Interim Report – Sorry to keep you all waiting!

[Mirage]

"Synch" is actually as valid abbreviation of "synchronize" as "sync" is. That being said, I really dislike "synch" myself.

[Arcon]

"Synch" is actually as valid abbreviation of "synchronize" as "sync" is. That being said, I really dislike "synch" myself.

"sync" is more valid because that actually represents the name SE chose for it themselves "Level Sync". It's not an abbreviation of "synchronize" at all.

[Sunrider]

The Aqueducts actually have an explanation. Apparently, the mobs were so insanely strong and such a huge threat to the Safehold, that Mildaurion/Eshan'tarl cast some super white magic on the whole place after barring the all the entry points, level capping all the mobs (presumably also keeping them from breaking out). Unfortunately, this also caps any players that enter at level 40.

Now, why Promyvion is capped, I have no idea. We'll assume a wizard did it.

[Demon6324236]

The Aqueducts actually have an explanation. Apparently, the mobs were so insanely strong and such a huge threat to the Safehold, that Mildaurion/Eshan'tarl cast some super white magic on the whole place after barring the all the entry points, level capping all the mobs (presumably also keeping them from breaking out). Unfortunately, this also caps any players that enter at level 40.

Now, why Promyvion is capped, I have no idea. We'll assume a wizard did it.

I do not recall that but the point remains in either case, story reasons for why many of the level caps exist are either silly and stupid, or non-existent. All over the game they have level caps which pop up in some form with little to no info. Such as the airship, one could argue maybe since your so high up maybe it somehow makes you weaker, but then why no cap when fighting Tenzen? Why no cap when flying for transportation? Many things are unclear about it.

[FrankReynolds]

I do not recall that but the point remains in either case, story reasons for why many of the level caps exist are either silly and stupid, or non-existent. All over the game they have level caps which pop up in some form with little to no info. Such as the airship, one could argue maybe since your so high up maybe it somehow makes you weaker, but then why no cap when fighting Tenzen? Why no cap when flying for transportation? Many things are unclear about it.

I can explain level caps for the misguided people (I'm not talking about you). Back then people rarely had more than one or two jobs at 75, if any which made it incredibly hard to find a group of people with the jobs needed to beat an event. However, lots of people had jobs that they leveled as subjobs or just never got around to finishing due to the incredibly slow leveling process. So, by lowering the level caps on events, they created a much larger pool of eligible players to do the events. Many people would have rather stabbed themselves in the eye with a rusty spoon than level ninja or black mage to 75, but a shit ton of people were willing to level them to 37+ for subs, which meant that they were close enough to participate in lower level stuff. Take me for example. I leveled ninja to 50 just for seal BCNMs. I took samurai to 60 just to do the airship fight. I hated every moment of it, but I needed the clears.

Now that they have given people the ability to level a subjob to 99 in less than a day, there is no shortage of players who have the correct jobs leveled for events (especially since there are really only about 6 jobs you need for every event now) and thus no need to level cap things in order to facilitate easy grouping.

TLDR; all teh level caps were made to compensate for a shitty leveling process and then in game explanations (the few they actually gave) were created as an afterthought.

[Rustic]

I do not recall that but the point remains in either case, story reasons for why many of the level caps exist are either silly and stupid, or non-existent. All over the game they have level caps which pop up in some form with little to no info. Such as the airship, one could argue maybe since your so high up maybe it somehow makes you weaker, but then why no cap when fighting Tenzen? Why no cap when flying for transportation? Many things are unclear about it.

Originally, the Aqueducts explanation is right on the money- a powerful seal was put on the area to weaken the monsters there, but the side effect also left anyone else stuck the same way. Similar effects were far more common in FFXI before they decided caps weren't worth it anymore.

Anyway: (TL;DR version at bottom)

What I look at here is something dangerous- I don't care if a game is old or new, without players cycling through as much of the game as possible, it dies. I can log into Everquest to this day and find newbie players smacking rats around, folks running around the Commonlands hunting, and so on. Players still go flowing through content on the way up to higher levels, and that content is still useful and relevant.

It's three years older than FFXI is.

The opposite has happened in FFXI. 99% of the game are dead zones. Take the area around Windurst. I basically saw either 99's, anons (who had L99 gear), one blue mage learning his abilities...and me. In a week. The effective level of support as a result for anyone coming into the game? Zero. The game feels frighteningly hollow to someone looking at it from the point of view of a new player, a view that in my case is countered only by knowing that the player population is elsewhere.

Making the road to 99 easier was one thing. Obliterating any feeling of progress outside a few brief jumps to 99 was the key to a seal of a different kind- one that bottles the remaining players into a slow population decline and renders huge chunks of work on FFXI moot.

Think about it this way. Say a days' casual work would get a level from 75-99. It'd get you two levels a day from 50-74. Three levels from 25-49. Four from 20-24. Five from 1-19.

