Reasons Why FFXI is Declining

[nyheen]

was watching some old ff xp pt videos thinking wow things changed. remember the time when you joined in a xp pt deck out thinking with your job iam so bada$$ owning s@#$! but not anymore if it like this.. dont feel the same

[predatory]

Acron I don't know where or when you started playing but almost everything you listed is absolutely wrong in pre ToAU xp parties. You must have never leveled on lizards or scorpions, or exorays, or any number of mobs that used status effects and links against you, and we certainly did learn mob positioning, and back then sc coupled with mb were a big part of endgame. I knew many ls leaders who would rather have 2 dds sc so 15 blms could mb on Kirin than any other set up because kirin went down fast with that combo.

Stompa is absolutely right those xp parties you so easily sneer about were the training grounds, and if you couldn't do your job there, word got out about you, and you could never get in a decent shell, because it wasn't just a bunch of mindless zombies in those parties, there were endgame ls leaders leveling subs or second jobs, there were people from those same endgame shells leveling, at the time it was a big society, and a person was exposed to more people than he really knew he was meeting. The word got out about top notch players, and they were invited to join the shells that covered all spectrums of endgame, whereas alot of other players joined different shells to do different events.

The difference between good players and great players came from alot of trial and error done in those xp proving grounds that you so casually sneer about. At the time allakhazam.com was about the only site that offered any kind of information about the game so players didn't have the option to look up everything about the game as fast as they could type in a web address, (provided they had a second pc, because there was no windowed mode for the game at the time), and become read up about something, they had to learn it on the fly, or be stuck at low level forever on a desirable job.

I will give you that the learning experience wasn't over once you hit endgame, but the learning curve was much smaller by that time, and as long as you had the abiltiy to read directions before an event or ask questions then you fell right into the roll you were assigned by the job(s) you had chosen to level. If you made it to endgame and didn't know your job thoroughly you were immediately removed from the shell you had just joined, easy as that. People now are forgiving and willing to guide people, and show them the ropes at endgame, back then we didn't end of story.

The endgame you keep talking about has changed as well because let's face it, there really hasn't been any endgame for a very long time, back when CoP came out if you missed the missions your shell had done that day you better catch up before the next event, and you better do it on your time, meaning you better not be doing it during an hnm, dynamis, or sky run, which of course left very little time to actually get it done on your own.

I agree with Stompa the march to 75 is much too easy now, with helpful people you can take your first job from 1-99 in a matter of days, it takes less than a week after that to be totally skilled up, and within two weeks of that you can be all decked out in skirmish and delve gear, thinking you know something about the game, when you basically don't know shit about your job much less the game, and no, running around keying doesn't teach you anything about anything, other than how to run around opening boxes with a key

[detlef]

Cure V is special. But wasn't the original comparison between III and IV?

Aside from that, I hated leveling. For the longest time I only had a single job, BRD. It took me about 4 years before I leveled a second job because I found XP so tedious. And this was at a time when BRD and RDM were very desired. I can't even imagine leveling something like THF back then. If Abyssea hadn't come along I would have missed out on getting to play SCH, DRG, WHM, and a host of other jobs.

I guess XPing can teach you the basics, but it really just hits you over the head with the same thing over and over. You learn so much more about how to be a better player by doing endgame.

[Demon6324236]

Can you learn things about your job in XP parties which will be used in EG? Yes, anyone would be a fool to deny it outright. However, most things that can be learned like this should be able to be picked up fairly quickly in my opinion. Nothing, and I mean nothing at all, should take anyone the amount of time it used to take to get from 1 to 75, for a person to learn, understand, and develop the necessary skill to perform something you can learn about your job. No matter where you put it to use, it should never take that long to learn it, or get good at it.

I think if you were active the full time, 1 --> 99 in 3 days would be fine, so long as the person has to participate in the party and do their part. If they had to, then things would be easy to learn in that time frame, skill ups could be accelerated to accommodate that speed of leveling, and all would be fine. The parts you learn are not things that take a super long amount of time to learn, maybe for you to become skillful at, depending on what you are talking about, but not ever something you take that long to actually learn.

