Dev Tracker

[ringthree]

Good Grinding = Nyzul Isle/ZNM
Bad Grinding = Salvage/VNM

In one you walk away with something and in the other you walk away with nothing.

Salvage was better than all other content combined even with no drops.

Reward rate is easy to change. Getting content right is the hard part.

ZNM and Nyzul are "good" grinding? So good grinding is a crappy loot pinata?

[Michelob]

Pre-patch Ein where rates on Abjs in NQ chambers was around ~5% your only reason for doing Ein was to unlock Odin battles. Like you said, Ichor became useless fast. The mythical Sheep NM that doubled drops I saw once ever. We got 2 Hydra fangs instead of 1 that day. Yeah...

Odin had such a large lootpool that after the 3 chambers (given your shit was in order, mules and wins) of nothing seeing yet another god damn Wbody or something equally worthless was always complete letdown. Oh sure, you'd have the runs where it almost seemed worth it when 2 Ebody would load but overall the amount of time wasted in Ein truly made runs demoralizing. This isn't to say that I didn't squeeze out fun talking shit on ventrilo or doing the Odin fights but with no intermediate rewards, you either got abjurations or you got a whole lotta nothing and Einherjar was damn good at giving you nothing.

Even with the sub-par drop rates, Einherjar was a damn fun event at 75. And time sink? If your shell had a strict entry time which ours back on midgard did, the event took 15-30 minutes twice a week. That's 30-60 minutes of fighting a week and what an additional 5 minutes to get there each time. Average time per week spent was like 45 minutes with tier 3 weeks maybe averaging a little higher.

[Malacite]

Salvage was better than all other content combined even with no drops.

Reward rate is easy to change. Getting content right is the hard part.

ZNM and Nyzul are "good" grinding? So good grinding is a crappy loot pinata?

Err, yeah, in what universe was ZNM good? Nyzul was actually kinda fun, but the random bullshit floors it would throw at you from time to time did suck (like clear all enemies 2x in a row or triple fucking lamp floors)

ZNM was just stupid from the beginning. Maybe if they hadn't implemented it in a half-assed way with Pankration and that arbitrary cap on how many pictures you could trade per day, it would have been tolerable. VNM is only slightly better in that you don't have to participate in all the side bullshit, just grind the NMs but that too essentially boils down to luck with regards to getting the abyssite to change color.

At least they've gotten Voidwatch right so far. Salvage was also really awesome, just the drop rates were too low.

Oh lawd... I hate to say this but what if they add staggers to Salvage when they decide to revamp it like they did Dynamis as part of the effort to make Mythics more accessible/augment Salvage armor?

[Dooom]

At least they've gotten Voidwatch right so far.

Low drop rates on r/ex items which goes to a random person with no opportunity to give it to someone else or the loot pool is not getting something right.

Oh lawd... I hate to say this but what if they add staggers to Salvage when they decide to revamp it like they did Dynamis as part of the effort to make Mythics more accessible/augment Salvage armor?

I'm fucking sick of triggers/staggers. It's a bullshit gimmick that we should not have to rely on to get drops.

[Michelob]

Low drop rates on r/ex items which goes to a random person with no opportunity to give it to someone else or the loot pool is not getting something right.

This.

I'm fucking sick of triggers/staggers. It's a bullshit gimmick that we should not have to rely on to get drops.

Oh God this! How about a challenging fight instead?

[Esvedium]

It'd be nice to get stagger-like drop rates on something without having to stagger it, like making Treasure Hunter more than Placebo+1. Until that time, I'll take "stagger to actually get drops" over "no stagger system and no drops ever lol" any day of the week.

[ronin sparthos]

Salvage was better than all other content combined even with no drops.

Reward rate is easy to change. Getting content right is the hard part.

I fail to see how Salvage was "better" than all other content that came out around its time along with "getting content right", you'll have to elaborate on that.

Salvage rates were embarrassingly bad and the player was like the hamster on the wheel, going nowhere for months. Was the system fun by my definition? Yes, but so were alot of other events. Was it rewarding relative to time invested? No.

Even if you managed to gather the pieces, odds are you had to deal with the further boondoggle known as gathering up Imp Wootz. The whole thing stank of bad grinding and contemporary events were more rewarding.

