How Could SE Realistically Improve Modern FFXI?

The common complaints I see for modern FFXI is Sortie and LFG for Odyssey.
I'm not familiar enough with current endgame to say much about Odyssey, but I do have some ideas about Sortie.

The fact that Gallimaufry only comes from Sortie rather than being able to buy it from the AH or earn it in other content seems like a big issue. I think making Gallimaufry and the other Sortie currencies earnable through other content would go a long way towards helping the Sortie burn-out. There are even some mostly defuncted content they could recycle/rebalance to reward it, like the Sea NMs, Voidwalker, and Campaign. They wouldn't need to change much, it might even be easier than what they're doing for Besieged.

What are your thoughts?

As far as improving, it's just a matter of constant addition. Onward and upward. Smoothbrain want shiney show other smoothbrain. Moar bigger number. You can do that forever, it doesn't matter how good or bad or how much they complain about it, they will do it.

As far as your actual post, their goal is retention and duration. Not satisfaction. An addict will never be happy, only compelled to their addiction. Making it better/faster/easier/more available is counterintuitive. Burn out is the goal. Because addicts don't burn out. They drag themselves through it hating life but doing it anyway, not by choice.

See, a modern (any) game has to obey the 4 pillars, keep everyone happy in their exploration, collecting, killing etc. But a 20 year old game only has to compel the lifers that're still there.

While I don't necessarily agree with Eiryl, the problem is that XI players will tend towards the most optimal use of their time, even if it's less fun.

I think that's actually why the developers tend to keep most currencies in a vacuum. Why would I for example spam Salvage for a paltry ~60 or so Alexandrite after a 30-minute climb when I could do three runs of V1VD Ambuscade and walk away with enough Hallmarks and Gallantry to buy 2,000 Alexandrite? And then continue doing so, buying and selling other items to simply purchase more Alexandrite from other players.

At best, introducing Gallimaufry to older content might mean players who want to grind it can do so beyond their daily limits. If the Gallimaufry earned from other sources is still less than the amount earned from Sortie, you've changed nothing, because players will still do Sortie every day, and then turn to grinding this other content in between runs. If it's more, then you've eliminated Sortie as an event as players flock exclusively to spam that instead.

This is off topic. I do find it interesting though. SE isn't optimizing for retention and duration, it just seems that they seem to be developing FFXI as a product rather than service. The gameplay loop of Sortie isn't that bad if you're working on other REMAs along with it. But if all you really have left to do for any given job is Sortie, that gameplay loop isn't carried enough to be satisfying.

Like say though, this is an entirely different conversation.

The game is fine as it is.

Only issue is the fact that you have to choose between either empy armor upgrades or making primes. That they need to resolve by allowing trading of sapphires/stones for gallimuffins.

There is no way they will make galli obtainable in other content. How will you do dailies then.

I think a lot of people will be happy if they successfully revamp several older events AND keep everything running smoothly with QoL improvements(the servers not dying or getting worse when they transition them most importantly). If we get a new new endgame every 3-5 years then it will keep most of the dedicated crowd with the least budget that SE can get away with.

The problem everyone has is that none of that is now. Too many people expected something big for 20 and didn't get it. At 22 we get the results of what looks like only 2 devs working to keep this thing going. There is only so much they can do. When they cut the budget for this game, they made sure that people that really like it were trapped and there was no alternative. I don't think the devs are going to get their budget back and I expect that they will get better at redoing older content. But we still have to wait for it which feels icky when we pay a monthly sub and why many people put this game down only to pick it back up when there is something to do/boredom wins again.

Odyssey is getting a segment boost so long as we even remotely keep this pace, 2m already is pretty darn amazing even if you factor the non-dailies probably won't refresh. I wouldn't expect more improvements to odyssey and as odyssey + sortie are the current gear goals, it's unlikely they will soften them anymore unless they are attempting to increase the general ilvl of future content(no reason to do this). Sortie won't get improvements for years. It's designed in a way to give you significant power boosts in Empy +2 and significantly less efficient power boosts vs time spent for +3/Primes/+2 earring chasing. That's intentional design, they wanted it that way, they needed time and they got it by proving that we'd grind it out like we always will.

