New HTBF Shinryu 2.0

Also, you've forgot to mention how S.E was dragging out the release of content from the WOTG expansion for 2-3 years.

Probably because they sent most of their staff to 14..

The assumption that operating cost for ffxi is low always cracks me up. SE has proven time and time again they can literally do nothing right when it comes to this game but the assumption they run a tight ship for ffxi with effective operating costs cracks me up.

But I digress. None of us can truly know how much it actually makes since books are pretty deceiving. We can derive from their earnings and the playerbase though that even if it is 100% profit it's a fraction of a percent of their overall profit. That is fact. It is likely profitable. It could likely be even more profitable with minimal effort, but in the grand scheme you're focused on your big sellers not your .5% product. It is not a golden goose or cash cow. Sorry.

They have made no secret they initially intended for us all to move to 14, most of us simply don't like the new one though since it's based on a totally different game (wow instead of everquest). I think they finally realized it's never going to actually happen years ago, and so they do begrudgingly update 11 to keep us as customers.

Abyssea was literally created to kill ff11 over a 3-4 year period, they put everything on fast forward. The only time I quit ffxi for a long while was 2-3 years after Abyssea, when I literally capped out everything. I had never even contemplated it before that.

They stated that 14 was started because the 11 developers were considering an engine and dev kit upgrade and saw it would cost so much, they just decided to make a whole new game for the 11 playerbase to migrate to instead. It was literally supposed to be ff11 mk2.

The problem is, they went all george lucas and got so wrapped up in the exciting project of making a new game they forgot it was supposed to be for the 11 players. What they ended up making was something fun for them to create and not a good game or a game for the target audience.

This is the real reason Tanaka was fired, not just because the game was garbage but because he totally misread the 11 player-base and we didn't want to move to some other game.

I think ultimately this is the best timeline I suppose, cause we still get 11 in its original form and not some fortnite lite nonsense (all be it with a lesser budget) and the people that like 14 as it is now get to play that too.

Personally I don't have an issue with how 11 is right now, just keep adding stuff as they are and I'll keep paying them. I do have some big expectations for the 20th though, I'm expecting them to do what they did with rhaps and add some new zones and stuff. If they don't do that, I don't get why they are hyping it up so much.

Give a quoted citation please, because that makes zero sense. Abyssea KEPT subscribers up for a long time, with the lull in content afterwards being what caused some people to leave. Any player loss was because they were too slow to follow up after Abyssea and underestimated how long stuff like Empyrean weapons would keep the hardcore occupied, not because they were trying to slowly kill the game.

The year prior to Abyssea, I saw a lot of people take sabbaticals or just quit due to fatigue. They didn't care for what little was added to the game during that time frame. It was a pretty slow year. If you had achieved a lot in the game for your favorite jobs, there wasn't a lot to do unless you felt like taking up another.

I think there was a lot of uncertainty on Abyssea's release. By the time the 3rd Abyssea addon released, things definitely felt a lot busier on the server I was on. Public shouts were busy, people were moving. This activity continued straight through till a bit after Seeker's launch.

Yep this lines up with my experience too. Abyssea felt like the final nail in the coffin to keep people gone for good, but Wings of the Goddess was slowly eroding the player base over time also. Most of the content was not super popular, almost all of the good 75 cap content is ToAU to be honest. Myself and most of the people I know took long breaks during WoTG out of boredom and dislike of how the game was headed.

What he described is the opposite of it being the final nail in the coffin, but rather that Abyssea made his server a lot more populated than it had been before it was released.

Ah yeah I misread that, I definitely felt like Abyssea killed the game for a huge swath of the playerbase. For sure people came back on the launch as they do any expansion launch from their WoTG slumps, but quickly learned that it was no longer the same type of game that FFXI had been and quit for good that time.

