Dev Tracker - Discussion

This is going to come across with a tone of ***, but I do promise that is not the intent. I truly cannot think of any examples that match what you describe, so- what are the games that purely reward skill and not some aspect of luck? Because once you remove performance as the sole evaluation of reward, you've introduced gambling.

The greatest 'skill' gamblers in the world still have to deal with luck. The 'luckiest' athletes in the world still have amazing skill. Its almost impossible to split the two in any game environment- be it a screen, a field, or a poker table.

Chess, Dark Souls franchise, many fighting games, a lot of FPS games that don't have crit-chance like attributes.

Luck is something that's added into games via unknown information and/or non 100% based proc chances or drop rates.

Not gonna give ya chess because that's just a video game version of an existing game, but fighting games are a solid example. FPS games, at least in my limited experience, aren't always as clean (luck of spawn location comes to mind as one example, I'm sure that those who play them more could list more), but definitely are more skill/repetition based in terms of success than luck, I'd give ya that.

Considering DS3 has a stat called 'luck', and all games have random item discovery that can be manipulated, I don't think this is a good example. Could argue moves some of the bosses do and npc summon performance comes down to luck as well.

People use additional service fees as wagers in XI to increase their odds at winning something from Trove or to cover more numbers in Mog Bonanza.


You need a wager, odds and a reward for gambling. Typically the reward stays since you need to keep people interested in playing, but if you remove the betting or the odds then I don't consider it gambling anymore.

Drop rates aren't gambling to me, until there is a situation where you can pay real money to easily access more "rolls". In FFXI, having multiple characters allows you to get extra rolls on certain content with very rare equipment as a drop. Whether that be Savory Shanks for Behemoth, AMAN trove, or whatever.

Yes, you could buy Shanks/Orbs on one character, but that could cost a lot of gil depending on the player. That can be bypassed by buying many characters for their points/vouchers. Imagine how many items you get with 18 characters compared to a player with 1. That player with one character would struggle to get the same amount of items by natural means in a short time, and that's if you can even find that many shanks/orbs available. The rolls at the drop are far more accessible the more characters you buy, which is like a slot machine. The more money you put in, the more likely you hit the jackpot. Pay2Win.

You do pay real money for drops in FFXI, it's called your subscription fee and addon services. The random gambling machine drops are there to keep you paying that monthly subscription. You pay $14~21 USD a month to raise your drop chance from 0% to something above 0%.

That's where it starts, but we all know it gets much deeper than that...


Kylos already touched on the mule tech. Quick and easy login and exchange. More chances at that D ring you needed, more abyssea boss items or just extra money.


Enter silver vouchers. We had quite a few campaigns for these where they overlapped with free login. Even if you didn't have the mules active you could get vouchers. Now you have a reason to level all those alts. Now that you have 15 level 99 alts, you've got access to ambuscade. Go low-man ambuscade with a few friends and cap out all their hallmarks for currency. Easy money!


Need that extra pain and suffering in your life? Lead all of your mules through the missions you need to unlock Oseem and take advantage of those extra Dark Matter augments!



SE doesn't offer P2W options for players in a cash shop, but the players have adapted the 'additional services' to serve the same purpose. It goes even further when you expand this out across multiple accounts.


There are over 3k accounts logged into Asura at any given moment. Thousands of accounts that represent only hundreds of players.

It looks like the Vinyl is up for preorder on the jp store now

https://store.jp.square-enix.com/item/SQEX_10964.html

I keep seeing those everywhere, do people really have vinyl players?

If you're an audophile or an hipster then of course!

Because of these people Vynils in the last 2 years generated more sales than CDs, for instance.

Free silver vouchers are up, enjoy logging in dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of accounts!

This started a day early? official site says tomorrow.

Edit: Yes it is today. Localization messed up dates

JP site: Period: November 18th (Friday) around 0:00 to December 2nd (Tuesday) around 23:00

Localization didn't mess anything up. Japan just operates nearly a full day ahead of us because of time zone differences. They're so far east of us that while we're still doing things on the 17th, midnight for them has already passed and they've transitioned to the 18th. The international date line is located in the pacific ocean just east of the continent, so they're among the first to transition to a new business day while we in north america are among the last. And the patch notes are based off the Japaneese clock time.

They're only 14 hours ahead of the east coast. 13 When the time change happens and vice versa. (So 17-16 for West Coast, 20-19 for Hawaii)

Guess they don't list the PST times on the JP site like they do elsewhere?

Reminds me that the sun never sat on my flight to Japan, and my flight back from Japan, I arrived on the "same" day I left lol.

It can be difficult to tell which actual day things start. Sometimes they put PDT sometimes they put JST sometimes they *** it up and do it wrong (too often)

It's easy to do the math to see what happened. The timestamp on Eiryl's message is 9:31 AM on FFXIAH's servers, which are based off central time. Japaneese midnight occurs at 9 AM central, so when Eiryl posted that it was half an hour past midnight for them. The process is automated and the servers are based in japan, so that's why it started when it did.

This will be the most lucrative silver voucher campaign to date as it coincides with the new original aman drop campaign which has proven to be quite significant.

(Should pull 5 billion fo sho)

May or May not be of some value (and may or may not be a flat out lie)
If you're keeping extra eikondrite you don't need to, you won't need another one for stage 3 stage 4 etc according to Gunisaka

Of course you do, you simply have to make them all. You just don't need extra.

Next stage will be a random drop from basement chests, then basement NMs, the amnion. Hedge your bets.

Not enough copium left in the tank to assume they'll add another new event before final stage of Primes. Gonna be Galli and Sortie drops all the way down

It will be disappointing if TVR ends and we dont have to go to Valhalla to kick *** for the Lord!

IIRC, they've stated in the past that the end of VR will come with a new endgame, associated with prime weapons. Maybe it'll get delayed past the end of VR, but it signals an intent for more content, at least.

I'm not going to bump it yet, December is Meebles V1

Really nothing else you don't already know from the freshly picked.

V2 Mantis - The more Buffs that Mantoid Revenge(sp) dispels the lower it's DT-

Have they stated when they are aiming to have TVR end? I thought I remembered them saying at the start they were aiming for 20th anniversary...?

2 years to get "half way"

Winter '24

This was during the May livestream I believe, they alluded to some other content that will be required to finish the Prime weapons, but it's very possible it was a translation error and they were talking about Sortie.

It wasn't. They did say they're working on some new battle content that will be tied to TVR. They also mentioned that the "battlefield" for it will be entirely new (as in, they won't be recycling any existing maps like Ra'Kaznar or WoE).