Starting to lose interest in the whole game...

[Demon6324236]

Cattering to the hardcore, forgetting the casuals.

Catering to the current players, forgetting new players. Most casual players I know are able to do Delve right now, they went with the LS on a few runs, did some bosses, we went with some of the hardcore people in the LS but all in all got wins for people. Then the LS did some Delve farms for plasm, again, casual members came, they were not uberpro, they did not have the best gear, we even had a WHM who was actually in almost full Teal, but we got them Plasm so they could get Delve gear. Most casual players I know have done much of Abyssea, most importantly the gear aspect, I have a friend who can only get on about 3 hours every day except Monday & Tuesday, he finished Abyssea gear and an Ukon by workin at it. My point in all of this is that they are not really targeting casual players, or forgetting them, the players who are hurt by this most are new or returning players because the content they need to use to build up and catch up is long since abandoned by most, thus making it to hard to catch up. Players both hardcore and casual who have been around a while have left Abyssea behind for the most part, its a matter of play time, not really how much you play.

It's not the community fault that they only pick delve geared players for delve content.

I forgot SE told everyone to only bring Delve DDs to Delve, oh wait, they asked people to bring more casual or weaker players along for the experience as well rather than leaving them out.

It's SE fault for creating an itemization system that makes 99% of everything useless and events that require so much precision to fight the amount of time required to get things done that makes players choose the best setups only for fights.

Whoa, wait, what? NM fights are hard, yes, but no one said, again, that people should jump right to Delve, we were never meant to, it was meant to be the hardest event in the game. Remember when Legion was the hardest content and only a handful of linkshells on each server did it? Yeah, that is what Delve was supposed to be, hard, but we did what we do, abused flaws, and boom, many more people have wins than were ever meant to by this point, killing the latter, making it the only relevant thing for the most part.

Now, you are saying its not the players fault they only take Delve geared players, well, who's fault is it? SEs, and your reason for why makes no sense. As I said, NMs take some amount of precision, if by precision you mean paying enough attention to exploit a specific built in weakness that we figured out how to do weeks ago. As for taking only the best setups for a fight, that's how most people do it, best setups, not best gear. Plasm farming is easy, so long as you have competent healers(who understand this is not Abyssea or VW with super MP) and DDs who do not get the party killed(DRKs who pop SE/LR/Bergressor and think they will live long) so that's not really hard or precision requiring either, just intelligence/attention requiring.

So I agree, NMs take some effort and might be a bit hard, but Plasm farming is easy, and getting wins is not to bad if you have some good friends willing to help out. Saying its not the players fault for Delve exclusive shouts though, that's an annoying amount of finger pointing. That's like saying its not the players fault for shouting for only RME DDs for VW months ago, because T4 City NMs are so hard, or that Qilin is going to kill party without RME only DDs. Its the fault of the player base being impatient with things and wanting everything now. Why accept a Hoarfrost Blade DRK or OAT DRK, or even a Rag DRK when you can have one of the 100 Bereaver DRKs who are just waiting for a Delve shout to go by on their screen? Simple, you wouldn't, and besides that, if you shout you probably want Plasm, or win, why take something that is either slower or weaker when you can assure yourself a better run, or better shot at winning, by simply taking only Delve people? You wouldn't, and so the player base does it to each other yet again.

[Merton9999]

I got invited to FFXIV beta phase 3... after only an hour of playing around, it glaringly made evident exactly why most people will move on from XI unless something drastic is done. I for one am 100% certain my decision to unsub this month was the right one. XIV has so many things XI players have been asking for for years.. and then some (NB not white knighting XIV.. just using it as an example of why XI is on a very steep downward slope).

Then again.. you know things are bad when even playing a game of solitaire on your PC is more entertaining than XI... lol

EDIT: Just saw the RUN merits and ya.. I rest my case lol....

Disclaimer: Not going to say any more on XIV just so I dont end up breaking some kind of NDA

I'm glad someone else did it before me, so I'm just going to agree. I was invited this weekend as well, and FFXIV is miraculous. The most fun I've had starting any video game in the last 15 years.