You'd still level up to cap in less than 60 days played at a casual rate. Halve that for your average hardcore grinder. A month from top to bottom. You'd actually have people in the mid-range for jobs long enough that combined with level sync, there'd actually be a reason for a lot of things that have vanished.

Cause right now? Lower level gear and such on the AH? Ha, ha. The market for lower-level crafted items? Who makes them, there's no market! There's even a crunch on -crystals- at this point, since you don't have lowbies sitting there whacking monsters around for synths- on Ragnarok, elemental clusters are literally tens of thousands of Gil each! Stuff that drops off L1 monsters is going for 30K a stack because there's nobody around to bonk lil' Goblin Thugs on the head anymore (and my guess is gardening for them is a moot point, since most people's pots are devoted to trying for more endgame-centric stuff).

Point being, games tend to function poorly when you eliminate the bottom entirely and focus the entire system on getting to the top, ignoring everything that doesn't do so, and then wondering why new players see the endgame wall and flee screaming. Of course they do. There was never any hill to climb- just *bam* here's your incredibly easymode exp process to 99, then we'll throw content at you that assumes you mastered every part of your job in a process we originally expected you to take months (at least) to do so. Easier was good. Easiest is bad.

We have MMO's that predate FFXI who didn't go the route of destroying the process of developing a character from the start that are still functional- and profitable to this day. They didn't close the door on people playing the game to the top, vs. being tossed there in a shower of exp. Thankfully, I do see some sanity showing up- it looks like with things like the blinker price change, they're making efforts to prevent another hyperinflation cycle like what happened just prior to the first big RMT/HNM busting purge about a decade ago. Again, though- the lack of a real road of progression also damages the economy of the game- with fewer gil sinks along the way and higher rates of gil gain at the top (now very top-heavy) of the charts, it makes it very easy for someone to go "Ooh, elemental cluster? Have 50K in gil for that!".
(As an aside, mid-ToAU 10K would have be considered inflated- and that's 5 times less than the current rate)

--

Long story short- making the game better via quality of life and relaxing some of the basics of the game was good. Effectively removing those basics, IMHO puts the game on a timer it should never have to worry about. Good, classic MMO's are easily seeing their 10th and 15th anniversaries with no signs of stoppage, only marked by the occasional bit of revampage to take advantage of newer systems as time passed by (EQ 2007, UO 2006-7). FFXI falls into that category- if it doesn't abandon itself in the process.

Adoulin is going to mark a point at which we see another chance to refresh and increase player population- but without anything save a coherent endgame, how do those players come into the game?

[detlef]

I can explain level caps for the misguided people (I'm not talking about you)...

This is a very good explanation that makes a lot of sense.

[FrankReynolds]

Originally, the Aqueducts explanation is right on the money- a powerful seal was put on the area to weaken the monsters there, but the side effect also left anyone else stuck the same way. Similar effects were far more common in FFXI before they decided caps weren't worth it anymore.

Anyway: (TL;DR version at bottom)

What I look at here is something dangerous- I don't care if a game is old or new, without players cycling through as much of the game as possible, it dies. I can log into Everquest to this day and find newbie players smacking rats around, folks running around the Commonlands hunting, and so on. Players still go flowing through content on the way up to higher levels, and that content is still useful and relevant.

It's three years older than FFXI is.

The opposite has happened in FFXI. 99% of the game are dead zones. Take the area around Windurst. I basically saw either 99's, anons (who had L99 gear), one blue mage learning his abilities...and me. In a week. The effective level of support as a result for anyone coming into the game? Zero. The game feels frighteningly hollow to someone looking at it from the point of view of a new player, a view that in my case is countered only by knowing that the player population is elsewhere.

Making the road to 99 easier was one thing. Obliterating any feeling of progress outside a few brief jumps to 99 was the key to a seal of a different kind- one that bottles the remaining players into a slow population decline and renders huge chunks of work on FFXI moot.

Think about it this way. Say a days' casual work would get a level from 75-99. It'd get you two levels a day from 50-74. Three levels from 25-49. Four from 20-24. Five from 1-19.

You'd still level up to cap in less than 60 days played at a casual rate. Halve that for your average hardcore grinder. A month from top to bottom. You'd actually have people in the mid-range for jobs long enough that combined with level sync, there'd actually be a reason for a lot of things that have vanished.

Cause right now? Lower level gear and such on the AH? Ha, ha. The market for lower-level crafted items? Who makes them, there's no market! There's even a crunch on -crystals- at this point, since you don't have lowbies sitting there whacking monsters around for synths- on Ragnarok, elemental clusters are literally tens of thousands of Gil each! Stuff that drops off L1 monsters is going for 30K a stack because there's nobody around to bonk lil' Goblin Thugs on the head anymore (and my guess is gardening for them is a moot point, since most people's pots are devoted to trying for more endgame-centric stuff).

