Old FFXI Vs New FFXI

Pchan has gimp Salvage luck, Ares isn't hard to get for him.

Thorny was nice enough to practically give me my pair if I farmed the pops so he could get d.legs :D Actually I owed a lot to him for the help gearing my WAR. Even if I farmed the lolpops. I never had to slave to a Sky linkshell for my haidate. I loved that.

When the only "challenge" in old FFXI consisted of mindless time investment (GRIND FOR POPS, GRIND FOR POINTS, GRIND FOR GEAR etc.), chance, and attempts to coordinate a herd of *** to do your bidding, then good riddance.

This bizarre threshold of "challenge" however, did strengthen the bonds between many players (while creating drama for everyone else), which is certainly one thing. I can understand this being something to miss.

What exactly makes an MMO truly difficult?

The challenge to me was people trying to do events with less and less people and finding ways to succeed. At this point though everything can be killed with small numbers, with no emphasis on strategy/skill. It's like... put a MNK on a mob with Counterstance up, give him a WHM that can spam Cure5/6, and watch it die.

my WAR is 45, and I never leveled NIN until recently.
edit: trusting retards is challenging.

Then why do you complain about sky noob.

pizza

They're still better than the standard pieces.

Pizza didn't magically fix everything and nullify all non-haste related upgrades.

As far as I'm concerned, you made the best post in this thread.

What is there to address? People are complaining that the game has changed, like people have always complained when the game changed. It's no more an attempt to sound cool than the endless "easy mode" comments. We get it, you're too good for this content. But if it makes you feel better:

"Even higher level endgame mobs like Kirin were so much weaker after the first cap raise."

People have been doing Kirin in 12 man pick up groups for years. The cap didn't do that, a brd rotation and a couple Drks did. Oddly enough, your later statements show you knew that already, so I don't get your point.

"SMN burns could've been fixed so easily SE just didn't feel like it. It wasn't a plague until level sync. Simple solution: 2 hour = no experience."

Smn burns didn't change the dynamic of the game, or take anything away from the experience of others. There was nothing to fix.

"Some people do play to be in the top 1%, that doesn't necessarily mean that casuals suffer. When casuals feel entitled to everything with little effort or time input, hardcore gamers do suffer."

Couldn't agree more. However, Abyssea content was designed to be done on the way to a new endgame cap, and we haven't reached it yet. As far as we're aware, it's the bootstrap content to gear up players for the final cap. Much like the Nyzul/Assault/Imperial Standing gear gave additional minimum standard gear leading up to the PW/Salvage/T3 ZNM level content and gear. Expansions that cap at level 90 content on a march to a cap 9 levels higher should not be considered true endgame any more than Nyzul should be for TOAU.

"The challenge to me was people trying to do events with less and less people and finding ways to succeed. At this point though everything can be killed with small numbers, with no emphasis on strategy/skill. It's like... put a MNK on a mob with Counterstance up, give him a WHM that can spam Cure5/6, and watch it die."

The thing is, there was a minimum of people who ever actually did attempt those things lowman. While pretty much everything can be done with a mnk and a whm now, it's no different than the way you could throw a few Rdms at almost anything before.

I'd be hard pressed to name any large number of people I regularly see doing it, and the ones I do see who are equipped and motivated enough to do it are the same people who I saw low manning prior to the cap raise. The small groups regularly doing Empyreans are the same people from the HNM shells who were doing relics before. The rest of the server are still shouting for 18 people to do zone bosses, the same way they were taking 18 to do Limbus 8 months ago.


As opposed to the endless threads about how the game is dead or ruined? It's the same old cycle that's been going for years, not some new and novel issue up for it's first debate.

Pizza obsoleted Adaberk(WS only if you really want to push it)/Hecatomb Cap and an entire relic weapon?!

MMOs aren't difficult. It's very rare you'll think that someone's skill won a battle, it's normally a comfortable win or a huge loss. Sometimes a healers reactions will save a fight going south, but pretty rarely.

If an MMO isn't action based, it can't be hard imo.

Ares cuirass and lol at invoking relics.

here's a question , do any of you feel, other then the forementioned, what relic's/salvage/nyzul/sky isle amours worth it since abyssea empy armors release?

I really enjoy the changes after all. Welcomed them with a lot of reluctance and hesitation, but in the end I had to give in.

They focused mainly on the concept of "Reward", giving a stronger feeling of reward to players, achievable in a much faster way with less effort/time.

This made the game way more enjoyable, together with a *** of small tweaks here and there that overall made it faster to play and less frustrating. (there have been more changes/additions to jobs over the last 9 months than in the last 8 years)

All in all we could say the game got much much faster. You level faster, you kill things faster, you have a *** of buffs (up to the point gear starts to matter much less, paradoxically) and the negative aspect of this pardisiac landscape is only one imho: it all burns too fast.
Up to the point you start wondering: where will this end? They probably went "too far" already, it will be very hard (impossible?) to go back now, and it will be very hard for them to offer new content or balancing the old one without just adding more abyssea (or similar) stuff.


You see, compared to other MMORPG which were based on the concept of "Tiers" (a new expansion/patch come out with new content, usually the older content gets discontinued and nobody cares about it anymore) FFXI had a pretty original and unique structure. Most of the end-game activities were all in parallel, not tiered, and they were overall kinda balanced among them, as in: players had interest in doing a lot of them, even a lot of time after their release, even after new things had been released. It usually took a lot of effort (at least, for most players) to get certain rare items, but once you did the sense of achievement was really intense, and you knew that item would have lasted a long, long, long time. SE have always been afraid to add new gear that was simply DESTROYING the old options. It happened, but not many times, and usually the difference wasn't huge, or it was just a sidegrade rather than an upgrade under all point of views.
Abyssea sorta destroyed all of that, and despite FFXI team's shy attempts to give new sense to such old content (Trials etc) the situation is still pretty complicated for them to handle.

