November 2019 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

[Beastorizer]

Meh, I just grow tired of them treating this like a F2P mmo.

They don't want to do any real updates, Monstrosity, jobs, RMT (Which I am willing to give them a slight pass on), etc. I feel like, if you release content & jobs, you should constantly update it. I understand that the Rhapsodies was the finale, but the updates have been lazily implemented. These few jobs which have been "Updated" are simply the latest example.

I feel like the effort is not there with this game. It is in maintenance mode. The only problem is, you are charging people a monthly fee, but not putting in the work. I am playing until this free campaign is over, then I am jumping on Pokemon.

(Hence is why I was not posting recently until November 8th......If you get my drift).

[Alhanelem]

At least it turns out one of the pets sucking was a bug... so it hopefully it isn't crappier than the previously existing pet now lol

[Gwydion]

At least it turns out one of the pets sucking was a bug... so it hopefully it isn't crappier than the previously existing pet now lol

No, it's still marginal improvement over the original and hardly a job adjustment. Beastmaster, as a job, has broken mechanics, mis-matched job abilities, irrelevant job traits and mediocre 119 pets. Nothing about the current state of Beastmaster makes any sense. This is very worrisome.

Edit: Providing a link to show the output of /checkparam which indicates that the HQ pet had it's HP modifier fixed, but all other stats appear to be identical: https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/4...um/74/#3467953

TLDR: Mediocre re-skinned jug pets are not a job adjustment.

[Beastorizer]

The range was not game-breaking perse. No idea why they felt the need to change it. Took them a decade to realize that? I think not...

Now, giving the pets JAs & Magic pending their job. I do think this may be somewhat OP. The crabs would probably be able to tank bosses, and DRK monsters are nasty with SE. Then again, I came back from a 2015 break. So I have no idea what type of numbers DD are putting up now and days. Maybe it wouldn't be OP...

I feel like they may end up doing a BST re-haul soon. I say that because they continue to shoot themselves in the foot. If the pets were new & powerful, it would have calmed the crowd. To release reskins as people are asking for adjustments & not pets simply put gasoline on the fire. I mean, you were asking for a revolt at that point.

Lets all be rational for a moment, what did they think was going to happen as people were asking for no new pets, but you go ahead & release pets that are not new nor powerful.......lol....

[Seish]

Hello,

I don't talk much on here but I want to give my two cents. First off, to the developers I have to say I feel your effort and heart in the game. As someone that has played since 2003, I have seen the evolution of it. It has been clear to me, that the Final Fantasy development team is finally listening to the fans. I hope that the game can continue so that others can feel the hard work put into it like I have. But while I give praise, I may make a suggestion at the same time. Currently, WOW has gone back in a surge since they launched "Wow Classic". Many players love the old challenge of Final Fantasy XI and I believe you would see a huge surge of people returning if a "Final Fantasy XI Classic" is brought back. As many in our community know, there are private servers of Final Fantasy XI out there--with Nasomi and Eden being the most Notable. Some of these servers have a population of roughly about the same as servers in Retail.

Several people have gone there because they miss the old FFXI and many said they would return to FFXI if there was a classic mode. I am happy in Carbuncle, but I know a lot of people are looking at this. And honestly, seeing how these private servers are operating, it makes sense to look into a classic FFXI. Now I am not saying to play in these private servers, as honestly it's better--and more stable--to play in Retail but I listed the example as a case in point. Maybe even tweak some small parts here and there with a scalable level sync, slightly easier crafting and fishing, augment HNM claims, but something that captures the essence of FFXI back in 2002. As WOW has proven, it's not graphics that makes a game, but gameplay. And the hardcore gamers are only looking for that challenge. I am not saying to shut down the current servers. Those should exist as long as Final Fantasy XI is supported. But I do think that to help restore the game, a modified Final Fantasy Classic would be a good idea to attract both new and older players alike. I feel the effort the Team put into it and all I want is that same feeling to be felt by other players.

I mention it on here, because it's related to the updates in general. Their hard work, and posting a video for us to see, is coming a long way to when the dev team was closed and barely told us what was going on. I think going forward, the game can grow. Please look into my suggestion.

