The Real Problem With FFXI

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The Real Problem with FFXI
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By RadialArcana 2020-09-03 03:17:40
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Every other MMORPG is a literal single player game, there is no "community" at all in any of them. You level from start to finish solo with quests you can faceroll through, you do endgame by pressing a button and being matched with random people you will never ever see again from other servers and then everyone leaves at the end without saying anything the whole time. This is the norm for all modern online games.

This long lost community some people lust after is a relic of the past, almost nobody really wants to be totally reliant on others anymore (I'm not sure most ever did, they just had no choice) and waste 2 hours making a group to do something for an hour.

If there were no multi-boxers a mass of people would quit and the people who remain would just rely on trusts more, then demanding content be made easier or trusts stronger. You would still not get your utopia, the problem is the mindset not the on-follow armies. The reason mutiboxing is so common on FFXI is because every other game just adapted to embrace solo play more, with dungeon finders etc. Since FFXI did not we have to use multi-boxing instead, that are just glorified trusts.

The majority of the server does not multibox (even if you think otherwise, these people are just more active so you notice them more), it still takes ages to fill groups very often because they don't want to group up. They prefer to struggle with trusts or pay someone to do it for them. Check Ambuscade zone, you will see a mass of people solo, these people could easily group up and do very easy for more rewards but they don't. It takes 10x as long to clear the content solo and is more work, they don't group up to even make small teams with trusts. They don't want to, they will wipe and stop trying before grouping up. They will fail over and over again while someone is shouting for players to do the thing they are doing.

When you see someone with a load of alts on follow, you need to keep in mind they would not group with you even if they did not have them anyway. They may not even be on the game at all. In a pay to play game, that person is helping keep the game running for you to play. That's really all you need to think about it, instead of being annoyed by them.

Also, there is nowhere else to go that offers what you want either. You can play any mmorpg to max level and do all the endgame content and never make a single friend or even talk to a single person at all, this is the totsl norm in-fact now. If you can click a dungeon finder button, that's all you need. Online gaming now is not a social hobby anymore, it's all about the content and other people are just unpredictable AI.

Something many don't want to accept is most people who play online games are anti-social, this has always been the way. The games just used to force them to mix, but now with so much competition they can't force them to do it cause they will just leave and go play something else.
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By soralin 2020-09-03 03:32:02
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I honestly would say the majority of the source of this particular issue, is a pretty big lack of information on content.

Even on here, most ambuscade months, people refrain from posting detailed strats, and when they do post details, its vague or referential, like "Oh its kinda like <other strat> except you do more like <another strat>" which is super hard for a newbie to parse when they have zero knowledge on any of this.

Like you go and browse the majority of end game fights, HTBF, Ambuscades, Omen, Geas Fetes, etc, and like half of them have no discussion page whatsoever, and half of those that do its just Spicyryan going "Easy solo on blu", then the handful of those that have an honest to god post, just go "Well we had this setup, had this job focus on this, easy clear".

I recall back in the day, most fights had extremely detailed strats, most of the old BCNM, KSNM, etc pages had dozens of accounts of various strats and ways to handle it.

See the thing is, I think most people would love to be in a group, but so many of them have no idea what makes or breaks the group.

Thats why everyone shouts for 5 song bards and idris geos and ***, cause the only strat a newbie knows typically works is either Nirvana smn burn it, or TP burn it with buffs out the whazoo.

Actually doing the strats instead of zerging it? Whoof, that sounds hard captain, and idris geos are a dime a dozen.

So this cultivates both an economy and culture in the game where a handful of folks are "in on it" and know wtf they are doing and how to beat V1VD ambu runs and omen runs and Lillith and etc with like 3 people, and then they sell 2~3 spots to the other 70% of the server that took one look at the page for the fight and was like "The ***? How do I....? What?"

If you really want to start trying to cultivate a community again and get FFXI back on the track of people actually doing content, here's what you should be doing:

1. Support content creators. This is the biggest one. There's folks out there making guides and trying really hard to get info out there. Spread their channels, subscribe, like, link their vids in your discords and linkshells, spread the word on these peeps, they are the front line defense against the merc culture.

2. Roll up your damn sleeves and start adding guides to the battlefield pages, seriously. Make sure to specify stuff like "Absolutely does not require high end gear, easily done by a 6 person group roughly like so", if all the wiki entries for this stuff had 3~4 different approaches to burning down these fights, without a doubt the merc culture would shrink a decent bit.

