A Message to Our English-speaking Community

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Originally Posted by Umichi

all of those things YOU wish to see. SE never intended everyone to be a one man army.

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Tell me what's bad about a storage slip for non-augmented relic+2, please.

Or anything else I listed that could be done for inventory?

The only possible issue is something someone expressed about them needing to change the results of the recipes, and that's a fair argument, but there are possible ways around that. One possibility is making no change at all and just having the alchemists build stacks of 99 at a time. As long as you make all 99, it's the same gil, and more AH-space available to you.

Instead of making 20 stacks of 12 echos, you could make 2 stacks of 99 (formerly 17 of 12), and 2 stacks of 12 remedies, and 2 stacks of holy water.

Yes, *I* wish to see them, along with many other players, because *I* am aware of the issues in the game.

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You see you use the term good as in literally good (the positive iterance of the word) work. I used the term good work as in their work is good keep it up. there is a difference.

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I'm not seeing a difference. You're saying the work they're doing is good, and I disagree. I like a few things, and have pointed them out (Monstrosity, New Skirmish, though both have issues) but the overall direction the game is going is bad. You don't go tip a waiter who provided bad service just because the drinks were cold.

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You don't have to be a jerk about everything especially when you are speaking to another person from another culture especially ones like japan where courtesy and respect get you farther than being rude and obnoxious.

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I'll need you to point out for me where I was being a jerk. I've tried to be courteous and honest. I avoid sugar-coating my words simply because I understand that it will be translated and pleasantries and colloquialisms may not translate well.

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However I'm not going to continue defiling a thread which was aimed at good intentions. I've said my part HF sitting on the black sludge of a floor you call negativity.

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Ideally, I wouldn't have wanted to taint a thread created as a sign of good will but we have pages and pages of threads that aren't being seen by the right eyes. It is my genuine hope, a faint one, that Matsui would come back to this thread, see all the replies and find someone to translate for him.

It was my intent, and I think I achieved it, that my first reply was as nice and respectful as could be, as I want to be a positive member of the community. I'm sorry though, I'm not going to say to him what I believe are lies.

Perhaps he just isn't hearing us. Maybe, not likely, that's been the problem all along.

I can safely say If i made a thank you thread and came back to nothing but more complaints about people whining the game sucks because their favorite jobs aren't updated or their favorite event isn't designed how they wanted, I'd probably just ignore it.

There's a time and a place for bringing up issues, Its littered all over this once decent forum... Can go to "New Posts" and almost every threads going to be another inconsequential complaint. i've contributed a few myself and stand by a few, but the point remains, If anyone wanted to be Courteous or polite they'd of kept their squabbles, qualms and bickering in any of the 1,000 already existing threads for such a thing.

I'll acknowledge my argument is kinda pointless cause its attempting to reach people who feel fully justified hating this man and will continue to find reason to do so despite how much the games improved since he's joined. Maybe not all of us agree on this point, and maybe the success isn't in Subs, but I'll maintain this is because FFXI players are among the worst in the MMO community for accepting new things (sorry!), but the game is a lot more accessible to everyone, with the only real hindrance being the communities ability to welcome less than perfection. Which is our fault not so much as its theirs, cause I can tell you with fact you can beat Tojil and etc without Perfect weapons... the LS I was in did it before they added I.lv stats like Skill+ and not a single one had Oatix... And I've seen it 8-manned.

I can speak with 100% certainty half the stuff suggested here, even stuff I've backed like SMN/THF/RDM updates or Campaign updates, Is in majority either looked down upon or laughed at as pointless by other forum communities, and people I play with online. There are some who wouldn't mind it, but very few who say they'd support putting man hours too it as a priority.

Point being, they listen to our suggestions, they just mostly suck or not everyone wants them and they're going in order of priority, and while they may seem "urgent" to you or me, they aren't, which is the bottom line.

They're doing a fine job and while a lot of us can disagree with the design direction, when it comes to minor things we have to understand we're not the center of the universe, and despite having this Official forum hub, not all suggestions here are equal in the eyes of the FFXI community and this is not the single source of their information, by their own admission they do read other forums to get a rough idea of peoples reactions and such or for leisure heck if i know, this is just their hub where they can respond.

