Delgear
08-11-2025, 06:12 AM
User interface and gameplay loop
I think it would really help ffxi to modernize its User interface and remove a lot of the programming from the user experience. Crafting macros is fine for the vets among us but a lot of new players stepping into the space are definitely intimidated by it, and the game doesn't conver very well in the early parts of the game how important LATERAL advancement is. Most modern RPG's go with a direct upgrade strategy as in when you get a new piece of gear it is just objectively better it has most or all the same stats as your last item but more of them. and they cycle out old gear very quickly with seasons ..... I'm not going to lie i hate this modern push in games and its a bias i have, and it is one of the main reasons FFXI is one of my favorite games. I think the idea that there are so many wide gear options and that gear is situational is very very good moar bigger number only advancement is not as interesting or engaging at least to me as having all kinds of situational gear to go collect for different situations.
Also the way ffxi interacts from server to client is kind of a dated practice when it comes to the way FFXI is programmed at heart. so many actions require multiple tit for tats with the server, so as an example one of the most common actions a player might use a weapon skill
-The player is in an "idle or TP"
-set sends a request to the server innitiating a weapon skill
-bounces back to client to see what they have on
During that time the client is most likely switching gear so client side data processing is happening.
-the equipment is bounced back to the server at the time of the weapon skill going off
-the server bounces back the damage
-the player innitiates a request to switch back to TP set
-The server recognizes and processes the TP set as the now active set.
I'm going to float a strange idea here that i think if implemented would seriously reduce the amount of conversations between ffxi servers and players but achieves the desired response or gameplay for the players but also makes the gameplay much more approachable for new players, and gets rid of the necessity for a lot of macros and macro lines.
What if a players character had a "Derived stats profile" on the server, and in order to affect these profiles one would have to turn in (destroying the in game item) to PERMANENTLY adjust thier derived stats. to explain this better lets say a player is playing Warrior and lets pick a commonly understood stat like equipment haste.
If the warrior takes thier current body piece that for instance provides +6% haste donates it to this system destroying the item, when this player now plays warrior they will always have 6% haste applied to that state when it is the most relevant stat. If the warrior then obtains a better chest piece that adds 8% haste if they use this same system to do this again it instead appends the warriors maximum haste by +2%
The idea here is by making the characters derived stats stored locally on the server, and having it run an algorithm or simulation parse 1 time when an item is appended to the derived stats and/or a player initially engages an enemy neither client nor server need to run those calculations in the middle of combat numerous times. If you fight an enemy the server picks the equipment required to provide the best accuracy and or fastest tp build / highest weapon damage depending on the situations encountered and then no more communication is required back and forth beween client and server to resolve the numerous math equations. all battles all over the server communications become:
-Player innitiates an action
-server checks derived stats profile
-server executes action with pre-calculated interaction(Cached for this mob type maybe cashe like 4-5 mobs in the cache)
-Server returns result to client.
You could make system optional so players that want to hang onto the way they have always played, but this system would certainly reduce the knowledge barrier of entry and in addition would inspire collecting all the pieces of armor in the game and turning them in to be destroyed as the first haste piece mentioned above would start you at 6 but each iterative piece collect an addition to the base peice. so collecting only the 8% piece would only append +2% to the derived stats, making you want to go back and seek out that lower level piece. I call it Mog Armoire, additionally allow it to return lockstyle items to the player for the items you have collected. This segues into my next topic.
One of the worst parts of this game is how much content you have but refuse to meaningfully use. This game tells a great stories, it has really well crafted encounters that have over time become lame stomps, and are skipped through. One of the best things you could do for the game is INSPIRE end game players to go back and relive the game to some extent with lower level players and reward experiencing that game level synched and or geared at that level. In addition to adding this "Collect them all" mentality to advancement will help but another great step you could take is:
Make helping newbies end game relevant. So a lot of people out there will help a newbie start out the game, but its generally through things that circumvent or avoid actually replaying the game since it is more efficient and has more payoff.
