Why not borrow the good parts from FFXI?

Massive city battles with invading forces.
Ferry/Raft rides with random events.
Meaningful exploration with difficult mobs, mazes, unique pathways, and things to discover.
Skill-based battles rather than combo-spam.

Eureka is literally just 100s of people running from nm to nm killing things near instantly, and lagging people out. It's basically just hunts in a special zone with pointless mechanics everyone is ignoring.

And rather than make the zone interesting, it's just groups of mobs scattered in giant areas with almost nothing interesting to discover.

I don't understand why devs keep implementing the same 100+ person spam hunt/nm/fate mechanics, that lag people to death, and make the monster your killing disappear from your screen due to the number of people.

Because the game design does not allow for it.

-Massive city battles with invading forces.

Would result in, and I quote yourself, "100s of people running from nm to nm killing things near instantly, and lagging people out."

-Ferry/Raft rides with random events

In XIV would turn into "An instanced 'dungeon' where sometimes a giant crab spawns, and sometimes it doesn't. And the giant crab drops lv.1 glamor gear."

-Meaningful exploration with difficult mobs, mazes, unique pathways, and things to discover

I doubt this game can actually do this. You have to remember that part of the reason XI felt like this is that
A) You sucked at it. You were a ween who'd hardly played an MMO let alone an online game and didn't fully understand the constrictions the medium possesses, and...
B) You were probably still on dial-up or really crappy ADSL and so you weren't inclined to seek online sources of information out, or maybe didn't know of their existence. Not to mention today's datamining culture literally everything in the "maze" would be discovered before the servers even come up.

-Skill-based battles rather than combo-spam

Would require an entire rework of the game systems, something I doubt they are inclined to pursue.

"I don't understand why devs keep implementing the same 100+ person spam hunt/nm/fate mechanics"

Because their subscriber numbers stay afloat, so why bother improving? The game has remained exactly the same since 2.X, and it isn't going to change.

Personally I would rather we quit trying to recycle anything from FFXI at all and make FFXIV unique and special with new fresh innovative stuff.

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Why not borrow the good parts from FFXI?

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I thought they did for Eureka.

:rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by Alash

Because their subscriber numbers stay afloat, so why bother improving? The game has remained exactly the same since 2.X, and it isn't going to change.

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I just want to borrow this bit right here because it highlights one of my biggest complaints about 14, and why I'm currently loving Eureka. SE keeps sticking to the safe path of "hey lets copy wow and other western mmos
instead of trying to either improvise or borrow stuff from ffxi. Would I like to see some things like an actual rework of game systems and endgame that doesn't fall into the dungeon spam for tomes, raids or trial? yes I'd love it but sadly Alash has the right of it that SE won't bother improving because they have the subscriber numbers. It's kinda sad how vertical progression and this devotion to the 2.x formula is really only leading to stagnation. C'mon SE let's get some version of dynamis, sky, nyzul, salvage, sea etc and horizontal progression with it.

I'd love for some besieged or salvage but i doubt we ever see that in XIV. heck even Einherjar

Content in 14 doesn’t have the staying power of 11. Due to linear progression once the new patch comes out the old content is all obsolete and there’s no reason to run it anymore other than glamour. Content only lasts about a month in ffxiv. This isn’t the case in ffxi, 12 years later and people are still doing dynamis (the first endgame content added).

Why make complicated and intricate content that is only going to be played for a month? ffxi didn’t have that problem because content lasted years and the equipment stayed relevant until late in the game and when it became irrelevant, they updated the content to make it relevant again.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

Content in 14 doesn’t have the staying power of 11. Due to linear progression once the new patch comes out the old content is all obsolete and there’s no reason to run it anymore other than glamour. Content only lasts about a month in ffxiv. This isn’t the case in ffxi, 12 years later and people are still doing dynamis (the first endgame content added).

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Yet there are far more people playing FF14 than FF11. FF11 may have staying power - but only for a few people.

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

Yet there are far more people playing FF14 than FF11. FF11 may have staying power - but only for a few people.

