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"Human or not" a letter to Yoshi-P & SEFollow

#77 Dec 03 2016 at 8:41 PM Rating: Decent
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Lyrailis wrote:
Yet one more thing I need to alt-tab out of the game for. You want to talk about Exploration? Maybe I'd like to talk about Immersion. Alt-tabbing out of the game destroys immersion and I find myself doing it constantly while playing XI. You kinda have to, because the game does not tell you anything about anything hardly. They did add crafting lists, but it takes hours to find what you're looking for through convoluted menus.


Don't be offended please, but I will be short and to the point here since I've spent quite a bit of time posting about this subject already(both here on ZAM and in other forums)...

You are doing it wrong.

FFXI is a game heralded by most as having one of, if not THE best community in an MMO. The reason? Well a large part of it was the fact that the game didn't spoon-feed players everything. The fact that you didn't know everything, weren't told everything or didn't have a wiki to visit with all the answers was a large part of what fueled that community. You're not supposed to Alt-Tab, you're supposed to talk to people, make friends and either ask them for help or learn on your own.

I honestly felt like SE drove me up to the front gates of my home city, threw me out on my neck and flicked a few gil at me as they drove away laughing. It was cold, it was brutal and it was unforgiving. It was also the closest SE has come to RPG in ages. I hated loving every minute of it and I still have fantastic nightmares about it to this day.



Edited, Dec 3rd 2016 9:43pm by FilthMcNasty
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#78 Dec 03 2016 at 9:44 PM Rating: Good
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FilthMcNasty wrote:

Don't be offended please, but I will be short and to the point here since I've spent quite a bit of time posting about this subject already(both here on ZAM and in other forums)...


No worries, it takes quite a bit to actually offend me, lol.

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You are doing it wrong.


I'm doing it the only way I know how, and the only way I really see possible to be honest.

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FFXI is a game heralded by most as having one of, if not THE best community in an MMO. The reason? Well a large part of it was the fact that the game didn't spoon-feed players everything. The fact that you didn't know everything, weren't told everything or didn't have a wiki to visit with all the answers was a large part of what fueled that community. You're not supposed to Alt-Tab, you're supposed to talk to people, make friends and either ask them for help or learn on your own.


I remember the older days of XI, back before Fairy was merged with Sylph, and I remember how people would ask questions and they would go unanswered for long periods of time. I remember people getting ridiculed for armor, subjob, and even main job choices. I remember the Elitist standpoint that many NA players had during those days, where you were expected to be as self-sufficient as possible; back when I did CoP with my linkshell at the time, you were expected to wiki everything, and if you showed up to a fight without having all of your cutscenes, you were simply left behind.

Back then, I didn't run Windower; I had a laptop computer running next to my PC (that I bought for that very purpose) JUST to look stuff up on wiki because I had to. I remember the playerbase back then being somewhat toxic (or at least at the time I thought of it as toxic... little did I know that it was tame compared to what I would later see in WoW) towards newbie players, and players looking for information.

Maybe that has changed, but it left me and my family member with a very sour taste in our mouths. We do everything solo/duo now, and now that 95% of the game is solo or duo-able, that's quite fine with us. A whole new world is open to us now.

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I honestly felt like SE drove me up to the front gates of my home city, threw me out on my neck and flicked a few gil at me as they drove away laughing. It was cold, it was brutal and it was unforgiving. It was also the closest SE has come to RPG in ages. I hated loving every minute of it and I still have fantastic nightmares about it to this day.


Perhaps we have a different view of what a "game" is supposed to be.

I play games to pass time, to relax, to have fun. I'm not in it for challenge (though if it is TOO easy to where you can't possibly fail, then it gets too boring), I'm not in it to have to run around aimlessly trying to figure out which NPC, Door, or Object gives me the next cutscene and in a lot of cases, it simply does not make sense what you are supposed to do next.

Just earlier today, said family member and I did a couple Rhapsodies. One of them required WOTG missions up to a certain point. One of said missions, an NPC says "we're going to Sauromugue to do some scouting!" Okay, fine, we go to Sauromugue. I look it up on wiki and for some weird reason, you're supposed to check the locked Jueno doors for your cutscene. Out of all the ???s in Sauromugue, doors, objects, and other junk, THAT door held the cutscene.

I have an RL job, and I simply don't have the time, energy, or desire to check every single clickable object in the zone to figure out WHAT actually progresses the mission. I simply don't. Nor do I have time to sit around with my thumbs up my rear waiting on someone to answer shouts, to which I imagine the answer will be "go to bg wiki" or something similar.

I'm not offended by what you said in the least, but surely you can understand where I'm coming from?

