Strike #3 for May.

[Kaylia]

People are just lazy, my HP is in toau, but I stay in Jeuno to seek, shop, synth, afk, w/e. Nothing is holding a person back from staying in Jeuno instead of toau really.

[edit]
misread your post

[Titanss]

What the hell you people talking about to lazy to get the ring...it takes 10min

[LD]

Those of you who can not/will not read a long block of text, special consideration has been made for you.
Bolded and Underlined portion towards the end.

So we should tell people to suck it up and quit complaining? That won't fix the problem that the transportation suggestions have been trying to fix, which is 500 people hanging out in Whitegate, and trying to encourage them to be in Al Zahbi, Jeuno, a home city, Tavnazian Safehold, a new zone in Al Zahbi, or wherever.

People will idle where it's easiest and most convenient to access every service (including transportation), and that's Whitegate for 90% of the player base. They will then continue to complain about the lag. From a business perspective, telling your customers "Don't be lazy!" doesn't work from a business perspective -- you have to anticipate they will do what is most convenient and plan accordingly. SE failed to realize the popularity of Whitegate as a base of operations, and now we are trying to come up with non-hardware altering solutions that will alleviate the problem.

Exactly, the problem is most of the people in whitegate are, in fact, idling, waiting for something to do.
Most of the entertaining parts of the game are in the East, and Whitegate is the East's Hub.
If you're waiting to do something interesting, why leave yourself in the boonies?
Granted, most people can simply warp back to whitegate, then warp somewhere else, but that's the problem, isn't it?
The in & out, the traffic, the congestion of a 'go to' zone.

As long as people have little to no reason to be on the other cities, and as long as people want to cut as much time out of a trip as possible, people will always be in the Hub.

The only real solution is to make new interesting areas outside of the East and/or make old areas important again.
Sealion's Den is already set up to have some sort of transportation dock there (why else would they make an entire map/zone for a BC?), the chocobo racing stations has shown that the devs aren't afraid to just edit a zone, and there are numerous unused holes and potential zonelines in areas from Lufaise Meadows to Kazham to La Theine Plateau.
Also, the ferry from Mhaura to Al Zahbi shows that new routes cycles can be fit between the old ones.
Not only does this mean a potential new route in Selbina down the road, but airship routes for all the major cities AND Jeuno (thought I suppose it would cause less stress for them only to add new airship routes in the 3 cities).

I may have gone off on a bit of a tangent, but my point is that Whitegate's problems will probably be gone with the next expansion.
Whether they improve old areas, add a NEW new jeuno, or, well, the game starts to die, whitegate's problems are transient and there's very little than can be done about it in the interim.
Reading Disabled: The Important Part:
It is SE's fault for making the area have so much in it without realizing how popular it is as a hub, but the onus is also on everyone who idles there when they know God Damn well they could just as easily leave themselves in the forest or log out for a while (or, if they're active, do something).

[Krelian]

Besides the drops in Salvage the cost to enter is way too high. Sure if you can play 7 days a week in an assault static, you are good to go. I am trying to get away from having something scheduled for in the game every day of the week. Two Dynamis, Two Limbus, thats four days right there, then add a day in for assault to get the salvage points and a day for salvage itself thats six days, then add in anything else you wanna do small NMs, HNM, sea, sky, and the week is way too full. I'm tired of just sucking it up and playing by their system, did that shit in sea killing DRK IX'Aern 62 times to produce what, 7 JoLs, fortitude 32 times for one torque, it was rediculous, sure they finally changed it now a year later. I'll wait a year for them to change the entry fee before getting into it.

I've seen this same kind of arguing in other threads and I never agree with it. You need 3 people to do Assaults, and there are several assaults that have 15 minute time limits on them and good AP rewards. Chances are on those nights that anyone does Dynamis or Limbus or anything else, they can find 15 minutes before or after the event to do an assault. And finding just 2 people to go with you should be simple. I'm not going to bother talking too much about this because it's been beaten to death. 2k AP really isn't that much, and it should take 30 minutes tops to get enough AP to do one Salvage.

Go here http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16528 if you're not sure on good ways to farm AP. And you can go here http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15073 to argue about it being too much AP.