ZNM and Nyzul are "good" grinding? So good grinding is a crappy loot pinata?

How wasn't ZNM a good grind? You invested time taking pics, killed mobs that had 100% rates on higher tier mobs and all along the way you were rewarded for your time invested.

The only thing I'd peg ZNM for was the crappy limitations on trading plates and the whole concept of picturetaking as a whole but really that was typical SE protocol at the time. If you weren't being blocked via pics you had arbitrary lockouts, HNM windows or JP midnight to deal with.

Monsters had a variety of good loot (for its time) that you could choose to sell or not, battles were unique and encouraged a variety of setups and overall the system was sound.

Bring your own pop and odds are you were walking away a winner along with your friends/LS mates if stuff double dropped. Textbook good grinding.

Nyzul? Even less of a hassle than ZNM, fun (and frustrating) due to the randomness of floors and rewarding via the gearsets/mythic weaponskills that were impressive at the time. Loot pinata? Not quite but the event was 30mins and assured you at least some EXP.

VNM is only slightly better in that you don't have to participate in all the side bullshit, just grind the NMs but that too essentially boils down to luck with regards to getting the abyssite to change color.

VNM... better than ZNM? Sheer insanity.

T1s had no drops.
T2s were difficult and had some terrible drops upon inception of the event.
T3s had one unique drop and some very lazily put together sellables designed for at least a party or more.
Yilbegan is the most poorly designed HNM in the game hands down. He alone puts VNM to bed and I have no idea what the developers were reaching for with his design.

VNM made things like Garrison seem more rewarding.

[Spira]

I'll have to agree to some extent about ZNM.
It was a good system when its drops were relevant. It had all the checks built in place.
Unique point-based trig acquisition that was economy resistant, demand based trigger pricing, 100% trophy, decent NM pop placement, low ??? repop timers, optional paths on lower tiers, Gearsets that dropped from multiple sources, unique NMs with unique AI (eg Claret).. Higher tiers had gil drops, Tier 4 NMs had spacious Islets where you could fight them / prevented stealing unless people invested zeni to go there, and so on..
Drop-rates were also pretty decent.

It had some drawbacks, but most were minor. Picture grinding is a chore - hunting requested mob families are typically not really worth the effort. 10 pic per day limit was the lamest arbitrary limitation. If they wanted to prevent people from accumulating points too fast and spamming it, the demand point system already worked rather well. T4 trophies not being 100% meant PW pops were rare as well and people didn't get enough chances to even try PW, let alone come up with good strategies for it.
PW being ridiculously hard with its 17 forms of hell. But that was basically it.

Now tho, with demand a bit lacking, some of these limitations could be done away with for convenience sake.
remove the 10 pic a day limit, boost zeni/pic amounts across the board or lower zeni cost of trigs, make t4 trophies 100%. those would be excellent conveniences for anyone still wanting to try the NM system. Added incentives could be augments to Enkidu/Aurum/Oracle set.

Nyzul was also a nice grind, as far as floor progress was concerned. Randomized floors with reasonably varied difficulty for a balanced party. Lamp floors that required coordination. Random floor bonuses and penalties switched things up - sometimes in an extreme way - but made sure that it wasn't always routine. The only thing that was bad was droprate for the boss floor eq sets, and the 1 person climb at a time thing before they changed it

[Dooom]

It'd be nice to get stagger-like drop rates on something without having to stagger it, like making Treasure Hunter more than Placebo+1. Until that time, I'll take "stagger to actually get drops" over "no stagger system and no drops ever lol" any day of the week.

The trouble with them for me is that they lock you into the same job set-ups, and that often fights are about holding and procing the NM before you kill it, artificially increasing fight length/difficulty. A general raising of drop rates would be much more preferable imo.

[Byrthnoth]

Salvage was not rewarding, but was very fun and did have long-term (sometimes more theoretical than not) rewards. I think the biggest boon to Salvage was the people it attracted. In order to get much out of Salvage, you had to be willing to do runs with no tangible reward every other day for a year. People that could do that generally liked the event and tried to optimize it. Being with a group of people that liked the event and tried to optimize it made the event fun.

I have great memories of my Salvage group, as opposed to almost every other event-driven group I've ever been in.