As far as XI goes, I don't necessarily think they're trying to dump people over to XIV. I think they're just trying to make sure XI remains a different beast, so they can attract multiple types of players. I haven't enjoyed much of XI since I finished Abyssea, but I do think it offers some positive things I'm not sure I'll find in XIV. Though I'm out as of June 30th, I'll definitely still keep an eye on the game and the forum comments, just in case XIV ever gets stale.

[Cledant]

You can kill NMs for your items, who said you had to grind Plasm? No one, people just favor that as it helps multiple people, if you wanted you could go out and do Mata, kill it, get Airlixirs for upgrades, use the 500 Plasm a kill and use that Plasm for more items as you slowly build it, need around 600 Airlixirs for a level 15 piece of gear anyways, say you get 15 on average counting +1s, that's 40 kills, 20k Plasm, enough for most drops from normal mobs. Besides that there is always the possibility of killing normal mobs.

We forgot a horrible event, sounds like a good thing to me.

Bosses hardly grants any new items or weapons but a bunch of airlixirs (thats why almost/everyone prefers to do plasm grinding), on top of that it takes a considerable time to gather alliance members for bosses/delve, since most servers are dead with lots of non-active players

[Sarick]

I've been playing this game for close to 9 years and finally seem to be at the point where I'm struggling to find reasons to keep putting crysta in or even log on for an hour each night. Even a skillup session on GEO seems like a futile effort.

If they haven't already, S-E would do well to take some pointers for ArenaNet as far as designing FFXIV 2.0 updates in the future.

I agree with this 100%. The game has moved in the wrong direction since the update. Before you gained power by mostly leveling up and getting sets of gear that generally worked well for your level. Now they've added super items that push the game toward the hardcore play style. SE really dropped the ball in this expansion. These changes hurt a lot of players and their interest.

I enjoyed abbysea a lot. I could log on do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. I didn't need stink'en large alliances to enjoy the game. This game has become a large rat race that SE keeps adding track to at the end while everything behind you turns to rubble. What happens when you can't keep up? The answer is simple the road behind you collapses. This is what has happened with the games direction. It's why so many players feel what this OP is saying.

If it's not fun then everything is for naught. It's not fun playing a game like a real life job. A game is supposed to be about entertainment. I don't get paid to play "I'm not an RMT" so this game should be fun. Unfortunately, it's not and the time I'm spending is mostly on offline RPGS.

[BST]

Does anyone here think that SE would give a shit if they lost 50% of subs for this game now that XIV is really that good?
XIV:ARR is amazing! just look at the JP beta forum "165,000 testers over 30-40+ servers with 700,000 signups for Phase 3 to 4".

[Jaall]

FFXIV is definitely gonna take over this games crown. I really think FFXI has lost too many players now and is ready to pass the baton. As far as SE's support for this game goes I'm not sure what will happen but when FFXI stops being their main money-maker and FFXIV takes over, you know where SE will be spending their time and money.

[Rustic]

I really loved abbysea too, yes it was god mode but it brought me back to this game. I personally thought the content was fun and obviously you got rewarded. You didn't have to be in a ls for half a year to have enough ls points to have a chance to lot for items. To me it was fun. Now all I have been seeing is content being developed for us to get this gear here from this spawnable nm and that's it. What good is gear on this game anymore? Spend all your time getting it to just stand around and let ppl check you. These are just my opinions, flame on

Abyssea was designed to be a mercy-kill for FFXI when FFXIV came along. Adoulin was designed to kill off everything prior, thanks to Abyssea basically rendering the game "over" as the equivalent of a "New Game+". Unfortunately, someone in there didn't realize that people will do whatever content is "best" and ignore the rest, the same way people ignored 99% of the old game content once Abyssea came along.

It feels like they, once again tried to finish off the game but missed horribly, having lobotomized most of their own creation and leaving us only with people farming for plasm, endlessly.

