Older content is easier with SoA gearFollow

Naw, I agree with Sparthos. Given the skeleton crew working on FFXI, horizontal gear progression is much more sustainable than vertical. They've shown that they can't sustain vertical progression rather dramatically, so sticking with that model is only going to drive FFXI even further into the grave.

Additionally, FFXI cultivated a playerbase that enjoyed horizontal gear progression. I certainly didn't stick with the game for a decade because I disliked and wasn't motivated by its reward structure or lacked vertical-progression alternatives. It's full retarded to switch up something this basic over a decade after release.

And yet when you're tightening your financial belt and devoting the bare bones to a title, why exactly would it be wise to invalidate those things in the game that already keep the base occupied? Things like Salvage II, Nyzul II, Abyssea, Voidwatch et al. Horizontal gameplay keeps people doing old content while you churn out a small amount of new content. When you go vertical only the new content matters as you've eliminated the viability old content entirely.

It makes no sense if you're going to use a resource argument.



I never enjoyed Dynamis (old or new) and thus I avoided it. This only bolsters that in a horizontal game if Dynamis wasn't your gig you could simply move onto something else that was entertaining and a wise use of your time. In a vertical game, if Dynamis is the top ilvl content and you don't like it, too bad you'll be waiting for the goalposts to move in order to leapfrog over it. This is what we have right now with Delve and Skirmish II. If you dislike both, you're pretty much wasting your subscription until something new happens.



XI always presented itself as a difficult MMO from the moment you walked into the Dunes and realized that soloing in the game was limited. CoP was an exteme example of that type of hardcore gameplay and the devs have since gone on the record about that. What I expected from SoA was a 'lesson learned' mantra from Matsui where things would be a bit more casual (like early Abyssea) but at the same time maintain the foundational principles of the game (horizontal play) and instead we have a gear revolution that has completely decimated what kept people playing. Did Matsui even consider what would happen from the perspective of players? Obviously not. It's like Adoulin was conceived over a dartboard and beers.

It's like Nintendo announcing one day that Super Mario Bros. is going to suddenly become a First-Person Shooter.



And we got it. Content that is either easily burned through or has been invalidated due to rising ilvls.



This is an argument of design philosophy here that boils down to personal opinion. I feel that gear being spread around encourages people to do events they'd normally not do in a gear-driven ladder situation, encourages exploration of the game even it means boring camping (NMs, not stupid kings type sh*t) to slow to down the consumption of content which gives the developers time to churn out new content and encourages an overall system of reciprocation. If you help me with Dynamis then I'll help you with camping your NM you can't solo by yourself. More gear to obtain and sets to perfect means more players doing things rather than hitting the 'I have everything' wall which brings to mind the idea of ending subbing.

All events need not apply to classes though it'd be ideal if they did. In SEs horizontal system, there was always something that applied to a job at the endgame with very few exceptions (pet jobs mainly) meaning something to do. If you had an event that didnt, you could simply work on another job or gravitate towards only those events rewarding to your class. Options.



This is a list of grievances that have nothing to do with a simple horizontal vs. vertical progression discussion. I could go on for days about SE ignored pet classes for years, let tanking collapse into meleeburns, ignored the unsustainable situation between melee and magical dmg, refused to tweak kings allowing an era of bots, let THF descend into TH tagging, refused to allow cooks to see the stats on food, failed to explore token systems properly, relied on too many JP midnight waits or even allowed for 3rd party tools to become near mandatory in their game. These grievances don't change that horizontal gameplay is what this game was built on and since its elimination the game has suffered dearly for it.

I had at one point had for blue mage alone a tp, ws, magical ws, benthic typhoon, spellset, pdt, mdt, evasion, acc and nuking set. Eaching having their own upsides and down depending on the situation.



Quitting comes down to the individual and yes, vertical progression was slow which gives weight to the horizontal gear choices available. When someone says Duelist's Chapeau, Ridill, Joyeuse, Armada Hauberk or Hagun they only mean something because they were achievements to obtain. Where ilvls and vertical make gear useless with each patch there are also often some small horizontal choices to pick from. FFXI simply did the opposite with many horizontal choices and a few vertical options.

