Interim Report – Sorry to keep you all waiting!

[Arcon]

Okay, then. Why do we have level 1-98 then at this point? Explain.

For people like you who wouldn't know what else to do if they didn't have their precious EXP. Everyone else has moved on. SE could auto-cap people's levels to 99 and I wouldn't care. I'm done leveling completely anyway, as are many other people. That's what the last decade was for.

[SpankWustler]

I am a blob of pessimism, filled with Flamin' Hot Cheetos and regret. I shall slough over all, weeping my cynical slime.

Once upon a time, HNM's were something fought over for spawns and controlled by RMTs who used their access to easy power to get a virtual lock on the game and it's economy.

I wish the people who I remember gathering at usually-not-Nidhogg were RMT. People who wanted to make money in real life never would have invested so much time in something so relatively unproductive. I suspect RMT would have left after three days and my shame would have felt all the more acute for I would have been doing something as a hobby that somebody else passed over as a job.

It's been a long time, but you're talking about the guys who piled into Sky, yeah? They were a pain, but it's a huge stretch to say RMT had control over anything other than the huge golem with a funny name who dropped half a Byakko pop-set.

Ask every player that had an Emperor/Empress hairpin if it wasn't. Gear was treasured because it was rare, potent and useful- and because it was more powerful than average, it was useful longer.

Equipping in the olden dayes isn't as positive as a lot of people like to remember.

Some equipment was so sough after in those days because all other options were bad, spectacularly bad to the point of adding only defense. Other times, items were just assumed to have quality equal to their rarity because few people fully understood what various bonuses actually did.

Edit: To tie my points together with this off-topic topic as a whole, it's great to have a feeling of drama or nostalgia, but those things are just feelings. They're not concrete and not everyone is going to share them.

[FrankReynolds]

You mean to say that 3 people stayed in the same group for 14 hours and you just happened to wake up the moment he got the last member? What are the chances of that? - Like 1 in a couple thousand trillion? At any rate, if you want to do the mission also, shouldn't you help look for members too and not leave it up to the leader and then complain later on how long it took to get the mission started? Wait, I forgot who I'm talking to; Nevermind.

And yes, I realize exactly how incredibly unlikely it was that I would wake up just in time. That was the interesting part of the story. I know that you like to imagine that you're sooooo awesome that if you had been in that group, you would have filled it up in a minute or two, but you're wrong. If you were half as good as you think you are at forming groups and getting things done, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

And then made a system in which leveling said extra jobs is a trivial process. Counterproductive, you think?

I don't have time to read all this, because I'm about to leave for the company xmas party, but I did want to respond to this ^ because I think you might have missed what I was trying to convey.

It's not counterproductive. They no longer need you to spend all your time leveling. They have created sufficient endgame content for you to stay entertained with (by "you" I mean the general populace). What they do need is for you to have a bevy of jobs leveled so that you can use them to participate in that content.

They can't very easily keep making mid-grade content because most people who have already leveled whatever jobs they like will just ignore it or become angry that they can't use the abilities / gear they have earned for the content. They can however (or more accurately they already did) speed up the leveling process so that everyone has access to high level content.

To sum it up: losing stats, abilities etc. to level synch is annoying. Losing the ability to spend months / years leveling is not so bad in comparison. Especially when you consider that the ability to waste time leveling is still there sans the people who actually like it.

[Caketime]

The Snark in this thread is nearing critical levels.

[Rustic]

For people like you who wouldn't know what else to do if they didn't have their precious EXP. Everyone else has moved on. SE could auto-cap people's levels to 99 and I wouldn't care. I'm done leveling completely anyway, as are many other people. That's what the last decade was for.

Till Geomancer/Rune Fencer show up, anyway. But hey, you're hardcore. Grats on the Maat's Cap++ level of dedication. You're effectively done with the game at this point until a new expansion shows up. Everything's old hat to you, you've likely run CoP missions till your eyes bled, fought Alexander enough times that you have your name on the list, could draw Lilith from memory with your off hand, and the words "Shadow Lord" on your screen trigger migraines and the only thing of interest to you at this point is whatever new comes along in the next expansion plus the next iteration of L99 gear.

In other words, you're done with 99% of the content. Now, tell me why it's a good thing that the current system renders a similar amount of the game meaningless to new players, and why new players would even come into a game like that- and in fact, how the game sustains itself without them.

I am a blob of pessimism, filled with Flamin' Hot Cheetos and regret. I shall slough over all, weeping my cynical slime.

And that slime smells like Mountain Dew and sorrow.