[Demon6324236]

Well in all honesty I am not sure this game will be around once FFXIV comes out. Yes, I know, people have been saying FFXI would die forever, but whats new? FFXIV is another game from SE, its taking resources, it appeals to the same kind of players in many ways including the Final Fantasy title itself, not to mention Squares traditional way of story telling and character development. So far as things that FF games do best, we can expect to see them in FFXIV like we did with FFXI, also, many players here have been saying they will be changing to FFXIV.

Sure, FFXI just got a new expansion, but look at its reception! Even though I myself like many things it brought, it seems like the majority of people who speak on these forums do not like it, many in fact think its destroying the game. As it has been said, Delve has become the most popular event in the game in a matter of a month since its release, and not popular like VW, but popular in the way that almost everything before it was instantly taken from being worth going after, to being a waste of time. Things like the Delve weapons or the new pieces of armor have easily surpassed our previous expectations of gear, and besides that many old pieces of content which were viewed as possibly the hardest things in the game, have become trivial. Things like Legion, where mobs were hard to kill and presented a real difficult challenge to even the best of players, have become jokes, not only were they weakened but the average damage a DD can deal as well as their average gear level in terms of things like Accuracy have been boosted to extremes.

The direction the game has gone overall has also changed, we once had gear come out which was mostly side grades, and while many people hated that, what has happened now seems to be even worse, but admittedly is what was basically asked for. People hated side grades and wanted real upgrades, the problem that was brought with this is the fact we all see those upgrades, and instantly go after those, especially when they take less overall time to get, than our old weaker gear. After all, why go out of your way to make a Relic when you can make a weapon twice as strong in only a few hours of Delve farming? Some of the gear was a bunch of clear upgrades as well, for instance the light DD legs, which are amazing, or the Mikinaak body which rivals Phorcys for many WSs at level 15 and beats Phorcys at many others at the same level. In the end, we saw just what we asked for, direct upgrades. The thing is they tried to change the direction in the way of tree progression. So we would work on, say, the Skirmish weapon for our job, like SAM, and then once we had it with some nice augments we would take on Delve, and move on to that weapon.

The problem with tree progression in this game stems from a single issue that SE has seemingly had with this game for quite some time. The lack of ability to get things right the first try. Many pieces of content are not balanced properly for the players on its first go around without some type of exploit or locking of the mob in question. Like Legion which was Stun and PD locked to stop the enemies from hurting you, yes, we won, but the point is we did it by literally removing the enemies offence from the equation. In this case, rather than making the enemies over powered for the sake of being over powered, they did it very well, they gave them each weaknesses, not in the form of procs or anything like that which we saw in the past, but more creatively. By giving every NM their own special way to fight it, like keeping Blind on a NM to not only take away its two best attacks, but also lower its evasion to levels it can be easily hit, they made each NM special and unique in the way which you had to fight. Sure, under it all it was a zerg in the end, but one which took more planning and thought to succeed at.

The problem to all of this great work in my opinion was their flawed start. As I said, SE has a hard time getting things right the first time around, in this case, as we asked for a long time they finally gave us an event without a highly restricted timer, like how Legion and NNI were, when we always complained about zerging everything. The problem existed because once we had no timer, and we could easily move back to the NM's position, it became pointless to give up a fight, why quit when you can just keep going at it till it dies? So that's what we did, we kept at it for hours and hours, killing each NM one by one figuring out the weaknesses along the way, but as we did we also got the KIs, the gear, and in the end, killed the tree. The tree was meant for us to progress along to the point where Delve would be hard, but possible to the top players, it was meant to be something no one had really beaten as of right now, only a few select shells on each server, and the Delve bosses would be long out of reach still.

