're still wrong.


FFXI was a huge success, a stand alone classic online game, DURING THE SLOW PROGRESS YEARS. Since it got made into a super easy to beat game, it has crashed into the ground in flames.

Out of curiosity, what recent content did you ever beat? Did you beat NNI? Did you beat Legion? Did you beat Odin II? How about old content, did you beat Absolute Virtue? Pandemonium Warden?

Slow progress is good. SE can't handle fast progress, as they've proved repeatedly now. Slow progress keeps people playing. Slow progress ensures that previous achievements don't go to waste. Slow progress makes for a better rounded game.

EXP is not that slow progress, EXP is no progress. EXP kept you from progressing. Dynamis was slow progress. Sea was slow progress. Sky was slow Progress. Limbus, Einherjar, Salvage, everything that wasn't EXP related was slow progress. That was what kept the game alive, that was part of what made the game great. EXP had absolutely no part in it. I played the game without EXPing for years and I was highly active in all those years. What do you think I was doing? What do you think everyone else is doing? Some people had better things to do than screenshot 20 Lv.75 jobs in their MH. That was not what I played for. Having a job at 75 meant nothing.

Many people felt they could quit a job when it was at 75, and that's the part I never understood. Leveling itself needs to have a purpose. If you only level to level, what's the point? You level to beat new content, to experience new things, to explore the remaining game, which is huge. Out of all the possible activities the game offers, leveling never claimed more than 10% of it (pulled it out of my ass, it's figurative). There were so many events that I rarely even found the time to EXP anymore (which was good and bad, good because I didn't have to put up with it, bad because I wanted THF at 75 back then). So even with that dead, the game would still very much be alive. The fact that it isn't shows that the problem lies far beyond just EXP.

[predatory]

Acron I don't know where or when you started playing but almost everything you listed is absolutely wrong in pre ToAU xp parties. You must have never leveled on lizards or scorpions, or exorays, or any number of mobs that used status effects and links against you, and we certainly did learn mob positioning, and back then sc coupled with mb were a big part of endgame. I knew many ls leaders who would rather have 2 dds sc so 15 blms could mb on Kirin than any other set up because kirin went down fast with that combo.

Stompa is absolutely right those xp parties you so easily sneer about were the training grounds, and if you couldn't do your job there, word got out about you, and you could never get in a decent shell, because it wasn't just a bunch of mindless zombies in those parties, there were endgame ls leaders leveling subs or second jobs, there were people from those same endgame shells leveling, at the time it was a big society, and a person was exposed to more people than he really knew he was meeting. The word got out about top notch players, and they were invited to join the shells that covered all spectrums of endgame, whereas alot of other players joined different shells to do different events.

The difference between good players and great players came from alot of trial and error done in those xp proving grounds that you so casually sneer about. At the time allakhazam.com was about the only site that offered any kind of information about the game so players didn't have the option to look up everything about the game as fast as they could type in a web address, (provided they had a second pc, because there was no windowed mode for the game at the time), and become read up about something, they had to learn it on the fly, or be stuck at low level forever on a desirable job.

I will give you that the learning experience wasn't over once you hit endgame, but the learning curve was much smaller by that time, and as long as you had the abiltiy to read directions before an event or ask questions then you fell right into the roll you were assigned by the job(s) you had chosen to level. If you made it to endgame and didn't know your job thoroughly you were immediately removed from the shell you had just joined, easy as that. People now are forgiving and willing to guide people, and show them the ropes at endgame, back then we didn't end of story.

The endgame you keep talking about has changed as well because let's face it, there really hasn't been any endgame for a very long time, back when CoP came out if you missed the missions your shell had done that day you better catch up before the next event, and you better do it on your time, meaning you better not be doing it during an hnm, dynamis, or sky run, which of course left very little time to actually get it done on your own.

I agree with Stompa the march to 75 is much too easy now, with helpful people you can take your first job from 1-99 in a matter of days, it takes less than a week after that to be totally skilled up, and within two weeks of that you can be all decked out in skirmish and delve gear, thinking you know something about the game, when you basically don't know shit about your job much less the game, and no, running around keying doesn't teach you anything about anything, other than how to run around opening boxes with a key

[detlef]

Cure V is special. But wasn't the original comparison between III and IV?

Aside from that, I hated leveling. For the longest time I only had a single job, BRD. It took me about 4 years before I leveled a second job because I found XP so tedious. And this was at a time when BRD and RDM were very desired. I can't even imagine leveling something like THF back then. If Abyssea hadn't come along I would have missed out on getting to play SCH, DRG, WHM, and a host of other jobs.

I guess XPing can teach you the basics, but it really just hits you over the head with the same thing over and over. You learn so much more about how to be a better player by doing endgame.

[vienne]

[QUOTE=Arcon;474619]... blablablaQUOTE]

Please arcon stop posting you're making my eyes bleed and I didnt have my morning coffee yet. Everyone on here knows your point. You're the sweetest but, we'll never agree on the "lets start the game at 99" idea.
Some people just like to exp (moi) some dont (toi), there should be something for everyone out there. Hating to grind a job didnt keep you from taking that route for your first main jobs. For me exping feels like progress, I find it neat when I hit that next lvl and get to play around with a new ja/ws/ma. I refuse to lvl my jobs in a sleeping aby-doll pt for the only reason that i dont want to pay for a game i dont really play.
and about lining up for SATA... hell i see alot of people do SA these days but never SATA i guess it has its reasons.
Anyways I didnt feel like reading everything you posted I need coffee first O.O

[Demon6324236]

and about lining up for SATA... hell i see alot of people do SA these days but never SATA i guess it has its reasons.Primary reason for SATA is for the enmity & DMG spike. Once you get to level 60 THF, you get the Assassin Job Trait, which makes Trick Attack force a crit on your attack like Sneak Attack does, which eliminates a good part of the extra DMG gained from stacking them, making it more effective to split them up, forcing a crit on 2 separate attacks rather than a single attack.

That's from what I know of THF at very least.

[Afania]

Stuff about you can't learn your job in EXP pt

Learn about your job in EXP pt is not black and white. Your job in endgame may play differently, but there are some mechanics that works in both EXP pt and endgame. They're not completely different.

[Demon6324236]

Can you learn things about your job in XP parties which will be used in EG? Yes, anyone would be a fool to deny it outright. However, most things that can be learned like this should be able to be picked up fairly quickly in my opinion. Nothing, and I mean nothing at all, should take anyone the amount of time it used to take to get from 1 to 75, for a person to learn, understand, and develop the necessary skill to perform something you can learn about your job. No matter where you put it to use, it should never take that long to learn it, or get good at it.

I think if you were active the full time, 1 --> 99 in 3 days would be fine, so long as the person has to participate in the party and do their part. If they had to, then things would be easy to learn in that time frame, skill ups could be accelerated to accommodate that speed of leveling, and all would be fine. The parts you learn are not things that take a super long amount of time to learn, maybe for you to become skillful at, depending on what you are talking about, but not ever something you take that long to actually learn.

That's my take on this argument at least.

