Reasons Why FFXI is Declining

[Teioh]

Why not just make the game free to play and implement various micro transactions like several other dinosaur games that were failing? There are 700 people online on my server which is the second most populated server in ffxi. 40-50% of these are afk in various places with their bazaars up.
I want what most other paying customers want, for this game to flourish and in the direction the game is currently going this game is taking a turn for the worse. In order for ffxi to flourish we need more players. The various word of mouth recruitment campaigns have done very little to populate in-game worlds and those that come back to see if ffxi has gotten any better were severely disappointed and cancelled their subscriptions a month later. The game just isn't able to compete anymore with paid subscription games like World of Warcraft(incoming flame war) so why not implement a new structure that has been tried successfully by many other online RPGs?
Everquest, Lineage 2, SWTOR, LOTRO, and many others have gone from a non-viable business model to a game that actually makes money by implementing micro transactions and doing away with the monthly fee.
Also make Abyssea 75-99 and make it and a few select jobs subscription only, that should bring in some revenue and more importantly some customers.

[Afania]

Why not just make the game free to play and implement various micro transactions like several other dinosaur games that were failing? There are 700 people online on my server which is the second most populated server in ffxi. 40-50% of these are afk in various places with their bazaars up.
I want what most other paying customers want, for this game to flourish and in the direction the game is currently going this game is taking a turn for the worse. In order for ffxi to flourish we need more players. The various word of mouth recruitment campaigns have done very little to populate in-game worlds and those that come back to see if ffxi has gotten any better were severely disappointed and cancelled their subscriptions a month later. The game just isn't able to compete anymore with paid subscription games like World of Warcraft(incoming flame war) so why not implement a new structure that has been tried successfully by many other online RPGs?
Everquest, Lineage 2, SWTOR, LOTRO, and many others have gone from a non-viable business model to a game that actually makes money by implementing micro transactions and doing away with the monthly fee.
Also make Abyssea 75-99 and make it and a few select jobs subscription only, that should bring in some revenue and more importantly some customers.

F2P model is for casual/come and go players. FFXI needs dedication, F2P isn't going to help much.

[Krashport]

Well the item mall is here already... Yeah its a lowball mall, but still it's a mall. $12.95/mo, then keep login'in to participate. Though they do like to call it;
The Repeat Login Campaign!
http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/cam...h/login04.html

f2p might not be that far fetched, seeing not many have realized that an item mall is here already...

[predatory]

when a game goes f2p it is dead, any moron knows that, The idea isn't to kill the game, its t get the game designers off their lazy fucking asses and get to work. They seem to think that they can ignore what the population of the game wants, and for there to be no repercussions, how about this for a repercussion, I buy 1 share of stock in the company then go to a stockholders meeting and tell them exactly why ffxi is falling flat on its face. The reason this game is failing is the dev team is weak and lazy. in Japanese terms they have no honor and should be replaced, especially the head developer. Get your shit together SE because you have lost the driving force in the game world, and that is simply imagination and ingenuity, us in the player base can only carry your lazy asses so far

[Kormak]

I believe FFXI had the chance to win old players back and even gain new players with this expansion if it simply would have been handled correctly. Yet instead we got a drop in players by at least 1/2 within a mere set of weeks after the initial "oh new expansion lets check it out hights". The problem: I haven't even started talking about how bad the actual content is we got so far but, it did not only try to change how the game has worked for the past decade, which naturally will upset players content with the style of the game so far, no it also invalidated any content before itself. I ask myself: why did they waste their time and bothered to make Nyzul 2, Salvage 2, Einherjar 2 and Limbus 2? For what reason did they overhaul previous engame events, just to have them being 100% worthless a few months later because the gear they provide is crap compared to the unmotivated level 113 crap we have now.
Why was it necessary to bring out skirmish as event with superior loot but no accessability just to bring out something else a month later making skirmish useless already and why are we still stuck with this event? At least the latter is easy to answer: there is no other content in this expansion and this expansion killed any other content but itself.

Since all previous gear is obsolete, would you mind telling me what body piece MNK's use to TP in? What body SAM's use to WS in? There are several such examples in mage gear sets not to forget most Nuking + WS rings are from old content and the highest STR ammo piece is lvl88. And of course, arguably the best ring in the game is lvl70.

