Rumbles of a New Version Update in the Distance (09/20/2013)

[cdgreg]

That's disappointing in the sense that from the dev comments a week or two ago it seemed REM would be in the first of the 2 updates. Not shocking though, stretching out the monthly fees!

[vagus]

Looks like ill be retuning in November. Was waiting on rem patch.

[cdgreg]

Also, can a brother get 120 craft cap please?!?

[Draylo]

Seriously, how can you not see why people are salty at this? It's been a horrible gap of no fun content and people have dropped like flies since ARR release. I get you really like FFXI Draylo, but try to think about it from a logical stance.

I didn't say I couldn't understand why they are upset. I just don't understand why they don't just quit so the people who still care about the game don't have to read their sad bullshit every day on these forums or anything update related. You just end up creating more negativity.

[Byrthnoth]

I just don't understand why they don't just quit...

idk, because we enjoyed the game for a decade and hope it returns to not sucking?

[Draylo]

So bitching in update threads about how shitty and lame you think the game is, is going to make it not suck?

I really guess I'm the only one tired of it

[Byrthnoth]

That's what it sounds like. My server has dropped 30-50% of its population in the last two weeks. How about yours?

[dasva]

Population over here doesn't seem to have gone down too much. Though alot of that might be the jps and people just logging in afk while doing other stuff more waiting for something interesting

[cdgreg]

Something crazy happened for about a week - I was able to walk up to a fishing guild and get minnows. That has since been fixed and they are generally grayed/sold out within the first :30 of being open.

[Malithar]

Its not so much about blindly bitching (at least on these forums, good fucking luck on XIAH) but rather discussing with others about the merits of the updates. Nothing against you Draylo, but typically, you kinda blindly defend FFXI. To some degree, we all love the game, or we wouldn't still be playing it. But some are more open to discussing its short comings, and these updates seem to be leading us to just that.

After Delve hit, we had a solid 2+ month period where people were either content with the game because they were working on Delve still, were pissed that their RME's had been dwarfed and had quit/cut back play time, or managed to beat the content prior to the +skill update. It was a good time for the game IMO. People working out strategies, working out the best rotations and jobs to bring, improving their characters to specific needs (+acc, +macc, FC/haste/-recast for stuns, etc).

After that skill update though, for a good portion of people, the game became stale. Not that the people who had already beaten Delve needed any help, but now after the skill update, they face rolled it. They could go in with terrible jobs, jobs people didn't even really have geared, just from what scraps they had gotten from SoA, and still destroy the zone. They lost out on what fun there was. I liked that the +skill update allowed the groups that were almost there as far as clearing Delve was concerned make it happen, but it was too much, too soon. When Delve was released, Matsui had said they would weaken it in the future so that everyone would have a shot at it. But it all lost its luster too soon. Add in to the problem that they didn't replace the tier it occupied with anything challenging.

Roll in their next event, Skirmish 2. I don't know anyone who doesn't think this event is a bad joke. I'll even go as far as to say that I enjoyed the event for like the first 3-5 runs. After that, it was obvious that its lifespan was going to be extremely short, as in those few runs, I was capped on gear. Awesome....now what?

And that's where we stand now. Most players are kinda just standing around wondering "now what do I do?" Its a difficult position to be in really. Some have jobs to lvl, some have old JSE to grind, some are catching up on old expansion missions/quests, etc. There's a lot of things to do in the game. But what about if you're caught up on all of that? You're really pretty boned.

We've got some cool stuff coming in October, no doubt. +80 inventory space? Fuck yeah. More Monstrosity zones? Fuck yeah. But what is there to do? All of the juicy, keep us busy for days/weeks/months work is held off for November. Thats fine, I'd love something to keep me going over the Winter. But they couldn't toss any of it into October to keep us going? Horse shit.

Again, its not just blindly bitching, its more discussing why we're stuck in such a limbo. The glory days of FFXI are prolly far gone, and never coming back. None of us really know what to look forward to in the future, as its changing at a pace we've never seen before. Personally, I have some high hopes for these BC remakes and AF/AF2/AF3 updates. Will it all pan out though? Who knows, but I certainly hope it will, because like you, I love this game. Granted, I prolly love it more for the fact that I'm restricting myself from other MMOs because I'd rather not get addicted to another one for a decade+, if they even last that long anymore. But it is what it is. I'm on this train til it crashes and burns, and while I'm on it, I'd love for it to be full of pleasant, fun times that foster good memories of my time spent in game, than full of long stretches of no new meaningful content.


TL;DR: Shit sucks atm, admit it.

[Draylo]

I don't disagree with that at all, things are slow now. I realize or there obviously would not be a huge population decline. My point is, for the people still playing this game its frustrating. All you see every time you log into the game or various forums is people bitching and talking shit about this game. Then we get a thread that has update information and some exciting things and you get that one guy "HA DAT WONT FIX DIS NEWAY, DEAD GAME FFXIV YO." This mostly applies to ffxiah, but now its spread here and not even past the first page you see a negative "ya its nothing"

[dasva]

Something crazy happened for about a week - I was able to walk up to a fishing guild and get minnows. That has since been fixed and they are generally grayed/sold out within the first :30 of being open.

I noticed that too. Though I can still get some sometimes and even buying against other people I can do decent since some of them seem to be slower on the enter key. Still nice to not have to make all of my own now

[Bukadan]

One problem no one seems to mention is that a lot of the people who were bitching about REM updates at the start of delve SUCKED ASS. I don't want to play with these people because most of them quit the game because it was too hard. Like, they weren't even good enough to follow directions in ciezak NQ mob farming...

