What is keeping FFXI from reaching the potential it has?

[Indalecia]

SE and the PS2

[Baha]

• SE having about as much of a connection with the player base as with a ball of yarn. They don't know what people want, and do not care to learn it. When they implement stuff it's only revised after months or even years of whining.
• Inconsistency is right. RoZ, CoP and ToAU all had their strengths and weaknesses, but apparantly SE is an awful, or at least a horrendously slow learner. They repeat mistakes but often don't build on what is succesful.
• A lot of the fanbase knowing this, but still put SE on a pedestal. Some of it understandable (can't exactly interview them and ask "FFXI is shit, why do you continue to pretend that it does not smell?"), some of it baffling. "With campaign FFXI finally opened up for solo! I love hitting walls to get my paladin buffer!" Though I guess even that is understandable, after a certain point you get unreasonably attached to FFXI, and keep hoping for it to get better.
• Very closed off. No custom interface, addons or anything custom available officially? Years and years of "windower is cheating! you should be banned!" uncertainty before you could even alt tab (and even then it still sucks). You can't see half of the shit that is important (a lot of stats, WS points, fractional skillup points, how stuff deals damage) without going through some trouble. etc.
• First and foremost, FFXI is a console RPG. The PC version is just a port. To overhaul the PC version completely, they might as well simple start work on a new, PC-only MMO.

I'm doubtful any SE MMO could turn out well though, seeing how they don't listen to their community. But I'm pretty certain that they will not give FFXI the attention or the budget it needs to seriously improve. You'll keep getting the same crap most of the time, with a few rays of hope in there, but nothing earthshattering.

By the way, does anyone have accurate numbers for FFXI? I checked, but I only found the same 500k number that they were throwing around when I still played.

[Mayareira]

By the way, does anyone have accurate numbers for FFXI? I checked, but I only found the same 500k number that they were throwing around when I still played.

Database - FFXIAH.com

500k sounds reasonable.

[Cakes]

One thing from which all the other limitations are derived - the lack of dialogue between the Devs & the playerbase, and the general ethos of the company and their methods; it's not really suited to an MMO.

Spoiler: show

If you want to see an example of dialogue and dev/player interaction, CCP & Eve Online are a shining example of how to do it right.

[MarkM.]

A few things.

1) blah blah blah harsh inconsistent punishment for dupes (I'm not going to start this thread morphing into yet another thread about that.)

2) I started playing when the Xbox version was released, even then some people that I knew played, and bitched about botting. I will say that indirectly banning the dupers did eliminate botters, for the time being, but they will come back. SE has failed to address this issue, and it's just a matter of time before DA turns back into bot central.

They took a step in the right direction with ZNM's, but that still doesn't address the problem with kings.

3) I posted this in the question section of the forums, and I will repost it here. From what I can see there are no NA/EU people on the dev team. Yes, I am aware that SE is a company mainly based out of Japan, but you have a large player base that is from NA/EU, that aren't really represented in my opinion.

4) 21-24 hour pops and greater. This really screws you out of being able to do a lot of end game events, ZNM's addressed it somewhat, but I'd like to see it taken farther.

I will say one thing that I do really like about FFXI, and I think it's the only MMORPG that allows this, is the ability to change jobs on your char. To me that's the one thing that SE does better than every other company out there. (I could be wrong about this, I'm not sure.)