It wasn't perfect but what is certain is the end of FFXI if there isn't a course correction. I think if the R/M/E adjustments comes across with negative reception that there won't even be a south for things to go.

Edited, Oct 10th 2013 1:28pm by SparthosofLakshmi

Very few were really doing much of any of that. Salvage two didn't offer much and died out not long after it was put in, if you have to use mules or pay people to get into a event it was a pretty dead event. VW was 4 mobs that made people gil. Also your out of your mind is you have ever thought FFXI was more difficult then WoW or any other MMO out there. What was hard was not dieing of boredom doing the same event/mob for the 1000th time. The groups that failed anything were mostly pugs and even pugs in WoW or other games had problems cause they were pugs, all pugs are hit or miss. Once you have the strat down which might take 2 or 3 tries after that it was **** easy. What made anything hard in this game was trying to explain every thing typing things out. I used to hate doing Nysul isle till I found a group that used vent, went from being lucky to get 5 floors to clearing 5 floors with ease. Wasn't because we were that well geared (basic AH stuff) but order lamp floors were a breeze with it.

Only reason I stuck with FFXi was it was my first MMO and WoWs art and others that copied it always seemed off. but while you might have stuck it out how many never picked it up or dropped it once they hit level cap because they got sick of chasing a carrot they knew they might never see. What really made people quit and in droves where the REM requirement that came into the game during the VW prime and carried over to Delve and all those monkey sees and monkey do. More people left because they couldn't even get into the events with out having the gear from the event or grinding out a event that they were already sick of just to see that even those weapons were not accepted anymore but were still more then enough to clear.. I and many others were turned away from delve runs, skirmish runs and whole bunch of other events because I didn't have a delve weapon. Turned away from skirmish for not having a delve weapon, the event that was to be the stepping stone to delve. All that started in the VW era of the game.

It depended on the job, blm, or blu(if they had all their spells and some times even if they didn't) were auto invite, whms not having to really worry about being good whms due to temps and so on. Point still stands it all started with VW and SE is partly to blame here too since they let to much time go by before nerfing the outside mobs down to 20mins depops not saying they didn't drop the ball. VW didn't need REMs to clear they needed people hitting the procs to refill temps. I been on many a run with all REM DDs and as soon as one person mention they had score board up the run went to crap. Delve weapons are not needed to clear delve KI NMs knowing the trick is what was needed.

Here's the thing, I quit in part because the people around me were quitting, too. This led to the spiral of alliance-focused content being more difficult to engage. Byrth can say he feels Adoulin is the cause of decline due to some limited data crunching, but then I could say sticking with horizontal progression and the systems that it ran on led FFXI from that age old 500k sub yield to maybe 200k, a modest spike with Abyssea and content you could do without fielding 17 others bodies (why hello thar vertical progression), but then back down to whatever it is now. Perhaps sub-150k. Undoubtedly you had people holding out through the suck of the VW era to see if Adoulin would help the game. They were quite possibly like me, seeing friends go to other games, RL not meshing up, or just unwilling to play the social politics game and/or grinding their nose against the limited PUG scene. Enter Adoulin and, poof, more alliance content with Delve (with the pop timer nerf then segregating people on clears) and nary a reasonable and accessible low-man activity in sight. Grinding bayld wasn't fun. Its rewards certainly didn't justify the boredom and monotony. The colonization system didn't help, either, especially since a player's contribution seems too far abstract in manipulating the percentages or really feeling they're making a difference in progression. Unlike campaign where you at least knew if you cleared a wave, hey, battle won. People replacing RME only snobbery with Delve onry could've been avoided, sure, and we'll be in agreement SE's ****** up on that scale. I just find it a bit fallacious to blame something that's obviously worked for other MMOs when I can look past it and see the player requirement issue that's also plagued those other games with the insistence of large-scale content. XI, sadly, lacks the tools they have to get people together more easily. So, why pay for content you'll never see?

Or they could have left cause of the REMD being needed to get into groups. People got sick of it and left in droves. The people without REMDs and soon after was just delve weapon only far out numbered those with at the time the drop started. Not being able to do the content will drive people away from the game faster then anything else. And after the bump we got with abyssea of NOT needing 17 other then the drop off after SoA came out and the sift back to it before any other new low many content was brought in is proof of it. The REM folks can rattle on how they left when they were demoted but the people with out left before they did.

