Let Producer Matsui Know How He Should Catch Up on 2 Years!

Thank you Mr. Matsui, for taking the time to read our requests.
I would like to see the revival of the 6 man party, but with a few differences.
Since abyssea, NOBODY wants to xp the old way anymore and that is understandable (30k xp / hr vs 200k xp)
However, abyssea xping is perhaps the most dull thing I have done in FFXI. Fishing is more fun.
My suggestion to you and your team, is to implement some sort of reward points
(like merits, materia, junction/esper points, from previous titles.)
that can only be obtained, in party.
NOBODY is going to XP in Aoudlin, if it's the same as all of Vanadie'l.
New abilities should not be given, they should be earned/purchased with these points, or use points to get KI
The 6 man party definrtily had it's flaws, like player DC, not being able to find specific players Ie. tank/healer, wait time etc...
but apart from all the flaws the 6man party was by far and wide, more enjoyable then abyssea XPing.
There was danger! There were links! Deaths! Tears, laughs. It was a very alive social experiance, even when we played with ppl who didn't speak our language. Please find a place for it, it is what made FFXI what it is.

One more thing I would like, I have solod BST to 75, with three different races (Galka, Hume, Elven)
And it was an awsome experiance, different from the old 6 man party, partly because you played all the roles, puller, DD, tank, and healer!
Lonely, but none-the-less, so much fun. Slowly taking over the zone. I would love to see "Charm" become a Beastmaster's way of life once more. ty

More progress based reward systems, less luck based reward systems.

EXAMPLE:

Abyssea, if you did not 'get what you want' I.E. the items associated with a 'Blue Trigger', nine times out of ten, you still walked away with SOMETHING, I.E. Seals, coins, stones, cards, or jewels, that went towards gear.

It was easier to rope together groups when everyone could benefit in their own way.

I want to PLAY the game again.

I'd like to see more 'working towards a goal', and less content based on 'repetition based on low drop rates'. I'd rather go to Dynamis 100 times and collect coins than fight Pil 100 times to get 1 body.



Add "Add to Treasure Pool" to Voidwatch, please.

Voidwatch was an A-Class gaming system that had a reward system that borders on punishment for the users. The ticket system implemented is a decent step in the right direction, but the overall frustration of fighting the same monster repeatedly with little to no reward rarely makes people come back for those 'tickets'.

"Add to Treasure Pool." helps foster the old teamwork feeling FFXI used to have.



I'd like to see "Dead End" content made more relevant.

I love some of the side events in FFXI, but some are just for "Trophies". Things like Pankatrion, Moblin Maze Mongers, etc. They possess some great potential, but their implementation always came up short. Usually their rewards were lacking.

As an example, when Fafnir/Nidhogg, (King)Behemoth, and Adamantoise/Aspidochelone were changed, they would have amazingly better fit into the Moblin Maze Monger scenario. You build a maze from collecting pieces to get to fight 'HNM X'.

The current system is nice, and gives a good reason to do the KS99 fights again however, the above was just stated as an example.


On that note:


More "tiered" content; linked quests, and such.

As frustrating as CoP was at the time... I got to admit, earning the right to do go to new areas, and unlocking new battlefields, was really nice, made it all "worth it". And I will tell you right now, I'm going through it all a second time without the level restrictions and it's amazing.

Had voidwatch, for instance, limited people based on the rank of their Stratum I think the system would have been easier to 'control' rather than dismal drop rates. Higher drop rates, with restricted access, and "Add to Treasure Pool" woudl have made Voidwatch much more engaging.


Another example:

Black Belt Quest:

Kill 2 NM rams, get 2 different horns:
>> Purple belt,
>> The ability to unlock Brown Belt quest.

Kill 3 NMs in the 4 corners of the globe:
>> Brown Belt,
>> The ability, along with the proper level and skill, to unlock the Black Belt quest.

Kill 3 HNM in the 4 cornwers of the globe:
>> Black Belt!

>>> there should be a quest like this for every job. <<<


Secondly I just want to list off the stuff I liked that was added, and why. This might be a better way to understand "What I want going forward".

I liked NM Hunting in the past. When the drops were changed to Rare/Ex on the majority of them I was one of the few that was happy. Having a Peacock Amulet was liek a badge of honor that I 'did my time'. I miss having rewards out there in rare spawning NMs. And I will say, having salable items from BCNMs available along Rare/Ex versions from NMs makes the whole thing a "Win".