That's my take on this argument at least.

[Arcon]

Levelling was part of the game, the act of partying was a fun bonding experience. It was frequently exciting and hilarious.

Your opinion. A valid opinion, but an opinion nonetheless. I have no problems with you enjoying it at all, I never did. I have a few friends who like it, for whatever reason. What I do have a problem with is you stating that leveling was a huge, important part of the game and that that's the reason why the game is declining now.

I'm also calling you on the lie you made a few posts back, which I let you go on it so we could agree to disagree and move on, but you are clearly bent on having a fight so you can have one. There wasn't "a dozen" in the old game as you lied and claimed. TOAU had at least 20 camps alone. Even Mamook had five good spots for xp parties. There were hundreds of xp camps in Vanadiel for lvl 15-75, but you lied and said "there wasnt hundreds there was only about a dozen xp camps in the whole game pre Aby" <paraphrased bcoz I can't be bothered cutpasting your blatant lie>.

Sure, you can call the different locations in Mamook fighting the same 3 mobs different camps, just like you can call the different locations around the Sand Sweepers all different camps. Generally one zone has two to five different locations for camps. They might be in a different location, but they're the same mobs, same tactics, same scenery (again, Mamook is a good example of that). Sometimes lower level mobs are on one map, higher level mobs on another, but the same version of those (see colibris and crabs in all kinds of zones). Whatever. The camps weren't my problem with it, but they were definitely not a selling point either. Maybe more so than Abyssea, but that's hardly an argument, since Abyssea's camps sucked balls.

Re; lack of new content is why the game is failing. That is pure BS. People kept their FFXI accounts active even when they had to work 2 years for a single Raja's Ring, the old game offered far less gear/endgame content, and yet people kept logging in and playing it. Because it was a challenge, and involved long term effort.

That's not true. The old game offered roughly the same endgame content there is now. They added new battlefields, but they can be breezed through quickly, and that is the key difference. In the sheer amount of battlefields, sure there's more. But in the amount of time you can invest into endgame, it actually got reduced significantly, even despite the additions, because old content is so easy to complete and new content is so quick to finish.

And because XPing was a fun party experience, it was exciting and you could shine for a few hours on your best job.

You couldn't. EXP never gave you the chance to shine, because there was no situation where you could. Without challenging mobs you can't exceed. I can brag about solo tanking HNMs. I can't brag about a 1k weapon skill in an EXP party. What situation is there possibly where you can shine? That one time where you survived a double link?

Xping wasnt boring filler. I can say without a hesitation that soloing 75 lvls of Bst in 2004/early 2005, was the most nerve-wracking excitement life/death surviving-on-your-wits experience I've had in FFXI totally. It is way beyond any big endgame NM with thousands of teeth. Solo Bst was an adrenaline rush in 2004~. You could die all the time. It was incredibly exciting and rewarding. And it was entirely effort-based oldgame XP.

Despite the absolutely ridiculous claim that it was "beyond any big endgame NM with thousands of teeth", I'll let this slide because it was a solo effort. Those are generally much more than regular EXP parties, both in terms of required skill and relevance to endgame content. That is not what I mean by EXP party. I solo'd both Black Mage and Scholar on pets, so I know what that entails, and I also know that EXP parties don't compare at all to it. Which brings me back to ridiculous:

Xp parties too. Excitement. Crawler's Nest basement, "secret room". The puller leaves the hidden wall and goes to find a fly in the big room. The party waits in the secret room, resting MP. What will come through the secret door? One fly? Five flies? Two flies and an exoray? Can we survive? Excitement. Novelty. Each pull could bring a new dynamic situation that required teamwork and sometimes luck just to survive. Thats a bonding friendship-making experience, and a TEST OF SKILLS.

Cute that you think that. If you consider that a test of skill, you probably didn't even stand a chance in Dynamis.

You won't see any of that in your monocamp doll ops 'sleep for 69 lvls' new game.

