Dev Tracker: Discussion

[arus2001]

XI's "death" began with Tanaka regaining control and shit-tastic drop rates in alliance content via later-Voidwatch and Legion. If you want to make the argument that people got bored with XI because they got what they wanted and quit (or maybe pissed they weren't lording over the plebs with botted gains), go ahead, but there are likely just as many that quit because they had no hope of (reliably) getting things after Abyssea, be it 1500 HMP or what few decent Legion/VW drops there were in an "RME or GTFO!" landscape. I'm not above saying Matsui has done some good things since, but the time I took away from XI also helped me realize what it was sorely lacking relative to other games and consequently seems incapable of remedying under its current engine/server capabilities.

Not like this is a new fucking argument, though.

As for augmented gear, I don't think it bugs me so much as long they comfortably span multiple jobs and working on the augments themselves is a reasonable process. I'm not 100% sold on that being the case for Alluvion stuff, as the people who thrive on that are likely those sitting on old gil or the time/patience to slog through salvage/dynamis daily. If Aby-Zitah is more like, "Hey, this type of cruor would let you buy augment chances!" alongside poppable NM drops, then I'd say it's about as close to perfect as we could hope. There'll still be optimal methods of acquisition, sure, but not so shut-out as even low-man Delve could be.

Otherwise, lack of new content would pretty much kill any MMO. And part of that sting was felt late-WotG, if not sooner depending on your play style.

[dasva]

I had a lot of fun with Pankration waaaaay back when.

It was unfortunate that the best setups boiled down to a few rock-paper-scissors builds but even among them there was quite a bit of variety.

Kind of sad it was amazingly complex and all this talk got me interested in it again... so went to try new stuff out and it appears you can't take pics of any mobs in soa zones . Shame they'd probably be worth like 3k zeni each lol

[Kainstryder]

I have little hopes for the story to be anything decent either. Adoulin was extremely rushed and we really got a skeleton story with nothing fleshed out or explored upon. Mostly "hey here's the missions, enjoy!" then 2 updates later "we added 2 quests which are basically just cutscenes, please enjoy!" that should've been mission cutscenes to start.

If a full-fledged expansion we paid money for was lacking, I have zero hopes free content story will be anything good. Probably some cookie cutter anime heroine story of "I am Altana from a different dimension, please my warriors save vana'diel! Fight for ever lasting peace uguu".

Here's to hoping the final armors or rewards (maybe Genji armor finally?) rape everything that has been or will be.

[Damane]

i guess legion armor abjurations werent added into the battlefield spoils galore campaign, all i see is i-kupons and +2 empy items drop

[Isiolia]

No, releasing content that's low man or solo able by average everyday players with same rewards is/was the games undoing. You can't really think that easily available content and rewards is a good thing for the players who plan on playing through it especially when considering people returning isn't the main point here. People who are never included in /t invite parties shouldn't hope for this content difficulty because it'll make them worse and less desirable in the end, which until new content stops, should be the goal

Letting people play the game on their own terms is good for maintaining subscriptions. It doesn't serve to drive them to other games. It might not appeal to the top few percent of players that just get bored if they can't sit around town wearing shinies few other players can get, but they're relatively few.

I'm not saying having a challenge for those that want it is bad. More just countering the notion that making things tuned around smaller groups was to drive people to XIV. SoA's early alliance-based focus, REM-only mentality at the time, and so on probably contributed far more to people going to XIV than Abyssea did (also, that's when the beta for ARR hit). At that time, my small LS was doing stuff like NNI, Salvage 2, etc. Had SoA content been as accessible then as it is now, we could have swapped to doing that. Instead, everyone quit, because we couldn't really play the game as we'd been enjoying it for the previous few years.

[Bukadan]

The game isn't prohibiting at all though even at the high difficulty levels. I have no rem, other than mules bard, and never have, but it doesn't stop me from doing the 3 man delves, D avatars/ouryus. If full parties can't complete those, with better equipment (I'm gimp as fuck), then any easier the content becomes makes it even more of a joke on gated-by-equipment content, but above all seriously removes the burden of serious and efficient play by players who are already questionable at best. This is not the way to improve the games playability, solo small group or otherwise

[Isiolia]

That's how things are now. That's not how things were when ilevel was originally introduced, and people were throwing alliances at the NMs in the field (with rotating BRDs/CORs/etc) and then farming plasm by holding the NMs in a fracture while everyone else killed the regular mobs. There were no i117 welfare items, WKRs popped once a day and took tens/hundreds of thousands of Bayld to get into, Skirmish cost millions to do, etc. Basically, little in the way of logical progression.

