Is FF11 Doing Better Than We Thought?

I was on a break during the start of Adoulin so I am not 100% sure what content came out right at it's release, I apologize. It was the same thing as the people who quit during Abyssea release. Things changed and people who spent all this time getting caught up on Voidwatch for whatever reason were just pissed I suppose. Which was dumb when Abyssea came out and was equally as dumb when Adoulin came out, especially now when the game in my opinion is as good as it was pre-Abyssea time. They have lowman content that you can do with smaller groups, alongside larger group content in incursion and making Mythics is still a long solo project for players.

If they had released a new game with the content of the new FFXI, it'd have worked, it'd have sold (though not with FFXIV as it's cannibalism obviously). But updating this old game doesn't work, it only appeal to the people already playing. And I mean playing, not just paying.

But the situation is good anyway, for FFXI and FFXIV. Both games have their own niche and playerbase, I wouldn't call either bad or in bad shape.

SE gave the people who were finished with their ***more to do and the people that hadn't caught up got butthurt... which sadly is a majority of the playerbase.

You misinterpret the rme issue that came up.
To people who never bought gil/sat on capped gil for whatever reason, rme were a huge investment in time and work. And they made it with the expectation that it would steadily stay at the top, meanwhile they could play the treadmill with equipment slots to pursue in various content. Everyone was happy.
In abyssea they gave easygoing content(anyone could get things done), but with long grinds(be it empies or collecting all atmas and junk..it added longevity). Later we had fun to do content but made it last through poor drop rates(VW, Legion).

Come Adoulin you get rme trashed(first bad reaction), but not only that, but with content that could be cleared fast and that started a trend of constantly replacing everything. This eradicated the long term commitment from players while 'offending'(for lack of a better word)the ones who invested in a rme. They weren't done with the game like you say, they got a long term prize, or were still on the way to make it and got rewarded with *** all.

Yes, they eventually backtracked and now they're on top again, but the players lost are hard to recover.

You're certainly right about that. People who pay a full subscription fee and are satisfied with content that would be terrible in a free to play game.

I'm sure they're profiting well when they don't even need to think when developing "new" content, they know their current playerbase will shallow whatever crap they dish out.

Truth.
Still waiting for Draylo to come in and whiteknight it though. I heard someone say it WASN'T worth it to keep playing or comeback... who will lie to them now?

I think XI won't last forever but with where it is right now I'm not worried to much. They keep dishing out new stuff and that's all I want keep playing/paying. We just had a year of monthly updates (or is it still going?) so those who are worried need to read up on what's been added.

Yeah lot of people left when RME became trash. It saddens me to think some people haven't heard you can 119 your RME now. Like stated before, SE should have been clear about RME increases. In their defense though they said they wouldn't leave out RME's the second they heard of the unrest.

>100k subs does leave me a bit unsettled though. I thought we were doing better =< And I agree about the server merges, not a giant mega server, but combining the smaller ones would be great.

I was trumpeting server merges pretty heavily upon coming back, but at the same time, I don't want double the competition in Dynamis. :(

Even on Asura there's alot of dead moments in Dynamis. If your schedule doesn't allow farming at those time I see your point but Dynamis isn't that packed anymore. I blame the drop in currency price but I do wish they'd make Dynamis bigger or something. I see three people in Dynamis and I won't want to enter >.>

Yeah, I try to go in during the dead times, haven't had much issue yet. But I figure there's a "Francisco" or two on another server who goes in on the same time/days that I do.

And I agree about not wanting to go in with three or more people. Doesn't help that people are dumb *** hell. I was just in with only one other person in the zone (who was killing the far west rabbits and orcs). I was on the opposite side of the zone killing DC Ravens. Then some idiot BLU showed up and basically followed me around trying to gank mobs from me, leading to crappy drops for all.

I would have moved away, but I only had 10 minutes left, so it didn't seem worth it to spend some of those minutes running to another camp.

I really want a break from this game.

As someone said a little bit ago, you are foolish to think the content in this game is "terrible" in comparison to free to play games. The fights now may be rehash of old fights... but not all of them. All of the Unity mobs have unique mechanics that aren't be any stretch of the imagination difficult, but are interesting. It also seems like you have completely forgotten about incursion... so yeah the whole crap about it being boring content is complete ***. Especially considering the content in xiv isn't anything to write home about in comparison.


People who thought that R/E/M weren't going to get an update are foolish and probably the game is better off without them. Of course they are going to update the best weapons in the game at some point... hell even xiv relics are being kept as the top of the weapon list so it's not like SE has a bad track record of it.

