How To Fix FFXI

December is my ten year anniversary of FFXI. During that time, I have spent numerous hours playing, and while I still play the game often, since the release of Adoulin (perhaps Voidwatch?), I have spent less time and had much less enjoyment.

Monstrosity is a masterpiece. I love it. Continue to make this as you have. It is fantastic.

There are so many things to like about Adoulin, and we have been given so many things we wanted; however, here are a few things that need to be resolved.

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Things That Seriously Need To Be Fixed
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Stop Giving Away Everything
First of all, stop the login campaign. What is there to do in the game for someone that does not want to do Adoulin? Well, I guess I could go to Abyssea and work on my... oh wait, I just get the +1 not doing anything at all. Well, I could go to Dynamis in the Glacier and finally get my... oh wait, I get that for doing nothing but logging in as well.

Next login campaign, maybe you could make it so it levels you up once a day and you automatically get relics. I mean, because they are useless right now anyway. (I am being sarcastic here. Please do not do this. Stop giving away stuff that should be fun to do. Chocobo wands, costumes, etc. are fine. That is perfect. Just stop giving away seals, gear, etc. It is just as bad as having them leech experience.)

Stop Vertical Progression
People loved the game at level 75 because they could do Limbus, Dynamis, Sea, Sky, Assaults, Salvage, Einherjar, Nyzul Isle, missions, quests, and more! There were so many things to do and so little time to do them. While the method of obtaining gear sucked and people hated having to fight the same mobs repeatedly, people had other things to do, and it was fun.

Abyssea outdated gear, but it still kept people busy. When 99 arrived, Abyssea, Legion, Salvage 2, Neo Nyzul Isle, Limbus 2, KSNM99s, Neo Dynamis, Einherjar 2, and Voidwatch were some of the events. You could do things solo, take few people, or gather an entire alliance. Lots of variety because the gear from multiple events functioned uniformly.

Now, what is there to do? Skirmish and Delve. That is it. Nothing else in this game matters. We went from having numerous events to having two events. The problem is not Delve. The problem is not Skirmish. The problem is that the gear went too fast. It was not too easy to get. It was fine in terms of difficulty. The problem is that the gear was too good. It should have been side grades that resulted in the replacement of multiple pieces. Let me give you an example. A ring with physical damage taken -6%, INT+10 and MAB+10 for mage jobs. That would have been great. In addition, we should have already seen Cait Sith and Atomos, and they should have been worthwhile.

At this point, FFXI is seriously broken, but it is not unfixable.

Fix Old Events
Fix the old events by updating the gear to match all other events. I do not mean add new content. We should not see Salvage 3 or Dynamis 2. Instead, we should see you do to Limbus what you did to Dynamis. Allow low numbers of people to accomplish these things. Leave the big events to big groups of people. A balance should exist here.

Remove the limit for the number of participants for any event. Assault, Salvage, etc. should allow a single person to enter.

Remove any event that makes you wait more than one day. You should be able to enter any zone once a day.

Fix Future Content
No more items. Seriously, stop it. I do not need to obtain 10 Kretin Seals to enter a new area. Why even waste the hard disk space for all of these zones that are not being used? When was the last time anyone has been to Bibiki Bay for a quest? Why are so many resources no longer being used?

Start using old items. You want the best weapon in the game and want progression? You should be required to combine a relic with a drop from Tojil and a drop from a new creature. Bam! A new item, and everyone would love the progression.

This is the best method to fix crafting as well. To get certain gear, you should be required to get lower level gear to combine. This includes gear from certain NMs and crafted items. You want the new AF? You must purchase an item from the AH that someone with level 50 leathercraft made and have quested the original AF. When their powers combine, boom, you have your gear. Crafting is rekindled, people are doing old content again. People are happy.

Make people go into old dungeons again. Get strange items that were not used for much in the past. Those old items should be used again. Stop adding new ones unless you add truly new enemies with truly new models.

Enemy Challenges
Enemies should be challenging regardless of your gear. Players enjoy making small progressions in their gear. I was actually working on improving my gear to solo certain NMs when Adoulin came out. I got the new gear, and the NMs, the ones that I had been spending years to build up my gear for, were not only easy, but their drops were made obsolete. I was doing what you wanted. I was getting gear so I could beat NMs to get better gear. But this progression was slow and it was fun.

Monstrosity is the only thing I have to look forward to at this point so please do not screw it up.

Inventory Crisis
Allow items to be combined when they have all been obtained. Here is an example of a problem from the player base:

Allow us to combine all of the elemental obis from Sea into one!

Here is what they want: A quest with reasonable difficulty (one to two players) that allows you to combine all of the elemental obis into one.

