New HTBF Shinryu 2.0

I didn't notice any difficulty difference.

I read it was around 800k

They stated in an interview that they basically playtest the game solo, so this leaves a wide area of issues that can occur that they're not aware of. Frankly, I'm shocked the biggest obvious *** I can remember were probably still Sneak Attack from the front and Healing magic doing 99k damage to undead. It's amazing there haven't been worse bugs exposed on day one of patches. Some bugs will no doubt occur and you can't blame them for not being able to test the full run of the game from all angles. The game is massive with tons of systems at this point.

The only thing I harbor real resentment over is the neglect they've shown their cash cow. While they waste money left and right elsewhere (allowing Nomura to mismanage projects repeatedly for years at a time for one), XI and its playerbase have treated them very well. Square basically stopped reinvesting in it on a larger scale 5 years ago and we get the fruits of a very few employees' labor, including whatever random guy they pull from XIV for a day for a small task here and there. And it definitely doesn't feel like that happens very often.

Let us be honest: holy magic should do way more damage. (I know it isn't healing, just sayin').

FTFY

But on a serious note, I can believe they playtest/QA themselves. But we are also talking about developers leaning on the older side who most likely can't keep up with the shenanigans the playerbase can think up of outside of their design ideas.

I only did 3 fights last night after the maintenance but the battle didn’t feel too much different than before. The only odd thing I observed was certain enspells not performing as well as others for no apparent reason. I’ve been soloing VD for the past couple weeks and never observed this occurrence until last night. Aside from that caveat, the difficulty felt about the same as well as the enemies HP.

My experience with loot hasn’t changed sadly, still getting the same 3 accessory drops.

Updated the drop rate of armor/weapon from 1% to 2%.

I think internally they really really REALLY wanted it to die after Rhapsody and for the entire playerbase to move to 14, but they're too scared of 11 players simply not moving to 14 so they won't pull the plug. The cash cow still produces the cash.

Actually I think they wanted it to die after 14 launched, but instead 14 had to go and die because of that entire launch debacle.

Friend has being doing d solo on rdm... said everything feels the same...

Ill be trying tonight the same way... felt comfy as long as you bring 4 stacks of meds and holy waters

Did a few on VD and didn't think it was really any different.

This is something I honestly believe as well. I've had zero desire to even play 14 after so many years of being on XI. I'd already decided this would be the last MMO I would ever play.

And yeah I've also felt a ton of neglect from the devs in this game in the insulting way they've just dumped a ton of content they could have easily added more to for people to enjoy.

Case in point Trials of the Magians was really great from a casual player's point of view. The fact it's now only really used for Relic, Mythic, Emp trials for the most part is saddening.

So many people I knew spent hours/weeks building a ton of elemental staves only to have them all made into ***once item level became a thing. They could have easily created more trials to allow you to make these items comparable to current content but they just dumped it to the wayside.

I like monstrosity also as it was something unique and fun but hey, nobody really does it anymore either. Meebles was cool, MMM was neat. Limbus was a fun group event as well.

While I'm mostly OK with how ffxi is now, I really hate how they constantly dump a ton of content they obviously put time into only to make doing it pointless cuz yeah, gear progression is a thing.

If anything, they should've tripled the drop SLOTS, not RATES.

Increasing the RATES across a pool of available lot will yield, no change.

That's if I am interpreting their "updates" correctly.

Anyone else observing a shift in his elemental weakness throughout the fight? I am noticing huge variances with my enspell damage. Unsure if it's weird resist and/or O-Sash procs, or if he is shifting his weakness subtlety throughout the fight.

Cycling enspells to get optimal damage has greatly sped up my clear times, I cannot find a pattern to it but it seems that one element seems to randomly do double the damage of the other five.

Maybe I am just in my head from the madness of grinding this over and over without a good drop but wanted to put it out there in case others are observing this too.

He takes half damage when wings aren't up, and full damage when they are. That's probably what you're seeing.

100% certain they've tried to kill the game in 3 separate occasions:
1. Release of Abyssea. (Lifting of level cap from 75 to 99)
2. Release of Adoulin. (Introduction of Item Level 100+)
3. Release of Rhapsodies. (The infamous "Maintenance Mode" quote)

I mean they've been quoted as saying the higher ups are surprised the game even still continues to make money year after year. Which is why they kept getting 1 year extensions on the budget...

cash cow is pretty generous, ffxi is cash positive because of low resources.

none of you have likely worked at large companies. cash positive departments get cut all the time if there are better investments.

if FFXI makes a return of 2% a year but ff20 would make a return of 10% a year with the same resources allocated to it there would be a strong business case to cut ffxi.

this happens all the *** time, especially at big companies.

https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/news/pdf/21q4earnings.pdf

they are publicly traded, this information is freely available.

ffxi likely makes less than .1% of their profit. it's not even on the map. sorry

Shows you have no idea and that is how their projects work...

Apologies for derailing further. I don't think anyone is genuinely saying XI is a still a cashcow (perhaps in a hyperbolic fashion, but anyway...), but loathe are we to forget XI was literally paying for itself and XIV [1.0] when XIV imploded on itself and went F2P for an entire year. (Kinda hard to forget the beginning cutscene of XIV 2.0 is of Bahamut rising to the sky and destroying everything just so that you player can have a "fresh start."

Ive worked in finance for 3 different companies in the top 30 of the Fortune 500 thanks. But this statement is mostly true except the return on FFXI at this point is probably significantly higher than the resources used on a yearly basis. It’s likely the most profitable from a yearly ROI perspective but on a straight monetary basis as noted it’s really low. Even still if it’s exceeding the companies hurdle rate it will continue to go for a very long time.

I am also of the opinion that they “thought” the game was going to die with the conclusion of RoV alongside the end of PS2 support. Instead they entered a period of stabilization where the population/revenue landed at a lower plateau but then just paused so to speak. Sure we go up and down a bit but more or less we have seen very little change over the last few years and as such the game will continue until some Significant event changes that or other outside factors (like the retirement of certain people). This is the part that surprised them. They assumed a normal bell curve for the games life but it turns out that back tail was much higher than expected. I’m almost positive they even talked about this once.

FFXI is the golden goose that keeps on giving. It doesn't matter how low the growth may or may not be each year. It can probably survive at least full two years of consolidating servers and no new content should they decide to slow things down even more, still printing easy money. I'm prepared for the last year or two to be just that. Maybe Billy the janitor will know just enough to toggle campaigns for us.

The game's been an impressive return on their investment. I laugh at tsm's comment. SE squandered the generous returns on other pursuits.

Your dad works for SE too ? Cool.

yeah, I'm sure they tried to kill their game immediately after releasing an expansion

lol

They tried to kill FFXI but you damn kids won't quit. How many shiny weapons do you need to do recycled content.

Let's be honest all they really do is change out ambu once a month. Sure they occasionally do things like Odyssey. But most months it is the bare minimum effort.

Curious way to "kill" the game considering how many people abyssea alone brought back.

This is also a numbered FF game. Look at rhe lengths they went to for XIV, also the company is not purely profit based and numbers. They have artistic ambitions otherwise they would simply churn out gen Z garbage like fortnites and amoongus type games to copy the most profitable stuff. Instead they have done stuff like remaster obscure games like chocobos dungeon and crystal chronicles etc.

To bring the thread back to its actual purpose...

Got cloak on 18th VD win since update. Seems drop rates are better... still not great.

Using a thf??

TH4 rdm solo

I want Billy The SquareEnix Janitor to be the new [GM]Dave.

Billy The SquareEnix Janitor was the person that created Shinryu HTBF.