Stop bringing that argument please. You don't need to convince me that Abyssea EXP is lame. I know. Abyssea EXP sucks balls. It's horribly boring and unproductive. The difference between us is, that I think the same thing about regular EXP. However, in Abyssea it only takes a few days instead of months. A few days of boring repetitive content beats months of boring repetitive content. Even more so if you can afk in the meantime and do something fun instead. That's how I see it. I know you disagree, and again, that's fine.

Acron I don't know where or when you started playing but almost everything you listed is absolutely wrong in pre ToAU xp parties. You must have never leveled on lizards or scorpions, or exorays, or any number of mobs that used status effects and links against you, and we certainly did learn mob positioning, and back then sc coupled with mb were a big part of endgame.

I didn't play much back then, and it may have been different, but not by much. Simply because mobs that can successfully prepare you for endgame do not exist outside of endgame. Sure, a scorpion can paralyze. A lizard can petrify. And that's all they can do. You may learn what those status effects are and how to cure them, big whoop. You don't need a several months long repetitive course to learn that, one look at the wiki page is enough. And you still won't know what to do when your entire alliance is hit by all of them at once. It may have been more of a challenge back then, and if it was, it might have also been more fun back then. But after that, it wasn't. And post-ToAU was the longest period of the game's life and that was a time during which the game was thriving.

[Afania]

Can you learn things about your job in XP parties which will be used in EG? Yes, anyone would be a fool to deny it outright. However, most things that can be learned like this should be able to be picked up fairly quickly in my opinion. Nothing, and I mean nothing at all, should take anyone the amount of time it used to take to get from 1 to 75, for a person to learn, understand, and develop the necessary skill to perform something you can learn about your job. No matter where you put it to use, it should never take that long to learn it, or get good at it.

I think if you were active the full time, 1 --> 99 in 3 days would be fine, so long as the person has to participate in the party and do their part. If they had to, then things would be easy to learn in that time frame, skill ups could be accelerated to accommodate that speed of leveling, and all would be fine. The parts you learn are not things that take a super long amount of time to learn, maybe for you to become skillful at, depending on what you are talking about, but not ever something you take that long to actually learn.

That's my take on this argument at least.

EXP pt serves more purpose than "learn your job" though. It's more like a way to social and have a feel of "A long journey to endgame". You can make a RPG hitting cap in 1 day, then when you're finally at max level it won't feel the same....some gaming experience needs time to develop, like how a film needs to be 3 hours long instead of 30 min, and novel needs 1000 pages to tell a proper story. Only issue in XI is, this game has job change system, so some ppl may lv 2nd or 3rd job and has to go through that all over again.

[Demon6324236]

In some games, a long journey can be a good thing, when its interactive, and makes you actually do fun things along the way. If a game has a leveling path of sorts which will make you fight encounters which are challenging and entertaining at certain points to actually involve the person. This game, has never been that kind of game, this game has always had experience parties just hacking away at the same type of mob over and over again while pulling another back to camp, sometimes with links, sometimes with additional agro of a higher level mob, but its not ever been the type of experience I would think of as a journey to EG which gives me any sense of growth.

To give my example in your own film analogy, I feel like FFXI's leveling would be the same as having a long backstory take place for over half of my movie, just to get to the part of the movie which happens in present day, the part that should be the meat of my experience, after having explained how the character got to this point. If a game wants the XP portion to be a journey all on its own, it needs to break up that leveling experience with some challenge, and meaty part of its own, to give not only a climb of levels, but a challenge to push yourself and see what you have learned, improved, and how you have grown. The thing is, like I said, FFXI leveling has never felt anywhere close to that for me, even the limit breaks were not close, though that was mostly because they were not fun or entertaining, but rather they were an annoying obstacle in my path to me.

So far as social aspects to it. Socializing can be done anywhere, anytime, XP parties hardly have that as an exclusive thing, even if they did, the same socializing I can do with someone in a Valk Dunes party killing crabs and lizards can be had while I kill worms in Abyssea for 4 hours.

Those kind of arguments have never made sense to me for those reasons.

