Reasons Why FFXI is Declining

[Arkitan]

And Im just saying that without having the game have value, the game will always remain in the toilet with their players whining, crying and complaining consistently! SE mise well make the game free to play if they want to continue to outlaw RMTing! The only people that are really gaining anything is SE in general! Theyre the ones that like to dip their hands into our bank accounts and giving us very little in return! RMTing would actually solve that! Being a crafter myself, am I the only one that the only thing I miss about the good ole days is inflation?

[Arkitan]

You have no proof of these sweatshops! You know most RMTs are bots and some are legit players. Spread some more of that false propaganda! Some people havent heard it!

If some people received a milkshake headache every time they did something stupid, some players (Im not naming anyone) would have a 24 hr migraine! O.o

[Arkitan]

Dude, Im not an RMT but I still screw with my server's auction house! Why? Because I can and noone else will because the people on my server dont have the basic economic sense to know how! Its not hard to figure out the simple! I turned a 500k darksteel harness +1 into a 1.5m piece of armor! Mule is Yunalescas, check FFXIAH.com if you dont believe me! Now its continually selling for 1.5m because Ive forced people to remove their head out of their asses and persuade them to craft! You should do the same! =)

[FrankReynolds]

There are lots of ways to play videogames at a high standard of skill, without requiring RMT gil input, and without requiring high-value inflated prices on goods you sell just so you can play. I very rarely sell high-price inflated items, most of my income is just farming regular junk and also fishing. I am still able to seriously enjoy the game, have immense amounts of fun and excitement in low-man runs with my friends. Having fun is not expensive. Having the best gear in the game often is. But even in those cases you can farm it, just much slower than if you were surfing the inflated RMT wave.

I've been a gamer for 33 years, I'm not especially proud of it because being old really sucks. But for over three decades I been mashing these buttons and I've always felt that Gaming is no different to other high-skill sports. For example in the Olympics, top athletes compete, and victory is based on skill, stamina, practice, luck, etc. These factors are no different to Videogaming. When an athlete uses steroids to win, that is the same as a Gamer buying gil, or using hacks and cheatmodes. It is cheating, it places an unfair advantage on the person cheating. And it is considered a big sin in all Sports, and many Gamers consider it to be a big sin in Videogames too.

The best times I have had in FFXI in 9 years have been exciting low-man battles where me and my friends were almost dying but somehow managed to survive, by skill and stamina. That doesn't cost gil. And those are the best times I've had. Also obtaining ra-ex stuff from caskets or NM's, really gave me a thrill when the item dropped after so much effort. And again it is an entirely gil-free situation.
I don't have a problem with catching fish and NPCing them or selling them at low AH prices, or farming/making my own threads for clothcraft. The money is enough to support my game. It just takes longer than the 'buy everything with gil' route, but tbh man I'm not in a hurry.

And that's cool for you, but a lot of people don't enjoy the same things you do. I've played FFXI pretty much since the JP release and I've made / lost a few friends, but that's really not why I log on. I log on to play. I can hop on any game on xbox live or just use a phone if I wanna chat with friends. I used to enjoy crafting when I first learned it. That's why I leveled fishing and cooking and a few other subs, but it got boring after the first year or so and now it's just a mindless time sink to me. It's not fun at all. A lot of people didn't even level a skill before they came to that conclusion. I also spent months farming beast blood, buggard parts, beehive chips etc. again, incredibly boring. I used to get super pissed at the bots I saw until I got to a point where I realized that I was farming gil in an incredibly mind numbing fashion just so that I could be geared properly for events that I wanted to do when Instead, I could make the gil much faster just doing the events by selling stuff to people who had made their money through whatever means.

All that aside, the reason there are so many RMT is because so much of the population use them. If you remove the RMT, you remove the people who depend on them. Not only that, but the RMT themselves pay for an enormous number of accounts. All that money goes to development just like your's and mine and is desperately needed at this point. It's seriously a necessary evil.

[FrankReynolds]

For one thing, the vast majority of players have never used RMT gil.

