Dev Tracker - Discussion

Maybe we finally get the 50 DT ring

what's that, it's "In Besieged"

oh okay

Give them time. As soon as they figure out how to add a new series of trusts and tie them to loot crate purchases...

Let's be real, a 50 DT ring that worked in all content would be busted and would go in nearly every single set for every single job. It would greatly diminish any effort necessary to build a balanced set. It would be a huge crutch for those who have it and a holy grail for those who don't. We don't need that kind of simplicity in this game.

I agree with every part of this post :P

Maybe if it was 2012.

Every set now already has 30DT in it. On already BIS gear.

It's not as ridiculous as it would seem to just give it out full time. (they wouldn't, still)

For the 5% of the time you need full turtle, sure, lovely. Unnecessary 95% for losing SB or QA ring slot etct

I was thinking about your post and how to make Limbus weapons worthwhile.

TP Bonus off hands and a 2hand grip that smashes Utu would have a large portion of the players back in Limbus. Doesn't make the event any better but the carrot could be a must have.

I hope I'm wrong and can continue avoiding Limbus but it would be a smart content pushing move.

Overcapping -DT is super common now. It's not even an issue to hit 50 in most sets, even casting ones. They recently added an all-jobs body piece with -20DT, a mask with -10DT, and a ring with -10 DT that's fairly easy to obtain. It's not even OP anymore, because any of your best armor pieces are going to have some -DT on it anyways, and you're capped after a point. The problem is, if they do come out with something like that, it's going to be another grind you're going to hate and foam at the mouth after, when it's really nothing amazingly superior to what you already can accomplish. I wouldn't put it past them to make a 100,000 Imperial Standing Accolade ring that gives -50DT, so that you're grinding Besieged for the rest of your life.

Walmart turban reskins

xi has lots of subtle pay to win elements in it, which was acceptable when matsui was trying to update the game but far less today

Such as?

Yeah 50DT isn't anything special, it's just kind of the norm now with all the PDT/MDT/DT thrown around. It's now about having Def/MDB/MEVA/HP to go with that DT.

I'm probably reading too much into it, but they no longer seem to be referring to this as the final besieged update.

Only thing that comes to mind is add-on expansions which had some potentially better gear that what was available + the other augment gear that mighta also fit that mold if you got lucky enough. Along with that was some other codes from RL events or physical merch like the coat that let you warp to nashmau. Can't say i'd call them accepted though

If anything id imagine p2w content would more accepted today considering everything else out there(pls no)

$1 per wardrobe, while also spamming you with gear and filling up your wardrobes.

Free play that locks gear in previously used wardrobes unless you pay up.

My own kid was haranguing me about p2w when he saw me logging to a succession of lvl 1 mules. Login pts, daily tally/gobbiebox, aman trove, mog gardens... these are all p2w systems. I have more +2 earrings than I would've. I have more gil than I would've. Some days I don't even have time to play, just quickly log to mules to collect points - I like having that option, but it's still p2w.

And the worst part is that money isn't coming back to 11 it's going into some crypto blockchain NFT horsehit (if they're still stupid enough to be doing that)

They're so slow on their trend chasing I don't even know if that's still coming or not.

(***I'm behind, Symbiogensis their NFT game released and already closed, no one posted about it)

It's even more insidious than this. I exposed this almost 9 years ago, how the Free to Play campaign rules don't explicitly say your wardrobe gear is locked and inaccessible. It might seem obvious, but it's intentionally omitted. A simple statement mentioning that would be helpful and, honestly, kind of up front and moral. The fact that a player returns to the game without any knowledge of this, only to be disappointed when you can't use 95% of your gear, and the only way to access the wardrobe is to pay for basic service (because you can't reactivate wardrobes absent of the basic service), is somewhat deceptive marketing. It may not be directly p2w, but this is one area where you are almost conned into paying to return to the game. It was even more evident when they gave out Bonanza weapons last year and people wanted to return to try them out.

(This is your yearly reminder, to take everything out of your paid wardrobes the moment you unsub)

I think the wardrobe complaint is way overblown.

Wardrobe #1-2 remain free to all, during free play campaigns or otherwise.

Most casual players don't even use paid wardrobes (#3-8), that's really more for the more hardcore crowd. So, no big impact on the casual audience returning for free play campaigns.

For the people who cared enough to pay additional money for the additional wardrobes (generally people who are a bit more into the game and more likely to understand the nuances), yeah I guess SE could give a better warning that there is no free play access to the paid wardrobes. But come on, to deal with this issue (that has been widely reported on for years), you can just... move vital gear from Wardrobes 3-8 before you cancel service. Or even if you forget, it's not like it is permanently locked away. If it's that important to you to get all your gear that you stashed there, pay the monthly subscription fee ONE TIME and you can access the wardrobes and move stuff and this won't happen to you any more in the future.

