Originally Posted by
Arcon
Edit: This was longer than I thought, tl;dr at the bottom.
Ok, for this post, let's discard the HNM-aspect to FFXI, since that is quite a different beast that needs to be dealt with.
I've been in pretty much every "scene" or "subculture" in FFXI during my play time. Hell I've been a lazy student, so I've had plenty of time to play. I know the HNM and endgame scene, I know the social scene, I know the "stand around afk and wait for some noob to shout to help them out with G1 or something" scene. I know that no content was even half as shit as people claim (ok, HNM was, admittedly, but that's it). I've been in a social LS for most of my time and we've been doing everything FFXI had to offer, with almost all noobs. We did Dynamis, Limbus, Einherjar, Sky, Sea, KS99, had several Salvage, Nyzul and Assault groups, and we did all of it regularly. Saying "Abyssea offered content to everyone" is an asinine statement, because content was never blocked to anyone, it wasn't even much harder to access, I know several people who shouted their Nyzul/Assault/Salvage statics for example. And I remember more than one shout run for Dynamis and other events. In our LS, we even had plenty of people participate who were < Lv70 still, and some of them stayed there for a while. And you know why that was possible? For two reasons, first of all, it wasn't too hard (maybe T3 Einherjar, but once you get the hang of it, and I know for a fact that even noobs eventually do, it's doable), and secondly, there was no competition. Occasionally some Dynamis was blocked, so you did another zone, but all in all, you were never denied any content by other people, they never "stole" the access from you.
Also, I don't know where you get that shit about 0/100 droprate from. We had gotten almost all Dynamis items for most people who needed it (obviously some newer members didn't have them yet). Same with sky, we had Haidate, W.Legs and pretty much everything else worthwhile for everyone who needed it, to the point that we stopped doing Sky after a while, unless we got new people. AV drops were the only thing we never got around to doing.
I don't know any great item that had < 10% drop rate back in the day, and even that was pushing it (that's talking NM drops, of course Dynamis fodder mobs don't count, since you can plow through them). Simply, I have no idea where all that rage is coming from (except Sparthos's rage about the development teams' conspiracy to suck the soul out of every paying customer, that's just his paranoia/insanity). And remember that I'm only referring to the old FFXI, not the new FFXI. You'd have a hard time finding anyone disagreeing with the common notion that the drop system sucks ass.
That's not saying stuff can't be improved. But Abyssea is definitely not the way to go. I cannot name one good aspect of Abyssea I'd incorporate into old FFXI. Abyssea, for the most part, didn't have the "steady progress" that people claim in here. It had instant progress. If you wanted an item from Abyssea (bar Empyrean weapon), you could get it within the hour usually, two or three hours, four tops, if you were extremely unlucky on drops. That even extends to +1 equipment and for the most part even +2 equipment. The drop system in Abyssea was bad. The opposite kind of bad. Forced drops by an artificial game mechanic unrelated to the moster itself (weakness staggering) takes any kind of progress completely out of the equation. Sure, you still had to do that several times to get your +1 item, so I guess overall there was some kind of progress, but if it can be done within an hour or two, you can hardly call it that.
The only steady progress in Abyssea were Empyrean weapons. That was actually progress you could measure on a daily basis (if you were that involved), and know that every time you farm for it, you're one step closer to the goal. And I do like that, something like that should be employed for new content as well. However, the way it was added to Abyssea was just retarded, again. Boss grinds, seriously? Admittedly, I think SE simply underestimated how powerful Abyssea buffs would make the player. I don't think they ever intended for people to farm Glavoid in a party of three, which makes it even worse. They probably thought it would take months of intensive group involvement to get one player their Empyrean, making them almost as exclusive as relic weapons. Still, the one thing in Abyssea that has steady progress is the one thing people complain most about: endless boss grinds for Empyrean weapons.
And I can't believe how everyone is suddenly defending Abyssea's drop rates, when in every other thread (even some of the same people) complain about staggering and how it was retarded and should have never been implemented. So... what? You just want 100% drop rate without doing anything for it? Again, I just don't see the problem with old drop rates. Greatguardian, your argument about the law of large numbers would be perfect, if the drop rates actually were as bad as you claimed. Even Ridill, your example, had quite a decent drop rate, I've seen it drop quite a few times myself, and I was never too active with HNMs, I only did them on and off during a certain period of my FFXI career.
You're right, if an item had a 1% drop rate, steady progression would be better. I argued that myself, when SE asked us whether we wanted random or static augments, if you remember that discussion. I argued that with random augments, you have a 1% chance to get it perfect, whereas for static augments, you'd know you get it perfect it would just take you longer. But that's perfectly fine with me, and I agree wholeheartedly.
However, if an item has 20% or higher drop rate, it doesn't matter much either way. Let's assume an item has a 50% drop rate, just to make a point. Theoretically, it's still possible for someone to go 0/20 and another group going 20/20. However, the chances of either are 0.0001%. That's probably comparable to the chance that you'll wipe on a mob in your steady progression (assuming it's Abyssea-easy) and miss a step. That means, with a chance of 99.9999% you'll get the drop in 20 runs. So the law of large numbers doesn't mean much in this context.
Having said all of that, let me try to make my points again. First, minor point: oldXI wasn't perfect. It also wasn't bad, and definitely not nearly as bad as some people here make it out to be. And honestly, I really hate using the "so then quit" card, but seriously, if that stuff has been annoying you on an epic scale for several years, are you that deseperate to that to yourself?
But second, and major point, and if there's one thing you take away from this post, let it be this. This is the tl;dr stuff:
Disregarding whether or not people enjoyed Abyssea, Abyssea-like content cannot be efficiently sustained, not even by a big development team. FFXI does not have the resources to do anything like this again. SE needs to adjust what they know for a fact that kept people playing for almost a decade, and try to fit it with their current mentality. It is not easy, personally I don't think it's perfectly possible, they will have to cut some corners and some people will dislike it. But they have no other options, and they are painfully aware of it, hence what they said in that interview.
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