I wish the people who I remember gathering at usually-not-Nidhogg were RMT. People who wanted to make money in real life never would have invested so much time in something so relatively unproductive. I suspect RMT would have left after three days and my shame would have felt all the more acute for I would have been doing something as a hobby that somebody else passed over as a job.

Thus the "fought over for spawns" bit. RMT didn't control them, but boooooy you couldn't swing a dead mandragora in Dragon's Aery without hitting someone using a claimbot from one HNMLS or another. RMT groups did in the very early NA days still sit there claiming a lot of HNMs or even NMs, but with the first real bansticking that started to fade in a hurry, and most of the roadblocking was sitting there blocking access to Sky. Here, this was 2006:

http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/384...measures/page3

"Prices for items on Alexander... RMT Bazaar
Autumnstone 11mil
Summerstone 6mil
Springstone 6mil
Gem of the west 3mil
Seiryu Seal 300k
Suzaku Seal 300k
Byakko Seal 8mil
Genbu Seal 10k"

It's been a long time, but you're talking about the guys who piled into Sky, yeah? They were a pain, but it's a huge stretch to say RMT had control over anything other than the huge golem with a funny name who dropped half a Byakko pop-set.

See above. Till S-E really, REALLY got to clubbing RMT over the head, they had a tight grip on Sky for years.

Equipping in the olden dayes isn't as positive as a lot of people like to remember.

Some equipment was so sough after in those days because all other options were bad, spectacularly bad to the point of adding only defense. Other times, items were just assumed to have quality equal to their rarity because few people fully understood what various bonuses actually did.

Of course, as we headed upwards levelwise, the stat pool for items got bigger as well. And yeah, you had crappy items, the same way we can look in the AH today and see rare, crappy items that nobody equips. But the point was that good items, regardless of level requirement, WERE prized, hunted, bought, sold, used.

Not anymore. Those NMs sit, un-wanted, un-needed, along with most of the zones in the game. Yeah, they're old news to you, the long-term player who's done all that a dozen times. The problem is that if there's no use to those zones for anything- leveling, item hunting, whatever- it narrows the game considerably. It reduces the value of that game to newer players when they look around at what's seemingly a vast array of content and are told "Nah, nobody does any of that. Get to 99 and endgame event everything, all the time." - and then you show them how to skip 68 levels by doing nothing as someone waves a great axe in circles while dualboxing a healer in an endless cycle of dead chigoes and the victory theme playing every few.

Players stay where they invest. FFXI has reduced that investment to the point where new players are newbie, L30, L99, and "why aren't you in Empyreal Paradox, noob". It's an awful fragile tether compared to folks who got their airship pass, AF, DM earring, their CoP ring, ToAU ring, etc. etc. when each step along the line mattered and took effort. When a game overtrivializes it's achievements along the way, it loses that grip it has on players to continue playing. We become a community of the hardcore, for the hardcore, crumbling away one burnout at a time with no new faces to replace them.

Edit: To tie my points together with this off-topic topic as a whole, it's great to have a feeling of drama or nostalgia, but those things are just feelings. They're not concrete and not everyone is going to share them.

No, they aren't- but it's that investment of feeling into a game that hooks players and keeps them playing- the lifeblood of any MMO. Hell, I'm not nostalgic about a lot of my time in FFXI- but it's the times that did inspire drama or do inspire nostalgia that get me to keep logging in and throwing my $12.95 or so S-E's way. They're the investments that keep a player grinding through endgame content, the ones that kept older players in Dynamis for years, hammering against CoP missions, getting parties together to exp or merit, camping that NM for days straight, synthing that 50th time for a fortune in mats to get that last 0.1 skillup rather than saying "Screw this" and never coming back.

We've trivialized so much of the process of progress that we've lost the very process of investment that produces players like us. Players that stay, and play, and buy new expansions, and keep the game population alive.

I'm all for not having to repeat that cycle and level of investment for people at the same intensity who have gone through the dance before. What's happened is that we've eliminated the cycle for everyone, new AND old instead- not merely made it easier to do that next job to 49 or 99, but made it so trivial as to be meaningless. Sit in place. Watch exp flow in. Get job to 99 so we can do that endgame run as X job instead of Y or Z. Woohoo. Achievement. Pride. Not.

No more "I'm going to go into Giddeus and hunt down that Yagudo cause I want the staff for my bard, I'll use that for months" or "I'm going to Crawler's Nest to sneak around cause I need a coffer for my AF" or "Wow, I just leveled up in (insert strange zone here) and I wish I'd known it was that awesome when I leveled (oldjob)!". With each part of the game we trivialize, the road is narrower, the feeling of worth from doing something along it lessened, the desire to go further more easily derailed.