(PS Dude above me, Like 99% of this is not directed to you or anyone specific in this thread)

Well I don't think it helped that that particular post was started by one of the more sycophantic posters on this forum. I'm sure everybody knew it wasn't going to go well the moment the post was made. It didn't help that he said "gratifying" instead of "gratitude."

Aside from that, once you make a post (especially one like that), you have no control over the responses. It's not like you can police or bully people into only responding positively. While we'd all love sensible, well-reasoned posts, I think that rants are also helpful because they convey much more emotion. I'm sure that we wouldn't have gotten as quick or as definitive a response to the RME issue if people hadn't flooded that thread with negative responses of all kinds.

Anyway, I have no doubt that Matsui is doing the best job he can for us. I have no doubt that he has the game's best interest in mind whenever he makes a big decision for the game's future. We'll see how well he does. As players, if we are given a forum to voice opinions and concerns, it should be used to provide critical feedback on anything and everything. As long as you don't make it personal, he and his staff should be able to handle any and every bit of feedback we give without shedding a tear.

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Originally Posted by Umichi

And you people wonder why they don't bother posting more material in threads? most of you are either ungrateful, or selfish... And the only thing your worried about seeing is responses to game content, or the mechanics behind game content... they don't want to talk mechanics as every time somethings not broken what do most reps tell you to do? go to your community based sites for info. They don't want to talk to you about how YOU think the game should be run. What they do want is feedback for the job your play, and questions about their game that doesn't force them to pull the "I can't really talk about that because it's a nono topic for us to even discuss" card.

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What's wrong with wanting to know about mechanics behind an event? How can you justify GMs not being allowed to explain to me what I have to do to qualify for drops in a WK Reive, and them having to tell me to go to a community site? How is it wrong for us to want to see responses on content rather than only lore, or silly comments and the like rather than real meaningful and informative responses to a post? Its funny how they say something isn't broken, go look at community sites for problems which are multiple years old, and yet, the players on any English site have no info on it. Were not perfect, community sites are not perfect, to always point us to only other players means many things can go completely unknown forever such as ToAU kings because we have no idea exactly how they work which is why sometimes they go a very long time without people getting them to pop.

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No one was patting them on the back.. If I wasn't clear enough I stated in my initial post on that thread that I appreciate the work he's doing and I know how much pressure he and his team are under and to keep up the good work.

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If someone tells me to keep up the good work, I think I'm doing well, doing the right thing, how is making me think that not the exact same thing that patting someone on the back is meant to do?

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then you get your emo responses like "Yeah he does an ok job, but he still sucks at this" or "Wheres mai cait sith" or "Haste II?" or "I disagree he sucks he needs to do a better job"

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We point our how he does a bad job as well? Why he should not keep up 'the good work'? I fail to understand how that's ungrateful or selfish of us.

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then he comes onto the site and posts something for english speakers thanking us for our patience and tells us that they do look through our forums and hopes he can do a better job and everyone goes apeshit on him... no wonder why he stays to posting in threads that are about gaming lore of future updates.

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The reason we get on him about things is because that's all he posts in, if that's why he posts only in them then congratulations, you have found the loop. He does not answer many of our questions, we complain, he hates us, he does not answer many questions, repeat.

Maybe, just maybe, we are complaining in this thread because he said we are all happy about the new content, which the only content I think got universally good feedback on was Monstrosity. It would be like if at a concert the crowd was booing and there were 3 people out of a thousand which were cheering & shouting for an encore. It doesn't mean they all love you, it means if you want to do a good job, you need to make the other 997 people like it by changing some stuff up. He came in saying he's happy to see we all like the new content, and he reads our posts, these two things contradict one another and if you think about it, make his post meaningless in a way.

The concert is a fantastic example.

When a concert sucks, most people leave. What's left are a few people who want to stay, stay merely because friends are staying (sound familiar?), or because they paid to go.

How does that relate to XI? A lot of people have given up on XI. They left. They may have stayed for some time, because friends did, as many in my clique did, but ALL of those friends left for XIV? Why am I still here? I enjoy the total result of my effort. I enjoy the journey as much of my friends, but I'm not keen on starting a new journey because it appears, I'd rather continue on the one I'm on.

To put it better, when a concert sucks, you have three types of customers. Those that left, those that want to stay, and those that stay because of friends or some loyalty to the band. FFXI has three types of customers, aside from those who quit because it was time to move on: Those disappointed, who quit, those who want to stay, and those who stay for friends/attachment to accomplishment/faith in the brand.