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Odd, not a lot of player plays a 10+ year old mmo vs their latest mmo. /thinking emoji

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Originally Posted by Azurymber

Massive city battles with invading forces.

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V1.0 had this, various other MMO's have this. It generally results in not being very fun for the people who don't want to participate. Like ideally, the mechanism for this is to have a city that is regularly assaulted by various classes of monsters (eg from easy zombies to hard dragons) and you have to participate in some meaningful manner to get any reward. It could even be done in a way that crafting and gathering classes can be used to build defenses.

However as much as I like the idea in concept, in practice, players and bots just zerg the map and no strategy is involved.

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Originally Posted by Azurymber

Ferry/Raft rides with random events.

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V1.0 also had actual "ferry" zones. Well, until they got rid of the Ferry entirely. Another MMORPG I've played had something like this as well. To get to a "fishing ship" required triggering a certain event.

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Originally Posted by Azurymber

Meaningful exploration with difficult mobs, mazes, unique pathways, and things to discover.

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What people want when they ask for "meaningful exploration" is that they want dungeon/tower/castle type locations that actually require "solving" (eg "The Sunken Temple of Qarn"'s type of puzzles but actually open different paths through the dungeons, and they change if you don't solve them correctly.)

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Originally Posted by Azurymber

Skill-based battles rather than combo-spam.

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Combo-spam is what every turn-based system uses because that's what is less cheatable and most fair, it also gives it enough turn around time to verify that the combos and skills are valid. Action MMORPG's (where you have to manually dodge as well) are extremely cheatable and tend to suck if you don't live in the same city that the servers are in. This is why many Japanese and Korean games tend to suck when they are localized to for North America/Europe, because they don't have the sub-16ms (1 frame) latency to allow all players fair play.

Up until Eureka's release, there were a number of people calling for something akin to FFXI's open world leveling system. So apparently some people thought those were a "good part" of FFXI.

What we should all be learning from Eureka is that implementing stuff from FFXI doesn't work because FFXIV is a different game.

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Originally Posted by Rinuko

Odd, not a lot of player plays a 10+ year old mmo vs their latest mmo. /thinking emoji

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FFXIV has far more players right now than FFXI did at the height of its popularity. MistakeNot is exactly correct: the stuff that was appealing about FFXI appeals to a much smaller group of people than what is appealing about FFXIV.

Skill based? you mean stand there whacking at a mob until you've gained enough tp to use a weapon skill? Yes there are exceptions to that, but that was the majority of XI's combat. Also kiting a monster because a tank standing in one spot and getting whacked on wasn't a good idea doesn't take much skill. Neither does stun locking things to avoid the worst attacks a monster can do.

Meaningful exploration? There wasn't any. The one way drops were more annoying than anything.

Also I guess you never noticed all the reskined crab, fish, leaches, ghosts ect that XI had you whacking on to level up.

Frankly I don't like when ppl talk of exploration as a lasting content because it isn't. Once you have seen it and found it that novelty is gone unless you deliberately make it very hard to explore or gating it somehow and even then ppl will find ways
Plus now we live in the digital age, compared to say vanilla wow or FFXI prime time , information sources are much more widespread, to the point that imho they killed exploration entirely

Sometimes what we want is a conglomerate of different factors that can no longer be recreated unless we deliberately decide to downgrade ourselves.
That's also why I'm very skeptical about the staying power of vanilla servers on wow.
Ppl that really enjoyed that type of game will love it, but what will happen once all content is done for them? I'm honestly not in touch with how far the private servers have gone in vanilla wow, but once you clear naxxramas 1.0 what's for them exactly?

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

Yet there are far more people playing FF14 than FF11. FF11 may have staying power - but only for a few people.

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I often wonder. In it's prime ffxi had an active playerbase of a little over 500k players.

Currently ffxi has an active playerbase of somewhere around 500k players. They're really not that different..

The rent that many more people playing at all...

Ffxi was largely unmarketed in the West. Where ffxiv is all over social media and various ad campaigns trying to draw players in. I mean sure it's had 10 million players but it's really struggling to push past it's predecessor. Which maintained the same level of playerbase with only a fraction of the sales. And next to no marketting at all.

