Holy Hell This Place Is Still Active?

I'm so proud of you guys! What the hell is new in this game anymore? Nothing? Everything? :o

Depends on the year you walked away. Quite a bit had changed. Lots of content to do. Lower population. Npcs for your party.

How about you sub and find out! Who knows maybe you'll like it and stay! :)

Judging by AH history, they left like, two weeks before Adoulin was released.

There's, uh, been some changes

The entire game

Idk kinda feel this game is over for me..missing times in 75 cap..16 years of playing..as much I like this game I guess its time to face facts..few new adjustments and trusts hmm..makes game soloable in few content well my english sucks and vocabularity ofc just idk thats why I keep break atm.

Just take a break, play some single player games. When you come back, make an second account (if you can afford it) and gear up your waifu / husbando / pet taru.

It's okay to come and go, you don't need to feel guilty about it. It is also genuinely annoying when people are like "omg dead game how are you still here!@?", though.

Just came back a week or so myself after 8 years or so and yea, basically the entire game is new. It's been really fun not knowing a goddamn thing tbf.

May 7th. Be ready.

I highly recommemd returning and playing the game for the storylines. Its basically all soloable for the most part.

Luckily, you're from the best server.

they talked about adjusting all jobs i am guessing they would give us many new tools, instead of just buffing the meh jobs for EG

When I think back on missing the 75 days, I more miss the community rather than the gameplay.

The gameplay was slow, took hours to accomplish anything and waiting for an hour(s) just to get a group to try to level up wasn't fun, it was just tedious and mundane. The fact that so little was able to be done alone was annoying. However, that in itself was a boon and a bane.

It was a boon because it created a far better community than any game I've ever played. People were more well known back then. People were known for their true accomplishments, not for what they accomplished using 3rd party addons. Back then, people communicated a lot more. Because so much time was spent together, many friends were made. Today, most (not all) of the friend groups (or cliques) I've talked to became friends back in those days.

It was a bane because you could log in for a few hours and accomplish absolutely nothing. For many people who did not or could not play this game 23/7 like many did/do, it left them feeling frustrated as they couldn't accomplish much. I've met several who quit because they hit a wall they could not overcome.

It was also a bane because some people who lived in the game had accomplished so much that they unfortunately let it get to their heads. While I cannot speak for servers other than my own, I've known people who wouldn't even talk to you unless they felt you were at their "level", people who performed group content with equally geared people yet insist they "carried" the group or people who forced lower-geared players who were trying to gear up to sit on the bench yet condescended them for "leeching." I've laughably seen a handful who still project this false sense of self today. However, this isn't to imply that this type of person is exclusive to this game.

Now, I tried to play Nasomi once but after making it past the dunes, I stopped. I thought hard about everything I had to re-do and I just couldn't bring myself to do it again. It was a fun trip down memory lane.

Old FFXI had the philosophy that community was king, above the playing experience, above respect for a players time, above everything else. You were not a player, you were just a cog in the community. That simply would not fly in 2021.

You could not level past level 12 unless other people (and key jobs) were available, you could not do anything at all but sit in town and wait for an invite (cause nobody would offer to invite you if you were not in town and ready to grab a teleport to camp asap).

You could not do any kind of content alone (or even with one friend most of the time), outside of farming chips or crafting. It wasn't that you just needed a few friends, you needed a lot of random people or organized groups.

You had to have a literal timetable for content, limbus at 6pm (twice a week), Dynamis at 8 (twice a week), Camping kings and WoTG HNM 6-8 (FU sandworm/DI) hours a day, Einherjar at some ungodly hour. You didn't play the game when you were bored, you organized your life around the game.

You had to literally join a shell to do certain kinds of content, if you could not join one you could not do that content *at all*. There was almost no pickup mentality back in the day, because drop rates were so awful nobody trusted anyone. Talking of that, you had to keep doing content with your shell after you got all your stuff because "they helped you get yours so you gotta help them for the next 2 years". I literally did Limbus twice a week for over a year when I had nothing but Acoins to get form it.

Making gil was harder than making money irl. The sheer amount of work and time I had to put in to get my relic back in the day was obscene, I had to fund my Dynamis LS runs and lot all coins.

