February 2020 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

[Akihiko_Matsui]

The latest FINAL FANTASY XI Digest is now available! The digest covers key features from the most recent version update. Check out the video, try the version update, and leave a feedback based on your experience of playing the new content.

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Please reply to this thread to leave your feedback.
Please only post feedback pertaining to the version update and digest video in this thread.
To better collect your feedback, we ask that you post one specific feedback per reply (of course you are allowed to post several replies!)
Before posting your feedback, check the thread to see if similar feedback was already mentioned and hit the “Like!” button instead of re-posting the same feedback.

[Typral]

Hello! Can you please give out more tickets for the fan gathering, or let people transfer tickets if they aren't going? I have tried to get a ticket, had one transfered to me that was confirmed but I don't think it works like that. What can we do if one party wants to transfer the ticket to someone else!

[Alhanelem]

Can second the above. I had no idea t hat an RSVP "ticket" didn't mean I was going.

[kusaregedo]

mireau is way overtuned and unnecessary. waste of time to try to kill it when you could have already earned your 80 points the old way. please fix.

[Alhanelem]

I think maybe they just wanted to break every single server's perfect DINM kill streak lol.

[Xilk]

Thank you for adjusting the bst ready times to 1 second!

[Javarr]

Hey Matsui,

So can we talk about how DI is now TOTALLY BROKEN. Your new pet, Mireu, is WAY over the top. So far in the reported data there is one confirmed kill on Phoenix and that tool 117+ players present. That's a little excessive and would nearly be impossible for lower population severs to down. Pretty sure ya'll angle is "Get the DI gear and vanquish it that way!", but it really should be a requirement to bring these things down. This really needs to be addressed, either that or allowed the spawn separately from the normal DINMs. No only does this pretty much assure a chain break and whatever "Effect" that chain has, but also locked up any other progression on the SERVER for an hour while this thing sits here. This really needs to be addressed, as I thought we were past the days of Tanaka and Absolute Virtue... This kind of thing needs to be saved for the Master Tier fights instead of thrown into the middle of community content.

[Allreadyinuse]

whaa-whaa i cant solo new content the day it comes out. probably with trust buffs and no domain invasion gear.

[Armoredwolf]

The issue isn't that people can't solo it, or that it is too difficult. The issue is that DI was an accessible and consistant daily time sink for the last 2 months. Sure, a lot of people don't like dailies, but you could plan around having 40 minutes(25 post spawn change, which was great!) to clear it. Now, if you set aside 25 minutes to do it and this dragon happens to pop, your plans are shot unless a ton of people happen to show up to down it. Suddenly, you're waiting an extra 40 minutes and it's an hour+ to do your daily cap.

Tack on that there's apparently no extra reward for it, and we've lost a whole lot while being given nothing in return. That's a quick ticket to upsetting people in any game.

[Malakef]

You guys have made it take much longer to get points whenever the new dragon pops. Please move this to somewhere else or GREATLY increase what it gives. Like maybe a weeks worth of points.

[Alhanelem]

Honestly i had no idea t his was going to be a lotto pop on DI NMs. Before the update came out, i thought it was just going to be a new NM in a new location.

[Sirmarki]

Honestly i had no idea t his was going to be a lotto pop on DI NMs. Before the update came out, i thought it was just going to be a new NM in a new location.

Yeh. that is what I thought too.

[Gwydion]

Why did you make Siren so small compared to cutscenes and other avatars?

[WinsorSD]

The new dragon is the biggest waste of 60 mins. I have better things to do in both in the game and life, than to spend 60 minutes hardly denting this. The daily cap of 80, made DI doing this daily bad enough.. and now this dragon.. I just warp out now when it pops.

Make DI Great Again...

[Dekusuta]

My personal idea is to have the new dragon pop randomly as a bonus kill and time saver as it's very difficult to get killshot on the dragon or on the last monster on the first wave. The majority of players are doing 4 domain invasions daily.
Reduce the HP of the new dragon so it takes about as long to kill as the others, and simply have it pop concurrently with a domain inviasion main dragon at random, so the group killing there can continue doing so and saves travel time.

Make it pop randomly rather than every set kill count. The reality is majority of players do domain invasions for the daily points then leave immediately, the event itself is a time sink., Any amount of time saving like the recent tweaks to dragon timers would be greatly appreciated.

[Malakef]

Once you guys correct the mechanics of it, the spawn rate should be increased too. If it’s not 1 out of 3 chance then you will never average faster point accumulation. Assuming that’s the whole purpose of the dragon and not some gimmick to slow us down a few times a day.

This right now though is bad for so many things such as:

Nearly unbeatable because of the spike flails being caused by trusts or players who want to grieve others which kills the whole zone.

Because it’s not being killed it stops all domain invasion progression while waiting for it to despawn.

Because of the above it negates the last update you did to make point accumulation faster.

Appearance rate is so low even if you wanted to fight the dragon you could spend hours doing invasion and never see it.

Point above means even if you fix the dragon players still will rarely ever get points done more efficiently since you could go days/weeks and never see it.

In addition, these mass player battles cause extreme lag and make the content non playable for some people.

And that’s stuff just off the top of my head.

[fillerbunny9]

Domain Invasion was tedious enough before this with the daily "obligation"/limit to points. now if Mieru shows up, it's GG time to warp out and find something else to do for 30+ min. I am glad I am almost done with accessories so I can leave this content in the dust; it shows a complete lack of respect for the time investment of the players and is completely backwards as a method for people with less time to "catch up."

[Velner]

Hello Devs:

I want to add that the new Domain Invasion dragon is a disappointment. You just recently revitalized Domain Invasion. It's fun! I love competing for the killing blow and it gives me something beneficial to do when I only have an hour or so after work to play (like tonight). But that new NM spawned on my first Domain Invasion and that means I can't do Domain Invasion for an hour. Fenrir will not kill this thing. And it's unlikely to organize the 100-200 people necessary. My recast timers are broken. BPs are all messed up. I can't do Domain Invasion. What happened????

-Velner

[Spaitin]

Please remove this mob from the game or have him spawn in a different zone. Mireu is invincible on Asura. It makes Domain Invasion dead content for good AND bad players.

[Spaitin]

The revert of your nerf from last month is appreciated, but still not there. I suggest removing all delay between ready and activation. You need to just floor the ready recast time down to 10 seconds through merits. Right now you are forcing the master to wear non ilevel gear next to the pet in an AOE and enfeeble heavy game. In short, you are ENCOURAGING the master to fight AWAY from the pet. Please stick to what you say you are trying to do, give us encouragement to fight next to the pet.

BST needs the level cap of ALL pets raised to 119 and the pet buff needs to effect the entire party. SMN already has better buffs that can effect the entire party. We also need new pets that are good at enfeebling and good at enhancing the party. Most of the buffs now are laughable. If you at least make them AOE buffs for the party/alliance. That would help.

We are in a bit of a strange situation where all DPS pets are completely useless right now. They hurt your overall DPS to use a ready move. Please do something about that. The only niche is AOE dmg.

Pleas remove the job abilities Charm, Tame, and Gauge from the game. They serve no purpose and just take up space. I would like it if you made gauge do the same thing as /checkparam but on the target including mobs. Please give beast feral howl and bst affinity naturally. (without merits).

Please make reward recast time around 15 seconds. Any fight where the target uses amnesia/petri/para makes the pet worthless.

In my opinion, bst is the weakest job in 6 man party content. Which is the vast majority of content. IF you do not plan on further changes/updates for bst, I recommend making it so that you can trade in BST exclusive gear and exchange it for equivalent gear to other jobs. That way those of us who have invested TONS of time into the job can at least go another direction without a complete waste of our efforts.

[Dekusuta]

On the new dragon Meiru, so many people were trying to kill it on my server Bismark for over 30 minutes my window slowed to a crawl on my fairly modern PC, assuming it's a single core/FFXI limitation.
But the short of it is, after a while, my window crashed and I don't know if I even got credit.

Edit: I got credit for the kill.

This leads me to my next suggesiton. Under 'currencies' add daily domain invasion points so players can track if they have capped their daily points yet, as well as see their total points without going to norg.

[Nyarlko]

The new DI dragon is over the top and needs to be toned down a bit.

* Cap the scaling on player group size and reduce the HP to something more reasonable for a large group to reliably down it in 15min or less.
* Remove it from counting towards the kill count. This would at least remove the server-wide penalty of breaking the kill streak.
* Change it so that points gained from killing it do not count towards the daily cap. There is currently no positive incentive for participating in the fight (since you could almost assuredly gain the additional 60pts to hit cap by killing normal dragons in less time pre-update,) and the way that it works currently actively discourages players from doing more fights in the miraculous occurrence of defeating it.