3. When you see people shouting for idris geos and 5 song bards, speak up and call out that its absolutely not necessary. We need to publicly call these people out and tell them to stop asking for carries. Unless its ***like WoC or HELMs, I dont wanna see you begging for an Idris and 5 song bard lol.
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By Leviathan.Draugo 2020-09-03 03:48:27
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Soralin is absolutely right. having some basic sets for sure are helpful, and continuing to build those sets makes the flow of the battles easier and easier. but BiS out the *** is not required to win. I mean you can't be naked, but you dont have to be perfect.

I'm guilty also about the vagueness of our Erynis win.

COR rolls in PLD party
RUNIST, Gallant, umm cure potency, and ..... evokers?
GEO did defensive bubbles, helped cure.

3 song BRD, march, ballad iii, and minne I think.

WHM cured like crazy.

Used the pop near reisenjima 2? the one with the hill
mnk was up hill with boss, pld was down hill slightly w/ back hooked into the map edge for knock back. Having the pop set built on the PLD makes it a joke for crowd control, all you have to do is keep the PLD alive at that point. all the agro will stay on the PLD.

I remember standing within 10 or so of the PLD and it was safe from the adds, needed to be a certain distance away from the MNK to avoid getting 1 shot. 16+ I think (this is where the elevation helps i think)

The MNK party I cannot recall, probably dual geo (non idris), brd, cor, and rdm or whm. admittedly this party is much more developed.

I was part of the tank party, it was a close call a couple times, but we won. And that's all you need.

Edit: couple things we learned after the fight, the PLD should have gone /dnc, for the non spell based erase JA< and extra self curing capability, it's like 8-10 mobs pounding on him, so TP gain was not a problem for this purpose. I think they like to use a silence move often, he ran out of meds near the end.

and If our CORs were a little stronger could have helped do some damage to the main boss with ranged attacks and weapon skills.
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By Asura.Sechs 2020-09-03 03:53:35
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Asura.Splendid said: »
The real problem with FFXI is multi-boxers.
I think you're venting off your understandable frustration and putting all the blame on multiboxers.

I understand where you're coming from, I agree multiboxers are the unwilling source of multiple levels of issues, but I don't think it's useful to blame them and I don't think you can do anything to stop them from doing it.
It's a multifaceted issues and we can't really simply point the fingers towards multiboxers, imho.
Regardless, way too late to do anything, supposing there was anything SE could do to begin with.


Wanna know what I think a big issue with FFXI nowadays is?
Communication.
It's virtually impossible to have a solid, reliable, efficient way to intercommunicate between the community and the devs.
It's frustrating and it's a shame. Multiple small issues could be solved with a few hours of work on their side, but more likely then not they're not even aware of them and there's no reliable way to tell them.

That aside, another big technical issue with FFXI? Its internal network communication protocol. All the protocols used to handle communication between the server parts, between clients and between servers and clients.
With better, more efficient, more reliable means to achieve communication among these actors, the whole gaming experience would become so incredibly better.
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By Draylo 2020-09-03 03:54:21
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Just sad really, even the players mindset has become more centered around those ideals. We're all just becoming fossils, lets enjoy our game while its here. I can't even recognize most of these new "online" style games, dumb gen Z kids ruining gaming with their Fortnite and mobile games.

While most are listing benefits of multi-boxing, it is true that it is taking away a lot of the core principals of the game. Less reliance on groups or others and everyone soloing with their private funded armies.

Is anything similar happening in other MMO's that are still around and old? Do people multi-box in things like WoW? Abyssea started the majority of this and it's just progressed to this point with the lack of content and the over-abundance of addons/tools. That and the fact that SE keeps creating incentives for people who have multiple accounts that Abyssea started for the most part. Now its even bigger with multiple campaigns, Ambuscade, player greed etc.

One of the bigger problems is the lack of content though.
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By Asura.Sechs 2020-09-03 04:13:40
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Draylo said: »
Is anything similar happening in other MMO's that are still around and old? Do people multi-box in things like WoW?
That's an interesting question, but it's hard to make a 1:1 comparison because of how different the base structure of these games are.
WoW and FFXIV (they have the same structure) are heavily based on automatic duty-finder instruments and a structured, "seasons" based vertical progression.
You would hardly benefit from multiboxing in games like these.
Plus they are very fast and difficult to automate. Last but not least you lack the availability of automation instruments, and when stuff comes out it usually gets prompty patched.