[Arcon]

Levelling was part of the game, the act of partying was a fun bonding experience. It was frequently exciting and hilarious.

Your opinion. A valid opinion, but an opinion nonetheless. I have no problems with you enjoying it at all, I never did. I have a few friends who like it, for whatever reason. What I do have a problem with is you stating that leveling was a huge, important part of the game and that that's the reason why the game is declining now.


I'm also calling you on the lie you made a few posts back, which I let you go on it so we could agree to disagree and move on, but you are clearly bent on having a fight so you can have one. There wasn't "a dozen" in the old game as you lied and claimed. TOAU had at least 20 camps alone. Even Mamook had five good spots for xp parties. There were hundreds of xp camps in Vanadiel for lvl 15-75, but you lied and said "there wasnt hundreds there was only about a dozen xp camps in the whole game pre Aby" <paraphrased bcoz I can't be bothered cutpasting your blatant lie>.

Sure, you can call the different locations in Mamook fighting the same 3 mobs different camps, just like you can call the different locations around the Sand Sweepers all different camps. Generally one zone has two to five different locations for camps. They might be in a different location, but they're the same mobs, same tactics, same scenery (again, Mamook is a good example of that). Sometimes lower level mobs are on one map, higher level mobs on another, but the same version of those (see colibris and crabs in all kinds of zones). Whatever. The camps weren't my problem with it, but they were definitely not a selling point either. Maybe more so than Abyssea, but that's hardly an argument, since Abyssea's camps sucked balls.


Re; lack of new content is why the game is failing. That is pure BS. People kept their FFXI accounts active even when they had to work 2 years for a single Raja's Ring, the old game offered far less gear/endgame content, and yet people kept logging in and playing it. Because it was a challenge, and involved long term effort.

That's not true. The old game offered roughly the same endgame content there is now. They added new battlefields, but they can be breezed through quickly, and that is the key difference. In the sheer amount of battlefields, sure there's more. But in the amount of time you can invest into endgame, it actually got reduced significantly, even despite the additions, because old content is so easy to complete and new content is so quick to finish.


And because XPing was a fun party experience, it was exciting and you could shine for a few hours on your best job.

You couldn't. EXP never gave you the chance to shine, because there was no situation where you could. Without challenging mobs you can't exceed. I can brag about solo tanking HNMs. I can't brag about a 1k weapon skill in an EXP party. What situation is there possibly where you can shine? That one time where you survived a double link?


Xping wasnt boring filler. I can say without a hesitation that soloing 75 lvls of Bst in 2004/early 2005, was the most nerve-wracking excitement life/death surviving-on-your-wits experience I've had in FFXI totally. It is way beyond any big endgame NM with thousands of teeth. Solo Bst was an adrenaline rush in 2004~. You could die all the time. It was incredibly exciting and rewarding. And it was entirely effort-based oldgame XP.

Despite the absolutely ridiculous claim that it was "beyond any big endgame NM with thousands of teeth", I'll let this slide because it was a solo effort. Those are generally much more than regular EXP parties, both in terms of required skill and relevance to endgame content. That is not what I mean by EXP party. I solo'd both Black Mage and Scholar on pets, so I know what that entails, and I also know that EXP parties don't compare at all to it. Which brings me back to ridiculous:


Xp parties too. Excitement. Crawler's Nest basement, "secret room". The puller leaves the hidden wall and goes to find a fly in the big room. The party waits in the secret room, resting MP. What will come through the secret door? One fly? Five flies? Two flies and an exoray? Can we survive? Excitement. Novelty. Each pull could bring a new dynamic situation that required teamwork and sometimes luck just to survive. Thats a bonding friendship-making experience, and a TEST OF SKILLS.

Cute that you think that. If you consider that a test of skill, you probably didn't even stand a chance in Dynamis.


You won't see any of that in your monocamp doll ops 'sleep for 69 lvls' new game.

Stop bringing that argument please. You don't need to convince me that Abyssea EXP is lame. I know. Abyssea EXP sucks balls. It's horribly boring and unproductive. The difference between us is, that I think the same thing about regular EXP. However, in Abyssea it only takes a few days instead of months. A few days of boring repetitive content beats months of boring repetitive content. Even more so if you can afk in the meantime and do something fun instead. That's how I see it. I know you disagree, and again, that's fine.


Acron I don't know where or when you started playing but almost everything you listed is absolutely wrong in pre ToAU xp parties. You must have never leveled on lizards or scorpions, or exorays, or any number of mobs that used status effects and links against you, and we certainly did learn mob positioning, and back then sc coupled with mb were a big part of endgame.

I didn't play much back then, and it may have been different, but not by much. Simply because mobs that can successfully prepare you for endgame do not exist outside of endgame. Sure, a scorpion can paralyze. A lizard can petrify. And that's all they can do. You may learn what those status effects are and how to cure them, big whoop. You don't need a several months long repetitive course to learn that, one look at the wiki page is enough. And you still won't know what to do when your entire alliance is hit by all of them at once. It may have been more of a challenge back then, and if it was, it might have also been more fun back then. But after that, it wasn't. And post-ToAU was the longest period of the game's life and that was a time during which the game was thriving.

[Afania]

Can you learn things about your job in XP parties which will be used in EG? Yes, anyone would be a fool to deny it outright. However, most things that can be learned like this should be able to be picked up fairly quickly in my opinion. Nothing, and I mean nothing at all, should take anyone the amount of time it used to take to get from 1 to 75, for a person to learn, understand, and develop the necessary skill to perform something you can learn about your job. No matter where you put it to use, it should never take that long to learn it, or get good at it.

I think if you were active the full time, 1 --> 99 in 3 days would be fine, so long as the person has to participate in the party and do their part. If they had to, then things would be easy to learn in that time frame, skill ups could be accelerated to accommodate that speed of leveling, and all would be fine. The parts you learn are not things that take a super long amount of time to learn, maybe for you to become skillful at, depending on what you are talking about, but not ever something you take that long to actually learn.

That's my take on this argument at least.

EXP pt serves more purpose than "learn your job" though. It's more like a way to social and have a feel of "A long journey to endgame". You can make a RPG hitting cap in 1 day, then when you're finally at max level it won't feel the same....some gaming experience needs time to develop, like how a film needs to be 3 hours long instead of 30 min, and novel needs 1000 pages to tell a proper story. Only issue in XI is, this game has job change system, so some ppl may lv 2nd or 3rd job and has to go through that all over again.

[Demon6324236]

In some games, a long journey can be a good thing, when its interactive, and makes you actually do fun things along the way. If a game has a leveling path of sorts which will make you fight encounters which are challenging and entertaining at certain points to actually involve the person. This game, has never been that kind of game, this game has always had experience parties just hacking away at the same type of mob over and over again while pulling another back to camp, sometimes with links, sometimes with additional agro of a higher level mob, but its not ever been the type of experience I would think of as a journey to EG which gives me any sense of growth.

