January Version Update Schedule Revealed! (12/15/2014)

[dasva]

Yeah I think fuma still stack at 12... they were also super expensive back in a time when gil didn't rain from the sky. Iirc Manji weren't exactly cheap either

[Priran]

airship fight wasn't hard if you used a ninja to tank instead of paladin, I accidentally won it doing a trial run to familiarize the group before blowing CCB polymers (since the chip drop rate sucked and they were still ex).

I'll grant memorable though

[Ophannus]

Another thing is 95% of all the adoulin areas are never seen be the player because we just waypoint and homepoint everywhere. CoP required you to traverse entire maps and dungeon crawls to get to bcnms. The only hcnm area in adoulin was really just rala which was right outside town. The only real dungeon crawl in soa was at the end with rakaznar.

[Trumpy]

Since Seekers came out I read a few times Devs make reference to people wanted more Lore, so they worked hard to include that in Seekers i guess. I dunno who the fuck these people are tho.

Im the kind of guy that likes to read everything in the CS and not spam enter like alot of people do but even these days I find myself wanting to spam enter. I think it started with that fuckin male dancer with the lisp that you have to stare at a sentence for 15 mins to figure out what he is saying (you know change all the TH to S and go from there), then followed by alot of Moogle dialogue lately. Massive amounts of alliteration and Doesnt make sense to me half the time with any kind of quick reading. It can be a chore and after a CS hits the 5 min mark im losing interest. I liked how the magian moogles talked. it was unique but easy to read.

[Sechs]

airship fight wasn't hard if you used a ninja to tank instead of paladin, I accidentally won it doing a trial run to familiarize the group before blowing CCB polymers (since the chip drop rate sucked and they were still ex).

I'll grant memorable though

Our group was so awesome we had a PLD tanking with Scorpion Harness and Bat Earrings, using blind potions on himself.
Hahaha xD

Took us our good number of attempts to do airship fights.
Second hardest fight for our setup was the magic pots one in Sea, 8-2?

[Draylo]

I really miss the old difficulties in missions with CoP.

[NynJa]

Another thing is 95% of all the adoulin areas are never seen be the player because we just waypoint and homepoint everywhere. CoP required you to traverse entire maps and dungeon crawls to get to bcnms. The only hcnm area in adoulin was really just rala which was right outside town. The only real dungeon crawl in soa was at the end with rakaznar.

You still have to run to the waypoints and home points to get access to them. You made it sound like you immediately get all HP's and waypoints.

[Spira]

like once?
actually ra'kaznar is a bad example because with the lower gates areas you could effectively warp straight to the Turris.

i think the problem is theres not enough to do in the zones themselves apart from quests/reives and battlefield entrances. I get that theres the shift towards instanced content but the lack of open-world spawn NMs and other elements that actually make use of the environment mean that most areas in SoA have virtually no personality.

also Ra Kaznar as a whole is a total waste as is.

[Hitou]

Did everyone really have that much trouble with the O/U fight? I think my group went 1/2 on it and the first run was a dry run just to test the waters so to speak. Got all the way to ultima before we died or timed out whatever it was. I don't think I'd say any of the fights were really "hard" certainly more challenging than newer missions battles, though. Most of that had to do with CoP being very early in the game's life, players not having all the mechanics of the game down to a science, good gear not being plentiful, most people having 1 maybe 2 jobs leveled, and freaking level caps. Seriously, the hardest part of CoP was carrying/dboxing low lvl gear just to do the missions. And I did all of CoP before any of the multiple nerfs they did.

Honestly I don't wanna think about how annoying it would have been to clear Adoulin missions if they were "hard." It was hard enough finding people that wanted to do them at all let alone people that didn't suck.

[KetSC]

Seekers of Adoulin story is good but like I said before, it did feel like it could use 3 more major updates worth of missions before finishing. One of the major problems was there was a huge cast of characters but (for most of SoA missions) it was just Arciela and you (which isn't bad but there were lots of other cool NPCs I would have liked to see in the main storyline). For example, the Geomancer team was cool and impressive in the GEO artifact cutscenes but they never appear in the main story. Same with a lot of the other NPCs.

I still like SoA over most expansions though. I think the main thing is that the player character felt a bit more involved and actually more important in the story than CoP (for example). In CoP, the player character might as well not be there (they are there just to fight stuff). Yeah, Prishe likes the player character a lot but honestly, in most of the scenes you aren't doing that much.