I understand your general idea is what can be done, but I think the answer is they are already doing it the best they can with resources they have and how they are allowed to work inside the current work culture of their company.

This is a really good point. What would you think if they introduced more RoE Peculiar foe objectives for Absolute Virtue and Yilbegan. After rebalancing their respective NM systems?

AV and Yilbegan would then drop 2 additional Voracious Psyches, along with additional gallimaufry beyond the cap. The benefit to this would be that Prime Weapons could be made a month or two faster, and people aren't ripped away from Sortie.

gonna throw out a realistic one here as most of these will be farfetched

they need to start creating longer form content or releasing content that has sellables associated with it.

no one should be forced to go back to 8 year old content if they want to try and make gil. gil is still largely sought after by the playerbase.

yes. i am aware ody seg farming gives gil for completion, this is lazy and horrible game design to inject gil randomly.

see omen: moonbow stones/corals
see dynamis-d: s. astrals/voidwear etc
see HNMs: craftable gear and sometimes straight up tradeable gear.

ody has nothing really of concrete value
sortie has nothing

if you want people to want to do content give them a monetary value item even at a low % drop rate, or craftable mats, to do the content so that it is more repeatable by people who have capped farming said content.

craftable items are great in ffxi for two reasons:

1. they provide an entry level way for people catching up to buy good gear
2. they provide a way for seasoned players to get gil to fund REMAs or whatever else.

really don't want to hear some *** about how this empowers RMT. if you make bad game design decisions specifically to try and thwart RMT you should just shut the game down

These are not equivalent. One pumps gil directly into the playerbase, the other needs to be traded for gil the player base already has.

With inflation holding at a slight increase, I don't see an issue with how much gil is added.

This is great. Give players additional bonuses for the content they're already doing.


The reason I'm talking about getting older content updated is because almost all of the development work for that content is already done, and players have no reason to engage with it. They might as well recycle it since they don't have the man power to develop new forms of rewarding gameplay systems from scratch. Re-tuning old HNMs and making them reward Gallimaufry and Voracious Psyches isn't mutually exclusive with what you're talking about too, so it wouldn't hurt.

They just revamped the servers for at least another 5 years, I'd just like to see some changes implemented over that time.

You're exactly right though. The build up to the 20th anniversary and then the "Psyche! You've already got it all!" on the part of the devs seemed to have tore chunks out of the FFXI playerbase.

I consider myself a FFXI normie. 1 account, I play on controller and don't use crazy amount of automation (I laugh when I get "Please update your lua file" or something when I play cor)

FFxi isn't engaging anymore. I was gearing my SAM and was working super duper hard on making my SAM pimp. But then Prime Weapons came out and we found out we need to be a FOMO Addicted to get it in 6 months, so the jobs I spent years gearing now needed 38 months to get all weapons for the jobs I enjoy playing.

It seems they embraced the bot/time sink culture and have no plans to steer it back to allow players to actively grind on times that work for them instead of expecting me to log in and play for 2 hours every damn day with the requirement of 5 other humans to assist me or a crazy amount of automation that I don't like and really don't want to do.

I don't see them doing this. People that have multiple stacks of sapphires/starstones are going to immediately gain a ton of galli depending on the conversion ratio.

I can see them doing something like "10k + a sapphire, or 5 sapphires" and "70k + a starstone, or 5 startones". That both satisfies the people who are grinding primes but still wanna upgrade a piece here and there without losing 80k worth of progress, and the folks that are grinding lowman/solo and want to upgrade the normal way.

Sortie would still need to be the most effective way of getting Gallimaufry. I mentioned elsewhere that, if they rebalanced older HNMs for RoE objectives, they could have them reward extra gallimaufry beyond the daily cap, along with an extra voracious psyche every month.

They need to spend money on the game, which isn't going to happen.

Every time people wishlist about how to improve the game it always involves adding new content, new equipment, things to do, etc. and that all = developer time = money.

The problem is, there's no guarantee it would make players come back to the game and no business is run based on being nice to their customers, they're run based on making money.

Read these forums and you'll quickly realize that FFXI players are (by and large) motivated by the carrot, so you can't just randomly decide to scale up old content and people will flock to it, you need to give them a reward, which means designing new items and most likely invalidating old items, plus making content difficult enough for those new items...it's a big problem requiring a decent budget/staff to come up with an answer that will be satisfactory to the community.

