Reasons Why FFXI is Declining

[Arkitan]

And Im just saying that without having the game have value, the game will always remain in the toilet with their players whining, crying and complaining consistently! SE mise well make the game free to play if they want to continue to outlaw RMTing! The only people that are really gaining anything is SE in general! Theyre the ones that like to dip their hands into our bank accounts and giving us very little in return! RMTing would actually solve that! Being a crafter myself, am I the only one that the only thing I miss about the good ole days is inflation?

[Arkitan]

You have no proof of these sweatshops! You know most RMTs are bots and some are legit players. Spread some more of that false propaganda! Some people havent heard it!

If some people received a milkshake headache every time they did something stupid, some players (Im not naming anyone) would have a 24 hr migraine! O.o

[FrankReynolds]

I wasn't confusing anything. I was saying that RMT sucks a really big load of b@llz, and gil-buying destroys the virtual-world in terms of giving an uneven playing field, where those who have cash money can buy game progress, and other people can't. That is just the practical side, then theres the gaming philosophy side, which is that you "Play The Game, Don't Pay The Game" ie. if you can't beat a game without cheatmodes, hacks, or free currency then You Really Suck at videogames and you should watch TV or something instead.

Unfortunately, making gil through SEs intended means (farming and crafting) is incredibly boring and not actually hard at all to most people. Being able to sit in one place and craft an item or press the "Fish" button 1,000,000 times isn't actually a skill at all. The game owes much of it's longevity to the fact that many people are able to skip that boring crap and go kill HNMs, or kill sky gods or Sea or Limbus or VWNMs or abyssea NMS or farm dynamis to sell the currency etc. none of which would be remotely possible if all the people who hate fishing and crafting had not been able to remain interested in the game by skipping that part that they hate and focusing on what they like.

I prefer some events over others, so I "Farm" those events for cash and sell to people who can't do them for what ever reason. I then use that money to pay for things that I myself don't want to farm on my own for whatever reason. The number of people in the game who can't do them would drop dramatically if there were no easy way for them to come up with the cash to pay me. I would be forced to either do events that I hate or crafting / fishing which I also hate. The money has to come into the game somehow and the players in general aren't willing to bring it in because it's boring.

End game events don't drop anything that is NPCable for any reasonable amount of cash. Go try RMT sadly keep this game afloat and allow me and you to make money doing events that we find more palatable instead of fighting over beehive chips for months on end in some starter zone. I don't buy gil, but I understand the necessity. Do RMT's screw things up for people who actually like to fish? Yes and it sucks. Do they screw with the auction house? Yes and it sucks. But they also make it possible for me to make my money off of fighting monsters and events that I enjoy instead of fishing and farming beehive chips and I am thankful for that.

[Arkitan]

Dude, Im not an RMT but I still screw with my server's auction house! Why? Because I can and noone else will because the people on my server dont have the basic economic sense to know how! Its not hard to figure out the simple! I turned a 500k darksteel harness +1 into a 1.5m piece of armor! Mule is Yunalescas, check FFXIAH.com if you dont believe me! Now its continually selling for 1.5m because Ive forced people to remove their head out of their asses and persuade them to craft! You should do the same! =)

[FrankReynolds]

There are lots of ways to play videogames at a high standard of skill, without requiring RMT gil input, and without requiring high-value inflated prices on goods you sell just so you can play. I very rarely sell high-price inflated items, most of my income is just farming regular junk and also fishing. I am still able to seriously enjoy the game, have immense amounts of fun and excitement in low-man runs with my friends. Having fun is not expensive. Having the best gear in the game often is. But even in those cases you can farm it, just much slower than if you were surfing the inflated RMT wave.

I've been a gamer for 33 years, I'm not especially proud of it because being old really sucks. But for over three decades I been mashing these buttons and I've always felt that Gaming is no different to other high-skill sports. For example in the Olympics, top athletes compete, and victory is based on skill, stamina, practice, luck, etc. These factors are no different to Videogaming. When an athlete uses steroids to win, that is the same as a Gamer buying gil, or using hacks and cheatmodes. It is cheating, it places an unfair advantage on the person cheating. And it is considered a big sin in all Sports, and many Gamers consider it to be a big sin in Videogames too.