In games like these the use of bots was mostly used for repetitive tasks like farming of mats to sell and make money.

I doubt there are other MMOs who are still alive that are not based on microtransactions.
The era were MMO were a golden goose and every company was releasing MMOs is over and has been for a long time.
People and companies both have moved towards other genres.


I have to agree with Comeatmebro though. I don't wanna blame anyone, but the fact in FFXI we have so many highly developed instruments to automate tasks, the fact they're so available for everyone, the fact SE doesn't do anything about it. All these are inter-related and, let's face it, it played a big role into creating the situation we're experiencing and that the OP discussed at the beginning on this thread.
I don't think we have anyone in particular to blame though. It's all a domino effect.


Let's try to see things from a different perspective. Many of us whine about the fact that this game is no longer about that slow pace, that level of punishing gameplay, that "forced" player interaction approach.
Many of us use melancholia goggles while whining about the lack of all of that but realistically if things were still that way, FFXI servers would be closed by now and would've been for a long time 'cause nobody would be playing anymore.
As much as we can whine and say we miss those times, times have changed, *WE* have changed.
Even if things were to magically go back the way they were, most of us would stop playing entirely after a couple of months of enjoyment.
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 Leviathan.Draugo
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By Leviathan.Draugo 2020-09-03 04:19:12
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EQ is still alive.
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By Asura.Sechs 2020-09-03 04:21:25
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Leviathan.Draugo said: »
EQ is still alive.
DAOC and Ultima Online are still "alive" too, and Elder's Scrolls (which is farily new compared to all the other MMOs mentioned so far) is as well.

They're all pretty different though and hard to compare.
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By Leviathan.Draugo 2020-09-03 04:26:13
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Ultima Online, the OG MMO. At least from a graphically driven standpoint. 23rd anniversary this year, and omg the graphics on that. Just impressive. We have many years ahead of us.

and then there is this: https://www.uoforever.com/?
 Asura.Verbannt
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By Asura.Verbannt 2020-09-03 05:02:59
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While multi-boxing does generally leave people out of group that otherwise could fill said role. I believe part of this, not all of it, is due to communication and knowledge of the playerbase.

I decided to cut out my rant below and focus on the thread. (decending order ofc)
4) players should be competitive, my mule should not be better geared than your main. You should want to become the best, this helps the group grow (I last geared brd 3 years ago, 6 years ago for whm)
3) If you want to join content you should be well-read on the content, that is to say no one in group should have to play while teaching you what a wiki could tell you.
2) If a group invites you to content they shouldn't have to wait on you. (hey I have been that guy before thats been late to an event w/o warning... it happens just dont make it the norm)
1) Know your job, Gear your job, and be prepared before the event starts. (this includes food, meds, tools, macro's, lua's etc)

Otherwise, a mule is a less stress-inducing option.

This is a game, not a job, and failure to do these things makes the game a chore for someone.

As for things SE could do, change the items that can be crafted into spheres into items from high-level mobs only. 124+ only... or set a limit to the ammount of spheres that can be generated on a character to the amount needed for a shield roughly. (or a monthly cap IDK something)
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By Bismarck.Oldmancebi 2020-09-03 05:21:31
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Shiva.Arislan said: »
Bahamut.Negan said: »
as for the OP: EVERY multiboxer I know almost NEEDS to multitask to enjoy the game. Almost like they are bored as a single player. I consider multiboxers "the next level" of playing FFXI because I cant do it for ***.

Yeah, I originally made my mule so my LS-mates could play a wider variety of jobs, but ended up keeping her around because not controlling simultaneous accounts feels really weird now, like I have a lot of extra time all of a sudden between actions.

As an avid dualboxer, I try to share the side benefits with as many friends and strangers as possible. But even then, I still feel like multiboxing is a "bad" for the community.

I kinda feel the same way, except mine was out of frustration for minimum salvage limit/duo box dynamis and other restrictions. I did enjoy helping people farming abyssea key items.. Plus don't get me started pre-abyssea when you'd take 30~60mins making a party only for the one healer to bail after thirty minutes ._.