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Originally Posted by SannaR

Skill based? you mean stand there whacking at a mob until you've gained enough tp to use a weapon skill? Yes there are exceptions to that, but that was the majority of XI's combat..

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Bit more to it than that. You generally had to be a bit more aware in xi. You didn't have red circles and telegraphs all over the place telling you what was going on and where you had to pay attention and figure it out. Mechs were also a bit more punishing if failed. In ffxiv you can blatantly ignore so many of them and it just doesn't matter. You will never die

I would like open-world leveling instead of only leveling within dungeons. Leveling in Eureka in casual parties is pretty fun and less stressful with giant pulls. We can roam around and pull mobs as we see fit, change jobs between battles for buffs or raise, then switch back.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

I often wonder. In it's prime ffxi had an active playerbase of a little over 500k players.

Currently ffxi has an active playerbase of somewhere around 500k players. They're really not that different..

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That is not a valid comparison. 500k was FFXI's maximum subscriber base. 500k is the "active" number for the FFXIV census, which includes only characters that have completed the level 65 dungeon. There are many paying subscribers who have not done that. I attempted an apples-to-apples comparison on this thread: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...83#post4547683. To be fair, I assume far more people complete content in FFXIV than did in FFXI, but even given that, FFXIV's endgame community is several times the size of FFXI's.

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Originally Posted by Talraen

]To be fair, I assume far more people complete content in FFXIV than did in FFXI, but even given that, FFXIV's endgame community is several times the size of FFXI's.

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Whee do you figure that. If you Google play online vanadiel census for various years. You tend to see thecendgame community makes up a massive segment of xis playerbase.

In comparison I think even normal mode raids have a participation level of well under half of the playerbase. Seem to recall yoshi saying low 40s in discussion about creators lower difficulty and its impact on participation some time ago.

Ex primals and savage are lower still.

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Originally Posted by Alash

Would result in, and I quote yourself, "100s of people running from nm to nm killing things near instantly, and lagging people out."

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But is is what Eureka is, what 2.X fate farming was and what hunts are.

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Originally Posted by Talraen

That is not a valid comparison. 500k was FFXI's maximum subscriber base. 500k is the "active" number for the FFXIV census, which includes only characters that have completed the level 65 dungeon. There are many paying subscribers who have not done that. I attempted an apples-to-apples comparison on this thread: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...83#post4547683. To be fair, I assume far more people complete content in FFXIV than did in FFXI, but even given that, FFXIV's endgame community is several times the size of FFXI's.

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Contrary to popular belief, FFXI used to be hugely popular and used to be the second MMORPG behind wow for a while.

https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...%2Fm%2F064ln09

Data doesn't show FFXIV to be more popular than FFXI was during its prime time.

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Also I guess you never noticed all the reskined crab, fish, leaches, ghosts ect that XI had you whacking on to level up.

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You mean, the same models you're actually currently fighting in FFXIV ?

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Whee do you figure that. If you Google play online vanadiel census for various years. You tend to see thecendgame community makes up a massive segment of xis playerbase.

In comparison I think even normal mode raids have a participation level of well under half of the playerbase. Seem to recall yoshi saying low 40s in discussion about creators lower difficulty and its impact on participation some time ago.

Ex primals and savage are lower still.

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By "endgame community" I mean the pool of players who have fulfilled the requirements to do endgame content. And "endgame content" in this context means level 70 content. In FFXIV, that's everyone who's completed the story. (If nothing else, they all qualify for Eureka.) The FFXIV census currently lists 549k players who have completed the level 65 dungeon, and it's reasonable to assume that most of those have gone on to finish the rest of the game.

By comparison, look at some FFXI statistics: http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/gui...192.1481641280

Less than half the player base (which peaked around 500k) qualifies for Sea, or any other gated endgame content aside from Sky (which is 6 years old at the time of this census). Because completing the story in FFXI was so difficult, the pool of players who could do endgame content was much smaller.

None of this means anything about who actually does endgame content, but FFXIV's available community is very clearly far larger.

