Eorzea feels...Follow

Didn't Abyssea cause a population bump at first.. I know tons of people came back for it, in the end it pushed out allot of the long time players.. Personally there was allot I liked about Abyssea and allot I hated. Overall it gave players a lot to learn and do. I might be one of the few but I liked Abyssea.

Really though how much has changed in FFXI?
Yea you can level fast with GOV and Abyssea.. Really fast.
Yea they nerfed COP many years latter but in FFXIV it only takes months till they nerf content which is way to fast in my opinion.. I just finished my lights last week and now they made them easier already.. In FFXI it takes years till they make content easier. Personally I like they took a little of the ruff edges off FFXI, I had less time anyway.

There has always been teleporting in FFXI, you could teleport to outpost etc. Opening up those teleport points was sometime rather hard and a quest in itself.

Aht urhgan area I still can get lost in.. Zones in FFXIV you might get turned around in but never lost.

I dont have a problem with FFXIV being more casual, that's why I play it. I just want more variety of end game content. Just bored of the pattern type bosses and cookie cutter dungeons. I want a dungeon where I have to use my brain to beat, or strategies, or terrain or something not my memory only.





Edited, Jan 29th 2015 3:19pm by Nashred

The first big nail in the FFXI coffin for me was the destruction of the old Dynamis. I loved 75-cap Dynamis, it was my favorite thing to do in the game. A massive group, carefully organized and directed, working together to achieve difficult goals. And they made it a joke. Kicked me right in the teeth with that one.

And then lights were the next one. No longer was it a matter of the difficulty being in the killing or the fight, but tickling the mob under the chin until it burped the right color. That was a little compensated for because Voidwatch had a few good elements of old Dynamis, the careful organization and strategy, but the lights really stopped it being a good substitute for me. Abyssea was a curiosity, but having that awful light system was a real pain.

Then they did the iLevel thing, which annoyed me by itself (for many reasons), and by chance coincided with the dramatic explosive self-destruction of the leadership of the endgame LS I was in, and I just kind of stopped playing. For a while, I went around doing all those quests and missions that got skipped over in progression, but then I tried FFXIV and those quests and missions and the scenery and fishing and crafting was so much more fun than FFXI that I just quietly dropped the latter. I still haven't cancelled my FFXI sub, but I guess I will soon; I haven't even fired it up in over a year now.

I didn't mind the iLevels in FFXIV because at least they were there from the start, upfront and honest, instead of blindsiding the established tradition. But the big thing is that while pretty much every update to FFXI from ToAU onwards had me reacting, "Oh no, they just broke THIS now!", every FFXIV update has me excited about the changes and new content. That's a pretty good indication that I'm in the right game now.

I just wanted to chime in and say I'm absolutely in love with the phrasing.

"I'm in the right game."

This absolves blame or responsibility so much on the director that they absolutely must appeal to one group's sensibilities or another. They're free to be creative or derivative if they wish, and it is the player that chose to find a place that suits them best.

Of course feedback is always necessary to keep things comfortable or to make them better. That's part of the whole experience. But I feel a lot of the arguing seems to be a matter of justifying preferences by belittling other's. If we simply discussed whether or not this was a matter of comforts I think the tone of conversations would go a lot better.

FFXIV for me is comfortable. I don't push myself too hard and when I do... well, I have weird pursuits like having a character dedicated to PvP (And cooking!) that keeps gameplay fresh for me. I'm weird like that. I like splicing up my gameplay with character personalities. Lin's focus is story and PvE. Hyrist's is PvP and Cooking, Eric's is trivial pursuits (Tetra Master!) and Alchamey, and Scrappy Cat (Tashil) is for crafting/gathering focus.

FFXI diddn't lend itself to this kind of division. And while FFXIV isn't as Alt friendly as I'd like it to be (Mailing x.x) It's quite possible to make each of these pursuits feel like its own game, and I love that about FFXIV.

