Keeping content relevant

[Celebrimbor]

There is a rich and plentiful library of wonderful content yielding an awesome variety of level 75 equipment, it is a shame for that content to go to waste.
There should be 75 cap dungeon instances of Beadeaux, Davoi, and Castle Oztroja, with NMs inside leading up to a Boss. These 75 cap dungeon crawls would yield Item level 119 equipment. The dungeons should be hard, requiring 12-18 people well geared, and the rewards should reflect that difficulty. This will make all the old content relevant again, people will want salvage sets and 75 abj gear, and will make linkshells relevant again as well, requiring an alliance to beat it.

[Catmato]

I'm not sure about those zones, but I do support making more level-capped content, as long as it's relevant (read: drops 119 gear). We spent too much time at 75, let us use some of that gear again.

[Pixela]

Honestly what they should do is add avenues for people to solo/ duo /trust stuff like this in a longer route to get good 119 gear. The geared players, or players with contacts / linkshell can still do it the faster way and the "scrubs" can gear up at a much slower pace to possibly get to the point they are acceptable to the minority for inclusion.

The current system still favors the minority and leaves the majority out in the cold, there is no slope to gear up anymore.

FFXI these days is mostly centered around mercing content, because there simply is no slope to build yourself up. It's sad that the last ABJ rainbow event put more endgame gear on players than the previous year of normal play did.

Also keep in mind that alliance content on a server that isn't Asura and Odin is not going to work, and server merges are not going to happen.

[OmnysValefor]

That's more or less what they've been doing for years.

Limbus II, Dynamis II, NNI (for their day).

UNMs are frequently straight upgrades (or very near it) from classic NMs and so are several Escha NMs. High-Tier Battlefields are also in the spirit of this.

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So what you're asking is not for keeping content relevant, which they've been doing, but for keeping old gear relevant.

If this old content is hard (as it should be), then it's important to properly gear. What's that mean? I need to go refarm AF+1 gear, relic gear? Maybe they can just scale back the 119/109 versions of AF,ETC in these zones, but I need to buy another Scorpion Harness, Haubergeon, and Dusk Gear? I need HMP sets (bye bye Refresh II). I can barely manage the space to properly gear the jobs I have.

Not to mention how much RUN and GEO would change the landscape of the contest.

Finally, and most importantly, most populations are not healthy enough to stock alliance-level content especially when you're expecting these new 99s to have brutal--admittedly you probably should have this one anyway, loquacious, boxer's mantle, resist sets (gross).

[Alhanelem]

I don't think it's a good idea to make any more content requiring more than one full party anymore, it's just too difficult to get a group together unless you belong to a strong, established clique.

Content doesn't have to require a ton of people to be challenging.

[Kincard]

Content requiring more than one party does have its advantages. Content requiring large groups is more fun to experiment with, because there's more flexibility in group building. True, the larger community will usually just find the one easiest strategy and double down on it, but that applies to any content, really.

Not sure how I feel about the proposal for making 75 items useful again, though, given that most of us have reforged and/or thrown away all our 75 gear. While I agree there are some things about the 75 cap that made combat more interesting (Omnys pretty much listed all of them), things like inventory woes and the need to recollect 75 gear don't sound very appealing to me.

[Alhanelem]

Not sure how I feel about the proposal for making 75 items useful again

Well they've already offered high tier versions of 75 (and earlier) items via unity NMs. That's fine, I don't see the point in making old 75 items "relevant again" when equivalents exist in many cases for 119. Sounds to me like some people just dont want to do the work.

[Alhanelem]

I don't consider artificially limiting myself to beat old content a test of skill, because that test is meaningless against the game as a whole. I've done ENMs before (which are the same now as they were ages ago) and I wouldn't describe it as "white knuckle excitement." They're decent fights for sure, but not any easier or harder than max level content is at max level.

I personally know no one deliberately limiting themselves to a certain level. I know I'd never do it, because I don't see how that affects the fun factor. Doing 75 content at 75 vs doing max level content at max level, I don't see the difference.

I mean, if you enjoy it, power to you, but I can't see SE investing time in something that such a minority would care about. They never fixed ballista or pankration, never finished monstrosity, all niche contents that only a fairly small group cared about, so I wouldn't have much expectaiton about this. THe most likely outcome is taking more 75 content and scaling it up to i119. If the experience is the same, what does it matter what the number next to the letters 'lv' says?

