The "New Direction"Follow

Condolences to your friend, Pawk. I tried to explain that scenario a month or so ago, but was basically accused of being a lazy, talentless mooch demanding handouts in my dbox with a side of not presently being subbed disqualifying me from seeing similar behavior in MMOs everywhere via a mix of aged content and tiering walls without reasonable shortcuts after the fact.

Keeping current can suck, especially if you fall behind for whatever reason. There's a strong element of luck involved in finding good friends/linkshells/PUGs consistently when you're actually able to sit down and play. Heaven forbid if your actual play time is erratic and want to avoid the opinion "You're the guy that only shows up to ask for things. Such a lootwhore!" when you'd probably just be third wheel in more recent content. Sure, nice people exist and someone could find them, but good luck with that. Ultimately, I'm of the mind that how a game is designed will influence how its players behave. FFXI is experiencing the consequences of long grinds, access restrictions, and ****** RNG. It's not a new happening, either.

The 20m timer on the Delve NMs was pretty much the dumbest thing SE could've done to solve their perceived "problem" with congestion. Otherwise, the general Delve reward system isn't bad. Skirmish needed help on access restrictions, but I haven't read much on people saying it did the trick with the recent patch. Bayld gear could maybe stand to be less costly and a bit better to avoid slaving away to NNI and other "of level" content. Let's face it, whacking trees for hours isn't fun, nor is shouting endlessly for help on things nobody else wants to do because there's nothing in it for them. I'm not at all a fan of the invisible Colonization % decay, either.

I wish things were better. They could be, easily, but then the 1% would rattle their sabers again.

First character got banned a month after first Abyssea expansion. Current playtime: 156 days. Brand new started well into Voidwatch era on a server I had never played on before. I have yet to join an LS, and my friend list for the server is empty. I leveled WHM first, then BLU. Shouted for most of the stuff I couldn't solo on BLU. Got 90 Almace almost all solo. Started dual and tri-boxing after all that. Nothing I have done to gear all the jobs I have geared is stuff you can't do with one or two other people. I just don't waste my time waiting around for things to go my way. If people used as much energy actually trying to accomplish something in game as they do pissing and moaning on these forums they could all be pchan level of geared.

You said it yourself, people have to start somewhere. The best place is dropping the ******* crutch and admiting that you are part of your own problem.

The difference is I have a choice of my beach. If the maker of the beach charges me $10 and then it rains, I go to Blizzard beach or Treyarch beach or 100 other beaches and get sun.

**** me off and you don't get your $2000 over the next 10 years, maybe even lose me as a customer for life. And you bet I will do everything in my power to keep other customers I know away from you.

See it's really easy to change oneself, but it's a lot easier not to **** off customers in the first place instead of expecting they change themself.

You're a bit slow huh? FFXI is a niche mmo and one thing it has is you put in effort to get the a relic or mystic or a 99 emp it will stay on top like they have for the past 11 years. Even how long most of the gear in the game has held up is some thing other mmos have not done adding evening more to the niche. If the game goes down the road it looks like it's heading why should we stay with a company that sucks at understanding their own game as well as player base and has even treated it as a piggy bank to fund a failed MMO they released in barely beta state. There are other kids on the block that are doing what is happening now not only better but not tied down by 11 year old code and a discontinued platform.

Also "earned it" really you can't be that dumb to say something like that unless you're baiting. R/E/M holders have earned it just as much as anyone getting a delve weapon if not more depending on when they started it. And was any of the other upgrades free or handed to them like all of the trials or items off arch dyna lord that were 20mil a pop not long ago. I even think relics were due to get knock down a notch since they became so common but still be a head slightly.

