This thread AGAIN, please, fix WK.

[Daemon]

Dude, you're wrong.

Accept it.

The event requires way more effort than the reward considering the high probability of nothing at all.

It doesn't matter how much or how little content SoA has, the event is still badly designed, and is most-literally, self-defeating.

Well yeah but are we looking at a finished SoA?

[Umichi]

I still think it's just because you guys are slacking off in WK... perhaps system can detect if you are dual boxing a pretty interesting way to make it a detrrent as we all know SE doesn't fullymsupport dual boxing

[Rekin]

Well yeah but are we looking at a finished SoA?

One does not rate a product by the versions that come after it, one should rate it as it is given.

That being said SoA as a whole seems rather haphazard in long term planning.

[Kylos]

Well ... after spending a few hours of my time doing Hurkan for the third time (getting bullet and grip first two times), and spending 65k bayld on a pop, I was granted the ultimate of gifts. It was ... part iron ... part sand ... could it be!???

IRON SAND!!!

Woot, I feel so accomplished. Thank you SE for wasting my time once again, absolutely love it. I don't care that I didn't get a Scythe, Axe, Hat or Boots from this, because the Iron Sand will keep me happy for a long time.

I have had so much fun today, I don't think I can bring myself to go back until Wildskeepers are changed, otherwise I may have some kind of overload! I just can't understand why people are doing these reives less and less nowadays despite the huge colonization rates! You got to be crazy not to want some Iron Sand!

[FrankReynolds]

The majority of other games don't require players to use gear for specific abilities, spells. That's why everyone has to carry so much equipment.

Other games don't require macros for gear swaps or the need to have zillion pieces of gear to WS, or accurately accomplish a single task or land a spell.

The majority of other games don't give you sub jobs, where you also use gears to enhance your Subjob abilities.

This one does though... Because it was made that way. They may not have intended for us to swap out so much gear in the beginning, but they have certainly encouraged it over the last ten years. They had plenty of opportunity to make gear and items that were sufficiently powerful in their respective slots as to negate the need for swaps. They chose not to. PS2 didn't do that. They did.

I agree with their decision to make gear swaps a part of the game. It adds complexity and makes the game more dynamic. I don't agree with their decision to keep an incredibly crappy macro system in light of vastly superior third party tools or their decision to make so much gear of varying use that it taxed out the inventory system.

I especially don't agree with the way the do updates in the wrong order. If they plan on adding something that will tax inventory, they should update inventory first. When given the option, they put the horse before the carriage every time.

And most games don't give half of the detail options of enhancing your character.

Okay, well customization that annoys the customer isn't really of much benefit.

Other games use color and fashionable items to make a character look different. FFXI offers items to make you stand out in power from the rest, not by how you look.

Which is fine in moderation. It's when specific pieces of gear become a requirement for further participation and said pieces of gear require help from other people in order to obtain them, that things begin to fall apart.

Long difficult time consuming quests, missions, boss fights that drop powerful items that give everyone a chance to enhance your character differently because not everyone has the drive, skill or time to obtain certain pieces allowing each player to have different types of gear even if its a momentary thing, at least your accomplishment will make you different that everyone else's accomplishment.

I could pretend to be all altruistic and say that I bought a Lexus because I wanted to differentiate myself and show my drive and skill (time is not a virtue, it's commodity), but I think you know that's BS. I want to have the luxury and I want people to see me as someone who is better than them (also, chicks dig it).

People who are interested in the challenge will do it no matter what the reward is.

People who want something that shows their skill and prowess will do it just to have a shiny trinket that proves that. Even if it doesn't really make any substantial difference in their life (like trading in my Hyundai for a Lexus).

The rest of us (the vast majority) will do it because the gear is better than what we had, it makes other things easier and it gives us a sense of superiority.

These things don't really need to be connected. If you look at the vast majority of games out there, you will find that most in game achievements give nothing more than a medal, or a new skin for your character or an gamer rank point. They don't have to make the gear so powerful that you cannot complete certain events without it. They don't even have to make gear that comes from these events vastly superior. It just has to be a little better than the last thing. Look at afterglows. They provide no direct bonus to the user, but you know damn well that if you had the time and money, you would get them all just because.

Unless you want to have the same exact power as everyone else using temp gear that everyone else can get easily only to toss it out for the next tier that everyone else can get.