Right, so you find two newbs for 15 minutes and potentially lose, or you go with LS people 15 minutes+setup time maybe 45 total for 2k Assault points. Assuming you have all the assault gear you want from the past year or what not, yea this works. If you want to buy assault gear with points, you need to make enough to work towards that, and the 2000 point admit fee. So as someone said before so rudely, the assault tags are cumulative, yes, you can go once a day, my whole point is, you have to setup the run once a day = 7 days in a week + everything else = way too busy. Listen, like I said before, if you live in the game like many of us do, and go from sea to nidhogg to assault to salvage, its no big deal. If you dont want to schedule two previously game commitment free days of your life around assaults/salvage, its not. Its not too much AP, the point is its AP period. Gil works, use it. I didn't post this for the hardcore FFXIers, I posted it for the ones who quit the hardcore scene and are trying to be casual yet still make progress in the game.

[Tordall]

I'm in the group of people that pretty much burnt out on HNMs. I'm currently doing Assault, Dynamis and Limbus regularly.

We typically do assaults after limbus and it takes an additional 45 minutes to 2 hours depending on which ones we do. We've been averaging 6k+ assault points each week per member.

I'll probably try to add salvage in 6-9 months from now when I finish a relic weapon (spending all my extra time fishing/crafting atm).

[Zilong]

Besides the drops in Salvage the cost to enter is way too high. Sure if you can play 7 days a week in an assault static, you are good to go. I am trying to get away from having something scheduled for in the game every day of the week. Two Dynamis, Two Limbus, thats four days right there, then add a day in for assault to get the salvage points and a day for salvage itself thats six days, then add in anything else you wanna do small NMs, HNM, sea, sky, and the week is way too full. I'm tired of just sucking it up and playing by their system, did that shit in sea killing DRK IX'Aern 62 times to produce what, 7 JoLs, fortitude 32 times for one torque, it was rediculous, sure they finally changed it now a year later. I'll wait a year for them to change the entry fee before getting into it.

I've seen this same kind of arguing in other threads and I never agree with it. You need 3 people to do Assaults, and there are several assaults that have 15 minute time limits on them and good AP rewards. Chances are on those nights that anyone does Dynamis or Limbus or anything else, they can find 15 minutes before or after the event to do an assault. And finding just 2 people to go with you should be simple. I'm not going to bother talking too much about this because it's been beaten to death. 2k AP really isn't that much, and it should take 30 minutes tops to get enough AP to do one Salvage.

Go here http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16528 if you're not sure on good ways to farm AP. And you can go here http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15073 to argue about it being too much AP.

Right, so you find two newbs for 15 minutes and potentially lose, or you go with LS people 15 minutes+setup time maybe 45 total for 2k Assault points. Assuming you have all the assault gear you want from the past year or what not, yea this works. If you want to buy assault gear with points, you need to make enough to work towards that, and the 2000 point admit fee. So as someone said before so rudely, the assault tags are cumulative, yes, you can go once a day, my whole point is, you have to setup the run once a day = 7 days in a week + everything else = way too busy. Listen, like I said before, if you live in the game like many of us do, and go from sea to nidhogg to assault to salvage, its no big deal. If you dont want to schedule two previously game commitment free days of your life around assaults/salvage, its not. Its not too much AP, the point is its AP period. Gil works, use it. I didn't post this for the hardcore FFXIers, I posted it for the ones who quit the hardcore scene and are trying to be casual yet still make progress in the game.

What kind of fucked up casual gamer can't set up 1 hour on 2 night out of 7 per week to assault?

And for fuck's sake, AP farming assaults takes like 10-15 mins to finish, it'd be less than a fucking hour on those 2 night to use up your tag.

Hell, why don't we just fuck this whole salvage and assault system since it's too fucking taxing for most of the casual gamers. Everyone should just choose a fucking armor set of their choice and have it delivered to their moghouse within 1 game day.

[aurik]

Wall o text, put some paragraphs in that thing.

First off, stop doing "pickup" anything. Don't you have reliable friends? Or maybe you're not reliable enough yourself that reliable people want to befriend you.

Second, what assaults are you doing that you might lose? I haven't lost an assault since probably November or some-such when a disconnection caused us to not have the manpower to win. Nowadays I do them half-asleep and we still win in under 10 minutes each time.

Third, you say your week is too busy for assault, yet you manage to fit in do 2 dynamis, 2 limbus, hnms, merit, xp, sea, sky, and make money. Maybe you should drop events that you don't really have an interest in instead of bitching about having too much to do.

[Sci]

Listen, like I said before, if you live in the game like many of us do, and go from sea to nidhogg to assault to salvage, its no big deal. If you dont want to schedule two previously game commitment free days of your life around assaults/salvage, its not. Its not too much AP, the point is its AP period. Gil works, use it. I didn't post this for the hardcore FFXIers, I posted it for the ones who quit the hardcore scene and are trying to be casual yet still make progress in the game.

