Dev Tracker - Discussion

As someone that's benefitted from you coming back and helping me out just about every time I've returned, and tried to pay it forward when I could, I 100% agree with you. I just sadly think at this state of the game (or maybe it's just an Asura thing), the opportunity for these things to happen especially if you don't already know some folks, is few and far between. So folks just resort to leveling a mule so they can actually play some content, or paying to skip to where they think they'll actually be able to join a group and play some content.

I don't think this is just an FFXI/Old game thing either. In the short attention span, content creator/guide/walkthrough, queue for groups era of MMO's, everyone's conditioned to just blast through things solo as quick as possible. Hell even I've been caught off guard when joining groups and people are just friendly and chatting folks up, trying to develop strats, and actually doing what the games intended lol

In a discussion of expanding content from party to alliance, where multiple people have brought up RMT and Mercs, to expand the ability for larger groups of friends to do stuff together in the event someone is missing or quits, you bring buying and selling accounts and wonder how i put the two together.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Southern Sandy has multiple locations where we can oversee the peons walking into our grand city.

I thought people quit cause they just didn't like playing with the community... I can see a new player being like screw these people...

You might be thinking about WoW.

Most new players will not encounter the people doing V25 Bumba or Sortie with Prime III. Simply because said people would not interact with them.

New players are WAY more likely to come across a LS of 18 people that fail to kill Omen bosses, or fail to kill Schah for the 90th time.

Someone said that back in the day you didn't see war/nin with good gear that didn't know how to play.

I pointed out buying/selling accounts was a thing back then, and yes, you did see those.

You read "replace friends with RMT accounts" somewhere. Maybe ask if you're not sure.

I feel personally attacked.


I think the "old school" mentality of this game just being at odds with the modern and immature gamer is the issue here.

The analogy of life to me here is apparent: we here, most of us, are the doctors of the game. The word "doctor" is derived from the Latin "docere" which literally means teacher. This is why your college profs are called "doctors."

College professors are masters of their profession. They split their time between training the next generation and pushing the boundaries of their field (with research). We are doing the same when we bring the new guys through dyna-d, ambuscade, omen, etc. We may even bring up a "TA" for a(n) odyssey/sortie, essentially our pushing of our own boundary.

My experience here has been the resistance to competence. Ask a newish player to bring their level 99 ungeared whm? "Nah man, I'll just skip." They would rather just quit. Their dds are trash, contribute very little to progress, but they demand that's all they wanna do. These are your kids that shoulda been plumbers, they won't be the next generation of doctors, so its...frustrating.

Aver dragged me through events where I played a job I didn't really want to play for a couple years before I earned my doctorate in ffxiology.

Tldr;
I'm old, whippersnappers have no respect, and people need to stay off my lawn.

It's simple, SE is selling entertainment as a product, FFIX is just one of those products. This flavor of product was popular once, it no longer is popular and has been relegated to only being sold at specialty import shops.

XI is sort of the only MMO I've played that essentially requires "paying your dues" in the WHM or support mines (but god forbid you show up as a BRD with less than 1 year of investment in REMA) before someone is allowed to play jobs that they might be more interested in. In most other MMOs you will certainly be waiting longer if you're playing a DPS job but you'll find a group eventually and be able to reasonably contribute when you do. There's a lot of reasons for that, of course, and most of them are endemic "issues" to the game if you see them that way (support in XI is wildly overpowered, DD jobs scale way higher than tanks and WHMs, gear creep has let supports function as 2/3rds DDs, etc) that will never get addressed. Like the above poster said though, it's one flavor of entertainment being offered, and if that entertainment is suggesting that someone go through about 6-24 months of ritualized hazing playing healer/support before playing jobs they're interested in they'd likely just look elsewhere on the market for products that let them play what they're actually interested in immediately.

I don't have the historical background to know if this is just an ilevel-era issue or if this sort of thing happened in the 75-cap days too and I've never particularly had interest in playing on private servers so I'm not sure if people were more able to just play the jobs they were interested in from the start back then and the demographics better sorted themselves out or not.

Eh kinda, mighta been worse tbh. content was more 12+ man so a person with just DDs could still get in but those who took up support/tanks/healer roles were cosigning themselves to that pit more often than not, as joeDD over there doesnt want to take the next couple weeks taking/gear whm, rdm, brd, pld, or nin to 75 and would rather level another dd

Ilvl made all of the above quicker to get up to speed aside from brd due to the rema expectations. Can still function fine without but 4 song and later HM just became the standard

I think it's an ilevel, new era, 6-man issue more so than it was previously - although it was still there to an extent. The gap between fresh 75 with some AH/Sky gear, and someone on the high end was a lot smaller in comparison to today, and support jobs filled in the majority of the gaps that gear lacked. That plus more alliance content meant everyone didn't need to be geared to the teeth to participate. Then again I was in an LS that didn't suck, and didn't PUG anything outside of EXP, so all of the above is probably skewed lol

I'm going to sound like a broken record and a lot of people are going to roll their eyes and skip this post, but once again I think the issue comes down to all new players skipping straight to the end of the line. On a smaller server maybe that's necessary, but on Asura especially, I think it's just laziness/envy.

