Newest interview (abyssea was a mistake?)

[Arcon]

"And lo did the Maleficent Dark Demon Emperor Tanaka-sama don his dark robe and did he take up a goblet filled with the blood of a thirty-year-old virgin who married a cartoon character and did he don his dark dress socks, and he smote and laid low all drop rates that stood before him. For thirty days and thirty nights did Demon Emperor Tanaka-sama code the drop rates of Voidwatch til they sank lower than the bowels earth.

From his dark and dank lungs did echo forth a decree that never again should anything of value appear in the Treasure Pool. Henceforth, the sky hung low and black and the dead seas stank of cat urine most sulfurous." - Ito 12:15

I love you.

[Kristal]

I think the biggest mistake with abyssea was setting the minimum level cap to 30. Instead of doing 30-75 in parties, eating food, wearing up to date gear , skilling up you went along, you now just jump into abyssea wearing nothing, and come out 9 hours later on 95. Ofcourse, horribly underskilled, so SE had to add several skillgain boosters or most people would still be struggling to unlock quested weaponskills by now.

Abyssea and the level cap rise to 99 were bound to have a big effect on gameplay, creating an entirely new endgame, but I wish the devs actually thought these important things through before jumping off the cliff.

[Morier]

SE didn't have time to think about all of these things pre-abyssea. They kinda treated this game and it's community as a red headed stepchild for awhile. Then 14 bombed hard and suddenly they needed to recoup money and started throwing things at FFXI to keep people and make more come to it.

Then made these forums to make it look like they care so much about our feedback.They are nice and all but if they cared so much why didn't these forums exist pre ff14 crash? Now that the sinking boat that is 14 has now stopped leaking due to FFXI they can sit back and reflect on what they think they should have done.

I love abyssea and how it changed the game, but it all was just a kneejerk reaction to 14's flop.

[xiozen]

Whenever new content is released to an MMO there is always a chance; a possibility that said new content will have a detrimental effect on the "overall" gaming experience. Abyssea, sad to say, did a few things--perhaps unintentional or unforeseen--but done nevertheless: 1) Casual gaming brought to a completely different level--to be on-par or perhaps was threatened by, WoW and its play-style environs. 2) Created the ability for exploits by inadvertently allowing the "let me get 2 or 3 additional accounts and box my stuffz" mentality. Lastly, 3) Created an air of relative "ease" as an expectant aspect of future content releases.

I enjoyed Abyssea and continue to enjoy it--but I am also a very casual gamer. The "Balance" mentioned in the article is and should be a valid concern from the development perspective; primarily because an MMO is suppose to "last"; all that running around must serve a purpose. Things cannot be "easy" in an MMO and expect it to live. FFXI last as long as it did because it did the MMO-thing, right... made content that was well balanced and required (key word), players to interact and rely on one another (not create multiple accounts and utilize those as your WHM, BLM and TANK jobs from different systems). Large link-shells had purpose and a cohesiveness which added a benefit to the lotting system from yesteryear.

Thinking back to those days of Dynamis when you found yourself attending soley to see if that piece of rare armor would drop. Even then we spat and argued about the drop rate; LolDrg or Lolpup would be the butt of the jokes and we would sit with anticipation after every fight to see if that armor was for the job we were currently specializing in or looking at leveling. It is this very anticipation which is gone now... thanks to Abyssea. So the question I can ask, along with everyone else, as well as the SE Development team, is can FFXI truly recover from what Abyssea did?

With such a diverse world-wide community and the ever present saying "You can please some people some of the time but not all people all of the time"; we're left grasping at whatever it is the SE Devs can spirit up and bring to the table to be weighed against "Abyssea content" because that's the taste that has been left in our mouths. Voidwatch... I'll only end up repeating what's already been said by so many others before. I am unsure of FFXI's future, but for me, it has been 10 years---my longest subscription in any game ever... and I will stay until the servers shut down for good; because home is where my FFXI heart is. I have faith things will balance out fairly well in the end.

[Kimble]

An internal producer is heavily involved in the development of, usually, a single game. Responsibilities for this position vary from company to company, but in general, the person in this position has the following duties:

Negotiating contracts, including licensing deals
Acting as a liaison between the development staff and the upper stakeholders (publisher or executive staff)
Developing and maintaining schedules and budgets
Overseeing creative (art and design) and technical development (game programming) of the game
Ensuring timely delivery of deliverables (such as Milestones)
Scheduling timely quality assurance (testing)
Arranging for beta testing and focus groups, if applicable
Arranging for localization

Thats what a producer does. Go be a dumb ass somewhere else.