[Antithesis]

• SE having about as much of a connection with the player base as with a ball of yarn. They don't know what people want, and do not care to learn it. When they implement stuff it's only revised after months or even years of whining.
• Inconsistency is right. RoZ, CoP and ToAU all had their strengths and weaknesses, but apparantly SE is an awful, or at least a horrendously slow learner. They repeat mistakes but often don't build on what is succesful.
• A lot of the fanbase knowing this, but still put SE on a pedestal. Some of it understandable (can't exactly interview them and ask "FFXI is shit, why do you continue to pretend that it does not smell?"), some of it baffling. "With campaign FFXI finally opened up for solo! I love hitting walls to get my paladin buffer!" Though I guess even that is understandable, after a certain point you get unreasonably attached to FFXI, and keep hoping for it to get better.
• Very closed off. No custom interface, addons or anything custom available officially? Years and years of "windower is cheating! you should be banned!" uncertainty before you could even alt tab (and even then it still sucks). You can't see half of the shit that is important (a lot of stats, WS points, fractional skillup points, how stuff deals damage) without going through some trouble. etc.
• First and foremost, FFXI is a console RPG. The PC version is just a port. To overhaul the PC version completely, they might as well simple start work on a new, PC-only MMO.

I'm doubtful any SE MMO could turn out well though, seeing how they don't listen to their community. But I'm pretty certain that they will not give FFXI the attention or the budget it needs to seriously improve. You'll keep getting the same crap most of the time, with a few rays of hope in there, but nothing earthshattering.

By the way, does anyone have accurate numbers for FFXI? I checked, but I only found the same 500k number that they were throwing around when I still played.

Could it possibly be that hard to redo and touch up the game? You already have the foundation as it is. All they need to do is build upon it.

What if (probably will never happen) PS2 support was cut off. What could possibly happen then?

[hellstorm]

been said 100 times, but having 2 version update files (one pc/xbox and one ps2) would be a HUGE step forward. and on another note, is the fanbase still on ps2's still that strong?

yes it is.

Also I believe publicity is a big issue to. You can't turn on TV without seeing a wow commercial, but I think I have seen a total of two ffxi commercial ever. They give very little care to the NA fan base and focus all there advertisement in Japan. If they put as much advertisement as they do with all there other console games ffxi would be the top game right now not wow.
Another issue though which has been touch on by others is time vs reward. People spend days camping mobs like tiamat and just for a pair of boots that give you 12% movement speed. The game need larger verity of hnm and they need to make the drops more rewarding. hydra, Jormungand, Vrtra sit up for days, weeks, and some time even months without dying. Instead of improving drops why not just spread the wealth.
Then there sea which currently is worse time sink vs reward of them all. Having syth mats or something other then just torque would at least help and give other reasons to go to sea.

[Balb]

This a hundred times over.

Zilart was good, CoP was hard, but rewarding. Ignoring the disallusionment that we all felt as SE patched CoP time and again, it was a good expansion. It felt like Zilart and CoP were building us up for something and then *BAM*, ToAU.

The game reached a new peak at ToAU, and everyone knew it. SE even carried the expansion's content additions for longer than they did with the previous two expansions. But then they gave us WotG and failed to realize how quickly Campaign would lose its luster. Add on the fact that the updates were VERY slow, and now we're told that WotG is 50% complete and we're already looking at these "mini expansions". Rather than give us more WotG story, they're adding ten-dollar side quests three times over. We'be been brought up to believe that story line drives exploration, but we're faced with a lot of blue-balling from WotG and some bread and circuses from these mini expansions as the only story we're getting.

I hate to quote so much, but this is pretty much why after 4 years of playing, it was time for me to hang it up. SE had a good train running with CoP ~ ToAU. Between those two expansions, we saw a plethora of events, that pretty much made up a good amount of the endgame experience as most know it. I thoroughly enjoyed the game from those expansions.

WoTG was an exciting concept when presented, but failed to deliver. "Yea people said the same thing when ToAU first came out" blah blah and "its not finished yet" blah blah, but the updates are too few and far between now. Waiting 3-4 mos for developers to put together an update, just to be disappointed in its lack of content, to hear the "You'll need to wait a little bit longer for that" interview BS is annoying. Then what, you wait out another 3 mos for more fail? No thanks.

The fact that they are satisfied with delivering piss poor content, and their failure to fix things needing adjusting for some time is unexceptable, and I just lost all interest in supporting that lazy ass attitude.

