Reasons Why FFXI is Declining

[Leylia]

I hardly ever write in this forum, because of the fact that what we write mostly seems to matter squat to SE 99% of the time, which is indicated by responses not even touching the threads actual topic or the lack of responses to start with.

I however feel that I should also voice my discontent about this new Seekers expansion. In my opinion it is as much of a fail as FFXIV 1.0 if not even worse.
The marketing was horrid, inlcuding advertisement (did anyone other than actual FFXI players knew about this expansion?) and availability (You couldn't even get the damn thing until a day or two before release in Europe) as well as price/content mess up (30€ really??? For a lousy amount of new copy/paste areas, new monster models countable on one hand and the same music for the entire ulbukan continent). I know we haven't gotten all that is supposed to be released with the expansion but what we actually got wasn't even worth a dime in the beginning and all at the cost of nothing else being ever done. The new interface, which we might finally get soon was supposed to be here way sooner, things like the new avatars promised 2.5 years ago have gone so low in priority you got to ask yourself if they ever get implemented within this century.

I believe FFXI had the chance to win old players back and even gain new players with this expansion if it simply would have been handled correctly. Yet instead we got a drop in players by at least 1/2 within a mere set of weeks after the initial "oh new expansion lets check it out hights". The problem: I haven't even started talking about how bad the actual content is we got so far but, it did not only try to change how the game has worked for the past decade, which naturally will upset players content with the style of the game so far, no it also invalidated any content before itself. I ask myself: why did they waste their time and bothered to make Nyzul 2, Salvage 2, Einherjar 2 and Limbus 2? For what reason did they overhaul previous engame events, just to have them being 100% worthless a few months later because the gear they provide is crap compared to the unmotivated level 113 crap we have now.
Why was it necessary to bring out skirmish as event with superior loot but no accessability just to bring out something else a month later making skirmish useless already and why are we still stuck with this event? At least the latter is easy to answer: there is no other content in this expansion and this expansion killed any other content but itself.

As a result people don't do other things for gear anymore, cause there is no other gear that still counts and people being able to finish fracture also don't do fracture anymore because they have beaten it enough times so they don't need anything from it anymore simply because it only offers a very few rewards to start with (why does everyone nowadays look the same I wonder...).

I understand that there needs to be incentive for players to do the new content so obviously the gear needs to have perks the older gear didn't have. However, was it necessary to drastically wipe up the floor with everything else? Just take the Phorcy's Korazin, add a mere 5str to it and keep all other values the same and people would go for it, cause it would have been the best item for the slot. Just look at the stupidness of the duplus grip. 1% more DA just ONE percent and on the one hand people went crazy about it while on the other it still didn't make the pole grip a crap item.

In my opinion it cannot be that say a Samurai that has played the job for over 5 years, put effort into gearing the job and pulled awesome feats with it but has no Tsurumaru, can be beaten by a person who leeched Samurai from 1-99 got lucky on a Tsurumaru drop, got otronif for his MNK and now tries playing sam for the first time and yes, the difference between Tsurumaru and the R/E/Ms is big enough to warrant the "newb SAM" to be better. If the gear was only slightly better, this wouldln't be possible and it would still have an appeal to it (and no for anyone who comes and says "well go get Tsurumaru then", I have that stupid weapon and I am disgusted by it)

I know this is a way too long post and maybe also missing a red line going through all of it but at least it has an answer to the OPs question. Granted it is my personal answer for the question, but I am sure that while some might disagree, many will actually agree with me. There is more that I could rant about but let's give it a rest here^^

Sincerely, Leylia

[Demon6324236]

One of the reasons I have continued to play this game is because of its horizontal progression. During all of my time playing there were very few times I knew 1 item was so powerful I had to have it in order to play my job effectively, most of the time, that was a RME, due to things like RME requirements during the VW Era. If I wanted a game with Vertical progression, there were many other options out there for me, but I did not. FFXI changed everything in the blink of an eye to a completely different style without any warning, which took that away, and out dated everything.

You ask why an expansion shouldn't? Why its different? RotZ, CoP, ToAU, all were made at 75, they all worked, we played for years with those, at the level 75 cap, doing things like Sea, Limbus, Sky, Dynamis, Assaults, Salvage, Einherjar, and so on. It worked because everything had a place, every event was useful to something.

The problem with what SoA did is it was poorly timed, and it was to late. Had it been done earlier in FFXI's life, not as much an issue, as other have said, it was a well established horizontal progression system in the game. The other reason is because it simply came at the worst possible time, when people would already be leaving the game, and the dev team is smaller than ever before, which means that the sudden change can push more people to quit, while the smaller dev team can not put content out fast enough to keep up with us beating it down. The killed everything old, but can hardly offer us anything new, I mean in all honesty, who can tell me you want to do Skirmish every day all day, since you did everything else Adoulin had to offer when they were implemented? I don't, even if I did, I would be done with it in no time, and it would leave nothing to do, that's why its flawed.