FFXIV is just the better concert next door.

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Originally Posted by detlef

Sycophantic.

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I don't like being called names, especially ones that are false..

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Originally Posted by Karbuncle

I can safely say If i made a thank you thread and came back to nothing but more complaints about people whining the game sucks because their favorite jobs aren't updated or their favorite event isn't designed how they wanted, I'd probably just ignore it.

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So you would do the stupid thing? If everyone is yelling at you that they are angry and do not like the game for blah reason and you do nothing but ignore it you will only serve to alienate those players, and prove you did not truly listen to them in the first place has he has just claimed. Also, unless the majority of people are doing this, it would be no issue anyways, so its not as though he would be alienating some small part of the players, but rather, it seems the majority of players would be ignored, again, meaning he is doing just the opposite of what he said he is doing.

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I'll acknowledge my argument is kinda pointless cause its attempting to reach people who feel fully justified hating this man and will continue to find reason to do so despite how much the games improved since he's joined. Maybe not all of us agree on this point, and maybe the success isn't in Subs, but I'll maintain this is because FFXI players are among the worst in the MMO community for accepting new things (sorry!), but the game is a lot more accessible to everyone, with the only real hindrance being the communities ability to welcome less than perfection. Which is our fault not so much as its theirs, cause I can tell you with fact you can beat Tojil and etc without Perfect weapons... the LS I was in did it before they added I.lv stats like Skill+ and not a single one had Oatix... And I've seen it 8-manned.

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While all of this is true, there are some things they do very poorly. The game is more accessible in one respect, while they are still as vague and unhelpful with things as ever before, leading only to community sites for information, expecting us to have nothing more than other players to get our info from. I accept some new things, I hate many others, part of why new is bad for this specific game is that those who like old, not people who are ignorant and hate it for being new, but they just flat out do not like new, could come here for old. Now, this is becoming new, so where does one go for old? The game had a unique aspect to it of being different, many people didn't like how, but it was different, so it worked for it, if you make an old game like every new game there will never be much reason to play it, if you make an old game stay old, it might continue to live on as an old game, for those who like them.

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I can speak with 100% certainty half the stuff suggested here, even stuff I've backed like SMN/THF/RDM updates or Campaign updates, Is in majority either looked down upon or laughed at as pointless by other forum communities, and people I play with online. There are some who wouldn't mind it, but very few who say they'd support putting man hours too it as a priority.

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I'm sure, this is a close minded player base after all. I basically had to argue with a leader 2 nights ago to let me go RDM/SCH as a DD to Yorcia Skirmish, because he claimed my RDM would never out DD his DRK or MNK. After finally getting him to accept me I ended up out DDing every person in the Skirmish easily because I was 1~2 shooting nearly everything. Because of his close minded approach to my RDM, thinking as most do, RDM is worthless, magic damage sucks, WAR DRK SAM MNK are the only real DDs, blah blah blah, he almost made his run fail, because without me, they were not killing mobs as fast as they popped up. The problem is that they hardly do any of these updates anyways. If they fixed RDM's flaws, maybe people would bring one more often, maybe it would not be getting replaced by SCH once again, right now, in all content RDM has been good for in SoA, mind you that's limited to Skirmish and Delve Boss runs. But rather than do that kind of update, they make new events which only make their old events not worth doing, which is creating a cycle of wasted time.

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Point being, they listen to our suggestions, they just mostly suck or not everyone wants them and they're going in order of priority, and while they may seem "urgent" to you or me, they aren't, which is the bottom line.

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How many people asked for Skirmish gear to smash Delve rather than be on par? How many asked for more completely random augments for an event? How many asked for hour long battles that take more than 50 people to take down? They listen to some suggestions, yes, but it seems to have almost no priority factor. How many THFs will really use marksmanship weapons? How many RDMs will really even be allowed to use daggers in parties without RDM melee being upgraded at some point? How hot were these topics even in their own forums? Yet, here they come, we will be getting them in the fall update. What about redoing merits? Making TH mean something in more events? Making THF have more of a use than simply TH? Fixing RDM melee by adding more decent gear? RDM unique spells or Haste II? These are things which were much more popular and requested many more times by the players, but they never happen, yet, Marksmanship & Daggers are on the way. How is that priority?

