If You Could Change One Thing About FFXI...

I would make spheres EX and purchasable from NPCs. They would still be botted, but they would only be botted by players making a shield for themselves. Additionally this would remove millions from the economy. Not enough things in the game remove gil from players.

This, but, if there is no gil to be made from it, then no one would do it.

No one would farm Omen if swart was E, no one would farm salvage if alex was E, no one would farm dynamis if currency was E. (not literally "no one")

The whole dynamic of the game is held together by the fact that people with time to waste supply the people with no time to spare. It falls apart if any event lacks ability to be sold. You need both.

One thing? Why stop there?!

1) Remove 3 person requirement for older content like Delve. I know many who have quit the game because they're gated by things like this.

2) Allow trusts in all old content (salvage, etc...)

3) Liven the world up by making even more older areas more relevant somehow. There are some zones that are almost never visited anymore. The UNM pop spots or VNM are the only reason some are visited anymore.

Make this infinite uses or rechargeable. It's time.

I'd enable being able to cast within range regardless of line of sight.

Fix the invisible wall spots in southern sandy, upper jeuno.

Fix the packet size cap so you can zone and load inventory within a reasonable time and then also increase storage.

While there are plenty of potential things were they willing/able to reengineer the game or port it to another engine...
It seems like they could reasonably address animation lock given that third party tools can. Simply removing player collision at all times while they're at it would also be nice.

I'd like to rewind to 2006 or 2008 while keeping the way the game is now. I wonder how it'd be.

Make it so I don't have to install a bunch of mods and have to do some light coding to play the game.

Lower WS damage across the board. White damage should matter more than it does. (Can buff white damage as well but 99999 has become too easy)

Get rid of crafting shields(already mentioned). They are dumb and ruined crafting IMO. 99% are botted and t0s should be extremely rare.

Oh man, aeonics would shine!

1. A reason for lots of characters to be in Kazham. If most players were in lvl 75 era gear that would be even better. Maybe a npc that delvls you to 75, add a bunch of lvl 75 era HNMs that are time spawned. To claim or do any actions on the hnms you need to have a lvl 75 lvl cap status from the kazham npc.

2. Make a 75 cap for dio and ballista OMs.

3. Remove the 24 hour wait on FoV augs make it once a game day.

Add nyzul tokens to currencies available from copper vouchers

You don't, lua is a scripting language, not coding.

Scripting is absolutely coding.

Edit: to stay on topic, I'll add another thing. Add the proper jobs to the relics and empyreans. BLU on Excal, GEO on Mjollnir and Gamba, etc. There's no reason to keep them off.

//lua load MountMuzzle

You're welcome.

One of the highest paid specializations in the IT industry revolves around using scripting languages to write automation code.

https://medium.com/lcom-techblog/scripting-and-automation-skills-for-devops-engineers-4c42d03cf1bc

https://engineerbabu.com/blog/what-is-scripting-in-devops/

The "Dev" in DevOps is using coding techniques and concepts to facilitate automation of "Operations". Those guys get paid a helluva lot more then software developers who now are largely outsourced to body shops in India.

On Topic,

Completely remove the dependence on buffing everyone. Limiting haste to 50% while lowering the attack cap would do this, simultaneously reduce monsters HP and defense by 50-75%. Place a limit on mRatio as well so we don't turn into a caster-onry meta. That would enable them to rebalance the game for a more inclusive meta instead of having WHM + GEO + BRD + COR for everything.

FIXT

I work for a large organization and thats what they do *shrug*

I wish they'd fix the damn autotarget functionality. Autotarget always go from left to right mobs on the screen, starting from the center of the screen and regardless of their distances from you, and if a mob is 10 degrees (I may be exaggerating here) left of center, it won't pick it up, and it's annoying as ***. It's also annoying when it will target the mob on the far back of the pack instead of the one in your face. And it also seem to prioritize pet mobs instead of their bst or pup or smn masters. Autotarget should go to the mob closest to you that has enmity on any party memeber regardless of what direction you're facing or if you yourself generated enmity on said mob (Many trusts have died because of this).

Next would be an overhaul of menu systems. Menus are too slow to navigate.

I'd change getting locked in place when multiple things are happening to you. Few things infuriate me more than casting flash on a mob, only to have it go behind me and I can't move until I'm nearly dead or I just die.

They've got quite a pickle on their hands- they designed a combat system to reward coordination (skillchains), then produced content that needs more damage dealing than works with that system by requiring more damage dealers than can be coordinated into skillchains...all while having 4 times as many damage dealing classes than support classes when the game mechanics demand more of those support than the damage dealers that outnumber them. The one answer they used to have is that by encouraging a skillchain/burst method, a group could maintain that desired coordination for large spikes of damage. But they even took that away in the name of balance.

Today's game more represents a trebuchet than a battle. All the work is done prior to actual engagement through preparation of gear,strategy, and buffs- and then when ready, one just pulls the trigger and launches. But once that projectile is fired, all control of it is lost...either you prepared correctly and win, or you didn't and you lose. Very rarely does mid-battle strat have value.

I've always felt the solution wasn't trying to balance the jobs into just different costumed versions of the same thing, but to produce content that through varied mechanics NEEDED different setups/strats. But with the stagnation of content and gear creep happening, the need to vary strategy vs just bullrush stuff has shrunk. I just don't see how it gets "fixed" without a massive game design shift like you describe- but I think we all know its far too late for that.

Would "port FFXI into 2010+ era game engines perfectly" work?

Auto Target System, soon as you kill a mob, the damm thing targets the one furthest away. Make it target the closest. As old as this game is, its never been fixed.

someone make a plugin....

This is a slippery slope because then people will want einherjar currency too and essentially someone can just spend copper vouchers to remove planned artificial RMEA content timesinks

Next they would give imprimaturs for vouchers too and skip adoulin timesinks etc

Add deeds of heroism to currency available from copper vouchers.

1 vouchers = 1000 deeds

Its not like Copper vouches rain from the sky. It would more or less speed up the process rather than break it.

pretty much this.

I'm really proud of you folks, no one has yet suggested sliders for bust and hip size during character creation.

Take note, game designers.

Ibf4 some really nasty looking galkas