Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

It's still a very good piece augmented. You'll still wear it with Idris.

Everyone gets so damn caught up in the +Geomancy when it comes to gearing up a GEO, when the two best things about Idris and Bagua Neck+2 are the -PetDT (on idris) and the neck's +duration as well as its amazing "absorbs damage taken".

Who cares how strong that bubble is in potency if it can't take a hit or two.

Well I finally ponied up and transferred my LP character to Bahamut. Hope I can get to playing with my brother and a couple of other folks there.

What time do ya'll play?

What happened that made you and your brother to go in separated roads?

Did you ninja lot his Optical Hat?

I'm stalking you rn but cant find anyone named Vyre

The LP character's name is Calmwind.

I most play in the evenings or late at night, depending on work schedule. EST.

Usually grinding EXP/CP or recording :)

Well, WELCOME TO BAHAMUT!

No, back in the day when we first started playing, you couldn't choose your server. I wound up on Fairy at first, and then Asura when I tried to restart. He wound up on Titan, and he played a ton so we wound up doing our own thing.

Eventually we both got world passes for each other, but had our mains on separate servers still.

At some point he paid to move his main to Asura, but a couple years later lost it in the Salvage Bans.

He restarted, and at about that time I got into a relationship with a woman on Bismarck. Eventually I convinced him and my friends to move there during the Voidwatch era while I was in A-School in the Navy.

Couple years later, XIV came out, and my Ex had dumped me. I stopped playing XI seriously, so my friends all went their own way, my brother included.

I'm not sure how he wound up on Bahamut, but he did. A mutual friend of ours had moved there too. My other friends either quit outright or moved on to XIV.

When I made the LP character, I made him on Odin because my friend Vox is there, and then Creaucent from here was there too. They both helped me a ton. Creau helped me kill KB a lot very early, and I got my Defending Ring with his aid. Vox OHKO'd Kirin and Divine Might for me, as well as all of old Dyna and CoP Dynamis.

However, they're both way more at endgame level than I am. Vox is pretty much always busy, and Creau stops playing to focus on XIV on occasion for months at a time. He went to Ragnarok recently I think to get an Aeonic he won in a raffle from Ejin or something? idk. Vox is busy with her career, and only on to do Odyssey/Sortie with her husband and group. They're all sporting like fully augmented Nyame and Aeonics and stuff. The rest of the week she's dual box'd by her husband's character.

Ultimately I didn't make the character on Bahamut right away because my brother was always doing his own thing too. AH prices were also cheaper, and I wanted to take advantage of that while I was just getting started. Cheaper AH = More value in Sparks/Accolades gil. Now though, I actually want to play with people, and we can probably do Ambu together or something on occasion.

Our mutual friend quit though, and my brother is working on his FFXIV characters again. He's sorta depressed by Matsui stepping down and hearing about maintenance mode/rumors of, "The End." and such.

So in spite of trying to play together again, we may not, again xD

But hey, Jessikah greeted me within like 10 minutes of moving to Bahamut so :o there's that! Idk what I could offer any of you other than company, but I'm there now! Well, I won't be on again until like 11:30EST and only for a few hours because back to work at 7am, but ah well.

I didn't know the Canook was here. Also that is way too early.

I've waved to you while you were AFK before :P

I'm almost always AFK, and also AFK.

Eh less neat than I expected.

Welcome.... We will make sure that you don't live long enough to regret it!

*Ominous thunder*

Its pretty good and I think you'll enjoy it if you liked the first two. I like the movies a lot too, I wanted to collect their 1/6th scale figures but Drax is like 1k now and some of them are not that great in my opinion lol. Now they are doing new figures of the new movie but they are all in the same suit which is lame, I think its said because the actor who plays Drax gained a ton of weight and couldn't do his normal look.

They look really good and detailed, but I prefer their original looks

The draw-distance in Xarcabard was really nice, as were all of the fire effects in the Cloister of Flames.

I bet FFXI could make for a really cool ARPG if done properly.

I expect to be taken to an event where I can get charmed and then WS'd for 99999 within the month!

Just do the Quetzalcoatl DI. That one's always charming folks. >_<

Speaking of this, what's everyone's high scores in this PvPvE arena? Personally I have killed a maximum of seven players in one run. A prouder moment than any Bumba V25 or Aminon kill.

this looks pretty promising. Will this finally be the cure to FFXI? I watched it all thinking it was an RPG, then read the description.
It's an MMO



Also GOTG3 was crap. Or i'm just getting old. Shouted at neighbour from my balcony to get their stupid mut off my lawn.

Saw a few vids of it, looks promising for sure

I saw that. It's not slated for release for a while yet though, so we'll see how it turns out.

