Please Fix Shinryu.

By Yoji Fujito in July 2021:

"We would like to address the situation regarding the congestion in ★The Wyrm God. Our ideal solution would be implementing a multi-layer area or reservation system to allow players to enter the content more smoothly, but this is unfortunately impractical due to the tremendous complexity of adding these for the area used in this particular content. After hard consideration, we have decided to increase the number of merit points required for phantom gems from 10 to 30 in an effort to allow more players an opportunity to enjoy the content.

Since this adjustment by itself would only become a burden for players, we will also increase the chances of obtaining certain rewards (particularly equipment) across all difficulty levels. We’ll perform an emergency maintenance to apply this change once it’s ready for implementation. Furthermore, this adjustment is not a temporary workaround; it will remain this way moving forward. We offer our humblest apologies for the inconvenience this has caused."

After almost two years of The Wyrm God battle being changed, I would like to submit the following argument to not only have it scaled back to its original 10 merits per battle, but also to revise the drop rates.

1) When this battle was implemented, it was understood that there was a ton of congestion. It was notably apparent on the Asura server, and possibly 1 or 2 others, but none of the smaller servers suffered from this. After 2 years, it is likely that many players acquired equipment either directly from, or more likely via AMAN Trove. Therefore, reverting to 10 merits per battle would unlikely cause any serious congestion. It “could” happen on Asura if everyone was to rush over to spam immediately after an update, but this would eventually die down. I am aware of the restrictions placed on the entry to Abyssea - Empyreal Paradox, and that you cannot change how it works to give us an efficient queuing system.

2) When you stated the drop rate would be fixed to make it easier for players to obtain equipment, this did not happen. Outside of the three common drops (Pebble/Earring/Ring), the rest are likely tied to the same, extremely rare drop slot. If that isn’t true, then at least the Scythe & Dagger share their (very rare) own slot, while the head/body armor share another (super rare) slot. Therefore, if players are lucky enough to see these, the slot would choose one piece out of the list to put into the treasure. However, these drop slots are far too rare! Also, the issue is made worse by needing 30 merits per kill. It only allows a party to fight Shinryu twice (three if they have one before farming merits) before needing to return to merit farming. This makes grinding The Wyrm God exceedingly annoying.

Players are not against working hard to earn equipment, but the rarity of drops discourages linkshells from scheduling events for it. As I’ve said several times to my LS members... "you’re more likely to get Shinryu equipment from AMAN Trove". I got my Crepuscular Scythe from there. I know others who got daggers and bodies from there. But hardly do I ever hear anyone buzzing that they got something from Shinryu. I’d like to point out how this is a similar gameplay issue to Tartarus Platemails in Vagary (mostly found in Leafallia & AMAN) and Omen Bodies (AMAN). Rather crudely, these drop rates encourage players to hope on AMAN Trove more so than the content it comes from.

Is it by design that the equipment was made so rare? I don’t believe so. The FFXI team likely wanted to ensure they weren’t too common, and that’s a good thing! We’d be bored if we got everything in 2-3 days. Fujito promised it would be better, but it isn't. All it did was make it so very few players want to fight Shinryu. It is disheartening to do this content without being adequately rewarded for our efforts.

3) If you cannot change the amount of merits per entry, nor the drop rates for any reason, I have an alternative solution. I would highly recommend adding a system that gives a new form of currency earned by defeating Shinryu on “Very Difficult”. Basically, you could make it so defeating Shinryu, for example, 20 times, would give enough currency so you can trade to an NPC for a dagger. You could make it 35 times for a body piece. I’d even accept beating Shinryu 50 times for a body. Why? Because at least then I’ll know that repeatedly defeating this will eventually get me something. It’s a quantified progression that isn't heavily relying on a random number generator to work in our favour.

4) The latest bug in The Wyrm God allowed players to fight Shinryu with a Primeval Brew. This was a golden opportunity that many (I wasn’t subscribed but I know players who were) jumped at, and I understand why. Up to that point, many had given up. They couldn’t be bothered with the endless grind. So, for players who had millions of cruor stored up over the years, they began spamming VD to see if they could gain anything from it. If it wasn’t the most perfect example of how wrong the content is, I don’t know what else would be. Even with access to spamming VD Shinryu repeatedly, players were still annoyed with drop rates. The FFXI team likely has records of what happened. Was that not enough to tell you that the content needs tweaking?