The original release of 14 may have been dumpster fire alpha software, but it had a lot more in common with 11 than ARR did. The skill system was even more freeform than XI, balance didn't exist, combat was super grindy, gear had minimal stats... It could have been a worthwhile successor, but they rushed it out the door with poorly designed zones and zero story content beyond the intro sequence.

Stuff like leveling conjurer by pulling groups and cure tanking while they killed themselves on THM spikes was fun, but there wasn't any content beyond making numbers go up.

how did a shinryu killing thread evolve into how abyssea killed the game arguement

Every thread gets into dumb arguments after like page 9.

Original XIV had mostly technical issues, which are well explained in detail by that 3 parts very long Video on Youtube financed on kickstarter.

The server infrastructure had even more issues than FFXI. It's hard to explain, just watch the video and it's explained pretty well.


It also had a several lack of game content, and of... game plans? Basically we could say the game was launched like 6 months too early, it needed waaay more work before launch.

Had it been launched in a better form my idea is that FFXI would no longer exist now, and FFXIV would be a much smaller, niche game compared to the MMO wartank it is nowadays.
It would've been way more similar to FFXI though.

As incomplete, imperfect, different and full of issues as original FFXIV was, you could feel sort of a "legacy" between that mess and FFXI. It was a thin line, but it was undoubtely there, imho.

Did some fights last night, got allot of nothing. just the accessories.

havent gotten a single armor/weapon drop yet, and it feels like my group is starting to burnout of it already.

Yup.
People trying to get in hasn't changed. Spend more time farming merits than the fight now.

no wait to enter on my server luckily.

Fight is two minutes after buffs. Maybe less. Zone is actually rather empty at certain times, like nobody in zone for five minutes, then 40 spamming the door again. Refill merits another ten minutes. Such a dumb cycle. Everyone on the same schedule

Really not something to grind all at once as bad as the armor and weapons drops are. I'm getting Gyve Doublet level annoyance with these drop rates. Do a few per night and move on.

Looking this my thought is: how can a suposed to be a QoL change suddenly just made this worse for the players without rewarding close to no benefit to them?

This is near the sadism lv “oh, hey they are having lots of issue to do the content”.

“Ok, lets make it worse,”

There's a benefit, but most people haven't done enough runs to see it.

I've personally had a much easier time getting into the battlefield after the update, as well.

Yeah I've hopped right in without an issue. Maybe a 1-2 minute wait. Before the update I would get the prompt to enter and be kicked out most of the time from all the spammers.

It's basically updated Sinister Reign with the solo entry. "Better" because you can pick your boss. "Not better" because the drop rate is atrocious. So is it really better? Just a bit different here:

Less time spent on entry, less overall time spent on farming desired items.

Vs

More times spent farming merits. Larger sting if you lose (-30 merits hurts). More times you have to group up to dump merits (can't do 7 fights in a row like previous HTBF).


Overall it's better to not have to waste as much time trying to enter the fight, so the change is an improvement even if you don't see the desired drops immediately. I would have loved an option in Omen that allowed me to get a body twice as fast for 2-3x canteen uses, even if it meant I couldn't do Omen as frequently.

I got all my omen bodies from aman trove and have only seen 2 ever drop in omen... I guess the solution is just add the new drops to aman trove...

That was my next thought, but then again I really hate when good items are locked behind completely random events. Like Bonanza weapons. So I will take grindy if the alternative is AMAN trove (there is no limit on merits, so technically you can farm Shinryu/Lilith/Odin/Alexander/Cait Sith at your own pace).

Though, if they do add more things to trove, the cost of orbs goes up on the black market, so you can make some money off of it regardless.

AMAN seems stagnant for a long time already.

Anyone know why Pyric Bulwark wears off instantly in Shinryu HTBF?




Did they mess up and block the effect from Temp items like Fanatic's Drink and it indirectly affected Bulwark? This was while buffing before the fight, not during.

Yeah looks like it.

It's minor and I never use the spell for the most part, but I submitted a bug report for it anyways.