[Runespider]

Old FFXI (and seemingly what they want us to go back to):

:Schedules, having your whole week set out with days and times to be at certain events (the one day you miss, the item you wanted all year drops and went free lot).
:Best content/gear for 5% of the playerbase, crap for everyone else.
:Waiting around, big groups... lots of gather time before the event.
:Worry of constantly trying to find a group that do events in your time zone or at a time you can attend.
:Horribly low drop rates where rewards come every 6-12 months++ and just doing the event for no reward at all in most cases. When I say horribly low drop rates I'm talking years to get one piece of gear that was marginally better than what you already have.
:Having to carry on doing the event for probably years after you get your gear due to the horribly low/random drop rates to help others get the gear, cause you now feel guilty for leaving now you got your stuff.
:Leaving friends to join shells that did the content you want to do since social shells couldn't do it.
:Linkshell leaders watching you to make sure you are at events and not doing something else during EVENT time.
:Every aspect of the game being down to a roll of the dice, with odds firmly set against you.
:Being the best meaning the people with the best bots/hacks (bot claiming, flee hacking around salvage etc).
:Having all the best gear needing a parser to differentiate you from joe scrub.
:sidegrades forever.

Abyssea XI:

:You can make progress on your gear in stages, seals/+2 items/emp items, few kills..a little closer to your goal.
:Content open to everyone.
:Can do everything with some friends, don't need to dump them to join some LS full of people you don't really like anyway.
:No schedules, no worry about being on a GMT/EU/JP server or finding groups to fit.
:No big LS only content, open to everyone. PUGS flourish.
:Far fewer botting/cheating and far less reward for doing it.
:Content having very few bottlenecks so even if people are hording stuff you want to do within an hour or so they will be gone.
:You are regularly rewarded for your time invested.
:Getting all the best gear/atmas etc turning you into a powerhouse.
:genuine gear upgrades.

Only problem I had with Aby was the level cap to enter being way too low and cheap brews (most stupid idea ever). Aside from that everything was fine.

The Tanaka thing now is beside the point, whoever is to blame for how the game is going for the last year now doesn't matter cause it's in full force and they are saying more to come. The timing from being fired from FFXIV and FFXI turning to crap is still very suspicious but whatever.

FFXI has been casting a giant shadow over FFXIV and I don't think they expected Aby to be as popular as it turned out to be (bringing back masses of old players no less).

[Kysaiana]

Abyssea wasn't a failure, but I will agree it changed player attitude towards battle content. No longer would people spend 2hrs fighting a monster only to have 2 wind crystals drop. Now, in the wake of Abyssea, we have Voidwatch, and we're back to square one with horrible drop rates. To use a tired expression, you can't feed people crap sandwiches for years, suddenly offer them steak for a year and then go back to the crap sandwiches.

To everyone saying the game was great back in the day because it was a terrible grind for gear, I'd have to disagree. FFXI hasn't lasted this long because all the players had saint-like patience for drops. It lasted this long because, until recently, I had been getting semi-regular expansions which offered new areas to explore, new battle content, and most importantly, (to me and many others at least), story. A lot of people play this game because it's an MMO and they love grinding for months and months to min/max their character to optimal performance. This is all well and good, but a lot of people play this game because it's a Final Fantasy game. The lack of any new story lines to follow means I have nothing left to do but grind out magian weapons and the failure that is Voidwatch on weekends.

Abyssea was fun but I wouldn't want all content to be like it. I especially hate the weakness system and has spread like a cancer to nearly all content in this game now.

[Rydstrom]

i completely agree with tanaka.. the balance of the game was horribly done in abyssea. war is to OP whm ONLY healer pld all but useless brd all but useless i could go on. nothing he said there was wrong. if you want easy content go play wow i didnt sign up to see my apoc drk useless to my mnk with below average gear please fix mr tanaka

[Urteil]

i completely agree with tanaka.. the balance of the game was horribly done in abyssea. war is to OP whm ONLY healer pld all but useless brd all but useless i could go on. nothing he said there was wrong. if you want easy content go play wow i didnt sign up to see my apoc drk useless to my mnk with below average gear please fix mr tanaka

I don't think you're smart enough to own an Apocalypse.

[Arcon]

Overseeing creative (art and design) and technical development (game programming) of the game

You just made my point nicely. Good day to you too.

Bullshit

You like putting your finger in your ear and sing to make all those nasty voices go away, do you?

Basically what you said was what I said, only you were horribly exaggerative to the point of being wrong. The very first thing I said to you in this thread still stands: You don't get it. No one disagrees with you that Abyssea is more fun. That is not the fucking point. Abyssea is bad. It did not belong in FFXI. It's the reason why every server is dead, not Voidwatch. Hell, last time I checked they didn't delete Abyssea yet. If people enjoy it so much, why are the serves almost empty, even after two merges?

Enjoy it all you want, that doesn't make it better. That doesn't make the problem go away.