Newest interview (abyssea was a mistake?)

[Sparthos]

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.

Abyssea was successful because it was open to everyone and the loot was potent enough that even the worst player could realize that those zones were the place to be. The problem with alot of old XI content lay in the fact that if you didn't reach X point, you couldn't participate meaning that for someone doing the content it became difficult to organize a run because the available pool of individuals was immediately hamstrung.

Great for statics and potential poison for casuals.

For instance, Salvage. Remember the AP you needed to enter? If you didn't do your homework (and got access to RedvBlue) you either had to repeat other runs that did not completely cover the cost of entry into Salvage or spend time getting to RvB so you could reasonably maintain points to do the runs. So in addition to doing the run, you had to spend 30+ mins doing a prep run of Assault to cover Salvage. This was the model for Salvage in effect:

Do Assault (tied to points and microscopic drop rate HQ items) -> use Assault Points for Salvage (thus draining your ability to use Assault points for rewards) -> Enter Salvage -> Fight NMs with microscopic droprates -> More than likely get nothing -> Rinse -> Repeat.

Does that sound like something fun outside when repeated over 100x? Let's not even discuss that locking you into RvB completely hosed any chance of making Assault progress or helping friends. "Sorry, cant use tags - doing Salvage."

The dev response: Get better friends.

Oh, and who can forget Salvage locked you out of Nyzul Isle meaning that creating statics barred you from participating in the other event which again lowered the immediate pool of people you could participate with and doubly so when Salvage was literally an infinite grind. Tired of being on the hamster wheel? The system then forces you to cut 'friends' loose because the rates were so bad that it was impossible to help all your individuals finish pieces leading to perpetuated drama, unneeded stress and a "me me me" mentality amongst some players.

Admittingly however, Nyzul drop rates were far and away better than Salvage.

On Assault? Many people never got to high ranks (due to SE not updating the AP loot and being afraid to challenge kings gear at the time) meaning that if you managed to reach the levels of Sergeant or Lieutenant it'd often be a chore to find other people in your rank to assist on runs. You were actually penalized for being ahead of the pack unless you happened to have a static. Why couldn't you just bring anyone into the run? Why make it so hard to gather up individuals to have fun?

Update the rewards? Naw, lets just keep Kings popular so people can make thousands off bots, perpetuate RMT activity and overall depreciate the quality of the game.

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.

And how were those shout Dynamis runs were run? Thanks to how Dynamis rewarded individuals it'd often be some variant of:

(Dynamis-Bastok) (Do you need it?) Currency X, Relic Freelot (/tell) Leader

So basically you were doing a run for someone to finish their relic while you were given the equivalent of scrap drops, especially as Dynamis was old as shit and began to drag in it's old state for far too long. Dynamis boiled down to a world where a few people manipulated the masses to finish year-long commitments often with very little recompense for the participants.

Someone at SE thought this was a good idea to leave unmodified? Or were they so blind they didn't see what was happening across servers for the better part of years?

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 personally went nearly 40 Kirins without Wlegs and only recieved them recently after buying a set and just throwing my hat into the ring. Stuff is random and what is an easy score for one person can be a nightmare of years for others - the key problem with relying on the random number generator. Ask around these boards and im sure you'll get many first hand experiences on the horrors of a chapeau, tonban, shadow ring, macha's coat etc etc.

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.

Paranoia and Insanity? Or just my observations of the SE dev team over the years? I'll leave the readers to decide.

If you think that SE cared about paying customers throughout CoP right up until Abyssea I launched, you're clearly obscuring the facts in order to play apologist for the devs. The reason why so many people applauded Abyssea is because things were previously designed so terribly with regards to time v. reward, drop rates, time commitments etc. that Abyssea didn't even seem like the design of Square-Enix.

The last idea to come from SE before Abyssea were:
-VNMs
-Yilbegan
-Evoliths

The trifecta of quite possibly the worst ideas to come out of dev teams heads.

For years many good ideas (and bad ones) were floated to the dev team yet they never really cared to take consumer input to the development process because they were content in designed this game within a vacuum. Tanaka clearly didn't help things either his grumpy father mentality of "you'll eat those damn peas and you'll like it!". Things that are just now being addressed could have been solved years ago when the playerbase pointed them out yet im supposed to sit here and commend the dev team for once again reverting to the "ignore base" mode of development?

