Sortie rewards for solo / casual players.

[radar]

One of the primary reasons to do Sortie is to upgrade Empyrean (for non hardcore players, hardcore players get that & primes & +2 earrings).

The requirements are ridiculous.

If you as a casual or solo player want to take part in Sortie, each monster gives around 30 gali per kill, bosses around 2k gali, boxes around 500.

The Ground floor isn't too bad, so you have a good chance to get a Sapphire and a decent amount of Gali per run.

The basement level is not for casual and solo players at all, yet players are expected to obtain a Ra'Kaznar Starstone to upgrade each piece of Empyrean armor.

The chances to get a Starstone are far less for these players, and so chances are they are going to be forced to buy one for 90,000 Gali.

90.000 gali for a Starstone + 70,000 fee (160k Gali for each piece of armor, when players may have numerous jobs), for one piece of armor.

Is this really acceptable? When so many players of this game are casual/solo, and trusts are so import to its profitability is this still really acceptable?

Maybe double the amount of Gali monsters give, add Starstones to login points (you add +1 earrings to bloat inv, but not starstones?) and boss kills.

Not only is XI wildly over-difficult in terms of content for most of its players, but the grinds are so long and ridiculous it's almost impossible to retain any new players that join.

[Alhanelem]

By the time you're able to do things like sortie you're really not a new player anymore.

Trouble with this there's no easy way to accomodate solo players without making things multiplicatively easier for groups. The content was designed for groups, solo play is available so your progress doesn't completely stop if your group doesn't run, but you should really be trying to find a group if you can find one. It's called an MMORPG for a reason, yes, many of us can and will play solo most of the time, but people shouldn't resist trying to find groups for the handful of contents that are best enjoyed with one.

[VoiceMemo]

Well to play devils advocate, FFXI is still a MMORPG, focus on the MM, Massive Multiplayer. So yes even though you can enter solo and do things solo, even with trust some things still require teaming up. Though I believe some jobs can solo a few 2nd floor bosses(basement), sch being one of them with self skillchaining.

[radar]

Trouble with this there's no easy way to accomodate solo players without making things multiplicatively easier for groups. The content was designed for groups, solo play is available so your progress doesn't completely stop if your group doesn't run, but you should really be trying to find a group if you can find one. It's called an MMORPG for a reason, yes, many of us can and will play solo most of the time, but people shouldn't resist trying to find groups for the handful of contents that are best enjoyed with one.

Grouping on XI is not the answer, the game is too difficult and the good players community is a) too unforgiving of failure b) unwilling to help others cause of cost of doing so or punishments and the casual / solo community is heavily trained in learned helplessness and afraid to group up and make a fool of themselves. You cannot just group with a bunch of friends or randoms (not that they will join anyway, no matter how long you shout), they have to be very specific jobs, they have to fully understand the content, they have to have 1) really good gear and b) they have to have macro in good gear too (ws sets, aggro for tanks, fast cast for mages etc) or you'll wipe worse than if you just used trusts, and with the added bonus you get a bad reputation too now for wiping on the server.

There are plenty of ways to accommodate solo / casual players for Sortie, you could add a weekly RoE objectives to content for example to give a big boost. Kill 200 trash mobs in a week = 5k extra gali, that would make it far more mentally rewarding and give people a goal to work on they can do. Kill 8 bosses (inc minor) a week to get a starstone etc

There are ways to do this, all the basic systems are there.

As for your MMORPG argument, every single mmorpg on the market is mostly solo based so I'm not sure what you think this means anymore. This isn't the Everquest Era anymore. All MMORPG means is lots of people on the server to interact with.

XI has a number of problems, firstly it has a shoestring budget so they are very limited in what they can do and so have a motive to make things take longer b) there are zero beta testers for content (been this way for around 10 years), so they calculate difficulty based on what they think and if people can clear things in the server records, or just watching after implementation.

The problem with many endgame players in the west if they have countered the extreme difficulty with a) 3rd party stuff that give huge advantages (who will quit the game if those things stop working) and b) years of grinding the best gear to min max.

If you come from XIV, are a returnee or are solo / casual the game is very unrewarding to the point of being a vertical difficulty scale, and given over half fit into these categories this is not a good strategy to be profitable.

When you play a normal modern mmorpg, grouping is the answer cause the game is designed to be beaten when you do that. On XI it's not, you can argue it's designed for you to fail. This is fine if you're a 2002 mmorpg full of teenagers, not so much when they are all grown up.

There needs to be a path that is rewarding for over half the population that are scrubs, or they will stop paying a sub to do nothing.

Even just adding RoE objectives to stuff will help a lot.

[Alhanelem]

Grouping on XI is not the answer,It's an online multiplayer game. Grouping IS the answer.

There is not many contents that can't already be done solo. There SHOULD be SOME content in a multiplayer game meant for groups (even if you can enter solo). And I write this as a majority solo player.

Any adjustment to sortie rewards has to consider both camps, because both will be affected.