[Alhanelem]

"classic mode" or "classic servers" will never happen, and there's a few reasons for that-

-Unlike some games that have done this, there is not a lot of agreement among players suggesting it as to when "classic" is. WoW Classic goes all the way back to before the first expansion, i.e. completely vanilla. It also won't go past that, so it's going to be completely stagnant once it reaches the last update before BC. here in FFXI, some ppl want to go back to TOAU, some people want to go back to just before abyssea came out (citing it as the thing that killed the game), some people want to go back to CoP, etc. Although nobody really wants to go back to FFXIV 1.0, which is actually before the North American release, and before a lot of spells and things that we've depended on since we started playing game along. There'd also be no NIN/SAM/DRG (SMN probably not, but it isn't actually a Rise of the Zilart job, even though it was released with the RoZ pre-patch). WoW Classic will only be populated until it stops receiving updates- They aren't developing new content, and it will not go past the day before Burning Crusade. Once people do all there is to do, they'll go back to standard or find another game to play.

- The devs are running on a skeleton crew, and I don't think they'd convince SE to let them expand the team for a project like this. There's no way they'd be able to do it without halting development on the current game, which has its share of players enjoying it and it wouldn't be fair to stop updates for them to create a classic server. They just don't have the resources that the WoW devs have.


- Doing so would fracture the community.


- The number of people who would actually pay to play it, given that it wouldn't get updates, is probably not high enough to be worth the development cost and effort. It would not be surprising to me if they have in fact done a CBA (cost-benefit analysis) on this already.


- A lot of the people who want this already play on private servers and since they're playing the game for free, there is little chance they would want to pay to play an official version.


- This isn't a confirmed fact, but I had read that in the early days, SE wasn't keeping every build of the game in an archive, and in fact they might not be able to bring it back even if they want to as a result.


- Oh, and Playonline probably can't handle it. It's a source of a lot of problems for the game (i.e. not being able to seperate the game from PoL itself, net rate/packet size, etc). POL imposes some significant limits on the game itself and being that it holds the system that manages characters and subs and stuff, this could get in the way.


Besides that, do you really want to give up the useful conveniences we have today, like mounting almost anywhere, teleporting between home points, and such? There's also already been a massive discussion about this in a thread specifically on the subject- if you want to discuss it further, post in that threat, as much as it pains me to suggest bumping it.

[Seish]

I don't agree. It takes money to make money and what you mention on the part of the company not being able to do it is pure speculation. Fracture? Nah. People will make their own accounts. But look this game is meant to be played with others. I don't think you have read where SE said if the game gains popularity they would continue to support it. They said that, and one of the things they wanted to do was invest in newer servers--again not my words. They also said they have a decent size in that same year and that they set the goal for 2021 because they wanted to ease the tension and have their team not feel pressured. But as far as POL, trust me it can handle A LOT MORE traffic. This game at its peek had 500k subscribers. POL will be fine.

I have read what you talked about with regards to the "build". Instead of it being a build, what was said was they didn't save the source code. It is why they needed the PlayStation 2 Devkits to develop for this game to this day--because they do not have the existing source code. That is different than them not having access to the original game without updates.

As far as the private servers is concerned, SE can just make a C&D and be done with it. The game is SE's property and they are in it to make money. If they were to do it or not, that's on them and I am sure many who host private servers expect it and those that play on them know this is a strong possibility. Nothing wrong with SE protecting their IP either. I don't see where it can't be done. I see the disenfranchisement but this game doesn't stop people from having two characters. Now, one can have their opinion the matter, and that is a personal belief on splitting the community and a valid discussion to have. But I think for sure, the other points aren't a concern.

[Alhanelem]

I don't agree. It takes money to make money and what you mention on the part of the company not being able to do it is pure speculation. Fracture? Nah. People will make their own accounts. But look this game is meant to be played with others. But I don't think you have read where SE said if the game gains popularity they would continue to support it. They said that, and one of the things they wanted to do was invest in newer servers--again not my words. They also said they have a decent size in that same year and that they set the goal for 2021 because they wanted to ease the tension and have their team not feel pressured. But as far as POL, trust me it can handle A LOT MORE traffic. This game at its peek had 500k subscribers. POL will be fine.