Doing the above would change the current negatives of the fight to positives. There would be incentive for players who've already capped out for the day on normal dragons to participate in defeating it, we'd be capable of defeating it without the entire population of the server showing up to fight, and the penalty against all players for not defeating it would be removed.

I know it might be a bit much to ask, but perhaps instead of a random/lotto spawn off of the normal dragons, it could be converted into it's own separate timer with a unique spawn location? I don't think that most of us mind challenging optional content, so if it spawned in it's own area, similar to Quetzalcoatl in Reisenjima, on it's own spawn timer unrelated to the normal DI dragons so that it does not interfere with the content flow that we've gotten used to, then it could be positioned as high tier content aimed at higher end players who are strong enough to justify breaking the daily point cap. It would be kind of cool to essentially have a new ilvl world HNM.

tl;dr: Please convert this new NM to an actual bonus fight that provides rewards to all who participate in defeating it regardless of their daily cap, and make it defeatable within a reasonable amount of time on all servers.

[Kylos]

Do you guys test these updates before you implement them? Because for years, so many updates could have easily been balanced had you allowed real players to test in some fashion.

I know we used to have a test server.. but would it be so difficult to invite a few players to another server to try things before you haphazardly throw things out?

Watched a friend of mine the other day have a go at Mireu with just two other people. After 20 minutes, they took 1% of health off it. Said to him.. you're probably best warping out.

So Mireu is not only a huge roadblock, its 'rewards' are pointless. You can already cap out points in one battle if you do it right. Yeah sure, it requires timing and a bit of luck, but capping out
80 daily points wasn't difficult with the current system. So by adding Mireu to fix a non-existent problem, you created wasteful content that is absolutely useless. It also has to be the first
dragon you fight that day for you to get the full benefit.. but only if it can be killed quicker than if you postponed your daily DI time til later.

Even rewarding us 500-1000 DI points that do NOT count towards the daily cap, still wouldn't be enough for two reasons:

1) Many players have already bought the majority of the accessories you listed. Unless you plan on adding even more rewards for this content? Then it's pointless and only helps
those who just recently returned. But by doing this, you would be actively discouraging them from accumulating vorseals; which was really difficult to do under the original DI system.

2) Some big servers will struggle to beat this in the allotted time due to a lack of coordination, as Spike Flails severely hinders progress and the time runs out.
Players will yell at each other for doing it wrong. Not only that, but trust songs/rolls overwriting other players stronger songs/rolls is a huge flaw in this content.

And on the smallest servers, gathering enough players to have a go at Mireu is a difficult task. You know that on a small server you're looking at an average population
of 200-400 players at any given time, and at least half of those are mules, RMT, or players who are away/busy elsewhere? So it's either down to a well coordinated
linkshell doing it entirely by themselves, or literally the entire server needs to show up and hope they can down it in time.

Honestly, I would just delete this NM and start again. Put it in as a new high tier battlefield which has nothing to do with Domain Invasion whatsoever.
Anyone who got this title already, should be given a free orb/key item so they can fight this at their leisure. You tried to shoehorn something really challenging
in to this content, when there was no space. Like others have said, it desperately needed to be its own spawn which isn't a random occurrence,
and the rewards had to be super rich to entice players to come together to down this monstrosity.

If you were planning on adding new Domain Invasion gear? I wouldn't bother. Make it an incredibly rewarding high tier battlefield with only one difficulty,
and make it so all 18 players can choose what they want from vanquishing it. Making it a HQ version of DI feels too hard to implement, unless
you were to create a new instance for it somewhere else in the Escha zones. Hell.. throw it in to the Cloud Of Darkness battlefield area, if you find it
necessary to have this somewhere in Escha. At least by having it in a battlefield, no one can waltz in, summon trusts, then proceed to spike flail
the whole alliance.

As for Beastmaster.. how many times have you updated this job lately and gotten nowhere with it? I'm not a BST, but it pains me to see this job
be so messed around. It's like there's no real plan, you just throw things at it and hope players will like it. Then you quickly revert back when you
find out you messed up (like the WHM 'update'). Seriously guys, get some actual feedback from real players before you try implementing stuff,
and you'll save yourselves a ton of headaches, time, and money in the process. Also fix Ninja already.. that jobs been dead forever.

[Isola]

I think it's already pretty loud and clear.

Mireu as implemented is just a big fail. Sometimes you guys really don't put any thought into the things you do. You need to take this one back to the drawing board and start over completely. It fails to accomplish anything you intended it to do and comes across as nothing but a punishment.

Also, it shouldn't take a week to fix the Yoran-Oran issue. And I still haven't forgotten that you should've adjusted Final Heaven when all the other Hand-to-Hand weaponskills were adjusted. If that means having to do all the relic weaponskills, that's fine too. But it needs to be done.

Paladin still is no where near where it needs to be.

Elemental Magic is still miles behind where it needs to be.

Still screwing up majorly on BST. The fix is so easy. You can keep the master in melee range, without making the command range so ridiculously small.

Ninja still in desperate need of a complete overhaul.

There's this whole pile of super easy, super obvious fixes and wants... they're gimmes, easy wins to make you look like you care about players.... and you're at the complete opposite end not listening.

[Rwolf]

Summoner: Siren

Thank you for adding her and the effort that was put into furthering the storyline. I only wish that Clarsach Call was a buff to the party. I think it would be encourage Summoner more into melee or magic groups.

Wind's Blessing overwrites Carbuncle's Shining Ruby. Not sure if that is on purpose or not.

[Rwolf]

Beastmaster

Activation Timers for Ready.
Thanks for adjusting the activation time back to where we can use Desultor's Tassets regularly. I think most would prefer if we just had instant again with no Ready -recast gear required. Either increasing merits again or replacing the 1200 gift.

Distance remains a prominent issue with reliably activating abilities.
Distance is genuinely an issue still with Beastmaster. I know the developer's have stated that they don't want to take this route but it is very necessary with just how combat is in this game. It makes it easier to control the pet which already has issues in groups of monsters. It's just frustrating and not fun. Encouraging melee can work through buffs to melee and pet bonuses when master melees.

Variety of pets is still lacking and jugs take up a lot of inventory.
Some suggestions:

Remove Beast Affinity trait since it's become pretty much mandatory. Let pets scale with main weapon or something.
Have us learn pets instead, a new all purpose jug or biscuit could summon pets.
Call Beast should reset if the pet is above a certain HP threshold like PUP. This helps with battles where you lose pet by being charmed, changing zones, etc.
Bestial Loyalty should call the last recorded pet similar to Deus Ex Automata.

[Rwolf]

Paladin

Thank you for the continued changes made for PLD.

Atonement damage too low.
Atonement's damage feels like it needs a boost still. Adding the enmity it deals helps but with such a low cap on damage. Once you're able to do enough damage. You can get more enmity from just doing other weapon skills instead.

Caballarius Coronet +3 augment should persist after unequip.
Relic Head +3 augments for Iron Will: Fast Cast only work while the head is equipped. Given that other jobs like RUN's Inspiration augment works on activation. Is it possible to make it so you retain the Fast Cast to Rampart as long as it's active?

Reprisal having enmity like Foil.
While Banishga and AoE curing can be helpful sometimes for gaining group hate. It can be really hectic with some fights that spam hate reset. I think it would be great to just give Reprisal the same enmity that Foil has. I know that the developers would like PLD to be different from RUN but it would be very helpful.

Updating Ultimate Shields
Aegis and Ochain could really use an update. Monster combat skills are getting so high that it's getting harder to block while RUN has straight % chances to negate damage through parrying which is close to 100% with Battuta and +parry rate. They are great shields but I think it wouldn't hurt to give them a 119 equivalent.


Aegis could use Shield Skill, not to the level of being an all in one shield but equivalent but a decent rate should be nice.
Ochain was mentioned to have the rate of a item level 150 shield. So as 119 maybe add HP or some magic evasion.
Srivatsa needs help. If it's supposed to be a melee shield then give it a good reason to use over the other two. Maybe Shield Bash: Chainbound so PLD can self SC and TP Bonus+500.

[Typral]

Hello, why is the new Siren BP not working with Shining Ruby or Rampart? They shouldn't all share the same effect

[TullemoreAsuraFFXI]

Hauksbok Arrow + Hauksbok Bolt + Hauksbok Bullet Are ammunition that are implemented as rare/ex. For 1000 Domain Points cost players can not utilize these for Gun / X-bow / Bow weaponskills unless Producer Matsui + Director Fujito can confirm these items have a hidden effect that they will not be consumed when shot. Double Shot job ability for Ranger job shares a reuse timer with Unlimited Shot, so even attempting a complex and risky item switch macro to use unlimited shot is still a huge penalty when you've excluded the use of Double Shot if utilizing Unlimited Shot. This isn't my first comment about this. Can we have an adjustment to these items so that they are not consumed when used as ammunition?