The game is absolutely full of convoluted stuff that makes no sense and/or stuff that there was no way you could have possibly known other than brute force attempts what you were supposed to do.
#79 Dec 03 2016 at 10:26 PM Rating: Good
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I remember the older days of XI, back before Fairy was merged with Sylph, and I remember how people would ask questions and they would go unanswered for long periods of time. I remember people getting ridiculed for armor, subjob, and even main job choices. I remember the Elitist standpoint that many NA players had during those days, where you were expected to be as self-sufficient as possible; back when I did CoP with my linkshell at the time, you were expected to wiki everything, and if you showed up to a fight without having all of your cutscenes, you were simply left behind.


This, honestly, is what pops into my mind any time someone gets all misty eyed about what a great community FFXI had. Yeah it had its moments sure, but there was also a definite dark side to it that people just sort of forget about.
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#80 Dec 04 2016 at 7:17 AM Rating: Default
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It is interesting though, if you bring XI in a positive light people will say it was actually negative. I loved XI's peak community - the only time I've ever seen someone go unanswered if is they ask a dumb question, especially if you're max level. No 75 RDM should ever be caught dead asking "what am I supposed to do?" No 75 BLM should ever be caught dead asking "what are the elemental wheel resistances?" No 75 SMN/20 SMN (Later) should be caught dead without their avatars or asking what x buff does and so on. I never seen someone ignore people on basic questions, but I have seen people get ignored or 'go wiki' on dumb questions you should know the answer to after over 200 hours+ of gameplay in the early days lol.

FFXI was built in such a way that most of your questions are answered by time you hit level 75. People, unlike this game and most modern MMO communities, didn't take your **** or let you get away with being a ****. You had your douche LS leaders and such, but if you were a known troll, asshat, ninja lotter etc, it gets around the whole FFXI community, you're essentially blacklisted as long as people will recognize you and even if you name change and server hop people find out fairly quickly as old habits die hard.

For most of XI's prime (2004-2008) you had to work with the community, not everyone clicked but it was far more of a COMMUNITY than games these days being designed like single player games largely. I never forget about the "dark side" because I still remember VERY vividly how Dokaka singlehandedly destroyed the JP <> NA relationship for the rest of XI's lifespan and not because he stole the item, but the aftermath of resulting NA players belittling the Japanese for being "too trusting in an MMO" and given the time frame this happened, there were very few international MMOs even running (most had separate servers) I also remember the elitist community very well too. But the whole "wiki everything" is true for just about every MMO and every game known to date - hell most companies opt to have their OWN wiki if possible because it's just so much easier. Wikis are essentially online Reference Books/Strategy Guides, I've yet to play an MMO that actually spelled everything out for you that had a lot going for it. XIV is such a simple MMO where very little matters, even the community, so the stuff spelled out for you in XIV is to be expected these days, but back in the day it wasn't as common as one may think.

Not everything was clear in XI but that just added to the atmosphere, someone had to find out how to complete the quests/kill bosses etc to even populate said wiki and I can tell you now dat mining doesn't reveal everything nor did polutils - it reveals a lot but a lot is still stored server side and ironically, came from Japanese wiki which BG loved to steal and take credit for back on their wiki.
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#81 Dec 04 2016 at 3:52 PM Rating: Good
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Uh, I was talking about legitimate questions, such as "Where do you find _____?" (insert quest start NPC here)

Or "How do you get ______" (insert quest/armor/weapon/spell scroll/area here)

And the like. The answer was almost always the same, from what I could tell. It was some form of "Go look it up, (insert insult/expletive here)!"

As far as populating the wiki goes, when you have a big linkshell of 50+ players, brute forcing is easy. Get a few dozen people all trying to get the same quest done, and the information is quickly found when you got a couple dozen players scouring the zone until one says "Oh here it is, I found it!"

But how is a lone person supposed to do this in any reasonable time-frame? The quest will (sometimes) tell you what zone to go to... but that's it. A zone is large, and oftentimes full of aggressive mobs that you (back then) couldn't hope to fight solo.

And I remember the hours and hours and hours of waiting to try to get a quest done. I remember hours of seeing the same person shouting for something in Jeuno (usually Genkis) and they'd still be shouting, hours later, after I got back from an XP group or something.

I remember a few quests I needed and it took hours and when I finally DID get some help, it was 50/50 if we actually had enough help to actually do the quest in question. And then, the people who wanted paid for every little thing. My God, some people were charging 50k, 100k gil to kill 3 mobs in Xarcabard and such a few times I remember. It took like 15-20min and they were bilking people out of their last gil just to get a limit break quest done, and these limit breaks as you remember absolutely halted progress on your character until you got it done and they were NOT soloable whatsoever.

