Opinions On FFXI's Life.

I agree with Sekundes.

Yeah some implementations of the new content were done badly and with no careful planning, and some people also may not like the turn the game which they played for so long took and quit but a radical change was inevitable.
(For the record, i quitted the game when Adoulin first came because i foresaw the big changes which i didn't like, but deep inside i was not having true fun for a while. To be honest when you start dual boxing all the time on an MMO and play it like it is a job like i did, something is wrong...But still FFXI was a great game for me for a few years and gave me wonderful thrills and memories.)

Vertical progression and iLevel items was a radical change for FFXI but what would have happened if it hadn't came... I believe it gave a new flavor to the game that will attract more people on the long run that it wouldn't attract if it stayed the same, especially those who are familiar with the iLevel trend on MMOs.

As for the declining in population is only natural when you have curiosity for FFXIV if you are a FF fan and also schools and colleges starting too.

I believe if Matsui gets his s**t together and starts planning ahead for once, FFXI will have many years of life to come even if it has changed.

It has more to do with people growing up.

FFXI was a teenager game between 2003 and 2008. Meaning that if you are younger than 22~ now, school doesn't apply to more than 20 people worldwide. As for college, I keep seeing American college student cry that they have debts bigger than the money I have earned in years of work and have 50 part time jobs, I don't know what the *** they would do on FFXI of all games.

If we are to talk about the rest of the world, let's take supported countries, Germany is rather cold toward MMOs so this explains that, France doesn't like international servers and UK is busy with PES 2014.

While FFXIV did suck a certain playerbase from FFXI, people need to face reality: FFXI is losing players because no new players will start FFXI and the existing players are growing up/getting tired of it. The game can only lose players at this point, it cannot have a positive ratio anymore.

I'm grateful for monstrosity as it basically brought back 33% of my money to SE, but that's still a loss of 66%. I'm not gonna keep 20 accounts up when I could be buying an escort with that money.

The game could be around 5-10 years from now but will anyone of you ? I mean let's be honest they aren't producing content at the rate that will keep "hardcore" people around. I see a bunch of login campaigns, Mog Bonanza, and other little dumb events to keep casuals happy. Maybe right before the servers go offline they will give summoners Cait Sith just to say see we did it.

Huh? There's some gear from Skirmish II that is still good even if you have Delve Boss gear. Also, casuals don't all have the attitude "best or gtfo," that's one of the things that makes them casuals lol. Argument make no sense ;;

I'm not honestly sure what stopped my interest so suddenly for FFXI. I'm not about to argue, debate, or troll in any way. Personally when the expansion hit I couldn't believe that even cruor gear completely destroyed most neo-nyzul things. Lots of things were replaced on a massive scale and then with the following updates it happened at least 2-3 more times.

The sudden eradication of all previous gear outside of swap-in's for ability's was really ridiculous in my eyes. Also the fact R/M/E even 99'd are sitting and collecting dust for an unspecified amount out time (Minus PLD/BRD obviously).

FFXI far from lacks content or updates. Play as a monster was really cool.

As much as I hate to say it, when Tanaka left he honestly took the good flow of the game with him. I enjoy Adoulin and the areas. I really enjoy the lore and music as I always have. But the direction and feel of the game mechanics itself has heavily shifted, and quite frankly I really don't enjoy it.

I'm sure the game has a good 4-5 years left in it unless subscriptions keep dropping like I hear they are, but then again everyone I hear it from are the naysayers and "ffxi is dead" crowd. Probably the same ones from the salvage bans.

So instead of having a raid day where you do 2 or more Delve runs, you do 1 run for 30 minutes and log off. Much better.

I think the issue is that there are no long term, individual goals for people to work toward. You could say that Mythics and the like are still there and are as challenging as ever, but it's hard to bust your *** with the same fervor if your goal is reduced to a trophy item.

That's not it necessarily. It has been stated multiple times, pre-adolin there was a ton of things to do as the rewards were all pretty comparable for the most part. SEwent through the trouble of adding synergy to abjurations, upgrading salvage gear to 99, introducing NNI, ToM on R/E/M, AF3+2, AF2+2, restructured dynamis.. the list keeps going [I was holding out for Garrison 2] but a significant amount of the rewards from that content were immediately outdated. Some of it remains useful depending on the situation, but most of the gear was on par with each other. Yes the old content did not go anywhere, yes we can still do it, but why bother? And as I've seen expressed countless times, why bother +2 Stoning your skirmish gear if at any time all the work you put into it is going to be nuked with delve 2?