Thanks to the fact we rushed ahead, this will never be realized, and another piece of content which suffered the opposite, a slow start, will be forgotten. By that I of course mean Skirmish, a piece of content which we had many problems with originally, mostly, accessibility. By the time this was fixed, Delve was released, and with it came the exact thing that made Skirmish pointless, Delve weapons, so now Delve weapons are much stronger than Skirmish weapons and Skirmish offers nothing unique worth the time to get it, even if it is much more accessible now it has so few people doing it that not many care. I myself am among those who never did it while it mattered due to lack of funds or luck, and besides that, the time has come now that I probably will never bother, after all, why would I do it when I can farm Plasm in less time and have every KI from Delve so far?





I honestly think that FFXI will die this time. Like I said originally, I know people have been saying that for a long time, but look at how things are going right now. The game has changed directions completely again, unlike Abyssea, this way is going much worse, Abyssea brought in people by giving a new fast way of leveling and making the end game, which was built on the most, more accessible. SoA, or rather, Delve on the other hand, has turned most of the games content into nothing, the same way as Abyssea did in the end, but in a much more drastic way. Abyssea made leveling irrelevant and out classed most of the gear, in those respects this did the same, but Abyssea was many different things all wrapped under a single title, it had experience point parties still, it had seals, +2s, Emps, multitudes of NMs and areas to go in, many types of mobs, and quests, as well as a story which while it was somewhat poor in quality.

So far Adoulin has given us Reives, basically killing roots and rocks or special mobs meant to be hard which people tackle with -DT ignoring attacks, Skirmish, a long lost event almost no one got to do, or ever will bother doing, and Delve, the content which outdated almost all other content. Many things we looked forward to with Adoulin have failed to come about. Our resort islands, play as a monster, a new story which would not be strung out like WotG, all 7 HNMs, and so on. If you think about it, even the HNMs have been changed in a way which to me takes all the fun out of it, like Abyssea, and WotG, our dimension is once again not good enough. So far as I understand, Delve, Skirmish, Abyssea, WotG, VW, Prov, WoE, and possibly more are all events or expansions which take place in other worlds. I would be ok with that if it did not feel like everything hard was in another dimension. When will a true challenge come back to Vana?

All in all, FFXIV promises to do what its earlier version did not, provide FF fans entertainment in MMO form, in a fun world with good story and great gameplay as well as beautiful graphics that are awe-inspiring when you first lay your eyes upon them. Many people have already claimed they will take their leave from Vana once its released, or already have in hopes that it is as big of a success as it looks like it will be, and with how FFXI has changed over the last few months, it is not looking good for the game. The only hope I think FFXI has left is in this supposed June update we are supposed to get, a large update which was to bring a ton of Adoulin related things to us, like our resort and the other areas. But the question we must ask is, are we going to be delayed again? Its over half way into the month with little info, and as much as SE loves to keep things secret, this is only hurting them more at this point. On top of everything else, will this update really help things? The damage Delve did has been done, nothing short of nerfing its rewards to fall in line or removing them from players who got them so far from the early rush when it was broken will fix these issues. Neither of these two options would go well with players either, both would throw us into a fit of rage. So what will this June update bring? Will it be worth the wait some have given or will it only prove that this game has met its end finally, and the expansion's life, as well as the games life, cut short?

[Castoth]

I'll agree that SoA content, so far, only caters to current players and makes it extremely hard for returning/new players to ever catch up. As of now, I've been starting to do SoA content (grinding Imps, farming Bayld in the few Ceizac Rieves done during JP primetime so I can afford a Wildskeeper Rieve KI, etc) and already am seeing major issues ahead within the next few months. Heck, one issue I'm already coming across is that many sections outside of Ceizac are impossible to pass through now due to higher level Colonization Rieves blocking all routes. Bivouacs being destroyed in most areas is another issue as their waypoints can't be accessed even if I could reach those blocked off areas. Good luck shouting for a Morimar or Moh Gates Rieve group to temporarily break through those, now that most of the playerbase has moved on to Delve and have their warps already.

This is just one example. Once Delve 2.0 gets released, it may get even worse if Matsui lacks the foresight to address the new/returning playerbase and cause more to give up.

[Spectreman]

If all those elitists from FFXI leave the game for FFXIV i feel pity for those trying to have fun in FFXIV.