Not all content is for all players. I think that's one of the things that I like the most about XI. The developers put rewards at the end of absolutely bonkers milestones because that's something that some players might want to do.

So many people wrongfully accuse XI of being way too hardcore, but the only one forcing you to consume the mountains worth of content is yourself. If you take it in stride, XI can be played for fun in the most casual ways imaginable. It means you can continue making meaningful progress for as long as you feel like playing the game.

If the developers catered solely to the casual crowd, everyone would only show up after a major patch for a day or two, then stop altogether. I don't know about you, but I really appreciate having reason to log in and enjoy XI's world and gameplay mechanics day after day. It's still satisfying, tangible progress.

I know I'll never hit ML50, I know I'll never get a (fully-upgraded) Prime Weapon. Those weren't designed for me.

This is the way. Somewhat equivalent to the fast/slow AF+2/3 upgrades.

This is an excellent and obvious point.

Why not increase yields of these items in salvage? Open up other activities already in play?

Spreading around the muffins isn't such a terrible idea. SE does like their narrow hallways (einherjar, anyone), but spread some of the goodies around to already existing content.

Hell, add a level cap requirement for the amped up drop rate. I wouldn't mind doing level 75 cap Dynamis - Xarcabard for a couple hours if I could walk away with a comparative couple hours worth of dyna currency.

That's why I suggested making older content (Sea and Voidwalker for example) reward extra gallimaufry and an extra Voracious Psyche per month (2 VPs from Absolute Virtue and Yilbegan). This would cut at least a month off the Prime Weapon grind.

As far as budgeting, they have shown a willingness to re-tune Besieged. I don't think this is too far fetched.

Anything that cuts grind is simply not going to happen.

One of the most impactful and yet small changes would be to increase the data rate cap to the client. 1 minute to zone and have all your inventory is silly.

Both Sortie and Odyssey could benefit from daily/weekly RoE's intended to help out solo players or lowman teams. Giving out an extra 5k muffins or 3k segs per run isn't going to break the game for groups already doing 9/9 or full C clears, but it'll be a massive improvement for everyone else.

Sortie also needs to add upstairs boss room gadgets to the teleport network. Making players run from corner to corner is not a skill check or engaging content.

Increased EP in Sortie, sellable drops, or even a gradual muffin reduction for prime stages would be nice, but I feel like that's something they'll add a few years in once interest starts to wane. I doubt we'll see anything like that before 2027~2030, but I'll be happy if SE proves me wrong.

A permanent 150% segs would be fair.

They could fix RP farming to make it worthwhile to do more than 6% HP so you have motivation to actually play the game, not afk 13mins over and over and over.

Galli is not so bad but 1m/2m/4m would have been fairer. Beyond your first it should be 500k/1m/2m with twice the Mesosiderite needed.

Remove 6 month limit to make Idris/Epeo.

Omen is great, add option to enter hard mode of bosses with new drops by trading 5x Scale of the relevant NQ boss to the ethereal thingy or something.

IMO there are two abstract things they fail to recognize.

The first is just how hard it is to break the barrier into endgame for new players, content is either done at close to max efficiency or not at all. The designed the content in such a way that it should scale upwards as you grow and improve (e.g. v5, v10, v15, so on), but no one does it that way. Do you honestly blame them? If I have 2 hours to do stuff and make progress, doing it at an exponentially slower rate is painful. I may do it to help, but it's still painful. Example being they jump to v20 at least and skip earlier tiers, no one with the experience to clear the lower tiers actually wants to do them because it's less efficient and slower, tied to daily gates or rewards, and I feel like this should've been obvious. All this pointing that...

Secondly they don't understand that we're all old. This isn't 2005. I'd venture the average age of the playerbase is at least late 30s if not earlier 40s. Most of us have jobs, families, and numerous other obligations. We've played this game for decades now and it's easy to hit burnout when you expect people to do the same damn thing every night on repeat for six months. It was one thing when it was new, fresh and we were younger with more time, but even then it was borderline sadistic, now it's just embarrassing how they act like we're still in that phase of the game and our lives.