What if the mentor system was retooled to allow feedback from players being helped and rewarded the helper with actual endgame progress .... any team activity should be more rewarding than any solo activity just because of how the game is designed (skill chains, support class, healer solo difficulty) in the same token i think Gallantry should be the most valuable ambuscade currency by a decent measure. Perhaps it would also reward people helping those of lower gear level or progression more, providing an incentive to them to see how much they could carry lowbies adding another possible difficulty slider for elite players the more they handicap themselves with lower geared members the greater the rewards. this would be easier to implement with the derived stats profile saved server side or basing it on the maximum gear score the player owns in each slot for that job. maybe bonuses for tackling the content levelsynched to the appropriate level for the material.
The mentorship program needs an incentive like a Karma shop that rewards you for helping players get through all content especially the part that presently winds up being solod by almost all players.
Last topic ide like to discuss "being able to interact with content" i find a lot of hard stop handbrake moments in ffxi where if you don't have optimal gear you just "can't participate" some more frustrating examples include trying to get enough magic accuracy to be able to land critical debuffs on RDM, almost requiring equipment you need the debuffs landed on to get (Obstinate Sash RP) or needing to land debuffs on severel highly resistant mobs in Sortie to get more galli.
So i think a lot of buffs and debuffs could be nuanced to provide a better play experience and ill cite some examples below:
Poison: poison does an amount of damage per tick, you can either remove it or not remove it, this means that if you can dispel it sometimes the encounter becomes trivial, other times it can be so restrictive that you REQUIRE White mage and Divine caress. How i would implement poison instead would be that instead of poison just being a regular debuff have poison be 1hp/tic and be able to stack ... the more you get hit with poison the more stacks it gets, when poisona is cast it removes a certain number of stacks which can be affected by equipment bonuses, skill, job abilities like divine seal, etc. so this way it is easier to balance poison across multiple jobs that may want to remove it. I believe this mechanic could be applied to many other debuffs much like slow, doom, and many others. This means classes that cannot completely deny a poison aura can still interact with it by removing most of the poison here and there slowing down the poison's escalation. Auras would just add poison per pulse. each form of poison should have a cap of stacks and the target's cap will compare with any and all incoming poison effects and just retain the highest cap.
this also means on the player debuffer side of things, you don't have to make the cieling to successfully debuff so high anymore but have resistance lower the number of stacks and require you to cast multiple times to build it up to maximum potency and maybe have a chat log report when you fully stack this debuff like "The target is fully poisoned". this way multiple players can accumulate thier abilities towards a goal and it could make sense to have multiple jobs casting poison to stack it up faster.
Paralysis, Paralyze, curse, distract, frazzle can all work this way so that even if a healer cannot completely remove the debuff they can lower its potency by casting na spells or bar spells.
some debuffs could work better as an inverse like doom, doom should apply more stacks the weaker it is, and lets say doom is removed always at 30 stacks, if the caster doesn't have the potency to remove doom outright it adds a number of stacks back, delaying how long it is before doom kills the target. rather than a specific potency and roll requirement to remove at all or you can't do anything.
This means if an encounter requires you to lower an evasive mobs evasion rather than have all rdm's fail to affect the mob at all until +400 macc or something instead, if you cast the spell at all it will apply at least 1 stack, but maybe distract 3 sets the cap at 40 evasion reduced or something, all players casting distract, ditract 2, and distract 3 will append to that effect until it reaches the cap, it allows you to make the spellcaster have to cast the spell more than once without it being moderated so much by RNG and failure and can instead be moderated by efficiency.
The Market
I think the main problem ALL MMO's have is that they tend to operate in a sellers market.
What do I mean by that ?
well what is sold and how much it is sold by is by and large moderated presently in ffxi by the sellers, if the game introduced 25,000 players tommorow none of the already existing players are going to suddenly start providing craft only items at lowe rlevels that aren't required for endgame mmaterial .... it's just not worth thier time. any new player who crafts will realize it is much faster to grind using NPC items presently due to how low standard material drop rates rae and then they will just craft higher level gear as well and not really participate in the low level economy anymore.
I think your best bet to change this fact is to reverse the economy to be a "Buyers market" and you already have the infrastructure to do it ..... guilds and guild points.
I think instead you should replace the Auction house system slowly over time with a commissions system from the guilds, allow players to instead of posting equipment on the AH post requests on a like system for crafters to craft, making the primary reward be guild points for completing contracts thus obtaining better crafting gear and more crafting formulas through the key items is obtained by interacting with the community and providing the good that people are requesting. Hopefully this will reduce the amount of Gil crafters will need to charge to make a profit as they can get maybe some HQ end game crafting materials by fulfilling contracts.