For a brief while I had some faith the devs had learned their lesson but it's clear they're going back to the regularly scheduled program of low drop rates, obscure events that few enjoy, microscopic upgrades and 'take a year to finish a piece'.

The dev team aren't idiots and it'd be unfair to call them completely inept but they really need to do something that they clearly haven't done in years:

Play the game.

It would clearly avoid silly moments like mentioning that BST is 'powerful' enough to need limitations on pets, show the flaws of classes like DRK and give insight into what exactly the updates and patches do to the status quo within Vana'diel.

[Seriha]

I honestly don't get the harping on the entry level requirement. Having it at 30 hurts nothing. Having it at 75 would just mean new players wouldn't be able to access it when they got to the appropriate level (in my case it took 3 days to get to 30, I started stones accumulating, and then a couple months later, when I was ready to go in and start working on that content, I had stones to work with)

So what if people can leech exp. Who really cares?

Every time I see people whine about the 30 cap, I remember all the Astral Burning in KT or how people only level sync'd to colibri in Ronf or at the Leypoint with a PL. These people all "sucked" at their jobs, too, I'm sure. Minimizing the tedium of EXP and basically upping the party size to 18 for it did wonders for the game. No longer did you need the perfect set up. Some guy sitting on his butt with his flag up for hours became far less likely. Recapping EXP from deaths as an "out" job was no longer a chore. People can actually make gil while EXPing these days, too. Multi-tasking in FFXI like getting cash and EXP was unheard of in the old days.

[Worldwise]

Abyssea a mistake? hey come on that's nonsence!!!

[Arcon]

Paranoia and Insanity? Or just my observations of the SE dev team over the years? I'll leave the readers to decide.

I vote paranoia and insanity. Your entire post reeks of it.

I don't think the dev team is perfect, in fact, I criticize a lot of what they did (and do), even in this thread itself. I know they're out of touch with some things, and often don't have a clue about how the playerbase will react. But that's not what you're saying. You say they do it deliberately.

And how were those shout Dynamis runs were run? Thanks to how Dynamis rewarded individuals it'd often be some variant of:

(Dynamis-Bastok) (Do you need it?) Currency X, Relic Freelot (/tell) Leader

So basically you were doing a run for someone to finish their relic while you were given the equivalent of scrap drops, especially as Dynamis was old as shit and began to drag in it's old state for far too long. Dynamis boiled down to a world where a few people manipulated the masses to finish year-long commitments often with very little recompense for the participants.

First of all, no. Dynamis shouts didn't look like that. Relic holders either had their own LS where they leeched off their people, or they were doing it within their own LS (usually HNM/endgame LS), to help each other get relics useful to the group. Dynamis shouts were usually "Choose AF or big money to lot on, rest freedrop". And even in sponsored runs, why did you participate? You could have just as well set something up yourself, if you wanted free drops. Sure, sometimes you didn't know any better, so you went with other groups a few times to figure it out, and then voila! Then you knew better. That's what people did. We had plenty of regular Dynamis shells, unsponsored, shared costs, shared rewards, we did it like this in my social shell as well.

Someone at SE thought this was a good idea to leave unmodified? Or were they so blind they didn't see what was happening across servers for the better part of years?

It wasn't bad. There was nothing wrong with it, and I just told you way. There has always been a way for everyone to profit from Dynamis. If people going for a relic could find hundreds of people to leech off of, then those hundreds of people would have been more than interested to join an equal split Dynamis LS. It's as Greatguardian said, content was always open to everyone, only Abyssea made it more obvious. It was not a game flaw for not teaching people how to make their own groups, it was people being comfortable with being lazy. And guess what, it's still the same. Not every noob can make an Empyrean. Let a party of pink people try to farm Glavoid KIs. They won't kill Adze. They won't be able to farm with chests, hell they probably won't even be able cap lights. That doesn't mean it's hard. It's piss easy. People in my LS didn't know how, I showed them, now I get to leech too while they do it, without issues. The development team didn't step in and told them how it works. I did. Same as back in the day. It's not something the development team should even be working on.

Does that sound like something fun outside when repeated over 100x? Let's not even discuss that locking you into RvB completely hosed any chance of making Assault progress or helping friends. "Sorry, cant use tags - doing Salvage."

The dev response: Get better friends.