In SoA, I liked how Arciela and the player character were like buddies. The player character felt more involved in the story. It wasn't like the other expansion where it was like "Hey you adventurer person, help me fight these monsters" while all the other cool NPCs were doing the actual work (like getting some boss down to 0% with the cutscene after actually showing you getting owned just for an NPC to come save you).

SoA did a good job of making the Player Character more involved in the actual plot. Plus (in SoA) the player character wasn't getting owned left and right by everyone unlike the other expansions.

Regardless though, the presentation of FFXI's story beats both WoW and FFXIV IMO. The cutscenes are longer, more things are happening (even if it the promotion quests had epic one hour cutscenes).

I like the way things are done in FFXI than in FFXIV.

Problem with FFXIV's story (or at least story presentation):
1. Everyone but the Player Character is completely useless. A primal summoned? No worries, the Bringer of the Light is here to save the day. Rinse and repeat.
Same with the class and job quests. The player character just makes everyone else useless in FFXIV. There's almost no point for a story at all.

I did argue that in Seekers of Adoulin, the player character actually felt important for once in the plot but the important thing is that the other NPCs were just as cool and just as important. In FFXIV, it's like the only person that matters is the player character and no one else. Everyone relies on the Player Character for everything in FFXIV. The Player Character effortlessly defeats armies alone. What about the other characters? The Player Character gets all the focus.

2. Excessive padding or filler quests. Like 90% of the story quests in FFXIV don't even have any cutscenes or have an importance to the plot. With FFXI, every small event (even minor) gets like an epic 5 hour cutscene showing what's going on (with explosions happening everywhere and some guy saying "get down!"). Again, this promotion quest cutscene is the prime example of making something minor into epicness.

3. Not enough focus on the other characters. Again, the focus is way too much on the player character. I want to know more about the leaders and stuff of the nations in FFXIV but everything is all about the player character and not anyone else.

One thing FFXI does well still is a better cast of characters that are equal or better than the Player Character (kind of World of Warcraft but your PC is a bit more closer with the cast of characters than in WoW). I appreciate that FFXI doesn't make the PC overshadow almost all the other characters in the game like FFXIV does.

In Seekers of Adoulin, there are lots of cool NPCs. The Geomancer quest is an example. Flaviria is also really funny and another example too. Each NPC got a decent quest line with a decent amount of cutscenes with stuff actually going on (unlike FFXIV where it is mostly you reading text 90% of the time and nothing actually happening and the 10% of the time that cutscenes do happen, the Player Character effortlessly saves the day - rinse and repeat).

Plus in FFXI, NPCs keep getting new questlines. I only joined Unity Flaviria but I am guessing they added some fun text for each NPC of each Unity. Here is the dialogue for Flaviria for example.

???: The magic doll you are trying to reach is either suffering from mystical interference or is not attuned to a bearer.
????: Please check the settings and try a-again...
???: Ahaha! Who can ever resist a good joke?
It's me, and no other!

And the dialogue options:
1. Flaviria?
2. Arciela? -> Huh? Arciela? That little waif of a princess? Granted, I'm quite pretty as well... But let's get down to business.
3. Who?

There's always a lot of thought put into dialogue options too and quest progression in FFXI compared to FFXIV. Like a ton of NPCs reference other quests you do or other events that happened.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed Seekers of Adoulin. It was kind of rushed but it had enough for me to really appreciate all the characters, areas, music, etc.

Also I like SoA more so than any other expansion so far in terms of story. SoA felt really big. A huge cast of characters plus I truly enjoyed the "Excerpts from Adoulin".

That's also another thing I like about FFXI compared to FFXIV. FFXI (from the Vanadiel Tribune to like a Life of an Adventure, to all the in game events) has a ton of extra story stuff you can read on the website in additional to all the stuff in game too.

And also for the discussion of difficulty of the missions, CoP missions were really easy.

The reason why people had a hard time with CoP:
1. People were still leveling their first job to level 75. Priority was leveling job rather than doing some missions (which may or may not provide rewards).

2. For most of CoP, there was no rewards at all. I mean new areas and probably a few neat gears to get but that it was it. If you don't have a level 75 job (or maybe two), then it would be a waste of time to spend doing CoP instead of getting your first 75 job ASAP (and then doing the cool things like Dynamis, Sky farming, etc that all the cool level 75s were doing).

