Rate of Leveling and the New Player Experience

[Malithar]

I want to clarify, I've never suggested unlocking hard mode fights for people that have not done the fights in storyline. I want unrelated content (such as not being allowed to do any reforging till almost finishing COP) to be removed.

Can get behind that, cause as you said, it's largely unrelated. It's just all the other things mentioned go hand in hand with completing the missions for various reasons that made me read your post as dumb it all down. The vet comment was more aimed at a line from earlier in this thread (I think?). Your comment of returning multiple times just brought it to mind. :P

[Castanica]

I think people need to understand what FFXI is for a new player, a lot don't get this because they have a linkshell and have friends in-game.

FFXI is a single player RPG from 1 till 99 that you pay a subscription for, that is what FFXI now is. You don't make friends in parties, you don't make friends in misison fights it's solo all the way.

When I initially played you had groups for everything, every zone had people in them and it was an MMO first and foremost (people used to throw linkshell invites at you and everyone was really talkative due to the nature of xp parties and everyone being happy when they had a party). Many things like missions were group based activities.

Now you're extremely lucky to find a zone with another living person in it, all missions are solo affairs because there is nobody else to do it with. The even added leveling buddies (that dissapear if you dare invite someone LOL) because there is nobody to level with.

Many things like missions that takes 2 hours due to hilarious faffing "run to zone a, talk to npc, come back to home nation, talk to npc, go back to zone a, another cut, back" was offset by the community aspect of the game. Sure it was unfriendly and boring in the past too but their was a payoff, there were group fights along the way and there were lots of people around. What worked in a community based MMO with group based fights won't work in a single player mmo like FFXI and people will bail.

I say again, FFXI is a single player MMO for almost every single new player. Given that, why should new players stick with this game when it's so unbelievably unfriendly, confusing (if you don't know wiki exists), boring and that you have to pay for? the chances of meeting another human being are almost nil.

When I started this game 8-9 years ago I didn't know to go look on websites for walkthroughs for everything, the game sure didn't tell you what to do adequately or what was available. Other players told me about things, I joined a linkshell and more people told me things or helped me.

Leveling is the hook for these games, leveling is now a single player experience and it's horrible. If the game isn't fun, isn't in any way enticing why will anyone stick with it?

[Zarchery]

While your argument is valid, if we did it and got new players but got no new players without doing it then it seems like the obvious better option. No one will really stop from coming back because of these things so why not do it?

The practical problem is that it fixes nothing in the long term. You double XP now, maybe attract a few short term players. What do you do a year from now when that XP rate becomes the new normal and people still feel like they're levelling too slowly? Remember a few months ago when they increased the movement speed? Remember how awesome that felt at first? Does anyone even notice that any more?

I keep seeing all these people who have this attitude of "I hate so many aspects of this game, can we please change them?" Like that doofus Crevox, who's average post went something like this:

"I went through the Chains of Promathia missions and it was the worst experience in all of creation! I hated hated hated hated hated it! It was like having my skin peeled off! Please get rid of this aspect of the game because I hate it so much!!!!!"

Making changes to really awful things that a big swath of the players hate, such as say the glacial levelling pace pre-Abyssea, or the insane repop time of TOAU beastman kings, makes some sense. Because that's an actual improvement to loyal customers. But trying to bend over backwards to appeal to your most demanding and difficult to satisfy customers is no way to run a business. Because you're not going to win new customers. You're going to get some temporary string of new blood for a very short time, then you'll be right back where you started and have to up the ante again.

You know, I don't like fighting games. Too fast paced and chaotic for me. The Smash Brothers series is really popular. But I don't go and, like, demand that the game be slowed down to be turn based instead of everything happen simultaneously. I actually accept that there are video games I don't like. It's an attitude some people can't accept. If this game is really so crushingly awful, don't play. It's a GAME. It's supposed to be fun.

[Puck]

I think people need to understand what FFXI is for a new player, a lot don't get this because they have a linkshell and have friends in-game.