Stuff is nice now. It scales. At that time, it didn't. Meanwhile, you had ARR coming out. They didn't upgrade REM at first either, pissing off yet more people. Again, if people want to point fingers or accuse something of driving people to XIV...Abyssea is a bad scapegoat. ilevel implementation makes a lot more sense. It eventually got fixed, but at the time, which happened to coincide with ARR's beta/release, it was quite different.

[Toth]

The adding of i119 gear right off the bat essentially negated the desire for many to get specific but ilevel inferior pieces along the way as well. You got those nice claws from Wildskeeper? Well, there are ones 14 ilevels better that drop from delve! Once Tojii was farmable, I think you saw a noticeable decline thanks to MNK-mania.

[Bukadan]

Having lead the first delve win on my server I understand what you're saying, but even this day the problem remains, I no longer shout since 9/10 times I'm better off working around that potential bad member

[arus2001]

...other than mules bard...

People both underestimate advantages like this and too often assume everyone else shells out for multiple accounts. When you're all alone with Eminence gear as really the best you can hope for as a starting point with parties being difficult to put together for numerous reasons, namely logistics and content age, the game landscape can look a lot different. To somewhat paraphrase what Isiolia brought up about subs, what compels people to pay for a game they can't play?

[vivbiibasjiu]

No it wasn't. For as many people that quit over the level cap rise (which is the real issue there, not Abyssea), plenty more came back. Logically, people could actually get back up to speed quickly for the first time in the game's life.

Abyssea itself stands out as some of the best content design FFXI has had. Highly accessible and beneficial to players of all stripes. They'll be lucky if this new content mimics that success - keeping players busy for years. Unlike SoA era content, it was implemented in the right order as well.

Giving players greater ability to solo/lowman is less a move to make them quit, and more one to allow them to stick around. That's what the borked implementation of ilevel got so wrong.

Yeah, such great content! WAR MNK NIN WHM BLM or GTFO. Literally never seen any other job in abyssea during that time, it was the content with the most job restriction in the game's history. It also started the era of everyone making 50 gimp mules to solo everything for themselves, hence the death of the community and the beginning of the "me me me!" era where if someone actually wants to team up with you, you groan since it means less for you and your gimpy mules. Abyssea was a joke, and it was meant to be the "end" of the game. Much like Rhapsodies is now going to be the "end". Deal with it. Not everyone loved lolAbyssea

[Bukadan]

It was the worst content in terms of its lasting implications to the player base. I quit before abyss a and came back after, I returned to absolutely TERRIBLE players not even understanding basic game play. The worst is when people don't understand that if a guide says jobx x3 joby x1 jobz x2 they don't consider why that standard was even put there nor do they care as long as they get the win. It makes for shitty parties when you have those players who self limit themselves by not changing gear for situations, by not being proactive about buffs and doing them without being asked, melee fighting in spots away from cure range so mage needs to be in range of aoe to cure. None of this matters to most people. The gear change thing really pisses me off because it's not opinionated that swaps make you better, it's fact and if you aren't willing to contribute to a party to the best of your characters ability then do not opt (or even hope to) in on harder content till you are able to handle it

[Selamis]

Yeah, such great content! WAR MNK NIN WHM BLM or GTFO. Literally never seen any other job in abyssea during that time, it was the content with the most job restriction in the game's history. It also started the era of everyone making 50 gimp mules to solo everything for themselves, hence the death of the community and the beginning of the "me me me!" era where if someone actually wants to team up with you, you groan since it means less for you and your gimpy mules. Abyssea was a joke, and it was meant to be the "end" of the game. Much like Rhapsodies is now going to be the "end". Deal with it. Not everyone loved lolAbyssea

More people loved it than hated it and I'm not sure what types of groups you hung out with but Abyssea was content that anyone could do. Xp parties were diverse, people came gimped as fuck and still were able to contribute. Bosses could be farmed with any combo of jobs (usually people to hold KI so it didn't matter on the setup) mobs could be tanked by any dd as long as some type of healer was present, your typical pld and nin weren't holding hate for long with people dropping 5-8k ws at the time and they were mostly brought for procs.

Delve had much more restriction when it first came out, I've never seen someone excluded from Abyssea because of their job, where as that happened with Delve initially. And let's not overlook kings, two tanks, whm, rdm, a sam, and 1 or 2 other dps, and blm only with thf for th. Yea, that sure was diverse content.