To give my example in your own film analogy, I feel like FFXI's leveling would be the same as having a long backstory take place for over half of my movie, just to get to the part of the movie which happens in present day, the part that should be the meat of my experience, after having explained how the character got to this point. If a game wants the XP portion to be a journey all on its own, it needs to break up that leveling experience with some challenge, and meaty part of its own, to give not only a climb of levels, but a challenge to push yourself and see what you have learned, improved, and how you have grown. The thing is, like I said, FFXI leveling has never felt anywhere close to that for me, even the limit breaks were not close, though that was mostly because they were not fun or entertaining, but rather they were an annoying obstacle in my path to me.

So far as social aspects to it. Socializing can be done anywhere, anytime, XP parties hardly have that as an exclusive thing, even if they did, the same socializing I can do with someone in a Valk Dunes party killing crabs and lizards can be had while I kill worms in Abyssea for 4 hours.

Those kind of arguments have never made sense to me for those reasons.

[Afania]

In some games, a long journey can be a good thing, when its interactive, and makes you actually do fun things along the way. If a game has a leveling path of sorts which will make you fight encounters which are challenging and entertaining at certain points to actually involve the person. This game, has never been that kind of game, this game has always had experience parties just hacking away at the same type of mob over and over again while pulling another back to camp, sometimes with links, sometimes with additional agro of a higher level mob, but its not ever been the type of experience I would think of as a journey to EG which gives me any sense of growth.

To give my example in your own film analogy, I feel like FFXI's leveling would be the same as having a long backstory take place for over half of my movie, just to get to the part of the movie which happens in present day, the part that should be the meat of my experience, after having explained how the character got to this point. If a game wants the XP portion to be a journey all on its own, it needs to break up that leveling experience with some challenge, and meaty part of its own, to give not only a climb of levels, but a challenge to push yourself and see what you have learned, improved, and how you have grown. The thing is, like I said, FFXI leveling has never felt anywhere close to that for me, even the limit breaks were not close, though that was mostly because they were not fun or entertaining, but rather they were an annoying obstacle in my path to me.

So far as social aspects to it. Socializing can be done anywhere, anytime, XP parties hardly have that as an exclusive thing, even if they did, the same socializing I can do with someone in a Valk Dunes party killing crabs and lizards can be had while I kill worms in Abyssea for 4 hours.

Those kind of arguments have never made sense to me for those reasons.

I guess this is just a personal experience type of things.....I've experienced many different ways of lving in other MMOs...do quest, do dungeons, get EXP by exploring maps, do public event, do PVP etc.....but they're all very different from XI 6 man party. And yes, I've done Abyssea worm pt many times too, still different atmosphere and pace from 6 man party. People come and go in worms pt, and often afk. You can't develop same atmosphere in such situation.

You can argue that you can social in dungeons/public event/PVP blah blah, but they're just not the same as XI 6 man party. You usually* don't chat for 3~4hr in those events due the the design mechanic....they don't last as long and you need to focus 100% there's less time to chat. You said you want fun and interactive ways to lv, then you'd see "kill this, sleep that, runnnnn" "pop ballad please" in /p chat rather than "Today my dog had a new baby, so cute :)" "What's the name of your dog?"

6 man party in XI force you to social in a much slower and relax pace, it's like 6 person got stuck in an elevator and has to wait for 3hr for the rescue, so they start chatting and ended up become friends after they're out. If they're not stucked in the elevator they won't say more than hello when they met each other.

I'm not trying to argue 6 man EXP pt is better or worse than Abyssea pt/quest for EXP/public event/PVP/exploration for EXP, just stating they're different in terms of atmosphere and pace, and other means to EXP simply can't replace it.

[Xantavia]

To give my example in your own film analogy, I feel like FFXI's leveling would be the same as having a long backstory take place for over half of my movie, just to get to the part of the movie which happens in present day, the part that should be the meat of my experience, after having explained how the character got to this point. If a game wants the XP portion to be a journey all on its own, it needs to break up that leveling experience with some challenge, and meaty part of its own, to give not only a climb of levels, but a challenge to push yourself and see what you have learned, improved, and how you have grown. The thing is, like I said, FFXI leveling has never felt anywhere close to that for me, even the limit breaks were not close, though that was mostly because they were not fun or entertaining, but rather they were an annoying obstacle in my path to me.
There was always the option to do missions in between your leveling, the first times at least. Your first job, did you get it to 75 before doing city rank 2? The level capped BCNM's (2-3 and 5-1) told me I should break up my leveling and work on those. Think I was only 70 went I first got Rank 10. Solo'd up to the Black Coffin fight for Aht Urgan in my mid-60's when I still enjoyed BST. Maybe you feel that the game doesn't really begin until you hit level cap and can start doing events that drop the best of the best gear. I myself think the journey up to that point is more rewarding. Different people enjoy different things, but we will never agree on where the real meat of game is.

[FrankReynolds]

It's not about where the meat is. If you guys think 6 man old school parties are where it's at then do them. Level synch never went away. The old camps are still there. Nothing changed about that.

What you want is for everyone else to feel like you do. They don't. They don't want to do what you want. If they did, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

[Xantavia]

If the rewards were similar, I think people would still be doing it. But since we are all lazy, the path of least resistance is taken. I know that if a 6-man party offered xp close to the rate that abyssea or GoV pages do, that would be my leveling preference.

[Psxpert2011]

Hello Everyone!

We know there are many reasons. However in this post, Lets see everyone list 1 Reason Why you think FFXI is Declining.

I Figure we must try to get the DEV TEAMS Attention some how?

#1. Share 1 Opinion in a short Comment.
#2. No Criticism, disagreements, or replies to other people who list their opinion.
#3. Stay on topic so we can make it easy for them to see our lists of Opinions.

Disclaimer: Nothing is fact, just opinions on everyone's point of view. Please do not reply to others comments with debates because this is not meant to be a debate from player to player. Only an insight of how each person thinks of FFXI at its current state.

You can make your comment simple or detailed like my first comment below. You can also add other opinions but please try to keep 1 opinion per reply.

Thank you.

Opinion: I'm not going to say FFXI is declining or getting better. I don't have the statistics. It's an individual preference what a real MMORPG should be and how we play.

Reason:Most MMO player are raised in the slow and steady while the new-age is adapted to fast progression and materialism of in-game gear,equipment and cool items. This clearly confuses the community about what the MMO is all about and how it'll grow.

Conclusion: FFXI started out slow, gaining interest using the brand Final Fantasy and displayed slow-paced progression and rewarding us players to a feeling of accomplishment.

Tanaka is gone, the traditions are gone. It's post- RotZ, CoP, ToAU. WotG introduced a "Sandbox" concept and now is under-rated. The fast and furious is here and taking over and it's a New World Order. Why? Because we let it happen.

Solution: Unless you want to start a whole new character to experience the past, I fear there no new content now or in the foreseeable future that'll remedy the damage Abysea has done to Vanadiel. Let's just hope the reverse happens to FFXIV:ARR and the game develops from the fast-paced playing community to tradition RPG-style of MMO with Yoshi-P.

