How Could SE Realistically Improve Modern FFXI?

Most games create content to make people want to keep playing, the effort required to convince them is high.

XI isn't in this position, we already want to keep playing and we just want a reason.

You can't have a better position to be in as a developer, however the problem isn't with the developers as much as the management who cut the budget.


y u do dis, it's like you're trying to trigger people to get mad at you.

As usual, Thorny puts together a well thought out response with a dozen valid questions and points, and Eiryl continues to spout meaningless trite with absolutely no thought put into it.

Maybe he's projecting his own lack of effort, knowledge, experience, and care onto SE.

Oh, you forgot to do Xarcabard and all the dreamworld dynamis, Thorny. Surely those will be extremely simple 1-to-1 ports of the original with just level+35 added to all the mobs, right? Or we can just copy/paste the demons from TVR? If we want to add all the jobs, we can just copy/paste them, then change their job to BST or whatever, EZ PZ.

I'm not saying SE couldn't add these zones over the course of a long enough timeline, I'm just saying it's not an easy update. I know Sahzi already realized this and acknowledged he shouldn't have said "easy", or could've been more clear about what he meant by "easy", but there are a shockingly large number of people here who think that developing new FFXI content from old FFXI content is just adding a flat number to a bunch of pre-existing numbers, or copy-pasting enemies from one zone and putting them into another.

I'd love for you to point out some enemies that were lifted from one piece of content and dropped directly into another piece of content, while we're on the subject. I was going to say Strolling Sapling as a joke response, but it turns out the saplings in Konschtat, La Theine, and Tahrongi all have different drop and steal pools.

The fact is, as much as people don't want to admit it, quite a lot of actual game design goes into making content.

A lot of game design for the tiny team of people still permitted to work on FFXI. A lot of players who complain about the game design approach the devs took with Sortie completely forget that, if the devs haphazardly throw together a Dreamworld Dynamis Divergence, the outcome will not improve the player experience at all.

Good idea.

To be fair, we've gotten so much re-skinned, re-purposed content over the years it's hard to blame the playerbase for thinking it's easy to do.

This would be a relatively small change, but make an ammo and food bag. Give all players a 10 inventory bag specific for food, and give all jobs a 10 inventory ammo bag. Jobs like nin and cor that are required to use items for their abilities get an additional 10 inventory in their ammo bags, or maybe make it a job trait to expand on the size of the bag.

Disagree.


Just for ammunition like bullets, arrows, etc. or all ammo-slot items? I think most people have more than 10 ammo-slot items. It would be pretty unusual to have ammo only inventory since we don't have weapon only inventory or neck only inventory. If it's ammunition only, it would be useless or very close to useless for 80% of the jobs in the game.


If it's a job trait, what happens when you swap from NIN to PLD? Are the items in excess of 10 inaccessible? Can they be moved, just not used? How does it decide which 10 are the inaccessible ones? What's to stop someone from re-organizing the ones they need into the 10 usable slots? What if you play NIN and COR, do you get 30, or just 20 that you have to share between both of those jobs?

I like the idea, but I think the complexity of the way you wrote it makes for a very complex situation with lots of caveats that would need to be implemented and opportunities for abuse or for the system to feel really useless to a large chunk of players. Plus if you don't play the jobs that were given this update it would feel like a kick to the nuts to get nothing or close-to-nothing. RUN and WHM coming in like "can I get a medicine inventory?" BRD says "hey, I'd like an instrument inventory" etc. etc.

I'm not sure of all the technical limitations but I know they said they held back on adding more wardrobes because of the load times and since they added up to 8 the time it takes to load wardrobes have gotten absurd. I think this is the reason they haven't implemented something like this, or just added more unrestricted inventories.

It takes a Zilart to fix.

No, we complain about Sortie because some of those design choices are intended to make the player experience worse.

We aren't complaining because Sortie is bugged and taking a long time to fix; We're complaining because SE deliberately made design decisions that are extremely frustrating to players, like earring RNG or muffins being shared between armor and weapon upgrades.

That feels bad, man. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence about what little new development we'll get in the future, either. That's why people quit.

This is probably way outside the abilities of the dev staff since this is a multi-facet problem, but I consistently think the lack of wider socialization hurts modern XI. I wish Linkshells could be bigger, AND for you to be able to equip more than 2 of them at once. That said, it's not like the chat window can really support MORE ***.