What kinda struck me as interesting was that the combat seemed (at least visually) really different between front-line and back-line characters. The front-line looks like it plays like a modern action game with dodge rolls and combos, while the mages and whatnot appear more like a traditional (maybe even tab-targeting) RPG.

it wont work as an mmo, maybe as an online RPG / Channel game like destiny 2 it could.

Wait, that can charm? Must have forgot about that.

Yeah and I hate it for that. Even if I do nothing but white damage and use non-buffing Trusts I seem to always be #1 or #2 on its hate list. So I'm either the one getting charmed or I'm the one the charmed person is going after lol

If I ever find myself fighting it out of necessity, I'll usually set mostly defensive spells, buff myself like crazy, and keep my trigger finger on Sudden Lunge if I ever see someone randomly break formation.

Recently I've met some game devs. people who have worked for ubisoft, riot and even SE.
They know FF but other than their main CEO, they're all from the sports, First person shooter, GTA type of games. their CEO knows Yoshida from back when he was a junior battle lead.
Looking at how much a modern FPS would cost to make from scratch, it's reasonable to say that SE wouldn't need to invest 20-30 Million USD in giving FFXI a MAJOR re-release with everything modernised. They're creating a modern game from scratch for much much less. Its not going to be on the scale of anything like Diabolo4 or FFXIV. but it is a large group of game devs and project managers, creative, animators etc working on it.
the reason upgrading XI would be so much more expensive is because its not on unreal engine 5.

I'm just astonished at how long SE have been milking XI without giving it any serious investment.
What a loss opportunity.

When I went to the SE cafe in Akhibara it was depressing. The merch options were limited and ridiculously overpriced. Something like 30 USD for a tiny FFXIV job stone. the food at the cafe terrible (nothing in tokyo is terrible. it takes a special kind of stupid to be bad in tokyo F&B wise).
It was empty, on a saturday at 7pm. Just me and some boomer goth spanish chick and the staff. The waffle stand outside had a que like 100 meters long. But SE landmark cafe absolutely empty.

Try walking into a meeting with executives explaining you want $10-20m+ to revitalize a 20 year old game platform that current brings in (likely much) less than $1m per year in profit, doesn't appeal in the least bit to modern/younger audiences, and has been phasing out for the last decade. I'll be able to hear the laughter from here. They are also looking at the longer term, 5-10-15 years from now, not just the initial costs, you also have to consider the cost of maintenance, support, and updates that would be required to meet modern expectations for a presumably new audience, because it is realistic to say they aren't gonna do any significant funding for current subscriber counts. You'd then have to convince them that the issue keeping people from subscribing to the current game is all the things you'll be modernizing, which I think is a difficult sell.

The scale of difficulty in creating a FPS compared to a full scale MMO is fairly different, both on the front end and long term. It also underestimates the difficulty and challenges of working with 20 year old legacy code to a modern framework. It would probably be easier to largely start over from the ground up than it would be to revitalize the existing platform.

They have a lot of reasons to keep the game running, they also have a lot of reasons, both business and engineering, to not invest into significant overhauls of the current game. Let's also not forget they explored doing this to some degree and canned the project.

ftfy

-95k active subscriptions. 12$/mo
-Approx USD 13m$/year
-3-5 Employees on FFXI, assumed annual salary of USD 200K/employee per year (generous)
-Labour = 1/13th cost/revenue
- Other costs: servers assume USD 1mil USD/year (exuberant)

If this was presented to me in an investment memorandum within the context of :
1. The company has invested *** all into the development
2. The company has invested *** all into marketing
3. 20-year track record of success
4. SE's 2dnd most profitable title, was their most profitable up until FFXIV 2019 ShB release
I would be interested in understanding more. I've invested in weaker/riskier cases.
But what would stop me from investing is the actual management team in SE.
I dont know how their board lets them get away with this ***. People must be asleep

Agree on the legacy issues of the tech/coding etc
But the I.P and customer base is the real selling point for FFXI-2. Also platformers, RPGs, and MMO's have become considerably cheaper and easier to make. I'm not saying they're cheap. But FFXI-2 wouldn't need to be anything on the scale of Diablo4 or FFXVI. Not to mention the fact that SE can and has re-used/recycled existing assets.
I dont know, there aren't too many games that are
1. 21+year old and still earning
2.A niche like FF and FFXI where you have both FF loyalists and FFXI loyalists (any FF fan is going to try FFXI-2, as is any FFXI fan.)
It's why Sony is paying a pretty a good premium to keep FFXVI PS5 exlusive. Its a major differentiator in the console wars.