[RandomCanadian]

BST updates:
If the intention is to encourage pet + master melee, please make design changes to job and gear that actually encourage that kind of play instead of restricting what you consider inappropriate.
- Get rid of the need for non-ilevel gear to get ready recast down to max. You want us to fight in close proximity but also make our ilevel dip every 10 seconds...
- Add some decent options for gear that improve master and pet melee. Current gearsets only allow one or the other to be well geared for TP. Forcing focus on master TP ensures that pet TP is gimped (and vice versa).
- I second some of the above recommendations to clean up legacy abilities. Charm, tame, etc. are a waste of space. And having 20 slots dedicated to jugs that are mostly useless just to have all the pets is really inconvenient. No one makes money synthing jugs - just make calling pets an ability you can learn and call it a day.

Domain Invasion:
DI was a good event for high and low level people to jump into with low bar for entry. A good idea for this stage of the game. But the addition of the new dragon doesn't make sense if that was the intention. Now the low level stuff is interrupted regularly, preventing people from doing the content at random intervals. It is useless for getting DI points as it is less efficient than spamming the low level stuff. And no high level people are interested in spending 60 min to take down a tough baddie for a title and no other reward. Just decide what the point of it is and design it with that goal in mind... this makes no sense.

I get this game is nearly in legacy mode and resources for development are limited, but having a clear game plan for these features is essential. We are only taking time to winge about these things because we really like this game and want to continue to value this service going forward. I love the state of the game at the moment and some small modifications to focus could really be effective.

Thanks and cheers!

[TullemoreAsuraFFXI]

Mireu just needs to spawn in a d.i. external of the three existing d.i. escha zones. I'd recommend making an alternative battle location and just separating Mireu to end these complaints.

[Kylos]

An update on how I feel about Mireu.

The other day I finished work and had to be up early the next day, so I had roughly 90 minutes of playtime to blast out Domain Invasion and log out.

I went to Sky, killed Naga Raja and got 20 points. Went to Reisenjima, which I don't usually do because I'm capped on the accuracy vorseal there.

And... Mireu pops. 60 minute timer. Gave it a few /slap before warping and logging out for the day. Great job SE! Wonderful content.

[raps1355]

Mireu has got to go, its causing mayhem for those without the time to wait an hour for it to depop. Its not even worth killing on a time to reward ratio, consider changing it to one of the following.

1. Cut its hp by 2/3 and lower it to 20 mins or simply put scale it down to 20 mins or whatever.
2. Add all domain point drops to it similar to the low chance of equip from the other drags
3. Address the mpk mechanic of spike flail by replacing it to single target on hate OR to really penalise them for doing it add that buffalo event move that kicks you out of the zone if you get hit too often and make it block you from escha for 1 hour.
4. Add a separate cap of domain points or uncapped and nothing to do with 80 points.
5. make it worth 3 of each drag vorseal or give it its own vorseal, maybe something like the atma of saviour occ absorbs damage effect.
6. delete it altogether

[Rupt]

The new dragon should be in its own spot, if it's purpose is truly a alternative to killing 4 dragons it should not spawn in there place, at least not with how overbuffed it is.

Did 3 dragons last night and on the 4th mieru popped so I just left and went to sleep. Had to wake up I'm the morning and do my 4th dragon before the reset, I don't think this was what you intended.

[Hamburgerz]

I had some time this morning so I geared up to do DI. I killed Naga in Ruan and went to Reisenjima. Mireu then spawned in Reisenjima. We tried to fight it for a few minutes and warped. I decided to try DI again a few hours later. I then went to Ruan and killed Naga again. I then went to Reisenjima and guess what? Mireu spawned again. We again tried to fight it for a few minutes and warped. I have wasted so much time on this dragon and missed out on my daily cap due to lack of time. Please fix DI you all have broken it so bad. I doubt this is the game play you all had envisioned.

[Selindrile]

Have to agree, Mireu is really overtuned as is, while it's possible to beat, yes, it's an unreasonable ask for a reive. All it really does right now is delay people's daily DI grind.

[Spellstar]

Please SE fix this! I can see you were attempting to make it easier for those that wanted Beads and those that wanted DI points but this is just a waste of everyone's time.

[Yoji_Fujito]

Thank you all for your feedback.

In content where a large group of players work together, the total amount of damage dealt by players tend to scale tremendously with each participating player. Notorious Monsters are adjusted to be on the stronger side with this in mind; however, this time there were some limitations caused by system-related bottlenecks, which resulted in over-tuning the monster.

After receiving your feedback, we’ve decided to make improvements in the next version update through several fixes and adjustments, which we’ll briefly summarize here.

▼ Adjustment Upon Entering the Battle Area
Displaying Content Level Beforehand
Up until now, it wasn’t possible to tell if Mireu had spawned or if it was another Notorious Monster. By displaying the content level beforehand, you’ll be able to tell whether the Notorious Monster that’s currently spawned is Mireu or not before moving to the battle area.

Addition of New Status: Battle Preparation Period
After moving to the battle area, for a certain amount of time you’ll receive a buff where you won’t receive any damage as long as you don’t gain enmity or manually remove the buff. When the buff disappears, you’ll be considered as participating in Domain Invasion. On the other hand, you won’t receive Domain Invasion Points if you enter the battle area and the battle ends before your buff has disappeared.

▼ Adjustments to Mireu
Greatly Lowering Spawn Rate of Mireu
Mireu currently spawns as frequently as once per hour and will be adjusted to appear far less often.

Adjustments to Rewards
In addition to the current rewards, you’ll be able to receive bonus Domain Invasion Points by defeating Mireu. These bonus Domain Invasion Points will be added regardless of your daily limit.

Furthermore, by repeatedly defeating Mireu, the amount of Domain Invasion Points that can be earned from regular Domain Invasions will increase, and in the final reward your daily limit will be slightly increased. The increased Domain Invasion Point gain and daily limit will reset when Mireu isn’t defeated consecutively; however, this bonus is shared across all players in that world.

Parameter Adjustments
We’ll be lowering the evasion and magic evasion of Notorious Monsters, making them easier to hit. Additionally, bonus accuracy will be added to the Awakening status.

▼ Adjustments to all Notorious Monsters
Adjustments to Monsters Not Being Displayed
We’ll be addressing an issue where players are unable to gain enmity on an enemy due to the Notorious Monsters not being displayed. Although their display priority was already increased, internally there are some cases where characters are prioritized, so we’ll be making adjustments to address this.

The above adjustments and fixes will be implemented simultaneously.

[Akihiko_Matsui]

The aspect of diligently gathering gear to attain a 10-second recast time on Ready will be maintained. Regarding the item level of leg gear, we didn’t see it as a problem as we understood that the general playstyle was based around changing gearsets through usage of macros. While it’s possible to add a recast reduction bonus to the new ILv119 gear, this would be done when a new beastmaster-specific equipment is to be implemented.

We aren’t considering allowing pets’ support effects to apply to the entire party. One reason behind this is that some of these support effects are extremely powerful and are only allowed because they are limited to be applied to the master. Second reason is that by making this an area of effect, we can foresee players requesting beastmaster to fulfill a backline supporting role in parties.

Due to the base parameter values of pets and production cost required, we currently aren’t considering raising all pets to Lv119. However, now that the support effects affect the master, if there are any specific pets you would like to see raised to Lv119, please let us know. Additionally, please also let us know if there are any pets that are already Lv119, but you’d like to have support abilities added to them as well.

Regarding Reward, the main purpose of the ability is recovering HP. Therefore, greatly shortening its recast time is difficult to consider in terms of current balance. We could avoid the balancing issues, if for instance, we were to lower both healing potency and recast time to 1/3. However, this would mean it’d require three times the amount of items to achieve the same amount of healing, so then we’d have to consider things such as changing the quantity of items created in one synthesis to three, lowering the price to 1/3, and changing the stack size to 99.

[Akihiko_Matsui]

Atonement is a weaponskill that allows you to gain a certain amount of enmity regardless of damage dealt, so we consider it as an enmity tool that shines when you’re up against an enemy with high resistances. When you’re faced with enemies that you can effectively deal damage to, we’d suggest using other weaponskills or other methods.

As for increasing Iron Will’s effect, the effectiveness of Fast Cast is dependent on gear parameter values, making it difficult to change.

Regarding the possibility of making ILv119 versions of Aegis and Ochain, we can’t do this as our current policies on parameter values would make them too powerful. Also, if we were to do it, it’d require adjustments such as greatly lowering Aegis’s magic damage reduction, and we don’t believe that it’d be worth weakening them that much just to have them become ILv119. However, we understand that many of you have fond memories of these items, so making them ILv119 will be a future task for the battle team.