Adventure is defined by the journey not the goal. A sense of accomplishment is rewarded when you beat the odds. There has to be a reason.

[nyheen]

It's not about where the meat is. If you guys think 6 man old school parties are where it's at then do them. Level synch never went away. The old camps are still there. Nothing changed about that.

What you want is for everyone else to feel like you do. They don't. They don't want to do what you want. If they did, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
why do people always bring up the "well old camps are still there, lvl sync still there. go pt there and leave us alone etc" of course it still there. the only thing that piss off lot people is what killed off our camps just like what killed off R/M.E and the other events. it no balance and now i dont even see people pting much at abyssea anymore. since SE, you
& lot of others wanted the game on super sonic speed & easy button well you see the results. hope you guys happy. congratulations for killing it for all of us now!

[FrankReynolds]

why do people always bring up the "well old camps are still there, lvl sync still there. go pt there and leave us alone etc" of course it still there.

The camps are still there. You don't use them. You are the problem. Not me. I quit using them before abyssea. I had red mage, monk, bard, white mage, black mage, samurai, dancer warrior and thief leveled and geared sufficiently to get in just about any event long before abyssea came out. There was a snowballs chance in hell that I was going back to level anything else. In fact, the only reason I did was because of abyssea.


the only thing that piss off lot people is what killed off our camps just like what killed off R/M.E and the other events.

RME have nothing to do with traditional exp. parties. Nothing. No relation. In fact, you can't even use the finished versions until you are done doing exp. parties.


it no balance and now i dont even see people pting much at abyssea anymore.


I don't see people doing much of anything anymore. It has nothing to do with abyssea. The new expansion is a failure. Plain and simple.


since SE, you & lot of others wanted the game on super sonic speed & easy button well you see the results. hope you guys happy. congratulations for killing it for all of us now!

As was previously stated: If people wanted what you want, they would still be doing what you want them to do and this conversation would not be happening.

If people didn't want what you want, they simply wouldn't do it. Taking away the option to level quickly would not have made people go level slowly. They would have just stopped leveling jobs.

[predatory]

I spent 159 merits the day before yesterday. I opened and capped requiescat, and took mnd to level 5, we're talking a weeks worth of oldschool meriting in one day, and as much as I hate meriting, it probably would have been closer to a month for me.

The first job I ever leveled was rng in 2004, and it took a year or better to get it to 75 because I had to stop to farm between each and every level after 50, and those farming runs got longer and longer as the xp necessary to get to 75 came in bigger blocks at each level. It was so ridiculously stupid that to get from level 70-75 you had to gain as much experience points as it took to get from 1-70, camps were over crowded until they came out with ToAU, but even then they only managed to make two camps really worth meriting at.

As much as I really enjoyed the old days, there is no way in hell I want to go back to them, it was a broken leveling system at best, and personally I'm glad Aby is there, it lets me do the necessary grind I have to do to make my char stronger, and it also allows me to do things with my ls, which of course allows me to enjoy the game more.

I say if you want to go do level sync with or without the book, then get some like minded people together and go do it, the only things stopping you are air and opportunity, just let the rest of us level the way we want, without trying to get in our way to do it, because I promise we won't get in yours

[vienne]

@ Frankreynolds (the guy with the most annoying sig ever)
I really dont understand why you keep defending abyssea like this, you're like the abyssea white knight. I assume that everyone who doesnt like abyssea (not so in fact the expansion itself but more the change in mentality that came with it) wants or expects SE to change things to the way they were, everyone accepts that abyssea is here to stay and we'll have to learn to live with it. People just want to point out that they dont want anymore dumbed down content anymore, but you keep interpreting everyone's posts incorrect to a point where you're almost offensive to people who are just sharing their opinion.

[Anjou]

@ Frankreynolds (the guy with the most annoying sig ever)
I really dont understand why you keep defending abyssea like this, you're like the abyssea white knight.

I actually liked Abyssea...there were lots of thingies to look forward to, and it KEPT OLDER CONTENT RELEVANT STILL.

[Tennotsukai]

I liked Abyssea as well. I remember how awesome it felt to hear about new blu spells, make those wishlists, and was very surprised and content with the new spells (except the worthless ones, ie breath spells). Also, blu was pretty good in abyssea so that was another plus.

My idea on why ffxi is declining is a mix of all things. FFXIV is a better game, even though it does not feel like a final fantasy game. Also, Adoulin, although far, far, farrrr short from what it should have been on delivery, it is not all bad. If RMEC's are upgradable after next update, imo, the expansion should have had all content released after official release to include the next update.

The initial expansion was crap, which a lot of people stayed for (several of my friends) and were really disappointed. They probably should have utilized their test servers more for the best feedback available. I'm not positive, but I have very high doubts that anyone that develops this game plays it.

If they did play this game they would realize crap needs fixed, and that this monstrosity element, though interesting and fun, needs delayed more for what the players want (Tourbillion fixed and that damn derpy caitsith)....also RMECs.

[vienne]

I actually liked Abyssea...there were lots of thingies to look forward to, and it KEPT OLDER CONTENT RELEVANT STILL.

never have I said I didnt like abyssea, I just dislike the whole leech pt thing and mentality that came with it, which is what everyone keeps defending in this thread if they're pro and keeps bashing if they're con.
I actually liked how they implemented empys and gave a reason to camp nm's in old zones. I liked the whole farm mob X for KI Y. Alot of good ideas but imo not the exp aspect.
And before anyone starts with that dumb excuse that we can exp in the old zones, I know, I've not leeched one job in abyssea because again imo, it seems pretty pointless to pay for a game which you let others play (lvling in other words) while you're asleep.

Anyways its the last I post about this, the discussion is pointless at the end of a post people only read what they want to read, and most can not emphatise with how others think, while I really do think there should be a solution to please both parties in this discussion.

[FrankReynolds]

never have I said I didnt like abyssea, I just dislike the whole leech pt thing and mentality that came with it, which is what everyone keeps defending in this thread if they're pro and keeps bashing if they're con.
I actually liked how they implemented empys and gave a reason to camp nm's in old zones. I liked the whole farm mob X for KI Y. Alot of good ideas but imo not the exp aspect.
And before anyone starts with that dumb excuse that we can exp in the old zones, I know, I've not leeched one job in abyssea because again imo, it seems pretty pointless to pay for a game which you let others play (lvling in other words) while you're asleep.

Anyways its the last I post about this, the discussion is pointless at the end of a post people only read what they want to read, and most can not emphatise with how others think, while I really do think there should be a solution to please both parties in this discussion.

Leeching has nothing to do with you. You don't have to leech in or out of abyssea. What you want is for other people not to leech. You want to force them to play the game the way you think they should play it.

I think I've been incredibly respectful all things considered. I didn't tell you that you have to play the game my way. That is your thing. I'm perfectly fine with you grabbing a few people and doing old exp. parties. Hell, if I get bored enough, I might even join one. But I will not let you get away with going on and on here about how the game would be just fine if everyone had been forced to do things your way. It wouldn't and it won't.