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They're doing a fine job and while a lot of us can disagree with the design direction, when it comes to minor things we have to understand we're not the center of the universe, and despite having this Official forum hub, not all suggestions here are equal in the eyes of the FFXI community and this is not the single source of their information, by their own admission they do read other forums to get a rough idea of peoples reactions and such or for leisure heck if i know, this is just their hub where they can respond.

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I agree they do a good job in some things, but I think they do horrible in others. I just wish they seemed to listen to us a bit more on where we want them to take this game rather than only going where they want with most things. We are in a car and they are the driver, if they do not end up going somewhere we want though, we are going to jump out of the car and find someone else going the direction we want if at all possible.

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Originally Posted by Umichi

I don't like being called names, especially ones that are false..

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He's not referring to you, he's referring to someone else.

Daemon authored the thread he's talking about and it was his second (or first, but he made two) attempt at a thread merely meant to praise Matsui. It got exactly what I'm sure he wanted: direct attention from Matsui.

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Originally Posted by Umichi

And you people wonder why they don't bother posting more material in threads? most of you are either ungrateful...

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I'm going to stop you right there.

The dev team doesn't post on the forums as a favour to us. They do it as a function of their greater marketing strategy - customer relationship management. And they don't do it for free. They do it because we pay them every month for their services. They also want us to keep paying them every month for their services.

Mr. Matsui doesn't do this out of "love" for the player base. This is his job. There are a lot of people doing him the favour of continuing to pay for the privilege of posting on these forums to express their dissatisfaction with his product, rather than just cancelling their subscription and moving on.

For any community management team, it's a challenge to sift through the tone and find the common denominator that creates dissatisfaction. But if any of them, including Mr. Matsui takes it personally and focuses on the tone, not the message and become offended...they aren't professionals.

And realistically, they have no right to be. It is very much a reality that we have been paying full price subscription fees for less and less resources/service every year.

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Originally Posted by Mnejing

He's not referring to you, he's referring to someone else.

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I retract my statement then :)

This thread was created like Friday night or something, so I kept tellin myself they'd be sayin somethin this week. They'd see the thoughts echoed here and make a substantive reply once the work-week started again.

Losing a little bit of hope for that, but I still hope they come through.

Please extend Magian 99 weapons with new trials that take the base damage to (at minimum) the lvl of Forefront weapons. A hard magian99 can take 2-3 weeks work to build, longer if you have limited game time, and a lot of effort. A forefront weapon can be obtained in a couple of hours. And yet the base dmg of forefront daggers is like +30~ over magian99 daggers which also carry heavier delay. We understand that SoA had these easy-to-obtain heavy damage weapons as an encouragement to ppl who felt jaded with the old game, but really it makes no sense to have a weapon ppl work on for 3 weeks does almost half the damage of a weapon you can get for bayld in a few hours. Thankyou in advance.

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Originally Posted by Stompa

Please extend Magian 99 weapons with new trials that take the base damage to (at minimum) the lvl of Forefront weapons. A hard magian99 can take 2-3 weeks work to build, longer if you have limited game time, and a lot of effort. A forefront weapon can be obtained in a couple of hours. And yet the base dmg of forefront daggers is like +30~ over magian99 daggers which also carry heavier delay. We understand that SoA had these easy-to-obtain heavy damage weapons as an encouragement to ppl who felt jaded with the old game, but really it makes no sense to have a weapon ppl work on for 3 weeks does almost half the damage of a weapon you can get for bayld in a few hours. Thankyou in advance.

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People used to take weeks or months to get sky/eihenjar/nyzul gear that now it obsolete as well. You can't hold yourself to older items forever. We had 6 years of sidegrades, its about time gear got a huge improvement in all areas.

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Originally Posted by Spectreman

People used to take weeks or months to get sky/eihenjar/nyzul gear that now it obsolete as well. You can't hold yourself to older items forever. We had 6 years of sidegrades, its about time gear got a huge improvement in all areas.

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I'm pretty happy with the new content. I can understand feeling a little angst over having REALLY hard to obtain gear become worthless overnight, but personally I'm glad to see the game move forward. Old content can't stay relevant forever.

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Originally Posted by Spectreman

People used to take weeks or months to get sky/eihenjar/nyzul gear that now it obsolete as well. You can't hold yourself to older items forever. We had 6 years of sidegrades, its about time gear got a huge improvement in all areas.

