Im going to rant on voidwatch a bit here since some others brought it up:


Right now there is a voidwatch shout after not seeing any for a couple hours. I am posting on this forum instead of joining that shout because I am second guessing whether i should spend 120k gil yet again for 6 more chances at something that has a 1 in 1500 chance of dropping.

You have game content I want to play and enjoy but you have turned it into a moneysink that has become increasingly frustrating due to 'bad luck' and a system that replenishes voidstones too slowly.
Something like Qilin is not hard game content, it is now a loot grind that I have to keep paying gil to participate in for a rare/ex drop.

I use rubi cells, red alignment always capped to 550% so what gives with your battle content design and sense of balance? I enjoy the luck factor but there comes a tipping point where players get bitter and angry their time and gil invested does not yield the treasure they desire from these events.


To compound this frustration, voidwatch participation has been suffering also partly due to not everyone being willing to 'gamble' on voidwatch and buy voiddust. Your perceived success of the event in the past was largely tainted by the cruor->gil abuse that had been going on.
Since that correction to the cruor->gil was made, event participation has dropped off significantly because voiddust are no longer subsidized through the previous cruor->gil conversion.

When I want to play FFXI and do voidwatch, most of the time im doing something else like reading forums and glancing at the chatlog window for a voidwatch shout. This is why people say they 'log in and have nothing to do' because they are doing the same thing. People are standing around waiting for something to happen, but your game design and RL time limtations on things like voidstones replenishing are largely to blame here.

I feel that the dev team should rebalance the event and encourage participation in voidwatch by having stones replenish quicker or implement an optional reward system where perhaps some lofty goal of turning in 1000 petrifacts would entitle the player to a pulse weapon/item/abjuration of their choice. At least with an absurd requirement of 1000 petrifacts, there is a 'light at the end of the tunnel' for someone grinding voidwatch that much.

The problem with FFXI battle content design and balance is that it is afraid of people 'winning too fast':
far too many hours before voidstones replenish
1 day wait to enter dynamis again
20 hour cooldown on meeble phermones
3day wait for einherjar
1 day wait for an imperial ID tag so I can do 1 assault/nyzul run
and so on.....

stop making game content that I have to wait around for to play. People making more than 1 empyrean/relic should have made this obviously clear to you by now that people will keep playing even if they 'win' at something. People wont quit, they'll find something else to do and keep paying their subscriptions instead of quitting out of frustration.