Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

[ShepardG]

On Valefor the server as a whole hasn't had control of Castle Oztroja [s], La Vaule [s], or Beaduax [s] in over 3-4 months. The server is predominantly Sandy both in the present and the past. I have been asking around trying to figure out what the best way to take these over. It's honestly a daunting task, and not one that I think i would get 2 alliance worth of people to focus on for an entire week straight.

In the little research i've done, i've been trying to figure out what servers have the most active "past" and I've noticed that there seems to be a lack of interest in controling these areas.

The post if to give an update of what nation usually has 6/7 or 7/7 areas, how often, and do the controled beastman strongholds rotate. I'd love a Roundel Earring and an Airy Buckler, but on Valefor I don't think I'll see them unless something drastic changes.

If you have ideas about the best way to take over these 3 area's to unlock the Campaign Ops, please feel free to post it. Thanks in advance for any info on your servers campaign history also.

[ShepardG]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

bump?

[Ketaru]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

On Siren, San d'Oria regularly has the most areas. No city has held all of the regions for a very long time. A few weeks ago, Windurst had all but Castle Oztroja (S), but could not take it by the next week. Bastok, as one might guess, regularly has the least areas.

[Neverslip]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

Hades just had the oppurtunity last week to get La Vaule (S) but was unable to do so. I wouldn't have the faintest idea why interest wasn't generated to take the place over...

*cough< forts are too nerfed<cough*

I've seen Ostroja (S) in the same circumstance a couple of months ago. I've never seen Basty get close - tho maybe I just didn't notice. I have given up hope for ever seeing a Airy Buckler on AH... and if it ever does show up, I'm sure I'd never be able to afford the crazy price that would be asked.

Campaign seems mostly to be viewed as a means to get one's buffer back so one can do other things that have nothing to do with the past. I'd love to find a shell that corresponds to my play time that has more than passing interest in the past and the WotG content.

[ShepardG]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

Yeah it's a sorry state. I would love SE to come out with WotG Endgame events.

Make it something like a dynamis, that you can only enter when one of those zones are controlled by the PC's. Something to generate interest. I mean they nerfed skillups from walls, and rightly so, but i think the entire community questions why you can't gain skillups from fighting MOB's that can one shot you at the drop of a dime. Not even the regular Campaign mobs, heck limit skillups to the NM of each wave. Anyway...

I really think it hurt the entire WotG expansion when they nerfed that. I honestly don't think there' s more than 30 airy bucklers in the game right now. Makes me sad But I forsee not only the price of airy buckler hovering @ or above 2-3 mil, but chuch mantles, witch's sash, and roundel earring going even higher.

I don't know how likely a WotG focused LS would be.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

On Kujata its actually pretty even. I originally started the game on Odin and then moved to Bahamut when they offered the GTFO free world transfer. Only 3 months later and I ended up doing the same GTFO to Kujata. Had I known when I got to Kujata that it would be predominantly Sandy based... I might have switched alliegence before I transfered. As it is, It has been a long hard 2 year struggle, but the end result is that Sandy usually controls over half the zones while Windy and Basty fight for the rest like infants in day-care fight over toys.

Eevery conquest update I check the map to see what zones we might have taken over on a fluke and make sure to snag them before I lost the only chance I may get for a while. Thankfully both Basty and Windy have a few dedicated residants who bust their @$$es and snag us the local OPs like Saruta and Gusta respectively. I finally finished all of my Bastok OP quests recently and have been considering a switch... to... hmm... this is awquard...

<pause>

...


...


I just realized that I'm talking about conquest when the OP's topic was Campaign.

/em whistles and walks away....