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Magian 99 weapons are lvl 99 weapons, the Forefront weapons say lvl 99<nameofjobs> on them too but for some reason have an enormous high base damage despite taking 3~ hours to get from hitting some feeble colonisation mobs. My point is that they should add this higher base dmg to magians which are also lvl 99 and take magnitudes more effort to get than a forefront.

Magians are lvl99 and date back to around 2011~ , unlike sky gear etc. which is absolutely ancient and lvl75. I have a lvl99 char and lvl 99 magian which was only released 2-3 years ago, so why is it gimped by other lvl99 weapons from colonisation-rieve that are 1000x easier to obtain.

As long as there are trials required to further upgrade them, more upgrades would be nice. Blu's love to Bura/Hala but I'm sure they'd love to offhand those expensive STR or DA swords that they made. Same for every job. The OA2-4 GS was supposed to be pretty darn good, and I'm sure there's a lot of them that would like to see the light of day again.

Bst's and their PDT Axes, too. Since pet levels are increased depending on the weapon, there's no scenario where bsts would want to equip those axes over something lvl 113 or so.

That was one of my biggest issues with the item level thing, magian weapons. Specifically the utility ones, PDT Sword, Pet:PDT Axe, EVA Katana, EVA Dagger, so on, any of the weapons which people made for utility uses like PDT or EVA. All of them were thrown so far behind in damage they are worth nothing now except possibly idle pieces, some of which cant even do that. An upgrade to them would be nice, or gear to replace them in their use, though I think the first is more likely than seeing a Buramenk'ah class weapon in terms of DMG with 11% PDT on it.

FFXI probably has one of the most "resistant to change" communities in the market. Which is kind of funny to me because complaints requesting change are all you see from us on the forums.

I am a complainer...but I'm a THF main...SE hates us, what can you do?

But even I think Matsui has done some pretty good things with SoA. To me, the fault lies more with their communication practices than with their work. They play a lot of things close to the chest in the (somewhat likely?) event that they can't actually make things happen within a reasonable time frame. They usually take way too long to implement the things they do talk about.

The other piece to that is that, personally, I wish that the team would find a way engage us more as a part of their decision making process, rather than coming to us after the fact. There are decision they make that seem to be made with a philosophy about the game that does not match the reality of playing the game.

But, imo, these are also the symptoms of an under-resourced team, which is not specifically Matsui's fault. SE just bet more of their chips on FFXIV and if early numbers are any indication, they were right to do so.

That sucks for those of us that are seriously, unhealthily attached to FFXI. But it's realistically a better investment for them.

It's an interesting story too if they pull it off. The first one sucked, they completely rebuild it from the ground up, and re release the game with resounding success - An unprecedented accomplishment. Something SE can be very proud of. A worthy extension of the Final Fantasy legacy.

FFXIV: ARR release has not been without incident, mind you, but it's mainly only because they were not able to accurately predict just how successful it would be at launch.

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Originally Posted by Stompa

Please extend Magian 99 weapons with new trials that take the base damage to (at minimum) the lvl of Forefront weapons. A hard magian99 can take 2-3 weeks work to build, longer if you have limited game time, and a lot of effort. A forefront weapon can be obtained in a couple of hours. And yet the base dmg of forefront daggers is like +30~ over magian99 daggers which also carry heavier delay. We understand that SoA had these easy-to-obtain heavy damage weapons as an encouragement to ppl who felt jaded with the old game, but really it makes no sense to have a weapon ppl work on for 3 weeks does almost half the damage of a weapon you can get for bayld in a few hours. Thankyou in advance.

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This.

I worked hard on making all six of my magian staves for BLM (and all eight for SMN). Had to leave because of financial reasons for a few months, and when I came back, SoA had been released and the godly BLM staff was being paraded around. I felt slapped across the face and even two weeks after coming back it still stings. I don't mind that there is a wonderful weapon out there for people to get -- that's super awesome! But why can that weapon be so overpowering, yet when we asked for a way to combine our magian staves into one staff, that was considered "too overpowering to do"? I mean, they have magic accuracy +1, magic damage +6 -- the new staff has INT+13 Magic Accuracy+191 Magic Attack Bonus+26 and Magic Damage+205, along with some other goodies like the higher damage, skill+, MND+, and enhancing of fast cast.

