The Real Problem With FFXI

I have a main character that I do put most of my efforts into. The other two are done with their jobs. So I don't log on each character to do dailies/monthlies or w/e. I log them on when I need them, most of the times I don't bother and pop my trusts (gets most jobs done).

There are some old school mmo's that still dual-box. Runescape and Eve are two I know of. Wow still has dualboxers actually.. But most modern MMO's don't really need to as others have mentioned already.

When I read this thread title, I thought:

One could argue the ability to use trusts for most content is another half of the problem. Why spend time making a party when you can just summon your own if you are on a strict schedule of playtime. Sure, trusts are not as good as actual players, but they are decent enough for you to be able to jump on a DD and plow through things while being healed and having a tank take the damage for you.

Why share loot farming lilith if you can just solo it over and over and secure the drops when they eventually decide to show up. This is unfortunately the player mindset these days. Multiboxers and trusts are both part of the issue if I'm being perfectly honest. Ambuscade kinda tried to fix this with the gallantry system.

I'd have to quit if it wasn't for my mules. I have a job, 4 kids and other adult obligations. I'm lucky to have an hour a day to play.

Whenever I join with other players there can be 15-20 minutes of shouting for jobs, AFK waits and player mess ups.

It is much more efficient to fire up my mules and burn through content on my own terms.

When I came back to the game after a long break, I did several things to catch up and gear up utilizing the methods designed currently for solo play but I hit a wall at one point. I was contemplating quitting or changing servers. Luckily I met a group that and have been able to get things accomplished.

I've done plenty and am very content with what I can do for someone who does not multibox.

I heard you hang out with multiboxers!

Some of the people I play with do multibox. Many of them only have 1-2 mules. One guy 5-boxes but we won't talk about him. He's a turd.

lol Imagine being a "career BRD", then seeing a MB'ers BRD mule with better gear than you, and then going on FFXIAH and making a whine post about it.


Imagine that.

lol

I’m actually surprised by a lot of the thoughtful responses here. Thank you for those.

The brunt of what I was getting at with all of this boils down to the requirement in using third party applications in order to play this game to it’s full potential. Many multi-boxers use send commands, which isn’t something native to the client.

Also...

Incoming run-on sentences Batman...

The TOS exists. It blows my mind to see so many people openly talk about using third party apps: like an app that instantly clears assaults, or prevents knock back on Lilith, or somehow MAGICALLY getting 400 hides per Odyssey run. Like real talk, I have a THF and I do Odyssey chests daily. On a good day I get about 200 hides. Mimics suck, and when they get me I don’t use an app to move my dead body away from them, I home point and try again tomorrow. I mean c’mon.

I think the real question here is: Do you pay the gold price or the iron price for your gear in FFXI? Let that one sink in for a moment.

Like—-do you think SE can’t read? Because they can. And they will ban. They’ve done it before. The problem that SE has gotten themselves into is that they won’t ban people for this stuff because the use of it, multi-boxing, and all the other shady stuff that people do is so widespread and accepted that everybody does it. Except for “weird” people like me who apparently play the game on hard mode.

What really grinds my gears is that SE doesn’t give us straight talk endorsing whether third party apps like Windower or Gearswap are okay or not. Instead they choose to just turn a blind eye or dance around the question because the game is still profitable for them.

As a side note, I fully believe the reason Malignance, and to a lesser extent items like Tauret and Naegling were implemented is because they are going to try and streamline future gear so that it’s going to be end all, be all. The type of gear set that has all of the stats at once, fast cast, weapon skill damage, etc. etc. If at that point Gearswap becomes less relevant, I’m curious to see what SE decides to do with regards to all of this.

Not taking that bait. Your mule BRD is geared? Great. My actual BRD is too. Thanks for playing.

The only real argument here is the boredom. With a GCD of 3.5 seconds and an APM of ~20, FFXI is one of the slowest paced games there is and playing 2 characters to nearly full efficiency without automation tools is still easier on the reflexes than being competitive in a modern MOBA or FPS. I can totally understand someone feeling bored/slow without their alt. Of course, this is assuming neither the main or the alt is running auto-ws, auto-bubble, auto-songs, auto-rolls, or any of the other gauntlet of tools that have become commonplace.

People talking about time issues are operating on the assumption that everything would stay the same without multiboxing. It really wouldn't. If nobody had these tools, and nobody had extra characters, the idea of scheduling events and being on time would come back into fashion.

You might only have an hour or two to play, but back in lv75 days there were plenty of linkshells that managed to schedule and run events at a specific time with minimal waiting and organizing. I'm sure anyone who played that far back remembers folks logging out where the event would take place prior to work.

You don't need a fixed level of progress to enjoy the game, it is a sliding scale where your level of satisfaction goes down the quicker you accomplish goals. Your first relic feels much more important than your 5th. Your first aeonic clear is thrilling, your 5th is 'meh'.

If you have 2 alts, things that would've been a team effort like T2/T3 reisenjima drops go from exciting to a chore. If you have 5 alts, most things in the game go from exciting to a chore. The more alts you have, the more progress you make, but the secret is: it doesn't make the game more exciting, nor does it make it more enjoyable. It just slides the bar for what is going to be exciting or rewarding for you.