[drwaffles]

Don't confuse sparse content with piss-poor content. The whole premise of WotG is very good and fairly well-executed, as is evident by the hundreds of players that spam the content every single day. But yes, it is rather one-dimensional and there's not enough to keep most high-level players interested indefinitely, especially if you're not a melee. That said, though, WotG was not supposed to be an endgame-oriented expansion, was it? The whole focus was on more casual content and an exciting new way to gain exp without grouping (if you ignore the wall-pounding part).

I'm still optimistic for the Walk of Echoes, especially if they somehow link it to Campaign. We've not had anything like Lumoria introduced for years (ToAU zones were great, but not quite the same idea), so I'm very excited to see what they do with it. I've gotten it into my head that'll it'll be comparable to the Farplane from the final chapter of X-2, which would suit me just fine, especially if they introduce new God monsters á la Sky/Sea.

[Aemora]

WoTG is simple failure. It's been out 14 months already, and by this time ToAU had released Salvage, Nyzul AND Einherjar. WoTG is just a series of updates that say "Yeah, we're making it slightly better/harder/easier/gayer for you to earn 3k exp max in an hour". Please... ToAU had all them awesome EXP camps for higher-end players, WoTG has hardly anything that people will want to Exp on because a vast majority of areas are unaccessable quickly. CoP was great because it was so challenging, and my weekends were spend doing just CoP stuff with my social linkshell killing our way through the storyline, we went 2/23 on O/U and when we beat that, that was the best feeling I've ever had playing a game. RoZ was a (singular) weekend job too.

Whilst the WoTG storylines are shaping up to be something quite interesting, the actual content of the zones is utter fail. They've given us Ixion, Sandworm and SCNMs. Nothing else in 14 months. No Merit camps, no good NMs, nothing tangibly good. The way they could make this good is if when they introduce Northlands, they add some awesome Merit camps and Sky/Sea/ZNM-like system, with rewards similar to that of Salvage, but just as gay to obtain.

In the meantime though, I'll still be in Salvage because that's the best event ever.

[Baha]

They could use the current foundation to appease the people still playing, probably even lure some back (hi!).

Just release events that are fun and have drops that make those events worthwhile. Dynamis, Limbus, Assault, Salvage; Einherjar, ZNM (to an extent) wooo
Make ZONES for endgame, challenging missions that you need to do to unlock those (Sky, Sea). I like storyline, but some cutscene followed by three months of waiting is not motivating. Some item like a ring? Maybe, but that's just the cherry on top of getting access to a bunch of new fun things to do and get loot from.
etc, I could go on, but I'm sure everyone has idea's that feed upon what's already there. Take a bit longer on the next expansion and release something that will occupy people for at least a few months, not weeks or days.

But to make FFXI attractive to new people, it needs a serious overhaul.

Complete graphical overhaul, new UI system (user-defined hotkeys, so people don't need to use 'questionable' software to get the input they need) and extensive rebalancing. If I had a friend start FFXI, I'd have to spend an hour to explain him things, explain windower and listing which jobs would be a bad idea to take up as a first job (for various reasons). "Oh cool! I want to be a summoner like Yuna! When can I be a summoner?" from a friend will get any FFXI player sweating. Shouldn't be that way.

A big problem is of course quite simple: less people play now than when most of us started. One of the biggest charms FFXI had for me were the party dynamics. Yeah it sucked to LFP, but getting a party that worked, and then Distortioning with the ranger for the mage to burst on? Awesome.
Gotten quite a bit harder to find xp parties since then, granted, you can do something else to get xp while waiting, but still.

And Campaign... yeah. Let's just say that I think of it as Besieged 2.0.

[tymora]

Aging graphics system (and not aging well on PC) and PS2 limitations.

I believe it is a conscious design decision to keep the PS2 UI as the standard to not risk alienating a good part of their playerbase. Good to keep their PS2 subscribers. Bad if you want to fight with the newer MMOs.

