RMT Bots Have Won...

Something like a daily ROE for killing a certain amount of locus mobs per day/week on X job in exchange for exemplar probably would have worked better than directly getting the exemplar like we do. People that wanna go fast to stand around can do so, while people that don't have a hyper offense setup ready to go can casually take their time and still get it done before the deadline. Taking on harder mob would have bonus XP, but not enough to supplant the main bonus.
Eg 80% of your exp comes from the ROE, but the mobs themselves can change that ratio a little for if you really wanted to brute force it by fighting more annoying or higher level types.

ML isnt so bad in concept but their math got away from them and there wasnt any reasonable person that said wait a min, what are we really asking our playerbase to do? Is it obtainable? Its the same thing with prime weapons, theres no reasonable person vetting. The people vetting are on a board that want percentages in dollars and to keep us the playerbase on the hook. Goodbye fun game. It could have been a reason to party up and just shoot the ***and get xp/ep like the original ffxi was. Noone thought they could hit 75 soon, it took about 2/3 of a year of constant playtime to hit 75 on a job.

Another problem is the playerbase doesnt engage with other player anymore since multiboxing and static's content. We could all post our messages in the looking for group system and leaders could choose a party, but that time is past and shame on the devs for not bringing that system up to date when they rolled out the ML system. If it aint easy to party up, then gonna go to bots or stifled ability to engage the content we are paying for.

I loved loved the CN aoe parties. Thank god I realized that and got about six jobs past 20 and 2 jobs past 40. When they nerfed that, I thought wtf SE, you broke my heart.

Just tell SE how much you love the ML system and enjoy botting. SE will catch on and crush it. That's what SE does. Crush things they find out we enjoy.

i always thought they should add a Daily objective for it instead, iv done rdm to 50 pld to 40 and rune 40 and il never touch it again

If they really wanted to lean into RoE, they could add a ton of weeklies like:

Delve (WAR) - Defeat all 6 delve bosses while on WAR. Reward: 500k EP.
Vagary (WAR) - Defeat all 5 vagary bosses while on WAR. Reward: 300k EP.
Skirmish (WAR) - Clear 5 alluvion skirmishes while on WAR. Reward: 600k EP.

and so on. Ideally, the EP values would be lower than straight farming EP, but high enough that the total reward is greater when considering content rewards. A focus would be placed on older content; don't want to incentivize people being picky on job for content that is harder to clear.

Doing it by job would allow you to work on multiple jobs at once, and it would give an added incentive to do older content that may be hard for newer/returning players to find groups for, or where auction supplies may be lacking. Besides, playing a job in a wide variety of content is how you actually master it.

That's the whole point honestly. Since any real additional content is a pipedream at this stage, they have something to keep people going in order to keep engagement with the game. Is it the most interesting thing? Absolutely not. But we are into year 21 of a game people thought would die out years ago after finishing another semi expansion that celebrated 20 years of memories.

I can somewhat understand why they want to keep us grinding EP, but the whole thing could have been better if they just make it more linearized and let approximately the same amount of total EP get us to ML60 or ML70.

The problem is that they are clearly afraid that sub-job passing 60 will break the game (which may be) but they still want to keep us grinding that much. So we end up with a system that is very grindy but with very little return passing ML40.

Personally, I just let go and see ML passing 30 as a bonus that I do not need.

I always thought they missed a good opportunity with Ody seg runs, they could of tied a large EP bonus to the end crystal based on the number of monsters killed.

I'd actually really like that idea. That and Sortie EP bonus would push these events even more.

I'm still waiting for the bonus EP events to happen like XP and CP

they have no impetus to make the grind faster, this is what we get now that they are in maintenance mode; it has to last as long as possible. see also: the batshit grind for Prime weapons.

Tying exemplar returns to content is how I believe all really wanted this, or at least a different type of EXP experience. I'm pretty sure most who are doing their MLs the "hard" way would love to spend an hour beating 10 mobs for the same Exemplar Point returns as killing 100 fodder-level scrubs in that same hour.

They're called Master Levels. There's nothing masterful about killing thousands of wimps who pose zero risk beyond afk'ing in the wrong spot now and then.

Here’s my POV.

First: SE doesn’t want you to actually EP, proof of that is they actually stopped the AoE EP party, the only way to have fun and play with people, the only time people shouted and made actual party for EP, so yeah bot won with SE blessing. They also keep telling you to go outside, leave the game and enjoy the flower (in the spring) or the fall color (in the fall).