[Stompa]

I don't consider artificially limiting myself to beat old content a test of skill, because that test is meaningless against the game as a whole. I've done ENMs before (which are the same now as they were ages ago) and I wouldn't describe it as "white knuckle excitement." They're decent fights for sure, but not any easier or harder than max level content is at max level.

I personally know no one deliberately limiting themselves to a certain level. I know I'd never do it, because I don't see how that affects the fun factor. Doing 75 content at 75 vs doing max level content at max level, I don't see the difference.

I mean, if you enjoy it, power to you, but I can't see SE investing time in something that such a minority would care about. They never fixed ballista or pankration, never finished monstrosity, all niche contents that only a fairly small group cared about, so I wouldn't have much expectaiton about this. THe most likely outcome is taking more 75 content and scaling it up to i119. If the experience is the same, what does it matter what the number next to the letters 'lv' says?

On the difference between 119 play and 75 play ; they are like two different games.

119 Mages have statbomb gear and loads of DT gear, they can nuke like crazy, take hate and even tank mobs. On 75 you would need Rdm/nin and skills and strategies to survive taking hate as a mage.

Lvl 75 content you can't just throw HQ GEOs and SCHs at everything. The level 75 gear and abilities don't support this.

So level 75 content is intrinsically based around a mix of jobs, and heavily reliant on strategy. At 75 I have to gear swap a lot, for the STR+6 bonus or whatever, because my gear is not statbombed with attributes everywhere. There is a lot less room for error at 75, because of the more basic gear and abilities, you have to play a tight game or you get KO on your first error. I found the 119 game was a lot more forgiving of errors (in most cases).

Reasons to want to play 75 content. Some people prefer the old areas, lottery-pop NMs, WOTG Campaigns, etc. And those areas are dead to you if you are on 119, the mobs are TW/EP and the bosses get oneshotted. On 75 it is a fun and challenging adventure again.

So again, I wasn't suggesting SE add more 75 stuff, because we know that is not going to happen. I was just pointing out that there already is a whole world out there which provides adventures for level 75 players, and it is now possible to build a mule char to 75 really quickly, if a person wanted to occasionally go play in the 75 old areas/content. I do know about eight people who do this, including myself.

[Alhanelem]

Lvl 75 content you can't just throw HQ GEOs and SCHs at everything. The level 75 gear and abilities don't support this.

No, instead you threw SAMs and BRDs at everything.

they are like two different games.

The difference is mostly in the existence of new jobs since the core of the 75 era. Yeah, some new mechanics came along, but the gameplay and combat itself is not different.

So level 75 content is intrinsically based around a mix of jobs,

No it's not. If you think we used a greater mix of jobs at 75, then you didn't really play much in that era... I maxed at least one job per expansion and spent literally all day waiting for parties sometimes. PUP wasn't wanted in the slightest until audolin, SMN was sometimes wanted for content but never for EXP, SCH and DNC were not very popular either; GEO was the first new job I leveled that ended up being wanted.

Some people prefer the old areas

Why? What's wrong with the new areas? they are all designed pretty well to me (barring the usual cryptic crap and one way paths th at are in many original areas...)

lottery-pop NMs,

Lottery pops were always, always, always a bad system, at any level. The smug satisfaction of winning a claim was completely outweighed by the hours of waiting and praying that you could overcome the bots the other parties were (allegedly) using. The only people (IMO) who liked them were the ones that exploited to win them more often. Personally, I want to fight things. Not wait for and then watch other people fight things. The fun should be in the fight itself.

And those areas are dead to you if you are on 119, the mobs are TW/EP and the bosses get oneshotted.

That's totally fine by me, because there are plenty of challenges and not TW/EP mobs in newer areas. It's just part of the evolution of an MMO. Even pre audolin, a new expansion meant existing content fell in popularity (although perhaps not to the same degree, the point remains). Stat creep still existed, it was just slower. the original 75 content got easier with every expansion- because there was "I just hit 75" lv75 content, and "i've beaten all the content" lv75- if 119 and not 119 are like seperate games, so too then were early 75 and late 75.

Scaled versions of content are available all over, not just in new areas, and I think they should keep doing that. I don't like level sync or other artificial feeling means of making something harder than it is.