I think it would really help ffxi to modernize its User interface and remove a lot of the programming from the user experience. Crafting macros is fine for the vets among us but a lot of new players stepping into the space are definitely intimidated by it, and the game doesn't conver very well in the early parts of the game how important LATERAL advancement is. Most modern RPG's go with a direct upgrade strategy as in when you get a new piece of gear it is just objectively better it has most or all the same stats as your last item but more of them. and they cycle out old gear very quickly with seasons ..... I'm not going to lie i hate this modern push in games and its a bias i have, and it is one of the main reasons FFXI is one of my favorite games. I think the idea that there are so many wide gear options and that gear is situational is very very good moar bigger number only advancement is not as interesting or engaging at least to me as having all kinds of situational gear to go collect for different situations.
Also the way ffxi interacts from server to client is kind of a dated practice when it comes to the way FFXI is programmed at heart. so many actions require multiple tit for tats with the server, so as an example one of the most common actions a player might use a weapon skill
-The player is in an "idle or TP"
-set sends a request to the server innitiating a weapon skill
-bounces back to client to see what they have on
During that time the client is most likely switching gear so client side data processing is happening.
-the equipment is bounced back to the server at the time of the weapon skill going off
-the server bounces back the damage
-the player innitiates a request to switch back to TP set
-The server recognizes and processes the TP set as the now active set.
I'm going to float a strange idea here that i think if implemented would seriously reduce the amount of conversations between ffxi servers and players but achieves the desired response or gameplay for the players but also makes the gameplay much more approachable for new players, and gets rid of the necessity for a lot of macros and macro lines.
What if a players character had a "Derived stats profile" on the server, and in order to affect these profiles one would have to turn in (destroying the in game item) to PERMANENTLY adjust thier derived stats. to explain this better lets say a player is playing Warrior and lets pick a commonly understood stat like equipment haste.
If the warrior takes thier current body piece that for instance provides +6% haste donates it to this system destroying the item, when this player now plays warrior they will always have 6% haste applied to that state when it is the most relevant stat. If the warrior then obtains a better chest piece that adds 8% haste if they use this same system to do this again it instead appends the warriors maximum haste by +2%
The idea here is by making the characters derived stats stored locally on the server, and having it run an algorithm or simulation parse 1 time when an item is appended to the derived stats and/or a player initially engages an enemy neither client nor server need to run those calculations in the middle of combat numerous times. If you fight an enemy the server picks the equipment required to provide the best accuracy and or fastest tp build / highest weapon damage depending on the situations encountered and then no more communication is required back and forth beween client and server to resolve the numerous math equations. all battles all over the server communications become:
-Player innitiates an action
-server checks derived stats profile
-server executes action with pre-calculated interaction(Cached for this mob type maybe cashe like 4-5 mobs in the cache)
-Server returns result to client.
You could make system optional so players that want to hang onto the way they have always played, but this system would certainly reduce the knowledge barrier of entry and in addition would inspire collecting all the pieces of armor in the game and turning them in to be destroyed as the first haste piece mentioned above would start you at 6 but each iterative piece collect an addition to the base peice. so collecting only the 8% piece would only append +2% to the derived stats, making you want to go back and seek out that lower level piece. I call it Mog Armoire, additionally allow it to return lockstyle items to the player for the items you have collected. This segues into my next topic.
One of the worst parts of this game is how much content you have but refuse to meaningfully use. This game tells a great stories, it has really well crafted encounters that have over time become lame stomps, and are skipped through. One of the best things you could do for the game is INSPIRE end game players to go back and relive the game to some extent with lower level players and reward experiencing that game level synched and or geared at that level. In addition to adding this "Collect them all" mentality to advancement will help but another great step you could take is:
Make helping newbies end game relevant. So a lot of people out there will help a newbie start out the game, but its generally through things that circumvent or avoid actually replaying the game since it is more efficient and has more payoff.
What if the mentor system was retooled to allow feedback from players being helped and rewarded the helper with actual endgame progress .... any team activity should be more rewarding than any solo activity just because of how the game is designed (skill chains, support class, healer solo difficulty) in the same token i think Gallantry should be the most valuable ambuscade currency by a decent measure. Perhaps it would also reward people helping those of lower gear level or progression more, providing an incentive to them to see how much they could carry lowbies adding another possible difficulty slider for elite players the more they handicap themselves with lower geared members the greater the rewards. this would be easier to implement with the derived stats profile saved server side or basing it on the maximum gear score the player owns in each slot for that job. maybe bonuses for tackling the content levelsynched to the appropriate level for the material.