FFXI has built itself up as a game that doesn't adhere to the vertical trend and that attracted people who were either grandfathered in pre-WoW or simply preferred a horizontal game. It's simply a matter of design philosophy. Vertical games like XIV have their fair share of trouble and you need only go to the OF to hear all the complaints about lacking content. And that's a new game with hundreds of hands on deck!

You cannot change design philosophy 10 years into service when the only people left are people who really, really, really like your game. If a player wants a vertical game, tons of steaming piles of F2P garbage are waiting for a new recruit. What has allowed FFXI to stand the test of time is not being a gear ladder and keeping you busy grinding out sets. People have invested years into their characters and to suddenly toss that out for very shallow, new content is exactly why people have decided to quit.

Nothing holds any real weight and future content will merely invalidate more content and any sense of accomplishment.

Even if the expansion was garbage (think WOTG), you had other things to do you could putt putt along doing those things. Adoulin simply informs you that all those other things are a huge waste of time, thus hastening the quit.




Edited, Oct 11th 2013 2:32am by SparthosofLakshmi

Yeah, can hit over 2k stones on the double-magic-damage targets in there (the ladybugs, funguars, and snapweeds, particularly)

Definitely agree with Sparthos on this one. Everything he's said is right on the money.

They basically took 10 years of this game's history and took a huge dump on it, beginning with Abyssea and Voidwatch, but Adoulin was the deal-sealer. Vertical progression killed this game. It may be possible to implement vertical progression in a way that wouldn't have killed FFXI, but they didn't. They screwed the pooch, and their implementation of vertical progression is directly responsible for the dying state of the game right now.

Edited, Oct 17th 2013 8:05am by Pergatory

Sorry to say much of that 10 years of content was already dead and abandoned long before SoA vertical. Also as been said before but there was a Increase in population with abyssea and VW went back to the mosly 1% drops with sidegrades being the bulk of it.

Really this most likely would have happen either freaking way just the excuse would be "well all we are getting is more side grades so i'm going to quit". I bet if you dug around on these forums you would find just as many threads complaining about how much all the side grades suck and so on. It's a 11 year old game that hasn't gotten any graphics update like EVE or EQ still tied down by outdated hardware and SE released a new shinny that looks better and has everything they want out of a modern MMO(the duty finder real instances etc.) I still think 14 might be in for the same fate as many of the wow clones but if SE is willing to push out content faster then they are now they might have a shot.

Content is effectively dead for an individual the moment they no longer have gear to acquire from it. This happened then. It happens now. The list can be a mile long and it still applies. It didn't make the old days auto-magically better and even had its moments of job bias depending on the event and your own likes. New content is better for everyone. Making us do the same old crap again, not so much. I'll never understand why some refuse to accept that the period between Abyssea and Adoulin was its own quagmire of nothing to do for a lot of people, thus many phoning it in if the expansion hype train wasn't enough for them.

Yeah, but I'd also say that:
* Dynamis - Wasn't dead until you had all the relic weapons you wanted.
* Salvage/NI/Einherjar/Assault - Wasn't dead until you had all the mythic weapons you wanted.
* Voidwatch/Abyssea - Wasn't dead until you had all the Empyrean weapons you wanted.

For me, FFXI has always been about doing things better and more efficiently, because you generally end up doing any given event a *lot*. Min/maxing against Greater Colibri at 75 made sense, for instance, because anyone going out for merit parties during that time period would be killing a lot of Greater Colibri. Being slightly more efficient had large repercussions in the long run. Maybe it wasn't worth upgrading a Relic weapon just to grind Colibri at little bit better at 75, but upgrading RMEs was kind of worth it at 99 when they were so much easier to get and Voidwatch was essentially a DD gear check.