[ShepardG]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

yeah don't feel bad, most of the regulars on the forums don't even play anymore, so they can't provide any insightful info either, but I don't know of any other servers that are "Well off" in campaign battles. It's in a pretty sorry state, when a server dosen't ever get a chance to even do the Campaign OP for witch sash, chuch belts/mantles, roundel's earring, etc. meh, oh wellll

[Karinya]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

I think the beastman strongholds and xarc were designed to be very rarely captured. (Beaucedine seems to fall decently often, in my experience.) It's not supposed to be like besieged where the player side wins 99.9% of the time. It's more like "do you remember that time 4 years ago when windurst conquered ronfaure?".

The non-campaign mobs aggroing on you during campaign battles are kind of gratuitous, though. (Especially since you can't gain campaign exp/AN for fighting them, can't gain regular exp/drops for killing them, can't skillup on them, but IIRC, *can* still lose exp if they kill you.) SE moved the amphipteres in Xarc, but IIRC there's still plenty of beastmen around the Campaign areas in the strongholds.

I think that's one of the bigger deterrents to going there, along with the fact that you get crap exp/AN for beating on walls and just the general difficulty of reaching the area/lack of any superior reward compared to more easily accessible areas.


If I campaign, I want to fight beastmen (or demons etc., but I'll lump those all in together), because that's (a) more fun and (b) how you get decent exp/AN rewards. If I defend, beastmen will show up and I can fight them. If I attack, beastmen *might* show up and then I can fight them, but I also might spend half an hour beating on a wall, only to have the battle end with no real fighting and I get 100 exp for a half hour. I also wouldn't qualify for union loot, even if any popped, which it probably wouldn't, because nobody else in the union fought anything other than walls either. So, clearly, I should defend, anytime my nation has anything to defend. (And when it doesn't, I'm still possibly better off defending some other nation than attacking.) Most people seem to follow this line of reasoning or something like it.

This suggests that one big thing SE could do to bring more people on offense is eliminate the false alarms -- battles with no enemy. There's probably some internal system that determines when the beastmen just don't *have* any armies that are capable of defending, but even though it sounds like that would be a good thing in a war, in Campaign it's bad for the players involved. A professional army might not mind walking in without a fight (realistically, if there's really nobody defending the enemy's fortifications, then there's often no reason to destroy them, because they are now *your* fortifications), but adventurers demand worthy foes.

Another possibility would be to give the enemy some mobs even when none of the real Campaign units is there -- something like belfries, but as a permanent feature of any defending stronghold that is taking hits. (Which reminds me: why do Campaign units sometimes show up, build a belfry or some other kind of structure, and then immediately retreat, ending the battle and depopping the structure they just built? That's dumb, they should stick around to take advantage of what they built. This goes for both sides, IIRC.)

Also, if you're a job that can't reasonably provide your own reraise, if nobody else is there, nobody else is there to raise you. So if offense (and especially offense in beastman strongholds) is unpopular, that makes it more dangerous (in terms of risking losing significant time, or having to HP and lose all your contribution to the battle, in addition to the danger of wasting time because there is no worthwhile enemy).

[ShepardG]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

Everything you said is exactly some of the reasons that, over the 20 servers of FFXI, only 1 a month, will ever have access to any of the Special Campaign OPs, for those aformentioned very nice pieces of gear. Most of the ones you see on the AH have been floating around since before the Skill up nerf, when there was 4-5 months overlap, and people still actively enjoyed doing campaign.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that SE completely droped the ball on WoTG. It's still not finished, It's been "adjusted" multiple times, some of the zones (SW doomvoid zones come to mind) still have regular issues with server side problems, and Instead of addressing alot of these issues (which I would think any good developer would sample their own work by participating, atleast a bit) have been either forgotten or acknowledged and then never addressed, while new systems for crafting, augmenting, etc. are implemented instead.

And people think SE is going to put out another expansion (I hope to god they do, but...) I just don't know

[Neverslip]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

Karinya - exactly... spot on. I couldn't agree more. Thanks for wording my thoughts about campaign almost to the tee.

[Mezlo]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

agreed. nice post Karinya.