SE is under no obligation to provide occasional free logins, much less for every paid subscription option. It's nice that they do a free login campaign, and probably a smart business move. But why would you think they'd just jump to giving the premium experience with all paid optional add-ons? Like, Hulu gives a free trial and other streamers like Disney+ used to... and the trial is, unsurprisingly, the subscription with ads - not the full bells and whistles experience with no ads and all the bonuses (i.e., the equivalent to the difference between a base FFXI subscription to which SE allows free access, versus the one with add-on wardrobes). Hell, it's nice enough that SE does give access to ALL same account characters for free logins (all previously existing mules), and not just the primary character on the account. And they even time it now so Bonanza marble sales coincide with free login campaigns, allowing you to play the Bonanza on deactivated mules if you so wish.


Fk yeah, I want my Great Value Turban (Red)! Very sad if whatever effect it has is only active in Besieged. Very happy if it turns out I didn't waste countless hours in or waiting for Besieged (mostly waiting for!) to get Imperial Standing Accolades. At least the Exemplar Points are a nice little bonus, and hopefully now a larger one at lv13.

P.S. - that's the taru RSE body (Wonder Kaftan) in the image from the update notes showing the turban reskins.

The RSE sets have 4 pieces and no head.

Hopefully the reason for including the RSE body here is to hint at the "more information to come" on RSE upgrades, as mentioned in the Strange Happenings in Vana'diel section of the update notes, and not an indication that new Besieged armor rewards are only on the level of the RSE+1.

That being said, it wouldn't be bad if those are SOME of the possible rewards, since that's actually pretty nice stepping stone gear for players working their way toward stuff like Odyssey and maxed out AF/Relic/Empy pieces. I'd just be pleased if we get something of true endgame quality to spend ISAs on.

Doesa anybody knows who mantaines the whereisdi site? I think it's fed through information coming from players on the various servers who are using a related addon, right?

Could it be possible to add other stuff to the info that gets send to the website? I'd love incoming besieged. Since the release of the content I managed to catch it online (and when I'm not inside instanced content) only a few times sadly.
Having that info displayed on the website might not change much but it would be helpful imho!

What do you mean you "guess SE could give a better warning"? They literally don't mention it at all, anywhere.

The goal of a free login isn't just to offer you a free login so you can play the game for a week and move on. It's to get you re-interested in the game to resubscribe. The players who are most likely to benefit from a free login campaign are your most dedicated customers who have invested years into the game but stopped; they return for a bit, enjoy it enough, and then resubscribe. The people who have put years into the game are your preferential customers, and it costs nothing for SE to offer free campaigns because the service is literally virtual and not tangible. They pay nothing and get the benefit of customer re-acquisition for free. SE benefits 100% from free logins.

Your Hulu analogy is not following the point I'm making either (it's actually bad because free trial-ad version of Hulu gives more eyes on advertisements, which benefits those business; they win doubly). I'm not even asking for them to change anything about how the wardrobes work during free campaigns, but that they should simply state that the free campaign ONLY applies to basic service, and paid extension services (i.e. wardrobes) are excluded from the service. A simple message would be just basic courtesy for your most prized returnees. The fact that they omit that information leads to disappointment by returnees, who otherwise would actually enjoy the game when it's free (which is what I believe SE wants you to do), but they really cannot. They flubbed the execution so bad that it impacts the customers SE is specifically intending to target the most (players who have paid for wardrobes, resub = more money for SE). The other issue is that in order to access wardrobes, you need to re-sub basic service PLUS the wardrobes, invalidating a returnee's free play. It's not implemented with your preferential customers in mind.

The problem with "Just move your gear out of bags 3-8" is you have to actually KNOW this beforehand, it's latent knowledge; most players don't read these forums, and it's not posted anywhere in the official emails or campaign web pages. They're buried in pages they would never find.

Fine, they could give "a" warning. That people still wouldn't read and won't truly understand until it affects them.

I don't think SE wants to do that because it just makes things sound more complicated and confusing. Most players (I would imagine a very large majority of inactive accounts) do not pay for Wardrobes #3-8, so I can see a rationale that going into detail about this more esoteric thing that only affects a small part of the population could cause more confusion among the masses than it helps.



As someone who works for a SaaS company, hosting capacity does not cost nothing! Especially in 2026! Is the vendor storage cost for additional wardrobe capacity a major expense? Not for one character. But it absolutely adds up if they're adding wardrobes to every single FFXI account ever created (which is who gets to log in on the free play campaigns). No f'ing way a game that is already operating on a shoestring budget will do that, and it makes total rational sense for SE to behave this way.