Here is what I did between Abyssea and Adoulin:

SpoilerSome people look at farming coins in Dynamis and see it as a boring task that they'd have to do for 2 months if they wanted a relic weapon. I took it as a challenge and tried different strategies, getting much better as time went on. At first I did the simple EP proc+kill that everyone else did in cities (~90-100 coins). Then I switched to using AoE WSs in cities (~120 coins). Then they unlocked CoP and I moved my AoE WS kill method out to CoP zones (~200 coins). Then they nerfed that and I switched to single-target kills without a sub, varying the zone (~180 coins average). Finally I settled on top-floor Tav with a sub as my farming location of choice (~230 coins average). As time went on I got better at dealing with links, managing my mule, avoiding TP moves, proccing, dealing with claim competition, THing things, and just killing as fast as possible. I'm sure I still have room for improvement, but the yield of my last Dynamis run (the only one with Terpsichore 99) increased to over 3x what it was when I started (~100->330). The replay value of farming Dynamis was very high for me, and I'm sure that I would still be improving if I was still farming it. I never made my mule a melee build or tried /DNC on my mule, for instance.

Salvage is a similar story to Dynamis. Before Salvage v2 I used to try for personal best Alexandrite/minute zipping through SSR on DNC/NIN + WHM/THF. I tried different boss strategies, different subjobs, different NM paths, etc. to maximize Alexandrite yield en route. I also capped myself out on Salvage v1 gear. After Salvage v2 came out, I just farmed plans like anyone else and got gear while continuing to farm Alexandrite. I did keep track of my best times, but it was less important than how many plans I got per run, whether I got a useful 45, etc. The replay value of Salvage v1 and v2 was high for me, though I'll admit that I go much less frequently now that I don't have access to a third account that I can enter myself with.

Voidwatch was a boringish zerg fest, but it's still a zerg fest that you can do better or worse at. I took Ukonvasara and Ragnarok to 99 during this period and used them to crush things in Voidwatch. If a group could pull me down to 25% of the parse without doing something stupid like putting me in a bardless party, then they could kill anything in Voidwatch. In a good Voidwatch group, you needed exactly two magic procs per kill and the Blitz would take care of the rest of the lights. I've killed Provenance Watcher without any procs before Adoulin. Those fights were fun.

And here's why I think that Abyssea to Adoulin was a failure for the average player:
SpoilerI could do most of these events because I had a dualbox account. That was really the primary weakness of Abyssea to Adoulin. It wasn't the prevalence of RMEs, the lack of lowman content, etc. It was just that healing jobs became so mindnumbingly easy between 75 and 99 that people could comfortably dualbox them. MP efficiency did not matter for anyone with a two week old level 99 WHM mule. Get WHM legs +2 and a few pieces of Refresh gear and you're good to go. I did all my farming with my mule /BLM because I wanted Warp and didn't need /SCH or /RDM's advantages.

I farmed my first level 90 Empyrean by calling in every favor that anyone still playing had ever owed me. When it came to build Ukon, I had no favors left and reactivated a friend's account that was already on my token (with his permission). If I didn't have that option, I doubt I would have ever finished Ukon and may not still be playing. I had so much fun building Ukon that I kept the account active and built Terpsichore, Ragnarok, Daurb, and Gjallarhorn and took them all to 99.

If healing in current events had been as hard as being a RDM in Salvage v1 at 75, there would have been no stratification of the FFXI social structure between dualboxers and not because the number of dualboxers would have been very low. It would have been so unenjoyable for me that I wouldn't have wanted to do it. By making healing jobs super easy to play, they dualboxing more viable. Dualboxers then crashed the currency markets to levels that made real duoing unsustainable in terms of reward/hour, and overall more RMEs were doubtlessly made because of the extra currency they brought into the market. This increased the number of RMEs and subsequently made them part of the DD standard for later content.

I used to be impressed when LFGed on WAR and got support in a merit party that let me go all-out and ride Hasso/Retaliation (with other DDs doing the same). I can count on one hand the number of times that happened in the hundreds of merit points I collected and thousands of merit mobs I killed. The few times it happened were generally a combination of a good healer (WHM/SCH or RDM/WHM) and a good bard that potentially had G-horn, along with a good COR. Point is, it was rare and represents a higher level of support against a lower difficulty enemy than we see today even in Delve runs. These days I toss two Ballads (out of the 3 I have access to) on the back line, the COR probably doesn't bother to use Evoker's, and we cruise on through Delve with DDs that don't know how Seigan works and absolutely no MP issues.

Edited, Oct 21st 2013 4:43pm by Byrthnoth