The importance of job points

[Malthar]

Read my post again, and this time read it intelligently without jumping to conclusions, then edit your post.

[Stompa]

Hilarious notion!

If this where the case it would be weeks till you had every decent item in the game available at the mog house for free, have you read the posts on the forum of people asking for things to be given to them? yeah lets do what the playerbase wants. The game would be dead in a month, mission accomplished?

Its really frustrating how the few try to change the game for them, regardless of the effect on others who have played for many many years and are quite content, the ones who are likely to play even after updates stop because they enjoy the game, not just prancing about displaying there recent shinnies. the ones SE should try to keep not drive away.

I wouldn't do it, if I found this game so incompatible to myself I wouldn't play, not try to make it worse for others to my benefit, and what a dwindling few we now seem to be.

I really love a lot of recent improvements that SE have made to FFXI.

Especially armor/job lockstyle changes, which is something that I've been hoping for since 2004, as it never made any sense to me that some jobs can't wear certain types of gear. So I really like the new lockstyle changes that allow WAR to wear Freestyle armors, for example, even though it is for purely cosmetic effect, that is still a huge improvement and makes the game far more enjoyable and logical to me.

Honestly I think SE have added so many cool new features and improvements to FFXI, over the last 18~ months, I think they've done a great job. And I'm really looking forward to the Goddess Gala and the Rhapsodies which are going to happen this year. So I'm really happy with all the new stuff from the last few years, and quite excited about the Big Finale content too.

On the subject of jobpoints/SU, as I said before, I love jobpoints and the idea of SU is a great idea, but I wish they'd made SU gear totally JSE, so if you earn 100 jobpoints for WAR, which you have to earn on WAR only, that unlocks SU 1&2 brackets on WAR only, but then the SU gear is for multiple jobs and isn't really connected to WAR abilities. So I think SU should have been JSE, but I still really love Jobpoints and I think the Gifts system is a really great idea. It is one of many extremely positive changes that have been added in the last 18 months, and I do really thank SE for the effort they've put into keeping FFXI enjoyable despite the dwindling playerbase.

[AtrixWolfe]

Grekumah,

You guys really should turn over development to us, the players, because the devs seem to get more clueless as time goes on.

Seriously, though. It would be a win-win for all those involved. SE can lease FFXI to a group of devs/players voted on by the FFXI community, probably the windower folks. They would in turn develop FFXI for minimal compensation and charge the player base enough so that SE can make a decent profit and pay for the server hosting. Yes, yes, I know how you guys feel about unofficial third party software, but from what I've heard, they've done a darn good job improving the play-ability of FFXI. Being an XBOX player, and considering the ultimate demise of FFXI on XBOX, I would like to see most of what is implemented in windower standard in FFXI. The development team has been following this trend anyway. And yes, I know the development environment is from the PS2 standpoint, and to continue maintaining FFXI a whole new environment would have to be put together and the code revamped and that would be as difficult as making a new MMO from scratch, but the player base dev community can actually make that happen! You can lease the game and the concept, the player base dev community would rejuvinate FFXI to come up to 2015 standards, and all SE would have to do is to make sure the general theme of FFXI is adhered to and reap in the dough! It's a win-win!

So how about it? Lease FFXI and concept to the player base development community so that we, the players, can have a better game with better expansions, and SE can have a cash cow with virtually zero maintenance. It's a win-win!

Not to rain on your parade because I enjoy your enthusiasm and putting it out there, but I don't really think that would be the best idea, I can detail why:
1) FFXI unlike many MMOs broke the mold and decided to lead rather than follow. It has many original ideas and is unlike any other MMO I have ever played, this is because SE bets on their own ideas and takes reasonable risks. They did the same with XIV but it was incomplete at launch and flopped, and now it has to be a follower rather than a leader, copying popular game design and asking the players what they would want. This is a fine way to make a game, don't get me wrong, but it is not a great way to make something unique and wonderful the world never has seen before, like FFXI.
2) Communities can get very out of control very quickly. While open source makes things easier to develop and get lots of work on it has the very big issue of without someone making the shots on what gets worked on in what priority and coming up with original ideas, giving players unexpected things than it will slowly become simply something the players (not all of them but the loud minority usually or those with ties to those in charge) wish to see. This will ostracize many.
3) Drama is inherent whenever you get a group of people with conflicting interests and have them try to work together, not to mention differing ideologies and best practices for dev... at that point it would become meteoric. Throw in different people wanting to be in charge and feeling they should be in charge and I see it as nothing but a nightmare.
4) SE has already made the decision to move the game to a native app, in other words a game built from the ground up with new dev tools, for android and iOS. I highly doubt they will ever jeopardize the success of that project by making a competing version. If they're smart though, which I hope they do, they will allow characters people have poured 14 years into, to continue to exist. That is a lot of time, gone. And they will alienate their core audience if they don't keep the characters alive.

I realize many players have justifiable reasons to be upset with SE. One can look at the outstanding bug list, the balance issues and so on, though I will say on balance that a perfectly balanced game rarely exists and is rarely interesting, balance changing is part of what keeps the game engaging and alive. I think they do a great job for their team size however, in the amount of content they develop. If SE seems somewhat disconnected from players, just remember, that's the reason FFXI is unique in the first place. This core group of people are allowed to exercise their own ideas. Which is rare in development of any kind. Catering to player wishes is what FFXIV has ended up having to do, but it's not the higher road. To me, it is like the artsy movie that comes out and sweeps up a ton of awards, versus the summer movie fodder meant to be crowd pleasers. If you just ask a ton of people what they want to see and go on that, you'll get the fun, but unmemorable summer action flick, forgotten before the summer is even out. If you give a core group of talented artistic people the ability to exercise their unique vision, sometimes you get a home run that lasts. FFXI if anything has lasted, and I think their development cycle though often a frustration and seems disconnected from players, is the same place that all the things we love and care about in FFXI came from. You can't have one without the other. Handing it over to a community would not be a good decision, they already have plans to remake the title for phones and tablets, and the best we can hope for now is the preservation of years and days of game-play in the form of character data.

I also wish to clarify, hoping my metaphors made clear my points above, I don't think FFXIV is going anywhere anytime soon, and it is not completely the forgettable summer action flick, more a balance between that and some core ideas of SE's own. I feel you do feel that compromise though when you play, and it holds your hand much the same way WoW and other popular MMO's that it was modeled after do. One could argue that FFXI in some ways modeled itself after everquest, which is true, but it took such a unique different direction.