Srivatsa’s stats appear to be fine as it is. Increasing them even further would allow paladin to gain additional offensive strength while maintaining its defensive capabilities, which is something we don’t plan to do.

[Typral]

Thanks for all the posts, its appreciated.

[Spaitin]

The pet enhancement effects are mostly worthless UNLESS they affect the party. SMN already has access to better AOE enhancements with the ability to stack those enhacements. (crystal blessing hastega 2 etc.) Bsts pet enhancements are actually quite weak. Rage would be detrimental to a party, basically only the crab and faaz would have mildly useful enhancements. You need to make them enhance the party AND make better ones for bst to use. Making beast at least be able to back line would be a HUGE improvement to the job, currently the only use for bst is to BACKLINE in dynamis D wave three using the slug. The slugs debuffs are actually better than ANY of the enhancements of ANY of the pets. So your enhancements are mostly worthelss EVEN if they affect the party. Right now bst is a play by yourself job. You have said you want it to no longer be a lone wolf job. Well it is ONLY a lone wolf job right now. Add some synergy for the party. Currently people would rather use a trust than a fully geared master rema bst. I would be okay with completely removing the healing factor of reward and just having it remove status effects. As was failed to be addressed in your post, the pet is completely worthless in any fight with amnesia/para/petrify.

Also, please address the issues with Tame, Gauge, Charm. THey are completely useless. They have 0 fights they help on. I would be okay with just removing them from the game.

Diligently gathering gear is fine. Making an 119 piece of gear with ready recast is also fine. Currently we are encouraged to fight away from the pet when using ready because we are using non 119 gear.

Bst is still the overall worst job in the game. It has nothing that it does well. Judging by your response, you are not going to do much to improve the job. Please do as you said and make bst a party friendly job. It currently isnt for all but 1 fight in the entire game.

My last ditch request is to let us trade in the bst exclusive gear for vouchers to get other jobs gear. Our efforts on bst are mostly wasted, please let us salvage our diligent efforts in gathering gear. I get it, old game with limited resources. At a minimum bst would need ALL of it's gear overhauled. We need gear that boosts pet and master not either or. I see that you do not have the resources to do that. So please let us exchange our gear and go on to different projects.

One other possibility would be to change the pet magic haste enhancement to Job ability haste. That alone would make bst mostly feasible for front lining.

[Ozaii]

Beast Master

Would it be possible to give bst a job ability similar to empathy where the master shares it buffs with its pet. This would allow more front line melee bst to use the pet with reasonable results. If its plausible this along with some axe ws adjustments could help the job by a bit or at least make it more appealing.

Also to add my preference on the jug pets at 119 if you devs can, I would love to see the hippogriph faithful falcorr, as well as the adamantiose crude raphie.

Paladin

If you can reduce reprisal timers to a timer similar to foil and adjust its enmity to similar values that would help pld a bit with aoe enmity.

If you devs can also give pld a cover that is aoe and or affected aoe moves and spells so long as the pld is in front of the targetted players, this would help make up for the damage loss from bringing a pld over a run. If we can have dds go all out instead of turtling up due to the pld eating their damage as well.

Also if possible fealty having its timers reduced to be similar to either rampart/sentinal/pflug/other defensive buffs would greatly help the job become more of a wall if it could ignore many effects similar to how run can with runes and its high meva although fealty shouldnt be full time like runefencers runes.

Off Topic

Also as a last minute unrelated thought. Can we get drg call wyvern timer reduced by any chance. It really sucks to be put into such a weakened state if we lose it to doom or something else silly. This and/or give drg malignance cuz that stuff rocks.

Closing Regards

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. And you devs have done great with pld so far. As well as the other jobs i know this takes time to fix and the code is very old but thank you for making a wonderful game and updating almost 20 years later.

[Gwydion]

The aspect of diligently gathering gear to attain a 10-second recast time on Ready will be maintained. Regarding the item level of leg gear, we didn’t see it as a problem as we understood that the general playstyle was based around changing gearsets through usage of macros. While it’s possible to add a recast reduction bonus to the new ILv119 gear, this would be done when a new beastmaster-specific equipment is to be implemented.

We aren’t considering allowing pets’ support effects to apply to the entire party. One reason behind this is that some of these support effects are extremely powerful and are only allowed because they are limited to be applied to the master. Second reason is that by making this an area of effect, we can foresee players requesting beastmaster to fulfill a backline supporting role in parties.

Due to the base parameter values of pets and production cost required, we currently aren’t considering raising all pets to Lv119. However, now that the support effects affect the master, if there are any specific pets you would like to see raised to Lv119, please let us know. Additionally, please also let us know if there are any pets that are already Lv119, but you’d like to have support abilities added to them as well.

Regarding Reward, the main purpose of the ability is recovering HP. Therefore, greatly shortening its recast time is difficult to consider in terms of current balance. We could avoid the balancing issues, if for instance, we were to lower both healing potency and recast time to 1/3. However, this would mean it’d require three times the amount of items to achieve the same amount of healing, so then we’d have to consider things such as changing the quantity of items created in one synthesis to three, lowering the price to 1/3, and changing the stack size to 99.

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions and for giving us the opportunity to provide you with feedback. Hopefully, we will have another NA-based event in the future!

Thank you for acknowledging the need for I-Level Ready Recast Legs armor, as well. Swapping into pre-I-Level armor hurts us, but I eagerly await Beastmaster + pet-friendly armor, with "same effect".

Regarding pets: Crude Raphie and Faithful Falcorr both NEED to be upgraded to ilvl 119, ideally without Beast Affinity. Please give us access to Fantod as well. My personal favorite pet is Pondering Peter, but he only caps at 118 with Beast Affinity.

Why does an SU5 Beastmaster need 5/5 Beast Affinity to keep a Pet at his current level? (At level 75, Call Beast+2 was sufficient to give us Even Match (equal level) pets!).

Regarding Reward, if you read my original question, I wasn't asking for 1/3rd scaling of Reward potency and Recast. Your example is a very drastic change and your players are not asking for that. We are merely asking for a 7-second reduction, which would bring us to 45-second most-frequent Reward recast. (This ensures we get the full (minus-34 second recast delay reduction) as described by both AF pieces, which has been currently capped at minus-25 seconds since inception in 2003). No change in potency should come with this 7-second reduction. Stacking Pet Food biscuits to 99 would be very helpful to our inventory problems.

There is so much to discuss with Beastmaster. Many parts of my favorite job, are left completely unfinished. Beastmaster should be a front-line support job, similar to the play-style of Blue Mage or melee Red Mage. The job traits, job abilities, group one/two merits should match your vision of front-line DD.

After 17 years of play, I am very weary of what feels like begging for moderate, fair changes. Please consider helping to make Beastmasters whole. Thank you for your time.

[Rwolf]

Losing the job's identity with new vision.
I feel that Beastmaster is losing its job identity with these changes and new vision. All except one job ability (Feral Howl) are pet focused and Beastmaster is the only job that can rest with their pet attacking. Yet we are told we are wrong. We can't backline support or pet focus because we should be attacking on master full-time. I don't understand why Puppetmaster is allowed to go between frontline and backline but Beastmaster is not.

Not understanding the new vision.
From what I understand, the new Beastmaster's vision is that the master should be standing right next to the pet and melee 100% of the time. Where the pet's damage is just supplemental. I don't understand this as Beastmaster has no native job traits to melee and all this pet focused gear and abilities.

Issues with new vision of Beastmaster.
▼ Axe WS are too weak.
Having access to multiple magic weapon skills needs better selection to magic gear.

Mistral Axe: Similar to Savage Blade but only 1 attribute modifier where Savage has 2.
Decimation: Overly increased by 1 weapon. Instead of +120% on weapon, why not boost the weapon skill itself by 100-110%? Then the Ambuscade axe can just be +10-20%.
Primal Rend & Cloudsplitter: They should be as strong as Leaden Salute and Trueflight if not stronger for being in close range.
Bora Axe: Please just make this Ice elemental damage. It doesn't get a lot of use.

▼ Distance is still an issue and jug pets have their own enmity list.
If we cannot have our old distance to activate abilities and that we can't use pet abilities outside of battle. Then just use Dragoon's wyvern AI. Pet fights what the master fights only. At least then the job no longer feels like the mechanics are broken. No one has to deal with being unable to access commands or worrying about pet running off and aggroing monsters.

▼ Job Abilities focus heavily on pets if master is supposed to always melee.
I don't agree with a change to melee only play style but the job abilities and traits don't support melee. Killer Instinct does but very limited use and doesn't work on magical damage ws.