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Originally Posted by Stanelis

Contrary to popular belief, FFXI used to be hugely popular and used to be the second MMORPG behind wow for a while.

https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...%2Fm%2F064ln09

Data doesn't show FFXIV to be more popular than FFXI was during its prime time.

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Google trendlines are hardly indicative of who was actually playing the game more. The top related query is "ffxi wiki." The fact that FFXI was often too obtuse to progress through without Googling is neither proof that it was more popular, nor a point in its favor.

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Originally Posted by Talraen

By comparison, look at some FFXI statistics: http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/gui...192.1481641280

Less than half the player base (which peaked around 500k) qualifies for Sky, Sea, or any other gated endgame content. Because completing the story in FFXI was so difficult, the pool of players who could do endgame content was much smaller.

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The RotZ graph shows ~82% of the player base on or past Ark Angels, which would qualify them for Sky.

~18% on Ark Angles, ~10% on The Sealed Shrine, ~8% on The Celestial Nexus, ~22% on Awakening, and ~24% on The Last Verse.

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Originally Posted by Ibi

The RotZ graph shows ~82% of the player base on or past Ark Angels, which would qualify them for Sky.

~18% on Ark Angles, ~10% on The Sealed Shrine, ~8% on The Celestial Nexus, ~22% on Awakening, and ~24% on The Last Verse.

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That's a good point, I'll edit my post. Though it's worth noting this is 6+ years after Zilart was released.

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Originally Posted by Ibi

The RotZ graph shows ~82% of the player base on or past Ark Angels, which would qualify them for Sky.

~18% on Ark Angles, ~10% on The Sealed Shrine, ~8% on The Celestial Nexus, ~22% on Awakening, and ~24% on The Last Verse.

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I would argue that this is because most players who couldn't get to that point quit the game, and are not counted in those statistics. I am certainly not one of the 82%, as I never got past the dunes.

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Originally Posted by Talraen

That's a good point, I'll edit my post. Though it's worth noting this is 6+ years after Zilart was released.

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The 7th Census, taken two years earlier, already had 77.9% of the player base with Sky access, so the portion of players taking that long is minimal.

Unfortunately that's the earliest survey that has the expansion data, so it's not clear how long it was really taking people. Or, possibly more meaningfully, how long it was taking them after they reached 75 and started working towards end game.

number of players really doesn't say anything about which game is better. Mass market appeal doesn't mean a game is good. It's like saying "More people play Mario than dark souls, therefore Mario must be a better game". No, not really, it just has a lesser barrier of entry so 3 year olds can play it.

The only thing I really want from FFXI is the horizontal progression, and to make things a bit harder to obtain. I don't need instant gratification. Even when it came to new jobs I liked having to go through a "tough" quest to unlock it, felt better somehow. I know unpopular opinion...

FFXIV is a better game than FFXI for many reasons but it did have more character and depth, people saying go back to FFXI, I say go back to WoW - vertical progression is boring and we're already feeling the effects from it in FFXIV.

There are many things that XI do right that it makes no sense they aren't in XIV. We're already porting things that don't make sense like mobs so why not more. (XIV angler fish walk, XI angler fish floats in the air, that's weird.)

• BCNMs/KSNMs. Can be spawned using protean crystals for example.
• NMs. Real NMs that take time and effort to kill, and rewards loot, not zerg FATEs for glamors. Force spawned or on a short timer like 1.0
• Loot Diverstiy. XI kept adding loot for ALL levels and not just lv1/cap. This includes interesting stats and even hidden effects. You know, like an RPG.
• Interesting Mob mechanics: Some mobs link with their same kind, others aggro low hp, magic, track by scent and lose you if you cross water. Other mobs only pop at night or get stronger at night, weather changes the kind of sprites in the area. 1.0 had mobs that followed you out of curiosity such as goats. We've seen some of these return for Eureka and that's good.

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Originally Posted by Talraen

That's a good point, I'll edit my post. Though it's worth noting this is 6+ years after Zilart was released.

