What if you could take it all back...

[Kailea]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

disappeared? no........
devalued to the point that 75% of the pop don't do it yes

[Ketaru]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

You can't force a playerbase, let alone one person, to find the same intrinsic value in the things that you do. I've pretty much played the game for years knowing that what I value deviates from the mainstream of the game.

[Kailea]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

You can't force a playerbase, let alone one person, to find the same intrinsic value in the things that you do. I've pretty much played the game for years knowing that what I value deviates from the mainstream of the game.

that has nothing to do with it -.-

[Armando]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

You can't force a playerbase, let alone one person, to find the same intrinsic value in the things that you do. I've pretty much played the game for years knowing that what I value deviates from the mainstream of the game.

You can't force them, but it's pretty easy to get 'em to do it (or not do it). The reward's just gotta be right. Most people didn't go through CoP for the plot.

[Kailea]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

I liked CoP's story -.- lol

[cidbahamut]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

disappeared? no........
devalued to the point that 75% of the pop don't do it yes

And this has absolutely nothing to do with Abyssea and everything to do with the natural progression of an MMO.

Back when I was a nooblet I spent the better part of two weeks trying to find people to help me do Garrison. I had absolutely no success, but you know I heard Garrison was mildly popular back in the day. I wonder what changed to make it not popular, because it sure as hell wasn't Abyssea.

[Kailea]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

natural progression of an mmo? no.........no where near "natural"

[Murphie]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

Hey, Kailea. Maybe try making actual statements instead of these sort of vague movements towards one. If you disagree with what someone is saying, explain WHY.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

I think what Kaliea was getting at is that areas and old content falling into neglect isn't a sign of progress but a fault. Its a fault many MMORPGs share, but that doesn't really excuse any developer for neglecting the earlier parts of the game.

There are ways to reinvigorate interest in an MMO and its old areas and it cannot be accomplished just by catering exclusively to a dwindling hardcore fanbase. You can raise the cap and add now landmasses to explore with new monsters to fight, but that only brings back the people that want the higher level grind, the new places to explore and who want the new shinies. Its not enticing to the people who haven't even got started yet, its actually off-putting to know those things are just further away for you when you start and its hard to ignore that with empty cities and zones everywhere you go.

I'm not going to be a broken record about the F2P thing, but that's just one way of remedying such an issue and you can look at Lineage II, City of Heroes, Champions and many others for proof of that.

FFXI was doing a damn good job of keeping all this endgame content in FFXI active and relevant with the 75 cap. You only had a declining interest in FFXI because ToA ran a bit long and WotG ran longer. Having the same team work on two MMOs at once was just a bad idea and FFXIV went on to suffer for it. They raised the cap in FFXI pretty much for the sake of the illusion of keeping FFXI relevant as they prepared a new MMO against the likes of Aion and other then-current/future MMOs as well as WoW's Cataclysm expansion.

SE could have kept the cap at 75 and just added new tiers of merits while letting Abyssea be just another 75 thing, but they fell into the trap of raising the cap because a vocal minority had crabbed about it for so long. They painted themselves into a corner, i think.

There are still ways out, but I think they're just going to milk the add-on angle for all its worth before they pursue them.

[Voltron84]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

Abyssea is wonderful. It was the solution to the super slow and difficult leveling before. I remember when you had to search for hours for a group and you were lucky if you got to 40 or 50 in a month. Then Abyssea came out. This made it difficult for new players to get a start. The uber quick leveling was nice for those 30+. The status of a high numbered level is nice, but with this came alot of high leveled noobs. People who haven't been playing but a few dys and be level 80 or 90 woudl be like "What's Tavnazia?" .... "Where's Sandoria?" "I'm only on mission 1-1 for my nation" Various things.

While Abyssea is wonderful for the impatient levelers it has dried up nearly all areas but those specific zones. Once in awhile, if I was lucky I would come across 1 or two people not in a noob zone. Getting help for missions, even in a big LS was hard. "Uh no one does them anymore.". SE's solution was GOV. It made it possible for new players and lower levels to group and get parties easily. But at what price. When I started back, in 2 days I was level 85. By the 3rd day level 90. On the 4th day I hit 95. Once I hit that good ole 95 there came the pressure to do events, to skip IRL responsibilities. It was never that bad before Abyssea came out.