I have read what you talked about with regards to the "build". Instead of it being a build, what was said was they didn't save the source code. It is why they needed the PlayStation 2 Devkits to develop for this game to this day--because they do not have the existing source code. That is different than them not having access to the original game without updates.

As far as the private servers is concerned, SE can just make a C&D. That simple. The game is SE's property and they are in it to make money. That simple. If they were to do it or not, that's on them and I am sure many who host private servers expect it and those that play on them know this is a strong possibility. Nothing wrong with SE protecting their IP either. I don't see where it can't be done. I see the disenfranchisement but this game doesn't stop people from having two characters. Now, one can have their opinion the matter, and that is a personal belief on splitting the community and a valid discussion to have. But I think for sure, the other points aren't a concern.

I mean, you can live in a fantasy land where this will happen all you want, but it's not going to happen.

And yes, it will fracture the community. Even if just a small number of people leave live for classic, it will cause harm. It will force the devs to divide resources- Something has to happen with "classic" or people will grow bored and stop playing. It can't just stay frozen in time forever.

Look, I will try to relocate the past discussion there was on it for you, but it is true- they don't have archives of the early builds of the game.

And as I said before- even if they can do it, the community needs to come ot an agreement about what they consider to be classic. The game didn't release globally at the same time like WoW did. For North America and the rest of the world outside Japan, Rise of the Zilart *is* the beginning. But for Japan, the game was out for a long time before it came to the US and the game was very different then from w hat most of us remember.. Then there are the people who just want to go back to before abyssea allegedly ruined the game (which is an argument I don't agree with but opinions vary wildly on this subject).


It is not going to happen. There have been people coming here and elsewhere asking for it for years, and it was essentially shot down by SE a while back. It. Will. Not. Happen.

as an extra bonus:
A lot of people who ask for this suffer from the rose-tinted glasses effect. Even if you get to have a server from XYZ year in FFXI's past, you'll find that it isn't just the same:
-You've done it before, so you don't get the same feeling from completing it again.
-Many players will tell you, half of what made FFXI so fun was the community- grinding together, doing contents together, since FFXI made you group for almost everything. But only a certain subset of the population wants to do "classic server" in the first place, and some people are just done with the game entirely and a classic server won't bring them back. So the population will be much lower than any real FFXI server ever was- It will be harder to group and that sense of community will just not be there the same as it was originally.
-Many people who play on classic servers become discouraged when they discover they have to start over from the beginning (i.e. can't have your old character in the state it was at the time) and don't really want to go through the grind all over again. This is the exact reason I didn't bother with WoW classic. I did like vanilla better than anything that came after. But the only thing I was truly interested in was doing Alterac Valley (before they changed it from an epic ongoing battle to just a short thing) and maybe UBRS, which I never beat while it was current. But I didn't want to spend dozens of hours leveling up a new character from the beginning to do those two things.


Feel free to read the lengthy thread on the subject here: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...Classic-Server

and as one of the later comments in that thread notes, you can play "classic" on any server on the live game already. All you have to do is not complete the limit break quest past level 75 (or level 50 if you want to limit yourself more to the content available at JP launch). If you want to play with others, just use the level sync feature or find friends willing to subject themselves to the same limitations. This is something you couldn't do in FFXIV btw, because it doesn't require any special quest or anything to raise the level limit, it's merely base don the expansions you have on your account.

[Ilisidi]

I'd rather have a fully single player version than classic.

[Alhanelem]

Also I considered coming back to WoW for Classic, but when I found out I couldn't use my old character from that point in time I didn't feel like grinding the levels out again lol.

And I'm not gonna lie, I'd have a similar feeling about a classic server for FFXI. I don't really want to go back to needing 6 real people in a party to gain any significant EXP on a special server that will undoubtedly have a lower population than any given server did back in the day. You'd basically be forced to only play the few most popular jobs if you wanted to make any progress at all.

Even in the current gsme, I'd rather play with others where I can, but I have the option to use Trust if I don't want to wait / nobody wants to invite me.