Item Levels

[Nebo]

Many of you that continue to play and enjoy FINAL FANTASY XI have at some point in time cast off your shyness and became players who made a breakthrough by forming parties and participating in pick-up groups......

Of course, with recent MMOs, it's possible to reach high levels while playing solo and players aren't spending a lot of time making parties because of the ability to auto-group up for large battles. While it definitely makes it easy to play, we are lacking too many things to be able to reach that point.

A couple of comments regarding group forming:

Leaders

FFXI is a complex game with a lot of depth and a large learning curve. Because the game does not help you to form groups in any way (and in fact hinders you in many ways), the system fundamentally depends on group leaders.

FFXI needs group leaders to function. Without them, everything comes to a grinding halt....endgame....casual play...the economy....everything.

(That would be bad for business)

The overwhelming majority of the player base does not read forums or web sites to research information about FFXI. Most of us don't even have a solid, basic understanding of fundamental game mechanics.

Leading groups is the single most difficult task in all of Vana'diel...and the single greatest reason people sit around town afk just waiting for shouts, doing nothing. For most of us, is much too daunting a task. Most of FFXI players lack the skills, knowledge, or confidence needed to form a 6 man Party for en event....let alone putting the right 18 jobs and the right 18 people together, point them towards an event and lead the charge.

And in FFXI, we ask a LOT of our leaders. There are so many things a leader has to have expertise with and put up with (it is simply overwhelming to your average gamer):

• Battle Strategies
• All Alliance Job Roles
• Human Resources Management
• Loot Distribution
• Conflict resolution
• Scheduling
• Organizing
• Patience
• Willingness to /shout or /yell for multiple hours upon hours just to get ONE alliance to do ONE event - This is a big one
• Dealing with stress and pressure of alliance members expectations resting solely on YOUR shoulders.

The list goes on.

Here's the thing about these leaders...the people that Square Enix NEEDS to keep or this game will surely fall apart completely:

They are R/E/M holders.

And most put a lot of work into completing them...Cue SoA release and your new Dev team just "decided" to make NM drop weapons that surpass R/E/Ms in the name of "vertical progression."

If you do not correct this mistake...I suspect most of those group leaders will eventually quit. Because for years and years they did their job for you. Over and over and over and over. They overcame your game's group building design flaws, lead countless groups/linkshells and events while accomplishing those 99 R/E/Ms.

TLDR: R/E/M Holders need their shinnies to stay shiny and we need them to lead our groups. If you make them leave...FFXI dies. No question.

And did I read that right? You are thinking of developing new content to add ADDITIONAL TRIALS to upgrade REM weapons?

Seriously!? NO!

Job Adjustments

The other issue is job adjustments. Another major factor contributing to the difficulty of forming and finding groups for content is this: many people are passionate about playing and gearing jobs that aren't valuable in endgame content...only a handful of current jobs are worth an alliance slot in endgame events.

I am a Thief main. I do not enjoy playing on Bard at all. Guess what job I've been stuck on since Delve came out?...Mostly Bard.

^ This is what happens to people. They get stuck on jobs they DON'T want to play to get gear for the jobs they DO want to play...only they never get to PLAY the jobs they love and they get burnt out...eventually quitting.

A wider variety of jobs needs to be made viable in endgame content. Based on your stated goals, this should be priority number 1.

Making it easier for people to participate on the jobs that they love will invariably make them more motivated to form (and join) groups by virtue of being able to play the jobs that they love in endgame content...something they cannot do now.

If you can correct this (MAJOR, FUNDAMENTAL) design flaw, you will accomplish your goals just doing that alone.

[pretre]

wow now im lost lol. I went from reading post that said r/e/m gunna be poop after upgrade to just about to cancel my id after 6yrs , to reading this latest post now I feel maybe we might get heard. please please please make r/e/m weapons on par with delve weapons it really is a deal breaker with allot of people. I run 3 lses 1 is adl 1 is emp weapons and were lost atm because if r/e/m is a sub par weapon no one will want these weapons which means dyna aby and salvage all go bye bye. I like delve but you have taken to much from us to introduce it, if r/e/m = less than delve weapons its a start from scratch scenario it kinda feels like the ff we all been playing for years ends now and a new ffxi starts. well that was my last ditch attempt to get you to see it from allot of peoples perspective. also some 6 man plasma farm be nice
p.s. keeping r/e/m relavent doesn't mean no one will do delve, ihave relic great axe and I was in middle of pimping delve great sword dagger axe an soon gun, just let me keep the relic weapon that took me over a year to make. p.p.s oh yea the woe ws unlock idea everyone I know loved that idea
p.p.p.s. lol please put war on the plasma axe, makes no sense war can use plasma sword dagger club but not axe

[Byrth]

Actions speak louder than words. We keep hearing apologetic posts like this followed by zero policy changes. Do something.

[Raksha]

Actions speak louder than words. We keep hearing apologetic posts like this followed by zero policy changes. Do something.

this

10char

[Nebo]

Actions speak louder than words. We keep hearing apologetic posts like this followed by zero policy changes. Do something.

^ This.

My suggestion:

For the time being, put the pause button on development work for:

• Mog Gardens
• Monstrosity
• Item level Exp /check update
• Cutesy seasonal events.

And divert all available power to forward thrusters:

• Job adjustments, balancing, making good on old promises.
• Lowman Content Updates
• R/E/M updates

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

So you want to abandon progress on content that's available for all players in favor of tweaks that only affect slim minorities?

[Nebo]

So you want to abandon progress on content that's available for all players in favor of tweaks that only affect slim minorities?

Did you read my post?

[Secondplanet]

i don't believe anything that SE says with dead lines and future releases

*Source* Cait sith and Atomos

[Kristal]

I'd just like to once again state my only real complaint about this "item level" idea: Encumbrance. You insist on throwing monsters at us with moves that not only remove our equipment but prevent us from re-equipping it again. This is already a death sentence for most jobs (the instructions for the MUM quest "Research: Rala Waterways" may as well be "go die and lose experience points," which tends to be the complete opposite of "fun and relaxation"). And now you're essentially saying that these moves can now effectively remove 10+ levels in an instant, with zero recourse?

I've done that one a few times on PUP, and even with the pet standing at a distance curing it still was 50/50 on actually killing it (usually due to enmity wipe causing pet to get agro for casting Dia II). This was before I got Alternator though. Now I'd just drop pet on it and grab a snack. Fortunately, the Encumbrance move is also the one you need for the task, so even if you die, you're essentially getting a free trip back to town and the exp loss is covered by the task reward.

[Kincard]

Actions speak louder than words. We keep hearing apologetic posts like this followed by zero policy changes. Do something.

Byrth always is able to sum up pretty much exactly what I want to say with great brevity.

Also adding that if REM needs to have additional trials, do not make them absurd like requiring the defeat of delve bosses 50 times/turning in 100 Bztavian Wings or whatever. A weapon that already costs ~100M+ to create should not need much more on top of it so I can have it be on par with weapons that players can farm in a few hours.

It would likely also be a bad idea to make it easier to obtain these weapons in any way just so you have an excuse to make the later trials harder. That would be completely missing the point because the same people bellyaching about REMs needing updates are very, very likely the same people that hate this new vertical progression system- people don't want to spend 500 hours obtaining a weapon just so other people can obtain the same weapon later in 10 hours. Players lacking REMs can call it self-absorbed or petty or whatever you want to, but I guarantee you that'll lose you a lot more customers than telling the people stuck on their quest to just suc it up and get a Delve weapon that'll give them the same functionality for a fraction of the investment.