Abyssea loot distribution (and most events after it) and party requirements (procs etc.) completely screwed up the way linkshells functioned and caused a lot of them to disintegrate. There were a myriad of other problems that I won't go into as well, but none of them caused as much damage as the release of SOA in it's initial form and the updates that have followed.

TLDR; fast exp. has nothing to do with the decline of the game and I am not white knighting abyssea. You are just wrong.

[detlef]

I'd like to point out that it's not white-knighting Abyssea so much as it is rightfully scorning the old system of leveling.

[predatory]

The old system was horse-shit pure and simple, stand around with your flag up all day in Jeuno hoping to get an invite to a party, and when you finally get the /t, mindlessly racing off to some out of the way zone, and hoping the whole time, that the party didn't break until after you'd had a chance to get at least a little xp for your effort.

I don't know how many times i was just about to dismount my chocobo at the entrance to the boyahada tree only to get a /t from the person who told me to come that the party was disbanding. Or spending hours and hours on end xping on IT++ mobs that you can't hit, because they give 250 xp when they finally do die, rather than knocking out T and vt mobs for 100 and 150 xp respectively, as fast as you can pull them, but the list goes on.

Party wipes, people racing out to grab a mob while the ranger's on a long pull, and pulling half the zone because the didn't understand spatial relationships and links, tanks who didn't understand provoke and flash, whm's who just loved to benediction after the pld's invicible wore because they didn't have the foresight to pop a drink and rest their mp for that minute, players who weren't geared for their level and couldn't hit worth a damn, and of course players who didn't use food to improve their performance.

That was then, and the game has improved vastly since those days, but there has been some major screw-ups along the way, when they raised the level above level 75 and on into 99 they didn't raise the mob strengths or adjust the strengths of the gear that you got from sea/sky/rank etc, which of course made those areas, (other than an earrring here and there, and a ring or two, whatever), pretty much obsolete and outdated, all parts of the game should have been level adjusted as the players went up in levels to keep the balance of the game, but instead much of the vast world of vandiel is pretty much ignored now, and has been for quite some time.

And of course as Frank mentiioned a couple of posts above mine, linkshells pretty much disintegrated overnight, gone were the days of the big linkshell when multiple players set out on adventures helping each other get stuff done. Now we have little pockets of players trying to help each other out, but never quite having enough manpower to actually get anything done on their own, and having to shout endlessly for even the simplest of things.Which of course brings us to the now.

Now rather than creating an expansion for level 99 players SE deciding in all their wisdom, (not much IMO), to go ahead and make game breaking mobs, and rather than scale them back to where they should be, they decide to add item levels to gear. How stupid is that? You can't hit the mobs with your RME weapons and armor well let's raise the item on your gear, I know how does this nice shiny new bayld set sound? Crap you still can't hit well how about we give you a second bayld set, get that ilevel even higher. Your augmented skirmish weapons don't do much damage, How's this sound for an idea let's add +1 skirmish weapons, and we got it /snap we'll go ahead and make the best armor in the game fall from its own skirmish. Now you should actually be able to get into Delve right? Well how about we do this, let's make it an event for just a few select jobs?

Are you kidding me SE? What we are ending up with is everyone playing mnk, sch, drg, geo, brd, cor and pld, and of course everybody is wearing red, (which is cool, it's my favorite color), with very little differences between the appearance in the Iuitl, and Otrnif armor sets. This is the best you could do?

Sorry about the rant, but damn this is irritating

[nyheen]

you can defend abyssea all you want. i like the place but all i said it was unbalance but all of you people keep forgetting even SE said "abyssea was a mistake and unbalance" on some interview before. since SE already broke the damn thing they didn care at that point & kept going. that was the time they killed 75 and lower lvl pts. one of the interview with SE (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/17773-Newest-interview-%28abyssea-was-a-mistake-%29).

now we in the SoA days SE even made it worst, players was keep asking for broken easy gear to get in no time. (skirmish was born) so now since things moving so fast, players are going to quit and leave faster. these are the reasons why FFXI is declining(defend it all you want but it facts), like lot of people said it no long term goals anymore. you can max out like less then 2 months. back at the 75 cap days we still had LOT of S#$% to do but at 99 we have less.

so how we going to fix this now? or can we even fix this? atm less people logging on, rarely any /sh happening it just a ghost town. starting to think any updates wont fix this, it starting to turn into like the old PSO (phantasy star online) it die out as soon people became broken strong so fast and got bored fast too. so bash on the old school stuff all you want but answer this, we been caped at 75 for many many years and the game was still strong with all them events, xp pt etc going on, why did it start to slowly die out after abyssea, SoA?

[predatory]

If FFXI survives SoA and Matsui, I will be very surprised

[FrankReynolds]

you can defend abyssea all you want. i like the place but all i said it was unbalance but all of you people keep forgetting even SE said "abyssea was a mistake and unbalance" on some interview before. since SE already broke the damn thing they didn care at that point & kept going. that was the time they killed 75 and lower lvl pts. one of the interview with SE (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/17773-Newest-interview-%28abyssea-was-a-mistake-%29).

I'm too lazy to look. Can you show me the part where they said that fast exp. was the mistake?


so bash on the old school stuff all you want but answer this, we been caped at 75 for many many years and the game was still strong with all them events, xp pt etc going on, why did it start to slowly die out after abyssea, SoA?

Because the events were what was keeping the game going. Now the events are pointless because the gear is outdated every update. Abyssea outdated a bunch of gear, but the new gear stayed relevant for a long time and some of the old gear / events got updated back into relevance. That does not appear to be the case with SOA. They have effectively limited the content to 1-2 events for most of the population and they have replaced the gear at a rate that has been completely jarring to the bulk of the player base.

If SOA had offered moderate improvements over the previously available gear and the old gear / events had been updated to coincide with SOAs release, it probably would have been fine. But at this point, most of the game seems pointless.

[Jerbob]

If FFXI survives SoA and Matsui, I will be very surprised
I think the potential is there, and the very fact that people still post on this forum demonstrates that people would like it to survive, but there is a significant amount of back-pedalling that needs to be done before survival becomes realistic. Given that the only time that I can recall that involved SE backing down was the massive payment fiasco when Click&Fail were introduced, I have to admit that the future isn't looking great.

[Babekeke]

There's still plenty to do in FFXI, even for the best of the best.

Unless, of course, you already have 20 mythics and all relic/empys? After SE announced the info about RME update, I think more people will come back to upgrade their RMEs, maybe build new emps/woe weaps to unlock new WS, and maybe even build new mythics, since they will be back to being the #1 weapons for most jobs.

Farming VW, ADL and Pand Warden since ilvl gear is now easier, and not a massive time-sink anymore.

[Spellcaster]

they stated that rems wont be better than seekers's tho, people don't get the memo. ffxi is dead

[Demon6324236]

they stated that rems wont be better than seekers's tho, people don't get the memo. ffxi is deadShow me where they said that...

[leorez]

Show me where they said that...

