Does Ffxi Suck Now?

Sorry, should've read over your post more than once, I understand what you are saying. Personally I'm happy with the direction the game is going in, but as I said, I can see why people would want content that can't be done with one party.

I know people hate on WoW, but having the same fight at different difficulties for different amounts of people (in their case, 10 people or 20 people fights) would work well with the rewards being different. Better rewards for doing a 18 person bcnm, but have a 6 person version of it with different drops.

I found it to be far less enjoyable. I actually liked when it took hours of camping, and a little competition to get the gear you wanted. It seems so readily available in most cases, that it defeats the reason why I fell in love with the game.

It's a good idea actually, maybe you should put it forward on their twitter?

How is it that other games were able to use alliances and made everyone happy? Doesn't WoW still have 20+ man raids that have really good gear? You seem to think more people = bad, only reason you think that is because you have to actually compete with people. Honestly, I think they should just introduce a system like Einherjar Cruoles. Everyone participates and everyone is rewarded. The system works just like Abyssea, easy access to gear, with the exception of being forced to working as/with a team.

Almost everything in abyssea can be low manned, hell everything.... All seal/+2 farming can be done with a combination of 4 people(3 if don't want TH, BLM/BRD BLU/NIN WHM/SCH). Compare that to what was needed in the past, for something like Einherjar or Dynamis... You needed to work with a lot more people to accomplish things. Even Exp requiring more work, now you just do your own thing. Towards the beginning people used MA and assists but now everyone just does their own thing, maybe you have a puller.

How come there can be challenging 6 man content on the level of Salvage etc, but when the idea is raised of challenging group oriented content on the level of Dyna or Einherjar, people scream murder. There should be a balance for everyone.

Completely agree with Enternius.
I'm a big fan of FFXI pre-abyssea. I really loved the freedom and the things we could do back in the day: Salvage, nyzul, assaults, sky, sea, dynamis, limbus, znm's, einherjar, etc.

Not that we can't do any of those things now. It's just that most of them are a bit pointless right now thanks to the amazing gear provided by Abyssea.

I feel bad, because the game was challenging (quote me if I'm wrong, at least I feel that way). I think that this challenge was both the beauty and the sin of FFXI: Vana'diel was a timesink in 2007 really. We used to log based on schedules and based on other people availbility when we were in big LS's. I was against that.
But then, when I was there fighting a very difficult NM, conquering those things with my friends... it was very fun and rewarding. It was primaly fun because it was very difficult. The reward was just a consequence of how much fun I had.

Abyssea itself doesn't suck -at all- in my eyes. Abyssea in the early days when the cap was 80, did what I wanted to do the most in FFXI: lvl with a lot of friends at the same time.
NM's popping at 20 min timer, getting stuff done quickly with lowman parties, dreaming of that dream weapon (empy) and being able to obtain it through effort, but not as hard as a relic... getting very fair amounts of EXP just by killing NM's. All of that is very very cool. I welcome that newest content with arms wide open.

I guess... in the end, I really wanted SE to find (if possible) a perfect balance between the FFXI pre-abyssea and post-abyssea. A FFXI where there's plenty of space for casual players, but there's also space for the hardcore ones who used to enjoy the FFXI pre-abyssea. Not that the hardcore players are lacking objectives (in the end they can always try to obtain a relic or a mythic).But things like Einherjar used to be very fun back in the day in my opinion.
I think that if SE continued to keep FFXI walking the way it is now, during the abyssea days, but still fit in events that requires strategy with some increased difficulty would please everyone don't you think?

Just my two cents =)

*edit*
Completely agree with Draylo too~

Maybe, I'll have to make a twitter account. Not going to post it on the lolSEforums because people there are raving morons.

Raving morons is too light a phrase to describe them I'd say.

Also Raen can spat his ***about how terribly easy the game was after he used the countless strategies and setups people had perfected over time all he wants. Why didn't you have w legs till after lvl cap? lulz. The game had challenge, you can't argue otherwise. Things were challenging the first time you did them. Just because you did them over and over and perfected a strategy doesn't make them any less challenging overall. The fun part was tweaking your strategy to allow less members and testing yourself/group or trying new methods to see if you could down it faster.

The player base has gotten older and has more responsibilities than we used to. It makes sense for the game to adapt and become more casual-friendly, and my only complaint is that they did it too slowly.

I've had a lot of friends quit because they couldn't keep up with their own standards due to time constraints from RL (got married, had a kid, started post-graduate work, etc). If they'd hung on until Abyssea, they'd all be 90 with pretty respectable gear even if they only played 4 hours a week.

For instance, what do you tell to the relic holder that couldn't find time to do his upgrade trials and still had a 75 weapon when we hit 90? He used to be at the top of the mountain, now anyone who kills a thousand monsters in an alliance for an elemental magian has a better weapon than him. If SE hadn't been so slow to make the shift from grind-fest to casual-friendly, people like that wouldn't have abandoned the game.

I'm in entire agreement with you, actually. Challenging content with more people isn't a bad thing if it's done right. Just with how SE made the content available (2-5 day spawns that your entire server competes against for 1 item that may or may not drop) was absurd. Having a group of people to fight those nms is fine and I'm all for it.

I really don't mind them making decent gear attainable. I kind of minded them making gear that I had obsolete (shakes fist at Ares) BUT: the newbs who i assumed would pile into salvage and get it in an hour didn't and probably won't. There are still empyrean weapons to make to keep SOMETHING a little difficult to obtain for the less casual players. I assume they will add more each update until 99 cap comes out and THEN start working on the more tedious stuff.