I am not going to argue that it hasn't allowed 1-99 burned jobs the ability to come close to veteran players but there is still so many pieces of old gear that is still relevant, just not the weapons.


Now as for the topic, the people who have defeated the hardest content before the update are completely bored with it and the rest of the playerbase doesn't want to level support jobs to beat the hard content. And you don't need emp/relic brds or even swaps to beat the new content, that has been proven.

This will just end up back at " Why should I have to level <job> to play the game? I have a perle BST that I enjoy playing with, I should be able to come that .... blah blah blah"

Anyway, I understand both sides of the argument but I personally like the new content as well as the old content.

Regards,

Kormak

[nyheen]

Since all previous gear is obsolete, would you mind telling me what body piece MNK's use to TP in? What body SAM's use to WS in? There are several such examples in mage gear sets not to forget most Nuking + WS rings are from old content and the highest STR ammo piece is lvl88. And of course, arguably the best ring in the game is lvl70.

I am not going to argue that it hasn't allowed 1-99 burned jobs the ability to come close to veteran players but there is still so many pieces of old gear that is still relevant, just not the weapons.


Now as for the topic, the people who have defeated the hardest content before the update are completely bored with it and the rest of the playerbase doesn't want to level support jobs to beat the hard content. And you don't need emp/relic brds or even swaps to beat the new content, that has been proven.

This will just end up back at " Why should I have to level <job> to play the game? I have a perle BST that I enjoy playing with, I should be able to come that .... blah blah blah"

Anyway, I understand both sides of the argument but I personally like the new content as well as the old content.

Regards,

Kormak

lot of the past gear is obsolete now. sure it some that ok but what the point at this time?. with Skirmish weapons/gear alone it broken as F#$% no one going to wanna do past contents for X gear if SoA gives broken gear in hours. you can literally 1 shot almost any past content without even trying. it feels like using a gameshark code on FF7 to kill anything in the game. even if they updated R/M/E SoA already did the damage to this and sadly people been dropping out of the servers fast. 200-400 is starting to be normal

[ScreamingInDigital]

Why not just make the game free to play and implement various micro transactions like several other dinosaur games that were failing? There are 700 people online on my server which is the second most populated server in ffxi. 40-50% of these are afk in various places with their bazaars up.
I want what most other paying customers want, for this game to flourish and in the direction the game is currently going this game is taking a turn for the worse. In order for ffxi to flourish we need more players. The various word of mouth recruitment campaigns have done very little to populate in-game worlds and those that come back to see if ffxi has gotten any better were severely disappointed and cancelled their subscriptions a month later. The game just isn't able to compete anymore with paid subscription games like World of Warcraft(incoming flame war) so why not implement a new structure that has been tried successfully by many other online RPGs?
Everquest, Lineage 2, SWTOR, LOTRO, and many others have gone from a non-viable business model to a game that actually makes money by implementing micro transactions and doing away with the monthly fee.
Also make Abyssea 75-99 and make it and a few select jobs subscription only, that should bring in some revenue and more importantly some customers.

EQ, SWTOR and LoTRO still offer a subscription option. As long as they maintained a sub option (in the event of such a switch happening, which I doubt at this point... but who knows, SE has been known to go from one extreme stance to another before), I think it'd be okay.

They need to stay the hell away from NCSoft's "Truly Free (to nickel and dime you to death)" setup. It's an abomination. I used to be a huge Lineage 2 player, for several years, and loved the hell out of that game. Then they did the whole "Goddess" expansion, switched to a fully F2P/Cash Shop model. They lied through their teeth in their lead-up PR, claiming that only non-game/stat effecting items would be sold (claiming they understood how such items in a PvP setting like L2 could be disastrous). They then proceeded to start selling such items almost from day one, changing their logic from "won't happen" to "well, they're optional!" They said this full knowing that in a competitive game like that, people will spend money - lots of it - to get an advantage over their rivals. People had been buying Adena, for just that reason, for years already in that game, so they didn't even have to 'test the waters' to find out.