Spoiler: show

I was one of the persons who did CoP early and assembled teams like a SMN team to get them Voyager Sallets and Jaeger Rings (then later an alliance for when Swift Belt was released) but also Soboro Great Katana too. For the most the part though, outside of those things, the rewards weren't really great (and those are low level rewards). The rewards in Sea weren't as good compared to Sky or Dynamis. Forgot when Limbus came out but Homam wasn't as wanted (PLD, DRG, and DRK weren't as popular as the jobs that can use Byakko's Haidate back then) and only like Brutal Earring and Rajas Ring were the rewards worth getting from CoP.

Overall, like 25 hours worth of standing in town shouting or members, 25 hours worth of traveling long places between cities to get cutscenes (and backtracking multiple times), and only like 5 hours worth of only battling, just to get like two things? Compared to doing other stuff (leveling multiple jobs to 75, farming sky or dynamis, etc), CoP was not worth the time spent for the reward obtained.

45% of FFXI back then was just standing around in town, waiting for members. The other 45% was walking (not as many teleports). Finally 10% of the time you actually fought stuff.

3. The difficulty in doing COP missions was finding people, not doing them.
I never had to do any CoP mission more than a once on average. 6-4 is really easy if you bring a bard and two healers (one WHM and RDM) or even just bringing three healers if you can't find a Bard (45 minutes is a long time and the bosses actually have little HP, so you can wipe two times and get up and still complete all 3 bosses; if you bring three healers, as long as you don't wipe twice, then you can finish the fight easily in 45 minutes).

For 2-5 (Mammets), I remember we did it with 5 people. One Monk simply kited two Mammets while we fought them one by one. Fairly easy fight if you have one person just kite both of them (and we did it with 5 people too).

4. A lot of bosses had some item you needed to farm.

Spoiler: show

I did the promyvions the first day they came out and that was with an alliance setup it took us 2-3 hours to get the alliance setup. Then 2-3 more hours to get to the boss (not difficult, just long because of the like only 25% chance for a portal to open). On the way there, several people had to leave (I only had one hour to play guys, didn't know it would take this long), so we ended up with like 5 people in some parties. There were like some parties with a Warrior not even using Great Axe (everyone knows that both Warriors and Dark Knights should be using Great Axe since Sturmwind owns so much) and like other optimal setups (or some dude without even a subjob).

Fight time I did it, it was 5 of us (the other alliance took our other players) then we get owned by the boss that spawns adds. Turns out we needed to farm Anima or something to weaken the boss or at least go in with 6 people or go in with people that actually had subjobs unlocked.

The second time I did this, we came prepared. Got six people. Farmed anima for everyone (made sure we had two of the terror anima and the intimidation anima on each person), then we owned the boss easily.

Of course, lots of the fights can be beat without having to farm anima or whatever (like the one with adds, if you bring a SMN for Astral Flow, it's really easy win) but that was back in the day when people had like only one job leveled up (and probably not all skills capped).

Point is, all that work wasn't really difficul. It was get right job setup or farm anima or both and easy win.

Overall, the difficulty was getting the right setup (again, people were still leveling their first jobs, probably didn't unlock certain jobs yet) or farming the items for the fight (like anima for the promyvions).

5. Bosses like Tenzen basically required the use of "2 hour abilities" which require "2 hours worth of wait" if you didn't win the first time. Tenzen was mostly random too.

Overall CoP was really easy. "Takes a long time to walk to places" and "takes a long time to gather 6 people that have 3 or more hours to play" should not be confused with actual mission difficulty.

40 mans were pretty easy if you knew what to do. The hard part was managing a legion of noobs (and getting 40 of them online at the same time to begin with).

This basically describes almost all MMOs (FFXI included) back in the day and still now too.

[Rooney]

I think the main thing is that the player character felt a bit more involved and actually more important in the story than CoP (for example). In CoP, the player character might as well not be there (they are there just to fight stuff).

Personally, this is why I liked the CoP story. It felt like the story was ongoing: stuff was happening and people (npcs) were doing things even if I wasn't.

2. For most of CoP, there was no rewards at all. I mean new areas and probably a few neat gears to get but that it was it.