Point being, games tend to function poorly when you eliminate the bottom entirely and focus the entire system on getting to the top, ignoring everything that doesn't do so, and then wondering why new players see the endgame wall and flee screaming. Of course they do. There was never any hill to climb- just *bam* here's your incredibly easymode exp process to 99, then we'll throw content at you that assumes you mastered every part of your job in a process we originally expected you to take months (at least) to do so. Easier was good. Easiest is bad.

We have MMO's that predate FFXI who didn't go the route of destroying the process of developing a character from the start that are still functional- and profitable to this day. They didn't close the door on people playing the game to the top, vs. being tossed there in a shower of exp. Thankfully, I do see some sanity showing up- it looks like with things like the blinker price change, they're making efforts to prevent another hyperinflation cycle like what happened just prior to the first big RMT/HNM busting purge about a decade ago. Again, though- the lack of a real road of progression also damages the economy of the game- with fewer gil sinks along the way and higher rates of gil gain at the top (now very top-heavy) of the charts, it makes it very easy for someone to go "Ooh, elemental cluster? Have 50K in gil for that!".
(As an aside, mid-ToAU 10K would have be considered inflated- and that's 5 times less than the current rate)

--

Long story short- making the game better via quality of life and relaxing some of the basics of the game was good. Effectively removing those basics, IMHO puts the game on a timer it should never have to worry about. Good, classic MMO's are easily seeing their 10th and 15th anniversaries with no signs of stoppage, only marked by the occasional bit of revampage to take advantage of newer systems as time passed by (EQ 2007, UO 2006-7). FFXI falls into that category- if it doesn't abandon itself in the process.

Adoulin is going to mark a point at which we see another chance to refresh and increase player population- but without anything save a coherent endgame, how do those players come into the game?

The problem with what you just described is that most people see leveling as a roadblock to freedom. If leveling consisted of doing quests / missions etc. that were different for every level and specific to the limitations / abilities of each specific job, you might have some point as far as the character development goes. But in this game, once you have gotten through the first 20 or 30 levels in party mode, you have learned almost everything that you will ever learn from the leveling experience. Leveling 10 or 20 jobs in old school exp parties is not going to teach you anything new and thus begins to feel like a giant waste of time. Especially when you consider that the structure of endgame events usually requires you to level at least one or two jobs that you never had any interest in leveling or playing. for example: none of the jobs that I enjoy playing have a place in Nyzul Isle runs and yet all of them require the gear from Nyzul to perform at a level that is considered acceptable for other end game events.

A lot of people spent far more time trying to get a group to exp with than they did actually exping back in the day and I think that is far more of a turn off than the current state of leveling. When you are on a low level job, you tend to feel impotent. Everything can kill you. Just going from point A to point B is a dangerous endeavor. How long do people really want to feel like that? What's more is that just leveling doesn't mean that you are done and can go join the HNMLS of your choice. You still have a ton of quests, missions etc. to do before you can even access a lot of that. Developing your character is an ongoing process that does not require a level attached to it. Completing missions, accessing new areas, following story lines etc. can be an experience that is enriching regardless of level.

I agree that a different mode of leveling would be better, but bringing the old methods back will not have the effect that people who push for it so desire. To be honest, I don't think SE would ever dedicate the resources required to make leveling worthwhile and fun. I think they reserve funding for overhauls of that scale for FFXIV.

[Rustic]

The problem with what you just described is that most people see leveling as a roadblock to freedom. If leveling consisted of doing quests / missions etc. that were different for every level and specific to the limitations / abilities of each specific job, you might have some point as far as the character development goes.

Then, I would say this: Why not? Compare what your first artifact armor was like compared to your Dynamis gear. One was traveling across the entire span of the FFXI map, battling NMs and finding your way deep into dungeons to gain your signature "job gear" in a story related to your specific job. The other was slapping mobs around endlessly hoping your Duelist's Chapeau (or insert PITA AF2 drop) would fall into the treasure pool. Which was more fun and felt more rewarding?

But in this game, once you have gotten through the first 20 or 30 levels in party mode, you have learned almost everything that you will ever learn from the leveling experience. Leveling 10 or 20 jobs in old school exp parties is not going to teach you anything new and thus begins to feel like a giant waste of time.

And here's another flaw. The idea that one needed to level 10-20 different jobs? For serious? How high?

Especially when you consider that the structure of endgame events usually requires you to level at least one or two jobs that you never had any interest in leveling or playing. for example: none of the jobs that I enjoy playing have a place in Nyzul Isle runs and yet all of them require the gear from Nyzul to perform at a level that is considered acceptable for other end game events.