This sums up my current issue with logging in completely. Well said.

[sorreh for the double post]

this is what i don't understand. why everyone was hating on tanaka "balance". he knew what would happen if you didn keep things in order . right now lot of stuff is imbalance. if things don't change soon (don't think it wont) it gonna end up like how PSO (phantasy star online) on dreamcast was.

I was all over the funny "balance" jokes. I met him in California personally and never had any true issues with him at the helm. But little did we know that when he left that the game would take such a tremendous shift in direction. You can tell the from the music, design and lore that the game was in tact and as great as ever. When it comes to the gameplay itself, mechanics and flow of the game, it's very very obvious that Tanaka's hand of guidance is no longer there.

FFXI is still a great game. I wouldn't call all of the old content dead so long as your a newer player or someone who never went and did it. But at this point in time for anyone currently calling themselves hardcore, chances are you are just taking in whatever content they throw at you and waiting for more.

If you enjoy the game still then play it. If you don't then make the conscious decision to deactivate for awhile and stop trying to drag everyone down with you is really all I can say for this thread.

Game still has a minimum of another 2-5 years easily.

The next generation of consoles and PC gaming is here. FFXIV even ushers in a new era and generation of gamer's alongside the XB1 and PS4. There is no doubt that in November, the console launches and FFXIV will draw even more players away. None of it is good for FFXI at all.

Many people will run this game into the ground until the servers go down. I used to think I was one of those people unfortunately.

That's find and dandy, but FFXI isn't exactly ushering in a whole lot of new players. Most of us have been around for a while. That doesn't make all of us hardcore though - it makes us veterans. It doesn't matter if you're hardcore or not - eventually you will run out of things to do, unless new content is added to keep everyone going.

And besides, it's not really a question of running out of things to do, it's more of a question of running out of things worth doing. Adoulin pretty much made a lot of things not worth doing.

That was actually my personal point lol. Post I made a little further up kind of led into the second post.

Not sure why people are assuming all the work they put in will be nuked with Delve 2 lol. If you look at pattern, "Delve 2" is fracture versions of Hurkan and Yumcax, which largely will have HQ versions of the gear they already drop. Not stuff that renders "Delve 1" obsolete.

It's not a terrible assumption considering all of the gear that came out at release of SoA replaced many things, and then the following updates replaced even more including what just replaced the old lol.

I feel the meme "I heard you like to outdate gear so we outdated your new gear which outdates your outdated gear." coming lol.

But yeah I hope they figured out what the hell they are doing because everything just kinda feels winged so far.

I was actually working on a Mythic-- the Bard dagger, but finding help is damn near impossible. I'm stuck on the three ToAU beastmen kings at the moment. They can't be trio-ed from what I can gather.

My worry is that, if I put all this work into it, will anything I do currently be outclassed or outmoded by something SE adds months from now?

It's how I feel with a lot of the gear I've worked so hard to get in the past seven-plus years. It's like all my time and effort went for naught thanks to the newer gear.

There isn't even much of a challenge nowadays with the newer content save for WKR and Delve bosses. I miss the days when FFXI was challenging. It was a breath of fresh air in the MMO market. It separated the game from World of Warcraft and its various clones out there. Gear felt rewarding to get after spending so much time and effort to obtain them. Leveling to cap level felt rewarding too.

Now, everything can be had within a week or a month.

The challenge is gone.

Instead of trying to replace content, SE should both fix them, improve them, and complement them with newer content.


The last paragraph is very much true. Thank you. I feel the same exact way.

People missing the man behind original AV, King windows, Dynamis/Limbus/Salvage/Einherjar entry timers/drop systems, the real decline of FFXI (WotG taking forever and a day), and so much more that I'm not even going to bother listing? Wtf is wrong with this forum.