Realistically, what a person interested in playing BRD should be doing, IMO, is playing with other lesser-geared players and doing easier content. A person with a meh-geared DPS should be playing DPS with a 3-song BRD, a meh-geared WHM, a non-Idris GEO, and a COR without Rostam or Regal necklace. Together, they can easily clear V0 Odyssey NMs, do pretty well in Odyssey Sheol A and B, do some upstairs bosses in Sortie, maybe E boss in Sortie, handle N or D intense ambu, Sinister Reign, Omen, Vagary, W1/2 Dynamis [D], etc. There's tons of content that a low geared person can do that will help them progress their character and doesn't require you to be geared to the teeth.

Instead, everyone wants to skip straight into the 9 boss Sortie runs and V20/V25 Odyssey bosses and start working on RPing their R30 nyame armor.

The whole point of xi is the grind to better your character, people who skip that are not doing themselves any favors. If they are that way inclined they might as well just go play 14.

SE shouldn't have put so much power into the gear and should've focused on making the players stronger.

Using BRD as an example since I've been playing it for almost 20 years now, Carnwenhan is fine, Ghorn is fine. Both just make you stronger. But it was a mistake to add a additional songs to Daurdabla (and the various 3-song instruments). They should have just made three songs the new normal (maybe Daurdabla only gives one extra song in this scenario which isn't as broken). And it was especially a mistake to make exclusive songs like Honor March and Aria. Make Marsyas give a stronger Honor March as its exclusive attribute. Make Prime give a significantly stronger Aria.

I don't care for Twilight/Crepuscular Cloak or Daybreak either, for what it's worth but at least they're easier to get. I also dislike weaponskills being locked to specific weapons. I think I'm just crabby in my old age.

In days of yore the game was quite a bit different.

For instance, Sushi only came out in roughly mid-late 2004 iirc, so before then your food options were atk, defense, int, and hMP type foods.

This put accuracy gear on top of all other gear, as haste gear wasn't plentiful either, and so party tactics were really steady and stable.

Caps on things were unconfirmed, and there were very silly debates and memes like, "Haste takes time to proc." Leading into Treasures of Aht Urhgan.

This basically put standard mages at the top of the pecking order, and sources of magical haste never stopped being valuable, but the realization of what was what and the effectiveness you could reach with stuff like Madrigal vs. March and such didn't really shore up to top dog until ToAU when the second support was introduced in Corsair. (Though there were fights that already leaned towards it like with how Dynamis Lord had to be handled with a Chainspell Stun zerg(of course I'm pretty sure Dynamis Lord came out after/around Sushi time anyway. I must confess I don't know everything about old XI, as it took me til late 2005/early-mid 06 to get my first 75))

With the advent of Sushi, Corsair, and Bard and a whole lotta monsters that resisted magic outright in ToAU, the game shifted towards being buffed melee centric, and it's never really moved away from that in general since. Mages forever in tears. Though back then, at least, you still wanted dedicated Black Mages for a lot of assassination squad style missions, like sending off the BLM party during Dynamis to time nuke that specific time extensions. Or to setup the stun rotation on stuff like Suzaku. Or to time nuke magic burst stuff like Nidhogg and Aspid.

Bear in mind though that old events for the large part were alliance based content where you'd have 3 parties or more, and you'd also have people show up to wait outside of alliance for people to die, for them to be then swapped into the alliance to carry on the fight. The biggest issue nowadays with content in XI is that it's mostly low man, so you need to optimize a single party, and that means stacking supports or stacking the effect you need most of, usually DPS buffs.

Back then supports were still highly valued, because even just one support could be "rotated" through the alliance, but several could also be rotated, meaning you could use 3 Bards to give double March/Minuet/Madrigal etc. to the whole alliance.

The hazing back then would be that if you leveled Bard or Corsair, you were going to get stuck on Bard or Corsair, and even though you had plenty of damage potential even back then, there were already so many other melees that you were more valuable subbing white mage and contributing to back line healing duties (don't feed TP bro!). Which sort of forever tainted a lot of people's perception of the support jobs until more recent years. Including the people playing them, a lot of the time. Never mind that gearsets were harder to come by to be effective and weaponskill modifiers were quite a bit different. Never mind people's perception about weapons under A- skill rank being gimp, which the supports only have Bs in their best weapons.

The common thing that would happen back then, at least something I witnessed a few times, would be that a career BRD that didn't want to be BRD anymore would go out and De-lvl on purpose to like the 60s so that they couldn't come to event as BRD anymore (one guy I knew actually de-lvled it from 75 to 1). Other dude I knew on COR straight up made a new character and stopped playing the character he leveled COR on.

We did what we needed to get out of that death spiral of NiTro.....

That's not realistic though. Player distribution doesn't really work that way.

You better have followed that up with "Nitenichi? More like Nightingale! Welcome to BRD, bucko" lol

As I always said- I might have been a musician in The Real, but that didn't in any way make me a better FF BRD hehe...