As much as I love/hate multiboxing it I can't dictate what everyone does with their 11.99 a month, but does make me a little salty when most of the content that mnost want to do require 3+ minimum to achieve, or require a merc.

Sure they've made certain things more solo friendly, but it sure feels more isolated than ever.

I can't see where Draylo said it, but I was under the assumption that account sharing was a bannable offense in WoW.
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By RadialArcana 2020-09-03 06:16:06
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Quote:
1. Support content creators. This is the biggest one. There's folks out there making guides and trying really hard to get info out there. Spread their channels, subscribe, like, link their vids in your discords and linkshells, spread the word on these peeps, they are the front line defense against the merc culture.

2. Roll up your damn sleeves and start adding guides to the battlefield pages, seriously. Make sure to specify stuff like "Absolutely does not require high end gear, easily done by a 6 person group roughly like so", if all the wiki entries for this stuff had 3~4 different approaches to burning down these fights, without a doubt the merc culture would shrink a decent bit.

3. When you see people shouting for idris geos and 5 song bards, speak up and call out that its absolutely not necessary. We need to publicly call these people out and tell them to stop asking for carries. Unless its ***like WoC or HELMs, I dont wanna see you begging for an Idris and 5 song bard lol.


I agree with this 100%, I've tried for many years now to help channels and others to build an audience as best I can by sharing their content around. When you try to share their stuff (this only seems to happen in the FFXI community) you get complained at because they should be doing it or you're just fishing for likes. Which is stupid as fk, no youtuber dislikes you sharing their content around and if you wanted likes you would just post a cat video. They want more eyes, they want more interaction and them growing helps everyone cause they make more videos. If they don't get these things they often stop making videos.

Cloudchief, Nextgames, Ruaumoko, Brixy, Ejin, Gabemaru etc

https://www.youtube.com/user/BrixyFFXI

Youtubers, artists, guide makers, content creators are an important part of a games sustainability honestly. A big part of doing stuff in groups is knowing how to act in a group, guides and videos help with this and make people more likely to group up.

Also seeing new videos of content creators playing current content encourages people to come back or start playing.
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By Mattelot 2020-09-03 06:24:09
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Asura.Splendid said: »
The fact that there are more people here trying to justify multi-boxing as opposed to speaking out against it just shows that this is an issue.

If you don’t have time to wait for people to do content then how do you have time to level multiple accounts up and cap their gear? This isn’t something mere mortals are capable of. Like—-I have multiple REMA. On one account. It took me a long time to get to this point. I can’t imagine doing it five more times. It seems like a HUGE time investment. Again—-something mere mortals aren’t capable of.

You are not wrong. A lot of the replies I'm seeing to your comment are rationalizing why they multibox, overlooking the main issue.

Yes, it's a huge problem that people HAVE to multibox to get things accomplished. They're doing it out of necessity. They don't want to wait to do things.

On one hand, one could say that's the way the game is designed and if you don't like it, it's probably not the game for you. That wouldn't really be wrong to say. However, rather than let a game die off, players took it upon themselves to pseudo-evolve.

I know it's different but a good example is the game MTG that I played for 25 years. A venue I gamed at a lot had a lot of mediocre players in it including the owner. One mediocre player got so sick of losing, he learned how to do this "trick shuffling" thing where he could force all the good cards to the top of his deck. He was called out for cheating but still did it and after a certain point, all the mediocre players were doing it, including the owner.

While yes, that example is 100% cheating, multiboxing is more of a grey area, the point still stands. Multiboxing itself is more money for the company. While they may or may not take action against botting is another subject.
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By Asura.Sechs 2020-09-03 06:40:03
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Premise: I don't multibox and I'd rather kill myself than having to do all those chores I had to do once on my char... again.
With this said, please allow me to carry on.

Asura.Splendid said: »
If you don’t have time to wait for people to do content then how do you have time to level multiple accounts up and cap their gear?
I think you're underestimating the efficiency of multibox and its intrinsic psychological aspect.

The "wait for people" is always there and it's always beyond your control.
The "wait to level up multiple accounts" is something you do once, then you're done. Furthermore, it's absolutely within your full control.
Last but not least, many of the things you have to do for one character, can be easily "shared" by multiple characters and hence done at the same time for what is a very little additional effort.