The content itself was fine, and (just like a poster above said) we got it in tiny spurts that lasted due to RNG, drop rates, and the need to repeat it many times over (and some) just to get what you wanted. Imagine you could buy Dyna AF2 with currency (back then that is, now its a joke to get, RNG aside), how much of a "joke" would that content have been? The majority didn't enter for some self guided moral reason of creating a relic for someone they didn't know, they came for a shot at that piece of AF2 they wanted. What if you could of bought your AF+1 and boss drops from Limbus with ABCs? That content would of been even deader than it was. Same thing applies to all of the old systems really. VW, Meebles (though its arguable the main draw here IS the gear you can buy, most of the drops are pretty lame, save for a couple), all if it. The randomness that made you keep coming back was there. Delve and Skirmish lack that, for better or for worse.

Personally, I enjoy the ease in being able to easily gear up jobs that I don't play often very well, with little work, while I spend more time on the jobs that I DO care about getting the absolute best gear from the combination of all events, new and old. What's there to *** about? What's the problem? Lack of content? Find some other ***to do, there's plenty that still matters. If you say there's not, then you're prolly some gimp in 5/5 Skirmish gear with AH accessories and 0 gear swaps.

Sure, there was more variety that mattered back then, but that doesn't mean that content was just magically raining from the sky on us. We just spent longer on it before having to look at a different event for upgrades. Get your easy mode ***, then go back and get the specialized pieces for situational use/max DPS/CP/macc/MAB, wtfever it is you're wanting to max out.

My problem with the game really comes down to a couple points:

1) I just dont find the game very fun. I havent before adoulin. I was hoping that the expansion would of added more fun things to the game. Like others have said, I feel that the expansion made fewer things to do than previous before.

2) I have no clue what the vision of the game's future is suppose to be anymore. I felt that ever since the RME change,the way Matsui addressed the players, that he didnt even really understand why it made people so mad. (which upset me more honestly than that all my previous things which were now useless but also I think the fact that some people spent years on relics/mythics and they were obsoleted on a whim without much thought is ridicolous). And since then SE has been poor at communicating what their plan is. I honestly dont think they have a plan. And thus I feel like I would be wasting my time, working on anything because I dont know whats worth working towards.

3) When I more or less quit playing, it was during Delve boss's (Skirmish II hadnt been released). Delve (bosses) pretty much made the majority of other content not very worthwhile (I realize that some stuff was/is still good). But honestly I hate the fact that you have to wait on 17 other people to do the only event that was worthwhile. By the time you wait for people to wc, pay the pizza guy, tuck their kids in, give their wife a massage, take out the trash etc it takes too long to do the only event worth doing. I wish they would of added more smaller events to balance it out, but really they never did, and when they did they ended up more or less obsoleting them (I.E. Salvage2, Meeble Burrows, etc) to the point where it wasnt worth the time.

4)Too many of the last few events are/were structured so that the only possible strategy was more or less a zerg strategy. Voidwatch - use fanatic powders and zerg down in 5 minutes. Legion - pretty much just a 30 minute zerg fest. Delve - pretty much a 45 minute zerg fest. I think the fact that so many events were "timed", resulted in people being stuck to strategies that were time efficient (I.E. Melee Burn). People stopped using blackmages (for years) etc because it wasnt efficient. When you look at older events like Dynamis, Limbus, Salvage etc there was a bit more variety and honestly you could do things with any type of strategy you wanted for the most part. Obviously there were still things you zerged like einherjar, bahamutII (if you wanted to do that way) etc. You could kill land hnm's, ks99's, sky gods, etc anyway you wanted to (for the most part), based off the strength of your linkshell members.

These are just some of my opinions based on how I feel about the game. I also doubt that the game will die anytime soon.

The game lost the most players when it became 'hard' to get good gear again. Yes there are some fights you can do to get some gear but the best gear is hard now. Meaning takes more then 3 people or you have to have the best gear already.

I know they tried to bring people back in by making it hard again but all they did was boost profit for a short time then killed it by the casuals that no longer wanted to play. Not everyone has hours to sit and wait to shouts or 18 people that can fight in delve. In abyssea, you could even do stuff solo and get something that is good.

I think if they want to keep casuals then they need to make weapons that are equal to delve weapons that can be done with 3-6 people. Better yet do something like they did with VW and make any item that weakens the bosses.

18 man content is too much with the current population.

Augmentable skirmish weapons +1.

Not really the best. People who play this game are obsessed with getting the best. Currently the best is not possible without 18 people. Even relics were always attainable, just over a very long period.

The "casuals" you mentioned aren't obsessed with getting the best. Thought we were talking about them.

casuals can get the best, just have to grind some gil then buy it.