It seems like all there is to FF11 is Abyssea. I have noticed attitudes of the player base have gotten alot worse. People harassing people just because of their name. For instance. On Quetzalcoatl server this player named Contesspuss was seen making nasty shouts about a character named Hannahmontana threatening to start rumors about her all because she said "no" to doing Abyssea. I've seen a player named Cmpunk on Fenrir get followed and harassed over his name. More of this has started since Abyssea has started.

With the lack of interest for anything outside Abyssea (besides void watch) and end game.... I am thinking this game might not last, although I hope SE does something to create a more healthy balance.

I even created a thread on my forums about Abyssea and what people think (poll included) (address is in my profile).

Bottomline here is I hope FFXI finds some balance soon.

[ShepardG]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

having played this game for 6+ years, and have finally moved on, I can say that "balance" will never come to this game. Atleast not the balance we want.

When it came out, the grind to 75 was rough but it wasn't complained about, it was, IMO, just enough angst to make getting 75 on a job worth it. Thing is, from the get go, SE never took into account their own players. Even to this day they have 1 year old forums that are pretty much black holes of great ideas and suggestions that SE doesn't try to work with.
I finally played some other MMO's, Rifts, SW:tor, etc. and I'm begining to see that sticking with XI for all those years was a mistake. It had some awesome times, and some crappy times, but all in all, the problem was how the game itself was designed.

Take for instance, garrison. Cidb mentioned this and wondered why it wasn't done anymore. Well, honestly, the bullshittyness of the rewards to effort ratio. It gave gear that was pretty good for lvl 20-25, but....it gave it so sparingly that by the time you grinded out enough garrisons to get the gear, you could have just leveled up and be wearing better gear /shrug.

I just look back on the game and all I can think is that the story (from ziliart to ToAU, didn't finish WoTG because Fuck SE for taking so G.D. long to finish a product)...ahem... the stories were fantastic. From the gods in sky, to prishe, all the way to the fight between alexander and odin, the stories were fantastic, but the game play itself was just horrible.

I mean nyzul? really? you had to level up 1-100, which was fine, and every 20th floor you could fight a boss for a piece of decent gear...only...the drop rates where stupid. I won't get into salvage, because that's even worse, but that's not health to folks who grind and grind and grind and BOOM after 20 level 40 runs, the boss FINALLY drops some denali legs that you want, and .... bam you get out lotted, or worse, you win with 20 seconds left, and someone forgets to pass or lot and you get booted and everything is lost. I mean...when you got that piece you felt great for about ....20 minutes? but seriously... it was just stupid.

You designed a fight on an airship that still to this day has to go down as one of the ROUGHEST fights of ANY video game. Then when enough we, the players, have screamed ourselves horse trying to get the dev's attention, do they through us a bone with some items that weaken the fight. AFTER A YEAR.... i mean...

I loved raogrim, and prishe, and the corsair from ToAU (forgot his name) but i'm done dealing with horrible games just to get a good story.

Abyssea, i loved, because it was a step in the direction that the game should have been, but they completely forgot the story side, and what little back story was there seemed forced, with little to no for-thought. I mean..i guess i'm fighting mobs in this other mirror dimension, but then... there's a dragon that I have to fight, but i have to kill some wierd chess looking mobs (caturae) because they unlock stuff... It was bullshit.

Games now-a-days need token systems, similar to einherjar and assault but the thing is.... don't make the gear suck like what SE did. I mean at 75, einherjar stuff was situationally best in slot for alot of things. But the problem with that... SE never kept it updated...i mean how hard is it to throw in a line of text with the NPC that says something along the lines of : "i got a new shipment in of the most astounding gear ever from the far east!" and bam, now people aren't abandoning the entire event. Hell, another bullshit thing was the entire feather bullshit... initially, everyone needed 9 feathers to enter odin's chamber... so heaven forbid you missed an einherjar which 2 einherjars a week that means you were fucked for the boss fight. Made slightly better, with the use of feather mules, but still a horrible system.

Thing is... most of the player base of FFXI... grew up. over seven years if you haven't made progress in RL, as opposed to a MMO then your priorities are vastly un-balanced. Folks started to understand that grinding for 6months to complete a relic, or finish a salvage set was just detrimental to having productive real lives. And that's not even addressing the HNM scene... fucking random windows once every 3 days (looking at you tiamat), i mean come on... that shit is just stupid. Hoping your fellow player's (AkA, the other Linkshell) FAILS, just so you can clean up isn't very... friendly.

