Quote Originally Posted by Zabuza View Post
Meanwhile you invaded and destroyed the entire genre we used to love, but that's fine, right? My FFXI was ruined thanks to the casual conversion. You invaded it and now want us to have nothing.
Yeeeeeeah, I'm gonna have to cut you off there.

Casuals did not ruin FFXI. Abyssea or the level cap increases didn't "ruin" FFXI, either, despite the frequent claim of such.

It was evident near the tail end of ToAU that something was up in content development. Things were getting rushed or scrapped entirely. Eventually we learned that SE was making XIV as yet another MMO, helmed by the same guy who lead XI, the questionably infamous Hiromichi Tanaka. This presented a quite evident drain on FFXI resources, and the attention the game needed to continue to properly flourish in its own ways. Instead, when we finally learned about WotG, it stretched on and on and on and on to the point it took years for them to actually finish the main story content with it. 1.0 here also bombs pretty hard despite no shortage of beta feedback, which sends SE into panic mode because now they pretty much have to remake a game, and not just an RPG, but MMORPG. FFXI further suffers content release drought because all hands on deck are primarily trying to salvage XIV. Abyssea runs its plotted course, but there's still no real future in sight. Voidwatch tries to be that sort of old school HNM with a pop system style, but feels horribly received between the proc system, lights, and utterly craptastic reward scheme. Such also began the creep of the mandatory RME, particularly for melee jobs, which very much screamed anti-casual gating by people who favored short-term success over longer-term community health.

I'm sure this assertion may sound strange, but people do like having things to do. For players like myself who pretty much exhausted the entirety of the endgame content they cared for, camping Fafhogg yet again was not something we looked forward to, yet another night of Dynamis was just hours of blah, I had no reason to run Nyzul, Salvage, or whatever else because I had all the gear I wanted, and in some cases, wound up with just because no one else wanted it. Sandworm and Ixion, as they came with WotG, weren't really anymore engaging despite the obvious "counterbot" logic of their spawning mechanics that people just got around with POS hacking anyway. And in some cases people would deliberately spook the latter so another shell couldn't claim. They tried some niche things like Wanted NMs or the earlier and very poorly received etched gear NMs, but there was still ultimately a point where they could no longer really fit sidegrades into the equation. Further so with how restrictive XI's inventory system was, and to some degree, still is. Imagine getting an Adaman Hauberk in 2005 and it still being BiS in 2009. Sure, you get your mileage out of it for the jobs that could equip it, but that also said there were literally 4 years of play where there was no improvement for the slot for its purpose. It didn't matter, however, if SE released a statistical equivalent of an Adaberk+2 or went the route they did with the cap increase, though. People were going to complain because their Adaberks were no longer BiS or just try to skip it entirely for the new version. Just as people complained about RMEs being briefly antiquated earlier in Adoulin due to absent ilvl upgrades. For whatever nonsensical reason, in games that literally thrive on the concept of continuously evolving with new content, some people think that when they're "done" that that should be it an anything that threatens that sentiment is bad.

No, what "ruined" FFXI for some was that they could no longer rest on their laurels. Content was no longer so stringently bottlenecked to timed spawns, insane gil costs, or in the case of Abyssea, not needing 6+ people, many of which you may not have liked but still had to tolerate. The way people leveled up changed, regardless of how some may have felt about key leeches, by effectively tripling EXP party sizes and minimizing the competitive aspect that far too often made things like Mamools or Colibri camps a chore. You didn't need a BRD. You didn't a RDM. Heck, you didn't even really need a tank. People were simply free to actually play their jobs, and with certain atma combinations, in quirky ways the rest of the game would dare not allow. And sure, some mobs were optimal sources of certain things, but there were also alternatives. Were Brews silly? Sure. Needed? Nope. Regardless of how this shook up how people played, there was still the inevitable lack of new content once people leveled all they wanted to, merited them out, +2'd their Empyrean sets, and picked up other odds and ends. At least until Adoulin, and even then some would call that spotty with a not-very-intuitive weakness system or the balance that went into the final tier Delve NMs.

Nonetheless, there were still all the reasons why FFXI never went on to "beat" WoW and wound up more the niche MMO. It was pretty much all but impossible to converse with SE until the OF, certainly to mixed success. Tanaka had his vision, with balance the memed scapegoat for some weird decisions over time. We had bonehead mobs like AV and PW. A lot of people hated paying to play a game they couldn't actually play because solo self-sufficiency was a highly limited thing (BSTs, SMNs, BLMs, and other things that waxed and waned over time). Some people being adamant XI didn't "count" as a FF game because it was online and locked behind the sub. People got chased out by CoP thanks to all the level caps and zero incentive for strangers to backtrack for help. And on and on and on. While it's super easy to just scoff a retort of some equivalent "It's just not their game, then!" line, I'd be more apt to assert that FFXI would be in an even worse state than it is now if they stayed the 75 cap course, never implemented Trusts, removed things like the CoP caps, and basically realized that maybe players being able to do all these things that exist without being shackled to an endgame shell might not be the end of the world. Pine about the good ol' days some other vets might, but the conditions that went behind that era no longer exist. XI found out what it's like to have more than just WoW to compete against. People learned things could be different, better, and to be blunt, accommodating. Lessons learned for 2.0 here, even if painful.