EDIT: ZAM decided to fall asleep for five min or something, but anyways, I suppose the community looked great from the top -- if you knew good people, and if you were in a linkshell then yeah, I bet you had a fun time. But if you were some newbie that didn't know anybody, didn't really have any connections really then everything was colder than Shiva's home. Very rarely did you find anybody willing to help without being paid, and people just ignored you or gave you cold shoulder. It was difficult enough JUST trying to get a group to get XP, I remember seeing people who make minor mistakes being chewed out because they were "dragging the XP down" or people would get kicked out of groups as soon as they got a certain level ("You're +2 levels... bye.") without even asking them if they wanted to at least get buffer. When you're at the bottom, the community wasn't so great. It felt cold and uncaring 95% of the time. I do have a few fond memories of a couple people along the way that I met, but most of my dealings with random people I'd very much chosen to forget. Which is why I go solo most of the time these days.

Edited, Dec 4th 2016 5:00pm by Lyrailis
#82 Dec 05 2016 at 12:23 AM Rating: Decent
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Lyrailis wrote:
But how is a lone person supposed to do this in any reasonable time-frame? The quest will (sometimes) tell you what zone to go to... but that's it. A zone is large, and oftentimes full of aggressive mobs that you (back then) couldn't hope to fight solo.

It's incredibly difficult for me to see why you put the words FFXI and solo in the same sentence unless you're lavishing praise on Lord Avesta. Literally everything you're shown, nearly every step of your journey tells you that you won't get far in this game if you're planning on going it alone.

Leveling beyond 15, subjob items, traveling to J-town, farming your keys for the Khazam airship, unlocking advanced jobs, more leveling, Rank 3.. all the way down the chain.

I get that you have limited time and you want to get on, get something done and get out. As someone with less hours a week to game than I have fingers, I can relate. Had I not had the time to invest back then, I probably wouldn't have made it out of the gates. I knew well before I left to explore the wilds on my own that I was going to need help. We, were going to need to help each other.

Misty-eyed about the community? Perhaps. I think it's more to do with the fact that I made my community. I made my own groups most of the time. I initiated my mostly static for ZM out of groups I had been in leveling up. Many of those players went on to join us in Dynamis and/or Sky. Subsequently the CoP static and Sea farms. I also co-ran a HNM shell. Thanks to a chill job at the time I was able to fish for an hour or two so I broke into 90+ skill prior to the changes.

I got a ******** of things done. I don't want a cookie. I'm not patting myself on the back here. I honestly think that I did it more out of necessity than anything else. I just realized early that it was going to take a lot of effort on my part and a lot of help from other people to stay active in so many different areas of the game.

Forgive me if it comes off as smug, but I feel it's a pretty good explanation for why the solo comments don't hold up for me.
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#83 Dec 05 2016 at 11:09 AM Rating: Good
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FilthMcNasty wrote:
Lyrailis wrote:
But how is a lone person supposed to do this in any reasonable time-frame? The quest will (sometimes) tell you what zone to go to... but that's it. A zone is large, and oftentimes full of aggressive mobs that you (back then) couldn't hope to fight solo.

It's incredibly difficult for me to see why you put the words FFXI and solo in the same sentence unless you're lavishing praise on Lord Avesta. Literally everything you're shown, nearly every step of your journey tells you that you won't get far in this game if you're planning on going it alone.


I have no idea who Lord Avesta is, but to be honest, a successful MMO needs both solo and group content.

Gating EVERYTHING behind groups is a horrible, and terrible idea because you just end up with bottlenecks like you did in oldschool XI where you have lots of people needing crap that nobody has any sort of incentive to help out with, like the genkai quests. Mandatory grouped content sucks, unless there's matchmaking like XIV has. And sometimes it still sucks, if you end up waiting for 45+ min queue to get a required dungeon done.

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Leveling beyond 15, subjob items, traveling to J-town, farming your keys for the Khazam airship, unlocking advanced jobs, more leveling, Rank 3.. all the way down the chain.


Nowadays, this can be done solo and very easily and the game is better off for it. No longer do you gotta wait around for people to help you out of the goodness of their hearts (they usually didn't....), no longer do you have these immense massive roadblocks in front of you.

It can be done solo now, and it's far better than it used to be.

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I get that you have limited time and you want to get on, get something done and get out. As someone with less hours a week to game than I have fingers, I can relate. Had I not had the time to invest back then, I probably wouldn't have made it out of the gates. I knew well before I left to explore the wilds on my own that I was going to need help. We, were going to need to help each other.


That's all great when you join a fresh new MMO, but after the MMO has aged and you join it not knowing anybody when you go in? It sucks. Everybody else is established and nobody has time for you, the newbie who has nothing to offer in return.