[Afania]

In some games, a long journey can be a good thing, when its interactive, and makes you actually do fun things along the way. If a game has a leveling path of sorts which will make you fight encounters which are challenging and entertaining at certain points to actually involve the person. This game, has never been that kind of game, this game has always had experience parties just hacking away at the same type of mob over and over again while pulling another back to camp, sometimes with links, sometimes with additional agro of a higher level mob, but its not ever been the type of experience I would think of as a journey to EG which gives me any sense of growth.

To give my example in your own film analogy, I feel like FFXI's leveling would be the same as having a long backstory take place for over half of my movie, just to get to the part of the movie which happens in present day, the part that should be the meat of my experience, after having explained how the character got to this point. If a game wants the XP portion to be a journey all on its own, it needs to break up that leveling experience with some challenge, and meaty part of its own, to give not only a climb of levels, but a challenge to push yourself and see what you have learned, improved, and how you have grown. The thing is, like I said, FFXI leveling has never felt anywhere close to that for me, even the limit breaks were not close, though that was mostly because they were not fun or entertaining, but rather they were an annoying obstacle in my path to me.

So far as social aspects to it. Socializing can be done anywhere, anytime, XP parties hardly have that as an exclusive thing, even if they did, the same socializing I can do with someone in a Valk Dunes party killing crabs and lizards can be had while I kill worms in Abyssea for 4 hours.

Those kind of arguments have never made sense to me for those reasons.

I guess this is just a personal experience type of things.....I've experienced many different ways of lving in other MMOs...do quest, do dungeons, get EXP by exploring maps, do public event, do PVP etc.....but they're all very different from XI 6 man party. And yes, I've done Abyssea worm pt many times too, still different atmosphere and pace from 6 man party. People come and go in worms pt, and often afk. You can't develop same atmosphere in such situation.

You can argue that you can social in dungeons/public event/PVP blah blah, but they're just not the same as XI 6 man party. You usually* don't chat for 3~4hr in those events due the the design mechanic....they don't last as long and you need to focus 100% there's less time to chat. You said you want fun and interactive ways to lv, then you'd see "kill this, sleep that, runnnnn" "pop ballad please" in /p chat rather than "Today my dog had a new baby, so cute " "What's the name of your dog?"

6 man party in XI force you to social in a much slower and relax pace, it's like 6 person got stuck in an elevator and has to wait for 3hr for the rescue, so they start chatting and ended up become friends after they're out. If they're not stucked in the elevator they won't say more than hello when they met each other.

I'm not trying to argue 6 man EXP pt is better or worse than Abyssea pt/quest for EXP/public event/PVP/exploration for EXP, just stating they're different in terms of atmosphere and pace, and other means to EXP simply can't replace it.

[Xantavia]

To give my example in your own film analogy, I feel like FFXI's leveling would be the same as having a long backstory take place for over half of my movie, just to get to the part of the movie which happens in present day, the part that should be the meat of my experience, after having explained how the character got to this point. If a game wants the XP portion to be a journey all on its own, it needs to break up that leveling experience with some challenge, and meaty part of its own, to give not only a climb of levels, but a challenge to push yourself and see what you have learned, improved, and how you have grown. The thing is, like I said, FFXI leveling has never felt anywhere close to that for me, even the limit breaks were not close, though that was mostly because they were not fun or entertaining, but rather they were an annoying obstacle in my path to me.

There was always the option to do missions in between your leveling, the first times at least. Your first job, did you get it to 75 before doing city rank 2? The level capped BCNM's (2-3 and 5-1) told me I should break up my leveling and work on those. Think I was only 70 went I first got Rank 10. Solo'd up to the Black Coffin fight for Aht Urgan in my mid-60's when I still enjoyed BST. Maybe you feel that the game doesn't really begin until you hit level cap and can start doing events that drop the best of the best gear. I myself think the journey up to that point is more rewarding. Different people enjoy different things, but we will never agree on where the real meat of game is.

[FrankReynolds]

It's not about where the meat is. If you guys think 6 man old school parties are where it's at then do them. Level synch never went away. The old camps are still there. Nothing changed about that.

What you want is for everyone else to feel like you do. They don't. They don't want to do what you want. If they did, we wouldn't be having this discussion.