[Xantavia]

The devs are stuck in a no-win scenerio when it comes to the top end of the playerbase. People burn through content as fast as they can, then complain when they have nothing left to do. Others realize that if they don't do it right away, good luck getting it done in the future. I think they also hurt themselves when they started on the ilvl gear. Before, you had some options in gear. It may not have been best in slot, but it was competitive and a useful piece otherwise. If you didn't have RME, there was always the option to make a str magian weapon. Now by making gear equal to gaining more levels, most don't see any reason to do anything not related to Adoulin. It leads to only a single event being relevent, and when thats done, there is nothing left to do, hence the complaints about lackluster updates. There is no way for the dev team to keep up adding new content at the rate people finish the old.

[Hyan]

God so much negativity. Anyone else just plain tired of it or is it just me? If its so bad you don't have to play or pay until you like it. SE has been doing this since forever.

Somehow I got the feeling that you assume people haven't been bitching at SE here since forever?

wtfamireading.jpg

[Toth]

I agree the game is stagnant right now. Delve has become boring and skirmish II flopped. I'm just looking at it as a time to enjoy FFXIV for a bit, play events in FFXI with some friends and gear my now 99 RUN, and jump back in full time after the new content hits starting next month.

[Damane]

I agree the game is stagnant right now. Delve has become boring and skirmish II flopped. I'm just looking at it as a time to enjoy FFXIV for a bit, play events in FFXI with some friends and gear my now 99 RUN, and jump back in full time after the new content hits starting next month.

this pritty much. enjoying 14 a bit until the next version update hits to come back and clear that and then back to 14 when i am done or need some casual time. didnt and wont give up on 11 unless my shell is gone

[Tymon]

The immense failure of the development team lies in the release of Delve and their moronic concept of how to stagger gear progression in this expansion. That is why the game is how it is right now, and there is no other reason.

You simply cannot release the best gear the expansion has to offer like that and then fill in "gaps" in gear progression. If everyone has the best and then worse stuff (or at best sidegrades) come out, do you really expect them to get excited? Not to mention they haven't even spoken of expanding Delve at all in EITHER version update. That's the only thing in game right now at all that takes even a modicum of effort to complete.

The negativity is because the game has never been stagnant quite like this before. I've been playing since launch and even when I was on hiatus I still was very aware of the state of the game. There has never been a point at any time where there was this little to work towards. The only people I could actually see having a valid counter to my argument are those who are either returning from a very long break or somehow don't have any Delve clears at all for some reason.

[jimbobsonofgod]

The negativity is because the game has never been stagnant quite like this before. I've been playing since launch and even when I was on hiatus I still was very aware of the state of the game.

Guess you were on hiatus from 2007-2010 then because the game was pretty stale then too.

[Byrthnoth]

Guess you were on hiatus from 2007-2010 then because the game was pretty stale then too.

For me, endgame was fun and active until the Salvage bans (at which point myself and >half of everyone I knew got banned). WotG's endgame sucked, but we were still spamming ToAU (ZNMs, Salvage groups, etc.) and CoP stuff (AV). There were still silly kings shells around and crap. Dynamis and Limbus groups still existed. Endgame was still going strong at the beginning of '09.

The bannings meant that spring of '09 to June of '10 (Abyssea) was little to no endgame for me. There still was endgame out there, but I just wasn't doing it because there were better effort:reward ratios for a new character. Even then, though, there was Dynamis. There was Limbus. There was Salvage. There were ground kings. Heck, there were still people doing sky (albeit not in linkshells for the purpose). Endgame still had depth.

Abyssea happened, Voidwatch happened, Legion happened, and SE spent a year rejuvenating old events with varying degrees of success. Overall, there were a lot of different things to do as an endgame player whether you were solo, lowman, or in an alliance. In the brief period following Salvage v2, endgame had a ton of different options and almost everything was productive and profitable due to RMEs.



For players, now we have Delve and Yorcia Skirmish. If you're willing to wait 40 minutes per Skirmish or burn a lot of gil, you can probably cap out on gear from there in two days. If you're in a good group that already has their shit, you can cap out on Delve in a week or so as well. If you're not in a good group, then you probably spend a lot of time being frustrated that you can't beat Delve bosses. There is no depth to this endgame.

The only content with any duration at the moment is Monstrosity, and it's incredibly repetitive. "Oh, you leveled Rabbit to 75? Now go level Tiger to 75. Then level Coeurl to 90. Then level Opo and Gnole to 75. Then level Behemoth to 30." You're killing the same monsters using pretty similar optimal strategies on all the species. I think I'm at the point where I have more monstrosity levels than job levels, which might benefit me in November when they finally add PvM. That's a feature that, btw, was pretty obviously supposed to be included in the initial Monstrosity release. When do you think we'll actually get to form parties? They implemented Monstrosity on the test server at the end of May (5/29) and the only things that have changed since then are the 50+ xp tnl and the addition of NA translations for instincts/etc.



The lack of support that this game had been receiving in recent years was tolerable mostly because we had old content to fall back on. We no longer have any reason to do the old content because of bad design decisions. I would like to believe that the FFXI dev team can turn it around, but they've had months and continue to make bad choices and fail to deliver. I'm not calling them lazy. It's entirely possible that their terribleness is due to constraints from within SE (lack of funding, manpower, etc.) but if I'm going to donate $30 a month for charity then it probably won't be for a company that just used to make good video games.