Half way through gets you access to voyager sallet, jaeger ring, soboro, a new avatar, as well as a number of ENM's (which actually had decent gear/gil drops back then) Finishing got you sea/limbus access (virtue weapons, torques, novio, obis, gorgets, af+1, brutal earring) CoP was probably one of the most rewarding expansions we had. Not to mention that people still use the obis and gorgets even today, and replaced brutal and af+1 just since delve 1.

Overall CoP was really easy. "Takes a long time to walk to places" and "takes a long time to gather 6 people that have 3 or more hours to play" should not be confused with actual mission difficulty.

We all know the missions aren't hard by today's standards. Even if we level capped them, our knowledge of mechanics and number of gear choices would make them easy. The point is that those fights were well tuned for the time. If you had less than optimal gear/setup, you could make up for it by farming the weakening items. If you had good gear/setup, you could probably ignore the items altogether.

This is also the reason something like CoP will never happen again. There is simply too much of a range of player capability now. There are people that still don't understand how to gear even though SE is throwing haste/str/dex/int/etc at them on every piece of gear. People that don't understand the importance of acc/pdt/etc sets. People that insist on meleeing on rdm in D or VD battlefields. And then you have people that have gear sets/swaps that understand the importance of support/buffs. Those two groups are miles apart. There's no way to tune a battlefield to be difficult to both anymore.

[Sechs]

Those two groups are miles apart. There's no way to tune a battlefield to be difficult to both anymore.

/applause

Sad but true. It goes for all the game content. If they tilt balance toward one side they're gonna make the other unhappy, if they keep it in the middle both sides will whine, it's a vicious circle and franky I see no way out. It's arguably useless to discuss about it at the end of things.
But this is exactely what I meant many posts before.
Yes, there was a difference even back then, but it wasn't as huge as today, and that's the main factor (out of many) why THEN it was possible to create something like CoP, and why it wouldn't work today. Which is why I said to Kainstryder that he was asking for the impossible (not like I wouldn't want CoP-like stuff again, but it's unrealistic to expect it to happen, or to demand it even)

[dasva]

5. Bosses like Tenzen basically required the use of "2 hour abilities" which require "2 hours worth of wait" if you didn't win the first time. Tenzen was mostly random too.

Could've just stuck to rotating rdm/drks and using 1 2hr per fight

[dasva]

like once?
actually ra'kaznar is a bad example because with the lower gates areas you could effectively warp straight to the Turris.

i think the problem is theres not enough to do in the zones themselves apart from quests/reives and battlefield entrances. I get that theres the shift towards instanced content but the lack of open-world spawn NMs and other elements that actually make use of the environment mean that most areas in SoA have virtually no personality.

also Ra Kaznar as a whole is a total waste as is.

Yeah things I miss... actually using the zones. Whether it be farming random stuff or repeatable quests or various nms. Heck sometimes half the fun of fights is learning to find and use the terrain to your advantage which kinda goes away in instanced fights to an extent

Things I don't miss... having to always run thru the entire zones for who knows how long except sea because it wasn't that bad and sea was friggin gorgeous.

[Ocara]

Yeah things I miss... actually using the zones. Whether it be farming random stuff or repeatable quests or various nms. Heck sometimes half the fun of fights is learning to find and use the terrain to your advantage which kinda goes away in instanced fights to an extent

Things I don't miss... having to always run thru the entire zones for who knows how long except sea because it wasn't that bad and sea was friggin gorgeous.

I don't miss enemies outside of sight range swooping down on me in sea/xarca [s]. Also tons of true sight/sound mobs from almost every post-zilart expansion making getting around annoying. Interesting ideas, but after a point you just want to get to your destination.

[Spira]

it seems the one thing everyone can agree on is that FFXI's story has no lack of flavor.. and this has been evident since day 1, with the slight animosity between nations and racism.. although its no longer as pronounced as it once was.

old endgame areas were truly fun to explore. they looked gorgeous and there was always some interesting mechanic about it that one would need to figure out. i think the popped NM systems were one of the greatest times for old-school FFXI, when people would literally explore every inch of the zones in order to figure out the mysteries of the system. and this varied anywhere from poring over game dats, or figuring out what flavor text meant, or going online to research what real-life mythos it takes inspiration from (hello sea!). but it was fun and there was this sense of adventure as the community worked together to figure something out. they were just fun to explore - it isn't too late for them to introduce more open-world content to SoA.. but it isn't a priority, seeing as the next big thing there is Alluvion Skirmish 2. We don't really know how much more content they have planned for SoA either.

relative even to FFXIV, SoA's story isn't that bad (XIV cutscenes are terribly lackluster. also ridiculously bad camera work and involve alot of 1 guy talking -> next guy talking and as someone else said.. the other characters are practically useless.).. but i think it was just not very well paced. SoA's lore could still be developed further.. and i suppose they'll do this.. but it doesn't seem quite as rich as ToAUs, nor as interwoven as WotG's.