Yes they have, they just don't know it. Every time you make money by doing something other than NPCing items, you are receiving RMT gil. SE obviously likes this set up because they have yet to create a solution that brings gil into the game without being crazy easy to exploit for RMTs. I know it's a tough problem, but come on... It's been 10 years.

The majority. You can't have a successful business model if the majority of people hate you and never use your services.

You also can't have a game altering problem if "The majority" aren't somehow involved.

The success of RMT comes from the Ultra-Lazy minority of players who buy so much gil in large amounts, pay for NM-botting teams, gear building and character building services etc. These players are a minority in FFXI and they spend a lot on RMT. They also lie, they buy mountains of gil to build a relic from 75-99 on a new account, then tell everybody they farmed it legitmode years ago bcoz they are so Mega Vet.

And obviously no one minds too much, or they would all be crafting, fishing and NPCing items like you instead of farming dynamis and selling NM drops / wins like they are now. No. They want to make a quick buck by helping that gil buyer spend his ill gotten loot.

RMT income is not from light spending by a player majority, it is from heavy spending by a player minority.

If that were true, the economies of every server would be insanely different based on the spending habits of a few people. They aren't because it is in fact a large number of people buy small amounts of gil.

On my LS and friend groups, nobody has ever bought gil. We as a group totally hate RMT.

LOL Ask anyone. They'll tell you the same thing. Someone's doing it though. A lot of someones.

RMT gil buying was as common as you seem to think, they wouldnt need to spam advertise it with tells. A popular product sells itself, it doesn't need to be rammed down peoples throats every 45 minutes.

*** looks out the window at the giant iPhone billboard and scratches head

If "RMT is so important for FFXI survival" ( to paraphrase you) why is it that now there is less policing of RMT in the game, and could be the Golden Age for RMT, the servers are all empty. Because : people were not playing FFXI to buy gil, hang out with RMT or with players who buy gil and cheatmode their way through the game. Players were in the game because they liked playing it, but now the game is not so much fun post SoA, people have quit the game. Despite the cheap availability of RMT gil. Surely everyone should still be playing FFXI and buying the cheap gil, according to your argument. But the fact is that most people played FFXI *despite* RMT gil, not *because of* RMT gil. The RMT gil is still here, but the players are not. Your argument dies.

Post SOA, there was nothing worth buying with gil besides delve wins and half as many people around to buy it. Gil buyers got mad because their shiny stuff that they paid for sucked and quit just like the people who built them the hard way. Watch the gil prices rise now that RME have been updated and need 300 items to finish. You'll see.

I never once said I use FFXI as chatroom or a phone conversation. I'm not logging into FFXI to chat, I login to low-man battles with my friend group. Its excitement videogaming, has nothing to do with phones or chatrooms. And I've had Stompa's content ID continuously active since 2004, plus two mules, so I've paid a lot more fees than most GS do.

That's cool.

We need RMT accounts to keep FFxi afloat because we lack well-designed content to keep real players in the game.

Fixed it.

RMT ruined the game for thousands of people years 2004--->2009. RMT using pop-bots to claim NM's, including warp hacks to warp to the spot where the NM was about to randomly pop at.There was RMT in Oztroya who he was selling okotes like candy and he never lost a claim ever, you would see him standing on the west side of the room, suddenly he jumped to the east side (without running) , and 0.5 seconds later the NM popped right ontop of him. This happened every time the NM popped. And he was RMT. Stealing treasure from REAL players. And supported in his dirty thieving RMT activities by the dollars of FAKE players who buy gil and cheat their way through games coz they don't got the rocks to play games on legitmode.

No, SE ruined the game for thousands of people by poorly implementing those NMs and / or their drops. Thank god for those ??? in abyssea huh? At least they got that right. Funny thing is that most of those bots belonged to people who play the game, Not RMT. Why waste money buying a fancy bot for an account that will probably get banned to camp and nm that pops 2 times a week when you can just send 1,000 sweatshop laborers out to farm bone chips and fish?