And here's something that exists even at 99: Gear coming from sources that X job requires to progress, but isn't useful for getting said gear. Even now, you see that with jobs who aren't generating the staggers needed for optimal drops = sorry, {No thanks}. If it's a process that results in gear that is ideal for X job, that job should be able to perform in some manner that makes it easier to come by. For example, if it's RNG/COR gear, give it weaknesses to a RNG WS or a specific Quick Draw.

A lot of people spent far more time trying to get a group to exp with than they did actually exping back in the day and I think that is far more of a turn off than the current state of leveling. When you are on a low level job, you tend to feel impotent. Everything can kill you. Just going from point A to point B is a dangerous endeavor. How long do people really want to feel like that? What's more is that just leveling doesn't mean that you are done and can go join the HNMLS of your choice. You still have a ton of quests, missions etc. to do before you can even access a lot of that. Developing your character is an ongoing process that does not require a level attached to it. Completing missions, accessing new areas, following story lines etc. can be an experience that is enriching regardless of level.

Of course, HNMLS as we knew it no longer exist, and we have a world now where even soloing EP's, you actually make a respectable chunk of exp per kill- especially when combined with training regimens that tack on an effective xp bonus with each cycle of dead beasties, and killing piles of bad guys also results in treasure chests dropping hither and yon. The old bad days of being unable to make appreciable progress without a PT are dead and gone. The problem lies in that the replacement has become sitting in place while someone spams AoEs with a greataxe. There isn't even that 10-20 levels of party play to learn your job anymore. I don't want to see the days where a character took a year to hit cap. I'd be happy with seeing people go 1-99 in 30-60 days played- where 30 is someone who pushed hard and partied constantly for maximum exp gain, and 60 for people who played casual and soloed much of the way instead. FoV could even be easily retuned to this- by offering training regimens that worked for parties and ones that worked for soloists.

I agree that a different mode of leveling would be better, but bringing the old methods back will not have the effect that people who push for it so desire. To be honest, I don't think SE would ever dedicate the resources required to make leveling worthwhile and fun. I think they reserve funding for overhauls of that scale for FFXIV.

We don't need to bring the old methods back- but we do need to overhaul the current one, which has become dangerously straightforward and mercenary and mindless, something that made chaining colibris old-school look like attempting to take the Shadow Lord on in a bronze subligar and nothing else in relative difficulty. When I'm getting people telling me we can take a job from 30-99 in a -day-, in fact taking a dozen+ characters that way at once without moving an inch, the system by which this is easily done is an error in FFXI that needs to be removed.

Heck, make characters gain exp bonuses from having leveled other jobs that level out as you get nearer your "top jobs". I've got a jobs I've already leveled? Awesome, give me a exp bonus of (50- current job level + number of jobs with a level higher than current job) x .(highest job level)%.

Take a newbie Black Mage who's just gotten their subjob done and starts leveling WHM from 1. He's 20th and hasn't done anything else. When he starts on WHM, he gets a "expert bonus" of (50 - 1(his WHM level) + 1 (BLM is the only job over 1) x .20 (his BLM is his highest job level at 20th) = 50 x .20 = 10% bonus at level 1. Not a huge bonus, but hey, it helps.

Later on, he's managed to take BLM and WHM up to 40/20 and he decides to start leveling Scholar. At level 1, his Scholar gets an expert bonus of (50 -1 +2) x .40 = 20% exp bonus. By 20th, the SCH is down to a 12% bonus- but still, he's moving faster than he did with his previous jobs.

He takes himself all the way up to SCH/BLM of 80/40 and decides to level that 20th level WHM up a bit so he can get some teleports. He's got a bit more than 25% bonus for that 20 WHM to work with- (50 -1 +2) x .80 = 25.6%.

Finally, he's hit 99 SCH/BLM 49/WHM 49 and with the Embrava nerf says the heck with it and decides to level Summoner instead for the laughs. He starts level 1 with Carby and company with a (50 -1 +3) x .99 = 51.5% exp bonus at first level, 33% at 20th, and he's even getting about a 5% exp bonus even at 48th.

Voila. Higher level players spend less time going through the level-up process, but they're not magically uplifted to job-godhood in a process that takes zero effort whatsoever on their part.

Then add in the needed changes to get rid of cleave-style exp gain. Nastier monsters with zone-banishing abilities like Cattlepult and resistance to crowd control, that lottery spawn with power levels based on how many monsters the party/alliance has chained that can be dealt with if everyone's paying attention, but will punk groups that are in an AFK leech mode, even if that's by harmlessly booting players out of exp range and requiring them to return- or if the group has next to no active players, getting their tank booted and the rest of the AFKers being mangled to death one nibble/zoneboot at a time.

[Prrsha]

A lot of nice ideas there Rustic!

What saddens me is that most of the naysayers complain but don't offer new ideas and feedback on how to fix FFXI. The devs have already admitted that FFXI needs a lot of work. I hope to see good things though...