▼ Currently limited to picking a pet for support effect, damage or monster affinity.
Currently Beastmaster can summon a pet every 5 minutes and 1 free every 20 minutes. This does not allow for Beastmaster to stack support effects from pets. To be balanced, either:

Every pet gets support effects.
Pets without support effects are stronger (but this steps on the vision of BST melee only).
Change the support effect duration on master and/or Call Beast timer.

▼ Issues with inventory / limited in choices of pets to bring.
Unless you only play Beastmaster, jugs consume a lot of inventory. Please consider a new system where you don't need to carry so many individual jugs. Ninjas, Rangers, and Corsairs got universal tools, pouchs/quivers, and high amounts of recycle.

[Rwolf]

At the very least please give Reprisal the same enmity as Foil. I appreciate that you gave PLD Banishga to tag multiple monsters but the problem is gaining enmity quickly after tagging. It would be very useful, especially against monsters that repeatedly reset enmity.

[Nyarlko]

The aspect of diligently gathering gear to attain a 10-second recast time on Ready will be maintained. Regarding the item level of leg gear, we didn’t see it as a problem as we understood that the general playstyle was based around changing gearsets through usage of macros. While it’s possible to add a recast reduction bonus to the new ILv119 gear, this would be done when a new beastmaster-specific equipment is to be implemented.

We aren’t considering allowing pets’ support effects to apply to the entire party. One reason behind this is that some of these support effects are extremely powerful and are only allowed because they are limited to be applied to the master. Second reason is that by making this an area of effect, we can foresee players requesting beastmaster to fulfill a backline supporting role in parties.

Due to the base parameter values of pets and production cost required, we currently aren’t considering raising all pets to Lv119. However, now that the support effects affect the master, if there are any specific pets you would like to see raised to Lv119, please let us know. Additionally, please also let us know if there are any pets that are already Lv119, but you’d like to have support abilities added to them as well.

Regarding Reward, the main purpose of the ability is recovering HP. Therefore, greatly shortening its recast time is difficult to consider in terms of current balance. We could avoid the balancing issues, if for instance, we were to lower both healing potency and recast time to 1/3. However, this would mean it’d require three times the amount of items to achieve the same amount of healing, so then we’d have to consider things such as changing the quantity of items created in one synthesis to three, lowering the price to 1/3, and changing the stack size to 99.

Regarding area of effect pet support effects: If making our pet's support effects would be enough to encourage others to ask us to move to a backline support role all by itself, then that just means that master melee is far too weak for players to consider it as a loss to do so. Please give us more reason to want to be up front swinging away, and for others to want that too. As many have pointed out before, there is just far too little in the actual design of the job itself to encourage us to hit things with axes.

Regarding Reward: I don't believe that anyone is asking for a drastic reduction in base recast for the ability. It has been brought up that Reward is subject to a bizarre cap on recast reduction, which is less than the reduction available from the 3 pieces of gear currently implemented which have been available for years. What reasoning is there to prevent the full application of available recast reduction from gear, especially since neither piece reaches the current cap on it's own and one piece required to hit the current cap is non-ilvl? By the way, the recipes for lower tier pet food already create a full stack of 12 per synthesis, with no improved results from HQ results, while even the highest tier (Pet Food Theta) is 4/6/8/10 per synthesis depending on HQ result.. There are no pet foods which have single results. ^^;;

Regarding ilv119 pets: Would it really be that heavy a task to change jug usage to ignore the innate level caps and override with ilv119 for lv99 players? Is it not possible to simply skip the check of the jug's settings and directly set the cap according to main hand weapon ilvl? This would be the simplest to implement solution most likely. The majority of naturally ilvl pets' stats are based off of job templates, so is your reluctance to allow all jugs to hit ilvl 119 because old jugs are coded differently? Personally, while that would be an acceptable solution, I am actually partial to the idea of stealing the pet ilvl system from PUP/SMN instead. It would help simplify our pets' mechanically if their ilvl was directly set by a new ranged slot piece of gear (which can stack with Pet Food in the Ammo slot,) and provide a balancing option development-wise for scaling pets beyond ilvl119 just like PUP/SMN. I imagine this would be a much larger task than the earlier suggested solution, so I don't have much hope that it will be considered as a viable option, but I do hope that you understand that there are alternative solutions if the current model is no longer within the capabilities of the dev team to continue development on.

[Ferth]

Seems like if you want Atonement to be used in situations where paladins cant deal a lot of damage, it should have it's skillchain resonances removed to function like Spirits Within or Sanguine Blade.

[Sirmarki]

I've noticed a lot of references relating to why this or that hasn't been changed due to game balance.

However, at this stage (on Asura at least) - Game balance has well and truly left the building.

1. Mercs sell everything. They offer the ability for people to 'buy' equipment from battles that they never even drew their weapon in. Any new content added just gets merced/sold. In fact merc yells selling said content probably out numbers genuine yells for said battles 30-1.

For example: A merc selling an item from the likes of Tenzen where you would need merits to be able to qualify in order to even get into the battle: The mercs just yell in the zone, said buyer joins the party, pays and lots on the item. The ridiculous thing here is that they don't even need merits to do so - they have completely by-passed that system.

2. The sheer amount of automated botting. It only takes a short walk around pretty much any zone, and you will find some kind of bot. /yell and job point sellers yells are relentless and if anything boil down to spam.

So, let's address these issues which are core game balance issues.

[Typral]

How do you address #1? How do you even consider that a core game balance issue? People are free to start parties or join parties whenever they want. If people are buying wins, it means theres a demand for purchasing content. It doesn't matter if they are forced to enter, people still sell wins that way too (Dynamis, Master trials.) It's sad but its what happens when we have an overabundance of gil via people selling and creating it from thin air with GAIN EXP sparks.

[Nyarlko]

I would genuinely like to know what criteria and metrics the dev team is using to define "Game Balance" at this point. Please consider addressing this at length to explain to all of us players how and why you are making the decisions you are making regarding job adjustments, so that we can lower our expectations accordingly. I say "lower" because many of us players are hoping for more, and more drastic, improvements to our favorite jobs than what you would likely consider feasible, so I believe that it would be beneficial to the community to have a clear definition of whatever limitations, definitions and benchmarks are in place in the current design process.

[Nyarlko]

Due to the base parameter values of pets and production cost required, we currently aren’t considering raising all pets to Lv119. However, now that the support effects affect the master, if there are any specific pets you would like to see raised to Lv119, please let us know. Additionally, please also let us know if there are any pets that are already Lv119, but you’d like to have support abilities added to them as well.

In the spirit of your request for requests for specific jug pets to get increased to ilvl119 and/or gain support abilities:

Please increase the natural level caps of the following jugs to ilvl119.
Reductions in synthesis material costs would be appreciated as well if possible.. particularly the recipes that require Philosopher's Stones.:


Cactuar - Amigo Sabotender : Only jug with Fragmentation skillchain property. Add Photosynthesis if possible (shareable).
Snow Rarab - Lucky Lulush : Only jug with Ice damage.
Lynx - Bloodclaw Shasra : Only jug with Lightning damage.
Hippogryph - Faithful Falcorr : Fantod (shareable).
Adamantoise - Crude Raphie : Harden Shell was included in the initial implementation as a shareable buff but the only Adamantoise jug is not ilvl?
Leech - Fatso Fargann : Please add Regeneration if possible (shareable). This is one of my personal favorite pets even though he needs the ilvl upgrade badly.

-----------------------------------

For existing ilvl jug pets:


Chapuli - Missing Nature's Meditation. (shareable)
Rarab - Droopy Dortwin : Stat differences are more than enough of a difference between NQ/HQ jugs. NQ should have a natural cap of 119 as well to reduce total dependence upon a 20min JA.
Mandragora - Sharpwit Hermes : Missing Photosynthesis (Shareable). Phaeosynthesis would probably be too much to ask for, but would be something exciting (Shareable.) Also missing Dream Flower. Please add it like the low level jugs have it. Crowd control can qualify as support, no? >_>
Toad - Brave Hero Glenn : New idea - Give Subtle Blow +50%~75% and flip the current atk-30%/def-30% penalties into +30% bonuses. This would give an option for meleeing masters who want a pet but not use Ready. Would at least make it more than a pure joke pet.

[Sirmarki]

How do you address #1? How do you even consider that a core game balance issue? People are free to start parties or join parties whenever they want. If people are buying wins, it means theres a demand for purchasing content. It doesn't matter if they are forced to enter, people still sell wins that way too (Dynamis, Master trials.) It's sad but its what happens when we have an overabundance of gil via people selling and creating it from thin air with GAIN EXP sparks.