[Lunaryn]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

On Midgardsormr ever since the ANNM update there's been a steady drift of people to San d'Oria. It started back when campaign was near-impossible to win, of course, but after the underdog bonus was added it stabilized for a while, until the notion that both Splitting Heirs and Sandy ANNMs were superior to their counterparts convinced a lot of people that there was just no point to being in any other past army.

Bastok's still surprisingly stable; back when campaign was imbalanced heavily in the Beastmen's favor, Bastok Markets [S] was being attacked every week; a massive effort the week before the underdog bonus update managed to win control of Grauberg, but that was the only high point in that chapter of campaign. Now Bastok usually manages to hold on to 1-2 zones at a time. Though as of tally in about 15 minutes, the city will be under attack...

And it occurs to me that I'm wrong about the above; the initial consolidation back when Campaign was insanely difficult was in Windurst, not Sandy; movement to Sandy was a later phenomenon. Which makes it ironic that Windurst is now so neglected that it faces battles within the city every other week. Some players (who belong to Sandy) even relish this prospect because they see being able to fight defensive battles in a city as highly convenient, and who cares about players allied to Windy who can't get campaign ops because the NPC is unavailable or the city is too cash-strapped to authorize them; they should switch to Sandy like everyone else, right?

Sandy is the only nation on the server to ever claim their respective beastmen zone; it doesn't do it often, but it manages from time to time.


And yeah, the fort nerf killed the will of players to do offensive campaign battles. Some folks won't even attack fortifications anymore even if they're there waiting for defenders to show, since 1) they don't really care about improving the allied influence, 2) they know any reward from it will be paltry, and 3) it leaves them vulnerable to aggro if/when defenders spawn.

Honestly rather than capping the returns (what I've heard they did to them anyway) they should have just plain halved them. Attacking fortifications just isn't worth doing from a personal cost-benefit standpoint even if you do care about influence.

[ShepardG]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

Seriously, was it that unbalancing to have folks actually attempt to lower the beastmans influence in a zone, by beating on a fortification for an hour or 2 ? if they AFK, have Beastmen spawn and kill them. I can understand the skill up thing (sort of, I personally think you should be able to get skill ups with or without campaign tags, I mean your using your f'ing weapon for gods sakes) but they basically just took a flawed system, and made it worse.

SE, if you read these sites, please do something about this. I like campagin, i ilke going and making my 15-20 minutes before/ inbetween events worth 1-2k, but your developers/designers have broken this entire aspect of the game as to make it un-appealing. I mean, so what if people get 1-2 exp for beating on a wall. Skillups? heck no. Mobs that spawn to defend the fortification, heck yeah, skillup on those should be included. I mean, I don't understand how they haven't either addressed this, or figured it out. MAYBE this weekend we'll hear someone call SE out on this. I hope so anyway.

[Neverslip]

Re: Campaign on your server, how has it been going?

Just got my Thf to 61 and as a result started Campaign'n again ... noticed Hades had a decent week to get things done.

Both La Vaule and Beadeaux were opened up to enter. Unfortunately I noticed this today.. the last day. Oh well... I'll explore another time I guess. Both areas are full on Beastmen fortifications, resources, and influence.

Meanwhile on the other side o the continent Windy looks to be suffering ... only has Waters and Garlaige Citadel under control. I've actually done fights in the past in Waters a few times. Scary battles.

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Since the merger:

On Cerberus all nations have taken over every zone except the beastman capitals. Sandy even has Beadeaux (S) under control. I would be nice if there were quicker ways to the beastman capitals, lol.

One caveat... getting a decent amt of xp is rather difficult due to the very high volume of people doing campaign. Might be post-version update furvor. People are going out and intercepting the beastman armies further and further out in attempts to xp thru campaign. There's alot more "hiding" of mobs now. Most the time I zone in and barely have the chance to get 500+. Alot of times it's even difficult to get 300xp and access spoils. Thf was ridiculous at 65'ish to get SA off. Even as SAM with Soboro and my xp harvest from campaign is proly halfed.... .. I hope the glamour of campaign wears off a bit.