It's fine to have gear that is different enough to actually make a difference. It's bad to have gear that is so much more powerful that you can't play at a reasonable level without it. When you do that, you end up with a player base that only does one thing because all other events drop vastly inferior gear. That means that anyone who doesn't like or can't do that one thing, has no reason to stick around. You do that enough times and there is no one left.

Most games make you choose or toss gear like crap items. And rares in most games are for fashion.

Most rares in this game are for fashion because they have been rendered completely inadequate by far more powerful gear and far more taxing events. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

As I said before, the power you gain from items were suppose to be power gained through level achievement. However the way DEV TEAM's direction, they prevent everyone from being able to solo mass kill everything in game and forever want players to party together to achieve goals.

The game hasn't been like that for a long time. Any time you make something so strong as to be required (whether this is due to actual game limitations or those imposed by consensus of the player base), you create a market for it. When people have things that other people need, they sell them. They don't give them away. When people make things to sell, that removes them from the pool of people that can be teamed up with. When the pool of viable team mates shrinks, the market for the selling get's larger. The more powerful the item and the harder the event, the faster this happens and the more the harder it gets for people at the bottom.

Again, unless SE changes the entire game according to convenience, then FFXI wouldn't be FFXI.

It would be like the majority of other games.

At some point water will reach the top of the glass.

I know I read an article written a long time ago that party play was always part of Final Fantasy games and that the DEVs did not want to break that tradition.

Just we are coming to the point that as more people are quiting, DEV Team is implementing items that are easier or less time consuming to get to keep up with todays standard MMORPG.

People today have more options than years ago and don't have patience to play just 1 game.

And most people today just want instant gratification and quick results. We live in a time where people have much more ways to be entertained than waste hours upon hours just to do stuff.

You have to make events for the population you have. The game won't grow by word of mouth. They have to advertise and promote if they want growth. Trust me. I manage an IT department. I support hundreds of phones. No one listens to my advice when they buy a phone. They buy whatever is popular on TV and the net. Word of mouth won't cut it and building events for hundreds of people won't make hundreds of people come play your game. This is not field of dreams.

They had a population large enough to support big events. They no longer do. Besieged worked because it was 10 seconds away from where all the bored people were standing and it didn't cost anything to participate. That is not the case with WKR.

While it takes hours to get a party and do 1 boss at end game. Other games offer players to do 10 billion things in a couple of hours. And because people are getting use to that type of play, everyone is losing patience to stick around and do what FFXI offers.

If you don't like the ilvl stuff, DEV team could have left us all at level 99. With level 99 content.

If the monsters are gonna smash us just the same, I don't really see the difference. Ilevel didn't add any new abilities. It didn't change how I play my jobs. It just added stats. They could have just added stats without gear. People could have continued to obtain gear at their own pace. Instead we have "Get everything now or be level 99 forever because no one is doing that event any more".

If you are level 99, obviously you wouldn't go back and play level 30 content. If the majority of players are level 99, then how do avoid the gap of all the new players or whoever is 1-30?

They fixed that by making leveling fairly painless, then they broke it again by adding iLevel gear.

If SE never implemented Abyssea, FC and level to 99 in 8 hours. How are those people going to catch up if the majority is past all of that?

Again, they could have made exp far easier to obtain without raising the cap. They raised the cap in order to give transition us into more powerful abilities. They made leveling in abyssea so strong so that people would maintain interest in it beyond just killing the NMs. By making Cruor and gil items and time come from chests, they gave people who didn't need to level a reason to help people who did. They could have just made every monster outside abyssea give 2,000 exp, but they wanted to keep people in groups. It sorta worked... sorta...

Obviously not many people are going to raise their hand and go back and help those lower levels, otherwise I'd see people helping all the time rather than complaint no one cares and no one helps others.

The rewards for not helping people far outweigh the rewards for helping. When you only have two hours and you could spend it getting and item that gives you 2 more strength than you currently have in your ws build, it doesn't seem like a big sacrifice to help your friend instead. WHen the item you could be working on gives you 200 accuracy, 200 evasion, 200 parry skill, 150 more base damage and 60 strength, helping your friend becomes a major waste of time. Especially if it's a stranger and not a friend... and especially if you could be charging that stranger enormous amounts of money.