They knew exactly what they were doing when setting up the F2P model for that game, and "Heavy Handed" doesn't even begin to describe it. Worst P2P to F2P transition I've ever seen. It went from being a game I played and loved for years, to "get the hell off my computer" in less than a week.

They did the same thing with Aion.

I don't believe, at all, though, that FFXI needs to go F2P. What FFXI needs is some serious thought and reconsideration of the direction they've chosen to take it. Trying to go with the vertical progression approach is just not going to fly. It's been proven time and again that developers can not crank out new content fast enough to stay ahead of players. Developers repeatedly underestimate their players and think they can somehow "stay ahead". It never works. SE's model of long-term progression with a "lateral" approach, rather than "vertical", served FFXI wonderfully for years. Yes, people complained about it... but they kept playing and the game maintained a healthy population for over 7 years before any kind of a noticeable decline began, which I would contend had more to do with the game's age at that point than anything else. Even then, XI's population decline was far slower than most any other comparable MMO out there (sub-based, etc).

SE could have stayed the course, continued creating content the way they did, and I believe the game would have remained healthier and the population wouldn't have dropped as it did. Instead, they decided to hop on the "mainstream MMO" bandwagon and start changing the game to be more like others (which they'd successfully avoided doing all those years prior). As I said in my last post, they decided to mix oil into water, and the results have been self-evident.

The population is at perhaps its lowest ever, and I don't think I've ever seen so many people as disappointed and upset about the direction of the game in all my time playing it.

They can't go back to Abyssea. They already raised the cap to 99 and, other than the "faux levels" granted through gear, there's only so far they can go in that direction.

I think they need to go back to their roots, look at what they did in those past expansions that kept people engaged and loyally playing for years. One thing I can guarantee they'll find is that their focus was far more on community, on lateral progression and on giving players challenges that weren't outright grinds, but that still took time to accomplish because they were difficult to do. Make old content relevant again for its own sake.

For their part, the playerbase has to get off this gear obsession they've been on. Every other complaint I see sometimes is something to do with getting new gear. This is the product of SE trying to turn the game into a vertical-progression setup. As Stompa said perfectly earlier in the thread, the fun of playing FFXI used to be playing FFXI. SE needs to look back to their own past, see what they did right, find a way to bring it to the present, and get themselves back on the right track. They're just getting deeper and deeper into the weeds with the decisions they've been making over the last few years.

FFXI was originally envisioned as a grand adventure, not a race to "end game". They need to return to that vision.

My 2 gil, and of course, my opinion.

[predatory]

EQ, SWTOR and LoTRO still offer a subscription option. As long as they maintained a sub option (in the event of such a switch happening, which I doubt at this point... but who knows, SE has been known to go from one extreme stance to another before), I think it'd be okay.

They need to stay the hell away from NCSoft's "Truly Free (to nickel and dime you to death)" setup. It's an abomination. I used to be a huge Lineage 2 player, for several years, and loved the hell out of that game. Then they did the whole "Goddess" expansion, switched to a fully F2P/Cash Shop model. They lied through their teeth in their lead-up PR, claiming that only non-game/stat effecting items would be sold (claiming they understood how such items in a PvP setting like L2 could be disastrous). They then proceeded to start selling such items almost from day one, changing their logic from "won't happen" to "well, they're optional!" They said this full knowing that in a competitive game like that, people will spend money - lots of it - to get an advantage over their rivals. People had been buying Adena, for just that reason, for years already in that game, so they didn't even have to 'test the waters' to find out.

They knew exactly what they were doing when setting up the F2P model for that game, and "Heavy Handed" doesn't even begin to describe it. Worst P2P to F2P transition I've ever seen. It went from being a game I played and loved for years, to "get the hell off my computer" in less than a week.

They did the same thing with Aion.

I don't believe, at all, though, that FFXI needs to go F2P. What FFXI needs is some serious thought and reconsideration of the direction they've chosen to take it. Trying to go with the vertical progression approach is just not going to fly. It's been proven time and again that developers can not crank out new content fast enough to stay ahead of players. Developers repeatedly underestimate their players and think they can somehow "stay ahead". It never works. SE's model of long-term progression with a "lateral" approach, rather than "vertical", served FFXI wonderfully for years. Yes, people complained about it... but they kept playing and the game maintained a healthy population for over 7 years before any kind of a noticeable decline began, which I would contend had more to do with the game's age at that point than anything else. Even then, XI's population decline was far slower than most any other comparable MMO out there (sub-based, etc).

