What made you quit FFXI?

[Yugl]

FFXI has never had much endgame content, and no real PvP which can add years onto a game's life. They've always used "stalling" tactics like super long grinds, low droprates, long travel times etc to disguise this.

Bingo. This is why I question the people who value older content so much. Not that VW is much better, but the old content was precisely that: old.

[Draylo]

Bingo. This is why I question the people who value older content so much. Not that VW is much better, but the old content was precisely that: old.

Why does old have to mean no fun? I still enjoy doing old content, do you question why I enjoy it?

As you can see by the votes, people preferred working towards something and not having it handed to them in 30 minutes. Sure everyone was high off Abyssea and was happy to get items so quick after the old system, but they get bored a lot faster. Which led them to quitting faster. I have seen it plenty of times and with a couple of friends who used to play. Once people get their goal, shit can get boring. I don't know of any other MMO that doesn't have time sinks or long grinds, they are always there in some fashion. Being thrown off somehow during a fight and making people stay on their toes is something the game needed more of. Voidwatch is a step towards that imo.

[Leva]

Japanese people should have been an option really, nothing makes me wanna quit more than seeing them with full alliances at KI NMs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

[Yugl]

Neither of us has the statistics to show an increase or decrease of players since Abyssea. New content is at least new. If you enjoy fighting the same mobs after 6yrs, that's fine, but I'm willing to abandon that for new content. VW is new content, so it belongs on my side of the spectrum, not yours. Longevity is independent of the difficulty as seen with AV in comparison to Salvage and pre-85 content. To answer your question, older content is redundant, so it is boring.

[drwaffles]

I quit a couple of days ago, for the first time since I started playing the game at age 15 or 16. The game lost its sense of grandness and much of its aesthetic value for me after the focus shifted so heavily onto Abyssea. The game no longer felt like a complete experience or a journey but a mindless gear-grind, as many people have already said. There was no satisfaction in anything any more, and I found myself constantly yearning for the old days - doing CoP, exploring Aht Urghan, participating in many different events in many different settings, generally being interested in the different facets of the game world. I don't know why, but I actually quite enjoyed levelling pre-SMN burn/Abyssea because there was a long-term progression arc. Yeah, it involved monotonous and often mindless mob-slaughtering, but at least you actually met and worked with new players most days and got to move through different zones at different levels. It made getting new spells, job abilities and gear feel exciting, and you can whine as much as you want about the artificiality of achievements delayed by time-sinks and shriek until you're hoarse about Stockholm syndrome (whose mention is the FFXI equivalent of Godwin's law), but clearly a hell of a lot of people got a lot of pleasure and enjoyment out of it.

Something else that killed my enjoyment of the game in the last few months was the creation of my WHM mule. Once she was up and running with appropriate Atma, I almost completely stopped playing with other people. Nearly everything I did was done alone, and that combined with a general feeling of dullness caused me to log in less and less, even when I had lots of free time. I wish I'd never made a second account, honestly, but it was pretty much a necessity considering almost everyone in my admittedly small LS now has a WHM and/or THF and/or BLM mule that they do their own stuff with. In short, the social and aesthetic appeal and the sense of achievement almost completely vanished for me.

Oh, and Refresh Atma are ridiculous and I pity anyone who has to play WHM on their main/only character. It used to be such a fun and interesting job.

[Draylo]

Neither of us has the statistics to show an increase or decrease of players since Abyssea. New content is at least new. If you enjoy fighting the same mobs after 6yrs, that's fine, but I'm willing to abandon that for new content. VW is new content, so it belongs on my side of the spectrum, not yours. Longevity is independent of the difficulty as seen with AV in comparison to Salvage and pre-85 content. To answer your question, older content is redundant, so it is boring.

Some people still want some of the items from that old "redundant" content and a few of the augmentable gear are still good situational pieces. I enjoy doing old content a lot more than I enjoy Abyssea. Going as something different that I never play to something that can be low manned adds something new to do. Like I am in the process of doing assaults all over again for my mythic so I go as random jobs I never get to play like SMN or bst. This was just to answer you questioning why people value older content and the old system, not trying to break up the depressing quitting theme in here.

[Yugl]

Some people still want some of the items from that old "redundant" content and a few of the augmentable gear are still good situational pieces. I enjoy doing old content a lot more than I enjoy Abyssea. Going as something different that I never play to something that can be low manned adds something new to do. Like I am in the process of doing assaults all over again for my mythic so I go as random jobs I never get to play like SMN or bst. This was just to answer you questioning why people value older content and the old system, not trying to break up the depressing quitting theme in here.

Nothing about your post pertains to the benefit of the event being old. Also, when I said I question people, I meant I question wtf is wrong them. I'm not genuinely curious as to why they like old events.

[Draylo]

Nothing about your post pertains to the benefit of the event being old. Also, when I said I question people, I meant I question wtf is wrong them. I'm not genuinely curious as to why they like old events.