"exacerbation"

Then again to fill that gap, DEV team sped up the leveling process to allow everyone to level to 99 in 8 hours.

Because of that.

Cost of convenience just made all auction house, NPC gear from 1-98 irrelevant.

There wasn't much they could do to get people to max level quickly and still keep mid-level gear relevant. They could have made more level capped gear that was craftable at various levels to replace it though. Again, a lack of foresight.

If the majority of players were level 30, obviously they are not going to focus on level 99 content.

On top of that they have to focus on level ranges close to each other say level 80-99. Not 30-99. It just doesn't work that way. And the further in time the game is around, this rule applies even more.

Meaning small changes can tilt the game off balance bigger as level ranges become higher and higher.

To the DEV team I'm sure Delve was meant to be the last tier of SoA. People skipped part of the tier design and that tipped the balance of the game way off. To us it was a big effect. To them it probably was a small detail that wasn't meant to be a big crash. But a mistake made it that way which is how big of difference this mistakes can be seen at higher levels.

They recreated an older problem. They were having a hard time keeping every job relevant at end game and getting people to end game level in sufficient time, so they sped up leveling so that they didn't have to make every job relevant. People could just level multiple jobs. But then they made a lot of the jobs rely on hard to obtain items and they implemented caps on necessary weapon skills, thus limiting the number of jobs people could adequately play.

Then instead of learning from those mistakes, they made content that was tiered in a way that is not viable over the long term because as more and more people beat it, it gets harder and harder for those who have not. Essentially putting the greatest challenge on those who are least prepared to complete it.

That's how hard development becomes as levels are increased.

No game developer is going to linger on to old content if the majority is past it doing bigger things.

And as levels get higher, gaps become wider and yeah it sux that people get left out but unless SE invested millions more and hired an army of developers to focus on every part of the game.

Why do it if there's not enough new players to join and fill in all those areas and populate it if there's no crowd?

Then again if there's not a lot of people on the servers why direct part of the crowd away from SoA if its only going to kill SoA content? Then you will never find enough people to do WR.

Well, if they don't maintain areas that are vital to new players, then they have no reason to try and attract new players. If they don't want new players then they have to maintain the base they have. If they don't want to maintain the base they have, then it's pretty much circling the drain.

[OmnysValefor]

Well yeah but are we looking at a finished SoA?

By the time they finish Seekers of Adoulin, Final Fantasy XI will be finished.

[OmnysValefor]

I still think it's just because you guys are slacking off in WK... perhaps system can detect if you are dual boxing a pretty interesting way to make it a detrrent as we all know SE doesn't fullymsupport dual boxing

Do you even know what you're talking about?

I don't dualbox, I don't have a secondary character to dualbox anymore (I had one a few years ago).

I've gone to every WK as PLD and been fulltime-active on the boss, except one where I went as BLU because I was on BLU and the boss was at 25% so I rushed out.

[Vasch]

I still think it's just because you guys are slacking off in WK... perhaps system can detect if you are dual boxing a pretty interesting way to make it a detrrent as we all know SE doesn't fullymsupport dual boxing

I've shown up at 5% and gotten just one tick and got a weapon drop. I've maxed out bayld and participated the entire time and gotten nothing. Getting no drops is firmly related to rolling a drop you already have. I've always gotten an item during my first participation in a particular WK, regardless of when I got there and damage done.

[Demon6324236]

I still think it's just because you guys are slacking off in WK... perhaps system can detect if you are dual boxing a pretty interesting way to make it a detrrent as we all know SE doesn't fullymsupport dual boxing

Actually, they do apparently support it, because otherwise it would not have been a noted feature in the new UI that we will be capable of having multiple game windows up at a single time.

Also, participation has nothing to do with it, at all...

[Daemon]

This one does though... Because it was made that way. They may not have intended for us to swap out so much gear in the beginning, but they have certainly encouraged it over the last ten years. They had plenty of opportunity to make gear and items that were sufficiently powerful in their respective slots as to negate the need for swaps. They chose not to. PS2 didn't do that. They did.

I agree with their decision to make gear swaps a part of the game. It adds complexity and makes the game more dynamic. I don't agree with their decision to keep an incredibly crappy macro system in light of vastly superior third party tools or their decision to make so much gear of varying use that it taxed out the inventory system.