What SE does: Make a new item that is super easy to get that replaces the item the player base wants. Not only does this make the players angry, you remove the incentive to do the old content and an entire zone, entire enemies, are no longer used. SE wastes its time and it wastes the time of the players. It is actually easier to implement what we want, and best of all, it is fun!

Magian Trials were fantastic, in my opinion. But instead of having a piece of gear from a chest, it should have been low level gear from the AH. A crook? Nah, should have used an Oak Staff. Twashtar should have been built from a Dagger on the AH. Your Abyssea AF should have been gear that started as mid or high level items from clothcraft, leathercraft, and bonecraft. Put these skills to use!

Keep the Delve and Abyssea Methods of Progression Not Obliteration of Gear
When you kill enemies, you get points or seals or wings or beads of some sort. You use those points to buy items like in Einherjar. I can tell you this: Everyone loves you for this. We do not want another VW fiasco. We do not want the old sky drop methods. We want to have items that can be purchased from an NPC.

The error in all of this is that every single piece of gear obliterates all of the older gear. You should require older gear to be obtained and traded to get the newer gear. Our gear should be upgraded.

Make Abyssea Level 70+
You can level just about as fast outside of Abyssea as inside. The major difference is that players are expected to be at the keyboard playing before Abyssea. The time has come to fix this. If people are upset that they did not take their opportunity to leech in the past, they have had plenty of time. They should have done it while they had the chance. This is a bug, not a feature. Abyssea should have never been pre-70.

Now I know that level 30 is the rule for all expansions, but this is one of those times you should break that requirement. If you really want something for the level 30 player to do with their Abyssea expansion, allow them to enter Abyssea but not gain experience from anything until level 70+.

The outside areas have been wonderful with book burns and other methods. Sure, people can still leech, but at least a new player will still find a handful of people leveling without going AFK for several hours.

Monstrosity
This is fantastic. Please do not break it and do PvP justice.

Deliver On Your Promises
How about you stop telling us what you are going to add and just add it? No more update notes until after the updates are delivered. That way, we can stop being disappointed. How many years has it been since we were promised so much of the stuff that we were never given?

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Fun Ideas For The Future
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Replace the Textures with HD Versions for Higher End PCs
Create and allow the use of HD textures for higher end machines. Outside of the game in the FFXI settings, "Use HD textures" should be an option. The entire game should have the textures redone. Do this after actually fixing the game play.

Last Man Standing Multiplayer PVP in the Colosseum
Allow six players to join together and fight six other players in the Colosseum. Each time a player is ko'd, they are marked with a large X icon as being out. They can continue to help the other players, though. When all players are marked out, that team loses. Players can come back after 30 seconds of being knocked out to help their partners, but they cannot have their X's removed.

Make it so you can only have one job of each type on the same team. For example, you could have not a team with two Red Mages on it. All jobs would need to be unique. This would foster team play and allow multiple jobs to be used.

Have a mog house near the entrance of the arena for people to quickly change jobs after matches or have it available as a warp near the Mog Gardens guy.

Either (a) lock players in the gear in which they enter so they are not reloaded when they change gear (the gear changes, but no other player can tell) or (b) enact a penalty when changing gear like in Ballista. I would prefer option (a).

Edit: Removed the part about adding Tetra Master to the game because people apparently do not want it.

Stop complaining ? >.> lol

first of all, FFXI not Broken, you just MAD noobs can get shit now (Which we all are)
sencond of all, there is something called LS (they can do old events) and stuff
and WTF "CARD CRAFT" that is another game buddy.

If you do /sea all and look at how the server population continues to drop, you would see that it is not complaining. These are suggestions to prevent the continued loss of subscribers. What fun is there in logging into the game and receiving items for doing nothing? That is not fun. Even with that, people are not logging in. I know numerous people that feel the rewards for the login campaign are great but would not be bothered to log in to get those rewards because it is not fun. They could very well rename the game, "FFXI Version 2.5: Seekers of the Login Campaign". Monostrosity is fun, but it should not be all there is to do.

In addition to what I have said, creatures need to be adjusted so multiple jobs are useful. Shadowbind from RNG, Chainspell stun from RDM, Invincible and actual tanking ability from PLD, Manafont from BLM... these were all things that were once useful in the game. When was the last time we had a RNG use Shadowbind for anything? It was fun creating new strategies, and it was fun actually having something other than BRD swapping to defeat creatures.

I kinda liked the log in event for my daul box I for one have farmed alot of paper seals some i got form domain opts spaming pages.
But it was kinda nice not having to do that again for my daul box.