FFXI is a single player RPG from 1 till 99 that you pay a subscription for, that is what FFXI now is. You don't make friends in parties, you don't make friends in misison fights it's solo all the way.

When I initially played you had groups for everything, every zone had people in them and it was an MMO first and foremost (people used to throw linkshell invites at you and everyone was really talkative due to the nature of xp parties and everyone being happy when they had a party). Many things like missions were group based activities.

Now you're extremely lucky to find a zone with another living person in it, all missions are solo affairs because there is nobody else to do it with. The even added leveling buddies (that dissapear if you dare invite someone LOL) because there is nobody to level with.

Many things like missions that takes 2 hours due to hilarious faffing "run to zone a, talk to npc, come back to home nation, talk to npc, go back to zone a, another cut, back" was offset by the community aspect of the game. Sure it was unfriendly and boring in the past too but their was a payoff, there were group fights along the way and there were lots of people around. What worked in a community based MMO with group based fights won't work in a single player mmo like FFXI and people will bail.

I say again, FFXI is a single player MMO for almost every single new player. Given that, why should new players stick with this game when it's so unbelievably unfriendly, confusing (if you don't know wiki exists), boring and that you have to pay for? the chances of meeting another human being are almost nil.

When I started this game 8-9 years ago I didn't know to go look on websites for walkthroughs for everything, the game sure didn't tell you what to do adequately or what was available. Other players told me about things, I joined a linkshell and more people told me things or helped me.

Leveling is the hook for these games, leveling is now a single player experience and it's horrible. If the game isn't fun, isn't in any way enticing why will anyone stick with it?

So right in every way. This is the state of the game today.

Everyone arguing against simplifying and easing the shittiest parts of the game are people that already did it a long time ago who would in no way be effected by those changes. Or worse, spiteful people that struggled through it and think others should have to struggle through it, too.

99 is where the actual MMORPG starts in today's FFXI. Actually, no. Lv99 with i119 gear is when it starts. And only if you picked one of the handful of jobs people want.

Imagine being a new player, choosing a job you like, struggling solo to get all the way to 99, working hard to get some decent gear, and then you find out nobody wants to invite your job to anything. So now you get to go back and do it again. Easier the second time, but not without a bitter taste in your mouth. But hey, at least you can use your unwanted 99 job to play through all those old missions nobody wants to do with you.

These days, it's REALLY hard for brand-new players to fall in love with this game. It's a lonely journey to endgame, where the community is more restrictive than ever. It's no wonder new players don't stick around anymore.

[Ramzi]

My fondest memory in FFXI was doing the CoP missions with a static party back when it was really REALLY hard. We learned the fights together, and got through it with teamwork. What an incredible feeling to finally beat Promathia and collect our rings. A new player just wouldn't have that same experience now. People need to understand that ripping your hair out trying to find the way to the top of that dumbass mountain in Attohwa (if you can even get to the entrance past all those idiotic miasma gates) is just not appealing anymore (it never was, but in the past we had a team to do it with, for the lolz). Waiting until "japanese midnight" to continue a mission where you are trying to finish it as quick as possible to complete the storyline for access to HM battlefields is not cool. It's bad enough that the story content needs to be done in the first place since it's all so irrelevant, but to have roadblocks along the way is just frustrating and unneccessary.

I put many hundreds of hours doing various story related content in FFXI. I enjoyed most of it, and despised some of it, but I would never wish that experience on a new player with no one to help them. If ever there was a time to implement an "I win" button, it's now. The game is rapidly going downhill despite unprecedented amounts of updates and TLC being given to it (and as a veteran player, I cannot express enough thanks to the devs). But to new players, it's all for nothing if they are unable to have an enjoyable experience. More and more vets are getting bored, or frustrated with the elitism at endgame, and no new players will stick around to replace them.

Lucky for me, my attachment to this game comes and goes, and if it were to vaporize from the face of the earth it probably wouldn't bother me at all. But for some, it would be devastating, and those are the same people pushing newbies away with their self centered attitude. The elitists are only hurting themselves by wanting to keep FFXI the way it used to be.