I don't mind getting a toon to the level cap in 2-3 weeks... hell... i welcome that now. My sense of accomplisments come more from finishing an instance, or a few good PvP matches than litterly getting a single level or worse, a half of a level in a 2-3 hour session.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not bitching about the game being hard. XI was never "hard", what was "hard" was getting a group of folks that could play 5-6 hours every night, with a 90% attendance rate.

What's sad about the game currently, is that new players, take that rush to level cap, and 1-30, with the alliance based grounds of valor spam, will take you 1-2 days. and then leeching in abyssea get's you capped in approx. 7 days, they never experienced the betryal of Raogrim, and his last effort to redem his sins, or that, "fuck the world, i'll fight bahamut by myself" attitude that prishe had. New folks won't understand where tonberries come from, or why automatons and cardians feud with one another.

In an attempt to please the players (aka "the money), they abandoned the one aspect of the game that I think folks enjoyed more than they even realize. And that is why in my opinion it's time to close the book on XI. To go back to Voidwatch bullshit loot, and grind tastic item collection is the complete opposite direction they should have taken. I still have an incling of hope for XIV, but not enough to pay for the game as it is and I definetly am displeased with the way SE has treated their players.

What makes me upset even more so is that players will continue to pay, continue to needlessly grind, instead of move on, and tell SE with their wallets. I see folks that defend this position with the argument that they DO have fun playing, and that these problems are minor annoyances, but I propose this question to them: Can you take a break? Can you cancel your sub(s) for one month? just one, play something else, play xb0x, or a Free-to-play MMO or even another charged based game, and tell me that you didn't have the same fun, didn't have that same sense of accomplishment without the horrible drop rates, and busted event mechanics, and hell, if you can, i'll pay for your next month's subscription.

[Malacite]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

having played this game for 6+ years, and have finally moved on, I can say that "balance" will never come to this game. Atleast not the balance we want.

When it came out, the grind to 75 was rough but it wasn't complained about, it was, IMO, just enough angst to make getting 75 on a job worth it.

Stopped reading after this. I don't know what magical fairy world you live in, but typically everyone I ever spoke with on subject, in-game and out hated the grind. Partying in and of itself was fun, especially the level of skill needed back in the early days (SC + MB, SATA etc) but it was pretty much universal that it simply took too long to level and it was way too hard to find anyone of the right level & job.

[Janay]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

You can't force them, but it's pretty easy to get 'em to do it (or not do it). The reward's just gotta be right. Most people didn't go through CoP for the plot.

I did it for the Achievement (Xbox 360 gamerscore) lol...

---------- Post added at 03:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:12 PM ----------

Abyssea is wonderful. It was the solution to the super slow and difficult leveling before. I remember when you had to search for hours for a group and you were lucky if you got to 40 or 50 in a month. Then Abyssea came out. This made it difficult for new players to get a start. The uber quick leveling was nice for those 30+. The status of a high numbered level is nice, but with this came alot of high leveled noobs. People who haven't been playing but a few dys and be level 80 or 90 woudl be like "What's Tavnazia?" .... "Where's Sandoria?" "I'm only on mission 1-1 for my nation" Various things.

While Abyssea is wonderful for the impatient levelers it has dried up nearly all areas but those specific zones. Once in awhile, if I was lucky I would come across 1 or two people not in a noob zone. Getting help for missions, even in a big LS was hard. "Uh no one does them anymore.". SE's solution was GOV. It made it possible for new players and lower levels to group and get parties easily. But at what price. When I started back, in 2 days I was level 85. By the 3rd day level 90. On the 4th day I hit 95. Once I hit that good ole 95 there came the pressure to do events, to skip IRL responsibilities. It was never that bad before Abyssea came out.

It seems like all there is to FF11 is Abyssea. I have noticed attitudes of the player base have gotten alot worse. People harassing people just because of their name. For instance. On Quetzalcoatl server this player named Contesspuss was seen making nasty shouts about a character named Hannahmontana threatening to start rumors about her all because she said "no" to doing Abyssea. I've seen a player named Cmpunk on Fenrir get followed and harassed over his name. More of this has started since Abyssea has started.

With the lack of interest for anything outside Abyssea (besides void watch) and end game.... I am thinking this game might not last, although I hope SE does something to create a more healthy balance.