I don't know what to think, I just enjoy the game atm, altough when I think about the future, the situation looks kinda dire to me.

pre- abyssea *** blows compared to post-abyssea.stop crying u *** babies. go do all that boring *** if u hate abyssea so much. id like to c how long u last.

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I honestly can't agree with most of this, 99% of it is you baww for Se making the game easier to those who don't want to spend months getting one piece of gear. I do agree that some gear is way to easy to acquire, but things like the pop systems and other things in Abyssea seem fine, improving drop rates for older gear is also a good thing, there no longer as disired, why should they be as hard to get?

Also, for your rant about mobs and areas and such, you completely missed the aspect of alot of this games story when you said, also consider abyssea is post-apocalyptic and was destroyed by powerful monsters, with only few people servivng to tell the taile and possibly finding a way to save there world. We never considered what would happen to Vana'del have we not saved it countless times in countless expansions. Prehaps this is kinda like a dimensional mirror, and what exists due to non-existance of our players in this other world. Also when speaking of the gigas you seem to forget that according to the storyline and if you have ever been in Vunknel Inlet you would know that that area is the original home of the gigas, in the regions vana'del we can explore. while there are still some mobs that don't make sense existing in X area, and its simple to see that the design of the areas wasent as creative as it was, consider the effort put into it was still good, if not you wouldent be coming anywhere near anything that has to do with this game.

I get another pirate suit. And it's worth wearing.

So, yeah, new FFXI is fine w/ me.

Very very very wise and objective analysys, you've done a great job there.
Now something about the part I quoted.
On one hand I can understand your feelings, but I think you're forgetting a certain perspective.

You see, there are also pros in that "mess" of copy/past they did with areas and mobs. For example certain races of mobs were pretty rare to fight. Having the chance to fight them a lot is certainly nice imho. As well as finding mini-versions of other mobs, I found that funny and cute.

And the poorly designed thing you're talking of, maybe you're forgetting that here we're talking about a different, parallel dimension that fits well in the new scenario of "multi-dimensional universe" depicted by the WotG expansion.
We have a chance to see "new versions" of the monsters and NPCs we know well.
These areas are clearly planned to offer small hubs for repeatable quests and such, the concept is not very different (altough implemented very differently) from the Daily Quests hubs of WoW, for example. Or from the Guild Leves of FFXIV, if we want to stay within SE games.

The plot too ain't that bad for a set of expansions which always clearly stated their goal was "Battle", and not "Plot". Judged from this point of view Abyssea's plot is awesome and imho better than all of the three "plot" mini-expansions. Seeing what happened in another world where CoP ended differently... was kinda nice and appealing if you ask me.


So, all in all, what you described as Abyssea problems in the part I quoted, wouldn't be problems at all if only Abyssea was A PART of FFXI.
That's it, A PART. The problem is that this game ain't Final Fantasy XI anymore, it's Abyssea Fantasy XI! And that's where trouble comes and where what you wrote in that part I quoted above starts becoming a real problem, and from THIS perspective I just described, then I guess I can agree.

Begrudgingly, I'm starting to like the new FFXI. The game was just so damn hard before. Even if you had the best gear and merits you still had to be extremely organized and team oriented to use the tools you had at your disposal back then to win. Today, collection of mindless rabble (myself included) can quickly assemble (4 hours or less is quick by old standards) in less numbers an take down the same monsters.

FFXI at the beginning was an experience. It was relatively fun to go to school and be like "pssst, wow? in ffxi it will take me 4 real life days to lvl to from 72-73!"

the game was hard. Mainly because you had to get help to do anything and your help came from people, who are not very helpful.

Id still play new ffxi. I cant atm because I have no free time ever but while olden days are good to look at through rose colored glasses, I would not want to go back. I like the nostalgia but it took me 2 years to lvl rdm! RDM 8| I almost quit the game entirely in 2004 because I could not find help getting my airship pass to kazham (yeah that srsly inhibited my game play...I cant see that happening these days) why do I want to put myself through that agony again. How did I stomach it anyway >.> uggg

PS macha's coat was easy to get for me, getting the 15mil was not, hence I never got it. It was marduk boots 8| dekka is the bane of my existence.

first : posting in epic Thread.
^ this . I been on since PS2 release (March of 2004) . I have 2 young children now (2y/o 6m/o) . Where in Old FFXI dedicating 5+ hrs every night took me about 2 years to get SMN75 and WHM+RDM 60+ then another 2 years to get full SMN relic , finish Lving RDM , Starting brining BLM up from 40 (i still miss Static EXP Tuesdays . best memories there . Holler Emma^^). only took me about 3 weeks to get SMN WHM RDM BLM past 85 .
Being able to log in , play for 2-3 hr and actually get somehting done is way better then spending the same amount of time trying to organize ppl to get something done .

Only shitty Melee jobs are DRK and PLD? You must have played with lolDRKS because i've never seen a PLD break the 3k dmg in Dynamis.

Abyssea killed the game, it takes no challenge to do anything anymore.
Purely ruined now
They made it so easy a WoW player could do it. /sigh