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/33112-Level-99-Relic-Mythic-Empyrean-and-WoE-Weapons?p=475191#post475191

though he did not say they will be weaker outright he did say: "The stats after the revamp will make it so they can be an option among the other powerful weapons."

basically saying they will either be as good as or weaker. Knowing how people are when it comes to the time and effort some have put into those, knowing they will only compare to weapons that dont take a fraction of the effort...it wont flow over very well.

[detlef]

He didn't say they would be as good or weaker. He said that the weapons' special properties (be it aftermath or weapon-specific benefit) would be taken into account to balance the damage and delay of the upgraded RME weapons.

[Demon6324236]

Exactly, they wont be weaker, they will be better than SoA weapons, just not in base DMG ratings, which are only part of why RMEs are great. The fact is, saying they will be weaker is very likely, wrong. You would have to make RMEs have a considerably weaker DMG rating before the DMG would low enough that RMEs would really come close to being weaker than Delve weapons. Going by their old examples, that wont be the case, and RMEs will be the top, but Delve weapons will be close enough behind that the exclusionary issues of the community should not be as bad as pre-SoA in my opinion, it will just be RMED, an upgrade from the current Delve or GTFO issue.

[Arkitan]

After the mass RMT ban, the game declined during that year! The game has no value if it has no potential to pay for itself, plain and simple! That is why games like EQ and WoW have flourished while FFXI hit the toilet as fast as it did! See what happens when you put incredibly stupid people in charge of a company?

[Arkitan]

And you wonder why so many people complain how the game goes downhill! If FFXI was free to play, there wouldnt be so much complaining! The game is worth nothing if it has no potential to pay for itself! This is simple common sense! Duh!

[Arkitan]

If SE would write a script that prevented botting and tolerated RMTing, the game would regain alot to most of its value again and would gain alot more people to play it and alot of players that left to return to it! It was the botters that you were mad at, not all RMTs. RMTing should be tolerated as long as its done legitimately (aka actually playing the game) rather than letting the machine do it for you! If you have to use a bot, whats the point in playing the game to begin with? Thats my opinion with use of common sense!

[FrankReynolds]

I used to MPK gilsellers on my bst in upper delkfutts tower around 2005. It felt like I was doing the world a favour.

Honestly RMT suck like a black hole in space. I can't hate them enough. And what you have on planet Earth is rich kids having a free ride through life, not having to suffer or work as hard as poor kids. If you have RMT in games that just brings the ugly and tragic inequalities of real world Earth into the virtual worlds too. I find it disgusting that people who work hard in office or factory all day, just to pay the rent, and then go play a videogame for a few hours in the evening, will not be able to obtain things as quickly as rich people who can afford to waste real world money on virtual goods. What I like about RMT banning, (and MPKING!) is that it gave a more level playing field, everyone in the game was in the same situation financially and had to earn money the same as everyone else. Now you've got Daddy's Little Princess buying HQ Delve equipment and Relic 99's etc. without lifting her dainty little finger. I've heard shouts by a rank1 day1 new adventurer offering 5m to get PL'ed from level 1-14. Thats a messed up picture right there.

LMAO most of the people I know in game are in their late 20s to early 40s and pay for this game with hard earned cash. WTF are you talking about? I can't remember the last time I met someone in game that wasn't employed and paying out of their own pocket. Unless you're counting housewives as spoiled princesses, I have no idea where you get this crap from.

[Arkitan]

Im saying the game has no value if it has no potential to pay for itself! If you fork over your hard-earned money to people that really dont care about their customers and only act like they do, then something is wrong with your brain! Just saying!

[FrankReynolds]

You should try reading posts before you flame them.

I was saying its wrong that people are able to buy gil, as it gives them an unfair advantage over hard-working people whose income goes 100% to paying rent, food and school uniforms for the kids etc.. I know a lot of players who are working fulltime and on the breadline and could never dream of wasting their precious income on virtual goods / currency. That isn't true of rich people. My point being that RMT allows the financial inequalities of Earth to reappear in virtual gaming worlds. Ie. you are buying progress in the game, which other hard-working people can't afford to, because they have famlies to support and bills to pay on low wage jobs.


No, I read it. You were confusing someone who has lots of time to play video games with someone who has good work ethics. The two have nothing to do with each other.

[Arkitan]

And Im just saying that without having the game have value, the game will always remain in the toilet with their players whining, crying and complaining consistently! SE mise well make the game free to play if they want to continue to outlaw RMTing! The only people that are really gaining anything is SE in general! Theyre the ones that like to dip their hands into our bank accounts and giving us very little in return! RMTing would actually solve that! Being a crafter myself, am I the only one that the only thing I miss about the good ole days is inflation? :rolleyes:

[Arkitan]

You have no proof of these sweatshops! You know most RMTs are bots and some are legit players. Spread some more of that false propaganda! Some people havent heard it!

If some people received a milkshake headache every time they did something stupid, some players (Im not naming anyone) would have a 24 hr migraine! O.o

[FrankReynolds]

I wasn't confusing anything. I was saying that RMT sucks a really big load of b@llz, and gil-buying destroys the virtual-world in terms of giving an uneven playing field, where those who have cash money can buy game progress, and other people can't. That is just the practical side, then theres the gaming philosophy side, which is that you "Play The Game, Don't Pay The Game" ie. if you can't beat a game without cheatmodes, hacks, or free currency then You Really Suck at videogames and you should watch TV or something instead.

Unfortunately, making gil through SEs intended means (farming and crafting) is incredibly boring and not actually hard at all to most people. Being able to sit in one place and craft an item or press the "Fish" button 1,000,000 times isn't actually a skill at all. The game owes much of it's longevity to the fact that many people are able to skip that boring crap and go kill HNMs, or kill sky gods or Sea or Limbus or VWNMs or abyssea NMS or farm dynamis to sell the currency etc. none of which would be remotely possible if all the people who hate fishing and crafting had not been able to remain interested in the game by skipping that part that they hate and focusing on what they like.

I prefer some events over others, so I "Farm" those events for cash and sell to people who can't do them for what ever reason. I then use that money to pay for things that I myself don't want to farm on my own for whatever reason. The number of people in the game who can't do them would drop dramatically if there were no easy way for them to come up with the cash to pay me. I would be forced to either do events that I hate or crafting / fishing which I also hate. The money has to come into the game somehow and the players in general aren't willing to bring it in because it's boring.

End game events don't drop anything that is NPCable for any reasonable amount of cash. Go try RMT sadly keep this game afloat and allow me and you to make money doing events that we find more palatable instead of fighting over beehive chips for months on end in some starter zone. I don't buy gil, but I understand the necessity. Do RMT's screw things up for people who actually like to fish? Yes and it sucks. Do they screw with the auction house? Yes and it sucks. But they also make it possible for me to make my money off of fighting monsters and events that I enjoy instead of fishing and farming beehive chips and I am thankful for that.