We need those feelings and a process that inspires them, however they're expressed to players, or the game becomes only a haven for those who got them before they were removed and we'll all be in FFXIV. In that sense, I actually think of Abyssea as being constructed to create a curtain to pull across the game. Show's over. Here's the easymode key, we'll just throw some endgame stuff for you dedicated players to do until the population burns enough out to justify closing FFXI down and we can concentrate on FFXIV and how we're investing players in that instead, thanks for playing, we'll see you in the next MMO.

If it isn't changed, I don't see much of a future for FFXI past Adoulin, as either FFXIV will again become a talent sink that removes developer efforts from FFXI, or the player population, starved of new players will drop below the critical numbers needed to sustain the game. I'm not saying "restore the grind of old or we perish", but if there's no emotional reward to investing time into the game other than the narrowest road to 99, FFXI will be a game that only appeals to the endgame player playing the endgame games, and a game cannot do this and survive in the long term.

[SpankWustler]

I have to address one vital thing before I leave for a racist relative's place to be horrified at the ways she's dreaming of a White Power Christmas.

Seriously, this is vital!

VITAL!

And that slime smells like Mountain Dew and sorrow.

I bought the wrong type and scent of deodorant last week, forcing me to really layer the stuff on and making "Mountain Dew and sorrow" a disturbingly accurate description of how I smell.

[Rustic]

Seriously, this is vital!

VITAL!

I bought the wrong type and scent of deodorant last week, forcing me to really layer the stuff on and making "Mountain Dew and sorrow" a disturbingly accurate description of how I smell.

You know how sometimes people say "I could smell that through the monitor?"

(Kidding!)

[Eyeballed]

And yes, I realize exactly how incredibly unlikely it was that I would wake up just in time. That was the interesting part of the story. I know that you like to imagine that you're sooooo awesome that if you had been in that group, you would have filled it up in a minute or two, but you're wrong. If you were half as good as you think you are at forming groups and getting things done, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Don't get jealous now. But seriously, if I wanted to get a mission done and my leader was having trouble filling the spots, I sure as shit wouldn't opt out for "beer and Netflix" while someone else did their best to recruit the remainder and then have the audacity to come out and complain that the leader didn't fill the group fast enough. When will you kids learn that life just doesn't drop into your lap while you sit around scratching your balls and stroking your cat?

I mean, if a small fire erupted in your house do you get a bucket of water/fire extinguisher or call the fire department and wait outside?

DO SOMETHING!!!

[Carth]

This thread has gone completely stupid.

Are we seriously arguing about old vs new? This is no better than the "Abyssea ruined FFXI" argument.

Oh wait...

[Prrsha]

For people like you who wouldn't know what else to do if they didn't have their precious EXP. Everyone else has moved on. SE could auto-cap people's levels to 99 and I wouldn't care. I'm done leveling completely anyway, as are many other people. That's what the last decade was for.

I sort of agree with you like I said before. If SE wants to make getting exp easier to get then it is now, remove the system entirely, because SE has trivalized it to that point. Whether it will help FFXI or not, that is another debate.

The Snark in this thread is nearing critical levels.

Ah, I love half-life... go Black Mesa! :3 http://www.blackmesasource.com/

Not anymore. Those NMs sit, un-wanted, un-needed, along with most of the zones in the game. Yeah, they're old news to you, the long-term player who's done all that a dozen times. The problem is that if there's no use to those zones for anything- leveling, item hunting, whatever- it narrows the game considerably. It reduces the value of that game to newer players when they look around at what's seemingly a vast array of content and are told "Nah, nobody does any of that. Get to 99 and endgame event everything, all the time." - and then you show them how to skip 68 levels by doing nothing as someone waves a great axe in circles while dualboxing a healer in an endless cycle of dead chigoes and the victory theme playing every few.

The basically sums up the problem.

Another problem is that SE thought placing level 75+ monsters in zones right next (or 2 zones away) from starting zones would generate more traffic in those areas. That was a huge mistake. If anything it make the game less newbee friendly and just served to frustrate crucial new customers. It handed them a dose of confusion while making it near impossible to do low level quests at low level (like they were designed to do).

One of SE's first thing on their agenda would be to remove those monsters (as high level players level elsewhere anyways). They do more harm then good. At the very least move them to higher level but accessable areas like crawlers nest. By then players know how to evade mobs and have access to abilities to go undetected.