Overall, the ffxi playerbase has always been dedicated and the game itself was designed really well to cater to both endgame players and casual players (the majority being casual players) who have a short attention span and a big mouth to complain with.


But... that's how the game has been since release. How is that any different then people "cheesing" Kirin by kiting it around way back when or "cheesing" it by zerging it. It's a valid strategy and some strategies work for certain fights and some don't. If you think bringing a zerg setup to every fight should be 100% successful then I'm sorry you are playing the wrong MMO series. Plus for most of these fights you are talking about, it's possible to do them on lower difficulty without rangers and just having your DD come sub ninja.

Incursion is completely different on top of that, you bring melee tanks and buffers. Unity you can bring pretty much anything and win and I haven't done the new skirmish, but I am assuming it is the same as the other two. Even the new High-tier fights are all catered to DD friendly players.

Overall, I think the playerbase of XI was just too... set in their own ways to be okay with progression. Hell, I'm sure if the game was still at level 75 with HNM windows and the like the playerbase would be as large as it used to be. Which I think is quite sad... if I can't accomplish everything I wanted at 75 in 11 years then I need to learn how to play a video game.

They're very boring. They die in 30 seconds, they drop garbage, and no one already wants to do them, because the drop rate is too high. And "regular players" have a VERY hard time capping accolades to even participate.
Incursion sucks hot sweaty monkey penis. The random *** factor is TOO DAMN HIGH.
Matsuyi was NOT going to update RME. He sure as ***changed his mind however after the fact. Damage was irreparable.
The zerging thing has been deadhorsed. It's boring, it's easy. But kiting Kirin around for 8 *** hours was not fun either. Middle ground does not exist in FFXI. Zerg everything or waste time.
The game would've still lost subs, it's just old, that happens, the decline wouldve been SIGNIFICANTLY less rapid however.

This.
His intention was to kill them but had to change policy to escape a lynching.

I never said they weren't boring, I said the mechanics for some of them are interesting. Easy content is fine since the gear some of them offer is really good. Jugo Kukri, Emet Harness, Regal Pumps are all really good pieces for their respective jobs. Not all of them drop amazing stuff and you know it's not hard to find people that don't have a certain drop and since it requires like no people to do is a great way for some players to get really good gear.

RNG is RNG in a game of RNG? Yeah it sucks to get shitty drops soemtimes, but the event isn't hard at all with a competent group for higher ilvls and still not that bad for pickup groups from what I have seen. It's a group event that caters to more then a 6 person cap so THANK GOD

My bad I figured it was in the books, my mistake. It's good that they changed their mind so the damage was obviously repairable, people just got butthurt and had more game options to play.

Fun? Not at all. A strategy? Yes. Which I think was the original point of this comment anyway regarding PLD + RNG being "cheese". What method can be considered fun now a days anyway?

Well, if people didn't have 14 to flock to when the level cap increase was released then yes it would have been super slow. My point was that a lot of old players would have probably still been playing now if they didn't have 14 to run to as a backup plan. I mean when the original 14 failed a lot of players came right back to 11 (even though they were super gung ho about how abyssea ruined the game) and then the same thing happened again with adoulin, except now 14 had a decent game to present as an alternative.

But I hear people who used to play whine all the time about how the game lost it's glory days and the HNM time was the prime of this game... which no... it wasn't. Sitting in Aery during a window for x amount of hours was terrible. ***talking on Ventrilo or whatever was great, but I can do the same now without having to sit in Aery.

If you follow records of eminence you will be rewarded.

Tell your other MMORPG friends to give it a try, even more so together. You will find the horrific past of Valkurm dunes parties, goblins camping the zone exit/entrances/bodies, etc. is truly that: the past.

Instead players (if they take the time to read the dialogue) are treated to an easily accessible and guided tour of many of the games integral systems. It has come a long way from that shitty adventurer coupon and the vague interest of some NPC is some place somewhere.

The new user experience, assuming anyone is willing to read (you are playing a Final Fantasy Game?) is fan-***-tastic. The trust system greatly enhances the ability to relate to the characters you encounter during the story line.

You get to see their special moves.
They say different things to each other as little easter eggs.
You can collect them like poke'mon.
It actually fleshes the game to feel like a single player RPG but XI still undeniably has MMO elements that have not waned over time.
It doesn't make me feel alone however. I have friends, I don't understand people who say this.


There are some of us that have been here a long time, a decade is nothing to scoff at. We have seen the best of times and the worst of times but the new user experience is truly something we missed out on.


I like the rest of the game too, but I'm talking about just the start.

There also happens to be a lot of talk out there MMO's are dying in general, curious how SE's subscriber trends are to other companies.