I liked Abyssea a lot, tiered progress, atmas, everything dropped something, NMs, HNMs, etc. It was a sandbox that one could actually PLAY in. It was good solo, and it was good in small to large groups. It had a little bit of everything for everyone.

I like synergy. The control over the synth is nice, it adds a 'skill' element. I like how it's moved to enhance and combine crafted gear now. It was a little awkward at first, but it's growing nicely into its own thing.

Trial of the Magians huge hit for me. I like going out to weird areas and killing stuff for a while with my friends, at my leisure. In the beginning the trials were a great way to run-into and meet new people. I loved finding myself in a massive alliance killing "crap mobs" with random people; as well as finding some guy in the most uninhabited corners of the world either hunting an NM or some wierd weather/monster combo. You KNEW why they were there, and it was a good ice breaker.

I think that about covers it for me. I could go on, but I picked the stuff that was closest to my heart, where I had the most fun, met the most people, or made the most progress.

I'd like to see some changes in the auto-translate stuff, if at all possible.
Readjusting the effects of some weapons and attributes for some weaponskills would be great.
Change the enmity system so tanks are actually tanks.
Somehow make levels 30~75 somewhat of a challenge again, so new players actually learn how to play the game.

The beauty of the PvP system in FFXI is that the players/environments can be tweaked separable from all other game play systems. Please breathe life into the PvP system in FFXI by adding some incentive for the less courageous. The system has more depth than many realize and it seems to be entirely on accident.

I am not a fan of world "PvP" as it usually entails 5 guys versus some-dude-killing-flower-monsters, or punch-his-shit-in-when-he's-at-5%-hp. I am a fan of "world" PvP in siege environments or when I willingly go into an area that I am told is "dangerous".

However my goal is not to punk people killing mandragoras in East Sarutabaruta. My goal is to climb atop Paradimo Del Tor help the Burtgang/Aegis paladin who accepted my challenge up the mountain, dust him off, then beat the white off of him.

I hope that specified areas for PvP can be implemented or a "PvP-status" (as in for dueling), and all balances will be held seperatley from other content. This is 2012, the fallacy that by changing things in PvP the entire game will be destroyed is an archaic, dying, circa-runescape era. train of thought.

Before anything else is considered the systems for PvP must be changed slightly and in many ways that is the only thing that is wrong.



Please add dueling and the appropriate options for refusals and blocking requests. Make it possible outside of towns, or even in towns!
Add the ability for people to have a specialized rank based on their dueling status, or Ballista chevron status, change the color of the name, give them a special idle animation. (People go crazy for the smallest stuff. This seems like minimal developer effort for a large gain.)


Please remove the point requirement to reserve Diorama.
Please remove the official matches from the Brenner Arena.
Please streamline the menus for the NPC's.
Please do something about the scheduling of the Official matches.
Please add more instances of the Diorama in Rulude Gardens.


If you do ONE thing and disregard this entire post and NEVER touch PvP again PLEASE (and this is a Dark Knight saying this):
Fix the spell Break and Breakga they do not suffer from diminishing returns as all other enfeebles do.

Add cosmetic rewards (title, aura?, costume item etc.) To the official matches.
Add valuable consumables that can bought with ballista points and used in select areas, such as towns, for a handy reset!
Add convience consumable items such as multi-use warp scrolls, re-raise scrolls, or movement + items buy able with points earned by participating in matches. (There are many other options of course.)

Drastically increase the exp rewards for the winning team in Ballista (30,000+ exp).
Or give the option to recieve Conquest Points/IS/Allied Notes something (5-10,000~).
Or give the ability to choose a reward such as Void Dust that can be used in conjunction with other content.
Or give out a small amount of ancient currency to a team that scored enough cumulative points and achieved victory.
What the hell give out 3-5 alexandrite per person to the team that scored enough cumulative points and achieved victory.

But what if people just stand around and trade matches?
-I highly doubt such coordination were to exist, and people like me would come in droves just to mess that up and take it for ourselves.
But what if people just stand around and try to leech?
-The point requirement scored by achieving Ballista objectives would ensure activity and as you don't know your value until the end of the game - there is no way to guarantee you are doing the minimum. Also just like how I don't invite gimp people to my provenance runs, people will start to avoid you.




The beauty of this game is that there is no specified "set" for anything, we collect gear and use the sets as appropriate for the situation. Please promote a synergism between PvP and PvE by allowing the events in small ways to feed into the other. Isolating events by locking people into static sets is not the answer.