On the bright side, instead of focusing on people's gear I can focus more on people's skill. Hopefully, this will cause some of the stagnant retardation in ffxi to die out (not holding my breath) or at least people to worry about doing a job well as much as gear, if not more.

What is the rush though? Can someone tell me that? You do realize the faster people "complete" this game, the faster it dies. Everyone at capped lvl on all jobs with everything capped is boring. I dunno what the rush is to be maxed out on everything. You should be asking for new things to do with your friends, new battles and mobs to overcome and challenges to face. Not "I wantz 2 get teh best gerz for logging in da game for onry 2 hours!!" There is no rush, as there always should not have been. The only person making that rat race is you and people like you.

I agree, like you, I also lost a lot of friends because they had a lot of real life responsabilities (maybe even friends in common?).

I wish they released this abyssea content sooner, but as I said earlier, maybe trying to keep the 'difficult' of FFXI pre-abyssea days at track.
If they released the abyssea content around the time of WotG, without losing track of things such as Einherjar (for those who enjoyed), I think FFXI would've still be very populated.

And then maybe all of those friends who left wouldn't have left for WoW in the first place haha~

I love Einherjar, btw. Fast paced and challenging for groups of people where you can parse and compete against other DDs. Remove the once a day limit (maybe one of each tier a day or something) and give it better gear rewards and it's perfect.

We need more content, then. =P

Clearly he isn't..

<Insert shades picture but I lost my shades D:>

Content, with the content.

YYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!

I'm all for it, I don't have the power to add any unfortunately. I think I am in the extreme minority of people who actually try to play this game just to enjoy it. Everyone else is all centered around gear and being the bestest. I have every single mission in this game completed because I love the storyline of all of them, enjoy the experiences and love doing missions. Everyone else loves to spam enter on CS and rag on how much the missions suck in this game. I dunno what people want anymore, but what I want is more fun that doesn't always involve getting x the fastest. I like my content varied, we have some low man ***now lets add some group ***so we can be balanced while still added more of the low man ***.

Seriously, revamp all old content by giving it new rewards and different difficulties and everything would be peachy. Salvage at higher difficulties gives more alexandrite and upgrade items for higher tier salvage gear, dynamis bosses can drop 1000 pieces and they drop stuff for relic armor and weapon upgrades, rinse, repeat with all other content. Keep the drop rates reasonable and they are lowering the re-entry limits.

I've been playing for 3 years now (so technically considered a noob i guess), loved it back then and still love it. I never bothered much with getting the best stuff, coz i always enjoyed discovering new jobs the most, seeing them grow and learning. Questing and bonding with my char (she's my baby).
So yeah, i kinda miss to xp pt in kuftal, bhaflau, the mire and stuff like that. So now i grab my blu and solo it up, which is fun too. And i like the fact that i can grab my bf and duo stuff, bc we both dont have much free time on our hands.

Btw, ppl being new to a game, or not excessively playing it, doesnt make them inferior beings... always wanted to say that. Its all about having a good time, isnt it? O.o

<3 ffxi, for all it was and is.

I used to love Ballista also, but you can see where that has ended due to there being 0 rewards. I also liked doing Pankration, can see where that has ended due to 0 rewards based on relevant content. They didn't even expand on it because nobody gave it a chance/SE didn't care. Chocobo racing, same deal. Everything just boils down to getting x gear in x time because that is all people care bout I guess. I would expect this of a single player game, but a MMO should be different imo.

Or add completely new assaults/salvage zones/content or even both lol. I made a thread a long time ago about revamping old content and doing silly things like Omega/Ultima at the same time but nobody cared lol. Was mostly starting ***but the general message was I wanted new content.

I think they just need some adjustments to them.

Let you change gear in Ballista, make it easier to get to the areas, etc.

Pankration was a good concept, and I had some fun with it, but how limited you control anything was annoying.

I never got in to chocobos, so I don't know what needs to change there.

Yea. I don't know how hard or realistic it is to ask for those changes are, though. =\

Well they need to change chocobo racing >.> ***is boring, make it player controlled somehow aside from tossing food at them lol. At least the races vs NPC... They should also add something like FF12-Rev wings/FF7 the game where you control the people defending against the shinra monsters going up the mountain to the Phoenix, that was fun.

Ballista needed the gear swap thing imo, it made players have to invest more thought into what they were gonna use to counteract certain combos, just like any other MMO pvp scene. If gear swaps were allowed w/o penalty we would all be blinking like christmas trees and the only winners would be people with blinkmenot or who had the best gear.

Yeah Pankration most likely had more plans for it but because nobody cared, SE didn't bother. I would like pokemon for Pankration style lol. Choose from 4 attacks, set your pet up with different traits and combinations etc.

I don't think revamping the old stuff would be a good idea. A lot of people (at least on Fenrir, mostly JPs) are intentionally capping themselves at LV75 to play FFXI like it was in the old days. I am one of them.

I loved pankration. Did it so much back in the day... then when znms came out and no one had ISP to just buy coins to get cameras I was like :p. I got tons of credits and cameras suckers

lol I really enjoyed it when it first came out. Back then it was one of the few things you could log in and do for a few minutes and leave. Did it a lot before classes.

Because I was saving my points for Ebody. It was never a question of whether I would ever get Wlegs - Kirin was easy. It was a question of when. When isn't really a question of challenge... just time.

Some things were challenging the first time I did them. The pinnacle of challenge, or so some people like to think, HNMs however... never challenging. My first day in an HNMLS I tanked Fafnir and was surprised as to how it was one of the easiest mobs I had ever tanked.

And you seem to forget that I was/am a RDM soloist, so I was always pushing content to its limits. Got my Wlegs back in October with effectively five people so it clearly wasn't the difficulty stopping me.

Hey raen... help me get Wlegs please