There really just isn't an ecosystem of enough newer/undergeared players to make any of what you're suggesting a viable means of actually playing and enjoying the game right now. I'm sure folks will try to argue or pull some anecdotes out to combat this, but the reality is after a certain amount of time of not being able to group up with other undergeared people, you either resort to paying to skip content to catch up or just quit. I wish it weren't so, but it's just the reality of a 20+yr old niche type of MMO without a constant stream of new players.

IDK if you're saying that there aren't 6 newer players on Asura or that 1/6 players don't want to play WHM or GEO. I think the latter is more likely to be the problem so I'm going to assume that's what you mean.

My answer is: tough titties, play some ***you don't adore. I've got tons of gil, time, and inventory clogged up in jobs that I leveled and geared just because it would help the job flexibility of my teams. If there are 100 new players on Asura and 80 of them want to play nothing but DD, I'm sorry but some of those 80 are going to need to take up PLD, WHM, GEO, BRD, or COR. Meanwhile every one of those 80 is like



ITT: at least 6 people with Asura profiles telling me that there aren't 6 people to group up with.

Edit: I've seen a billion posts on Reddit and pretty much every Asura post has several replies inviting them to linkshells or asking to join their group. Also as I and others have mentioned, you don't need 6 to get started, can go with 3 and multi-box or use trusts and still accomplish a lot of things. I think people are letting perfect be the enemy of the good.

I log in and I play Lvl 99Nickeny/Derp69.

Do they all play at the same time? Do they all have the same goals? Are they all geared for the necessary jobs? Are their lives consistent enough they can dedicated ~1-1.5hrs to do the same content nightly? Are all six people you want to work with?

I ger your point for the most part, but you really do trivialize building and maintaining a static. There could be 100 people and it wouldn't matter unless other factors align.


This is ultimately why I don't think we'll ever see eye to eye on a lot of these things. I appreciate your perspective, but I view this as a way to blow off steam and enjoy myself at the end of the day. If I'm spending an hour a day playing content I don't want to play on a job I don't want to play, then it's not fun.

Other MMOs have built their content with much greater flexibility to work around this. To an extent, I'm willing to deal with it, for instance if I have to come SCH vs Ongo, then fine, it's not my favorite but I can see an end to it. If I have to run a job every night for six months that I hate in content I'm meh about, then that's just not worth it.

It's a game. It is supposed to be fun. If I'm signing up to pay $15 for a second job then something needs to change.

Don't feed tp is forever the slogan of ***. Even when you really shouldn't be. Gotta assert that dominanance and make yourself feel important, otherwise people won't show up to your events and build your weapons for you.

Honestly, I have absolutely no problem doing alliance content with a 3-song, non REMA brd. That would free up my bad-*** regular brd's WAR (or my badass self) and our alliance runs would acheive much more for those that need it, overall.

I'm not really complaining here, though, as the alliance content is truly for the yet unrealized folks (or people moving into new jobs that need cards/rp/etc). I suffer from the burden of knowing the potential of what we could achieve if people were just a little more flexible.

Unironically, this is the best argument for making carry fantasy XI a thing that's come up so far. There aren't a lot of new players, most of the new players do not have the mindset or dedication to farm their way up. If the game is turning into carry fantasy XI by necessity, rather than by design, there's not much that can be done about it.

I don't really think you can change the mindset of american teenagers/80IQ young adults that came over from FFXIV. The amount of people willing to engage with content and grind their way up is limited. If the only way new people can play FFXI is to clear missions, leech odyssey v0/sortie, then quit because they don't have the dedication to make groups for Ody V20+ and got bored of leeching Sortie, then I guess it is what it is.

I don't necessarily think that we're at that point yet, though. You don't need to be wearing sparks gear to group up in a suboptimal group. You can be carried through Odyssey V0 and still be largely underpowered(you get the option of a strong WAR DRK PLD which is very useful for making a coherent group, but R0 sakpata is far from BIS). This is actually a reasonable path to catch up, because you'll still need to farm a lot of other pieces to improve your sets and be poking away at Sortie 10-15k at a time until you get your emp armor. It won't take years, but it isn't a handout.

Another thing to keep in mind, the American mindset isn't the same as the Japanese mindset, and this is still a Japanese game. Try walking around cities on Odin(a primarily japanese server) checking people. A good half are in some degree of progression between unaugmented odyssey gear and maxed out Sortie. There's more +2 sortie gear than +3, which means these people are doing Sortie and they aren't in a 40k+/run group(or haven't been for long). There are people wearing augmented escha gear, ambuscade gear+1. You'll see the same of the Japanese players(and a surprising amount of NA ones) on small servers. The average gear on a player walking around on Asura is miles ahead of any other server, and for the most part, it seems like those small server players are actually willing to engage with content because that's the best path forward when you take away the option of being carried immediately.

This sums up the NA attitude here, perfectly.

there has to come a point in modern XI where you must decide what is more important to you- playing your fav job(s), or getting to participate in content.

Whole *** game knows I love my RNG, doesn't mean I play nothing else.