Second: DI for beads 15 min, ody 30 min, sortie 1 hour, omen 20 min daily, dyna 2 hours twice weekly, and that’s without trying for NM, RP, quest lines of farming or other stuff, EP doesn’t fit and they know it

Third: they should definitely make the content (dyna/sortie/ody/omen) people play more EP rewarding

Fourth: even if you bot EP all night, 20 hours a day(and we know people do) it will still take the bot (paid or not) a whole month just for 1 job, so if someone bot 24/7 it will take him over a year to do all job to ML 50, ML 50 yes but can he play the job?!? In something that matter?!? That need to be seen as you need a whole lot more of knowledge and gears than that ML50 when 30 is all you need. The ML50 was done for the botters as they keep paying and someone has to balance the books in Japan

Last: people complaining are usually people that just complain and actually don’t even put the energy in anything. I can shout all day even for t3V25 (or someone on bahamut looking for just 1 member for Bumba V25 for over a month) and no more that 1-2 answered within an hour so yeah, ppl complain but also don’t want to be involved.

There, my first post ever now go write about those facts and go off rails guys

SE assumed ml grind and prime would keep us busy for years to come


Not realizing 99% will skip primes finish oddy and quit.

I assume the game will drop to 40k subs in a couple more months and thats when the rmt will find another game

My friend was botting ml on dnc...

He was getting 500k a day solo

It wont take him a year to do all jobs...

Odyssey is just kinda missed opportunities in a lot of ways IMO.

I already commented about getting EP rewards from content including Odyssey, but another way they could accomplish this would be to add a Sheol D or rebalance A/B/C so that one of the zones is more difficult. I don't think the intent behind Odyssey was really for us to be clearing the entire most difficult zone consistently and pulling entire floors. The content was balanced to the playerbase prior to MLs and prior to heavyweight augments, making a more difficult zone could be used to provide higher EP and segment rewards to people ML30+ and still working on Odyssey augments. I doubt we'll see this, though, due to the level of effort combined with them having no motivation to increase the segment return already provided by C, which caps how much people can earn in a single day, but I think it'd be nice/interesting.

I also kinda figured for a while they would add another T4, I know it's non-trivial to do this, but the content is structured in a scalable way so I figured they'd lean into that. Guess not.


I guess SE finally, after 20 years, figured out how to get rid of RMT: eliminate the playerbase! (I'm kidding, of course)

The only way I would excuse the current ML system is if it actually flagged everyone who hit ML50 for review to get rid of botters.

So that's your take? It has nothing to balance, or difficulty, types of camps, battle mechanics, level-syncing, etc?

When someone whos SJ is only lv58 asks to join my PUG:

How do you treat people who aren't job point Masters?

Are those like, NPCs?

Apex Cog, dont know what level (they all checked the same), 6 person PT with ML50 gave 324 base.
Ran outside to the Locus Colibri (once again, not sure what level I wound up fighting), 226 exemplar base.

So unless you're going to now suggest that the Locus multiplier only kicks in at higher master chain, your statement that "lv135 Locus gives better base EP than lv145 Apex" is wrong. Now if you want to argue that the EP/hr will be worse, I'm not gonna argue that. The *** gears took literally two minutes because it kept using Restoral, whereas the Colibri died in 20 seconds. If you're gonna suggest that the base EP is too low, that applies to literally everything, triple time for content where EP is offered.

But that's already been covered:

The system is designed to use Level Sync and to find sync targets. Thats the circular retention method. One person starts a new job at ML0 to sync to so the rest of the party can push to 50. When they get too high, another person drops to 0. And the cycle continues over and over. Why do you think they keep adding 133-137 targets?

Nov 2021 the 143-147 Arch Cogs were added in. Since then:
March 2022 CN (S): 129-140 (and later nerfed)
July 2022: Bhaflau 133-137
Sep 2022: KRT 133-137
Feb 2023: Bibiki Bay 135-139
Sep 2023: Caedarva 135-137

I'd be curious about the difference in strength between someone with end game gear with no job points, and that of the same gear and Mlvl max.

Like how significant the damage difference is.

Of course all of this just works to royally screw returning players and keep them locked out of PUGs forever. *slow clap*

Depends on the job, but if you're talking about the two characters above, the difference will be massive on any job. Most of that will be from JP & Gifts and not from ML though. The difference between ML0 and ML50 is well-known:
-50 all stats
-50 acc
-50 atk

Some HP & MP as well, but since most people only care about damage that's not likely to play a role most of the time. I'd say it's a difference of a few % in WSD. If for some reason your buffs aren't capping your accuracy you're looking at maybe a couple % accuracy as well. It's like having Indi-STR on at all times (for 45 ML).