The best times I have had in FFXI in 9 years have been exciting low-man battles where me and my friends were almost dying but somehow managed to survive, by skill and stamina. That doesn't cost gil. And those are the best times I've had. Also obtaining ra-ex stuff from caskets or NM's, really gave me a thrill when the item dropped after so much effort. And again it is an entirely gil-free situation.
I don't have a problem with catching fish and NPCing them or selling them at low AH prices, or farming/making my own threads for clothcraft. The money is enough to support my game. It just takes longer than the 'buy everything with gil' route, but tbh man I'm not in a hurry.

And that's cool for you, but a lot of people don't enjoy the same things you do. I've played FFXI pretty much since the JP release and I've made / lost a few friends, but that's really not why I log on. I log on to play. I can hop on any game on xbox live or just use a phone if I wanna chat with friends. I used to enjoy crafting when I first learned it. That's why I leveled fishing and cooking and a few other subs, but it got boring after the first year or so and now it's just a mindless time sink to me. It's not fun at all. A lot of people didn't even level a skill before they came to that conclusion. I also spent months farming beast blood, buggard parts, beehive chips etc. again, incredibly boring. I used to get super pissed at the bots I saw until I got to a point where I realized that I was farming gil in an incredibly mind numbing fashion just so that I could be geared properly for events that I wanted to do when Instead, I could make the gil much faster just doing the events by selling stuff to people who had made their money through whatever means.

All that aside, the reason there are so many RMT is because so much of the population use them. If you remove the RMT, you remove the people who depend on them. Not only that, but the RMT themselves pay for an enormous number of accounts. All that money goes to development just like your's and mine and is desperately needed at this point. It's seriously a necessary evil.

[FrankReynolds]

For one thing, the vast majority of players have never used RMT gil.

Yes they have, they just don't know it. Every time you make money by doing something other than NPCing items, you are receiving RMT gil. SE obviously likes this set up because they have yet to create a solution that brings gil into the game without being crazy easy to exploit for RMTs. I know it's a tough problem, but come on... It's been 10 years.

The majority. You can't have a successful business model if the majority of people hate you and never use your services.

You also can't have a game altering problem if "The majority" aren't somehow involved.

The success of RMT comes from the Ultra-Lazy minority of players who buy so much gil in large amounts, pay for NM-botting teams, gear building and character building services etc. These players are a minority in FFXI and they spend a lot on RMT. They also lie, they buy mountains of gil to build a relic from 75-99 on a new account, then tell everybody they farmed it legitmode years ago bcoz they are so Mega Vet.

And obviously no one minds too much, or they would all be crafting, fishing and NPCing items like you instead of farming dynamis and selling NM drops / wins like they are now. No. They want to make a quick buck by helping that gil buyer spend his ill gotten loot.

RMT income is not from light spending by a player majority, it is from heavy spending by a player minority.

If that were true, the economies of every server would be insanely different based on the spending habits of a few people. They aren't because it is in fact a large number of people buy small amounts of gil.

On my LS and friend groups, nobody has ever bought gil. We as a group totally hate RMT.

LOL Ask anyone. They'll tell you the same thing. Someone's doing it though. A lot of someones.

RMT gil buying was as common as you seem to think, they wouldnt need to spam advertise it with tells. A popular product sells itself, it doesn't need to be rammed down peoples throats every 45 minutes.

*** looks out the window at the giant iPhone billboard and scratches head

If "RMT is so important for FFXI survival" ( to paraphrase you) why is it that now there is less policing of RMT in the game, and could be the Golden Age for RMT, the servers are all empty. Because : people were not playing FFXI to buy gil, hang out with RMT or with players who buy gil and cheatmode their way through the game. Players were in the game because they liked playing it, but now the game is not so much fun post SoA, people have quit the game. Despite the cheap availability of RMT gil. Surely everyone should still be playing FFXI and buying the cheap gil, according to your argument. But the fact is that most people played FFXI *despite* RMT gil, not *because of* RMT gil. The RMT gil is still here, but the players are not. Your argument dies.