No, that's your response. The development team gave you plenty of options. If you do Salvage seven times a week, yeah, you'll run out of points. And again, it's the same thing in Abyssea, you hear people crying about it all the time "Can someone help me with G1?" "Why can't your LS help you?" "They're farming Empyreans."

So, it's the development team's fault? You don't have to do only one activity. But if you want the best and fastest progress, that's what you'll be doing. And it's always like that, not even in FFXI, that's life (in case you didn't figure it out yet). The more you focus on one thing, the less you'll be able to focus on other things. So screw the "development team's" response, here's my response: stop being so selfish.

I have to go out so I'll stop here, but the rest of your post is pretty much just the same crap over and over. You list thing's that are either the same as in Abyssea (but somehow they're the development team's fault), or they're irrelevant, and even a nice little lie you had in there: "Update the rewards? Naw, lets just keep Kings popular so people can make thousands off bots, perpetuate RMT activity and overall depreciate the quality of the game." That, my friend, is bullshit. They did update the rewards and they added most of king rewards to Einherjar, and BB items from KS99, which means only Ridill and Defending Ring were kings-exclusives. The only reason people still did kings was to sell items to impatient people. Regardless, I'll still agree that kings (and HNMs in general) were "bad" examples of the old gamestyle, but that's an entirely different topic on gaming philosophy (namely, whether or not everyone is entitled to the best gear).

Sorry, but if someone says that one of the biggest game developers in the world deliberately and maliciously try to frustrate their paying customerbase, you're just full of it. You're just a conspiracy nut and nothing else.

[FrankReynolds]

Ahhhh I miss the old days, When you could shout "Kirin (farm) (do you need it?) W.Legs = X everything else free lot!" and 2 hours later, you would have your W.Legs. You used to be able to join a Dynamis LS, and start collecting currency right away for your relic club. Relic gear was all free lot. Pick up groups were easily clearing einherjar daily, and there were no bots at ground kings because the gear they dropped was soooo easy to get elsewhere. Salvage was insanely popular, and everyone was captain rank. Points / tags were never a problem because everyone had already cleared all the missions and collected all the nyzul gear. Traveling by foot through 10 different zones to get to a level capped fight so that you could help a new player was super fun, and people lined up to do it.

J/K

Seriously though. I think up until they recently had somewhat of a change of heart, (probably with the failure of FFXIV as a catalyst) they considered it a sign of weakness to take player feedback seriously ( or they possibly viewed feedback as disrespectful?). I think they still purposely ignore feedback to some degree just so that they can show that they know what they are doing without our help. They still don't fully grasp that they are in the customer service business. It seems at times that they think they are artists, and that critics just can't grasp their work. And they are. This game is a wonderful piece of work. It's not perfect though.

[Luvbunny]

Ah you have to admit, one of the greatest thing about old style classic FFXI is that you can quit for 3-6 months and nothing really changes in the game and you don't feel that you get left behind since everyone still running on the same hamster wheels for years and still get nothing. Now, I have not been able to quit since there is always something to do, and so many options, and there is no reason for me to say I cannot do this and that - because now I CAN!! Obviously trying to solo is slow to kill the mob, with lower chance of drop rate and more challenging. I can just grab 2-3 other people and have fun and play 10 years worth of content. Abyssea made me cannot quit and have to pay monthly fees.... and I still have not yet consume all these contents. So I suppose bringing everything back to 2003-2005 is not a bad thing, I can quit again and not feel like I miss out on anything

Abyssea made casual, semi casual and semi hardcore people back playing the game since all the contents are now attainable with some works - the game may not be as "challenging" but the grind is there - more bearable than before. The game is very accessible now, and FUN, that is one word that has not been associated with FF11 for years. Obviously the people who are set on getting everything ASAP will now be able to get them fast and see no reason to play - then again those are minority - it is time to market and sell this game to the majority. And yes - they really need a new PR person and new advertising to re-position this game as FUN!

[Eric]

Abyssea was one of the best things that SE did to keep players like me subscribed. I took the maximum amount of classes that I'm allowed to take at my university last quarter. Instead of cancelling my subscription due to lack of time (like I would have in the past), I didn't, because I knew that in those rare moments where I actually had some free time to play that I could at least get something done if I decided to log onto FFXI for a short while.

[Sparthos]

I vote paranoia and insanity. Your entire post reeks of it.