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Misty-eyed about the community? Perhaps. I think it's more to do with the fact that I made my community. I made my own groups most of the time. I initiated my mostly static for ZM out of groups I had been in leveling up. Many of those players went on to join us in Dynamis and/or Sky. Subsequently the CoP static and Sea farms. I also co-ran a HNM shell. Thanks to a chill job at the time I was able to fish for an hour or two so I broke into 90+ skill prior to the changes.


You got lucky. I've tried making my own groups, didn't work out. I had a variable hour job, where week-to-week was different (it's better now, but it was worse back then). I didn't know what days or nights I would have off until 2 weeks prior. Sometimes I would have a Wednesday Night off, other times it would be Thursday Night instead. Trying to make or join any type of HNM/Dynamis/Whatever shell was absolutely impossible for me.

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I got a ******** of things done. I don't want a cookie. I'm not patting myself on the back here. I honestly think that I did it more out of necessity than anything else. I just realized early that it was going to take a lot of effort on my part and a lot of help from other people to stay active in so many different areas of the game.

Forgive me if it comes off as smug, but I feel it's a pretty good explanation for why the solo comments don't hold up for me.


I wouldn't say it comes off as "smug", it's just merely again... you need to realize you had a LOT of good fortune come your way, a lot of good fortune that many other players didn't have. You admit you had a more easy-going job, you had consistent hours, a consistent schedule and you were able to meet people and make friends and get one or more linkshells together. You were able to do this.

Myself, and other players, were not.

It is just as difficult for me to understand what it was like to be someone like you, just as much as it is difficult for you to understand what it is like to be in the shoes of a person like me.

But all of that is irrelevant now -- solo to 99 is 100% possible, or at least that's my theory. I can only see two minor roadblocks to soloing to 99 -- Genkai #2 and I think #3? The one that asks you to go to the 3 beastmen homes for their crests, and that one where you have to kill the 3 mobs in Xarcabard. I think the beastman homes are do-able, they just need extreme caution and/or suicide runs. The mobs in Xarcabard? Depends on whether or not you picked a good DD job. I've never tried to 5-man them at the level they were meant to be done at, but from testimonials that I've read, it sounds like it should be possible.

Otherwise, solo to 99 is entirely possible and relatively easy if you know what you're doing. There's a lot of learning, and making mistakes will get you killed, but again, you're still learning how to play. Though, sadly, skillchains, magic bursts, and general behavior in parties is not something you're going to learn... but I suppose that's a small price to pay for actually being able to get things done in a realistic time-frame. And besides, the easier Ambuscades sound like a decent place to get to know group mechanics.

That's assuming people still do the easier Ambuscades.... I dunno, I've never stepped foot in one myself, I've had so much to do and I read that they reset every month, so I was waiting until this month's reset before I give it a bash.
#84 Dec 05 2016 at 12:12 PM Rating: Decent
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I never had a problem getting teams together in FFXI. The player base in general was a lot more helpful and social than the current generation, a lot of people were always down to help out with stuff cause the game promotes that kind of interactivity. Even without a LS you could just shout in the city and some bored high level would help you out with your LB quest or whatever it was you needed.
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#85 Dec 05 2016 at 1:14 PM Rating: Excellent
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BrokenFox wrote:
I never had a problem getting teams together in FFXI. The player base in general was a lot more helpful and social than the current generation, a lot of people were always down to help out with stuff cause the game promotes that kind of interactivity. Even without a LS you could just shout in the city and some bored high level would help you out with your LB quest or whatever it was you needed.


What he's saying, and keeps being ignored, is that this isn't always the case. I myself have stood in Jeuno and shouted for literal days trying to get something like an AF3 quest or an LB quest done and gotten nothing. The community in FFXI was fantastic...except when it wasn't and the entire experience of the game was hard locked to getting community help with basically everything. I used to joke that I couldn't walk down the street and buy a hot dog without a balanced party of 6 in that game.

If you had a good group of people or you were really good at putting groups together then your experience was great. If you didn't have either of those things, your experience was randomly good and randomly awful. Acknowledging that the community wasn't always amazing doesn't mean they weren't sometimes amazing.
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#86 Dec 05 2016 at 3:56 PM Rating: Decent
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Of course it wasn't always amazing, nothing is, but it was a hell of a lot better than the playerbases we have today.
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#87 Dec 05 2016 at 4:08 PM Rating: Good
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BrokenFox wrote:
Of course it wasn't always amazing, nothing is, but it was a **** of a lot better than the playerbases we have today.


I don't think anybody in this thread implied otherwise or disagreed with that one bit, lol.

