Dev Tracker: Discussion

[urat]

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.

Didnjt need to farm lights for cleaving. Only the cleaver needed lights, and they almost always already had lights capped before you even showed up to their alliance.

Cleaver needs to know how to play. Everyone else literally just afks. They don't do anything at all.

[enoch]

Somewhat back on topic, I kinda hope the grayscale is just the backdrop and that as you run around Zitah you get into little pockets or bubbles of monochrome or psychedelic colors. Of course it won't, because it's a metaphor for the game world fading into obscurity but the characters and mobs are in full-color because of our fond memories of yadda yadda bullshit whatever.

edit: Has anyone yet mentioned "escha" in terms of Eschatology?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology
Eschatology is a part of theology concerned with the final events of history, or the ultimate destiny of humanity. This concept is commonly referred to as the "end of the world" or "end time".

[Bukadan]

the point is, when you consider all pros and cons of every expension, not just the little things or that one big thing you liked most about the game, you find that abyssea either was the root cause or ultimately facilitated things that would lead any self respecting player who values the ability and skill of players in general to believe that abyssea was the worst expansion. i mean the only thing you could even say beyond that is one of: "my 13bux", "solo/low man is my game, i dont care about anyone else", or "fuck you abyssea made it so i can enjoy the game while playing my 3ds". i mean, yes its your money, but you lose the ability to complain about getting/progressing through content that is actually hard. if content is easy for the people looking for solo/low man content, then itll be way to fucking easy for people who arent, i mean seriously. and finally if you find yourself in a lot of failing parties, its probably you. you cant just hope they make content thats easy enough that you dont even have to be attentive to the point where the game is holding your full attention, god forbid. of course, you could pull the RL card and say "its a game, who cares?" but if you do that then be a part of the conversation at all is laughable. abyssea sucks. sucked.

[arus2001]

I must've been in a weird LS because we didn't just do the bare minimum to get Aby procs, fuck everyone else. Sure, sometimes we had people who were happy just getting TEs for the rest of the group. Others focused on keeping tabs on the timed spawns or alerting about needed KIs in gold chests. Or for something like Bri, we had 3 smaller groups collecting KIs at each of the gigas to regroup at Bri and basically farm helms 3x as fast for the lucky weapon builder. I can totally understand keeping bodies minimal so there are less mouths to feed, and thus more rewards per individual, but that's more player choice than deliberately SE's intent.

The whole, "EXP the way I say or you'll suck!" thing was dumb with colibri, astral burns, or whatever the heck people have come to hate because someone dared to have their fun a different way.

[Kyreth]

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

We've been getting a few new players of late, amazingly enough.

It's astonishing to some vets how much basic stuff simply slips through, like WHMs who have no idea what a Barspell does or even how to status removal (I just Cured stuff, LOL). Or not understanding fundamental aggro stuff because they just RR'd with a Destrier Beret over and over getting to Abyssea camps, sat there from 30-99, and then started to actually play the game.

Stuff that would have never gotten them past Valkrum or Jungle in the old days simply because they would have died over and over again, and they're instead left with a shiny new 99 in spark gear who has no idea of half the shit their character can do or how they even do anything. Leeching doesn't prevent learning how to play, but you sure as fuck don't learn how to play while leeching.

[vivbiibasjiu]

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.

Exactly, people forget this is precisely what SE had intended, until FFXIV's failure, and they decided to continue FFXI since it was still making them money so they had to try to undo all the damage Abyssea did to the game and started working on Adoulin. Now they're doing it all over again with Abyssea - *ahem* "Escha" sorry, Zitah.
Replace all the fancy new words they use with "cruor" "atma" "dominion notes" "battle trophies" etc. and it reads exactly the same as abyssea does. It means they're tossing us aside once again for their shiny new game which I don't see lasting very long (history repeats itself!)

[ronin sparthos]

SE abandoned the game around mid-WOTG which already began the slow bleed of players even with HNMs in full swing. By the time Yilbegan and the other WOTG events dropped, the game was pretty much dropping awful patches, slower with no rhyme or reason to them. Dev communication was zero. I'd love to punch the guy who made Sandworm in the dick.

The idea that 1000 man hours made you 'better' at XI is also laughable. Better at what? Hitting a Slug Shot macro at 100 on the 1000th Greater Colibri the BRD brought into camp? If anything, XI has only become more complex to the point of being unassailable not because of the game but because of the Gearswap / 3rd party interfaces we're now forced to use.

First, standard Windower macros.
Then, Spellcast.
Now, take a crash course on basic programming to play a game! Gearswap.

Abyssea was the first last hurrah, a fun one where people saw alot of jobs become viable or just plain fun. All the time grinding up your jobs to cap, getting fun loot in Gold boxes, trying out new Empyrean WS and generally getting feedback from the devs and -quick fixes- is one of the highlights of the games history. Seekers continued the idea of faster patches, making every job viable within an old school XI framework but the damage was done already .It was done when SE decided to abandon full steam support for XI in exchange for developing XIV.

If SE had behaved the way it does now with XI from jump, perhaps XI wouldn't be looking at going offline within a year or two.