I know all of this from experience; I don't play XI for fun any more. It's my own fault, I've got enough heavily geared out alts to beat anything in the game, and have for years. I'm still missing quite a bit of commonplace gear for various jobs; but it's not exciting to chase it because I know roughly how long it will take and I know it won't challenge or surprise me. Getting the gear won't make anything else more accessible to me. It'll just change a number on a spreadsheet or parse a little bit.

Overall, buyer beware. If you don't buy into alt culture, and you take the time to make connections with other people who aren't spamming alts, you'll get a lot more enjoyment out of objectively smaller accomplishments and the game will be much more fun. Once you have a couple alts, it's far too easy to cap out on the majority of the game and leave yourself with nothing to do. Alt owners may tell themselves otherwise, but I guarantee most of them are the same people who sit in town because everything is 'too much effort' in a game meant to be entertaining them.

You're literally whining because others have secondary characters that are as good, if not better, than your primary.

It's just hilarious, that's all. It's too funny to watch people moan about stuff that doesn't impact them at all.

We would hope it would. Many have quit the game just because of the walls they hit at 99 due to not being able to go anywhere.

Sure, people even today schedule events like Dyna or aeonics but when you have to do that with seemingly everything, all those other games that have nearly immediate access to content start to look more alluring.

epic guile

You’re hilarious. And cute. C’mere I’ll give you a hug. Because obviously you need one.

You can come over to my Mog House anytime and play the name game.

RADDA RADDA BO BADDA BANANA FANNA FO FADDA ME MY MO MADDA. RADDA!!!

Real talk, I’m okay with my Bard being less geared than a multiboxer’s. I have nothing to prove.

Obviously we can't know for sure, because it'll never happen, but I'd like to think this is largely due to things earlier posts have touched on. The quantity of available alts creates a surplus of just about every role. The bar would not be 'yagrush whm' or 'idris geo' or '4song marsyas brd' without alts, as there would only be a fraction as many of any of these in existance.

You don't have to schedule 'seemingly everything', though. If you have a competent group of 6-12 that play in the same timezone for big events like dynamis and aeonic, you're much more likely to be able to pop in during that timezone and find 2-3 people interested in doing a smaller event like omen. There's much more motivation for people to do events when opportunity arises when alts don't make it perpetually available, so you have a lot less of the 'ehh maybe' and a lot more of 'sure lets go'.

Yeah, it won't happen but that doesn't mean we aren't for wishful thinking!

When I say "seemingly everything", that would be the case for many people. That's the reason they quit in the first place. I'm one of them.

Even today, while I've met people to do even more content with, it's not always something you can just dive into at any given time like other games despite time zone. That may vary depending on servers too. I have heard that Asura, you can probably get into PUG content for just about anything at almost any given time.

On Levi, I still find days where I log in for the couple hours I have after work and nothing is going on or nobody wants to do anything with anybody. Not faulting them, we all have our solo things we're trying to work on.

Granted, it's not as bad as it was back in the 75 era just before I decided it was time to take a long LONG break where you'd log in and nobody was doing anything, no exp parties really happening (or none that you'd dare waste your time in) so you end up logging out.

Nothing to prove, yet here you are.... crying about it.

lololol I'm all for hugs, but I really think you should try calming down and show us on the doll where the multi-boxers hurt you.

Whow boy. In before Aeonova posts a picture of something inappropriate in response to that...

It's ok. I have a bit of a history with inappropriate responses, wittingly or unwittingly. lol

You got me there, free login was good times but now back to "normal".

lol'd

Brings us back around to the "good'nuff" crowd. Seriously idk even know why NQ exists other than to annoy people.

Spoiler'd unrelated.

Because I don't have 60M laying around, damnit!

People die and get dispelled all the time. A real non-AFK BRD is able to get buffs back up and respond to that pretty quickly. Scripted mules seem to have a tougher time. AFK BRDs or BRDs who have DPS tunnel-vision, forget about it.

No idea what an AFK GEO would do if their bubble broke or the party wanders out of range. Is there some automated tool for that now? I wouldn't be surprised. XD

And yeah, part of being a decent support player is recognizing shifts/surprises in battle and adjusting your support in reaction to those things. Carols, Dirge if ppl are pulling too much hate, over-hasting to counter slow-aura's, etc. More BRDs should also be coordinating threnodies to help debuffs land at full strength.


Yeah, I agree, having the best player on WHM really takes the pressure off literally everybody else. Your tanks and support can be lazier, your DDs more careless, etc.

But sometimes you have to choose between safety of a WHM and the merits of a RDM, and it really helps to have support who can do statuses and support heal while the RDM is busy doing RDM things.

Personally, I think there's something of a balance there, as building up alts and learning to manage multiple characters at once can give a player more stuff to do. For as much as we can do on a single character, eventually there are inventory and "just not going to use it" concerns about building up more jobs that actively playing more than once character sort of fixes.

There's also a middle ground for content - Omen bosses, say - that are face-roll for a full group or alliance but might take some practice to dual or tribox. Similar to folks attempting solo strategies.

Ultimately though, sure, the game is finite, and people are going to get bored. Personally though, I have seen that across any type of player. Could be it's more prevalent in shells that are just a few people running an alliance's worth of characters. My experience is more with plenty of people having an extra character or two that'll fill in if needed, but having a full alliance of individual players isn't out of the question.

How do you know of my work?

Really? That's the comment you replied to? Totally missed the one where you were mentioned by name!

EDIT: Nevermind, you did see it.