Because it is breaking game balance. I left my character logged in for 15 hours yesterday, just in town, in yell. 95% if the yells were mercs and a handful were people getting people together for content.
Of course some people are going to 'buy wins' if the option is there, it is a tempting and easy option - It has now been accepted as the new norm to just 'use a merc'.

If you really think the future of this game is going to be all about people entering a party and lotting and then returning to town to just stand there (without even participating in the battle) JUST to have that piece of equipment. Then it won't have a future, especially with new faces, because if anything, if that is the way the game is going, it is becoming increasingly boring.

Bottom line:
It is all well and good about talking and balance when it comes to Beastmaster/other and timers/distance.

Yet, battles (a pretty big part of the game) are being manipulated to the core.

- Getting equipment from a battle you never even fought in.
- Getting gear from a battle that you don't even qualify to enter (not having to spend merits)
- Standing there getting job points because someone is running a bot for hours on end getting them for you.

I mean... Seriously, come on.....

[Typral]

Okay, cool feelings? How exactly do you combat it? This game is entering its retired mode. There is barely fresh blood coming into the game so I don't see what you plan to suggest to curb that type of behavior. Are you suggesting SE ban people who attempt to sell content?

[Sirmarki]

Okay, cool feelings? How exactly do you combat it? This game is entering its retired mode. There is barely fresh blood coming into the game so I don't see what you plan to suggest to curb that type of behavior. Are you suggesting SE ban people who attempt to sell content?

You think new people are going to stick around when only around 5% of yell is actually people DOING content?
How long are they going to stick around knowing that the only apparent route these days is to not do anything, pay gil for gear and then go back and look pretty in town.

No, banning is way over the top. Redesign the treasure pool so that people can't just join in it and lot. That way people will have to (god forbid) play the game (you know, like when this game was huge and people got stuff done without the level of merc that exists today).

It's an MMO, it is meant for people to get together, to find and meet new challenges.
Otherwise you might as well have every single item/equipment/weapon sold by NPC's, because whats the difference (NPC vs Merc)?

[Spaitin]

Your solution of redesigning the treasurepool so that you can't just join and get the item wouldnt do much to stop mercing. People would just join before the fight similar to that of helm clears. It would simply make mercing more annoying.

IMO that is a poorly thought out solution. Mercing is fine, without it new players would give up. Which is the reason it is so common. We get rid of mercing and honestly we lose like 60% of the player base. Sadly, mercs are a big part of the reason the game is still going.

Idk if you played back in the day. But mercing was EXTREMELY rampant in the 75 days (i know, i used to do it a LOT).

[Nyarlko]

Better solution for the merc'ing+newbies issue: Become part of the solution.

Pick up those random shouters looking for lower tier content and help them complete it free of charge. Be like me and build a linkshell focused on helping new/returning folk learn about the game and get up to speed to be able to handle the content themselves that others are selling.

Doing content in-house rather than with randoms that you don't know tends to be a more enjoyable experience at the very least.

Merc'ing of highend content really does not have anything to do with anyone who would qualify as a "new player". The biggest stumbling block when starting out is learning 18 years worth of content. You are correct that this is an MMO and we should ideally do things by doing them rather than buying them. Instead of complaining about something that has been officially given the green light (declared not-against TOS) being a problem for new players, help those new players yourself and maybe they'll stick around long enough to become veterans. :)

[TullemoreAsuraFFXI]

Or you implement this :

Placed into June Digest reply, but relates to items, crafting, economy + econ health
This is a concern for the longevity of FFXI, the current state of our community and the overall health of each server.

At this point i really really really believe that FFXI is unworthy of it's ignorant peer to peer transaction interfaces. Unregulated interface design has lead to a manipulated and sometimes corrupt environment. All items in game categorized as equipment should be account-mail only (bound to account). This specifically concerns only the mail system, equipment will still have a place in the economy -> Read Below. Increase mail outslot/inslot to 32+. Trade boxes have the option for a gil trade completely removed. Crafting skill level cap per character reworked to allow all crafts to achieve maximum skill level.

"EX" itemization tag is completely removed from game with the exception of reforged armors, augmented equipment or equipment with Rank point upgrades. All items are given a NPC mediatory vendor listing in a new player supplied warehousing/pawnshop style environment including items that have "EX" tag removed. Auction house is removed and replaced with this new interface. SE dev team + director + producer select a base exchangeable gil rate for said items in the new warehousing system. Dev team + director + producer can elect to set a minimum and maximum value for every listing. Bazaar is linked to new warehousing system, prices of items placed into bazaar are set automatically by the current listing price through the new item commerce system. Item listings are subject to the supply and demand through easily constructed price formulas by which small percentages of value are subtracted or added based on stock levels and availability of items within each listing. Prices never exceed the maximum price for items that existing NPC vendors sell at: this includes all items that are currently sold by every NPC vendor. When selling to NPC vendors players are paid a suggested amount of 75%-90% of the item's current listing price. Listing prices adjust automatically based upon inventory levels. Sold items are automatically accounted for and added to the warehousing inventory. Inventory levels begin at and can become zero.

All equipment purchased with "Sparks" will receive a random stat augment applicable to the jobs that access user prerequisite. Example: Cloth armor sold from Sparks vendor with job listings for BLM/WHM/RDM/SCH/GEO/SMN could receive an augment of +INT or +MND based upon the level range bracket it's sold through.
New NPCs created that will remove any augment for the cost of X 100 the item's minimum equipment level. One placed in each city where sparks vendors are currently located.

[Zehira]

Okay, I can tell you what I think now.

Asura is a very special server (great community btw) and this /yell was a very interesting feature. Mercing was never a thing in Pandemonium before both servers got merged. For years, I always wondered about Asura before I moved back. I got invited to the first linkshell. A few of days later, the holder of linkshell told me to recruit members so I went ahead and recruit members for her. I recruited more than 50 members in the same day I started recruiting as I basically said welcome to the family! Oops. Not a smart move. Everyone felt strange to each other and it annoyed the holder of linkshell the hell out. It took me several months to learn this community before I stop being the nicest person on the server.

Today, times have been changed. FFXI is no more. We are basically living in FFXIV's world where free companies and duty finder do not exist. People want to solo most of time. As I have told several months ago, discord is a very important thing to have. Discord keeps everyone in touch with. While I am having a break from doing the content with other members, my discord keeps getting 10+ notifications from the linkshell every week so it does tell me they are still doing stuff together. They are still recruiting new members to replace retired members. I guess I must be very lucky to be in one of the most active linkshells. That could be a reason why there is 95% mercing in /yell. Of course, one person takes all loots and divides loots by how many members who have ran an event. They have to be honorable enough to keep the linkshell going forever. Take a lot of practices with the same teammates every week. It's an old school MMO for everyone to enjoy.

Welcome to FFXI-2. /shrug You can still start looking for members if there is nothing to do. No one likes to stand in town and watch people selling content in /yell.

[Spaitin]

Or you implement this :

Placed into June Digest reply, but relates to items, crafting, economy + econ health
This is a concern for the longevity of FFXI, the current state of our community and the overall health of each server.

At this point i really really really believe that FFXI is unworthy of it's ignorant peer to peer transaction interfaces. Unregulated interface design has lead to a manipulated and sometimes corrupt environment. All items in game categorized as equipment should be account-mail only (bound to account). This specifically concerns only the mail system, equipment will still have a place in the economy -> Read Below. Increase mail outslot/inslot to 32+. Trade boxes have the option for a gil trade completely removed. Crafting skill level cap per character reworked to allow all crafts to achieve maximum skill level.

"EX" itemization tag is completely removed from game with the exception of reforged armors, augmented equipment or equipment with Rank point upgrades. All items are given a NPC mediatory vendor listing in a new player supplied warehousing/pawnshop style environment including items that have "EX" tag removed. Auction house is removed and replaced with this new interface. SE dev team + director + producer select a base exchangeable gil rate for said items in the new warehousing system. Dev team + director + producer can elect to set a minimum and maximum value for every listing. Bazaar is linked to new warehousing system, prices of items placed into bazaar are set automatically by the current listing price through the new item commerce system. Item listings are subject to the supply and demand through easily constructed price formulas by which small percentages of value are subtracted or added based on stock levels and availability of items within each listing. Prices never exceed the maximum price for items that existing NPC vendors sell at: this includes all items that are currently sold by every NPC vendor. When selling to NPC vendors players are paid a suggested amount of 75%-90% of the item's current listing price. Listing prices adjust automatically based upon inventory levels. Sold items are automatically accounted for and added to the warehousing inventory. Inventory levels begin at and can become zero.

All equipment purchased with "Sparks" will receive a random stat augment applicable to the jobs that access user prerequisite. Example: Cloth armor sold from Sparks vendor with job listings for BLM/WHM/RDM/SCH/GEO/SMN could receive an augment of +INT or +MND based upon the level range bracket it's sold through.
New NPCs created that will remove any augment for the cost of X 100 the item's minimum equipment level. One placed in each city where sparks vendors are currently located.