[Mefuki]

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm glad that things have become much more reasonable in FFXI, especially for new players. I was one of those people that beat CoP while it was still hard and was actually pleased that people would get the chance to advance in the mission line when it got easier (read: more reasonable). Levelling, in hindsight, was SO ridiculous. It took me a year, literally a year to get my first 75 job. Tons of things have changed for the absolute better but there's something I don't understand that keeps getting brought up in these topics:


I don't think I'm understanding peoples definition of "gate" or "roadblock". The CoP "gate" issue is really an odd one to me. It's not like old CoP.

It's not like how leveling used to be where you COULD NOT progress without other people. Where if the correct jobs or people weren't online, you were dead in the water.

Or Legion, where you simply weren't "allowed" to join without the "correct" jobs. Where if you were only interested in playing with the "wrong" job, you were dead in the water.

JP midnights: Roadblock. Trying to get through Necropolis, Quicksand Caves, etc in old FFXI: Roadblock. Trying to buy items from shops on holidays: Roadblock. Old AU Beastman king kills: Roadblock.

Heck, even current Delve I could CONCEIVE how someone would think that even IT is a minor "roadblock" because you still need to know some people who are decently geared and know the NM's strategies etc.

There's nothing "dead in the water" or "roadblock"-y about CoP. You just have to go and do it, on your own or with others, any time you want. So, I don't see the issue. A roadblock is something that impedes your progress and there's nothing you can do about it. And that isn't really happening anymore with mission content (and most things these days), as far as I know. You may as well start complaining that FFXI is giving you incentives to play.

Also, have we really reach the point where some people are complaining about having to collect Home points. You have to do it once and it's done forever and it's SO worth doing. Why complain about having to unlock things that can be done at any time with anyone, solo or in a group of however many friends you wish? Isn't that how games are suppose to operate? By that definition of roadblock, every video game in existence is riddled with roadblocks. "I want to go to the Shine of Winter but I HAVE to collect Great Souls or have 1,000,000+ souls. Roadblock." "I want to go to Tick, Tock Clock but I HAVE to get a ton of stars. Roadblock." "I want to go into Ganon's Castle but I need 6 Medallions. Roadblock." etc.


TL;DR: I'm for removing gates and roadblocks but we need to make sure we're not confusing game progression for roadblocks.

[Demonjustin]

The practical problem is that it fixes nothing in the long term. You double XP now, maybe attract a few short term players. What do you do a year from now when that XP rate becomes the new normal and people still feel like they're levelling too slowly? Remember a few months ago when they increased the movement speed? Remember how awesome that felt at first? Does anyone even notice that any more?

I keep seeing all these people who have this attitude of "I hate so many aspects of this game, can we please change them?" Like that doofus Crevox, who's average post went something like this:

"I went through the Chains of Promathia missions and it was the worst experience in all of creation! I hated hated hated hated hated it! It was like having my skin peeled off! Please get rid of this aspect of the game because I hate it so much!!!!!"

His feedback when it comes to earlier things in the game is actually far more valuable than most of us who are on these forums because he's actually a new player who was doing it all. He came here with a few friends and by the end of it was the only one left. That would seem to be the best kind of feedback you can get actually since it's an objective look at it rather than people like us who did it when it was harder and despite what we may think we are bias toward leaving it as it was due to the fact it simply doesn't hurt us and we've already done it. As for the whole idea of always asking for more, I admit that is an issue, but really the only changes they'd need to make to XP is kill the stupidly huge slope that develops at 50 and it'd be fine. Up till 50 RoE and pages make leveling quite fast and keep it going at a nice rate, once you hit 50 the slope that develops in your XP is so noticeable and so slow that it just becomes a boring drag at that point. This extends from normal jobs to Monstrosity as well and is actually why almost all of my monsters stop at level 60, the 50+ slope kills leveling being at all enjoyable to me.