And there's likely no practical way on the entitlement/authentication side to distinguish between people who once paid for an add-on wardrobe or who have items in there now, versus people who never even used a wardrobe (but who would cost SE money to just flip the Wardrobe #3-8 switch on for everyone).


OK sure, they should. But they don't, and I don't think that's really having a major impact on anything. People either figure it out after experiencing it once, see warnings from people like you posting about it, or they never notice.

How many people do you really think are like "I am considering paying a minimum of $14.95 per month to resub to FFXI with Wardrobe #3", but I got to log in for free once and I didn't have ALL features of the game I did when I paid full price. So I guess I'm gonna be mad and not resub. I imagine that's... a single digit number of people, if that.

Where are you drawing this assumption from?


I still never said they should flip the wardrobes on for previously paid people, but I don't know how you are saying there's no way they can distinguish which players have had paid wardrobes in the past. Your SE Account Management literally logs that information for you, the same as your basic service. If you cancel your basic service, you get offered a free campaign. If your basic service expires (you don't pay), your character is not eligible for a return. This means there is a validation against your account to see if you cancelled vs expired. They can add an additional validation to check for if you had wardrobes active at the time of your cancellation (they are logged right under your basic service)



If it convinces people to otherwise pay for something (even if just once) they had assumed was free because it was unclear how the operation worked, it's an impact. Money earned is higher than it otherwise would have been.

It's manual player input vs addon, but check out https://besiege.info/cgi-bin/stat.cgi

Basic logic, and talking to a lot of more casual FFXI players. I don't know if I've ever even heard of a casual player spending $2 a month on wardrobe 3. That's squarely in the realm of the kind of player who talks about FFXI in places like this, keeps up with endgame events, etc. Which is, and I know it's hard for people here to believe, the small minority of total players.

SE aren't stupid. They've been running a paid subscription MMO for two and a half decades, with free login campaigns for much of that time. They probably know a little bit about what they're doing.

I agree with this but think it disproves your earlier point. They know they're holding gear hostage in those wardrobes during the free-to-play periods. I don't think they expect folks to dive head first back into serious endgame content during free-to-play periods, maybe just visit with friends or do seasonal events or whatever. So they likely see it as "if you wanna do serious stuff, pay up."

I also agree the free trial of services like netflix and hulu probably aren't great analogies because you're starting those accounts fresh. Maybe a free trial of amazon prime, where it remembers your watch history could be more appropriate. If amazon gave you a free trial but prevented you from watching certain things it knows you'd like until you pay up, that'd be a pretty decent analogy, I think.

They had lots of ways to address the wardrobe cost. They could've made it a heroism deed reward when you reach some threshold - by being subbed for so long, you've paid for the wardrobe(s). Or maybe total earned login points over time. They could've unlocked a wardrobe for every year you've been subscribed - so those who've stuck around the longest, through thick and thin, get rewarded for it.

But...

Make wardrobes free and instead make us subscribe to make them load faster. I'll pay $6/month so I can stop waiting at the start of sortie for my inventory to load enough to let me warp

Does gearswap not bypass that limitation? I have seen equipviewer show my swaps from wardrobe stuff the moment I cast when zoning in. Think that's an equipsets limitation?

Why would they do that? The people who have stuck around the longest to accumulate all that gear or are willing to jump through in-game hoops are the exact people who are going to be most willing to pay the $2 fee. Giving those people perks for free that they are willing to pay for doesn't sound like smart business.

SE hasn't raised the base subscription price of this game in over two decades. That's a small miracle, so to me I view the wardrobe costs as just the price of the game going up over time like every other subscription, and the way I vote with my wallet that I'd like FFXI to continue operating.

I think it's a pretty smart, elegant, and fair solution for them to get some additional money from the players who use the game the most, and who can best justify the additional expense, while keeping the base price low to be more appealing to the LARGE amount of more casual players.

I mean I guess it depends on your definition of average player.

If SE is trying to appeal to the "average" player and that average player has the 2 base wardrobes, no mules on the same account, no $1 mules for extra aman chances or even just storage.

That average player will log in during free play with their 2 wardrobes, do one bcnm during campaign and fill up their inventory, drop/exchange it off to make space, log off and not play again until next free play.

Stands to reason SE doesn't make money off the average player during free play, and are actively trying to appeal to the 1% whales to spend more money.

Which is fine really, but let's not pretend it is to appeal to the average player. Average Joe doesn't have $15 a month worth of +2 earring gacha mules.