Feedback related to Vana'Bout

[Velner]

Thank you for opening this thread for feedback on Vana'bout. I enjoy the idea of Vana'bout with the community working towards a common goal. However, I feel like the implementation might have been too restrictive for widespread participation.

My main critique of Vana'bout is that the objectives do not compliment the content which is being highlighted. In this round, we are encouraged to participate in Ambuscade, where the main goal is to clear the monsters with a group as quickly as possible to earn Hallmarks and Gallantry, get a new Key Item, and run the fight again. However, because I do not play any job that can singularly clear every objective, in order to also earn the Plaudits for Vana'bout, I have found myself running Ambuscade alone just to clear all the various daily objectives without any focus at all on actually completing the Ambuscade. The result is that I'm either participating in Ambuscade OR I'm participating in Vana'bout. . . I am rarely actually doing both.

To address this, future rounds should remove the daily objectives and instead replace them with repeatable objectives. This would allow each player to set objectives appropriate for their roll in the party and we can continually earn plaudits while still focusing primarily on the content itself.

Another solution would be to allow for the objectives to be cleared for everybody no matter who accomplished an objective i.e. if one player does a 500 Wind Damage attack, every player in the party would get credit for it.

If both of these changes were implemented, we could simply form a party for the content, primarily focus on that content, and still participate in Vana'bout. And as a side bonus, the community could rally and push to complete the Vana'bout goals as the event closes. As it stands now, we don't really have any ability to push for the goal because we can only get 100 plaudits per day.

Thank you for your time.

[Uroah]

If the only thing they take and go forward with is that individual ROE should be party wide objectives.

Sorry to ruin the secret but your entire playerbase is multiboxes. Those players are very unwilling to do the same individual objectives multiple times. As they found out on the 3rd day when 16 million plaudits was hysterical.

It's not good enough. But if that's the bare minimum it's a significant improvement. It deters congestion. it promotes teamwork. and fulfills the secret goal of just letting everyone take their 6 box accounts through. Wins all around.

[RichLester]

What do you like or dislike about the latest Vana'Bout event?
Gaining sparks for doing ambuscades was good to help speed that up before the week is out. It's the repeativity that's annoying & how long it takes to complete the daily ROEs. The Damage Taken Round ROE depends on what kinda job you're on & party setup. I never managed to complete it. It was set too high.

How do you feel about the objectives and their difficulty?
The objectives were ok for the daily ones but should be brought down to say 5 magic attacks & magic burst, instead of 10 and 1 instead of 3 for clear ambuscade/heal 300+ hp/don't die/a few others. Also, as others have said, it takes a long time to do it

What changes, if any, would you like for future iterations of Vana'Bout?
Quite a bit. As people have mentioned in this thread already, us old veterans of the game have moved on in terms of the game & life. We don't have time anymore & we have pretty much done The Voracious Resurgance missions now so that we are just leveling up now. The rewards don't help us, apart from the deeds & the kupon i-aby for those who still need some empyrean gear to get to +1 for +2/+3 in Sortie.
Next round should be Sortie with gallimaufry given away as ROE rewards, instead of sparks. Why job points weren't given at 300 plaudits, I don't know. 100 job points we can just find a party & get that within an hour or so. The round after can be Odyssey with capacity points as rewards for ROE.

[chief_bigman]

I agree with what Velodan and ManaKing have said. When I first heard about this event (in an announcement way back I think, before it was given a name) it gave me the impression that it would be some kind of semi-casual, large player count, highly social content encouraging players at varying stages of the game to group up and hang out with strangers. My expectations were tempered by what I know about the heavily-instanced, low man, static, endgame focused direction the game has headed in, but I still had a little bit of hope.

What we actually got was incredibly uninteresting and very much not what I play the game for. As others have said, I also find the idea of dailies in a game with a playerbase who is (mostly) relatively old to be an absolutely bizarre choice.

From Vana'Bout, to the rampant botting and RMT problems, to the many bizarre utterances* of Fujito himself, I must also agree that the developers seem to be incredibly out of touch with what the actual charm of FF11 is.

* some exerpts from the recent New Years greeting, for reference, as I don't feel like making a new thread just to whine about it:

Our other guiding concept this year has been that of creating an "archive" of the game, which are topics that fall outside of the game itself.

In addition, it is our goal to continue creating content outside of the game itself in order to keep up with the excitement generated by you adventurers the world over

We're also currently working on the Echoes of Vana'diel alliance raid content for FINAL FANTASY XIV.
Once the content is added to the game, we hope you'll enjoy this whole new look at Vana'diel as well!

Ugh.

[Alhanelem]

While I do like the raid concept for Dawntrail as it could pique curioisty in FFXIV players who never tried XI, those other two bits definitely have me concerned, it makes it sound like they're planning the plug-pulling.

[JKap_Goat]

I agree, it sounds like they are pulling the plug and it makes me sad, I love vanadiel and I joined FFXI three years ago coming from XIV, I wish they just remake the game

ffxiv is such a boring game and I hope the next FF MMO doesn't have Yoshi P running the game

[Teraniku]

As for Vana'Bout how about making different events rotate through, since objectives are Records of Eminence based, why not try the format with Odyssey / BCNMs etc, at least rotating the event through different areas of the game will help it from getting stale and keep players engaged depending on the objectives / events.

[ManaKing]

Vana'Bout would increase in popularity tremendously if it unlocked a 2nd set of Nyame. ^,~

[chief_bigman]

I'd like to believe they're trying to attract new players to the game with those FF14 raids, but if they are, man is their effort an embarrassment. Maybe all of the following can be excused by "old codebase 2hard to work with sorry" but I can't know for sure for myself so bugger it, here comes the rant:

1. The free trial is still garbage, compared to SE's other two currently running MMOs. Only 14 days and only the base game? Both FF14 and DQ10 have infinite free trials with almost full access to the basegame and first expac of each.
2. The registration/install process.
3. A fairly poor tutorial, my standard for judging this is my recent experiences with DQ10 which has a lot of information easily accessed ingame AND a huge manual of sorts on the official website. The tutorial RoE objectives are a good start.
4. A new player generally won't even make it through the intro cutscene after making their character before seeing RMT yells in the chat, which their attention is of course directed to because that's also where the story dialogue shows up. Also, they'll quickly be exposed to all the bots running around right outside town. This isn't the first impression a game so important to SE's legacy should have on new players. Disgraceful.

I was over all this a few months ago but then I tried the DQ10 free trial and got mad again after seeing just how much better a treatment that game seems to get than FF11 does. They could be treating this game so much better, and I have to wonder why they aren't.

Going forward, the bare minimum I'm hoping for is that they can at least somehow archive the actual game so that I can chill in the world in the future even if they take the servers offline, like how DQ10 has an offline version. I don't think we've heard anything about that so far, just talk of improving the server hardware.

[Rinuko]

Seeing I was out of town for holidays when it was active my feedback is, it was bit short so I never got to take part in it.