80-90% of your playtime was waiting or traveling.

Drop rates were in the tiny fraction of a % level, getting a drop could easily take literal years.

Every form of content had long lockouts.

The time investment was so huge, you could not play if got a job or uni. I knew people that loved FFXI that had to quit because they got a job, all they could do was login to talk for a few hours a night. Telling your friend on FFXI that you were about to get a job was like telling them you were about to die.

Aside from everything else the vast majority of people that play this game today would be forced to quit overnight if it went back how it was. Including some of the people that say they miss how it was.

It's ok to say you miss the old community feeling but the only reason that was there is because the game was insanely punishing, you could not have the positives without the negatives. Most people will not accept a game punishing them in 2021 when they have other options.

This is one thing I actually sort of miss. There's no penalty for failure now.

in short, ffxi has become a single player game and low skilled players on an already skilless game LOVE it

It also encourages you to spam stuff. Setting content at spammable enables SE to justify low drop rates, which forces us to spam said content, which results in burnout, especially if you aren't fond of the content but want that gear upgrade...

Imagine if you could only do Lilith say once a day BUT the drop rates were (dramatically) increased to compensate. One, the fight could be made harder, possibly even requiring spite kills on VD instead of them just opening slots if you choose to kill them. Two, it really encourages you to group with people and play together. Three, less waiting in queue. Four, you might finish 5/5 malig in like a month but since you only have to go once a day, you might actually want to help your friends because it's one run a day not 2 hours of runs a day.

To me, that’s the difference that takes away the “earned” aspect of items in this game. I remember doing Omega with my old limbus ls and being next up for legs. Our main tank dc’d midfight and it overall caused a loss. I was super eager to get those only to wait another few weeks at the attempt just to fight him again.

Eventually I got and that series of 0s and 1s simply felt earned. The only items I can think that may be able to recreate this feeling in today’s game are Volte bodies but even then...

Double edged sword. In Theory it's great, promotes going outside the meta. You can attempt "it" with bsts and pups and not be excessively punished.

But in reality, it's just ruthless efficiency and spamming zerg.

Best laid intentions and all that.

It would maybe be ok if that would be the only thing that you could do 1 per day, but if you have other daily activities like omen, odyssey, domain + all the campaigns and projects like rema etc. It gets extremely time consuming and very uncomfortable. I highly prefer having a choice to setup for something and do it 2h once a week rather than being forced to do something every day or I feel like I am missing out.

Much better could be increasing entry to like 500 merits (make merits storable on nov) and increase drop like you suggested. That would result in the same, but you would still have choice to do the fight whenever you want and you could group for 10 fights once a month and not waste time on PUGing every single day...

i like group content on timers being optional, and not the entirety of what i do with my time. feels good to hang out with the ls but also not beholden to them to get every single thing done.

Even something as simple as allowing you to select a lockout duration (and boosting drop rate appropriately) would be a super interesting change.

A 24hr lockout is probably not correct for Lilith but it's a very easy way to say let's not do it 14 times a day solo, which was my point. Making it something you can't spam and increasing the drop rate and difficulty accordingly would be probably beneficial overall.

Beneficial to you, detrimental to them. They want you not getting drops. And waiting in queues, stretching those goals into sub dollars.

(But I'm solidly on team yes, please, do that, just have to understand why it won't happen)

Yeah, it sounds weird to say, but I both miss it and would never go through it again.

I'm all for penalty for failure but saying "well, you failed, try again next week (if you can even get the claim)" is rather brutal. I'm one of the oldest played characters here and even back when 75 was relevant content, there were items that only few people even had. There's nothing wrong with certain items being rare but it gets to a point where it's just not worth the time/effort for some people.

I will say, however, that even with the current state of things, getting a drop today feels more rewarding than any other games I've played in the last few years. I dabbled a bit in WoW and even getting one of the rarest and most sought after mounts in the game, I did not feel the sense of accomplishment that this game gives.

I understand 1000% that at least 90% of the stuff that I think they SHOULD do will never get done for reasons ranging from they don't have the manpower to they just don't give a damn. I'm pretty sure the Venn Diagram of Things SE should do that would almost certainly improve FFXI and Things SE won't do is like 99% overlap.

ol doodley doo