If you ask me AP is the less hardcore method of payment. It would take me far longer to farm up 50k to afford limbus than it takes me to gain 2k AP. You don't have to log on every day and spend 20 minutes finding people either. You're setting up a strawman for your argument, just making the whole thing into more of an ordeal than it is. What I usually do is wait until I have 3 or 4 tags, and even sometimes I waste one or two. And one of those days that I'm waiting around for some event to start, I ask a couple of the people I know who are interested in getting AP and we spend 30-40 minutes using up all our tags (Some assaults only take less than 10 minutes to complete). And I get the chance at getting some nice ra/ex stuff from the assaults, gain rank up points, and get items like hi potion tanks and reraisers that I can use for Salvage. It's a beautiful system. And it can't be so heavily affected by changes to the economy like Dynamis and Limbus are currently suffering.

But seriously go read that second thread I posted, it goes over all this. The only extra point that could be argued now is the addition of Nyzul isle to the draining of assault tags. But it should be fine because anyone who actually cared about 20k AP Assault gear should have gotten the pieces long ago, and could be sitting on an AP nest egg. I think I have around 40k AP unspent atm and it's just growing despite me actively doing Salvage runs. And long, long ago I had full Yigit and the couple of Pln. pieces that I wanted.

[Eander]

Here's my input from the SE Discussion Box on what to do about the macro system. I think it's a pretty good idea; it'd be cool for it to actually make it to them.

As an alternative to completely overhauling the macro system (which needs to be done, I'm not saying it doesn't), at least make /equip more intelligent.

It doesn't seem to be horribly unreasonable to make it so /equip can equip more than one piece of equipment at a time. For example (Not the best example, but it gets the point across. Someone who had a melee job could probably crap up something more representative of the purpose of this change):

/equip main "Templar Mace" sub "Numinous Shield" hands "Healer's Mitts"
/ma "Cure V" <t>
...

This would greatly reduce the number of lines to accomplish many simple tasks that are essential to jobs with many situational equipment sets. In turn, by taking up less lines, more macros would be available for use. In this example, the amount of lines to perform the same task is halved. If someone had a task with, say, 10 /equip commands and 2 other commands (JAs, /recasts, Magic, whatever) spread across 2 macros, they could reduce the number of lines needed by 75%, from 12 to 3, and the number of macro slots required from 2 to 1.

Recognizing the slot/piece and confirming syntax is simple for anyone that's familiar with regular expressions, which I would hope the FFXI engine has some interpretation of. Even without regular expressions, as a professional computer programmer, I can say any programmer worth their salt should be able to figure this out without regular expressions. The /nominate command works very much like what I'm proposing (with the capability to add a variable amount of parameters to the command), so it's not outrageous to think the same logic could be expanded to other commands.

To accomplish this, I realize the maximum length per macro line would probably need to be increased for this to be truly useful. Increasing the maximum line length is a problem as you don't want moronic /shout spammers to be able to put in an absurdly long message, among other issues that are easily brought to mind. The best way I can think of to handle this problem is to increase the length only if the macro line begins with /equip. Again, checking for /equip is easily handled with a regular expression or without.

As with any change to the macro system, however, this idea will probably get smacked with the PS2 Limitations bat, but it's an idea nonetheless.

[Beckwin]

I used to make about 1m a week between two characters by selling AP items. It paid for a lot of limbus.

[Lordender]

It wouldn't hurt SE to allow players to gain access to the imperial ward to balance out whitegate.

[Catsby]

Hello. I visit these forums often but I never felt like I had anything to contribute until I saw this thread. I agree with the idea of increasing macro size and graphical improvements for pc/xbox/ps3.

One of the non-endgame things I would like to see them comment on is the possibility of merging all the city AH with the Jeuno AH. I think that would spread people out a little.

Also, if they would consider rebuilding Besieged to make it playable?
When Besieged was first announced I figured it would work similarly to a Dynamis or a BCNM. When the beastmen attack the city you, those partied with you and 30-40 other people would be moved to an instance of the zone under attack. The monsters would advance from the gates and players would begin on the ramparts and sections outside the astral candycane. With 5-10 instances victory would go to players if the majority of groups were able to take out the generals before the beastmen reached the candy cane. Instead we got a tiny zone that 700 people crowd into and zerg rush stupidly tough monsters.