[Kyreth]

abyssea wasnt supposed to kill FFXI it was done to save it because of XIV failure at that time ¬.¬ and draw people back into 11, which it did. Abyssea was wonderfull. wtf you talking

Um, no. Abyssea was there to let FFXI players down gently.

"Yay, you saved all the things and can hit things like the god you are. Go play FFXI, game over man!"

THEN FFXIV 1.0 tanked.

This is the Last Hurrah v2.0: A WINNER IS YOU.

[dasva]

i guess legion armor abjurations werent added into the battlefield spoils galore campaign, all i see is i-kupons and +2 empy items drop

They were the last few times but it wasn't exactly a common drop and only certain ones had it

[Bukadan]

I mean honestly if any job can be a part of an event or anyone even super gimp can meaningfully contribute to the point that it's a breeze through, all while being the endest of end game, then you'll get hardcores capping out in a week or successfully camping over the gimps. Even the casuals would cap soon since the only requirement is merely attendance. No one should be happy with content whose main issue is just being there half afk. If you aren't pushed to your limit skill wise or gear wise if you suck, then you shouldn't be rewarded with anything other than furniture or level 1 event armor

[Selamis]

I mean honestly if any job can be a part of an event or anyone even super gimp can meaningfully contribute to the point that it's a breeze through, all while being the endest of end game, then you'll get hardcores capping out in a week or successfully camping over the gimps. Even the casuals would cap soon since the only requirement is merely attendance. No one should be happy with content whose main issue is just being there half afk. If you aren't pushed to your limit skill wise or gear wise if you suck, then you shouldn't be rewarded with anything other than furniture or level 1 event armor

Also take into account that Abyssea didn't become God Mode until Heroes came out and the atmas really buffed people. When it was new and no one really knew about procs and the atmas available were limited and not very overpowered as they would become, it was a very different landscape. You had to still put in a pretty decent amount of work in Visions and the bosses could still pose a challenge to some people and you had to still rely on others to gear yourself and couldn't low man everything.

[urat]

FFXI has always released content that was poorly designed, lets all just sit back and accept the fact that these devs are not masters of game theory, and they are releasing content not with the goal of us having fun, but content that makes people stay subscribed for another month or two.

Seriously, lets take a look at it here:

FFXI COP era (pre sea):

Dynamis, a several hour long event that took dozens of organized people to pull off, consisting of farming a bunch of trash mobs slowly and hating yourselves, then hoping to god you are the 1/several dozen who wins the lot on an item you want, and it finally dropped. Sometimes youd farm the entire dyna zone and not see your armor for 4 runs straight, then it drops and someone else gets it. Classic ffxi.

HNMs: Monsters that only spawn every 2-3 days, with a predictable spawn time, that drop some best in slot items? And super rare chance on drop? And you have to compete to claim the mob? And then lot for it? SE ad 0 clue what they were doing here, no end game event in any mmo has ever produced more squabbling and butthurt player on player hate in communities than HNMs. It was literally designed to pit us against each other. I barely touched HNMs during this era because it was such a cesspool of rage players and claim bots. Nope.jpg

Sky: See above. Except now you have to camp shit tier mobs instead of big bosses. They found out a way to make HNMs even more grueling.

Sea was probably one of the better designed events during this time. Whether that was on purpose or by chance, I dunno. However, there was a LOT less drama involved. Limbus was generally considered a much more solid event. Same zone farming style as dynamis, but significantly less time intensive and schedule demanding. I havent ever heard anyone talk shit about limbus like they did dynamis.

ToAU era:

So we had besieged, the first of the server wide event fun, and everyone really got into that. Solid design, but... didn't have any real rewards to it. It was just a place to skill up and get some points... It was fun I guess?

Meripos: Ah, you thought you were done exping after lv 75? Guess again, now you gotta go exp so more! Except you can only spend merit points in your MH, so unlike before you have to stop exping every couple hours to run all the way back to town, then come back. I think everyone was okay with the customization merits offered though, and it was received happily.

Salvage: The entire time salvage existed as a thing to do not for funsies, but because its gear was actually good, no one ever talked positively about salvage. Shit was random, and youd frequently easily get 2/3 of a piece of gear then spend a month farming the third. Even post fix its very annoying.

Einherjar: Mostly just boring. You get some people together and kill a few waves of mobs and mediocre boss or two. Rarely dropped cool looking armor no one actually bothered to get. This event was a /yawn fest. Only thing to do was grind up to odin, but outside of that it was boring as hell. Very uninspired design.

