Longer than a day <can I have it?>

[Jennestia]

Then what was it? Because I'm pretty sure the only thing that kept people running Dynamis all those years was the crappy drop rate.

XI is notorious for its use of low drop rates as a stopgap for any real content.

=\ And yet I've never seen this problem. People did Dynamis because it scheduled in their linkshell (which people always walked out with something they wanted (unless shell is pointbased) aside the notorious pieces to some forum communities, i.e Duelist Chapeau.) Limbus, which also didn't have a bad drop rate and used a currency based reward system for the mainly sought after non-armor pieces. Some Omega and Ultima parts were rarer than others but non too rare that you seen your server devoid of pieces. (Most mainly farmed coins and AF/Relic+1 materia regardless.)

Assaults as well had nothing to do with drop-rates, they were done for ranking, fun (some of them actually were fun "just to do" content) and points toward Salvage (which not even SE fully liked) or gear. Even Sky and Sea gods had decent drop rates that the main reason people kept the events in circulation were because they were always gearing up new members, very rarely did you enter an established Linkshell that didn't wear out a lot of content for it's spoils.

So no, "low drop rate" wasn't the reason content stayed alive in that game, new people had tons of content to do which kept it fresh because people were almost always finally being able to start doing that content, especially if you joined many years later.

[Kiote]

FFXI Content lasted so Long because you had to do it in Phases.

Sky - You had to kill each Boss Once Then you got to fight the super Boss

Dynamis - You had to Beat Each one to move to the next level

Sea - You Had to Beat Each one to Unlock the Next Tier

Nyzul - You had to Beat Each Floor to Move to the next floor

On top of having these built in tiers, each event also had a strategic cool down. Dyn was once a weak. Sky had Pop timers. Nyzul you had to wait for Tags.

People call these times sinks, but what they really did was Push players to work on all of the content simultaneously. You couldn't just throw yourself at the same thing until you figured it out or got lucky.

FFXIV has nothing to advance in. It is all one shot content.

[HiirNoivl]

Seven years?

[Estellios]

Dynamis was exactly a low drop-rate time sink but the other tiered events were done a lot better.

These fights are accessible to most people because you can retry the fight quickly without having to wait a long time, whereas most stuff in FF11 locked you out for 2-3 days no matter what, which is anything but strategic. It's why I think sky is probably the best-designed, since it doesn't lock you out of crap, takes some time, and its mostly easy to schedule around, barring needing X amount of people. Once they made most of those trigger NMs force popped it was pretty much perfect.

Moogle got beaten after people constantly throwing themselves at it for several hours at once which would probably end up being 2 months if this was FF11, and its very tough to practice any sort of fight when you have to wait that long. I much prefer it this way.

[Kiote]

Don't quote me on this, but i think Yoshida mentioned something about increasing the rate of content release after 1.21.

Hopefully it's not all DDs and Ifrits..

[Sephrick]

=\ And yet I've never seen this problem. People did Dynamis because it scheduled in their linkshell (which people always walked out with something they wanted (unless shell is pointbased) aside the notorious pieces to some forum communities, i.e Duelist Chapeau.) Limbus, which also didn't have a bad drop rate and used a currency based reward system for the mainly sought after non-armor pieces. Some Omega and Ultima parts were rarer than others but non too rare that you seen your server devoid of pieces. (Most mainly farmed coins and AF/Relic+1 materia regardless.)

Assaults as well had nothing to do with drop-rates, they were done for ranking, fun (some of them actually were fun "just to do" content) and points toward Salvage (which not even SE fully liked) or gear. Even Sky and Sea gods had decent drop rates that the main reason people kept the events in circulation were because they were always gearing up new members, very rarely did you enter an established Linkshell that didn't wear out a lot of content for it's spoils.

So no, "low drop rate" wasn't the reason content stayed alive in that game, new people had tons of content to do which kept it fresh because people were almost always finally being able to start doing that content, especially if you joined many years later.

Usually in Dynamis ~5 or so people out of 36 walked out with something. The rest were no closer to a reward than when they entered. I spent a year and a half sitting on DKP so I could win a bid on a rdm hat and saw two drop in that time, neither of which I had the points to win. I know some linkshells were throwing away rdm hats. Mine saw a lot of pup gear.

Some maybe you're right in that it wasn't necessarily low drop rates. It was just the random number generator compounded. by the fact that we were completely at its mercy because few events had any sort of progression system like assault.

Sky's problem was that it was a series of lower drop rates that started with a NM camp face off. The fact that SE designed a system that allowed RMT to dominate end game just left a sour taste for me.

I liken sky to winning a radio contest. Generally for those radio contests you can call in for a chance to win the cance to win the chance to win the chance to pick one of 100 keys to see if it unlocks a car to win a one year lease.

In sky you had the chance to get claim on a mob that had a chance to drop an item that gave you a chance to pop another mob which had a chance to drop items including part of a key to have a chance to pop another mob which has a chance drop some bigger items. Assuming no one MPKd and stole your claim along the way.

The only thing the old XI team would have done different with the Moogle quest is point the 5 NMs on opposite corners of the world, make them lottery spawns with 30 minute delays and lower the drop rate plus put a 24 hour cool down on the fight itself.

So maybe XIs drop rates weren't all that bad. It was just exacerbated by all the other arbitrary hurdles in the way.

[Estellios]

Don't quote me on this, but i think Yoshida mentioned something about increasing the rate of content release after 1.21.

Hopefully it's not all DDs and Ifrits..

Well I think this is the last general wave of large-scale revamps that can be done on the current servers, so I'd believe it.

[Sephrick]

Don't quote me on this, but i think Yoshida mentioned something about increasing the rate of content release after 1.21.

Hopefully it's not all DDs and Ifrits..

Yeah, I think this is just crunch time for them in a big way as the 2.0 roadmap has them finishing the new graphics engine around this time as well as wrapping planning and starting the software check.

[Rokien]

FFXI didn't have terrible drop rates, it just seemed like that because you could normally kill an nm once a day or do something once a week, it added life to the game

[Sephrick]

FFXI didn't have terrible drop rates, it just seemed like that because you could normally kill an nm once a day or do something once a week, it added life to the game

Added or detracted. Comes down to personal opinion.