If you come from XIV, are a returnee or are solo / casual the game is very unrewarding to the point of being a vertical difficulty scale,FFXI has been a grind heavy game since the first day. It's not going to appeal to everyone, particularly more modern gamers, and that's fine. Though, by and large the crossover has brought a considerable number of players to the game. FFXI shouldn't wholesale change its identity purely for the sake of player count.

[VoiceMemo]

Well if grouping is the issue, FFXI could implement a system like they have in 14. Where party lead post on a party finder message board and whoever wants to do said event can join. Though job combinations and how well geared will still be a factor.

[Alhanelem]

the search comment system was put there for a similar purpose, it just isn't nearly as intuitive. You can select a content type for your party and a description but it's not nearly as easy to use for either side. Now to be fair, it used to be used a lot in the earlier days but nowadays nobody seems to use it and relies on shouting.

If there was a cross world system for instanced content it would largely solve that problem but that would be a major networking and server related rework, so I doubt we'll be seeing anything like that.

I think the dev's ability to alter the UI in significant ways or make new ones is limited, and we'd definitely need a significant new UI elements to support a party finder system. But I agree that making grouping less of an ordeal would certainly help make more people interested in doing it.

[radar]

Some of you have really no idea what the game is like outside of your bubbles.

You're like a bunch of pro baseball players, all in a big hall with lots of other teams and you're like well if I just make a random team from this hall I can make a good team. So that means it's easy to make a pro baseball team.

Have you ever healed a bunch of random inexperienced players in difficulty content, with no BiS support jobs and just a bunch of melee in gear with no -dmg? I'm curious if you have seen how much damage players take, and how little damage they do.

[Alhanelem]

Have you ever healed a bunch of random inexperienced players in difficulty content, with no BiS support jobs and just a bunch of melee in gear with no -dmg? I'm curious if you have seen how much damage players take, and how little damage they do. 15 years ago and earlier, it happened all the dang time. It's how people learned things. Trust, as nice as it can be, is also the reason for these problems. It makes soloing so easy that people often dont' group if they're not forced to.

[radar]

Alliance content vs party content is a whole different animal.

Party, each person matters far more. Alliance there is plenty of room for carry weight.

In a perfect world Alliance content would come back, in reality the game is still capped at 56k connection, people use "spellcast magic" that clogs that server connection for everyone in the alliance (all that UI HP/MP updating of everyone in real time is not a good thing when they are changing gear so much) and they have added more data transmission too (we see what happens when they try in Dyna D, Ody and they lowered how many trusts you can have in Limbus cause of concerns over data capping). That's why the game is focused more on party now, and the difficulty was never really made for it.

I think they are starting to get how important -dmg is, the RSE was a good step but it honestly needs to be available all the time.

[Alhanelem]

Alliance content vs party content is a whole different animal.Well yes. I'm not really talking about alliances, but as you're probably aware I have issues there as well. I object to content being made for 18 people if you don't actually need anywhere near that many to actually do it. FFXI players have a way of bending over to minimize the number of people needed to do something (instead of doing it faster with more) purely so they can open up party slots to sell content rewards to / let people AFK and leech. That's something that doesn't happen nearly as much in FFXIV. Yes, mercing is a thing there and in an 8 man boss fight they can often clear it with 7 or maybe 6 and give 2 people rewards/free wins etc. But there is also content difficult enough that it strains a full size group and will never be easily merc'd. I don't want a new alliance thing unless it really needs an alliance.

[VoiceMemo]

I thought most came back to FFXI say form 14 is because it is hard, not easy like other games. Isn't that the appeal of ffxi? That because things take longer/more difficult to get the accomplishment is greater.

[Alhanelem]

I thought most came back to FFXI say form 14 is because it is hard, not easy like other games.In general terms, most of the core content in the game I would say yes, it's easier. But there are exceptions. For instance, on the solo side FFXIV has a handful of XI-style, cryptic quests with minimal direction- no markers to direct you to the next NPC or target, you must use logic to figure out where to go/what to do next, but these quests come with a warning label on them that you will not receive the usual quest help most quests in the game give.


And for groups, there are what are known as "ultimate" raids, which cap everyone's levels/gear to a fixed cieling that will never be changed, so they are always high difficulty. Most bosses/dungeons/etc can be beaten uncapped later on in a trivial manner but ultimate raids never have their caps lifted and are quite difficult. That said, they're also very optional- they allow people who can clear them to exceed the normal limit on weekly raid drops, but they don't drop anything unique to them (other than an achievement).

There are challenges to be had in FFXIV, they're just not along the regular progression path and are usually very optional. Whereas the baseline difficulty is generally higher across the game in FFXI.

[radar]

I thought most came back to FFXI say form 14 is because it is hard, not easy like other games. Isn't that the appeal of ffxi? That because things take longer/more difficult to get the accomplishment is greater.

Even just boosting the amount of Gali trash mobs give x2 will help a lot to casual / solo players, making an easier way to get a starstone (even if just adding it to login points) will all help a lot.

FFXI attracts players that like to climb mountains, but if the mountain is too steep or impossible to climb they aren't gonna climb it.

[Alhanelem]

you really need to be careful about how much you over-generalize a large group of people.