The biggest failure with Primes is locking things that could make content more engaging and interesting behind doing that same content for months on end. They had the chance to shake up the meta (and arguably did), but they put it behind so much boring *** content it's not worth it. We can argue about this, and have extensively, but the fact we were sitting at 62k active players, trickling down a few hundred a day, before free login tells me the game is bleeding subscribers. Many of the people I know who quit did so because Sortie sucked and they didn't want to bother with the Prime grind.

What's more important here? keeping the game running, players engaged, and content interesting or, channeling my inner Saevel here, keeping the shiny locked behind absurd gates preventing other people from getting said shiny? They need to recognize the age of the game, the age of the player base, and the reason people play. You could pull this out into a lot of things we do to bypass content: mythics, empyreans, etc - the time to actually do the content is stupid for a game this age.

Wasn't there a question put to the dev team about that and their answer was basically (paraphrasing) "The network code is a black box and cannot be changed without risk of breaking client/server communication"?

Something about the original dev that wrote it moving on and no one still there that knows how it works and is able to change it without breaking things.

gil is the worst way to reward players. it provides 0 engagement whatsoever.

This reminds me of when I came back from a bit of a break and I decided I was going to go really hard farming Lilith for Malignance gear. Of course, you get better drop rates doing VD but for I appreciated that just spamming E was a viable and maybe even preferable option for a ton of the playerbase. I agree that they never really got the balance quite right for any subsequent content. Maybe when they tied relic armor +3 to kills rather than defeating the wave 1 boss.

Is there a fair way to allow a solo player to farm 4k segments or 20k gallimaufry in 30 minutes? Would be nice if there was. 10k segment/50k+ gallimaufry runs will still be there.

This comment may be relying on a faulty assumption that they decided to re-tune Beseiged to make it compelling content or add value to it. I don't see this as anything like a Dynamis 2.0, Nyzul Isle Uncharted, Limbus 2.0 style of change (which absolutely were attempts to repurpose old content to deliver something new for players).

The much more likely reason for the Besieged change is simply to make the event take a little longer, due to JP players complaining that Besieged ending so quickly made it hard to do the monthly RoE for a meager silver voucher. That's also the reason they are only bumping mob stats up to lv99 - they're not trying to make it challenging or interesting, or particularly relevant. They just give enough additional stats so the mobs (which are still very easy for ilevel players) don't melt quite so quickly.

In essence, they're just making the grind for a truly tiny reward take even more time. While it might make it possible for some people to be able to show up in time after the fight begins and get credit to do their monthlies, personally it makes me LESS interested in doing Beseiged busywork since it will take even more minutes out of my day to get the same pitiful reward (do it two times for a reward of 1/6 of a Mars Orb that gives me a good chance of getting ka-thwacked). The time/reward is not worth it to me, but I guess I thank them for making Beseiged RoE (that I rarely did anyway) even less appealing, so I'll be even less likely to waste my time on that one.

That being said, I don't disagree with most of what you're saying about what they could do to improve the game, and I'd love to see actually meaningful retuning of older content (along with additional drops/RoEs/currency/whatever). I just don't think that's any part of the thinking of why they are changing Besieged.

The only real system wide change would be to how auto-target works. It should auto-target the nearest hostile monster to you inside your visual range, instead of the next monster ID inside your range.

Otherwise a few nice adjustments would be to relax on the EX weapon skills and let most jobs have of them. Allow ranged WS's to those with skill without requiring /RNG just as people can have H2H without /MNK. Anything that allows people more options, even if it's just for fun. Also better KI storing for Sortie, forced daily crap sucks for anyone with a life. Another adjustment would be large EP bonus's from completing events. For segments it would be when you touched the end crytal, a nice ~100K EP or more based on number of monsters killed. For Ody Gaol it would be a large amount for getting the boss under 75% before timing out, double for under 40%, double again for killing it.

That kind of quality of life stuff to encourage more participation.

i don't have any specific suggestions, and even this may be too vague to be of use, but i'd like more things that are just for fun and not about the grind (vana'bout is not quite there,, but a good start). don't remove challenges from existing content, but give people other things to work on that aren't master trial level. anything that encourages people to play together again would be worth trying.

also, i wish i could like Iamaman's post more than once, good stuff.