Nyzul isle: Lamps should never have been added, Nyzul sans lamps would have been a totally awesome thing to do, but with lamps PUGs became basically a waste of time, since youd always have one fuck who couldnt do them. Another example of SE not actively testing their own events they made to see how fun they actually were.

ZNMs: Actually were a rare example of good design, and became very popular very fast. To bad a pretty large sum of the 'good' gear dropped from it was not actually best in slot, and lots of the good gear from it was quickly outclassed and ZNMs became a waste of time to do (since people had 0 clue how to beat pandy warden atm outside of BGs logging out trick)

WotG era (aka still ToAU era):

The only thing people will ever remember doing in WotG era, and only thing they'll mention, were campaign battles. Campaign battles were a great way to solo exp to 75, and get merits when no one was online (playing on a wednesdays afternoon? Campaign battle prolly your best bet) They were randomized, and didn't get stale quickly, not bad.

HNMs: SE literally designed two HNMs with built in fuck you buttons. God damn it, why did they think this was a good idea? Sandworm and ixion had cool concepts to them, but they were also a great way to harass other end game LSes by fucking the pop over...

ANNMs: No one ever did this because it actually took some skill and drops had lolrandom augments. To date easily 25% of the drops of this event are unrecorded, which I personally find hilarious.

SCNMs: Some people did it, but travel to the strongholds was long and ardous. Combined with the fact that farming these NMs required traversing around lots of true sight mobs and required a group of 18 people to maintain sneak and invis well, and at this time it was a headache way too much for most end game leaders to bother with. Groups would do a couple runs, then after hours and hours of work farming the popset, either wipe to the SCNM battle or not get their drop, then give up in disgust. I have a lot of respect for the groups that actually took the time to farm this.

Moblin Maze Mongers: Oh shit, ya'll remember this? First week you couldnt play it because the zones had capped out how many ppl could enter at once! After that, the variety of MMM runs was actually pretty cool in my opinion. Also, with a well designed team it had some of the best exp/hour in the game if you knew what you were doing. The other more solo oriented MMM runs were interesting, but I feel like they could have had more to them. SE dropped it hard though, and never added anything else post the second round of runs (MMM NMs that dropped species based weapons and...fishing stuff.... >_>

Finally, SE released the big augmentation update, including:

A whole lot of shitty ass NMs all over the world... most of which had the shittiest drop rates ever seen. Why SE, why? 6 people camping an NM with drops that had like a 10% drop rate on its piece of gear? Fuck off.

Second, synergy! A new crafting system you can do with friends! Too bad the vast majority of synergy is useless crap you will only use to skill up synergy so you can... do almost nothing with it? Known for giving you the ability to make a handful of bst jugs and... I think some ammo? Meh. OH an you can make chatoyant staff.

But, for the briefest time ever (I think we had it for 2 months...?) we had.... Ebon/Ebur/Furia gear! And I have to say, that was one of the things I enjoyed the most at the time. Clearly they put a lot of effort into the system. Dozens of armor sets all different looking, you build a base set, then customize it, and then you can add 3 augments to it YOU GET TO CHOOSE? NONRANDOM!?! whoooaa- oh... The augments are all 'vs species' augments? Jesus fuck SE you were SO CLOSE, SO CLOSE!!! WHO THE FUCK WANTS 'ATTACK+5 VS LIZARDS ON THEIR HANDS? DAMNIT SE

VNMs: Whats better than counter camping someone? Counter camping someone on a mob that is invisible until you claim it!

And then they promptly trashed all of that and raised level cap for the wonderful world of:

ABYSSEA
Abyssea was okay, but also had some serious flaws that to date havent been patched because SE is like "meh, damage has been done. Fuck it"

From this point forward, SE just gave up on balance and decided letting us have broken ass shit to break the game with was fine. Cleaving was the worst thing that ever happened to ffxi. No good was to come from players being able to go from 30-99 (or whatever cap it was at the time, 80, then 85, then 90...) without doing anything. Just afk, come back 12 hours later and 'ding' you were 99.

Ever since this became practice, the average player has 0 fucking clue how the game works. Eating food became a thing to do if you were hardcore, not a standard. (remember when players not bringing food = /kick em and rep em with a non-idiot?), players wearing their higher base damage weapons on offhand because 'why does it matter, lol?' (ugh), and as said before, the me me me mentality.