SE could have stayed the course, continued creating content the way they did, and I believe the game would have remained healthier and the population wouldn't have dropped as it did. Instead, they decided to hop on the "mainstream MMO" bandwagon and start changing the game to be more like others (which they'd successfully avoided doing all those years prior). As I said in my last post, they decided to mix oil into water, and the results have been self-evident.

The population is at perhaps its lowest ever, and I don't think I've ever seen so many people as disappointed and upset about the direction of the game in all my time playing it.

They can't go back to Abyssea. They already raised the cap to 99 and, other than the "faux levels" granted through gear, there's only so far they can go in that direction.

I think they need to go back to their roots, look at what they did in those past expansions that kept people engaged and loyally playing for years. One thing I can guarantee they'll find is that their focus was far more on community, on lateral progression and on giving players challenges that weren't outright grinds, but that still took time to accomplish because they were difficult to do. Make old content relevant again for its own sake.

For their part, the playerbase has to get off this gear obsession they've been on. Every other complaint I see sometimes is something to do with getting new gear. This is the product of SE trying to turn the game into a vertical-progression setup. As Stompa said perfectly earlier in the thread, the fun of playing FFXI used to be playing FFXI. SE needs to look back to their own past, see what they did right, find a way to bring it to the present, and get themselves back on the right track. They're just getting deeper and deeper into the weeds with the decisions they've been making over the last few years.

FFXI was originally envisioned as a grand adventure, not a race to "end game". They need to return to that vision.

My 2 gil, and of course, my opinion.

And the problem with that was, they actually created nothing that I would call endgame, IMO Delve and skirmish aren't endgame. Endgame (except for hnms), always had a progression associated with it. You couldn't do dynamis until you'd attained rank 6, you couldn't do sky until you had sky access, same with jailers and limbus with sea access. There has always been a progression to be able to do endgame activities, along comes SoA and anybody can go in and do a skirmish or join a Delve group, one person completing one WKR so 17 other people can join them in a shout group is definitely not endgame.

I had really high hopes for this expansion, I mean they billed it as the first full expansion in 5 years, but what did we really get? We got Reives, WKR, Delve and Skirmish, that's the best they could come up with in their bid to keep us? Pitiful if you ask me. This is definitely not the grand adventure I was hoping for, and I feel more than a little let down at wasting the money I spent to get the expansion.

[KingShez]

Well, I can't say I'm disappointed with FFXI. I've played this game for over four years and I'm happy with what I got and the people I've met in this game, but all good things must come to end. This game has run its course. Over 11 years great job, but let's be real the storyline is boring, PS2 graphics, and adoulin weapons are ridiculous. The era we live progresses and we need to keep up with the Jones'. Nobody is running around with beepers anymore. We all have IPhones or galaxies. Whatever floats your boat. Stop trying to patch up the game and just come out and tell us you're killing the game! I promise I won't be mad. I'll just switch to ffxiv.

[Damane]

And the problem with that was, they actually created nothing that I would call endgame, IMO Delve and skirmish aren't endgame. Endgame (except for hnms), always had a progression associated with it. You couldn't do dynamis until you'd attained rank 6, you couldn't do sky until you had sky access, same with jailers and limbus with sea access. There has always been a progression to be able to do endgame activities, along comes SoA and anybody can go in and do a skirmish or join a Delve group, one person completing one WKR so 17 other people can join them in a shout group is definitely not endgame.

I had really high hopes for this expansion, I mean they billed it as the first full expansion in 5 years, but what did we really get? We got Reives, WKR, Delve and Skirmish, that's the best they could come up with in their bid to keep us? Pitiful if you ask me. This is definitely not the grand adventure I was hoping for, and I feel more than a little let down at wasting the money I spent to get the expansion.

delve is definitly endgame, haveing prequesites for sky sea etc was just retarded. ANYTHING you do at max lvl to further your gear is endgame. atm its delve and skirmish mostly because old content got irrelevant, in the november update it might be anything again with hardmode and REM updates.