I don't think the dev team is perfect, in fact, I criticize a lot of what they did (and do), even in this thread itself. I know they're out of touch with some things, and often don't have a clue about how the playerbase will react. But that's not what you're saying. You say they do it deliberately.

Ah the old ad hominem attacks when you can't defend your points, guaranteed to happen in every forum discussion or your money back.

If quoting the truth makes me paranoid, I embrace it because what I state happens to be the truth. The devs have had numerous opportunities to put down the worst aspects of this game like Kings, Salvage drop rates and botting but what did they do instead? Smugly declared the playerbase had no business to be whining and further piled on the insanity window HNMs, the events with god-awful droprates and even things no one asked for that failed on launch anyway.

Sup Yilbegan? Shadowless VNMs? Evolith mobs?

You also forgot about Sandworm and Ixion so soon? How they were in fact worse than kings since the pop windows could drag longer AND the old double-whammy that Ixion could be spooked (ohi griefing) and Sandworm could drop nothing (if he even popped at all)?

With years of watching kings, the devs came to a conscious decision to design Dark Ixion/Sandworm the way they did with tons of knowledge that this was a bad idea all around and still they proceeded. I call that deliberately choosing to create a system that was designed to encouraging botting, drama and grief.

You can feel free to retort though.

First of all, no. Dynamis shouts didn't look like that. Relic holders either had their own LS where they leeched off their people, or they were doing it within their own LS (usually HNM/endgame LS), to help each other get relics useful to the group. Dynamis shouts were usually "Choose AF or big money to lot on, rest freedrop". And even in sponsored runs, why did you participate? You could have just as well set something up yourself, if you wanted free drops. Sure, sometimes you didn't know any better, so you went with other groups a few times to figure it out, and then voila! Then you knew better. That's what people did. We had plenty of regular Dynamis shells, unsponsored, shared costs, shared rewards, we did it like this in my social shell as well.

Bolded: Why Dynamis was a terribly designed event beyond the initial 'fun'. The entire thing boiled down to a few people capitalizing off the masses to build relics while everyone else acted as servants to the LS. Yeah you could have left an LS at any time you please but does that change the fact that the event was designed to funnel currency to a single person in an MMO?

Even more amusing that this event was designed for 64 people. Sure, SE may not have anticipated that individuals would create linkshells that funneled currency to sole participants but how many years does it take to realize the system needed some balancing? Did they feel that allowing one person to profit from a 3hour run while everyone else accumulated what amounted to junk drops was 'fair and balanced'? Oh wait, they did.

It wasn't bad. There was nothing wrong with it, and I just told you way. There has always been a way for everyone to profit from Dynamis. If people going for a relic could find hundreds of people to leech off of, then those hundreds of people would have been more than interested to join an equal split Dynamis LS. It's as Greatguardian said, content was always open to everyone, only Abyssea made it more obvious.

I never said there wasn't a way to create an 'equal' Dynamis, only that the event as designed by the devs was ripe for the exploitation and the devs never cared to lift a finger about it. When Dynamis was actually relevant, the event was meant to be anything but a pickup affair. You needed coordination in dealing with crowd control, effective DD to defeat the waves before you were overcome and people who could do the pulls without agrroing a bunch of stuff which all lent itself to consistency via routine LS meetings to do runs.

After the initial surges and shells took form, the PUG runs eventually took over as the big shells started to decay due to player fatigue and individuals quitting the game. What started as an LS-oriented event deteriorated into a PUG free-for-all where most of the times the leader was out to use you to score free currency.

SE had opportunities to avoid these things from happening but they didn't bother to. It's just yet another example of sheer ineptitude or general apathy towards the overall health of the game.

No, that's your response. The development team gave you plenty of options. If you do Salvage seven times a week, yeah, you'll run out of points. And again, it's the same thing in Abyssea, you hear people crying about it all the time "Can someone help me with G1?" "Why can't your LS help you?" "They're farming Empyreans."

So, it's the development team's fault? You don't have to do only one activity. But if you want the best and fastest progress, that's what you'll be doing. And it's always like that, not even in FFXI, that's life (in case you didn't figure it out yet). The more you focus on one thing, the less you'll be able to focus on other things. So screw the "development team's" response, here's my response: stop being so selfish.