I wouldn't mind working hard on a quest (in fact it'd be a lot of fun with some sort of storyline!) to take these six weapons I worked hard to make and meld them into one staff equivalent in stats to the new weapon. -sigh- I don't want to throw away my staves because I worked hard on them, and yet they're taking up so much inventory...

Other than that, I do applaud Matsui for working hard to continue communication with us and update frequently. This era has already been more satisfying than the Tanaka era had been. (I'm sorry, Tanaka...)

Please don't expand lv99 magian weapons (other than RMEs obviously)

I already tossed mine :/

I lol'd.

You have my sympathy, though.

Almost two weeks later.

I think we have our answer.

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Originally Posted by OmnysValefor

Almost two weeks later.

I think we have our answer.

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who wants to talk to people who agree being rude is a legitimate way of approaching a conversation to get a point across..

It's kinda their job, and the purpose of this forum's existence.

I don't know, being super nice and respectful hasn't gotten a reply.

This thread was just fluff.

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Originally Posted by Umichi

who wants to talk to people who agree being rude is a legitimate way of approaching a conversation to get a point across..

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Watch CSPAN, Fox news, CNN, MSNBC, congressional hearings, better yet did you see how Parliament was acting when they did the vote the other day. If that hurts their feelings to freaking bad they should grow thicker skin. Not like anyone on the dev team reads the unfiltered NA/EU post. So if you use your head a little the JPs flame the devs just as much but there is no filter between them.

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Originally Posted by Umichi

who wants to talk to people who agree being rude is a legitimate way of approaching a conversation to get a point across..

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If they wanted rainbows and sunshine blown up their <Rear>s they got in the wrong business.

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Originally Posted by Ravenmore

Watch CSPAN, Fox news, CNN, MSNBC, congressional hearings, better yet did you see how Parliament was acting when they did the vote the other day. If that hurts their feelings to freaking bad they should grow thicker skin. Not like anyone on the dev team reads the unfiltered NA/EU post. So if you use your head a little the JPs flame the devs just as much but there is no filter between them.

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yes because FFXI is politics? and camiie just because they are a buisness does not mean we can't be civil.I'm sure they don't expect rainbows and sunshine... but at least have some decency.. we are adults..

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Originally Posted by Umichi

yes because FFXI is politics? and camiie just because they are a buisness does not mean we can't be civil.I'm sure they don't expect rainbows and sunshine... but at least have some decency.. we are adults..

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We pay for a service. Aside from that, what's your definition of "decency?" This thread has been very civil. If you're saying that every single post has to be worded carefully to filter out any negativity then you're in the wrong place. And I don't mean this forum, I mean the internet.

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Originally Posted by Umichi

yes because FFXI is politics? and camiie just because they are a buisness does not mean we can't be civil.I'm sure they don't expect rainbows and sunshine... but at least have some decency.. we are adults..

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So we are to just tolerate poor customer satisfaction in a product?

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Originally Posted by Umichi

yes because FFXI is politics? and camiie just because they are a buisness does not mean we can't be civil.I'm sure they don't expect rainbows and sunshine... but at least have some decency.. we are adults..

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For the most part we are civil, but it seems that most any criticism or request is met with belligerent White Knighting by some players and is either dismissed or completely ignored by SE. You can understand why some just say "screw it" and let loose with whatever is on their mind.

Also, this is a game where the customers have a lot of time, money, and emotion invested. Tempers will run hot at times. That's just how it goes and if they're truly professionals they are prepared for that.

If we were flat out saying insulting things to the developers, then yes I can see why you would defend them. However what most people do is publicly point ingame issues that the devs (and this is my own speculation, feel free to disregard it) ignore and therefore they have sought to use this forum as a means of bringing it to a more public light. Because for the most part, what gets said on this forum is talked about ingame. Sooner or later SE'll have to step up to the plate and either commit to fixing the more pressing issues, or else they'll face the realization that they will end up losing potential profits.

Something that is not focused on and has been neglected for a VERY long time, is new player retention. For a MMO to survive and remain healthy it needs to retain a certain percentage of new players. Grasping for vets with these "log on campaigns" will not fill your coffers in the long run. It is just a temporary stop gap measure. Vets will move on to other games eventually, players RL situations will change and some will leave. Many will move on to other games like 14. This is why there needs to be look back to the drawing board to solve some glaring problems that are keeping new players from staying in 11.