[Huggles]

If you ask me AP is the less hardcore method of payment. It would take me far longer to farm up 50k to afford limbus than it takes me to gain 2k AP.

It takes a minimum 2 days to get on average 2k AP no? You can farm Castle Zvahl and get the Orc Piercer which NPCs for 7k and easily earn your 50k in less than a day by NPCing all the weapon drops and selling the horns on AH and popping the occasional chest. Granted, you have to be able to solo farm Castle Zvahl, but many of the jobs that can solo farm Zvahl are needed in Salvage anyway.

[The Blackrose]

PC/Xbox360/PS3 graphical upgrade expansion

It worked for EQ, made it a much prettier game, old PS2 players can continue with their "legacy models" and users with weaker computers can keep the legacy models too. New armor will look basically default on legacy, but all custom on the updated user interface. I know this is possible, why havent you brought your game up to the next stage in graphical prowess.

While I would definitely welcome upgrades to armor and weapon models, as well as animations and maybe different hair/face customization, I think the base character models are some of the best in any MMO I've played. I've played games like EQ2 or VG where they have a great amount of detail put into their character, but it eventually gets to the point where I think it's more detrimental than appealing.

[Ayn]

But doing a Salvage is not as hard as Nidhogg, as difficult to claim nor as rare as a Nidhogg. You get one chance to claim Nidhogg a week~ and then a chance at the drop. Its a different system, and how your time is spent getting the gear is different, but the total time is comparable.

I'll agree with you as far as claiming Nidhogg, but you have alot more leeway to fuck up on Nidhogg than you do Salvage. The bolded part is something I do agree with (have even made the argument with some people in LS about it).

The gear is on par (I will probably be screamed at for saying that) with the Abjuration gear (some is better, some is worse, but that is the same with abjuration gear) so the difficulty should be on par.

I don't see why anyone would scream at you, since it's not a silly statement at all. But did I communicate the wrong message across? I actually don't have much of a problem with Salvage's difficulty, I *enjoy* the challenge there (even though I'm sure any of my LS mates can tell you how irritable I can get after a run..).

[vagus]

everytime i see that picture i laugh. we all know where galka's came from. *points at the guy beside Sundi*

[aurik]

If you ask me AP is the less hardcore method of payment. It would take me far longer to farm up 50k to afford limbus than it takes me to gain 2k AP.

It takes a minimum 2 days to get on average 2k AP no? You can farm Castle Zvahl and get the Orc Piercer which NPCs for 7k and easily earn your 50k in less than a day by NPCing all the weapon drops and selling the horns on AH and popping the occasional chest. Granted, you have to be able to solo farm Castle Zvahl, but many of the jobs that can solo farm Zvahl are needed in Salvage anyway.

No. It takes 20-30 minutes to get 2k AP, provided you have the tags available.

[Huggles]

If you ask me AP is the less hardcore method of payment. It would take me far longer to farm up 50k to afford limbus than it takes me to gain 2k AP.

It takes a minimum 2 days to get on average 2k AP no? You can farm Castle Zvahl and get the Orc Piercer which NPCs for 7k and easily earn your 50k in less than a day by NPCing all the weapon drops and selling the horns on AH and popping the occasional chest. Granted, you have to be able to solo farm Castle Zvahl, but many of the jobs that can solo farm Zvahl are needed in Salvage anyway.

No. It takes 20-30 minutes to get 2k AP, provided you have the tags available.

If someone does 7 assaults a week, they will have no more than 1 tag available per day. And the tag regenerates at 1 per day, so after you get going, your best rate for tags is one a day regardless right?

[aurik]

If you ask me AP is the less hardcore method of payment. It would take me far longer to farm up 50k to afford limbus than it takes me to gain 2k AP.

It takes a minimum 2 days to get on average 2k AP no? You can farm Castle Zvahl and get the Orc Piercer which NPCs for 7k and easily earn your 50k in less than a day by NPCing all the weapon drops and selling the horns on AH and popping the occasional chest. Granted, you have to be able to solo farm Castle Zvahl, but many of the jobs that can solo farm Zvahl are needed in Salvage anyway.

No. It takes 20-30 minutes to get 2k AP, provided you have the tags available.

If someone does 7 assaults a week, they will have no more than 1 tag available per day. And the tag regenerates at 1 per day, so after you get going, your best rate for tags is one a day regardless right?

You're still averaging 20-30 minutes of "work" per salvage entry.

[Huggles]

but that work is split over 2 days effectively, while you can farm 50k in 1 day.