Keep the incentive for people to strive for legendary equipment by keeping it legendary in player versus player conflict, there is more to the game than thugging around.



Synergism:
The best example I can give is official matches giving 2-3 void dust to each person on the winning team or a straight amount of conquest points, allowing them to fuel their foray into other content.

There are more I'm sure but that explains the idea most concisely.



(...and perhaps if you are not too busy can you please make Bale Flanchard +2 add one more status effect absorbed to Absorb-Attri when used in conjunction with Nether Void. . . thank you.)

This will be 2 seperate thoghts on some ideas.

First what about for fishing being able to rent a ferry for a few hours to go out fishing on the ocean, lakes, or a river.
You could make it where you can be randomly attacked by either pirates or mobs that pop up like a ferry. Also make it where you can invite friends to go with you so can have a small party out there.

Second.

What about making a trial or upgrade available for your original AF weapon. Upgrade it to lv 99 and make it decent to use. For example smn you can go and get a carbuncle ruby and fight the regular avatars to gain there powers on it and then the npc could fuse it with the AF weapon to produce a totaly new weapon. I know for sch there AF weapon was a spell but you can make a staff or something that will compliment the spell.

The Enmity system was primarily designed and best balanced for level 20~50 content. It continued to work at 75 because we accepted that DDs eventually capping Enmity through damage was an intended mechanic instead of an accidental outgrowth of scaling up from level 50. Now we're level 99 and DDs capping Enmity isn't an eventual byproduct of lowmanning, it's the necessary outcome of killing anything within the event's time limit. The Enmity system needs a serious re-work.

I understand that you guys have invested a lot of time trying to make abilities and things that will circumvent the obvious problems with this enmity system, and I can appreciate that many of them would be broken or need adjustments if you changed this. Still, though, you've made a game where it's difficult for anyone to intentionally hold hate unless that is their party's only goal. "Tanking a monster while your alliance kills it" is dead as a concept and, unlike many other strategic parts of FFXI that we've lost in the past 24 levels, this particular one isn't solely due to the content.

There are many ways to change this system so that it returns to its level 50 or level 75 balance. Please choose one and fix it. Here is an option (there are many more):
1a) Dramatically reduce the CE/VE amounts gained through doing melee damage by a constant number.
Example: So if you get 4 CE when you hit for 1 damage, after the change you would get 1 CE.
1b) Make CE gain through melee damage to be proportional to the target monster's HP (Ceiling).
Example: If you hit a monster with 100HP for 50 damage, you get 500 CE. If you hit a monster with 100,000 damage for 50 damage, you get 0.5 CE. Ceiling(0.5) = 1 CE
2) Increase the CE of Flash, Ninjutsu, Cure 4, etc.

Reasoning:
By restricting these adjustments to melee damage, you stop people from easily kiting things like ADL and killing them with Rangers and Black Mages. At the same time, for events like Voidwatch you will need to have a job capable of building CE through methods other than damage or the proccing Black Mages may move the monster. You will need a tank again.

There is plenty of danger for melees (AoE TP moves, attacks from Ironclad and the like, spells, etc.) even without the monster actively turning around and hitting them. Making them effectively unable to cap Enmity isn't much of a balance risk and is the easiest way to restore "tanking" to the game. Mages will need to use Enmity down sets instead of just saying, "Well whatever, the melee will keep hate."



Again, I don't care which option you pick to fix Enmity, but the system needs to be re-worked so that it plays some role in the game again.

It would be a huge investment, but FFXI is still working after 10 years so Please consider remaking graphic/textures/shaders.

Square Enix has spent the last years remaking old FF episodes for several consoles, like wonder swan color, psp, ds and even mobile. I understand Vana'Diel is huge, but I think the game still has the potential to attract new players, and it shouldn't really compete against FFXIV. Try to offer a different experience with the two games, just as you guys are doing with Dragon Quest X, but please, keep in mind that players want to play with something at least decent looking. FFXI is 10 years old and doesn't use cell shading, so you can feel all those ages.
Companies like Funcom (Age of Conan) or Turbine (Lord of the Rings online) managed to upgrade their products' graphic just by releasing hi-resolution textures packs. I believe that most of the playerbase currently playing has developed a strong bound with FFXI, and I can personally say that I would pay some extra money to have a graphic upgrade.
Also, if you guys think this would be way too expensive and not worth it, please consider releasing some dev kit to the users. Gamers' communities behind games like Grand Theft Auto are constantly working to improve the technical quality of their favourite games, and I firmly believe some of the players would gladly start working on remaking textures at least.
Let PS2 go, make a good use of Xbox/PC hardware and invest some money on a game that can still be profitable. After spending 200 millions USD on FFXIV I think it might be worth it, considering the playerbase. Don't just keep the users you have right now, look for more if you guys still believe in this project.
PS: apologies for my english, I'm italian (and I'm from the press, so I'm watching you! >_<)

Edit: Kickstarter might be an awesome way to check how many people are actually interested in spending money for a graphic upgrade.