[Hioki]

Salvage was better than all other content combined even with no drops.

Wouldn't say all other content. Einherjar and Limbus were pretty decent systems despite the wait. I've never left either of those events disappointed.

[Yeyoking]

Wouldn't say all other content. Einherjar and Limbus were pretty decent systems despite the wait. I've never left either of those events disappointed.

Einherjar was a 15-30min event that took 37 hours to gather for.....at least that was how it was back then. The time I've spent waiting at the entrance is probably 2.5x the time I've spent in the instance.

[Charismatic]

Problem with your crew, not the event.

[Kaisha]

So uh, bump? I'll be this borks Windoer sometime in the future.
Alt thought: OMG an update for windows only users.
Super troll thought that is probably more accurate given the adjustment to the font: We're getting 14's shitty menu system
Linky!

I'm not expecting much in terms of actual interface changes. Rather, I'd expect them to make mouse+keyboard actually feasible, as the mouse controls/target-clicking reliability is laughably bad, and always has been since its inception.

[Spira]

i dont care how much they change mouse+keyboard if my current keyboard usability remains the same.

I actually like that I don't have to use a mouse at all when I play FFXI be it on PC or PS3. And generally speaking other than to tab specific NPCs/PCs in a clusterfuck of other things, you're gonna be more efficient with the keyboard.

also..

The following additions and adjustments will be implemented in the next version update:

A new exchange NPC for crests and seals will be added.
Current plans call for allowing players to trade three seals/crests for any one seal/crest of their choice.

Porter Moogles will be introduced to the following areas:
Selbina / Mhaura / Rabao / Kazham / Norg / Nashmau / Southern San d’Oria [S] / Bastok Markets [S] / Windurst Waters [S]

It will become possible to redeem multiple battle trophies at once in the following areas:
Abyssea – Altepa / Abyssea – Uleguerand / Abyssea - Grauberg

meh. porter is convenient but nothing necessary.
battle trophies - traded it a total of once just to see if the armor was NPCable (they're not)
seals/crests.. I didn't think this was an issue for people much but I haven't done any of the new KC BCs... still, any form of conversion in full awareness of its drawbacks are nice. I woulda hoped to see more 3 job seals > 1 job seal of choice thing happening.. those things just get wasted everywhere.

[Daiiawn]

I think part of the issue with seals is that KCs are not /that/ common anymore, anyone wanting a black belt is going to have to use a LOT of seals (unless they get lucky and buy the item, which i cant see happening with egg). At least with this change monks can trade in their KC/HKC's for KS.

[TacoTaru]

Err, yeah, in what universe was ZNM good? Nyzul was actually kinda fun, but the random bullshit floors it would throw at you from time to time did suck (like clear all enemies 2x in a row or triple fucking lamp floors)

Yeah, five guaranteed wins floors that took about two~three minutes each were pretty awful. A spammy Cerb with his only TP move being Magma Hoplon or getting pathos: no white magic/weapon skills were as hard as Nyzul got. I wish I could have got 4 lamps floors and a boss every time, so I could be done with the run in 10 minutes.

[Kaiyoko]

i dont care how much they change mouse+keyboard if my current keyboard usability remains the same.

I actually like that I don't have to use a mouse at all when I play FFXI be it on PC or PS3. And generally speaking other than to tab specific NPCs/PCs in a clusterfuck of other things, you're gonna be more efficient with the keyboard.

also..



meh. porter is convenient but nothing necessary.
battle trophies - traded it a total of once just to see if the armor was NPCable (they're not)
seals/crests.. I didn't think this was an issue for people much but I haven't done any of the new KC BCs... still, any form of conversion in full awareness of its drawbacks are nice. I woulda hoped to see more 3 job seals > 1 job seal of choice thing happening.. those things just get wasted everywhere.

I was assuming it ment the +1 and +2 upgrade items. Crest being +2.

[TacoTaru]

Pretty sure it's referring to Beastman/Kindred seals <--> Kindred/High Kindred Crests.

[Byrthnoth]

Yeah, the fact that "Crest" is a reward makes it pretty unambiguous. This isn't a job seal exchange, as much as I'd like to have used it for RDM body seals. 24 trash seals for 8 RDM bodies? Deal!