FFXI Classic Thread

[Mertron]

do i really feel like plucking 50 rare goose feathers

[BerenTebogo]

I just picked up Vesperia for the PS4 so I think I'll hit that up after XV.

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Vesperia is so incredibly good, but it's the last of the "you can absolutely 100% miss things without having any idea they're even happening" tales era. If you want Plat, be careful of this.

You either need to use a guide or visit pretty much every town after every small cutscene or you could miss things. The notable one (that I don't remember the details of too much) is that there is a scene at the inn in the desert that is only available for an incredibly small window while the story has you on the other part of the world and there is no mention of it whatsoever.

Also the boss weaknesses. You need to hit every one and they don't tell you what they are mostly. lol.

[Tokitoki]

Isn't there a high combo one where you need to build Rita in a certain way so she does 1 damage, but can spam spells or something? I remember doing that, but maybe that was for some other reason.

[BerenTebogo]

Isn't there a high combo one where you need to build Rita in a certain way so she does 1 damage, but can spam spells or something? I remember doing that, but maybe that was for some other reason.

Probably. I just played through it again with GF but didnt even think about trying to do everything.

[Zealot]

Took down Pitioss, turned out I left the dungeon and saved literally one jump before the end. Just a few more of these bonus dungeon monoliths and I'll have the datalog trophy, top 0.1% baby.

Also the black hood is really underwhelming.

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[Xno Kappa]

Considering it takes up an accessory slot it’s pretty worthless. Would’ve been better to just make it a sphere grid.

[Sirious]

More and more days of bans going out. Can we get a salvage bans 3.0 out of it?

[D44kpunk]

All my accounts are still safe!

I don't bot 24/7 though and I think I'm smart about it.

I am worried about some because of the vw exploit tho

[Xno Kappa]

Oh snap there’s a VW exploit? Do tell homie!

[D44kpunk]

it's fixed now but you could get a cell anytime as long as someone had converted a cell previously

[D44kpunk]

the people on ffxiah are a special kind of special. holy moly

they'd fit in in YCS

[Fondue]

randomly clicked on the bgwiki discord channel and apparently spicyryan has deleted himself entirely from discord

I guess we wont ever hear the conclusion of the black dildo saga

[D44kpunk]

Quite unfortunate. That was an interesting ban I received today

[Anoat]

I had a larger than expected nerd laugh at that new dude saying spicy only ever finished COP post nerf like oooooooh snap

[D44kpunk]

same, i was hoping for some epic argument between him and spicy but all i got for christmas was a time out instead.

6souls salty af over something

[Tokitoki]

I had a larger than expected nerd laugh at that new dude saying spicy only ever finished COP post nerf like oooooooh snap

Amazing and also true.

[Fondue]

This is not a unique problem. All games run into the issue where everyone wants to DPS and no one wants to support, be utility, or tank. Any game where there are roles, the playerbase skews overwhelmingly towards damage. Dota 2, LoL, Overwatch, every MMO.

Everyone wants to do damage, so we kept getting more jobs that were different variations of physical DPS overcrowding the limited 4 slots in an alliance for physical DPS. There is no solution to this other than making the game overly easy.

As someone who devoted years of my life to gearing my THF and never getting to come to events on it because we could just put TH on with a dummy account then kick it from party, I have no qualms about end game being centralized around BLM damage and minimal upkeep skill chainers (SAM, RNG).

Want to get into an HNMLS? Level WHM, RDM, or BRD.

Also Abyssea didn't fix the gaps between jobs; it just made shit so easy the shit jobs could get stuff done. If you wanted to do something optimally, WAR and SAM still shit all over anything else. Abyssea just didn't require us to min-max anymore because LOLgear and LOLskill when you have a literal immortality potion and triple Atma.

[Fondue]

1. The game itself became easier in Abyssea and Voidwatch. Cruor enchancements, Atma, Temp items. These fundamentally removed the concept of tanking from the game, made healing easier, removed the concept of crowd control from fights, removed the need to min-max gear to do good damage.