The main issue, is that the game itself exacerbated the small amounts of nastiness that was in the community, to make them much more noticeable.

In games like WoW, or XIV, you can just turn off chat channels and Q up for whatever dungeons you need. You run into the occasional idiot or rude person, but you can mute them, ignore them, or if it's bad enough, simply leave dungeon and re-queue.

However, in XI, you didn't really have this option, it was find a group or not get anything done at all, and if you needed something like a genkai quest, you were unable to play, period, because your character had hit a roadblock in their progression. You could go level another job of course, but what if you had no interest in the other jobs? What if you couldn't find groups? That, and shouting for both a genkai and a leveling party at the same time could be difficult, and there's always the issue that if you get a group, and say 30 min later you then get a group for genkai then you ditch your leveling party and earn yourself a bad name.

Meanwhile, XIV allows you to Q for everything you can't solo and makes use of Level Sync and provides rewards for people to help you get through something. That way, you don't feel like such a leech when some high level helps you through something. They get rewards for their time, too.

You might not be actively shouting in towns and getting to know people, but still, there is a group mechanic there, and you do end up grouping with other human players. I feel it's a decent compromise to the problem that XI had.

EDIT: Another awesome thing that XI did that solved much of the problem? Trust magic. One of my favorite things (right next to mounts!) that they added in recent years. I just wish they would have updated your Adventuring Fellow that it could compete with Trust Magic... at the very least they could remove most of the stupid restrictions and penalties for using the Fellow.

Edited, Dec 5th 2016 5:13pm by Lyrailis
#88 Dec 05 2016 at 4:23 PM Rating: Decent
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Lyrailis wrote:

In games like WoW, or XIV, you can just turn off chat channels and Q up for whatever dungeons you need.


Yeah, and I hate that.

Well.. I only half hate it. I wouldn't mind it so much if it wasn't cross-server, cause then at least you'd be playing with people you'd recognize and it'd still keep the server community intact. Pretty sure that's how it was when WoW first introduced it. Once it went cross server people went full ******** anon and everyone just stops caring. It's like playing with evil robots. Might as well play a single player game at that point.

Edited, Dec 5th 2016 5:32pm by BrokenFox
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#89 Dec 05 2016 at 4:43 PM Rating: Good
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Pretty sure that's how it was when WoW first introduced it.


No, it was cross-server from the beginning. Limited to your battlegroup, but each battlegroup was like 15 servers or something. These days it's only limited by region (NA, EU, etc).

I don't entirely disagree with you about the effects of a cross server matchmaker like this. But I will say that queue times for a server-only version would be abominable especially at non-peak times. I've been doing the CT weekly for aether oils lately and it can take up to 2+ hours to get a party for any of them and that's WITH the cross server functionality.
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#90 Dec 05 2016 at 7:29 PM Rating: Excellent
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Sometimes you just gotta go with the lesser of two evils.

Sure, it allows the players to be essentially anon, but then again, not having cross-server matchmaking makes the whole game too boring, where you spend more time waiting than actually playing.

In an ideal world, we would have full-on community interaction with no automated matchmakers.

But this isn't an ideal world, so we kinda have to look at which would be worse: forcing players to wait hours, days, maybe months to get something done, or allow automated x-server matchmaking and suffer the consequences of anonymity going on in random groups.

And besides, all matchmakers, XIV's and WoW's included, allow a partial group to Q up. You can still go in with members of your Guild/FC/Linkshell/Friends/Whatever and fill the rest of the group with random pickups and still get the content done. It isn't like you're forced to queue solo for most of this stuff TBH.

There's still incentive to group up before Q'ing, and the bigger your group is, the faster the Q time will be, and the less chance that you will have of wiping. Having 6 players from the same FC and picking up 2 random pickups will probably give you a better group than having 2 FC members and 6 random pickups, or even worse, Q'ing solo.

But Q'ing solo is an option that exists if you need it.
#91 Dec 06 2016 at 1:59 PM Rating: Decent
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I think XI's community has always been bad, from the beginning, especially on Asura. There was a reason most of the stuff I did in the game it was with six (six, not a linkshell) people, mostly known IRL as well.

Also, early community efforts were generally, like most MMO, pointed to the easier solution (see Promyvion strategies with Rangers and Summoners) or sometimes ended up promoting wrong information - that was especially evident during the CoP days where most people who posted here hated the expansion and its story-focused structure (and by the way, back then the wiki didn't exsist in a complete form so most of the strategies we did with our group were improvised on the spot, with varying results).

XI however was built around the concept of party play, in this way is very "Japanese" (similar concepts can be applied to the ideas of Skillchains and Magic Bursts) and only years later it started to add more solo-friendly features.