They wont even give bst 119 pets. your solution is never going to happen simply because they lack they man power. Honestly, the cool thing about this game is how broken it is. These anti merc solutions are pretty dumb to be honest. Ill bet my left leg they NEVER remove the AH. This solution is actually laughable. Why not just play elder scrolls games solo?

You could make everything drop into personal pools, but then you get mercs selling kills left and right where the buyer has to be in the zone and BAM all of escha is even more laggy. Solutions have to be realistic lol. Expect Mireu level effort for solutions. Revamping all gear and currencies. LMAO

[Sirmarki]

Idk if you played back in the day. But mercing was EXTREMELY rampant in the 75 days (i know, i used to do it a LOT).

Maybe on Asura. I never heard of it on Fenrir, it was only when I joined Asura that I saw it.


People would just join before the fight similar to that of helm clears. It would simply make mercing more annoying.

IMO that is a poorly thought out solution. Mercing is fine, without it new players would give up. Which is the reason it is so common. We get rid of mercing and honestly we lose like 60% of the player base. Sadly, mercs are a big part of the reason the game is still going. .

They can't just join a fight if they don't have merits to do so..

If new players give up because they can't get gear through fighting battles, then what is the whole point of the game? People give up when they see unlimited merc yells in /yell and because everyone has got stuff from mercs, they dont wish to do the battles anymore, and so the chances are reasons for doing content are virtually nil. They get bored, they quit.

[Spaitin]

Maybe on Asura. I never heard of it on Fenrir, it was only when I joined Asura that I saw it.



They can't just join a fight if they don't have merits to do so..


You want to make merits a prereq for all fights? for non merit fights they just join before. Making merits a requirement just makes EXP/CP mercs even more prevalent. WOuld make even more mercing.

[Sirmarki]

You want to make merits a prereq for all fights? for non merit fights they just join before. Making merits a requirement just makes EXP/CP mercs even more prevalent. WOuld make even more mercing.

No... Im saying that under the current system, people can get gear by joining the party and lotting on equipment that had a requirement for merits, without even using any merits.

As an example:
Merc group kills Tenzen.
Ginsen drops in pool.
Exit out into Sea Lions Den.
Buyer/player walks into zone pays gil, and then lots on the item.

They then got that item without even dropping one merit.
That's not the way it is meant to be, clearly.

It takes next to no time to get merits to 75 SOLO.... I mean seriously, do you want everything to be no work and instant gratification? That's not how the world works.

[Spaitin]

That content is all dead. who cares if they merc it. Hardly anyone mercs those fights anyway because better gear exists.

[Sirmarki]

That content is all dead. who cares if they merc it. Hardly anyone mercs those fights anyway because better gear exists.

If as you say, that content is all dead, your attitude is to just merc the 'current and only remaining viable content' because better gear exists?

Right, we will go on the notion that content is dead, and worthless. So, nobody needs to do it.
Let's merc the only viable remaining content? Offer the goods from them and the easy way, so nobody has to even group up for that content.....

Then everybody returns to town, in their new gear (that they didn't even draw their weapon for), staring at the HP crystal?

Sounds like an amazing experience.... Take....My....Money....Now.............

[Spaitin]

Maybe not to you. but other people like it. Quite a few apparently.
My attitude is to let people do whatever they want, just because you dissagree with how people like to play doesnt mean anything. I think it is crazy to have someone merc most content for you, but im not such a giant narcissist that ill scream that they shouldn't be able to do it.
I cant even remember the last time i saw ginsen being merced lol. The merced content is CP/EXP/ESCHA/Dynamis/New HTBF. People merc T1 reseinjima stuff. Easily soloable content. Some people prefer to play that way. A lot of the newer MMO you can buy gil and gear straight from the developer. If you really want to get rid of mercing, have SE start selling it. None of the solutions i have seen from the players would do much to change it. I wish they would, cuz then the devs would have more money to work with and put back into the game. It would also get rid of a lot of the botting issues. I think botting is a FAR bigger issue than mercing. Mercing is really just background noise tbh.

I mean, tell me your proposed changes and ill tell you how people will start mercing it.

[TullemoreAsuraFFXI]

Postings and complaints beat around the bushes, some have outright pointed fingers at the correct culprits. Where there is a demand there will be supply (Academic Econ 101). So here are the elephants in the room that each have guilt in creating a mercenary customer.

1. Bots (3rd party ToS violations that script commands into FFXI).
2. Inflation of gil present on active accounts (This is made worse for every bot implemented).
3. Conditions by which HQ (high quality) synthesis product results occur.
4. Escutcheon creation sinks of time and gil which is compounded by the source of necessary material being obstructed by bots. (The crafting shields).
5. Ultimate Weapon (REMA) domination within 18 of 22 available jobs (Power Creep).
6. Conditions by which Ultimate Weapons (REMA) upgrade and the economic+acquisition grind that is attached to each. (Yes, all the non-gil REMA currencies).
7. Un-evolved /seacom party finding and communications assistance.
8. VE, E, N, D, VD reward disparities for battles with these difficulty selections.
9. Power Creep requirements to qualify as a competent participant for present-day ilvl 119+ battles that allocate economic rewards.
10. Monopolized and outrageous NPC vendor gil sinks attached to Job Specific Equipment reforge process and advanced crafting recipies.
11. Items tagged "EX" from battles that DO NOT have any relevant problem of a open world obstruction due to them being procured from instanced content (HTBF Omen Escha).
12. Direct un-mediated peer-to-peer transaction capabilities.
13. Persistence of RMT distribution, customers and supply chain.
14. Battle conditions, enemy capabilities, and player established counter-measure strategies that exclude a bracket of job type or dramatically favor specific party compositions as it pertains to jobs.
15. The mutilation of magic burst as a competent offensive strategy for significant content such as Ambuscade and the failure to adequately balance the utilization of BLM job as an elemental damage source with the capabilities of other offensive jobs.

Character equipment requirements, Job point requirement, and power creep along with the meta party compositions utilized by players have created a significant barrier to entry as a competent participant in content traversed for advanced character development. Players enamored with progress that is only directly or potentially achievable through economic purchases have these concerns as motive to extract gil from any viable source. Undeveloped or underdeveloped characters have to meet or exceed the content and player enforced barrier of competency for participation.

Gil has become the short-cut. The choice is to struggle with the status of incompetence or to purchase the minimum of competence which is the equipment requirement for a job to adequately fulfill it's placement within a party. The legitimate resolution is to form a linkshell, community, and/or static of players that have comparable capabilities and limitations that would climb the ladder of achievement together. Due to #7 and #14 the establishment of such social networks is in a dismal state. This leaves the unregulated marketplace as a means to attain requirements forced by both power creep and player preferences.
NOW beyond that explanation, the acquisition of these funds falls into question. Various schemes, mercenary work, market manipulations, Bots, ToS violations (dupes), micro-transactions and RMT purchases all have been utilized for these economic gains which motive originates from the availability to purchase progress of various variety.

As of late, SE has taken a progressive step with the development of the NPC Zurim and how he vendors his wares. The Unity NM system at the beginnings of modern ilvl 119 era was implemented effectively to curtail plundering tactics of embedded merc transactions. Dyn{D} although problematic with it's direct alliance-wide treasure pool system and complications due to the dupe scandal and cross-service of crafting skills has a small degree of improvement in the area of a 18 player alliance having enough room for the inclusion of additional job selections without increasing the challenge of defeating enemies.

In the state that FFXI exists today, I offer this advice. Buyer Beware! The value of what is sold to you is based on how incompetent the merc perceives you to be and how much gil they believe they can extract from you. Merc prices reflect the above mentioned scandalous behaviors and they are looking to sell their services to the players who place the least value on the gil they have.
Form statics, linkshells and social connections with people that have comparable schedules. Lift all players in your group to meet the requirements of modern FFXI and the newest challenges. If you feed wild animals, they will associate you as a food source. Merc utilizes this same precedent, those that feed that demand perpetuate that behavior.

[Spaitin]

UNM is merced pretty easily. you just sell kills. It didnt do anything to stop mercing.

[TullemoreAsuraFFXI]

True, but not even a fool would exchange vast sums of gil for that service. The fights are typically alot more available to the inclusiveness of job types with 18 player alliances being allowed. Thus limiting the perception of marketing the UCNM as a consistent source of sales for a merc.

