The problem with Naakuals

[OmnysValefor]

7/13: New Naakual, same problems.

The rest of this post is from 5/25, but it all holds true, aside from KI fees being reduced.

Throwing bodies at a monster, along with avatars, magic, and ranged attack, is not fun.

- - -

So, Naakual shouts don't happen a lot on Valefor, and always seems I'm promised to do something else when they do.

Last night I went to Achuka (Morimar).

First, once you've got the KI, there's little reason to go back. Once you have the armor(s) you want from it, there's no reason to go back. I'm to invest 100k and 6 hours* just to help people? Sure, I'll most certainly get 30k back, but 70k bayld is annoying to farm.

The next update is to change the bayld costs, but it's still unreasonable coupled with the time invested. Really re-working the colonization rate would do a lot of good. I can only imagine, and yeah, it's a baseless guess, but you expect participation in reives as campaign had in its hayday, but, at least on my server, that's not happening. Not even close.

Further, people can afk inside. Literally, make sure inventory has space, go to work. A few people unabashedly did a little bit of damage and then went and sat at the wall. The particular JP group that came in with us lay dead, with raises on, for 45 minutes, as did some NAs. These people just did not care to participate, but only to get the reward. There's nothing you can do to stop them from getting the KI so long as they don't die and time out--and of course, proven MPK is against the rules, not that it's worth the trouble just to make someone else's day worse, or dc before the end, like the whm who busted his butt, and then dc'd.

Before I continue, I don't know about your server but Morimar on Valefor sucks. (Yes, pretty much everything on Valefor sucks.) We were at 23% last night, after clearing all the reives on the map. We being about 30 NAs and 20~ JPs that happened to be there going for the same goal at the same time.

Without naming names, because at least he was willing to take the time to pug, the "assembler" of this event didn't really put much thought into setup. He asked for mages, so I came whm. We had no cors (to ignore the -dt%) or brds. Of the drks we had, one had twilight scythe.

SE, I wish you learned the mistakes of voidwatch, and even abyssea, to an extent - once the bulk of the playerbase, especially the better part of the good playerbase (good does not mean geared, but gear does help) has gotten what they wanted, content becomes very... unenjoyable. Without a doubt, Kaggen, Pil, Akvan, and Qilin would have died--or rather, stopped dying--quite a while ago if there was no reason for people to go once they had the item. Plates, Pouches, and a ridiculous low chance at cells are what made VW last as long as it did.

A steady stream of returning players, and the vast variety of content meant there was a lot to be done in abyssea. The returning players would gear up and become decently geared, and go help the newly returned players (in exchange for a seal they wanted, of course) who would gear up and become decently geared and go back and help... A person's quest to obtain empyrean weapons would also beget seals to players willing to help, but all of that has kind of died.

Too Long, Didn't Read: Abyssea lasted so long because there was quite a bit to grind out.

Park a gm on valefor, and watch shouts, or lack thereof, during NA weekdays, and the jp aren't shouting much. I've yet to see a jp shout inviting NA's either.

This isn't about VW, or about Abyssea, just that there were lessons to be learned.

This is about Naakuals, and that, in short words: Once you have the KI, there's no reason to help anyone else get it. Lucky me, I got the helm last night, but even still, it would be a long time from now and in a galaxy far away that I went back for such a grind. Worse, the drops are random and if it decides to give you the same piece of armor again, you get nothing. Boy that would be fun, as it has already happened to people.

One of the things Abyssea and VW did right was that EXP and Cruor became a by-product of endgame. You could easily merit cap, and gain a chunk of cruor in abyssea while pursuing your friend's empyrean weapon, or gold-box farming. You could cap merits in voidwatch after 3 x6 runs runs, and the cruor from voidwatch came a lot faster. Both of these, of course, during the Blinker era meant that making gil was(could be, if you chose) a byproduct of endgame.

Naakuals offer none of that, and because of poorly delivered content-phasing (it's okay, mistakes happen), most of the items they drop aren't worth the time.

So we screwed up the idea of how you wanted content to roll out. Please adapt to that. Plasm being a byproduct of this would be a fine idea.

Finally, and yeah I know this post is poorly organized--SE needs to accept that their software cannot handle mass events as well as it should. Many people using beastly computers, especially in regard to this game, experience great lag in big events like Besieged (as it used to be, and even can be today, though not nearly as bad). In the final hour of the fight, I shut every running process I could just to hope that the lag of so many players and pets wouldn't dc me.

[OmnysValefor]

Edit: Apparently his post was deleted. As I can't delete mine, I'll just leave this here.

Okay, what's wrong with it? I presented many facts:

* Colonization rate expects a level of participation that is simply not happening, in this brand new expansion. Maybe it would have if delivery had been done better.
* The weapons that drops from WK reives is largely just trash. The weapons all suck unless you have no rme.
* There's almost zero replayability unless you're desperate for a piece but I'm not seeing any Meikogai's, Heka's, Toci's, or Thaumas-sized upgrades there.
* Abyssea and VW had some good qualities, and some bad, and SE learned very little from them.
* The game can't handle mass battles. My computer is a few years old now. I have an i5 2500k (3.5ghz quad core) and an Nvidia 570 and I still can't target people outside of my party in besieged. Can't see them most of the time. There's a lot less doing besieged now than there was.
* The inability to target players outside your party, til they have spawned, is likely a bandaid fix by se so your system didn't get overwhelmed, all the time. Only at the end, always at the end. I'd say it's likely a bandaid because I don't experience the same trouble in morimar. No, unfortunately, I got to see every player and every pet. Noone just appeared around me.

You saw an attempt to post something snarky, and that's fine, but argue my points or leave.

Also, your server may be better, but Valefor is awful, and I'm sure a few servers are.

[xiozen]

Thanks for being honest. I appreciate reading posts that are based on experience instead of suppositions. I actually hope Square-Enix gives some thought to many of the points you've made, since to me they make perfect sense based on how the system is currently set - up.

With FFXI-ARR a few months out from release, I'm not feeling too confident about the Development team really seeing FFXI as worth devoting the time to fixing all of the things they've recently broken w/ the SoA release... /sad.

[Babekeke]

FFXI-ARR

***Ahem***

[Kaisha]

Make NM beads a new common additional reward from them (relevant to their zone), and after the KI reduction fee in the next update, should help spur some interest, both from LS bringing lots of bodies to maximize potential beads to save on farming time to prep for Delve boss runs, and folks wanting to sell them for gil.

[OmnysValefor]

Bumping because Naakual are still awful. The loot is better (only because new delve isn't out yet), but all the problems are still there, and in Marjami's case, the area to fight is incredibly small.

Valefor had over 350 people in the fight. It was cool watching people blink in and out like christmas lights.

There were 499 in the zone.

[Kaisha]

Valefor had over 350 people in the fight. It was cool watching people blink in and out like christmas lights.

Shouldn't be possible, since reives are capped to 64-participants max.

That or they screwed that up on the new Naakual fights.

[Karah]

Hurkan last night had more than 597 in zone. I severely doubt 530 stood outside.

[OmnysValefor]

Shouldn't be possible, since reives are capped to 64-participants max.

That or they screwed that up on the new Naakual fights.

Tough to say. I have never lagged so hard as I lagged in that fight but I never saw more than a couple dozen players at once, but they were blinking out. I was even losing party members, which the engine always tries to favor party members.

[Zigfreid]

Between that and the several posts I've seen so far complaining of issues getting nothing..I'm passing for now.