There is a reason why most MMOs don't support consoles. Consoles are like prisons you lock your game into, forever stuck on the same hardware.

[Antithesis]

I think we can all agree FFXI is not going anywhere anytime soon. It is still one of the most popular MMO's on the market despite seeming underground.

I like comparing WoTG to all FFXI in general. Because WoTG has MASSIVE potential but all we have gotten is Campaign and a pony.

[Pikarya]

I think we can all agree FFXI is not going anywhere anytime soon. It is still one of the most popular MMO's on the market despite seeming underground.

I like comparing WoTG to all FFXI in general. Because WoTG has MASSIVE potential but all we have gotten is Campaign and a pony.

& a Jeuno Flag.

[Maaglin]

SW wut

[Magicide]

1) PS2 limitations. It's obvious but still needs to be said. Not just because they're so restrictive, but because the fact that they're so restrictive leads to a general disrespect to the TOS (i.e. Windower usage, which naturally segues elsewhere), and because so much of the game gear is so intricate in terms of latents/effects/bonuses as to necessitate gear swaps in volumes and conditions that the PS2 limitations don't allow to be handled in any reasonable fashion.

2) In general, being out of touch with the NA player base. My belief is that the NA players in particular are more obsessed with optimizing their characters formula performance than they anticipated, and their understanding of their own creation isn't really geared for that. That's how you wind up with a ridiculous situation such as staves that have been around since the game's inception that can't be touched by any other piece of gear out there, including relics that costs millions and millions of gil to acquire.

3) The contested NM claim system, and the fact that contested NMs still drop elite gear. WoW completely crushed FFXI in this regard by simply instancing everything worthwhile. The level of hostility between rival LS's is an ugly aspect to the game that was completely unnecessary, and is only there because of a system that simply doesn't work. When 200+ people are gathered in a 50-yalm-diameter circle waiting breathlessly for a stupid dragon to pop, so itching for that millisecond advantage in reacting to it that they are willing to pay for and use programs that flagrantly violate the TOS, the system is broken.

4) The fact that updates aren't handled via torrent. It takes me hours to download a few megs on a high speed connection. What's wrong with this picture? I suppose this goes back to PS2 limitations.

5) Allowing major problems to go unaddressed for long periods of time. Specifically, the salvage duping exploit. I might be in the minority, but I think S/E had little choice but to ban many of the people they did (although the inconsistency with which they did so is still certainly a big issue). Duping in MMO's has always been Original Sin and anyone who made use of it without believing it could come back on them because it was as simple as /acmd leave is well-skilled in self-deception. But the problem was only allowed to get as big as it was because S/E fucked the dog from the start.

6) A total inability to calculate appropriate rewards for appropriate effort. Just utter failure in this regard. The fact that some mythic weapons aren't anywhere near as good as items you can get for under 1M at the AH is just an inexcusable, complete, utter failure. This leads to a majority of the game content going largely unexplored.

7) Reliance on repetition rather than variety for the greatest rewards. I'm okay with Salvage pieces being as hard as they are to acquire; what I'm not okay with is the only means of obtaining them being to repeat the same event over and over and over and over again until you finally get a drop. Make players explore more of the content, in greater variety, not just repeat the same shit over and over again.

I could keep going but that's good enough for now.

[sarsha]

This is a good thread, and I have been thinking about this question since I haven't play FFXI for over 6 months and switched to WoW (dragged by RL friends) for awhile. Now I don't play either of those, so I think my opinion is fair.

Itemization: The philosophy of creating item and the means of acquiring them.

It is the root of all problems in FFXI.
Here is why.

1.
Some argue that SE doesn't have enough resources to create enough content. That's true, but think about all mini-games that SE created and never update: Ballista, Garrison, Brenner, Chocobo Raising, Chocobo Circuit, Clamming, Pankration, etc, etc...

All of these are waste of time. Why? They have no reward what-so-ever. Those activities that people are still doing (the so called end-game activities), all have some form of reward. That ultimately boil downs to itemization.