[Traxus]

The problem with what SoA did is it was poorly timed, and it was to late. Had it been done earlier in FFXI's life, not as much an issue, as other have said, it was a well established horizontal progression system in the game.

It never would have worked, SE has never put out content fast enough to support it. Imagine if a few months after ToAU came out, 99% of sky/sea/dynamis/limbus/hnm/enm/ksnm/etc stuff was made obsolete by assault and ISNM gear. Than that gear is later made obsolete by nyzul isle and salvage, than by einherjar, than by ZNMs. Regardless of when vertical progression was implemented, it would have always had the same result: players not having anything to do except 1 or 2 current events, that aren't enough to keep players busy/interested/subscribed on their own.

FFXI stayed alive by keeping legacy content relevant, so players had a wide array of events and goals to work on that only increased over time. Somehow the people currently in charge of the game don't understand that.

[leorez]

Its pretty clear especially reading that pathetic excuse for a dev response that the few people still working on the game have no idea what made this game work for so long and have no intention to fix it. Its a damned shamed because me and 3 other people just subbed this month (2 to buy new copys of the game on top of that).

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

Getting the same xp from a mob whether you are 99 or ilvl117 would be like getting the same xp whether you are 50 or 68.

But who actually cares about EXP at 99+?

[Spectreman]

Outside of popping Honey Wine and Sweet Tea, I've probably spent less than 6 hours lifetime in the Aery. Personal attacks don't really help your argument (if you have one). Yorcia Skirmish sucks, try reading the responses to this thread over here:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...r-Skirmish-2.0

Being better and more rewarding than old HNMs does not make Yorcia Skirmish a successful event.

Sorry but all that Skirmish needs is to be made like cirdas so its fun and rewarding. HNM was a waste of life for those who wanted to have one.

[Byrth]

In case you missed it, he wasn't defending HNMs.

Yorcia Skirmish is the most boring event that has ever been introduced into FFXI bar none. My linkshell manages to do 1-2 a night before it makes us all get tired and go to bed at ~10PM. On the upside, at least I have been sleeping a lot more lately.

Well, maybe not bar none. Yorcia's only competition might be Monstrosity, if you consider that an event, because soloing a few dozen monsters to 99 is pretty freaking boring too.

[Infidi]

Give Yuley his TH3 back, please. Is that possible? :-)

Only if they give us Cait Sith at same time.

[detlef]

Sorry but all that Skirmish needs is to be made like cirdas so its fun and rewarding. HNM was a waste of life for those who wanted to have one.

Oh, so all that Yorcia Skirmish needs is to be completely different from what it is. That's like saying that Legion would be great if it was like Limbus.

And no, I'm not defending HNMs. Please stop referencing a bygone era of misery that is irrelevant to today's content.

[Jerbob]

I've essentially stopped playing XI since the item level and vertical progression announcements. I found that I was spending more time stressing out about bad management decisions than I was actually enjoying the game, so I took a break (my first ever) back in July. Aside from a couple of weekend visits to see old friends, I've not been back.

It's difficult to make sense of the state of the game at this time, really. SE has always loved to ignore its playerbase and rush headlong into pointless endeavours, but never on this magnitude. It's odd because, somewhat paradoxically, I want to want to play the game, but SE is continuously challenging that as if we're all playing some sort of bizarre metagame of "how long can you tolerate playing XI", with no-one quite sure whether quitting is winning or losing.

I think the true impact of these changes on the playerbase is difficult to gauge because of XIV. People say that population has declined because of XIV, but with the supposedly coincidental timing of XIV's release and XI's sudden drop into (further) insanity, how many of those people would have quit anyway? I took a break with no intention of playing XIV, but so many of my friends went over that I followed, somewhat against my better judgement. It's quickly becoming clear that XIV is going to be vertical progression + item level based from the ground up, so I'm regretting it to some extent already, but the real point is that with the new developer direction there's nothing here for me in XI either, no matter how much I want there to be.

It's not too late for SE to salvage XI. Please, just dump the item levels and dump the vertical progression model. No one wants it. Seekers suffers to some extent from the same crippling lack of resources that plagues the rest of XI, but it's not broken beyond repair. Rip out the new rot before it takes root, and rebalance jobs properly to let people do content on jobs they enjoy. Maybe even invest some money into the game! Just do something before everyone is gone and there's nothing to come back to.