Post SOA, there was nothing worth buying with gil besides delve wins and half as many people around to buy it. Gil buyers got mad because their shiny stuff that they paid for sucked and quit just like the people who built them the hard way. Watch the gil prices rise now that RME have been updated and need 300 items to finish. You'll see.

I never once said I use FFXI as chatroom or a phone conversation. I'm not logging into FFXI to chat, I login to low-man battles with my friend group. Its excitement videogaming, has nothing to do with phones or chatrooms. And I've had Stompa's content ID continuously active since 2004, plus two mules, so I've paid a lot more fees than most GS do.

That's cool.

We need RMT accounts to keep FFxi afloat because we lack well-designed content to keep real players in the game.

Fixed it.

RMT ruined the game for thousands of people years 2004--->2009. RMT using pop-bots to claim NM's, including warp hacks to warp to the spot where the NM was about to randomly pop at.There was RMT in Oztroya who he was selling okotes like candy and he never lost a claim ever, you would see him standing on the west side of the room, suddenly he jumped to the east side (without running) , and 0.5 seconds later the NM popped right ontop of him. This happened every time the NM popped. And he was RMT. Stealing treasure from REAL players. And supported in his dirty thieving RMT activities by the dollars of FAKE players who buy gil and cheat their way through games coz they don't got the rocks to play games on legitmode.

No, SE ruined the game for thousands of people by poorly implementing those NMs and / or their drops. Thank god for those ??? in abyssea huh? At least they got that right. Funny thing is that most of those bots belonged to people who play the game, Not RMT. Why waste money buying a fancy bot for an account that will probably get banned to camp and nm that pops 2 times a week when you can just send 1,000 sweatshop laborers out to farm bone chips and fish?

[Zumi]

The main reason FFXI has declined is the dual box attitude. What ever happened to doing stuff with other people in a group?

For a non dual boxer like me I can't get much accomplished because people tell me just dual box it. Like the new 300 rme drops. Dual boxers are all over raptor, chapuli, mata, taxet. Nobody will want to team up with you because people will say just dual box it.

Why because it is faster to get it done solo dualboxing because you don't have to share drops.

[FrankReynolds]

Infact you always avoid the points I make

I replied line by line. If you fail to get a point across to someone who is reading your posts with that degree of attention to detail, you will always fail because you are doing it wrong.

this most recent Trollhat post by you, you even altered my post which is very childish indeed.

It was easier to fix the mistakes. Don't be so sensitive.

I'm surprised that somebody with as much experience of losing as you have Frank, hasn't learned to lose more gracefully by now.

I'm surprised too. Here I had thought that this was a discussion forum, but apparently someone has been keeping track of our exploits and recording our wins and losses. Can you please list my stats and records for everyone so we can see just how many losses I have accumulated? Are they on the official vanadiel census?

RMT used pophacks and movement speed hacks, they didn't care about the accounts being shutdown because a lot of the groups involved in farming virtual currency were also involved in coding bots in the first place, so it wasn't a loss to them.

I have shared a server with several of those bot developers. It's pretty easy to tell how many real players (non RMT) are using them just by looking at the size of their linkshells and the number of people who are / were in them. It's a lot.

Yes some normal players use bots, those people fall under the same "cheat" category as people who buy gil. But 9/10 time when you spent ages trying to farm an item you needed, and somebody else was hacking it just for $$$, and you went home emptyhanded because they were cheating, that person was RMT.

Probably for a few items at a few points in the game. Anyone who quit because they couldn't claim KB or whatever NM your referring to was probably not sticking around much longer any ways. Face it. WHen you get to the point where claiming a 72hr pop nm is the make or break point, you pretty much have one foot out the door already.

Re; Iphone ads. Again, your normal strategy of chopping lines out of peoples posts and taking them out of context. I was talking about monobrand items, such as RMT gil, if everyone loved buying gil, they wouldnt need to advertise it. Mobile phones are different because they have dozens of competing brands and thousands of different models of phone. Theres only one gil, and if people wanted to buy it they would come to you, you wouldnt need to hassle them.
Like elastplast, you dont see billboards with elastaplasters very often, because when people get a big bleeding cut they go buy some plasters.