Community
- Keep this level of communication you showed in that post. Do it often.
- Have someone from the team keep track of sites like BG and AH, they're extremely popular and there's a lot you could learn.
- Improve LS community website.

General
- You know Windower exists, instead of ignoring it, just implement most of those features so people will actually listen when you tell them not to use third party programs.
- Allow us to split battle info and chatlog.
- Specific stat informations. We know how to calculate them, no reason to keep them hidden like it's a big secret, just remove the hassle for us to do boring math and tests everytime.
- Bigger macros.
- BIGGER GOBBIEBAG FFS!
- Maintain the new approach we've seen lately of "even if it can't be done on ps2 we'll do it for pc", it's cool if people want to play on that old platform, but don't hold back for pc.
- Make it so Furniture doesn't consume moghouse space, something like a separate kind of slots(like temps in inventory). We love decorating our mog, but space is a big issue.
- Visible ranged weapons. Seriously, let us toggle between main and ranged slot if necessary, but let me show off my bloody gun.
- Raise cap on meritable WS.
- Chatoyant obi, Chatoyant gorget.
- The chance to chose the augments you want is nice: less random, more choice.
- Better magic oriented food.
- Add to the merit categories "Other" things like magic attack, magic accuracy, magic defense, etc.

Battle
- Adjust enmity system. You know it doesn't work. All important mobs already have very damaging aoe moves, no reason to make it so they even turn around and hit extremely hard every dd who swung last.
- Adjust the difference between 2handed weapons and 1handed weapons.
- Less death moves.
- Less luck based stuff.
- Don't make paralyze eat recast time of JAs, or at least make it so it only takes 50% of it.
- If paralyze has to proc on magic, make it so it only procs at start and not at 80% or stupid things like that.

Nyzul
- Name lamps or remove the order chance.
- Give it a better progress aspect. Old Nyzul was an awesome event, new Nyzul is shit.

Dynamis
- Ban beastmasters(lol joke)

RDM
- AoE Temper and Haste.
- An enfeeble that cause the mob to take damage everytime it does an action for a period of time(just throwing ideas out there, but add new things, think about it a lot).

BLU
- Allow to save magic sets.
- Reduce VW proc list.
- Anything Prothescar told you about physical spells.

PUP
- More slots for attachments.
- Saved sets of attachments.

COR
- Remember you made promises about Quick Draw.
- Where is my Annihilator? (nope, I'm not giving up)

Last but not least
- Play the game. And I don't mean just test stuff, it's obvious that you do that, but make characters on any server and play all the content, you'll notice a lot that doesn't work.

Make Walk of echoes a worldwide servers event.

Allow people to choose a different server from the one they are in when they enter walk of echoes. You disable the trade function and disable the bazaar functions when in the walk of area zone. This prevent the cross servers contaminations of gear and items, you still get the items from the drops in walk of echoes. Then make it so every week have a walk of echoes tally for the servers and the least popular server will get a small treasure hunter boost in there walk of echoes.

Will allow people that over the years that have met friends from other video games and you find out play FF11 on a different servers though. You will be able to have a event with there friends and your friends that happen to be on different servers to be able to play with each other. Heck you might get all the friends together so there friends decide to pay the money for a server transfer, so you can make more money.

It is a pain to do the sign up process for new accounts and/or old accounts

Can you update playonline website with a video on how to make a new account and sign up on the xbox360.

Can you have a video for the xbox360 users on how to get a content id from steams version of the game since a lot people on the xbox 360 version can only get used copies anymore and were to use there content ids for there squares account.

Can you update playonline website with a video on how to make a new account on the PC.

Can you update playonline website with a video for older players that are coming back on how to transfer there playonline accounts to square account. And have a way that if a person got a outstanding charge how to pay it so they can transfer there playonline account to squares account.