2. Lowmanning itself is an easier form of gameplay. There is a natural challenge inherent in large group situations that cannot be attained simply by adjusting the amount of people down. The larger the fight the more opportunities for intricacy. It requires a higher level of collective skill when you impose the need for organization/coordination. For example, all the things I pointed out in my previous point removed the need for a group to show restraint and employ proper crowd control. Those were organizational/coordination challenges for your support players. The group had to be able to collectively react to a situation and work together. When fights are limited to lowman groups the level of intricacy is constrained. Yes, you can have a multi-faceted encounter with just 7-9 people. However the level of complication is always shallower than with 18 people. Think about it this way: a group of three people tasked with additional spawn crowd control can be charged with controlling more mobs than three times the amount one person should be able to handle. If a single person handles crowd control the spawns must be limited by however many spells he has. The encounter has to designed such that one person can do it all. However if you design the encounter for a large group and can assign three people to crowd control, you can increase the amount of spawns by more than three because they can stagger their spells. The very nature of a larger group expands the challenges you can throw in because you can force them to rely on good timing and organization to handle more than they could each do individually. This is the essence of a good team becomes greater than merely the sum of its parts.

3. Competition is an inherent value in video games. "But video games aren't a competition, they are supposed to be fun!" Yes, games are supposed to be fun. Here's the kicker. Competition makes games fun. Games rely on a sense of mastery/challenge to be fun. But mastery is relative. We value the acquisition of skills and the mastery of skills, but we judge the quality of our skills and the degree of our mastery through comparisons to other. People in a cooking contest enjoy the cooking because there's an element of mastery involved by comparing how good their food is relative to others. They want to validate their mastery through recognition compared to others. FFXI is primarily a game based on PvE (player vs. environment). The theme of XI is adventurers; this was reiterated in Abyssea's storyline itself. Given that, competition in this game should center on PvE. In other words the contest to be the best adventurer is a contest about who best conquers the environment of Vanadiel. The best way then to challenge players to get better than one another is to force them to compete for a limited resource.

Zero-sum competition between the player base is good. It drives the player base to work harder to top each other, it increases the fun of the game, it increases the value of accomplishments. The claim system rewards the group who brings the most people willing to actually pay attention, balanced against giving everyone a shot proportionate to their own collective effort camping. That sounds pretty fair. As far as skinner boxes go I'd rather have a lever mechanism that is a competition between me and the other rats vs. a skinner box where we all run our own individual treadmills and race to see who gets lucky with the lever mechanism first. Plus I think farming systems are tedious and would rather just fight the big bads than go through tech trees all the time.

4. World spawns rewards I'd argue the best system is a meritocracy which rewards the most skilled, regardless of comparative time dedication. We do not crown NBA champions or Superbowl winners based on how much practice they did, we crown them based on who is the best at the game... determined by the competition.

World Spawns are far from perfect at this... but are much better at it than instances. World Spawns blend a bit of "most time dedication" (in a communal sense; the group that puts in the most hours, when you consider each individual member's contributions separately, tends to have a claiming advantage) with direct competition and skill test (you don't get to wipe and try again, you mess up if someone's better than you they will kill it instead).

Some people legitimately didn't have schedules that were conducive to world spawn systems. However I do believe that, if devoted, anyone could attain almost anything EVENTUALLY from an HNMLS as long as they were willing to put in whatever time they did have to a linkshell. (Except for Defending Ring due to its rarity, you could just plain out never see it drop ever).

More people simply refused to level support jobs to gain entry into an HNMLS because they expect to be able to come in as a dime a dozen DPS/tank (and probably poorly geared at that since your objective in joining an HNMLS is to get gear).

Some stuff, even in games, is supposed to be hard. Shut up and do it. And if you can't, well that's where you rank as a player. Just like most kids aren't gonna get into Harvard, you can't have everyone be the best at a game. When Relics came out, SE specifically said not everyone was supposed to get one. Similarly, I think not everyone was supposed to get Ridill, Adaberk, Dramatica, and D-Ring.