[Arkitan]

Dude, Im not an RMT but I still screw with my server's auction house! Why? Because I can and noone else will because the people on my server dont have the basic economic sense to know how! Its not hard to figure out the simple! I turned a 500k darksteel harness +1 into a 1.5m piece of armor! Mule is Yunalescas, check FFXIAH.com if you dont believe me! Now its continually selling for 1.5m because Ive forced people to remove their head out of their asses and persuade them to craft! You should do the same! =)

[FrankReynolds]

There are lots of ways to play videogames at a high standard of skill, without requiring RMT gil input, and without requiring high-value inflated prices on goods you sell just so you can play. I very rarely sell high-price inflated items, most of my income is just farming regular junk and also fishing. I am still able to seriously enjoy the game, have immense amounts of fun and excitement in low-man runs with my friends. Having fun is not expensive. Having the best gear in the game often is. But even in those cases you can farm it, just much slower than if you were surfing the inflated RMT wave.

I've been a gamer for 33 years, I'm not especially proud of it because being old really sucks. But for over three decades I been mashing these buttons and I've always felt that Gaming is no different to other high-skill sports. For example in the Olympics, top athletes compete, and victory is based on skill, stamina, practice, luck, etc. These factors are no different to Videogaming. When an athlete uses steroids to win, that is the same as a Gamer buying gil, or using hacks and cheatmodes. It is cheating, it places an unfair advantage on the person cheating. And it is considered a big sin in all Sports, and many Gamers consider it to be a big sin in Videogames too.

The best times I have had in FFXI in 9 years have been exciting low-man battles where me and my friends were almost dying but somehow managed to survive, by skill and stamina. That doesn't cost gil. And those are the best times I've had. Also obtaining ra-ex stuff from caskets or NM's, really gave me a thrill when the item dropped after so much effort. And again it is an entirely gil-free situation.
I don't have a problem with catching fish and NPCing them or selling them at low AH prices, or farming/making my own threads for clothcraft. The money is enough to support my game. It just takes longer than the 'buy everything with gil' route, but tbh man I'm not in a hurry.

And that's cool for you, but a lot of people don't enjoy the same things you do. I've played FFXI pretty much since the JP release and I've made / lost a few friends, but that's really not why I log on. I log on to play. I can hop on any game on xbox live or just use a phone if I wanna chat with friends. I used to enjoy crafting when I first learned it. That's why I leveled fishing and cooking and a few other subs, but it got boring after the first year or so and now it's just a mindless time sink to me. It's not fun at all. A lot of people didn't even level a skill before they came to that conclusion. I also spent months farming beast blood, buggard parts, beehive chips etc. again, incredibly boring. I used to get super pissed at the bots I saw until I got to a point where I realized that I was farming gil in an incredibly mind numbing fashion just so that I could be geared properly for events that I wanted to do when Instead, I could make the gil much faster just doing the events by selling stuff to people who had made their money through whatever means.

All that aside, the reason there are so many RMT is because so much of the population use them. If you remove the RMT, you remove the people who depend on them. Not only that, but the RMT themselves pay for an enormous number of accounts. All that money goes to development just like your's and mine and is desperately needed at this point. It's seriously a necessary evil.

[FrankReynolds]

For one thing, the vast majority of players have never used RMT gil.

Yes they have, they just don't know it. Every time you make money by doing something other than NPCing items, you are receiving RMT gil. SE obviously likes this set up because they have yet to create a solution that brings gil into the game without being crazy easy to exploit for RMTs. I know it's a tough problem, but come on... It's been 10 years.



The majority. You can't have a successful business model if the majority of people hate you and never use your services.

You also can't have a game altering problem if "The majority" aren't somehow involved.



The success of RMT comes from the Ultra-Lazy minority of players who buy so much gil in large amounts, pay for NM-botting teams, gear building and character building services etc. These players are a minority in FFXI and they spend a lot on RMT. They also lie, they buy mountains of gil to build a relic from 75-99 on a new account, then tell everybody they farmed it legitmode years ago bcoz they are so Mega Vet.

And obviously no one minds too much, or they would all be crafting, fishing and NPCing items like you instead of farming dynamis and selling NM drops / wins like they are now. No. They want to make a quick buck by helping that gil buyer spend his ill gotten loot.


RMT income is not from light spending by a player majority, it is from heavy spending by a player minority.

If that were true, the economies of every server would be insanely different based on the spending habits of a few people. They aren't because it is in fact a large number of people buy small amounts of gil.


On my LS and friend groups, nobody has ever bought gil. We as a group totally hate RMT.


LOL Ask anyone. They'll tell you the same thing. Someone's doing it though. A lot of someones.


RMT gil buying was as common as you seem to think, they wouldnt need to spam advertise it with tells. A popular product sells itself, it doesn't need to be rammed down peoples throats every 45 minutes.

*** looks out the window at the giant iPhone billboard and scratches head


If "RMT is so important for FFXI survival" ( to paraphrase you) why is it that now there is less policing of RMT in the game, and could be the Golden Age for RMT, the servers are all empty. Because : people were not playing FFXI to buy gil, hang out with RMT or with players who buy gil and cheatmode their way through the game. Players were in the game because they liked playing it, but now the game is not so much fun post SoA, people have quit the game. Despite the cheap availability of RMT gil. Surely everyone should still be playing FFXI and buying the cheap gil, according to your argument. But the fact is that most people played FFXI *despite* RMT gil, not *because of* RMT gil. The RMT gil is still here, but the players are not. Your argument dies.

Post SOA, there was nothing worth buying with gil besides delve wins and half as many people around to buy it. Gil buyers got mad because their shiny stuff that they paid for sucked and quit just like the people who built them the hard way. Watch the gil prices rise now that RME have been updated and need 300 items to finish. You'll see.


I never once said I use FFXI as chatroom or a phone conversation. I'm not logging into FFXI to chat, I login to low-man battles with my friend group. Its excitement videogaming, has nothing to do with phones or chatrooms. And I've had Stompa's content ID continuously active since 2004, plus two mules, so I've paid a lot more fees than most GS do.

That's cool.


We need RMT accounts to keep FFxi afloat because we lack well-designed content to keep real players in the game.

Fixed it.


RMT ruined the game for thousands of people years 2004--->2009. RMT using pop-bots to claim NM's, including warp hacks to warp to the spot where the NM was about to randomly pop at.There was RMT in Oztroya who he was selling okotes like candy and he never lost a claim ever, you would see him standing on the west side of the room, suddenly he jumped to the east side (without running) , and 0.5 seconds later the NM popped right ontop of him. This happened every time the NM popped. And he was RMT. Stealing treasure from REAL players. And supported in his dirty thieving RMT activities by the dollars of FAKE players who buy gil and cheat their way through games coz they don't got the rocks to play games on legitmode.

No, SE ruined the game for thousands of people by poorly implementing those NMs and / or their drops. Thank god for those ??? in abyssea huh? At least they got that right. Funny thing is that most of those bots belonged to people who play the game, Not RMT. Why waste money buying a fancy bot for an account that will probably get banned to camp and nm that pops 2 times a week when you can just send 1,000 sweatshop laborers out to farm bone chips and fish?

[Zumi]

The main reason FFXI has declined is the dual box attitude. What ever happened to doing stuff with other people in a group?