If they spend the time creating useless content to fix the main game mechanism, or make those side games rewarding, players will be much happier.

2.
TOAU and WOTG have no main story, period. Why? Because nobody cares.

What makes the story memorable? Challenge and deserving rewards that sticks around. CoP does exactly that, and for those who actually complete CoP the hard way (before nerf), they remember the story because every BCNM victory is so challenging, require teamwork, require skill, and at the end give deserving rewards. That's memorable.

The experience of completing CoP in a static is so rewarding that you will likely pick up 5 life long friends (FFXI life) along the way.

TOAU and WOTG story sucks because its way too easy and offer no rewards. Itemization again. Wow actually provide easy and hard version of end game content. They are called normal mode and heroic mode, and depends on difficultly you get better items.

3.
Crafting is dead, economy is dead, and SE think it's healthy. The great depression of FFXI economy started when the economy deflates, deflates, and deflates even more. Making high-saving old-players life super easy and new player's life miserable. I know, because I fund most my Mandau with pre-deflation savings, and seeing my friends quit the game due to senseless farming for basic consumables, dynamis, limbus entrance fee, etc.

Farming plain sucks. It's plain wasting player's time. In WoW, people don't need to farm for entrance fee. They can spend more time on enjoyable stuff.

Why crafting is dead? Itemization. High level crafting make junks, and there's no efficient way to recycle them. In WoW, good items are often binded to players. The way to recycle them is to sell them for gold or desync (called DE) them for actually useful materials. So WoW has decent way to recycle items, while most items in FFXI are worthless to vendor, and non-rewarding enough to desynth.

4.
Drop-rate and time-reward ratio. Itemization, don't need to explain here.
30000 alexandrite? Itemization issue.

The objective of 30000 is clear: keep the items rare. But you know what? The mythic weapons aren't much better than what you already have! Again, serious itemization issue.

IMO, whoever does items planning limits FFXI.

I am not saying FFXI is a bad game. It had potential, but the designers are too stubborn to hold on to their own divine believes while the whole world is clearing yelling for something else.

[Silenka]

This is honestly the #1 thing holding FFXI back:

SE does not care about it as much as they should.

A lot more people would play if they just put more EFFORT into CARING about the game. Instead, they are lazy and cut corners wherever they can. Bugs that have been in the game since day 1 are still there (jeuno invisible block, various dynamis bugs, basic glitching problems). Small aggravations that are very easy to fix are completely overlooked, and in some cases, such as the salvage dupes, the caring only came long afterward, when it could hurt the playerbase the most.

FFXI is by no means a dying game, but the thing that will ultimately lead to its death is the utter apathy of the development team regarding their game.

[Tomiko]

PS2 limitations is not an excuse. Why? Because we've seen ToAU. Rock solid and accessible content, wonderful new areas, a very beautiful new city etc. etc. We are almost 3 years into the expansion and the game is still on ToAU's shoulders.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks their "PS2 Limitations" excuse is just a scapegoat.

I seem to recall them saying they couldn't add new armor/weapon models a few years ago due to "PS2 limitations." And now look at the new models we have (Mythic Weapons, Hofud, Valk Fork, Salvage/Odin armor, etc)

I agree that SE just doesn't care as much as they should. I'm sure many remember when they moved the Sanction NPC in Whitegate that the game would freeze up when talking to certain NPCs. It took SE months to finally address and fix the issue despite players reporting it (in game and on BG which is viewed by SE). GMs (some) that don't know game mechanics (telling people to zone Tiamat). How many years now have we been asking for help with AV only to be given a vague video that didn't have much to do with the main issue (meteor)? The only reason they addressed PW is because of the negative publicity they received due to BtL's attempt.

Long story short, instead of adding new content they should fix/address the current content that players have been complaining about for years.

[Hyan]

And they do that, but players figure out new problems and the loop goes on and on and on...