As a side note its kind of funny how everyone in this thread - people still playing seemingly agree Abyssea was a great change and the RME canning was a good thing. Theres very few of the other guys left. I'm one of the "butt hurt" guys but its cool, no one forces me to play and I ultimately quit because a lot of my friends thought the same and left the game too.

I still remember the announcement that RME's will be outdated a week before I finished my Conqueror. Or when Abyssea came out and crashed the prices of everything I was farming for mythic and alexandrites blew up in price because few were doing salvage anymore.

Ultimately its a topic that's probably got thousands of pages on this forum alone. Its all about preference. I tend to like long, drawn out stuff or time sinks maybe. I always prefered woodsball to speedball in paintball - never liked the right into action. I prefer RTS games to FPS - some of my fondest memories are matches that took hours if not days to settle. I liked grinding to 75, yeah it didn't take skill only time and getting into good parties to do it, but its me and I liked it. Even with kayak fishing I participate in a tournament that lasts from February to December. I like the marathon aspect of it and grinding my way to the top bass by bass.

There is no right opinion here, everyone likes different stuff. With the old style FFXI people were leaving/left too. Funny story I don't like final fantasy in general. I originally bought ffxi for a g/f in college. I had no interest or desire to play - but she handed me the controller one day while she had to go to the bathroom. I had too much fun beating up rarabs on her mithra monk I wouldn't hand the controller back...eventually I was forced to make my own character.

Personally, I think the path the game is on right now is a good one, and hope they keep it up well into the future.

- Introduce new gear / content
- Keep certain old gear (AF, relic, RME weapons, empyrean) relevant by allowing it to be upgraded to current standards

It wasn't so much an intent to kill them specifically.
(And that garbage about not wanting to make content around them is BS... Because if content was designed to take advantage of them, Zerg tactics wouldn't have worked with them.)

It was just part of the overall change from sideways progression (oh look a 15 STR AND DEX armor! Now I can replace my 12 STR and DEX armor.) to vertical progression (oh look a 39 STR and DEX armor! Now I can replace my 20 STR and DEX armor.).
What they didn't account for was not this "entitled" BS that comes up, but for the basic human practice of ascribing value to things with large time investments.

I was there, and the conversation basically went:
"We spent so much time and effort on these... How could you just invalidate them with a simple drop from Skirmish!?"
"Whaaaa? You care about the weapons specifically??? And not just about stats????"
SE really had 0 conception that people made psychological ties to their REMs while making them, even though that's basic human psychology 101... (Look up for why the Companion Cube is a thing.)

But then, we always knew SE aren't human and are a collective of aliens masquerading with human faces.

To be fair, I don't really give a rat's behind about Artifact/Relic/Empyrian.
I'm certainly not displeased with what they did with them, on the contrary, a lot of the items are fantastic but apart from enjoying some of the Artifact quest storylines I don't really have any attachment with the gear itself.

With the R/E/M weapons however I do, as many others beside me.
Matsui's team forgot that many of us put a lot of time and gil into these. The were the best, albeit marginally, and took time and effort to get.
I can only say that it was quite a virtual slap in the face for those people when they plainly said: "Oh, right... R/M/Es, yeah... we kinda forgot about those and don't know how we're going to fix that..." only to continue implementing the rest for 15 months with hardly a mention of them.

FF11 is doing better as long as I enjoy playing it and with less and less playtime available to me in years, I am kinda happy with the current direction of "jump right into an event when you feel like it" minus the "one setup for any given event or bust" mentality. There are still restrictions like unity accolades, but nothing as severe as the ones in the past like farming pop sets or HNM windows.

I agree that ignoring the bonds people had with their REMs wasn't a smart move and obviously costed them some subs, but at least we had it coming this time, although they back tracked shortly after. They have always been so away from their players. It wasn't really a surprise. Back in abyssea times though, people weren't expecting that huge jump in gear power and it ended with even bigger loss of subs. Similar to REMs, people cared so much about their abjuration gear and even gears like perle was a huge slap in the face, let alone the huge jump in stats with AF3.

They are in a much much more player friendly direction with the gameplay, but sadly they were already too late. I just hope they keep enough interest to keep the game going longer. I really want to see the whole world with more expansions before they pull the plug.

Today I was leveling in Woh gates or Sih gates or some Adoulin ***. I passed by a person leveling two characters named Hyuran and Miqoten.

It was then that I realized that FFXI will be here forever.

If you are a good cor and have made yourself stand out of the crowd it is very easy to get invited to stuff w/o a DP. I do draw the line at groups telling me to go /Whm when there is already a brd/Whm and a main Whm. Though it does sadden me when you get flurry II when you are meleeing had enough of that from trusts.