I especially don't agree with the way the do updates in the wrong order. If they plan on adding something that will tax inventory, they should update inventory first. When given the option, they put the horse before the carriage every time.

You are looking at from your point of view. 3rd party tools prove that it can be done doesn't mean it can be done. I see a hand full of people using speed hacks. That doesn't mean everyone at the same time can have adjustments made that way. 3rd party tools prove macros can be extended. I've only seen a hand full of people talk about using such tools. Doesn't mean everyone on the same map, same group, same time can change 16 pieces of gear at once. This is why lags happen.

Okay, well customization that annoys the customer isn't really of much benefit.

All games use visuals and stats gear for customization for a reason. Look at Ragnarok online. They make rares based on fashion to make every character different in style. Which draws addiction to playing bosses and hunting rares. OMG!! Baphomet hat!!! Osiris crown!!! They make items that's more eye candy with certain stats.

Even use cards that drop from every monster which are at 0.1 drop rate to allow players to upgrade their gear with better stats. Some items have up to 1-4 slots.

FFXI focus more about stats than instant fashion. And gear that focus on your overall power to make you stand out from others based on your gear, not by your pretty looks or how big your helm is. Our reward is based on power progression through items.

People who are interested in the challenge will do it no matter what the reward is.

Which is ok if there's enough interested but no one should expect every event to be the same. I'd hate to constantly do VW style every content. Or do every REM style for every weapon with decent stats. And no one will have the same drive to take on that challenge. Look at Mythic, do you see everyone with a mythic?

The rest of us (the vast majority) will do it because the gear is better than what we had, it makes other things easier and it gives us a sense of superiority.

And the most players did REM?

These things don't really need to be connected. If you look at the vast majority of games out there, you will find that most in game achievements give nothing more than a medal, or a new skin for your character or an gamer rank point. They don't have to make the gear so powerful that you cannot complete certain events without it. They don't even have to make gear that comes from these events vastly superior. It just has to be a little better than the last thing. Look at afterglows. They provide no direct bonus to the user, but you know damn well that if you had the time and money, you would get them all just because.

Power of gear is made according to the level range of content. To you it's overpowered. Then I start seeing people complain that they are sick of fighting Yumcax for 10 hours and Hurkan for 5.

It's fine to have gear that is different enough to actually make a difference. It's bad to have gear that is so much more powerful that you can't play at a reasonable level without it. When you do that, you end up with a player base that only does one thing because all other events drop vastly inferior gear. That means that anyone who doesn't like or can't do that one thing, has no reason to stick around. You do that enough times and there is no one left.

Already explained that drastic measures had to wow the community to bring life back into SoA. If you can't play without it, then that means you depend on your gear than your skill because you don't necessarily need strictly gear to define your skills. I use to spend atleast 6 hours a day soloing Mikey, doing WoE to practice my skills, evading, dodging, Spellcasting, gear swapping, figuring out various types of gear to reduce damage, reduce magic damage, kiting skills, MP efficiency, Regen and Phalanx time duration, stoneskin duration, Ability timers, Regen timers, amount shadows from utsusemi and what spells can be evaded and what spells can remove a mobs shadows instantly quick as possible,when to flash a mob, recast timers for spells, weapon swaps to Weaponskills and knowing which WS debuff to durations of debuff, and Mp vs Aspir recast. Learning to pace myself according to all timers. And so on. I've killed Mikey with every single Mage job including bard and Geomancer solo.

And most cases I am the last person to die when parties start to wipe including tanking bosses when DDs get smashed.

Sad when I'm standing there tanking a boss for a few minutes for all DDs... Then people constantly check my gear and wonder how I do it. When in reality anyone could if they only showed up well prepared >.>

Most rares in this game are for fashion because they have been rendered completely inadequate by far more powerful gear and far more taxing events. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Items will always become inadequate at some point in time if the levels are increased. Sounds like you want old gear to stay relevant forever.

The game hasn't been like that for a long time. Any time you make something so strong as to be required (whether this is due to actual game limitations or those imposed by consensus of the player base), you create a market for it. When people have things that other people need, they sell them. They don't give them away. When people make things to sell, that removes them from the pool of people that can be teamed up with. When the pool of viable team mates shrinks, the market for the selling get's larger. The more powerful the item and the harder the event, the faster this happens and the more the harder it gets for people at the bottom.