I feel like I'm in the right game too. Goodness, I never thought I'd get this excited about PvP again. Haven't felt this way since I planned out elaborate Stronghold assaults in Aion.

I think XI was on a massive decline prior to Abyssea, probably half way through the WotG story line. Myself and several other friends had quit with 0 intentions of coming back. Got wind from a few active friends that Abyssea was actually really fun and made a come back. I think many people got convinced to join up again and it had a slight resurgence. It almost felt like a final hurrah before XIV 1.0. Get Atmas and bonuses for huge damage, huge stats! Was the most fun I had in a long time.

Then of course, XIV 1.0 is a miserable pile of fail, everyone's becoming god mode in Abyssea and SE needs to back pedal. So then they release things like Voidwatch with awful drop rates and the game seems to plummet again and leads to where we are now. Now obviously this is just my take on it and Abyssea was probably never meant to be a last hurrah, it was simply a well executed expansion. I never experienced much after Voidwatch so I can't really comment how things unfolded beyond that.

I came back to XI back in November with their free welcome back campaign, along with SoA for 5$. Sadly, only one friend remained active, the world felt incredibly empty, so I didn't have much motivation to stick around. I advanced part of ToAU and WotG, got some basic RoE gear and that was that. I imagine the game still has much to offer to tightly nit groups, but it was sad seeing such an active world in 2003 come to this. It was nice seeing Vana'diel again though and I will probably check it out again on the next free campaign.

Incorrect - declines on servers happened during Abyssea. Even Square themselves admitted that the push to 99 was "too fast", which is largely what upset players, not the fact it was Abyssea, but what CAME with Abyssea. If the increase to 99 was over the course of years, it would have hit the playerbase and content a lot easier, but it was literally thrown in your face in terms of design, which further made it harder to catch up. And while this fact pisses players off (because they hate to admit it) Abyssea was done as hold over content while they focused on XIV 1.0, which is why not only did WotG take years to finish it (look at start and completion time of XIV 1.0 and WotG), but both were the focus of the Fan Fest that December. Was it really a coincidence that was the case? So while it went past the 'final cap' of 75, it was much too quick and obsoleted content far too quickly in a non vertical progression based game. Legion and such were fine, don't even deny it, people did the content just fine and continued to do it because it was the next step in progression and it used the same setup as Abyssea/Dynamis/Einherjar - Tiered progression.

What didn't fully take off was Walk of Echoes because it was at a pretty high standard of gameplay in comparison (much more tougher than it needed to be) and pugging it usually ended up ruining the runs because you had that one newbie SMN aggro everything and basically **** off the whole zone for the rest of the 30 or so minutes and unable to recover.

And let's be real, if you truly played XI, you would have realized that once Abyssea came out, most players hit 30 "normally" then went to get XP burned in Abyssea, sometimes paying 7m/hrs for the easy exp. This is what people means it started to kill XI, and in the usual "twist everything around", the usual people will say: "Just because it took out the grind blah blah blah", when the rest of the game's content is suddenly obsoleted and there's no reason to do x/go to x, isn't that..you know..dead? When you're killed, isn't per definition death is the final act of being killed? You also seem to have forgotten that the way XI was built was there were content to do inbetween your push to cap and content that was done at 75 cap because SE extended things to do rather than obsoleting them out right - This created having actual contet to do that you can rotate around then content to do on those off times. When Abyssea hit, you no longer needed to do -any- of that content. If that's not killing off XI, then I guess when it comes to XIV us needing ilvl 45-60 drops in 2.5 for progresion is a must have and i120 gear is optional.



Yeah, since Delve was designed for people who actually were up to speed in comparison to being in god mode due to the buffs Abyssea gave you (key difference: you weren't playing with raw skill power in Abyssea compared to other content that forgoes insanely buffing you) - Do you realize how burning your class from 30-99 made you unable to do actual content due to the skill system in XI? Once Delve came out and people that weren't up to speed started trying to do it, it was extremely hard to get into PUG wise because of people rocking gear and skills not suited for it.