[Isiolia]

Didnjt need to farm lights for cleaving. Only the cleaver needed lights, and they almost always already had lights capped before you even showed up to their alliance.

Cleaver needs to know how to play. Everyone else literally just afks. They don't do anything at all.

Abyssea was a lot more than zones to cleave in though, and you could basically say the same thing for pretty much any other method of XP in the game before or since. Abyssea is more alliance friendly, and the XP penalty eventually goes away, but it's not unique in the ability to carry people.

Most XP has been grinding, ideally on stuff that dies fast and doesn't hurt much. It's a different focus than what other activities might call for, so players have to adapt to other events anyway.

Either way, the XP aspect of Abyssea was largely necessitated by the accompanying level cap increases. Just making something that let people get solid XP in an alliance let things be inclusive, instead of having people only able to get a handful of preferred jobs invited to fight over a handful of viable camps. That the playerbase abused the -hell- out of it isn't entirely a fault of the system.

With that in mind, if the new areas can do that for CP, it wouldn't be unwelcome.

[Xantavia]

We've been getting a few new players of late, amazingly enough.

It's astonishing to some vets how much basic stuff simply slips through, like WHMs who have no idea what a Barspell does or even how to status removal (I just Cured stuff, LOL). Or not understanding fundamental aggro stuff because they just RR'd with a Destrier Beret over and over getting to Abyssea camps, sat there from 30-99, and then started to actually play the game.

Stuff that would have never gotten them past Valkrum or Jungle in the old days simply because they would have died over and over again, and they're instead left with a shiny new 99 in spark gear who has no idea of half the shit their character can do or how they even do anything. Leeching doesn't prevent learning how to play, but you sure as fuck don't learn how to play while leeching.

Yeah, I would say that mages got hit the worst by dumb players. Never having had to learn how to ride the hate line or any type of mp conservation while AFK leveling is a rude awakening when you bring the job to a pick up group. Best lesson I ever learned was back in the jungles when a PL'er decided to back off and let me keep the party alive on my own. It was from him I learned how nice a simple regen spell could be and save the big cures for the tank.

[Bukadan]

hopefully its very hard and challenging at its core, but then they can throw in the solo/lowman/casual type shit for them to deal with just like they want, just make the rewards reflect it.that way you have something for everyone, even though you KNOW those solo/lowman/casual will want the hard shit with good drops, yet for some reason cant seem to be successful and wonder why.

[BerenTebogo]

So much mad. So, so much mad.

[Isiolia]

From the description, it seems like the Atma equivalents will come in part from Rhapsodies progression. So it might get made easier when that's fully implemented, similar to how Abyssea got easier after Heroes (and 9 more levels).

'course, personally, I think Rhapsodies and in turn Escha should tie back a lot to game-wide mission progress and similar. It shouldn't be the thing you see rank 6 ignored-all-the-story folks in, due to the nature of it being the final content. Making new characters go do all that other stuff first would be fine. Not like they can't bum rush it in Sparks gear.

[Kyreth]

but because of the Gearswap / 3rd party interfaces we're now forced to use.

First, standard Windower macros.
Then, Spellcast.
Now, take a crash course on basic programming to play a game! Gearswap. [/quote]

None of these were needed. Zero of them. If anything, shit like this just artificially made wave after of wave of content off-tuned in difficulty. Heck, I'm sitting here with my THF in his mix of 119 gear. No Windower. No Spellcast. No Gearswap. Straight vanilla. It was the drive to exceed 100%, to optimize beyond the limits of the game engine that resulted in those programs- and they in turn fucked with the difficultly level of the game, which meant those programs went from "optional" to "needed to be good" for most of the more dedicated players. (Not surprisingly, it wasn't a hard step for many to go outright cheatmode with Clipper and the like.).

Not that FFXI itself wasn't partially to blame, but if we hadn't worked around things to be able to rapid-fire cycle gear, etc. to superoptimize play, later content wouldn't have ended up being built around the input those players gave towards "how well do people play"?

Abyssea was the first last hurrah, a fun one where people saw alot of jobs become viable or just plain fun. All the time grinding up your jobs to cap, getting fun loot in Gold boxes, trying out new Empyrean WS and generally getting feedback from the devs and -quick fixes- is one of the highlights of the games history. Seekers continued the idea of faster patches, making every job viable within an old school XI framework but the damage was done already .It was done when SE decided to abandon full steam support for XI in exchange for developing XIV.

Actually, it pretty much was the "we need the best jobs and fuck the rest" from my time spent pre-Adoulin in Abyssea...but that's the way it is with all MMOs. Still is, though honestly the only way it isn't is if they deliberately set up content that required specific, different jobs in multiple forms of content to produce the desired results.

If content, say had one kind of event that dropped armor for some jobs and augments for armor for the second event and a second event that dropped armor for the other jobs and augments for the armor from the first event...you could then set it up that each of those events worked best with a different jobset.

Jobs would have to depend on each other to advance, rather than there being a limited subset of jobs that's barely used in a narrow band of content and a specific set of "Princess jobs" that were basically a ticket to ride into nearly anything.

If SE had behaved the way it does now with XI from jump, perhaps XI wouldn't be looking at going offline within a year or two.