Players haven't been low levels in a long time. As you increase in level along with others, conditions change.

You have to make events for the population you have. The game won't grow by word of mouth. They have to advertise and promote if they want growth. Trust me. I manage an IT department. I support hundreds of phones. No one listens to my advice when they buy a phone. They buy whatever is popular on TV and the net. Word of mouth won't cut it and building events for hundreds of people won't make hundreds of people come play your game. This is not field of dreams.

Games become outdated. Nintendo doesn't spend millions of dollars to keep promoting 1st generation games. They move forward. Not linger. That's what FFXIV was made for. To move forward along with the times.

No one will play your event if your level 120 and breeze through in a couple if months.

They had a population large enough to support big events. They no longer do. Besieged worked because it was 10 seconds away from where all the bored people were standing and it didn't cost anything to participate. That is not the case with WKR.

Besieged was good for what it did how many years ago? You still want besieged to be relevant? There is a huge difference in level from WR and besieged. And most players are not at besieged era anymore.

If the monsters are gonna smash us just the same, I don't really see the difference. Ilevel didn't add any new abilities. It didn't change how I play my jobs. It just added stats. They could have just added stats without gear. People could have continued to obtain gear at their own pace. Instead we have "Get everything now or be level 99 forever because no one is doing that event any more".

So what's better? Have monsters easy? Where's the fun in that? They smash you until you and everyone shows up in higher gear. When VW and every other event was first implemented, people got smashed. Until people started getting the gear from VW along with REM that made it easy. And I've seen way too many players not even carrying -PDT set.

They fixed that by making leveling fairly painless, then they broke it again by adding iLevel gear.

If you are earning ilvl gear. I'm sure that means you are past the exp phase >.>

Again, they could have made exp far easier to obtain without raising the cap. They raised the cap in order to give transition us into more powerful abilities. They made leveling in abyssea so strong so that people would maintain interest in it beyond just killing the NMs. By making Cruor and gil items and time come from chests, they gave people who didn't need to level a reason to help people who did. They could have just made every monster outside abyssea give 2,000 exp, but they wanted to keep people in groups. It sorta worked... sorta...

Do you know what it means to reach the inevitable question? If the majority of players reach that question then your example becomes irrelevant. And the attention was Abyssea. Not outer areas. Unless you want Abyssea to become dead or struggle for groups to be made, quests and missions to be finished.

The rewards for not helping people far outweigh the rewards for helping. When you only have two hours and you could spend it getting and item that gives you 2 more strength than you currently have in your ws build, it doesn't seem like a big sacrifice to help your friend instead. WHen the item you could be working on gives you 200 accuracy, 200 evasion, 200 parry skill, 150 more base damage and 60 strength, helping your friend becomes a major waste of time. Especially if it's a stranger and not a friend... and especially if you could be charging that stranger enormous amounts of money.

Tell that to the people who are about statistics, items, materials, self gain, lazy and don't want to be bothered wasting their time to go back and help others when they are too busy trying to get the best items that are current. Then they wonder why they can't find enough people to do content like WR. Well maybe if everyone went back and helped others catch up. Eventually you will see those players join your groups later. But people are too busy focusing on them than focusing on the community as a whole. And because having that kind of mind only contributes to the issue of "Nobody wants to do stuff with me when I want to"

Til this day I always go back and help others, add those low levels to my friendslidt and invite them to play things like Dyna, Salvage, VW, WoE, Delve, Colonization Reives and I never have a problem getting people together.

But people don't know that friendships don't happen overnight and no one can expect people to magically join the event you want to do unless they know you personally and want to hang out with you because you took the time to make friends with them than expect strangers to join every event you do.

And people do look up to you and appreciate that you are spending your time and using your power for the greater good to help those struggling than leave them behind to catch up slowly only to find out that the gap got even bigger while High levels continue to progress.

There wasn't much they could do to get people to max level quickly and still keep mid-level gear relevant. They could have made more level capped gear that was craftable at various levels to replace it though. Again, a lack of foresight.

How exactly does that happen when people are always speeding past content faster than they can pump out updates. How do you decide which gear over another if there is no more level progress? Not everyone is going to decide 1 piece over another and most likely those who go for every piece will have different reasons to carry each item which would only add more items in your gear sets and increase more inventory crisis.