SE is not in a position were they can afford to **** off too many people with how much they have been failing lately. With how FF11 has been treated I will stay as faraway from any MMO they make from here on out as I have already done with with their offline offerings. Want facts, the CEO step down and their profits are in the gutter so I'm not the only one taking my money else were.

changed mystic to mythic that was mistake of not paying attention to which word I selected in spell check

Edited, May 18th 2013 4:29am by RavennofTitan

So you got banned... when the content was still relevant. Not the same situation as what I am saying. When Voidwatch started, there were still people gearing in Abyssea. Now, most of the population has moved to Delve, and more will keep moving there.

Abyssea isn't being done. If you started today, you could shout until your space, up and enter buttons wore away and unless you had pops, you might never get certain NMs. And that's only going to get worse over time. And your secondary solution, multi-boxing, is unrealistic. Not everyone is going to be tossing money at the problem, which is what you basically did. As I said before, for you, this is your life, not a game. You must do anything to achieve "success", even if that means being forever alone triple boxing NMs because no one wanted to help you.

Sure, everyone can buy a couple XBox's or rigs powerful enough to multi-box and play an MMO solo, but why is that something that should be happening? Does that not defeat the entire purpose of an MMO? Why not just go grind in a single player experience then, because that's what you're doing. And saying you "only need two or three people" is a nice thing, but the reality is that, as new content is introduced, the old is being abandoned. And if you can't solo it, relying on others to come back and help with no reward as well as taking time from their own progress can be highly unlikely. Hell, you discovered that yourself or otherwise you would not be triple boxing...

What I am saying is that the population of this game, people like you, are expecting far too much of people that treat this as it should be treated: a game. We should not need to multi-box, solo grind for months just to be "acceptable" for you when, in reality, the AH weapons, the Bayld gear, and such will bring you up to the low end of things. The content was tiered for a reason, even if the player base refuses to do it.

While I am a proponent of making RME up to snuff with Delve weapons, it doesn't mean that I think they should be the only acceptable options to gain access to fights. Maybe with the next patch, the tiering will be more forgiving on the "dirty casuals" of the game you seem to sneer down at from atop your tower of solo triple box elitism.

Oh and before you come after me calling me "lazy" or thinking I simply ***** about being unable to do for myself, I solo'd the bulk of my DNC seals. I solo'd 8-2 Bastok at 75. I solo'd my missions once I was able to. I have gone through the school of hard knocks, I've been there and done that without falling back to dual/triple boxing. I've made runs, I've done seals with others. I don't just sit my *** in Jeuno or **** and moan on the forums. But by the same token, I am not half as blind as you are to the problem. I realize that there is a problem here, one that needs to get corrected before it ends up rotting the game to its core.

Edit:

I guess what I am trying to say, at the end of the day, is I want this game to be better. I want it to reward people for helping one another instead of excluding them. I don't want the next players coming up having these roadblocks, having their fun ruined by the elitist pricks of the game. I want them to love this game as much as I did when I came up. But I want them to love the endgame too, like I loved Abyssea. Reverting to this alliance-only bull at this point in the game's lifecycle was a bad idea. Invalidating RMEs is a bad idea. Jumping up our power level like this, so suddenly, is a bad idea.

Edited, May 18th 2013 10:21am by Pawkeshup

Yeah, we've never once turned down someone who was standing around near a pop spot for an atma and asked politely if they could join for the clear, especially if they were on a job that had some curative or proccing ability (since you tend to want the full rainbow on big bosses.)

When Voidwatch first started up, it was just like it is now. They didn't want anyone who wasn't a RME. Voidwatch was a unique situation, however, in that they HAD to have some job diversity in order to ensure the widest range of procs were covered. So leaders were more desperate for boutique jobs and less hostile about taking someone who was only "very good" because there are very few career RNGs with RME left, for example.

The difference was that Voidwatch has so many battles and the gear drops are so damn rare that people are STILL organizing runs for NMs, although they're much rarer these days. (I feel sorry for the folks who are working on heavy metal plates. SE just needs to sell those directly for 100K cruor.)