XIV is an entirely different thing, though it plays safe too much for my tastes.
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#92 Dec 06 2016 at 7:52 PM Rating: Decent
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Lyrailis wrote:
I have no idea who Lord Avesta is, but to be honest, a successful MMO needs both solo and group content.

I added the 'Lord' part myself. His name was just Avesta and he was well known throughout the community as a player who could do things groups and small alliances struggled with all by himself. Basically, he was the only person who you could properly credit as playing FFXI solo.

Also, I'm not sure what your requisites are for deeming something 'successful', but FFXI is SE's highest grossing Final Fantasy title to date. This happened before the QoL changes that made the game solo and low-man friendly and I think that kinds sums up part of my point here. FFXI was a successful game in spite of(read: because of) it's group-centric focus.

Lyrailis wrote:
That's all great when you join a fresh new MMO, but after the MMO has aged and you join it not knowing anybody when you go in? It sucks. Everybody else is established and nobody has time for you, the newbie who has nothing to offer in return.

I'm not sure what else to say honestly. I don't see any game where players come together being almost completely devoid of teamwork and cooperation. It just doesn't make sense to me. I would have just played a single player game if I wanted to play alone. I'm not gonna pretend my interactions were all roses and rainbows either. I did say that I co-led an HNMLS. With that came drama with botters, other HNMs not respecting claim rules, balancing egos, more drama over drops...

I just realize that as typical, everyday ****. I probably ran into more of them than most people did simply because I put myself in the way(leading a few linkshells), but that's the nature of the beast. People are ******** in real life. People are ******** in game. I'm not lucky by any stretch. I just happened to be driven enough to seek out the ******** I got along with Smiley: sly

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Only hips + boobs all day and hips + boobs all over my icecream

HaibaneRenmei wrote:
30 bucks is almost free

cocodojo wrote:
Its personal preference and all, but yes we need to educate WoW players that this is OUR game, these are Characters and not Toons. Time to beat that into them one at a time.
#93 Dec 06 2016 at 8:35 PM Rating: Good
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I don't see any game where players come together being almost completely devoid of teamwork and cooperation. It just doesn't make sense to me. I would have just played a single player game if I wanted to play alone.


I don't know what that was supposed to be in response to because it's not what he posted, it isn't even what you quoted.

He's saying that you pretty much have to get in on the ground floor of an MMO to have a decent chance. While I don't necessarily agree 100% with that, I think it's pretty much right. The most recent FFXI example I can think of was when Delve was introduced and parties were demanding that everyone have a Delve weapon to do Delve with. Which was of course impossible without doing Delve. This was like a week or something after the system was released. And I've seen far more absurd examples than that in other games.
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#94 Dec 06 2016 at 10:35 PM Rating: Good
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Callinon wrote:
And I've seen far more absurd examples than that in other games.


I remember the days in WoW...

"LFM for (insert item-level 459 or whatever raid here). Must have 480 item-level and achievements. PST!"

*sigh*

Yeah, okay, I'm supposed to somehow have the achievements and better item-level than the raid actually yields, before ever doing said raid. *rolls eyes*

See, people want an easy smooth road. They don't want challenge, they just want to speedrun the stuff for vanity equipment, and sc-rew the people who actually need the content.

And if you comment about this, said players will go "Get a raid guild."

Uh, yeah, okay... raid guilds want the best-geared people. I need gear. I can't get gear without a guild unless I do PUGs, but PUGs won't accept me because I haven't already cleared the content.

It's a vicious circle of "Only the first may pass" and whoever wasn't there, whoever didn't have 40+ hours a week to get through the content first, gets left in the dust and they have virtually no hope of ever getting anywhere until or unless some stroke of luck happens and they actually find someone who will take them. But, the chances are highly against them.

Edited, Dec 6th 2016 11:36pm by Lyrailis

Edited, Dec 6th 2016 11:37pm by Lyrailis
#95 Dec 07 2016 at 3:22 AM Rating: Decent
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Callinon wrote:
[quote]I don't see any game where players come together being almost completely devoid of teamwork and cooperation. It just doesn't make sense to me. I would have just played a single player game if I wanted to play alone.

The conclusion of what I posted was at the end of the paragraph...

Lyrailis wrote:
I have no idea who Lord Avesta is, but to be honest, a successful MMO needs both solo and group content.


FFXI is the highest grossing FF title to date. That was announced before Abyssea concluded and the game really started opening up to solo play. Based on that, it's pretty clear that a game doesn't need solo content to be successful. That is unless, Lyrailis has some special criteria for being successful.

You disagree?