Changing this slope and then adding an advanced level sync system where the party leader can select the synced level so that missions and such can be done at certain levels would be perfect and no one would be hurt nor their experiences ruined. People who want to level fast, would level fast. People who want to level slow could sync themselves to lower levels to get that very same feel, and do missions at lower levels as to make them harder and more challenging providing all of those same experiences we all had when we were forced to do them at those levels.

Making changes to really awful things that a big swath of the players hate, such as say the glacial levelling pace pre-Abyssea, or the insane repop time of TOAU beastman kings, makes some sense. Because that's an actual improvement to loyal customers. But trying to bend over backwards to appeal to your most demanding and difficult to satisfy customers is no way to run a business. Because you're not going to win new customers. You're going to get some temporary string of new blood for a very short time, then you'll be right back where you started and have to up the ante again.

If that's the case then so be it, but this player base is shrinking on many servers and it's not an issue that's going to be fixed by leaving old content as it is when new players have to trek through it all before getting to where everyone else is. I'm not saying focus everything on that, I'm saying make a few small but largely meaningful tweaks to the older parts of the game and remove some of the old game prerequisites from things so that players can more easily join the game and get into it.

You know, I don't like fighting games. Too fast paced and chaotic for me. The Smash Brothers series is really popular. But I don't go and, like, demand that the game be slowed down to be turn based instead of everything happen simultaneously. I actually accept that there are video games I don't like. It's an attitude some people can't accept. If this game is really so crushingly awful, don't play. It's a GAME. It's supposed to be fun.

That's a stupid argument. Oh, I don't like how something is, but rather than providing feedback and asking for things to be changed that seem to drive people away I should say nothing and just not play it at all, even if what I'd be asking for wouldn't change other people's experiences in a negative way in the long run.

[Olor]

I don't think I'm understanding peoples definition of "gate" or "roadblock". The CoP "gate" issue is really an odd one to me. It's not like old CoP.

It's a roadblock because I could upgrade my relic to +2 without finishing COP but I had to get it almost to the very end to reforge it.... why? I have no idea - it's totally arbitrary.

That's what I mean by a roadblock. Forcing someone to spend a month working on missions to do something completely ENTIRELY unrelated to said missions... is a road block.

Not allowing me to get my KI for Voidwatch Zilart T2 because I haven't gone far enough in Zilart missions is a roadblock.

Do I care that it will ruin the order of progression (supposed to unlock sky through mission vs through voidwatch) Nope. I don't. I'd rather just be able to do voidwatch than have to run through Zilart before I could do what were some of the most popular fights during the height of it.

Now of course no one even wants to do those fights. I missed out entirely because I didn't have quest progression. Bummer.

[Lithera]

@ Mefuki most of the CoP roadblock complaints and really most of the this is a roadblock complaints is the needing to actually have to do the traveling part. Along with the "Yo-Yoing" before getting to the fights. Yet look at the last chunk of SoA missions how many times did we have to go back to the library or Levil, or to the dragon before our fight? If having to travel here and there while doing a mission is a person's main complaint then they're not want to do the current story once it's finished even for the holy crap item at the end that probably will be something everyone should have that suits their main jobs the best.

The soloing the missions can be a problem for new people if they don't shout for it or nicely send someone a tell that's in the same zone as them. Yesterday had a person shout for help on the final limit break and yeah I didn't respond, but I was busy doing a quest. Did see a person tell them to go get the items with log in points, but didn't see another shout from the person asking. :/

@Demonjustin the problem with Cervox is he complained after burning himself out after two months. He partly did this because his friends just wanted to get to the destination and not want to help him to do the older content. He also didn't feel that it was ok for him or his friend to ever have to wait for all of them to be on to go do something. That actually waiting was part of the game's problem and not maybe idk on him and his friends. Sure it can be frustrating trying to get a group together to do something specialy if so many have differing available play times.