The mentorship program needs an incentive like a Karma shop that rewards you for helping players get through all content especially the part that presently winds up being solod by almost all players.
Last topic ide like to discuss "being able to interact with content" i find a lot of hard stop handbrake moments in ffxi where if you don't have optimal gear you just "can't participate" some more frustrating examples include trying to get enough magic accuracy to be able to land critical debuffs on RDM, almost requiring equipment you need the debuffs landed on to get (Obstinate Sash RP) or needing to land debuffs on severel highly resistant mobs in Sortie to get more galli.
So i think a lot of buffs and debuffs could be nuanced to provide a better play experience and ill cite some examples below:
Poison: poison does an amount of damage per tick, you can either remove it or not remove it, this means that if you can dispel it sometimes the encounter becomes trivial, other times it can be so restrictive that you REQUIRE White mage and Divine caress. How i would implement poison instead would be that instead of poison just being a regular debuff have poison be 1hp/tic and be able to stack ... the more you get hit with poison the more stacks it gets, when poisona is cast it removes a certain number of stacks which can be affected by equipment bonuses, skill, job abilities like divine seal, etc. so this way it is easier to balance poison across multiple jobs that may want to remove it. I believe this mechanic could be applied to many other debuffs much like slow, doom, and many others. This means classes that cannot completely deny a poison aura can still interact with it by removing most of the poison here and there slowing down the poison's escalation. Auras would just add poison per pulse. each form of poison should have a cap of stacks and the target's cap will compare with any and all incoming poison effects and just retain the highest cap.
this also means on the player debuffer side of things, you don't have to make the cieling to successfully debuff so high anymore but have resistance lower the number of stacks and require you to cast multiple times to build it up to maximum potency and maybe have a chat log report when you fully stack this debuff like "The target is fully poisoned". this way multiple players can accumulate thier abilities towards a goal and it could make sense to have multiple jobs casting poison to stack it up faster.
Paralysis, Paralyze, curse, distract, frazzle can all work this way so that even if a healer cannot completely remove the debuff they can lower its potency by casting na spells or bar spells.
some debuffs could work better as an inverse like doom, doom should apply more stacks the weaker it is, and lets say doom is removed always at 30 stacks, if the caster doesn't have the potency to remove doom outright it adds a number of stacks back, delaying how long it is before doom kills the target. rather than a specific potency and roll requirement to remove at all or you can't do anything.
This means if an encounter requires you to lower an evasive mobs evasion rather than have all rdm's fail to affect the mob at all until +400 macc or something instead, if you cast the spell at all it will apply at least 1 stack, but maybe distract 3 sets the cap at 40 evasion reduced or something, all players casting distract, ditract 2, and distract 3 will append to that effect until it reaches the cap, it allows you to make the spellcaster have to cast the spell more than once without it being moderated so much by RNG and failure and can instead be moderated by efficiency.
The Market
I think the main problem ALL MMO's have is that they tend to operate in a sellers market.
What do I mean by that ?
well what is sold and how much it is sold by is by and large moderated presently in ffxi by the sellers, if the game introduced 25,000 players tommorow none of the already existing players are going to suddenly start providing craft only items at lowe rlevels that aren't required for endgame mmaterial .... it's just not worth thier time. any new player who crafts will realize it is much faster to grind using NPC items presently due to how low standard material drop rates rae and then they will just craft higher level gear as well and not really participate in the low level economy anymore.
I think your best bet to change this fact is to reverse the economy to be a "Buyers market" and you already have the infrastructure to do it ..... guilds and guild points.
I think instead you should replace the Auction house system slowly over time with a commissions system from the guilds, allow players to instead of posting equipment on the AH post requests on a like system for crafters to craft, making the primary reward be guild points for completing contracts thus obtaining better crafting gear and more crafting formulas through the key items is obtained by interacting with the community and providing the good that people are requesting. Hopefully this will reduce the amount of Gil crafters will need to charge to make a profit as they can get maybe some HQ end game crafting materials by fulfilling contracts.