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to be honest it doesn't matter if it was 6 years. as long as the census your looking at was pre abbyssea then zilart was STILL relevant content.. and that's the only thing that matters.. FFXI was after all a game you could take your time with.. you didn't have to get content done on day one...

it'd like taking savage clear rates 4 months after 4.2 landed and dismissing them because its by ffxiv standards it's ancient content... FFXIV is much a game where if you don't do content straight away you're likely to struggle with it or everyone would expect you to be fully familier... look at shinryu story where just days after the expension people were already abandoning it soon as it came up in trials cos people should have already done it by now..

or sigma scape when wasn't even a week old and people were complaining on the forums and reddit about people not knowing the fight or looking up guides...

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Originally Posted by Dzian

to be honest it doesn't matter if it was 6 years. as long as the census your looking at was pre abbyssea then zilart was STILL relevant content.. and that's the only thing that matters.. FFXI was after all a game you could take your time with.. you didn't have to get content done on day one...

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The vast majority of FFXI players never did any endgame at all, and spent 95% of their play time leveling. Incidentally, the experience Eureka was trying to recreate.

Also I spent literally years trying to get people to run Garrison so I could get a Mannequin, without any success. FFXI gave absolutely no incentive to do old content. FFXIV's roulettes, on the other hand, do. The only content in FFXIV you can't just queue for and expect to get reasonably quickly are Coil, Alexander, and everything Savage/Extreme. All other content remains playable long after day one.

To be fair, FFXI didn't require you to do things on day one, either. It just required you to have a competent static party to do anything other than just level. Which, to be clear, is a bad thing.

I said the reskined monsters part in that XI had the same thing to be a counter point to the person who said XI had more variety of monsters. To the combat sure you couldn't see how far the aoe was, but if you fought X amount of monsters you knew that if they petrified you either A normally could just stand behind them or look away. Which we do in XIV as well. Once you saw how a monster type fought and encountered a different type you had a good idea how their basics would be. Same thing as here. I don't know about anyone else, but I hated when I would be at max heal range and still be within a select few NM's more dangerous aoes and have to spend time healing yourself. Being slept by other people's monster's was also so fun...

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Originally Posted by Alash

A) You sucked at it. You were a ween who'd hardly played an MMO let alone an online game and didn't fully understand the constrictions the medium possesses, and...

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Condescending. The reason difficult mobs don't work is cuz
1.) Ilvl increase
2.) trash mobs in ffxiv are uninteresting. It's just do your rotation, dodge lights.

Mazes and unique pathways don't work in this game because there is no open world adventure at all, so open world in this game is a illusion, when you're really just traveling A to B with no danger cuz mobs always stop chasing you. You obviously didn't play 11 because there were areas where the structure of the map could change. Routes that worked before won't this time.

Things to discover?
It's called randomization. If you don't know what is popping up when, or events. You can create infinite exploring. Problem is ffxiv has static fates that are always the same and in the same place and it's not thought provoking at all. Nodes are always exact same place. Just everything in ffxiv is predictable.

All of what OP said is possible.

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Originally Posted by Azurymber

Why not borrow the good parts from FFXI?

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Boyahda Tree
Bibiki Bay
Den of Rancor
Rampage

The good parts of FFXI.

I played FFXI for years... many years... While it wasn't an entirely horrible experience I'm thoroughly glad to be done with it and have no desire to see any of its gameplay rehashed. I thought I'd moved on to something new and different. Please don't tell me I thought wrong.

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Originally Posted by Vivi_Bushido

Personally I would rather we quit trying to recycle anything from FFXI at all and make FFXIV unique and special with new fresh innovative stuff.

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They've proven time and time again that they're creatively bankrupt. Eureka just kind of proves the point when they have all the resources available to look at with XI's structured endgame, and the only thing they take away from it is stuff from Valkurm Dunes, the first real group leveling area: killing mobs at a camp and hunting NMs. It feels like content someone would make if they had only played up to level 15 in XI.

Also, with how any big FATE like the one in Lochs puts stress on the servers or how we have known for years you can't see Odin with lots of players, I'm not sure "put a lot of players in the zone" is a sensible design decision, especially when coupled with exp loss.