[Spaitin]

If the content becomes hard, then yes they would. When UNM was new you could charge pretty good amounts for a kill. Even still 200-300k a kill on the 135 UNM is pretty common. Most mercing is pretty small amounts of gil tbh. dynamis D wave three mercing is expensive and so is aeonic clear. BUt the rest are pretty darn cheap. Any content that has a requirement to get kill/clear credit or drops will easily be merced. Your solutions really just make mercing look slightly different.

[TullemoreAsuraFFXI]

guess you overlooked the part about removing the ability to place gil into a trading box?

[Typral]

You just sound like a communist at this point, just let people sell whatever they want. SE just needs to keep adding content and not let things stagnate like they have. There is nothing stopping players from grouping up, mercing or buying from mercs is not required in any form.

[TullemoreAsuraFFXI]

Correct, there's no requirement.
The alternative traditional way of doing things must be facilitated by players.
The implementation of billboard advertising by mercs in /yell imposes a perspective that contradicts the core intent of community formation and building relationships of trust.
Core values of MMOs.

If people would actually read each word of the comments concerning the topic you would have seen that the proposal didn't remove capabilities to sell things, it actually INCREASES those capabilities through the use of a new commerce interface that would replace the antique auction house with a evolved player supplied warehousing market. Complete with massively more items available (due to removing "EX" tag from equipment with the exceptions being items with rank points, items that are augmented and items that are described as Artifact/Relic/Empyrean).

[Spaitin]

Then they just use real money in paypal via discord. still will be merced. Also, SE will NEVER do that. to even suggest it is silly. If you want a different commerce system i suggest finding a different game. They dont have NEAR the manpower to do that, and they dont really care about mercs.

[Sirmarki]

SE just needs to keep adding content

And mercs just keep selling that content. Reducing the chances of people getting together and doing it (because they already bought the stuff from a merc).

Whatever your thoughts as well as Spaitin's are. Mercing breaks ToS.... Controlling 6 characters on one computer using third party software and sending scripted automatic commands to
each instance is breaking terms. End of story...

Unless SE want to re-write the entire ToS to say it is ok, until that day, it remains against the terms of service.

[Sirmarki]

Then they just use real money in paypal via discord. still will be merced. Also, SE will NEVER do that. to even suggest it is silly. If you want a different commerce system i suggest finding a different game. They dont have NEAR the manpower to do that, and they dont really care about mercs.


other people like it. Quite a few apparently.

So just make absolutely everything sellable from NPC's, right? Because whats the difference? If people like buying weapons/gear and not fighting, make it more user friendly, right?

[Spaitin]

Lol then go play wow or FFIV. you can do that in those games. People like this game the way it is, which is why they still play it. Your suggestion would just kill the game. SE is aware of people breaking ToS. Guess what? they dont really care. Your suggestions are a bit silly. They dont have NEAR t he manpower to do it. I wish they would make bst not suck. But it aint happening. They only tweak existing parameters. THey are not changing to new ones. Sure make it sellable by NPC. then they are doing the same thing you dont like just different.

People have been complaining about the mercing for 17 YEARS. you really think they are going to change it now? lol The reason they havnt stopped it is because they dont want to.

[Sirmarki]

Your suggestions are a bit silly.

Me: "Play the game, form a group and do content, it's actually quite fun" - Silly apparently.


Sure make it sellable by NPC

You: make everything sellable, nobody has to do anything whatsoever other than own copious amounts of gil and just stand there doing not much of anything...

In case you haven't noticed, with current trends, there is only one 'undead' server left with (I just checked) 2500 people on it.......
So, yeh, merc'ing isn't really working.....

Edit: I mean 500 people running 5x alts on each account.

I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one thinking this...

[Spaitin]

In case you haven't noticed, with current trends, there is only one 'undead' server left with (I just checked) 2500 people on it.......
So, yeh, merc'ing isn't really working.....


I mean... the only server that isnt dead is the one with mercing. The ones without mercing are all dead. You used bad logic on that one, can easily use it to describe multiple opposite outcomes. Yes your solution is silly. They will NEVER do what you are suggesting. For a solution to be good, it has to have at least a snowflakes chance in hell of being implemented. Your solution is silly and unrealistic. People actually go to asura FOR the mercing services, as crazy as that sounds.

[Kylos]

Wow, this thread got derailed hard.

1) Thank you SE (& Matsui especially!) for taking the time to address some of our issues, especially as it pertains to Mireu and Beastmaster.

2) Still have not seen any Mireu kills on Cerberus, but hopefully this can happen soon thanks to your adjustments.

3) I'm not a BST, but it's clear there's so much that can be done to the job going from the suggestions by others.
Just be smart about it, do small updates every month or so. Ask for feedback, test, test, test. BST can be great
again without being ridiculously overpowered.

As for the other stuff..

4) You'll find the merc 'problem' is only prevalent on the biggest servers. Go to any small server like Cerberus
and these services either don't exist, or only show up once in a blue moon. If you're so upset by players
selling content? Go to a smaller server and join/build a linkshell with players who want to beat things
the way the game should be played.

You'll be surprised how many players still get together to do content without any
exchanges of currency. My endgame linkshell is close to completing its fifth Aeonic,
we've destroyed Omen and plan on doing the new content as well. You won't get
things done as fast as somewhere like Asura, but you'll probably enjoy it more.

[Sirmarki]

Your solution is silly and unrealistic. People actually go to asura FOR the mercing services, as crazy as that sounds.

No they don't, they go there because it has a larger population, with the logic that more people = more stuff to do.
Not to pay a merc and then sit in town again, with no player interaction lol.... That is the reason they left the quiet servers in the first place....

I think you'll find the drive to Asura was all started some years ago by one big linkshell, not mercing...

[Sirmarki]

Go to a smaller server and join/build a linkshell with players who want to beat things
the way the game should be played.

I came from a small server (300 population peak around 3 years ago).

It felt like a ghost town. I mean you could go through zones and not see one person.
Every linkshell collapsed because it had literately no players in them.
Looking at the /yell log, it was completely dead....

The problem is, there is no happy medium. Asura is big, and the rest are tiny. There needs to be some middle ground met a long the way because the balance is way off.

[Nyarlko]

Merc'ing has been explicitly permitted by the devs under the justification that it qualifies as role-playing as a mercenary/sell-sword (as silly as that may sound.) So long as everything changing hands is in-game resources (ie: there are absolutely no RMT or RMT-like activities involved,) the practice does not break TOS according to SE. The devs have stated that in the past, and I've been told the same thing by GMs and their customer service line.

Multiboxing in and of itself is not against the TOS either. I believe the line they've drawn is that as long as you are doing so without using any tools which are manipulating FFXI data, then it's acceptable. Don't know for sure if they've ever actually come out and specified what types of non-cheating tools are permitted to interact with the FFXI client beyond screen capture/record software, but I know for a fact that it's OK to play multiple characters/accounts on multiple PCs, and that using hardware like KVM switches do not break TOS since that's what they told me when I asked. I figure that something like running multiple VMs on one machine w/ one FFXI instance in each would probably be acceptable as well since no game data is being altered, but don't quote me on that until we have an official answer. There are legitimate methods to multibox which are not against TOS, and multiboxing itself is not the actual source of your complaints.

That'd be bots.
Bots are bad and need to go away.
Preferably banned by IP AND payment method.
-_-

[Alhanelem]

Merc'ing has been explicitly permitted by the devs under the justification that it qualifies as role-playing as a mercenary/sell-sword (as silly as that may sound.) So long as everything changing hands is in-game resources (ie: there are absolutely no RMT or RMT-like activities involved,) the practice does not break TOS according to SE. The devs have stated that in the past, and I've been told the same thing by GMs and their customer service line.
I think most people understand that mercing via in-game resources isn't prohibited, however the problem is if people buy gil and don't get caught they're basically using an out of game resource.

Even though it's allowed, a lot of players see mercing as a problem because it facilitates lack of skill in the playerbase. This is also true in FFXIV where the same thing happens (you can even see people advertising "selling content" in the Party Finder). Since people don't have to learn how to beat content to get the rewards, now they may have the drops they want but they still don't have the skills they need.

[Spaitin]

Wow, yeah, mercing is permitted by devs lol. Took some looking but i found it. They also dont mind most addons. Multiboxing is completely fine, unless using addons that resemble "botting" or allow you to do things you shouldnt be able to do i.e. speed hacking..

They need to update terms of service to make it more clear. So complaining about mercing is completely silly. Complaining about RMT and botting makes sense. The only solution that I have seen in other games to combat it effectively is by having the developer sell the gil to players directly. The most successful MMO's of all time do it, so apparently it works well. I think they should sell gil just so they have a larger budget to work with.

[TullemoreAsuraFFXI]

I'll be the perspective of reason. If a company that makes video games wants my support as a customer through either subscription or purchase that company will refrain from business policies of RMT for pixels within their product. Period.