This varies by job though too. I'm sure the macc difference on RDM, WHM, BRD, etc. is fairly significant, though TBH there aren't that many enemies which resist but aren't immune or pseudo-immune (requiring immunobreaks) to debuffs.

There are other things like some extra phalanx potency for PLD & RUN, horde lullaby II options for BRD, and a handful of RDM gear changes for certain enfeebles, but these are (once again) tiny differences in performance. A single DM aug would replace 50 ML for phalanx potency, and the Horde Lullaby swaps are just for more macc which is of dubious usefulness.

I think this is silly.

A pretty large majority of the botters are in their same spot 24/7. They are easy to spot, easy to identify. If SE was actually going to do something about it, they don't need flags on ML50 to find it.

If the community actually cared about botters to the extent they thought they were ruining the game (like I did) they would kill the botters. It's not hard.

If I wanted an exp camp and botters were there, I took it. Period. Why would I care the thoughts or opinions of people who were playing the game via bot while they were sleeping or at work? I almost wanted SE to ban me instead of the botters just to see what kind of stupidness was really going on in the company, but they never did. And I'm sure I was reported lots.

PLD/BLU & RDM/BLU (I did it on both easily) -> aggro/high threat list some mobs (blue aoe spells) -> let a bot dia or fire or ranged attack one of your mobs -> reclaim that mob by actioning it (red for you) -> watch for which target the bot goes for next -> reclaim that target -> 7 or 8 times -> warp ring.

Dho Gates is one of the best exemplar camps at the moment. I was building groups doing 250k+ exemplar per hour as like the baseline minimum. Some of my groups were pushing 320k per hour.

When I first started my shouts shortly after the update that allowed for ML50, I was kinda bummed at how very few responded to my Dho Gates shouts with some people even thinking they were gonna take a jab at me like I was stupid for even considering Dho Gates by telling me how the exemplar was better at this place or that. But once I got a few people to finally go, I had repeat joiners like a cake walk. Even started to get people asking me "any room?" while I was already in a group killing stuff like people couldn't get enough.

I don't even know why people mess with all that single target shenanigans. SE never doomed Dho Gates as it relates to being able to aoe.

I had DDs of RDMs, THFs, NINs, WARs, DRKs, CORs, BRDs, etc. Some of those guys were actually pretty impressive on their Edge spam. Even saw a few PLDs sub DNC and maintained threat while doing Edge spam of their own. One of those PLDs I even saw in there a few times after he was introduced to the idea... doing it solo. Few Phalanx IIs and the DT gear of today, those crab, fish and bats are an absolute joke. Can slaughter both rooms on either side of that tunnel, alternating which side of the tunnel you pull from. I had a BLU simultaneously tanking and DDing in one of my groups, too. And I'm surprised I never saw more of that because even when Job Points was a brand new thing and I was on Carbuncle still, BLUs would be destroying the original Dho Gates' crabs/fish (before apex) in pairs or trios just running around spamming Subduction.

Anyway, I killed the bots so frequently in Dho Gates on Asura that many of the 24/7 ones ceased to even try to come back to their spot. I don't know if it's still the case 'cause I ain't played at all in like 2 months or more, but when I last played the only people that would really try to bot Dho Gates in the big room or the room down the tunnel from the big room were mostly solo/duo players and usually they'd only really try for that day or the next couple or few days. They weren't trying to 24/7 for weeks or months. I basically single handedly opened Dho Gates back to the players on Asura.

SE nerfing Crawlers Nest [S] was the final nail for me regarding actually farming Mlvls. Not only were those AoE parties FUN. But they also allowed for non-multiboxing players to PUG Mlvls.

SE's excuse of 'you guys are getting points too fast' means jack ***when they allow botters to exist and sell mlvls.

Now if they had super actively banned those guys, ya I can see this argument. But they didn't. So in my view, SE is entirely disconnected from the community and doesn't care about us. (Not that they ever cared about English speakers.)

The only negative thing I can say about AoE Crawler's parties is that they ruined the fun for people who wanted to be there killing slowly, for whatever reason.
A couple of PTs doing AoE there didn't leave a lot of targets for the remaining parties.

They could've "solved" it by releasing more areas where it was possible to AoE of course, but that would've been too much work, right SE? So they decided to simply make it unviable.
Good move SE, good move...