Wake up, "Seekers" is failing

[MarkovChain]

Airlixirs down to 5-7M (15 are up at the AH on my server), marrows are 10M still. We are about to reach 1 marrow = 2 airlixirs. Plasm farming is officially dead.

[Zumi]

Airlixirs down to 5-7M (15 are up at the AH on my server), marrows are 10M still. We are about to reach 1 marrow = 2 airlixirs. Plasm farming is officially dead.

If everyone farmed ADL the price wouldn't be that high, plasm farming is a easier to do for most people since its pretty mindless and you can join random pick up groups all day long. ADL takes a lot more effort to put a group together.

SoA being boring or whatever is more to do with not many people working on FFXI anymore then anything else.

[Damane]

Airlixirs down to 5-7M (15 are up at the AH on my server), marrows are 10M still. We are about to reach 1 marrow = 2 airlixirs. Plasm farming is officially dead.

dunno about you but gettign 210kx18 (18 people) plasm in 3 hour + a shitload of expensiv craft mats and gear and airlixirs +2 sounds alot hotter to me then doing ADL.

[Riggs]

i feel completly left out of this whole expansion, i work long hours and can mostly only play weekends, my main is thf and i have a 95 relic, i get invited to nothing, i have good gear and do great damage but no one wants a thf, sure i have drk and war at 99 but only off the shelf weapons on those jobs so again no invites, and the fact that many of the nm's only need beating once makes it even worse as most won't repeat them spreading the wins among more people. so to sum up i wasted my money buying this expansion

[Xantavia]

- RUN and GEO. I'm sure 90% of the people that came back for adoulin did it for the new jobs and you lost them. Your jobs suck, and me as well as others have explained to you many times why before the expansion went live. RUN is inferior to PLD, whatever you do. If not well prove it by tanking any delve NMs with it (and Im not even talking about tojil). GEO only offers something on the mega bosses... and even this is arguable.

Sadly, it's not the jobs themselves that have turned me off, but the announcement that AF will be level 99 did. I was having fun taking RUN out solo and killing stuff, then stopped at 50 waiting for the release. I've done that will all jobs in the past, but they changed direction with these two jobs. It killed all motivation to keep playing them because I personally don't enjoy racing a job to cap, then figure out what it can do. I like seeing gradual growth, gear included, but they lost me with this decision.

[Alhanelem]

I wonder why they didn't make comments since people kill 4x faster going back to real jobs like MNK, BRD, WHM etc.

Everyone always focuses on killing faster, but slow and steady can sometimes win the race more easily. suicidal zergs are fun and usually work but finesse, which is often lost on today's players, can make some fights a less stressful experience.

GEO has one thing going for it which makes it useful, the fact that it can debuff some enemies that can't easily be debuffed any other way. I think the technical issues and the things that are being addressed by the next patch kind of overshadow the fact that GEO can actually be put to some reasonable use.

I think the expansion is fun when I get to play its content, but delve kind of ruined everything because it's far too difficult to get into for everyone who wasn't ahead of the curve at the moment it came out.

Sadly, it's not the jobs themselves that have turned me off, but the announcement that AF will be level 99 did.

Of all things, why did THIS turn you off? Do you really want to walk all over a bunch of easy quests to get oyur job's trademark gear? Do you really want to spend all the time grinding to upgrade them before they beocme useful? Do you really want to do level 40-50 stuff in a level 99+ area?

Honestly, this move makes sense. if it wasn't unfair to everyone who hasn't already completed all the other job's AF quests and done the upgrades, i'd say they should all be changed to be like this. It's a little weird that the AF will be the higher tier of job armor for these jobs, but I'll take it if it means relevant gear with good stats.

[Radd]

The game pretty much became meh around the time that it was a requirement to have the weapons that take weeks and weeks to grind out. You can no longer just pick up, progress a bit and play. For most players, trying to get a RMED to 90+ is a brick wall of frustration. Honestly now, it's just very boring to grind out a weapon. There's no uniqueness to them anymore anyway, considering most no-lifers and major players already have multiple bundles of them. Missed the ship for getting Delve farming? Tough luck. Good luck trying to get a bunch of people to help you in most cases if you aren't playing often.

Current way the game is played for the average new player is:
-Start the game, level up and screw around while having some fun.
-Get to about level 30 and realize that no one actually parties at all except in abyssea or huge alliance parties, so you got abyssea and stand around very bored, or opening boxes for a bunch of levels, or get bored of wandering around in gusgen mines or crawler's nest.
-Realize that a large portion of gear before AF3 is completely meaningless and a waste of time to get now except for Rajas Ring and a few others, so do all the missions... Solo or with a friend, if you made one by now
-Finally get all that done, leveled up your job to the cap, and realize that now all your skills are gimp.
-Skill up for hours and hours, boring yourself to death in the process
-All done skilling up? Okay, time to do some AF3 farming for some basic gear, so you can participate in well, anything remotely interesting. Oh wait, need a few people to do this for awhile. This'll take you a few days or weeks, depending on how lucky you are.
-Okay, you are all geared up with just your regular set and have an ass weapon. "I better get a Empy weapon, I hear that is easy." "I think I can grind out a relic in a month or two! No sweat!"
-Realize you picked the wrong job to even attempt doing this, switch your job to BST, NIN or WHM.
-Do the above steps again.
-Realize that getting an empy alone is impossible, so you ask your friends, most of whom are busy and say "lol it's easy just dual box it and get it yourself!"