#1 New tutorial. There should be some form of offline tutorial to introduce new players to an old format of a MMORPG. This would help immensely. It coulc give players a run down for every job and how each one should be played in a party format. Currently there is no such thing.

#2 Economy problems. Currently due to the huge rate of exp gain from Abby and GoV and players are leveling far faster then they need the gear for it. This renders the need for low level gear (aside from Guild Points) non-existent. It puts up a giant road block up for new players trying synthing, because they will quickly learn that none of their equipment they synth will sell. They will lose gil altogether and just quit, shrug and ask "Why is this feature even in the game?"

#3 Forming Parties. In the past that was the #1 complaint about leveling. Finding xxx job to do xxx. I am pleased however to see changes in the UI for the PC that is going to allow players to find other players that need similar quests/missions/leveling related content done. So that problem is sort of being fix. Kudos.

#4 VERY high level monsters (Level 99) one or two ZONES away from a starting city. Really? Come on guys, this is really a poor battle design. Players from Bastok should not be given a quest to clear bats from Bastok Mines only to attack the first bat they see, and it one shots them and they die (because the bat is level 99). This zone connects to the town for Pete's sake. From a RPG standpoint, if the bats wanted to, they could swarm the city and kill every last NPC if they wanted to.

Also many of these level 99 monsters are right in the way of certain quests (like the brass canteen quest) and other low level quests. New players can (and will) get confused easily when they lack a tutorial regarding "Sneak and Invisible" and don't realize why they can't complete simple starter quests. In addition access to sneak oils and prism powders are far out of the gil range of new players. Please just remove those high level monster clusters. No high level player levels off of them anymore now that newer content is around.

#5 Low level content for lower level players. Players won't feel the need to rush to level 99 if they have something worthwhile to do along the way. Look at FF14 for an example. There are plenty of quests with rewarding items and those that give exp. The rewards for the lower level quests need to be looked over again and changed to fit the changing landscape of the game. No one needs a Linen Robe anymore as a reward for a quest that takes 5-6 hours. Also in 14, you have events like FATE that low level players can take part in. FFXI desperately needs events like this. Garrison and Eco-Warrior doesn't cut it anymore, especially when you are handing out many of the worthwhile rewards from log in campaigns anyways. A Wotg Campaign battle style for lower level players could be a start. That way players would be doing something "fun" to get to level 99 instead of spamming GoV fell cleaves in Gusgen Mines or leeching in Abby from level 30-99. Back in the day, that would be considered exploiting the system, but few care anymore which leads me to my final point...

#6 Very few Vet players will care about new player content. Why? Because it doesn't pertain to them. You will see very little threads about it. Heck, most of the new players who leave 11, don't even know this forum exists (or really care). See... new players aren't as passionate about 11 as vets are. Why? They have invested nothing but a month into the game. They move on and don't give it a second glance. All of those silent joiners and leavers are tons of cash flow out of your pocket. If you want to see a richer game, a game with a larger development staff... there needs to be the player base to support it. If you ignore these people new to 11, the game will slowly die out like a starved candle. I've seen it before in far to many MMOs to count.
If you really care about 11's legacy you need to fix it's foundation. Attract new players, make them feel welcome, WHILE attending to your vet players. If you don't do all of these things, all you have left is a server full of disgruntled vets wishing this and that were added to the game... but wonder why it isn't happening, because the devs don't have enough cash to hire a larger team to address those matters.

In closing:

Please shut down exploit leveling by capping abby to 75+

Please alter the GoV and FoV books so people don't fly to 99 in a few days. If they do, there will be no use for low level gear or a reason for crafters to craft them.

Please add fun and engrossing content for players that are leveling to reach to 99 so they are not bored and allow the content they do, HELP them obtain that goal instead of give booby prizes.

Please allow such content to be done with the help of vets and new players alike, working together towards a common goal. One simple way to do this was to have events with level caps on them. CoP was brilliant in doing so because you brought both communities together to accomplish certain aspects of the storyline. It would be nice to see those level caps back again. It would also serve to make low level gear useful again (which would help the crafting economy). My only gripe with CoP was that it was very difficult to organize a run. With the new search system, I hope this would be a thing of the past. Another thought would be to have level capped campaign battles that players could join freely. Or a FATE system like in 14.

Once you do the above things, advertise the game more, and let the new players enter FF11 and fall in love with it like we did before.