I am NOT advocating that you have to play the game a certain way. My opinion is simply that not everyone deserves top level rewards in virtue of playing. FFXI is like any other game. Go play Street Fighter or StarCraft at your own pace and your own way; the game is there for you to enjoy. But if you don't excel then you don't get ranked into the highest leagues.

There is no shame in that unless you yourself are making a value judgment based on that. And if you are, maybe you care a bit more about your relative position in that competition than you want to admit.

5. You didn't have to play the HNMLS style of you didn't want to. XI never lacked for content. There was a ton of stuff to do in FFXI that most of us just never bothered with because the rewards are insufficient. There was tons of content for non-HNMLS players in 75 cap that no one touched. Did you get Rank 10 on all 3 nations? Did you do those WotG missions/quests that didn't have rewards (finished well after most players left)? Assault? SCNM? ANNM? Nyzul? MMM? ToaU Beastmen Generals?

If the "fun" is to be had in doing content, then all there needs to be is content to do right? It shouldn't matter that the reward for all of that content was paltry.

The fact that people didn't do content that had no rewards reveals that there was an integral relationship between the enjoyment of content and its rewards. Content has to have some terminal uptake to motivate people to do it. We're not here to consume content for fun in and of itself, we played because we were in a skinner box. We are seeking that chemically stimulated euphoria we get from mastering certain tasks and being given treats for that mastery. Which means there is incentive as a matter of fact to make the treats harder to get.

People always react adversely to gear rarity, regardless of how that rarity is implemented. When gear was available through low man instances in Salvage people STILL were willing to cheat. The world spawn system is a red herring excuse. People just want to expend minimal effort to get gear.



XI content was slower than other MMOs; it worked because XI was created from the start to work on horizontal progression. It isn't about the amount of gear. It's about permanence of progression.

Lifting the 75 cap was a reset switch that, inherently, was bad because it introduced vertical progression.

And the fact is that in the end it tanked the player base. Casuals yearned for a reset. They got it. They loved it. Subscriptions spiked.

Then when they maxed out in gear because NOTHING in Abyssea was a challenge, they got bored and left. Subscriptions cratered. Now you lost the casuals with no attention span, and the hardcore players that were just screwed over left as well.

Ito invested in the wrong player base. Zero-sum server capped World Spawns were the best way to introduce sufficient supply control on gear. And the playerbase didn't know what was best for them.



You have to rate content scaled to the capabilities of the time. Fafnir was a lot harder when we used Adaman PLD/WAR with Earth Staff and before BLM potency merits and GHorn Ballads.

Also even near the end of 75 cap, as trivial as you make Fafhogg out to be, I will stand by the following statement: pre-twohand patch, an alliance of players all with median level skill for their jobs, arranged in a typically sufficient alliance (tank party, blm party, skillchainers) would not have the coordination, skill, reaction time, gear, etc. to beat Fafnir before rage. I'm basing this off the level of quality of a normal player as I have experienced it and watching tons of start-up shout LS go in and fail miserable at Fafnir.

Being a successful HNMLS demands a much different skillset from its members. It is a skill set 80% of the players in this game lack. It tests timing, understanding of positioning, reaction time, and yes the ability to simply fucking listen. I think people who lack these skills shouldn't succeed at this game. The biggest example I can give you is Shamshir and Hauteclaire. A wretched tank PLD who can kill 300 crabs but couldn't tank his way out of a paper bag can get Shamshir. Hauteclaire requires a halfway decent LS, and maybe it sadly doesn't require that you personally tanked Khimaira, it does mean you ideally are a competent enough player that an LS that can do Khimaira keeps you around.

Attaining King gear required devotion and commitment. Not only within an HNMLS to earn the right to lot on gear, but to gain entry into an HNMLS.

[D44kpunk]

he's already typed all this in other threads, it devolves into draylo/LoH/spicy/whoever just disappearing without refuting him and then the same old topic gets dredged up again in a year.

i don't even fully agree that the 75 era was the best thing ever. i still think FFXI at lvl 99/119 could be a decent game they just have no one working on it so the content is trash, which in turn makes the 75 era better

[Fondue]

I liked abyssea and early aldouin/legion