At this point you can either
-Buy another account and level up a dual-boxed heal bot to help you farm your 85 kannagi, then following on that, get the actual weapon you want so it'll be a lot faster.
-Suck it up and try to get your friends to help you get your empy weapon by constantly annoying and begging them, even though they are sick of it.
-Go for the relic and waste a month or two in dynamis, doing the same thing over and over again, still being behind of course.
-Say screw it and try for Delve and hope you can just leech a good free weapon.
-Let's not forget, you'll need to do some voidwatch in here somewhere, so stand around in Jeuno for shouts for hours at a time to progress here, or start one yourself, same thing, time is sunk.

Remember, this is just to be at par with doing a decent amount of damage as a DD. If you are a main heal, it's pretty much easy mode, but not everyone likes standing there spamming cures on people.

Stan: I can't believe it's all over. What do we do now?
Cartman: What do you mean? Now we can finally play the game.

This quickly comes to mind. There comes a point in time to just walk away from something or someone you love. This is one of those times.

Wall of text aside, there's a reason why many players have left and not bothered coming back. Once you are behind in FFXI at this point, the simplest way to put it is you are SOL, because someone will in most cases have better gear and stuff than you, so you won't get picked until you have it... but if you don't get picked to do the events to get the gear- oh. Right.

/rant

FFXI needs help. It's sad to see it in this state. It might just be time to bring it out back and put the 12 gauge to it's head.

[Yinnyth]

What you describe in your post is the beginner's dilemma, which has existed for a long time, and the gap only continues to grow wider and more daunting with each new addition to the game. Yes, SE could stop adding things to the game to stop the beginner's dilemma from getting worse, but that would be boring as hell for us, so they must keep adding things for us endgamers. Yes, SE could make it easier for newbs to catch up, and that's probably the best solution they have available to them.

But what you're prefacing your complaint with is:

The game pretty much became meh around the time that it was a requirement to have the weapons that take weeks and weeks to grind out. You can no longer just pick up, progress a bit and play.

So your real beef is not that it's hard to start off in FFXI, it is that you feel like you need one of the RMEDs, but you don't feel like you should have to put forth the effort in order to obtain one.

And what is your suggested fix then?

FFXI needs help. It's sad to see it in this state. It might just be time to bring it out back and put the 12 gauge to it's head.

Really? Nothing else can be done to fix FFXI in your eyes?

How about this then: delete SoA, and refund everyone's money. Would that bring you back?

[sc4500]

They made there money it did not fail to them. To us gamers yea it failed. We got ff14 on the way . Wish I would have just waited and got that instead it much more impressive.

[sc4500]

The game pretty much became meh around the time that it was a requirement to have the weapons that take weeks and weeks to grind out. You can no longer just pick up, progress a bit and play. For most players, trying to get a RMED to 90+ is a brick wall of frustration. Honestly now, it's just very boring to grind out a weapon. There's no uniqueness to them anymore anyway, considering most no-lifers and major players already have multiple bundles of them. Missed the ship for getting Delve farming? Tough luck. Good luck trying to get a bunch of people to help you in most cases if you aren't playing often.

Current way the game is played for the average new player is:
-Start the game, level up and screw around while having some fun.
-Get to about level 30 and realize that no one actually parties at all except in abyssea or huge alliance parties, so you got abyssea and stand around very bored, or opening boxes for a bunch of levels, or get bored of wandering around in gusgen mines or crawler's nest.
-Realize that a large portion of gear before AF3 is completely meaningless and a waste of time to get now except for Rajas Ring and a few others, so do all the missions... Solo or with a friend, if you made one by now
-Finally get all that done, leveled up your job to the cap, and realize that now all your skills are gimp.
-Skill up for hours and hours, boring yourself to death in the process
-All done skilling up? Okay, time to do some AF3 farming for some basic gear, so you can participate in well, anything remotely interesting. Oh wait, need a few people to do this for awhile. This'll take you a few days or weeks, depending on how lucky you are.
-Okay, you are all geared up with just your regular set and have an ass weapon. "I better get a Empy weapon, I hear that is easy." "I think I can grind out a relic in a month or two! No sweat!"
-Realize you picked the wrong job to even attempt doing this, switch your job to BST, NIN or WHM.
-Do the above steps again.
-Realize that getting an empy alone is impossible, so you ask your friends, most of whom are busy and say "lol it's easy just dual box it and get it yourself!"

At this point you can either
-Buy another account and level up a dual-boxed heal bot to help you farm your 85 kannagi, then following on that, get the actual weapon you want so it'll be a lot faster.
-Suck it up and try to get your friends to help you get your empy weapon by constantly annoying and begging them, even though they are sick of it.
-Go for the relic and waste a month or two in dynamis, doing the same thing over and over again, still being behind of course.
-Say screw it and try for Delve and hope you can just leech a good free weapon.
-Let's not forget, you'll need to do some voidwatch in here somewhere, so stand around in Jeuno for shouts for hours at a time to progress here, or start one yourself, same thing, time is sunk.

Remember, this is just to be at par with doing a decent amount of damage as a DD. If you are a main heal, it's pretty much easy mode, but not everyone likes standing there spamming cures on people.

Stan: I can't believe it's all over. What do we do now?
Cartman: What do you mean? Now we can finally play the game.

This quickly comes to mind. There comes a point in time to just walk away from something or someone you love. This is one of those times.

Wall of text aside, there's a reason why many players have left and not bothered coming back. Once you are behind in FFXI at this point, the simplest way to put it is you are SOL, because someone will in most cases have better gear and stuff than you, so you won't get picked until you have it... but if you don't get picked to do the events to get the gear- oh. Right.

/rant

FFXI needs help. It's sad to see it in this state. It might just be time to bring it out back and put the 12 gauge to it's head.

Best message I seen in along time so TRUE.