For a non dual boxer like me I can't get much accomplished because people tell me just dual box it. Like the new 300 rme drops. Dual boxers are all over raptor, chapuli, mata, taxet. Nobody will want to team up with you because people will say just dual box it.

Why because it is faster to get it done solo dualboxing because you don't have to share drops.

[FrankReynolds]

Infact you always avoid the points I make

I replied line by line. If you fail to get a point across to someone who is reading your posts with that degree of attention to detail, you will always fail because you are doing it wrong.


this most recent Trollhat post by you, you even altered my post which is very childish indeed.

It was easier to fix the mistakes. Don't be so sensitive.


I'm surprised that somebody with as much experience of losing as you have Frank, hasn't learned to lose more gracefully by now.

I'm surprised too. Here I had thought that this was a discussion forum, but apparently someone has been keeping track of our exploits and recording our wins and losses. Can you please list my stats and records for everyone so we can see just how many losses I have accumulated? Are they on the official vanadiel census?


RMT used pophacks and movement speed hacks, they didn't care about the accounts being shutdown because a lot of the groups involved in farming virtual currency were also involved in coding bots in the first place, so it wasn't a loss to them.

I have shared a server with several of those bot developers. It's pretty easy to tell how many real players (non RMT) are using them just by looking at the size of their linkshells and the number of people who are / were in them. It's a lot.


Yes some normal players use bots, those people fall under the same "cheat" category as people who buy gil. But 9/10 time when you spent ages trying to farm an item you needed, and somebody else was hacking it just for $$$, and you went home emptyhanded because they were cheating, that person was RMT.

Probably for a few items at a few points in the game. Anyone who quit because they couldn't claim KB or whatever NM your referring to was probably not sticking around much longer any ways. Face it. WHen you get to the point where claiming a 72hr pop nm is the make or break point, you pretty much have one foot out the door already.


Re; Iphone ads. Again, your normal strategy of chopping lines out of peoples posts and taking them out of context. I was talking about monobrand items, such as RMT gil, if everyone loved buying gil, they wouldnt need to advertise it. Mobile phones are different because they have dozens of competing brands and thousands of different models of phone. Theres only one gil, and if people wanted to buy it they would come to you, you wouldnt need to hassle them.
Like elastplast, you dont see billboards with elastaplasters very often, because when people get a big bleeding cut they go buy some plasters.

Really? Did I? I think maybe you pretend that I missed your point because you are out of logical arguments. If you google "FFXI gil" the first three results are three different RMT sites. So yeah, they need to advertise because there is competition.


But you always lose arguments with bad grace, and start taking things out of context, its your M.O., and changing the words in my post, and chopping like 20 mini-quotes out of a block of text instead of just addressing the central point I am making.

Try and be more concise with your posts and make one central point. Then I won't have to dissect them.


Basically if RMT were all kicked out permanently (would never happen) then FFXI would be a better game overnight. The skanky cheating no-game types would go back to WOW as soon as they realized they would have to earn gil like everyone else in FFXI has to. The prices would drop across the board, and crafting etc. would see a revival. And the next time you saw somebody with uber gear you would know they actually earned it not bought it.

Maybe... We'll never know.

[Demon6324236]

The main reason FFXI has declined is the dual box attitude. What ever happened to doing stuff with other people in a group?I have an entire LS filled with people, some who dualbox, some who do not, none of which are so selfish as to tell you to dualbox your own things because they will not help you. I am sure if you wanted to join not a person would complain unless you have done something to one of the other members of PuntDeTaru, which I doubt you have. If you want help with something I am sure anyone free would be up to helping you if they can, offering something like the Airlixirs from a NM or something would also be a great way to get help, I know many people in here are still gearing their jobs because they never got to attend Tojil runs, or at least winning ones. People still do things in groups all over, most of them to not ask others to join because there is no need to anymore, and you can not find help where you do not ask for it, I have not seen you shout in Jeuno for a WHM to heal your MNK while you fight Mata, nor any other NM, while offering the Airlixirs and other drops as the reward, would it likely pick up? No, but its an attempt, and since a WHM hardly has much to do during Mata so long as you are geared with PDT and such, it should not be much an issue if their rewards are somewhat sub par, all they spend is time performing slight cures on you.


For a non dual boxer like me I can't get much accomplished because people tell me just dual box it. Like the new 300 rme drops. Dual boxers are all over raptor, chapuli, mata, taxet. Nobody will want to team up with you because people will say just dual box it.Tell you what, even if you don't join the LS or don't want to, I will help you with your weapons whenever you want to hit me up if I am free. I will come RDM and either heal with /SCH or DD with /NIN depending on what is needed, insult my RDM in any way and I will leave, I come to help you because you ask, not to be told I am bad for meleeing, nor to be criticized on my ability to play my job unless it is justly deserved, not that I necessarily think you will, but I am saying it as a warning because I have gotten tired of it, and will not tolerate it. I will let you buy pops if you want, I wont, I am short on money as it is, I will however have no issues helping you farm pops for NMs if you want. I ask that you be understanding I would be helping you in my free time, and as such may need to leave at times or may not be available at times which are best for you, though I highly doubt I will ever have to leave during a fight unless it is extremely urgent.



I agree that dualboxing itself has had a negative impact on the game in many ways, but it was partially brought on by the very selfishness it has helped to cause. I myself have access to my GF and my best friend's characters so I can dualbox myself. I know the negative effects it has had and can have, but at the same time, I understand why people do it, and I cant blame them. Dualboxing is insanely helpful for someone who can not get help with things, for instance, I can not get help with my last 50ish Azdaja horns for my friend's Ochain, we need a healer to be able to do it quickly and effectively, and I am far to lazy to change jobs every 2 KIs, so we just don't do it, if I felt more comfortable doing it I could dualbox my GF's character on her WHM and do just fine, which is part of why I understand it.

[predatory]

IMO there's nothing wrong with people duo and triple boxing, (unless they bot while they do it). if someone is able to actually pull it off and hit their ws while they heal a party or whatever well good for them. Why would anyone think dual boxing was bad, especially now when the population has declined so far that getting groups for anything is near impossible?

[Demon6324236]

IMO there's nothing wrong with people duo and triple boxing, (unless they bot while they do it). if someone is able to actually pull it off and hit their ws while they heal a party or whatever well good for them. Why would anyone think dual boxing was bad, especially now when the population has declined so far that getting groups for anything is near impossible?Well part of the issue to it is the fact that so many people go off and do things alone without a care in the world. I can go dualbox seals in Abyssea without a care for if my LS needs the seals I do not, why would I bother asking? Well, I personally would, but many would not, if anything they would fear the case they may get all of the seals they need and end up getting stuck there helping the others, or the may feel like the other person will slow them down in some form. It also goes to things like Mata, which are easily able to be duoed, when someone can dualbox it, it creates more congestion because a single person is doing it rather than two, which means that there is no chance of the WHM having to leave, or something similar, which would remove the party from the spot for some time.

There are both good and bad things to each side of it.