I even created a thread on my forums about Abyssea and what people think (poll included) (address is in my profile).

Bottomline here is I hope FFXI finds some balance soon.

- This is where a Pet Peeve comes in, with people telling me to do something "new" in the game.
- I only started FFXI in February of 2008, but I have witnessed some troubling things. No level sync system, to be exact. Going home from work only to motivate myself to gain some levels on WHM when xp was like 7 per mob for Easy Prey!?
- Going back to people telling me to do something "new" bugged the crap out of me. I mean There's 6 of us. Was I really wrong for wanting to finish Nyzul Isle 100 to learn Blade: Kamu versus going NM hunting in Abyssea? Was I wrong for wanting to get Dynamis-Xarcabard win versus seal farming in Abyssea? If so, then sue me or hate me, because I didn't really care. I like Abyssea, don't get me wrong, but I also like balance.

When I get home from work, it's about 5pm. I log off no later than 1am so I can get some sleep for work. But Holy Jebus, I do NOT want to spend my log on time until my log off time just doing Abyssea. People would get disturbed at me for still wanting to do a Trial Weapon, or Rank Mission, or a piece of Salvage, and all that good stuff.

While I WOULDN'T take Abyssea back (as Abyssea made me love my NIN and WHM more), I just wish some folks wouldn't forget that this game is "Final Fantasy XI: Online" and not "Final Fantasy XI: Abyssea Forever". It is such a pain in the butt.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

Was I really wrong for wanting to finish Nyzul Isle 100 to learn Blade: Kamu versus going NM hunting in Abyssea? Was I wrong for wanting to get Dynamis-Xarcabard win versus seal farming in Abyssea? If so, then sue me or hate me, because I didn't really care. I like Abyssea, don't get me wrong, but I also like balance.

When I get home from work, it's about 5pm. I log off no later than 1am so I can get some sleep for work. But Holy Jebus, I do NOT want to spend my log on time until my log off time just doing Abyssea. People would get disturbed at me for still wanting to do a Trial Weapon, or Rank Mission, or a piece of Salvage, and all that good stuff.

You were not wrong. I haven't been in Abyssea in almost 2 weeks now. My focus at the moment is to finish the 4 pieces of Relic +2's that I want out of Dynamis, Finish to Floor 100 of Nyzul, Unlock Blade: Kamu & Leaden Salute, Beat all 4 Chariots in Salvage, Work my way up to Odin in Einherjar, Kill the 3 Boss NMs for ToAU and begin working on my remaining Assault Missions.

Granted, my reasons for these activities is to progress towards my Nirvana... but at least it gives me a variety of things to do/places to go. I'm honestly sick of Abyssea. I still need to gather up the remaining 35 Lanterns necessary for my 85 Armageddon, but after that... don't see expect Abyssea in my foreseeable future. Voidwatch either for that matter.

[Janay]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

You were not wrong. I haven't been in Abyssea in almost 2 weeks now. My focus at the moment is to finish the 4 pieces of Relic +2's that I want out of Dynamis, Finish to Floor 100 of Nyzul, Unlock Blade: Kamu & Leaden Salute, Beat all 4 Chariots in Salvage, Work my way up to Odin in Einherjar, Kill the 3 Boss NMs for ToAU and begin working on my remaining Assault Missions.

Granted, my reasons for these activities is to progress towards my Nirvana... but at least it gives me a variety of things to do/places to go. I'm honestly sick of Abyssea. I still need to gather up the remaining 35 Lanterns necessary for my 85 Armageddon, but after that... don't see expect Abyssea in my foreseeable future. Voidwatch either for that matter.

The sad part is, Yyg, EVERY...SINGLE...TIME... I log on, I get a tell immediately... "Hey, we need your WHM asap!" and this is followed quickly by an invite. So I ask, "Let me guess, for Abyssea, right?" They just reply with a "lol". I don't think it's really funny. But then, if I didn't want to play WHM, I wouldn't log in to begin with, right? Oh well!

In any case, it's another reason why I like the "Mercenary" status I unofficially given myself. Friends have WHM, but would rather have me WHM so one of them can come a job they actually "like" (DNC), while NOT having me come, say, NIN instead of us having to find another random NIN to assist us. This goes back to another level of balance lol... Silly people.

But alas it's none of my concern most of the time. I enjoy WHM for some reason.