FFXI was deliberately run into the ground so FFXIV would prosper- it didn't want to compete with itself, any more than it might want to have FFVI repolished into something it released to sell at the same time as FFIX that'd cut into the newer game's sales. They want us to move, and if someday there's an FFXVIII MMO, FFXIV will get the same "mercy kill" FFXI is.

[arus2001]

If content, say had one kind of event that dropped armor for some jobs and augments for armor for the second event and a second event that dropped armor for the other jobs and augments for the armor from the first event...you could then set it up that each of those events worked best with a different jobset.

Minus augments, that more or less was U/O with Homam and Nashira. Nashira was very rarely aspired toward because SE, at the time, really didn't know how to make mages interesting. Even lately they're not on the ball there despite MP cost and enmity adjustments. Nonetheless, you really can't make content based on the premise of, "If you do this for me, I'll do this for you..." because if you're the guy on the receiving end of the "for you" then there's no guarantee the "for me" types won't bail when they've got what they wanted and in part why linkshell politics totally blew with fly-by-night Sky linkshells that suddenly collapsed once the leader(s) got their haidate or cuisses where any and all work everyone else put in was USELESS with a capital U that I can't make big and bold enough. This is actually why something like Delve's system is a good thing. Beating the bosses directly is a faster access to goods, but if for whatever reason your priority is nowhere close to someone else's, you can still creep toward the goal. The good get geared more quickly. The not so good still have hope.

<typical MMO badass rhetoric that completely ignores problems with gameplay>

That can honestly only be met with...

So much mad. So, so much mad.

[dasva]

It wasn't the community that made it necessary it was SE. It was dozens of full or near full gear swaps for pieces of gear that are only good for one thing with a crappy 6 line macro system with no gearsets that pushed for something like extended macros or spellcast just to be able to use them. And SE just kept cranking that stuff out. And I'd argue it was our crazy attack speeds and how much you lost without great timing that pushed it to something like more advanced sc and finally gear swap. Not to mention things like insta cast/rapid shot gear

[arus2001]

But that's depth, man...!

[urat]

Abyssea was a lot more than zones to cleave in though ...

I explicitly said that cleaving was the worst thing to happen to ffxi, not abyssea.

Rest of abyssea content was actually just magian trials for the most part, the trials just took you to abyssea as part of the process. The two were interlinked, and if you read my post I had a lot of great things to say about magian trials, aka abyssea's content. (empy gear, weapon, etc were ALL magian trials if you recall)

I explicitly disliked the fact that SE just shrugged their shoulders at cleaving. Say what you want about what you think cleaving did or did not do, pre abyssea all the 75 players new the principles of their jobs for the most part, and post cleaving the player base slowly increased in density of bad players who had no clue how to play their job.

"Whats so great about mnd on whm?" "I dont need to eat food" "Why does it matter if my higher damage knife is on my offhand?" "TH procs more often if thief's knife is my mainhand"

Sorry, but as someone who ran an LS for many years, and ran runs of all the various end game content from 2003 til today, post abyssea the amount of complete morons I had in my parties dramatically increased, and the 'end game' post got dragged way the fuck back.

Instead of 'end game' players being people wearing medium quality gear with smart choices, as well as accessories that were pretty good, and knowing how the hell to play their job, 'end game' became level 99 players who had just dinged and didnt even have many merits yet on that job, and were wearing perle gear because its all they could afford. They didn't know how their job worked because they leached it all the way to 99, and they definitely werent using food or doing jack shit.

Do I care if you go and leach to 99? No, not really, I cleaved for KIs all the time and ls members and friends joined.

But if you leach your job up to 99, for fucks sakes don't try to take your gimp ass job with no skill ups on it to peoples end game events. You'll spend the whole run getting resisted, you won't know how to play your job, and you'll make it harder for the rest of us as we pick up your slack.

Because yes, leaching literally makes your character weaker because those hours of farming colibri and etc also ensured your skills were nearly capped when you hit 99, whereas leaching means now you gotta go grind your skill up to cap.

[arus2001]

Players not knowing about (good) food or other mechanics isn't Abyssea's fault. XI is absolutely terrible about teaching its players what do to without trial and error. Seriously, I've known new players who didn't even know how to rest to recover HP/MP. They thought they had to run back to their MH, or worse, accept the eventual death. So, yeah, while something like Cursna can remove Curse and it's actually listed to such in the description, knowing what enemy moves inflict the Curse status falls into trial and error. The fact many, many, many TP moves silently carry a status effect on top of damage is not the fault of n00b healers. If negative effect icons hovered by our names, it'd be one thing, but they don't.

Things like underleveled skills is just an archaic design that has somehow persisted to this day. You're right, it is problematic, but at the same time, just auto-attacking a mob hoping for some 0.x text isn't teaching anyone a valuable skill. It's something SE really should've axed long ago.

[Malithar]

So much QQ in this thread.

Didn't see it mentioned, but anyone else notice that trusts are being used in those fight pics? Guess it's not overly surprising. :/

[Draylo]

Yeah I thought I saw Tenzen, unless that's a player lol