Magian trials: In my opinion, best thing that has ever been designed for ffxi. Magian trials filled the gap a lot of people don't consider, and thats down time. You know, those times when no one else in your end game ls was on, no merit parties going, nothing to do... go work on a magian weapon! Having essentially an infinite amount of end game farming to do you can do solo is awesome, and its vague requirements (go kill rabbits somewhere, for example), meant you could go do your trials in places you enjoyed to spend time. It was freeform, fun(ish), passed the time, and rewarded you with non random stuff. Progress wasnt based on randomness, it was constant and you knew eventually you'd hit your goal.

The only thing I wish, was for the trials on empy weapons to be "Kill ____ x times" and not be "Trade in x ___s", this would result in people making the same empy paths teaming up and working together... not competing for drops. Some other party of 6 farming briareus? Sick, lets team up and pool our popsets and get double the progress! Nope, instead you have to counter camp them and fight with them... ugh. So close, but still, really solid well done end game event!

VWNMs + Walk of Echoes: Holy. Shit. Everyone gets their own drops? Check. Everyone gets rewards for helping? Check. Progressing gives you rewards too? (teleports), check! VWNMs were an example of SE trying out new drop systems, and it worked. People didn't need to fight with each other for farming, they worked together!

We won't talk about the 3 mini expansions. Nope.jpg.

Then, SE gave us: Seekers of adoulin!

Right off the bat, they gave us ilvl 119 weapons on the first update. People quickly started obtaining them, completely and utterly negating every piece of gear except a couple accessories. HAste on everything! Stat vomit on everything! Fuck all the rest of the gear, this shit was miles better.

Within a few months, everyone is now able to quickly obtain gear that blows everything else out of the water. Coolio. SE gave us the best in slot weapons first, THEN gave us stuff that was WORSE then it in the next few updates.

Delve was fun, but unless SE gives us gear that is slightly, ever so slightly better than current 119 gear in the next expansion, it will make even more players rage.

It will either be gear outclassed by 119 SoA gear, or gear that outclasses and shits on 119 SoA gear. Either way, people will rage.

Why didn't people rage when gear got outclassed before? Because it got outclassed by gear that took months and months of farming to get.

I got my entire set of alluvian skirmish gear in a whopping 1.5 hours, 5/5. It took me a whopping 15 minutes to buy a tonne of the augmenting rocks to get 5 dual wield on all 5 pieces, and cap my -delay on dancer and thief now.

Im fine with us getting super awesome gear that is new best in slot.

But jesus christ, don't make it so damn easy to farm! Killing tojil once on a 6/6 run I believe damn near lets you buy your entire set of delve geasr, I think it is slightly short and you can get like 4.5/5 of the set? Dont remember. I got into my first big delve run with a friends end game LS, we cleared beat tojil about 2 hours after we started gathering the crew. Tojil dropped 2 pairs of HTH, first pair went to player next in line for it, second pair was freelot.

I won lot against like 2 other ppl. In 2 hours I had essentially gotten 5/5 manibozho gear AND Oatixur. Skirmish v1 took me a whopping 3 hours to farm up full skirmish sets for my dancer/thief AND another full set for my smn. Augmenting them took barely any time.

Delve and skirmish have been fun, yes! But goddamnit SE theres a pretty fat line between "I spent four months doing dynamis with my end game ls and still havent seen my rdm hat drop" and "I joined a skirmish PUG and got 5/5 gear in a couple hours. Neato Burrito. Now all that gear I spent weeks farming is useless."

[Seha]

Stopped reading at the usual "if you leech you can't learn how to play".

[Isiolia]

From this point forward, SE just gave up on balance and decided letting us have broken ass shit to break the game with was fine. Cleaving was the worst thing that ever happened to ffxi. No good was to come from players being able to go from 30-99 (or whatever cap it was at the time, 80, then 85, then 90...) without doing anything. Just afk, come back 12 hours later and 'ding' you were 99.

Ever since this became practice, the average player has 0 fucking clue how the game works. Eating food became a thing to do if you were hardcore, not a standard. (remember when players not bringing food = /kick em and rep em with a non-idiot?), players wearing their higher base damage weapons on offhand because 'why does it matter, lol?' (ugh), and as said before, the me me me mentality.

I think that's a lot more them deciding that, after so many years, XP/merits don't need to be a hurdle. Abyssea's systems highly encourage players to have some idea of how the game works. Or, at least, be able to pick up on something. Even a basic XP party/alliance relies on building certain lights, not killing other mobs, etc. Farming stuff there even remotely efficiently means collecting Abyssites/Atmas, skilling up weapons/magic to proc with, and so on.
It may be more of a collectathon than a challenge, at least at this point (it wasn't exactly easy on release), but it does take absorbing a decent bit of knowledge to really succeed at.