Yes, I'm the slow one. I'm bored of being stuck three years in the past. And in some places, ten years in the past. I love when new gear is added and it isn't better than my old gear. It really drives me to explore new content. I love that sensation of I beat content without ever doing it. I love just doing things to help people but at some point the repetition and inability to move forward myself becomes heavily demotivating.

Excluding WoW all mmos are niche.

And yes if you're getting a perk for nothing, it is easy to say they didn't earn it. Do nothing = bonus! Where was the effort? In this scenario, they did less than the delve noobs. But the work before it? They already got rewarded for it. SE delivered on their promise already.

There is a group of players that whine when something becomes outdated or even made more accessible. They say it robs them of their accomplishments. How? It doesn't. Delve didn't rob me of anything. Making CoP easier didn't delete my rajas. Neither of these took away from my pride or my effort. So what's left? Bragging rights. We're so butthurt because our video game bragging rights are toned down. Oh no, in a community based video game where I might actually benefit from you being a bad *** too... because I need to flaunt my video game superiority. Well because of effort! Then why aren't they advocating for mythics to be the top dog? Relics are easy, just time consuming. Empy have sticking points, but I wouldn't call them hard until the plates are needed.

If I was trollbaiting, I'd say you find relics and empy's to be hard lol @poor people.

The thing is, that group of players isn't leaving. After all that's happened in this game all they do is huff and puff. They would have left years ago. They claim all of their effort meant something but they didn't exodus from CoP, Abysea, or Delve. They're not going to reject their handouts because they don't stand by what they say. They're just a group of people that think they're entitled because they coast on previous success.

I want more people to do cool **** with. I don't care how we get there. Let's have fun together.

All modern MMOs are now following the WoW model so no they are not very niche only thing is the story (if any really), char and npc models are different. So if I want to play that type of game I'll pick one up that isn't tied to a company that has failed as much as SE and has modern graphics and UI. It won't be over night but SE keeps driving people away from their products just look at their earnings.

Well, if we're plugging other games, Rift goes Free-to-Play on June 12th. It's probably closer to WoW than FFXI and it's not a perfect game by any means, but it can be a good time to play with a decent surge of other players hopping on the freebie bandwagon. Though, in my understanding of what info they've released on the conversion so far, it might be more cost-efficient to buy the game right now so you're not buying extra bag slots on new characters later. Though, I would assume you should be able to do that with the in-game currency, it just might get pricey. Otherwise, while some will ***** the F2P means Pay-to-Win here, I'm not really getting that vibe.

In the off chance someone out there might want to pick the game up, send me a PM so I could get some referral perks and you a few little bonuses on top. :P

Calling Eve "boring" is like calling the ocean a little bit of water.

Eve is boring on the scale and breadth which defies true explanation. I took a 14 day trial. I tried to like it. But it is sincerely the single most boring experience I've ever had gaming. Ever. I mean, on the surface, it sounds incredible. Large scale space battles. Real economic impact of your actions. Cutting edge sci-fi graphics.

The reality is lots and lots and lots of slow paced, click driven boredom. The first combat I had was me and my little PoS ship flying in a circle around another PoS ship in slow, snore-inducing boredom. Every great once in a while, you'd hear a PEW PEW indicating you shot or they did. Mining was even worse. Fly to the rock. Stare at the rock. Fly to the station. Fly back to the rock....

I'd argue that Eve is as far from a game as you can get and still be called a game, if Farmville didn't exist.

Yeah EVE looks like what I'll be looking into. I been wanting to check it out for awhile now just wanted to give SoA a go before trying it.

I can assure you the massive combat does exist, and you can directly impact economic systems, and the graphics are very nice in high res. But 14 days is hardly a fair assessment time. It would be like someone saying FFXI sucks because they got to level 10 and couldn't do anything fun, the game combat was slow, and all the drops were useless because you couldn't craft anything from them....but we all know that as time goes on the combat pace picks up, there are fun events solo and in group, and the drops that were useless can be useful if you level the skills to use them.






Edited, May 19th 2013 1:36pm by rdmcandie