I guess I am just used to looking up things on a wiki mainly because it's what I or my husband did during events we or our group were trying for the first time. It also was the response I got a lot from the lazy or smartarses in my LSes. Or we would be looking up fights to know the info for our group because we'd be the ones the rest would look to for info. Or if someone was having trouble unlocking something or completing a quest and our memory was forgetting that one minor step.

I would still hope the devs take a look at the level sync idea on the battle content section, because that is a great thread. I'm sorry I can't remember who the guy was who started that one about wanting to be able to have optional level syncs so that they could enjoy the hardness of the fights with their extraordinary group.

[Feary]

Mules are only usable in place of real players in serious content because of 3rd party programs. Frankly, it's part of the "not taking" people problem. The problem boils down to people being selfish though. SE shouldn't let people blatantly brag about cheating with zero consequences, it's certainly doing nothing to help the game. Yeah if the only way to get content done is to use 3rd party programs and have 2 accounts it does nothing to attract and keep new players playing. It's toxic.

No one is forcing Draylo to take mules instead of players. Frankly, I'm disgusted he can come on the official website and constantly brag about using third party tools with zero consequences. (Or "complaining" that he takes mules instead of inviting real players to parties)

I recognize that banning everyone who uses 3rd party tools at this point would annihilate the playerbase - and I know my viewpoints on them are not popular, but there needs to be some action taken so that it doesn't devolve further into "no 3rd party tools? No invite" than it already has.

I don't even blame most people who use them, when it takes 3 macros for me to cast a spell and they can cast with one button press or a specialized keystroke that does all their gear changes for them, it certainly enhances their performance so it can meet the standards that players set for each other... but I do blame SE for not sending a clearer message that once they have implemented gearsets etc they will no longer be tolerating tools that automate gearchanges outside the game.

Or they need to just link to windower from the official website and make it clear that in order to play competitively you'll need to use it. The status quo, where spellcast and other 3rd party tools that automate gear changes are officially against the rules but people feel comfortable enough breaking the rules to all but brag they are using it on the official forum... it's not sustainable. Those tools are a big part of what's dividing the playerbase.

Not everyone wants to have to write xml scripts to play this game seriously. No one should have to, since, officially, they are against the rules.

I think this is part of the balancing problem too. SE is busy scaling the game against what the "best" players can do, but I think you'd see if you looked that all those players are using 3rd party tools. So the game gets scaled against people who are running a program that automatically switches your gear for you when you reach certain HP levels or MP levels or w/e ... The rest of us have to make judgement calls and press several buttons.

While the gearsets will help even this out - it won't eliminate it completely. Even having to swap palettes and stuff is a great way to lose valuable time. People using these tools can just type a couple letters and bam! they are reacting.

When i starting play the game in 2004, i had it for ps2 and pc. i dual-boxed and played alts before 3rd party tools.

i dont take kindly to these assumptions.

also mules are characters on the same account used to store items.

alts are characters you use to play with for content. as i type this im in a party with a bard who has terpender and doesnt use the new +song horn. seriously ppl just dont complain about imcompetence to feel better about themselves. you dont need 3rd party tools to switch 1 instrument. these are the example you defend with statements like that.

you use alts when you dont want to deal with the brd who cant complete a rotation or sings weak ass songs and not shouting for 3 hours to do an 6man aa fight because you missed the curve.

who the hell WANTS to level and control two players. i mean yes it nice to have. but really? i think this big part is also really lost in translation. yes they may say "haha i can do it by myself", however that shit is taxing.

so Olor get over yourself, it has nothing to do with what you have or use, its about what needs to be added.

Matsui said there is no right or wrong when it comes to type of content for new and old players. which makes the point of Draylo correct, we need more balance in the type of content available to play. 10 years there was leveling for 6 man and endgame for linkshell. it wasnt balanced. today there is endgame for 6man and leveling for solo. its taken 180. its still isnt balanced.

if it werent for these asshat elitest cheaters, i wouldnt have known better and would still be a gimp ass console player who journey would of ended back in 2005 at bibiki bay.

these players given us alot of information, skill, technique that would of never been possible to figure out.