If level cap was 75 no matter how many items SE releases, you can't simply add higher stats over another forever. Your level has to be adjusted along with the power of the items being acquired. Unless they give more long quests like REM. then the gap will be between hardcore players over others who don't have the patience or drive to do those quests. Til this day you have people complaining they can't get into Delve groups because they don't have REM. if they are complaining that, it means they don't want to spend several months just to play Delve.

As for crafters.

This would only turn into a greed fest if its crafting items which would only make crafters rich.

Balance is like tug o war, the better you make it on 1 side, the worse you make it for the other side. Then again the worse you make it on 1 side, the better you make it for the other side.

They recreated an older problem. They were having a hard time keeping every job relevant at end game and getting people to end game level in sufficient time, so they sped up leveling so that they didn't have to make every job relevant. People could just level multiple jobs. But then they made a lot of the jobs rely on hard to obtain items and they implemented caps on necessary weapon skills, thus limiting the number of jobs people could adequately play.

Uhg no. It's the community who makes jobs irrelevant because NA players only care about statistics. JPs don't discriminate jobs based on statistics. Oh this job does max damage. This job is most effecient.

And because NA players think this way, they don't bother using other skills, abilities and only follow what statistics tell them. JPs on the other hand incorporate all aspects of battle and use every skill, every ability and come up with various strategies. Not because they follow statistics and aim 1 direction. So what if people think Certain skills suck because they only last 5 seconds.

I still question why people think rotating bards to have 6 songs in a party only to get confused over amount of time 1 hour lasts vs time spend dropping and rotating only to be off point. Still people think Summoner sucks yet I see JPs use them all the time.

Anyone limiting themselves and the entire group based on statistics only follow robotic system that becomes the same routine every fight. JPs use every job for different reasons and I've never been forced to come a specific job unless it was an event like VW where procs were needed and all other required jobs were filled.

As for relying on hard to obtain items. Lack of knowledge and open mindness prevents players from progressing. If I level a job to 99 on a new account. Ill level a job I can use to earn Bayld, buy Bayld gear, enter Delve on a job as a support regardless if I don't want to play the job. Earn my Kis, plasm, then invest buying and upgrading the gear I do want.

Then instead of learning from those mistakes, they made content that was tiered in a way that is not viable over the long term because as more and more people beat it, it gets harder and harder for those who have not. Essentially putting the greatest challenge on those who are least prepared to complete it.

All FF games have tier areas.

You don't pay attention to details I can tell. Human error happened with SoA. People were losing interest for several reasons. Colonization was too hard. That was one of the main reasons.

New expansion was doing fine before Delve, but when they release that, people jumped on Delve and skipped skirmish making skirmish irrelevant. WR cost too much Bayld and not enough people.

Delve made huge gaps and many were complaining about the overall SoA expansion as fail.

REM players complaining threatening to rage quit because of Delve weapons.

SoA failing because REM players lost interest. People without REM lost interest. Colonization too hard made players lose interest. And gaps between players who could do delve and those who can't made those without REM lose interest.

Quest with "go here, go tgere, come back, done" made people lose interest.

Fail SoA means Fail FFXI because honestly after paying $30 bucks for an expansion that was destroying the game I can see the DEVs had to do something drastic to spoil the playerbase in order to keep the crowd at SoA. Purposely directing as many people possible to keep the crowds attention on SoA. Even at the cost of making all other content irrelevant.

So what is better?? Direct everyone's attention back to Salvafe? Abyssea? VW? Or direct everyone's attention to the new expansion? You can't direct players to different parts of the game unless you want every single server to suffer doing specific events like WR, Delve, Colonization Rieves. Unless FFXI has an overflowing server of players it would be reasonable but we don't have massive amounts of people.

So unless you want less people to join WR then I see how the DEV Team has to catch people's attention by releasing overpowered items to keep the majority of players playing the new expansion.

Well, if they don't maintain areas that are vital to new players, then they have no reason to try and attract new players. If they don't want new players then they have to maintain the base they have. If they don't want to maintain the base they have, then it's pretty much circling the drain.

I wonder how many new players massively joined and over flooded the servers when SoA was released? I didn't see many.