Lyrailis wrote:
Yeah, okay, I'm supposed to somehow have the achievements and better item-level than the raid actually yields, before ever doing said raid. *rolls eyes*

Does it really come as a shock to you that experienced players would seek out other experienced players to group with? Real talk, if you spent your time trying to make or join a group of players with similar experience to you instead of rolling your eyes, you'd probably be more productive.

Hard to dignify responses so I'll go ahead and bow out here. Good luck with whatever game you play, but you should be more active. You'll have much better results.
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Its personal preference and all, but yes we need to educate WoW players that this is OUR game, these are Characters and not Toons. Time to beat that into them one at a time.
#96 Dec 07 2016 at 9:23 AM Rating: Good
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Quote:
FFXI is the highest grossing FF title to date. That was announced before Abyssea concluded and the game really started opening up to solo play. Based on that, it's pretty clear that a game doesn't need solo content to be successful. That is unless, Lyrailis has some special criteria for being successful.


This bit of trivia never ceases to amuse me.

OF COURSE FFXI is the highest grossing FF title to date. It's a subscription based MMO. For years it had an average of about 300k players each paying 11-17ish dollars per month to play. How long do you think that has to happen before it grosses more money than a one-off title people pay 60 bucks for and then never pay for again? This has absolutely nothing to do with its success as an MMO. By most MMO metrics, FFXI was a cult hit and nothing more. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but to put those two things together to claim some mandate for how success in MMOs is achieved is a little silly.

MMOs need both solo and group content. That's what Lyrailis said and it's absolutely right.

Quote:
Does it really come as a shock to you that experienced players would seek out other experienced players to group with? Real talk, if you spent your time trying to make or join a group of players with similar experience to you instead of rolling your eyes, you'd probably be more productive.


I believe I talked above about how not everyone has the talent for putting groups together. You have it, that's great, it'll help you. But not everyone else does and it IS a talent. This isn't something everyone can reasonably learn to do.

Quote:
Hard to dignify responses so I'll go ahead and bow out here. Good luck with whatever game you play, but you should be more active. You'll have much better results.


Someone has a different perspective from you so you've decided to declare yourself superior and walk away? That was a seriously smug thing to say.
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#97 Dec 07 2016 at 10:32 AM Rating: Good
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FilthMcNasty wrote:


FFXI is the highest grossing FF title to date. That was announced before Abyssea concluded and the game really started opening up to solo play. Based on that, it's pretty clear that a game doesn't need solo content to be successful. That is unless, Lyrailis has some special criteria for being successful.

You disagree?


As Callinon said, obviously FFXI is the "highest grossing FF game to date" because it's a monthly sub game. Obviously.

As for its "Success", you only need to take a gander at some subscription charts. We're not comparing FFXI to other FF games ('cept maybe XIV), we're comparing FFXI to other MMOs. Here's a quick google stats I found for 2009-2011 (back when FFXI was still being actively developed and in its "prime"):

Quote:
World of Warcraft – 12,000,000 (2011)
Aion - 3,400,000 (mid 2010)
Runescape – 1,300,000 (2009)
Lineage – 750,000 (2009)
Lineage II – 750,000 (2009)
Dofus – 520,000 (mid 2010)
Final Fantasy XI – 350,000 (mid 2010)


You'll note FFXI is 7th on the list. Mildly successful, but nowhere near the top three. Now obviously these numbers aren't perfect but they should be in the ballpark, rough estimates.

Quote:
Does it really come as a shock to you that experienced players would seek out other experienced players to group with? Real talk, if you spent your time trying to make or join a group of players with similar experience to you instead of rolling your eyes, you'd probably be more productive.


No, but you need to understand something: After the initial release of content, the number of Experienced Players to Inexperienced Players skews drastically.

When a new raid is released, it might look something like this:

(Inexperienced:Experienced players interested in doing the content, where "Experienced" are people who have fully cleared the content at least once)

At the beginning: 100:0
A week later: 70:30
A month later: 50:50
2 months later: 20:80
6+ months later: 10:90+

So basically, if you're at the beginning, then EVERYBODY is inexperienced with the new content. A week later, you've got several groups who've made clears, and a month later is when you see the "must have achieves!" shouts.

The problem with this, is if you just arrived later-on, you have nil chance of finding enough inexperienced players to fill out a whole group capable of doing the content, and as such you will need experienced players to fill slots.

Quote:
Hard to dignify responses so I'll go ahead and bow out here. Good luck with whatever game you play, but you should be more active. You'll have much better results.