In addition to not having to "waste time" anymore once you're done levelling your mules with the desired support jobs, it's also highly beneficial.
Think about doing a VD BC with a group of people vs you soloing that VD BC alone.
Every drop that falls, is yours. You won't have to fight with other people casting your lot or using /seacom.
And if you get multiple of the same item? Your mules will love them, or you can sell them to external people and make money.

Think about content that drops personal loot.
A very good example is the High tier battlefields during the campaign.
I have friends who, years ago, literally made billions of gil simply running Leviathan tribox with their main BLUs.
They made so much money they didn't know where to store it or how to spend it. Not joking.
Think about it, all the personal loot meant for single human players, was being concentrated into a single character/player.
Think about doing this in a group with six people.
Sharing the loot, having to wait for people to zone/be ready.


It's easy to see how difficult it would be from a developer's point of view to balance things out, to make the economy more "even" when on one side of the spectrum you have players who are completely alone and players who have 4+ mules.
If you make it so stuff is "fair" for multiboxers, then soloers will have a really hard time farming.
If you make it "fair" for soloers, multiboxers will be done in half a day instead of a month.
See what I mean? It's truly truly difficult to balance the grind out when you have stuff like this happening.
Unless of course you create content with R/E drops that cannot be sent to same account and have to be farmed solo.
But if you do that for every single content it becomes boring and frankly goes against what should be the goal of an MMO game. At that point you might as well play a single player offline game, no?
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By Mattelot 2020-09-03 06:48:04
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In addition, doing all the things your character did over again would be NOTHING like it was back in the 75 era. You can level significantly faster. You have trusts to fill the gaps to accomplish the majority of anything up until "endgame" content. And those who do multibox, each one that you get to max and gear will help make the next one even easier.

You'd have your own power leveler. Then your power leveler would have help. That or you level sync and level up with a more reliable Geo, Brd, SC partner, etc (sorry, you're not gonna out-do Shantotto II). The point being that it just gets faster each time.
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By Leviathan.Stamos 2020-09-03 07:08:34
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The issue is they are stuck in between in terms of what they can put out content wise. If they put out casual 6 man party content it will be cleared easily by multiboxers. If they put out alliance content smaller servers will complain there isn't enough people.

Really just wish they would put out challenging content, without giving in to people complaining it is too hard.
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By Asura.Sechs 2020-09-03 07:09:55
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If their concept of "difficulty" is fighting against the lag and the loss of packets, then I'd rather not have difficult content :-P
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By Lakshmi.Rooks 2020-09-03 07:16:01
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I mean, if they really wanted to introduce content that didn't explicitly favor multiboxers*, they would release true solo content that you couldn't do in a party.
However, that runs counter to the entire design of the game, and would absolutely punish players who don't have, like, an awesome DD set for their BRD. So it won't happen, and it probably shouldn't.
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By Asura.Sechs 2020-09-03 07:21:15
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Stop stealing my ideas I just described above! Bad rooks! xD
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By Mattelot 2020-09-03 07:26:21
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We should have more "you must solo" content. While there are many things you are 100% able to "HTBF", etc, we all know that the difficulties with reasonable drop rates are designed for multiple people.
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By Asura.Sechs 2020-09-03 07:31:38
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The lack of content is so bad (to get back on what Draylo was saying before) that they had to design their most recent "lowmen content" (the new HTBF in Selbina) with drop rates SO LOW that they suck even on VD.

Else people would be capped with gear in a month, and clearly they didn't want that, because people who are done with content, whine about the lack of content.
Whereas people who are stuck because drop rates suck, clearly won't complain about "having nothing to do".
Right?
RIIIIGHT?

SE guys are so smart, isn't it.
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By Mattelot 2020-09-03 07:33:29
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The worst part of that is that the gear from it is so appealing to many that they'll continue doing it despite how much it blows (yes, specifically referring to malignance).
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By Asura.Sechs 2020-09-03 07:39:09
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I could've honestly understood and maybe even supported lower drop rates compared to the old VD HTBF, but the fact that you don't even get a guaranteed single drop slot on VD is way beyond anything reasonable.

But then again I dunno, there have been lots of pretty unreasonable extreme grindy things. 10k Beit/Plut/Rift wasn't reasonable either when it was first introduced.
1500 HMPs wasn't reasonable either when it was first introduced, and so on.