The gap between Abyssea - Delve included things like Legion/Voidwatch and such, then came augmented AF/Relic, however "friendliness" is subjective in any MMO because some content simply isn't made to be 100% accessible to everyone and anyone who's played more than 2 MMOs ever and actually did high end raid content cannot deny the reason it's usually tied to Guilds/Clans/Etc more than anything because, as said, some content simply isn't meant to be done by "just anyone and any setup" and MMOs have been running perfectly fine with that being a thing. Especially not ARR when it comes to pugging. Try pugging certain ex primals, Final Coil or even T9 when you're not up to speed and tell me the results of how often you not only get the people, but how fast and many times you actually clear it with people who most likely aren't end-game raiders (which is why pugging usually exists, because most of the time people don't want to dedicate themselves to a guild let alone a static.) Heck, see how fast people rage quit when you pug compared to going in with your FC or group of trusted friends.



We don't know much to be honest unless I've missed a lot of interviews and the Japanese fan fest (I didn't.) Just knowing x exists doesn't really mean much beyond knowing they have ideas, for example we knew Shiva existed and we knew what she was going to look like, but did we know about her story? Mechanics? Drops? Purpose? When we seen Ramuh did we know that Ramuh was going to be more neutral based compared to other primals? drops? Mechanics? That's why we don't really know much yet, because for all we know, much like Crystal Tower:

Yoshida: "It was too hard, so this content will be delayed a quarter of a year in order to rebalance it and it will actually be in a different format than what we last stated, so instead of the Alexander raid being here at launch and coming with 2 separate modes, we're swapping it with x raid and redoing Alexander raid to be episodic content that ends up being the go to raid for progression."

So until they actually start populating the damn expansion website with info and such, everything is technically a surprise, since even recent interviews Yoshi didn't seem exactly confident about the spring release date nor willing to truly give out more info even though we're supposedly close to expansion release. (even Adoulin and basically all of XI's expansion websites had at least basic info up by now..long before nearing 3-5 months within release.)

I still have my record for how long it took me to craft myself a signed HQ Weskit down in my signature. But talking about it doesn't recall memories of joy over a great achievement. It just reminds me how sadistic and cruel SE's random number generator is. It's XI in a nutshell though. As one friend who quit XI back in the CoP era put it, "Too much grind, not enough gain."

That is right.. initially there was a bump.
I remember allot of the people who were playing forever were angry because it too them so long to get all their jobs to level cap and geared and with Abyssea everyone could easily level all their jobs to 50 and gear them in no time.. That was a big accomplishment to get all jobs up, geared and be able to play them and SE took that away from them..
Then there all these people who leveled all these jobs to cap but could not play them and did not understand them. This also led the the big seal greed ***** fest to gear the jobs.


Edited, Feb 2nd 2015 10:00am by Nashred

Summoner burning was great! You needed someone to be the "sync" - ideally a very low level, as the Gustav tunnel mobs stopped giving exp around level 30, if I remember right - but it was absolutely the fastest way to level pre-Abyssea.

Four summoners, a sync, and a throwaway slot for someone (usually someone paying for it), plus an outside person to link all the mobs and gather them up (usually a 75 RDM, NIN, or THF) and just stand there and hold them while the summoner targeted the lone red mob and Astral Flowed them all to oblivion. It was beautiful.

It's also how I got my SMN to 75, which is why my summoning skill was so out of whack that I proceeded to spend the next month with a Windower script running to try to catch it up.... summoning elementals over and over and over and over again....

Yeah, let's not pretend that it was some kind of utopian age of enlightenment when the exp pace was 4k/hr. Power leveling doesn't make bad players. Bad players make bad players.