Conclusion

Nobody is asking for a handout. I assume most of the player base wants to earn their equipment. I’m not asking you to make anything as common as the Pebble/Ring/Earring... but at least make it fair. That’s the word I was looking for. “Fair”. If whoever reads this understands what I’m talking about, because they have experienced the unfair nature that is Shinryu, please give this a message a thumbs up. I know the team reads comments, but only those that are well-received are taken under consideration. Thank you. :cool:

I think it's coming up on 2 years since it got released, think it was summer 2021, and as someone who is approaching 500 VD kills of him I can't agree more.

Nothing should take 2 years to get never mind the fact that 5!, yes 5 pieces of gear from this fight are all Tartarus Platemail droprate levels of bad.

I'm one of the unfortunate ones who is seeing one of the rare drops every 100 kills or so, but every single one has been the Scythe.

4 Scythes in all my kills and 2 years of effort.

750 VD kills here and have never seen a Dagger. Of course, I stopped farming it about a year ago when they added the gear to TROVE. Fun Fact: These items are more common from TROVE than the actual BCNM. Absolute fail at the drop rate.

To be fair, they added these items to the Aman Trove pool and with a high drop rate in the first month.

I doubt they will do this because they tend to calculate number of these items in the game to calculate if there is a problem or not, and due to AMAN there are quite a few now.

If anything, they could at least throw us a pity change, and make it require 25 merits per entry to at least allow 3 kills per capped merits.

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Originally Posted by Velner

These items are more common from TROVE than the actual BCNM.

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Yeh, that doesn't make sense really in my opinion.

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Originally Posted by Vyre

If anything, they could at least throw us a pity change, and make it require 25 merits per entry to at least allow 3 kills per capped merits.

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That good idea lets SE thinking and fix that

I'd shouted from the rooftops on this issue a few months post change and it fell on deaf ears. I couldn't agree more with the pathetic state of this BCNM. I'd love nothing more than to grind it out myself or with groups on D+ difficulty to have even as low as a 1/50 drop rate at a "very rare" item, but the drop rate from experience of the community, not just my personal bias, is far lower and warrants completely avoiding the fight all together. This is in dire need of a change SE. Please listen to the community here

out of curiosity... how was drop rate comparison with the old Abby version back on WotG days? I do recall that auto-RR on those armour sets would make a person very happy.

It's cool to try get some action on this but from a dev point of view there is no way they are going to do it after adding it to trove, it's just not going to happen. I'm saying this so you don't get your hopes up.

Trove has kind of turned into the fix all content in relation to drop issues, hell I even got my last piece of malig from trove on an alt and I would say 80% of the Tart mails are prob from that too (vagary is ass content)

Fix the drop rate!!!!!! It's too rare, stop being so cruel to your fan base who continues to support this game!

The gear is rare because you have people like Pixela demanding super rare items just for the sake of having something super rare for the ultra hardcore players to waste their life grinding. :)

To be fair, I said rare gear should either be cosmetic or a +1.

Having said that, yes it's probably better for it to be very rare.

I wouldn't mind a system where it keeps track of your victories and assigns points for each Victory for Merit Point BCNMs, (1 for Very Easy, 5 for the highest tier) and after XX amount of accumulated points, after you go over the cap you get a choice of any item in the potential drop list. (Considering it took me around 50+ normal Difficulty fights to just get the Culminus to drop on the "One to be Feared" BCNM) Since there are usually 3 tiers of item / gear drops, you can give each tier a point value (25/50/100 for example) so if you can only do the VE battle you'd need 4 times as many fights as the people doing the higher tier Battles to get what you want. It at least guarantees you can get something you want / need , If they think that's too fair, they can always reset your points once you take a prize from a tier set.

I couldn't agree more with all of y'all more you're all completely right velner you don't have a knife yet?!? U gave me the scythe ty again. It's just a shame that I haven't read anything about the newer item level cloak I haven't heard anyone say if it puts a good 3 minutes on stuff now compared to the other one where everyone's wanting to burst it for the extra accuracy to make it last as long. It would be nice. Really this is more of a study piece now than anything that I would gain out of it taking it with a link shell to events. Ty all for the good ideas, and the posting of information, and the game itself. Still haven't really farmed this like I want. A.M.A.N. drop probably

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Originally Posted by Chocobrotastic

I couldn't agree more with all of y'all more you're all completely right velner you don't have a knife yet?!? U gave me the scythe ty again. It's just a shame that I haven't read anything about the newer item level cloak I haven't heard anyone say if it puts a good 3 minutes on stuff now compared to the other one where everyone's wanting to burst it for the extra accuracy to make it last as long. It would be nice. Really this is more of a study piece now than anything that I would gain out of it taking it with a link shell to events. Ty all for the good ideas, and the posting of information, and the game itself. Still haven't really farmed this like I want. A.M.A.N. drop probably

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Thank you for your very first post. Please consider using punctuation in the future.