[Lyramion]

/applause

Sad but true. It goes for all the game content. If they tilt balance toward one side they're gonna make the other unhappy, if they keep it in the middle both sides will whine, it's a vicious circle and franky I see no way out. It's arguably useless to discuss about it at the end of things.
But this is exactely what I meant many posts before.
Yes, there was a difference even back then, but it wasn't as huge as today, and that's the main factor (out of many) why THEN it was possible to create something like CoP, and why it wouldn't work today. Which is why I said to Kainstryder that he was asking for the impossible (not like I wouldn't want CoP-like stuff again, but it's unrealistic to expect it to happen, or to demand it even)

Most people dont realise just HOW invincible you can make yourself nowadays. Tested DEF bubble and Gallants Roll with Mal last week. We got well over 3000 Defense out of it. Tanking a full train of woh gate mobs like it's nothing. That is not even considering you can also lower enemy ATK.

The difference of a full blown -DT set and some random 113-119 gear mix also is miles apart.


FFXI is a Sandbox MMO now of sorts. You are given many different tools and combining them the right ways makes the players way OP. People not using the tools right or not putting the effort into obtaining them can still hit difficulty barriers.

[dasva]

Most people dont realise just HOW invincible you can make yourself nowadays. Tested DEF bubble and Gallants Roll with Mal last week. We got well over 3000 Defense out of it. Tanking a full train of woh gate mobs like it's nothing. That is not even considering you can also lower enemy ATK..

You've been able to reduce enemy attack to 1 for some time now letting you floor their pdif even as a lvl 1 character lol

[arus2001]

Before this turns into a pissing contest over which game did what better (if I'm not too late...), I'm just going to interject that MMO storytelling just kind of winds up hamstrung from the start due to the whole, "Everyone's the hero!" nature of their designs. As is, we've seen the pendulum swing from us being fodder on one end, to NPCs being useless on the other. Overall, there are frequently times in MMO storytelling where I just kind of facepalm thinking, "Why would you say/do that?" when it comes off as either a break of character or a deliberate MMO tactic to string things along. This isn't to say I don't occasionally get the feels or whatever, but final quality seems to line up roughly some mediocre teenage fan fiction where we never really get to BE our characters.

Mechanically, I can at least understand some of the limitation. Too many choices and branches would just up development time significantly. Though, XI is certainly stocked with false choices where the results are either some slightly varied text and things continue on as usual or you're pretty much told, "Nuh uh, pick the other!" and then things... continue on. And honestly, the OOC meta doesn't help one bit in getting people into the more creative, storytelling mind set. Just look at the people that perpetually mock melee RDMs here. Doesn't matter that it's pretty much written into the class and they have abilities supporting the notion, just "DON'T FUCKING DO IT YOU NOOB IT SUCKS AND YOU SUCK IF YOU DO!" Sure, part of this is a mechanics issue, but it feels more like the RP in MMORPG isn't so much about being your avatar anymore as it is what slot in the trinity you're gonna inhabit (or if the carrot is worth chasing). That's certainly not good storytelling, either, even if it somehow results in some ventrilo conversation or whatever that a person may later recall and adore.

Maybe I'm aiming too high, but I'd like to see less, "Save the world!" and more, "Be your character!" encouraged in future games. But that won't happen as long as we're locked to the rails of the official story or there being no "epic RP gear" for some to flaunt and be useable in combat because they scripted or participated in some cool event(s). Or put another way to fall in line with my earlier derision of plots, the priority of combat and related systems is miles more ahead than that of plot, and you can bet the former influences the latter's limitations. No dev may ever admit this by virtue of keeping what lore junkies they do get from frothing, but if you've ever done some good interactive RP elsewhere, it's not hard to feel MMOs are "missing" something.

[dasva]

I love to melee on rdm... what I have against them is when they insist on meleeing in sets that given them 20% accuracy and completely forget they have cures or buffs when they are the main heal