Being able to low man things that used to require more people? Try reading harder.

[Yugl]

Being able to low man things that used to require more people? Try reading harder.

Neither of us has the statistics to show an increase or decrease of players since Abyssea. New content is at least new. If you enjoy fighting the same mobs after 6yrs, that's fine, but I'm willing to abandon that for new content. VW is new content, so it belongs on my side of the spectrum, not yours. Longevity is independent of the difficulty as seen with AV in comparison to Salvage and pre-85 content. To answer your question, older content is redundant, so it is boring.

You gonna make this into a 8 page argument or shut up now Draylo?

[isladar]

Let's try option B: shut up now both of you.

[Draylo]

nvm

[Ksandra]

I picked I got most of the things I wanted and got bored as it sorta was the closest though it really was the hubby that got bored first.

I think now we like too many mmos, and once we've done X content so many times we tend to just jump ship and try new content in other games.

It used to be about the gear, but now no longer. Doesn't matter how much shit we've gotten/didn't get, after spending a few months doing the same shit we feel pretty "completed" and move on.

[Cail]

both my best friends stopped playing a couple months ago, so this game is even more boring then before...I barely play at all and am probably gonna deactivate my mule account

[LinktheDeme]

Oh, and Refresh Atma are ridiculous and I pity anyone who has to play WHM on their main/only character. It used to be such a fun and interesting job.[/B]

no it never was fun and interesting to play. It's function hasnt changed at all it still is just heal, heal, and more heal. Oh and the occasional haste.

[Darkmagi]

Seconding the mule thing, it really makes FFXI into a single player game for the most part nowadays. I'd probably enjoy the game a lot more if I dropped my whm mule, but I'm too dependent on it.

[Kipling]

Agreed. I never had a mule until I came back and abyssea solo stuff required me to have one. I played most of my time never having a mule and was perfectly fine with finding people to do things with.

[Mojo]

I've 'quit' once and also have taken many extended breaks. For me, usually it's disinterest coupled with things happening IRL. In terms of what's been discussed about Abyssea and how it's affected the game - it goes both ways. It's certainly revitalized aspects of the game that were lack luster before. The best gear provides huge stat improvements instead of often pathetically marginal gains over the next best and often much more easily obtainable thing. They're also no longer designing the game around impractical bottlenecks and pitching it as real content. Items are much more feasible to obtain too. Empyreons are definitely a bit too easy, but I'd much rather settle with that than the absurdity that was obtaining relic weapons before the level cap increase and recent Dynamis changes. Not to mention that if they did make them more difficult to obtain, it's likely going to come in the form of some pointless grind which I don't think anybody enjoys (ideally it would be some difficult quest line for each weapon but I suppose that's too much to ask for.)

However, the horizontal development of FFXI was one of the best things it had going for it and I'd say it's the biggest loss that Abyssea has caused. I liked that there was such a variety of things to do at 75. If you thought HNM were fucking retarded then you didn't have to do them, there were plenty of other things to do and you could still be mostly on par with other players either way. You can certainly still do them now but it's not the same when you're 15 levels above it.

Either way, I'd say that most of the people I've talked to just say that they did the stuff they wanted to do and they're kind of bored now. They'll probably come back and play with the next patch and expansion, then take a break again when they've played it. Great. That's exactly the role a video game should play in our lives, no need to perpetuate it with stalling tactics as pointed out before.

[Sylvrdragon]

I've quit a few times. Every time, it was because friends quit or LS broke (Usually the two were connected somehow). Sometimes my friends got bored or found a new game/MMO, and other times they just had RL stuff they had to attend to. I still have a few friends that play, but being on the at the same time to actually get something done is rather sporadic. I'm gonna try to hold out till the 95 cap at least and maybe drag another friend back in who had to quit for RL stuff. If that doesn't work, then I'll probably put it down again for a time. If I do quit, I'll likely end up picking up a new game to fill the time unless I can actually get my shit together and tend to my own RL.

[Bardlet]

When I quit, it was probably a combination of game mechanics and another MMO. I'm saying game mechanics because (at the point when I quit) there were only so many times I could do Bhaflau Remnants without seeing 35 Marduk Pants drop before I started to become a homicidal maniac. Also, I was playing WoW at the BC/WotLK cusp and got sucked in (and made some great friends in the process).

I came back because WoW got boring after Cata when all the people I was enjoying playing with quit for Rift (or quit all together). I tried Rift, wasn't impressed, playing WoW a bit more but was terribly lonely, so here I am now.

[catfat]

The playerbase feels lifeless to me. Over half the people I played with either dual or triple boxed, doing stuff with so many mule characters just feels so empty and unfulfilling. The feeling of me not really being needed made me quit. That and coupled with the fact they there isn't much a future with my favorite jobs based on their responses: sch, rng, and bst