Edited, Feb 2nd 2015 3:18pm by lolgaxe

This, which could also segue into how why some "good" players thought they were "good" compared to others. Early XI was far more about time and luck than execution. Would people have been bitter about their Adaman Hauberk being replaced if they didn't have to go through a year+ of LS politics, HNM camping, or eventually Odin spam despite how long the item was so good? Probably not. To which, well, I generally assert that people are more generous with sharing things when rarity is not sky high. The bitterness and resentment some chose to express is a direct result of realizing that maybe the game did ask too much of them even if they may persistently deny it. This backlash was further revisited when RMEs were not initially upgradable with Adoulin. "It took me a lot of time to get XYZ! How dare you obsolete it!" Yes, some people quit because of Abyssea. I never said they didn't. But I'd be comfortable in the guess that for every person who did, at least one returned or even picked up the game to take their place. Which is exactly why XI falling back into the old habits was so detrimental. Not having Adoulin out within 6-9 months of Heroes did the rest.

And since I seem to be going all broken record with things I've said in the XIV section over time, every single piece of content released in an MMO ever will have a peak lifespan for an individual. For some it's tied to how fun the specific content is. Others care more about what they get from it. The rest may only put up with it because they want to curry favor with their peers. They're not mutually exclusive conditions, but when they dry up for the individual, that's it. It's beaten, it's useless, it's a waste of time, whatever you wanna call it. And that's not a bad thing since it inherently puts pressure on a dev to create more. I'm not a fan of "after the fact" hard mode dungeons or adding new things to old content with minimal tweaks. It tries to cheat that development principle and reeks of cost-cutting. Do it all at once or pick one, make it as awesome as possible, then move on barring bugs and QoL tweaks. Whatever comes of tackling the harder difficulties should ultimately boil down to progressing a bit more quickly and some greater vanity options, not outright exclusivity. All the whiny casuals paid their $15/mo, too, like it or not. They've bought into the dev cycle, too. Get better to get more in the same span or take your time. Neither choice is worse than the other as long as they have fun doing it.

As much as Coil might be right up someone's alley in terms of challenge, the way it's currently setup allows it to be completed by a very limited amount of people. You essentially need 8 people with similar schedules who don't bail 1-3 days a week (usually seems to be a min. of 2 days a week).

The minute you don't have the Mon-Fri 9-5 schedule, no static is going to touch you as it's almost impossible to get the same days off from week to week. Sure you can PF/DF, but uhh good luck with that. Just randomly try T5 with echo right now, it is PAINFUL. Divebomb/snake phase still finishes off most people, hell even conflag still confuses people (though much punishment can be absorbed due to echo). The way the newest turns are setup usually means not ONE person can ***** up which is also ridiculous. Once people gear up and/or echo is introduced then yes, mistakes can be made.

So unless you CAN do Coil, there's almost 0 challenge to the game. The other challenges (imo), are Titan EX and Ramuh EX, but again, try pugging those without a static of competent players, it's not fun. The 8 man requisite though is what leads to this. It's not enough people to force groups to pick up a couple strangers and it's too many for funny schedule people to do something consistently.

I didn't clear Titan, Ramuh, T5, T6-7-8 until my old static took me through. They didn't even carry me, it's just the PF/DF is that bad. The only way the PF works is if a group is looking for ONE member for the night, that's it. I think that's what people are after, some moderate challenge in dungeons/low man activities.

Well it's also because everything dies so fast, it hardly matters what you do. T1 is the same way, people don't even split the snakes up anymore, just a Zerg fest. T2, I imagine people sit around rather then actually try and deal with the Rot.

Yup, that's Shiva EX right now, was Levi Ex prior to that. Only a few people had access to them, they farmed the crap out of it, and then it was almost impossible to finish until Echo came along. I can imagine a ton of people still get knocked off Levi EX. That being said, I'm less bothered by those because there is no weekly lockout on them. So, friendly statics can rep one member with you and help you access them.

Edited, Feb 3rd 2015 9:19am by Montsegurnephcreep