Bump it's still terrible.... Why do you hate your fan base?

P.S. No one does this content anymore at least make it 25 merits a try so I can do a third attempt *eyeroll*.

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Why do you hate your fan base?

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Dramatic much?

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Originally Posted by Rinuko

Dramatic much?

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Pretty much what people don't that show up here like they will be heard or something after being a jerk.

"Sir, this rando posted we hate them for not making the drop rate better!"

"What?! I'll show them how much we care about them and change it right away!"

I still stand by this. C'mon Fujito. We know you want to correct this horrendous fight.

But then how else would they keep you so busy while not making much content? :p

SE recently sent out questionnaires about the game to the players, but going from experience, I highly doubt they will take notice of at least 99.9% of the feedback. This thread has over 100,000 views with a near universal agreement of the original post, but nobody from SE has ever bothered to leave a response. I still choose to stay away from Shinryu, and have since got a few drops via AMAN Trove. And speaking of that, I know the real reason SE won’t change this. The hard truth is AMAN Trove is a glorified gambling machine praying on susceptible (or those with money to burn) players. There is no skill involved and is entirely dependent on luck.

How do you get more “rolls” in AMAN Trove? Pay for more characters. Get an army of mules so you can get even more Silver Vouchers per month. If you could get the rare gear from the actual content with fair drop rates, players wouldn’t bother to do this. So, the real reason the drop rates on Shinryu and other content won’t change is because SE purposely wanted super rare equipment in AMAN Trove. They are the dangling carrots to entice players to spend more time and money on the “content”. Showing upper management a higher profit margin is more important than ensuring a solid gameplay experience for the loyal players. Developers know that regardless of what they do, players will keep on paying their monthly sub fees for years. And they won’t respond because it means addressing this gambling mechanic in the game. I await my ban from the forum for speaking the truth. AMAN Trove hurts the game and is nothing more than a cheap money grab gimmick.

How is AMAN Trove different from any other limited content in that regard? More characters = more weekly sparks/accolades. More characters = more monthly ambuscade. More characters = more login points.

It is very different because AMAN Trove is a slot machine. It isn’t content. You open boxes until you get eaten, or you get a shiny rainbow chest that triggers dopamine in the brain. Everything about it screams gambling machine. Yes, Special gobbiedial is a role of the dice, but because it has thousands upon thousands of items (most of them trash), it is a sheer lottery that most people quickly figure out it isn’t worth getting excited over.

You’re always getting “something” from gobbiedials, unlike AMAN Trove, where you can go all out and leave with nothing. You feel bad that you didn’t just click the gold box in the middle to get something, but you also feel repeatedly disappointed clicking the gold box right away. There is a high and a low, just like gambling. This isn’t the same as “Pay 2 win”, which is what you are implying here. People can shortcut all they like by buying more accounts. That doesn’t bother me, and I understand why SE made the game like that.

AMAN Trove was a step too far. They purposely kept drop rates ridiculous in some content to give players incentive to buy extra accounts for the gambling machine. Granted, some players may have already gone the “Pay 2 win” route, so it would not have affected them. However, it may have spurred them on to pay for even more accounts. I’m not a gambler. Never have been. But when AMAN Trove started up, I started thinking to myself... maybe I should make some new characters for this. I regularly experience apophenia when I am doing AMAN Trove. I know it is random as hell, but my brain keeps wanting to trick me in to thinking there is a method, and if I can only figure out that method, I’ll better succeed at it.

I didn’t even know what apophenia was until I started making forum posts about my observations on ffxiah. I have never been a gambler, and this “content” showed me exactly what it is like to be one. Nothing else in this game has made me feel as crappy as AMAN Trove, and I’m someone who lived in Maze of Shakrami for weeks back in the day to camp Argus. I have a ton of patience for a lot of unreasonable things in this game, but AMAN Trove? Hell no. This thing shouldn’t exist, but it does because Japanese have the “gacha” mentality, which has been normalised, and is becoming increasingly more so elsewhere. It will go over many people’s heads because pay 2 win has become so widespread that people can’t distinguish between that and gambling.

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It is very different because AMAN Trove is a slot machine. It isn’t content.

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While most people don't ever touch it, it is still content and there is a fight.