Dunno where the salt is coming from to be honest... but I didn't expect you to understand, most of the people I've talked to/with who have the raiding guilds and linkshells never understand, and have never understood our point-of-view. You're one of the very many who just fail to understand the problem with MMOs and wide-spread elitism.
#98 Dec 07 2016 at 3:43 PM Rating: Decent
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Callinon wrote:
Someone has a different perspective from you so you've decided to declare yourself superior and walk away? That was a seriously smug thing to say.

I'm walking away because he can't grasp a concept that has been around since long before MMOs were even a thing. Also, because now he's pulling numbers out of his *** to try and support his point.

Lyrailis if you want to try and use numbers to support your cause, you're better off going to a site like wowprogress and finding actual data. Try doing that instead. Just a warning though, you're not even remotely close with what you posted above.

Good luck!





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HaibaneRenmei wrote:
30 bucks is almost free

cocodojo wrote:
Its personal preference and all, but yes we need to educate WoW players that this is OUR game, these are Characters and not Toons. Time to beat that into them one at a time.
#99 Dec 07 2016 at 5:15 PM Rating: Good
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Quote:
Lyrailis if you want to try and use numbers to support your cause, you're better off going to a site like wowprogress and finding actual data. Try doing that instead. Just a warning though, you're not even remotely close with what you posted above.


What numbers are YOU using to determine that he's wrong?

In any event I think it was more an illustration rather than a statement of hard data. Over time the number of people who both want to do a particular piece of content and have not yet done that particular piece of content goes way WAY down, and it does so very quickly.

Obviously I don't have hard data on this either so I can only speak from my own experience, but even right now trying to get (for example) A5-9 done.. normal mode.. so I can move on, is totally impossible. Nobody wants to do it. I don't blame them for not wanting to do outdated content that has nothing for them, but it gates me and that's a problem. I had this same problem back in 2.x when I was interested in joining the parties looking to learn T10-13 but I hadn't cleared T9 and nobody wanted to touch that thing with someone who'd never been there. This happens over and over again and it's a problem. If I'd been there when the content was new, I'd have no issue, but I wasn't...
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#100 Dec 07 2016 at 5:35 PM Rating: Good
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Callinon wrote:
I had this same problem back in 2.x when I was interested in joining the parties looking to learn T10-13 but I hadn't cleared T9 and nobody wanted to touch that thing with someone who'd never been there. This happens over and over again and it's a problem. If I'd been there when the content was new, I'd have no issue, but I wasn't...


It's a problem that exacerbates itself:

If you're stuck on T9 and everybody's doing T10-13, while you wait on a stroke of good luck, the NEXT Tier comes out, and then T10 becomes obsolete while you're still waiting to do T9.

Then, you finally get T9 done, and oh wait.... now T10 is obsolete and you're running into another roadblock and you just can't catch up. The people at current tier are mowing the tiers down just fine, but you hit roadblock after roadblock after roadblock.

In WoW, the only remedy to this is to "wait until next expansion" because you can usually skip to the next expansion's first tier easily enough... but if you fall behind too far, you're sunk.

Again.

Until next expansion.....

Can't believe the devs can't SEE the problem with this kind of problem with people getting left behind because nobody wants to do outdated tiers of content to help the late-comers through.
#101 Dec 08 2016 at 6:30 AM Rating: Good
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It always seems like anyone who can't understand the concept that the older multiplayer content gets, the harder it is to do (as intended), were probably among the early clears or soon after. Some of this is due to lockouts if they exist. Some of it is due to costs if you need consumables. Some of it could be the content just wasn't fun (to do for the nth time). And if it's old enough, it's probably not worth doing because the rewards are no longer pertinent. As this issue pops up time and time again across MMOs throughout the world, sometimes devs try to address it, but other times not at all.

When it comes to XI, me harping on CoP probably seems like old hat to some, but the level caps were a hurdle that exemplified the issue of content aging decreasing accessibility. Once one finished a mission, the only real reason to backtrack was out of the goodness of their heart. And a lot of the time, doing so was urged to be a less a hassle as possible with aggro avoidance taking priority because 99.99% of mobs in the way of an objective were a waste. One might even argue SE forced mob engagement by sprinking so many true sight/sound mobs out there. It wasn't about making the world dangerous, it was just trying to artificially slow players down.

Otherwise, it's pretty dumb to assert that everyone should play the same way or else they're fundamentally looking at the genre wrong. Solo play is important to MMOs no matter how much the haters reject the sentiment. Matchmaking tools for when it isn't quite an option are just as important, which XI horribly lacked. So, yeah, for all people were "forced" to interact, it had a dark side those who merrily did get whatever done perhaps didn't notice. Further, I know I at least had a vast majority of groups being more about advancement, and if that wasn't be achieved, GTFO. Socializing wasn't at the core of that, and sometimes even discouraged through inaction or implied conformity.
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