Ludicrous game mechanics are ludicrous

[Alhanelem]

What about the NPCs that tell you your current fame? If a person spoke to every NPC in the town, you are bound to come across him. It's how I figured it out when all the guides that existed were in Japanese.

It's really cryptic, and there's no indication that what he's telling you actually has any meaning. It's about the only clue the game offers about reputation, but most people won't know to talk to these NPCs until they find out from another person or a guide that these guys are fame checkers.

[Windblade]

The game is so large with so many parallel quests going on that just using the game by itself as a way to know what to do and where to go seems to be virtually impossible. I have to read a guide on nearly every quest or mission I do, and I don't really mind doing that. My goal is to experience the story and complete the quest, not bump around in the dark wondering if I'll ever get to the next step of the quest.

[Carth]

SE has gotten better with this over time, but in the beginning it was really terrible, particularly with the Zilart mission line ala ZM11 where you have to find the "Mithra named Mary or Maroo", who was on the other side of the country.

As for the topic at hand, I'll have to agree, but this is also part of a bigger issue with FFXI as a whole, in the case that it's a fairly static world with no sweeping changes in it's environment. What this means is reputation is therefore hidden within quest lines and repeatable quests. Norg is the biggest fault of this, and I believe the reason for this is to avoid RMT from accessing easy money.

[Phogg]

This fact hit me again over the weekend when, for the umpteenth time in nearly 8 years I did the NIN scrolls in Norg. Think about how this works and then tell me with a straight face this is how enjoyable MMOs should be ..

Sounds like you are just mad that repeating something you have already done is tedious. Maybe find something else to do.

[Terrigenesis]

QQ some more

[Rustic]

Eh, I can understand. We're actually luckier than some MMORPGs.

Take EverQuest back in the day. Much the same boat- quests were figured out through the brute force effort of the playerbase. Throw everything at the wall until something stuck, repeat with next step.

Far as I know, FFXI is better coded in that some quests don't literally lead nowhere. This doesn't stop them from being very well hidden at times, but thanks to various dataminers and the like, we tend not to get stuck spinning our wheels. That doesn't mean it's less intuitive than it could be. A little nod at the beginning about how (insert fame NPC) is good to see about how your name is spreading, and a tweak to the fame-checker dialogue to give folks an option about "why fame is good for you" would be a nice quality-of-life change.

[Freebytes]

One of the problems with the lack of guidance and reasonable information as suggested by Windblade in his response also leads to another issue: You will sometimes completely forget the storyline of the quest or even where you are in a quest. You will talk to an NPC randomly, and he will say, "Great, thank you for bring me this!" This could literally be years later, and you have no idea why the NPC said this to you because the difference in time is so vast. In every other FF game that has existed, I talked to every NPC I saw. Every single one. In FFXI, it is better to avoid talking to an NPC unless you know the quest you will be undertaking because there is no telling when you will come back to it unless you specifically chose to start it on purpose.

Arcon had a good point about being a hero instead of doing repetitive quests. There should be certain quests you must accomplish to break the limit on the reputation. That way, there would be some variation in the repetitive cabbage deliveries.

[SNK]

Someone's never played some old school Dragon Quest.

[Rezeak]

Can anyone, from SE or outside, seriously tell me, with a straight face this is how it should be and that, in the absence of the 'official guide', 'DAT mining' and other third-party efforts like the Wiki, the quest system in this game is at all playable?

By asking other people in your linkshell.

Back in the day when FFXI was new and fresh quests like this added alot to the game in my opinion for example the NIN quest, alot of people worked that out by word of mouth rather than wiki(cause it didn't exsist) or some guide and because of this linkshells and friends list were essential. I would go on but point is when leveling was the main content, quests like this weren't to bad.

Of course, now I'm sure this costs FFXI money wise with newer players or even returning players that lost there account.Who do and will quit because it can take years to catch up to the current new content and while the old content was enjoyable when 1000s of people did it, it is now isolated which is something a MMO should avoid like the plague.

While it doesn't effect me too much for new players i'd...

Remove all but maat and 95->99 Limit quests
You can level up fame with merits.
Add new set of BCs that drop all the old quest spells.
Revamp the AF set to 95 versions (perle level stats)
Lastly you can buy level 75(with all skills caped at 75) with say 100 merits

That way newer players only need to be isolated once when getting to 99 then they can use there exsisting job to get jobs to 75 rdy for abyssea and acully be useful there.

(Btw just what i'd like i know too many people wouldn't like that anyway)

Either way, without new players FFXI is eventually doomed lol

[Alhanelem]

By asking other people in your linkshell.

Not everybody had a linkshell and not every person you ran into was helpful. And somebody had to be the first person to figure these things out. original FFXI depended on sheer numbers to produce some fool stumbling upon the solution then sharing it with others. There were a lot of quests in the game that had basically no clues at all- For a long time there were many quests and missions where an NPC would give you a task but not even give you a hint to where you should go to accomplish it. In a few cases an obscure NPC or object nobody would think to talk to gives you a hint. As I said before, there is a fine line between handholding and giving out reasonable information to gently nudge the player in the right direction without spelling everything out as "Go here. Get this. Go there. Kill that. Come back to me" in flashing signs that appear on the screen as you play.