Spare me the comparisons to RL as this is a game where a bunch of programmers make the rules and rule #1 is to make your playerbase happy with regards to the various events you design for them.

Unless you've joined Abyssea recently, there are no restrictions to helping someone else out which is far and away from how Nyzul/Assault/Salvage was designed. Sure, people may blow you off today cause they just dont wanna help you but back when TOAU was big, you really couldn't help someone with Assaults without throwing your own points for Salvage out of whack or losing a chance at Nyzul Isle. Your options were limited by design so can you really blame people for trying to pursue their own aims especially when Salvage boasted 0/250 on 35s? The game just wasn't user friendly and it was no secret that SE was trying to stall people to excuse themselves from making new content.

It was also around the end of TOAU that XIV was being built and resources were moved from this game. Even beyond a development decision, things were being built with the intention to keep people on the hamster wheel indefinitely rather than having fun or being user-friendly. Things could have been done differently yet they weren't and largely this boiled down to ego rather than the bottom line: giving players something they would like.

Funny SE only seemed to finally get it when XIV failed initially and the sudden realization that the faithful (if not battered) XI base should be given attention as paying customers. Part of me wants to say these forums wouldn't exist had XIV succeeded but I feel I'd be overreaching myself there.

I have to go out so I'll stop here, but the rest of your post is pretty much just the same crap over and over.

And you're good at hurling insults rather than defending your points.

even a nice little lie you had in there: "Update the rewards? Naw, lets just keep Kings popular so people can make thousands off bots, perpetuate RMT activity and overall depreciate the quality of the game." That, my friend, is bullshit. They did update the rewards and they added most of king rewards to Einherjar, and BB items from KS99, which means only Ridill and Defending Ring were kings-exclusives. The only reason people still did kings was to sell items to impatient people. Regardless, I'll still agree that kings (and HNMs in general) were "bad" examples of the old gamestyle, but that's an entirely different topic on gaming philosophy (namely, whether or not everyone is entitled to the best gear)/

You seem to continuously miss my point. SE had numerous opportunities to destroy the festering infection that was 3kings. Not create alternatives or sidegrade/downgrades - completely freakin' eradicate it. Yet what did they do? They let the festering infection spread, let the botters take control of kings and make billions of gil, facilitated RMT activity in Sky/Kings by doing nothing outside some posturing with the Special Task Force, ignored the playerbase suggestions to create poppable kings (Bercus even presented the damn idea DIRECTLY to the developers) and went above and beyond the call of duty in creating more lottery-pop monstrosities in WOTG.

Sorry, but if someone says that one of the biggest game developers in the world deliberately and maliciously try to frustrate their paying customerbase, you're just full of it. You're just a conspiracy nut and nothing else.

Really? How about we take an example from today to prove my point.

DRKs have asked for Entropy to be boosted to make Scythe viable again in todays 2011 FFXI landscape. A fair point as Entropy is rather underwhelming and comes too close to Guillotine in damage. The DEV response?

• Scythe Weapon Skill “Entropy”
We will be making adjustments so that the amount of MP recovered will be within a range.
There will be cases where the MP recovered will be higher or possibly lower than now, but we are planning to adjust this so that the average will not change by much.

Oh look, MP adjustments no one asked for rather than addressing the core issues. Don't worry, it'll be tweaked somewhere in 2013.

[Luvbunny]

Abyssea was one of the best things that SE did to keep players like me subscribed. Instead of cancelling my subscription due to lack of time (like I would have in the past), I didn't, because I knew that in those rare moments where I actually had some free time to play that I could at least get something done if I decided to log onto FFXI for a short while.

This kind of stories are the one that the developer should pay attention to. Contents that are easily attainable with some efforts - empyrian is not exactly a walk in the park for "the pink/pearle power rangers" - but the trials are doable with some works and minimal dramas. The empy people get their items, the casual get their plus 2 items, everybody wins and a great incentive to help each other.

The developer goals should be creating these type of activities, giving us a little drip of crack sugar, little by little, hooking casual players alike so that they feel that they can accomplish and have it - but it will still take them quite some time compared to the hardcore players. This way they get them hooked, and they have no excuse to quit and keep subscribing.

Grrrr... it would be nice if I can have excuse to quit because everything is so damn hard to get and take years to complete like the way it used to be. /end sarcasm

[Atomic_Skull]

Galka homeland

That's Altepa.