Really? Did I? I think maybe you pretend that I missed your point because you are out of logical arguments. If you google "FFXI gil" the first three results are three different RMT sites. So yeah, they need to advertise because there is competition.

But you always lose arguments with bad grace, and start taking things out of context, its your M.O., and changing the words in my post, and chopping like 20 mini-quotes out of a block of text instead of just addressing the central point I am making.

Try and be more concise with your posts and make one central point. Then I won't have to dissect them.

Basically if RMT were all kicked out permanently (would never happen) then FFXI would be a better game overnight. The skanky cheating no-game types would go back to WOW as soon as they realized they would have to earn gil like everyone else in FFXI has to. The prices would drop across the board, and crafting etc. would see a revival. And the next time you saw somebody with uber gear you would know they actually earned it not bought it.

Maybe... We'll never know.

[Demon6324236]

The main reason FFXI has declined is the dual box attitude. What ever happened to doing stuff with other people in a group?

I have an entire LS filled with people, some who dualbox, some who do not, none of which are so selfish as to tell you to dualbox your own things because they will not help you. I am sure if you wanted to join not a person would complain unless you have done something to one of the other members of PuntDeTaru, which I doubt you have. If you want help with something I am sure anyone free would be up to helping you if they can, offering something like the Airlixirs from a NM or something would also be a great way to get help, I know many people in here are still gearing their jobs because they never got to attend Tojil runs, or at least winning ones. People still do things in groups all over, most of them to not ask others to join because there is no need to anymore, and you can not find help where you do not ask for it, I have not seen you shout in Jeuno for a WHM to heal your MNK while you fight Mata, nor any other NM, while offering the Airlixirs and other drops as the reward, would it likely pick up? No, but its an attempt, and since a WHM hardly has much to do during Mata so long as you are geared with PDT and such, it should not be much an issue if their rewards are somewhat sub par, all they spend is time performing slight cures on you.

For a non dual boxer like me I can't get much accomplished because people tell me just dual box it. Like the new 300 rme drops. Dual boxers are all over raptor, chapuli, mata, taxet. Nobody will want to team up with you because people will say just dual box it.

Tell you what, even if you don't join the LS or don't want to, I will help you with your weapons whenever you want to hit me up if I am free. I will come RDM and either heal with /SCH or DD with /NIN depending on what is needed, insult my RDM in any way and I will leave, I come to help you because you ask, not to be told I am bad for meleeing, nor to be criticized on my ability to play my job unless it is justly deserved, not that I necessarily think you will, but I am saying it as a warning because I have gotten tired of it, and will not tolerate it. I will let you buy pops if you want, I wont, I am short on money as it is, I will however have no issues helping you farm pops for NMs if you want. I ask that you be understanding I would be helping you in my free time, and as such may need to leave at times or may not be available at times which are best for you, though I highly doubt I will ever have to leave during a fight unless it is extremely urgent.



I agree that dualboxing itself has had a negative impact on the game in many ways, but it was partially brought on by the very selfishness it has helped to cause. I myself have access to my GF and my best friend's characters so I can dualbox myself. I know the negative effects it has had and can have, but at the same time, I understand why people do it, and I cant blame them. Dualboxing is insanely helpful for someone who can not get help with things, for instance, I can not get help with my last 50ish Azdaja horns for my friend's Ochain, we need a healer to be able to do it quickly and effectively, and I am far to lazy to change jobs every 2 KIs, so we just don't do it, if I felt more comfortable doing it I could dualbox my GF's character on her WHM and do just fine, which is part of why I understand it.

[predatory]

IMO there's nothing wrong with people duo and triple boxing, (unless they bot while they do it). if someone is able to actually pull it off and hit their ws while they heal a party or whatever well good for them. Why would anyone think dual boxing was bad, especially now when the population has declined so far that getting groups for anything is near impossible?