People don't complain, or rather maybe they do but then they jump the grind train regardless, so I guess SE is right in keeping to do things that way.
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By Lakshmi.Rooks 2020-09-03 07:39:54
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Asura.Sechs said: »
Stop stealing my ideas I just described above! Bad rooks! xD

I read that part after I wrote my post! It's the obvious answer, but there is just zero chance it happens, in part because SE almost certainly does not see multiboxing as a problem. (At minimum, it is not something they're going to go out of their way to deal with/enforce the rules on).
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By Bismarck.Dekusutaa 2020-09-03 07:41:22
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Asura.Sechs said: »
The lack of content is so bad (to get back on what Draylo was saying before) that they had to design their most recent "lowmen content" (the new HTBF in Selbina) with drop rates SO LOW that they suck even on VD.

Else people would be capped with gear in a month, and clearly they didn't want that, because people who are done with content, whine about the lack of content.
Whereas people who are stuck because drop rates suck, clearly won't complain about "having nothing to do".
Right?
RIIIIGHT?

SE guys are so smart, isn't it.
I think their strategy and approach to drops is summed up here.

How do you maintain player retention and interest in progression without the use of loot boxes and other modern reward systems?

YF: People tend to get the wrong impression, but I believe that fundamentally there are no games that solely survive on simply having players purchase loot boxes. In any game, developers would still try to get the player to complete objectives in game using the item(s) obtained through the loot boxes.

In FFXI, we simply provide what people would expect from a loot box in the form of gameplay content and adventure. And at the same time, we continue to expand the areas in which players can try out or utilize what they obtain.
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 Asura.Sechs
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By Asura.Sechs 2020-09-03 07:46:46
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Yeah but I mean, the drop rates on those BCs is horrible, even on VD.
You should have at least 1 guaranteed drop slot on VD, period.
I think it's more about the fact that they lack manpower and need to slow down the pace at which people gather stuff because they have no means to offer content faster than that.


If you think about the early Adoulin Era there were many things to do, multiple content. There was difficulty, challenge, lowmen, alliance content, but the sense of progression was much more solid.
You had so many different HTBFs to spam that they could allow 1 guaranteed (2 possible with luck) drop on VD.
Here things are different, and the culprit is lack of content, which is the consequence of lack of manpower/resources in the dev's hands, imho.
 Bismarck.Dekusutaa
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By Bismarck.Dekusutaa 2020-09-03 07:55:00
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They never planned the game to go on this long, the early HTMBs were when they were still working on RoV and had manpower.

We've been in this mode since 2016, its possibly more apparent now because Omen is considered 'old' content now, but back then having new dynamis and omen was quite exciting.

I don't/cant blame them for lack of content post 2015, it wasn't for the lack of trying. And I do think more stuff are coming independent of the storyline possibly also giving us a new battlefield eventually.
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By Mattelot 2020-09-03 07:56:01
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Asura.Sechs said: »
Yeah but I mean, the drop rates on those BCs is horrible, even on VD.
You should have at least 1 guaranteed drop slot on VD, period.
I think it's more about the fact that they lack manpower and need to slow down the pace at which people gather stuff because they have no means to offer content faster than that.


If you think about the early Adoulin Era there were many things to do, multiple content. There was difficulty, challenge, lowmen, alliance content, but the sense of progression was much more solid.
You had so many different HTBFs to spam that they could allow 1 guaranteed (2 possible with luck) drop on VD.
Here things are different, and the culprit is lack of content, which is the consequence of lack of manpower/resources in the dev's hands, imho.

From a developer standpoint, I guess I can see why they wouldn't do that. If VD was guaranteed, you'd have people decked in their Wednesday best gear and keep fighting it all day long until the whole group got a full set since malignance is so alluring. People don't do this for upgrades that are marginal. They'll just wait until they happen upon it or occasionally do it.

If people were to group up and complete in a day, the content would quickly become insignificant or not done anymore since everyone now has it.
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By Shichishito 2020-09-03 08:09:22
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Draylo said: »
Do people multi-box in things like WoW?

multiboxing is not the core problem of FFXI. the root causes are a mix of game design decisions, rule enforcement (or the lack of it) and the cicumstances of the individual player. multiboxing is just a resulting side effect.

Asura.Splendid said: »
The fact that there are more people here trying to justify multi-boxing as opposed to speaking out against it just shows that this is an issue.
its no surprise tho. if you'd walk in a drug den and make a survey about drug use you'd also get widely different answers than what you'd get if you made the same survey on the general public.
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