I see people WAY more willing to join groups in LS chats than shouts. I feel like there's less judgement towards LS mates in general, and people are more tolerant of players in less fortunate positions if they're fellow progressing LS members, etc. I feel like more established players would also branch out into newer shells instead of just mainly hanging out in their permanent shells as well (not a criticism, this is basically what I do now despite my bitching).

Discord has done a LOT to help, but it's hard/impossible to really conduct in-game real-time recruiting and discussions via Discord. Look, I have problems, keeping 5 songs up on my pty for more than 10 minutes takes real effort from my brain. Trying to real-time track discord movements for a dozen different shells on my server is not happening.

Anyway, I just often find pockets of players kinda stuck in their one or two bubbles of players but I get the impression the game would really benefit from better community connections.

I agree with you Kaiylie, but I think (at least on my small server) it's more of a meta problem than a game mechanics problem.

I've only been in a linkshell with 65+ characters online at the same time ONCE and it was a few years ago and mostly due to a lot of multi-boxers having alts in the shell. The limit of 64 characters online in a shell at once is a very small problem and if you have 65+ characters online, you already have more than enough community.

Similarly, I feel like 2 linkshells is already more than enough for me. I'm sure if I had 5 linkshells equipped I would quickly be removing some of them because that would just be...way too much spam for me.

I think the core of the issue is the lack of PUG community and people willing to ask for and receive help with things. Part of it is probably population, but another part is a culture of...IDK apathy? It seems like a lot of people can't be bothered to help people. I've seen people shout for over an hour for mundane stuff and just be ignored.

Shout and especially yell are amazing systems and really can fulfill the needs of a community w/r/t doing content together, getting assistance on things, etc. Unity chat also has a lot of potential here (if you're not on Asura) since it can go to a huge audience no matter where they are.

The problem is: nobody does any events with anyone who they don't already know. This, to me, is the meta part and the real sticking point. Even stuff that doesn't have a tag like Vagary, GF, HTBF, Delve, Sinister Reign, etc. People just flat out do not play the game with strangers.

I think this comes down to a few reasons and it's not necessarily apathy.

The first is that a lot of these people shouting couldn't pull groups together to do it themselves because they, for various reasons, don't work well with others and get blacklisted. In other cases, people get burned helping others who turn out to be jackasses. I've helped random folks and it turned out great, I've had others not go so great. I think some experience the latter enough that they get leery of helping randos. It's a not infrequent occurrence where people refuse to take advice and start flying off at the handle because someone hinted that there is a better way for them to do things, few people actually take advice or help without being *** about it.

The other being people are wrapped up in their own content restrictions because so much content emphasizes statics. "Can you help me clear Sheol A/B/C?", "No, I have to keep my KI". I realize this is largely isolated to Sortie, Odyssey, and less so Omen and Dyna-D, but it's a factor. It's also a time thing, people have a bit of time and don't have the opportunity to break from their scheduled group to do stuff like that when they have limited time. With Sortie taking an hour, segments 30 minutes, formation time, etc you are 1:45-2h out preventing you from doing stuff other than that content.

Almost everyone I know or interacted with I've seen bend over backwards to help others, but it's generally people they know, from their LS, or in content that isn't tied to restricted entries. If you demonstrate you are willing to listen and not be an ***, people are willing to help you provided it doesn't interfere with their static activities, but randoms in shout are a wildcard and people don't want to risk it or mess with it.

If anything, IMO, the community is far better about this now than they were in years past, but PUGs are more of a wildcard now than they were then IMO.

No one wants to do Sheol or Sortie with strangers because picking up a useless scrub wastes your daily run.

There is no future currently planned for FFXI so I'm not certain why anyone should expect to be inspired. Sortie was designed to take a long time for this exact reason and when you scratch the complaints that are at odds with the intent, you're not left with any reasons to make changes to the content.


You can go every day if you want to.
You can go in a group or solo/lowman if you can't find one.
You can play any job you want to because they're all viable.


If SE created a poll asking what players wanted for 'the final major content', this is checking most of the important boxes. We're welcome to nitpick as long as we realize that's what it is.

I think the playerbase as a whole will never understand why when SE created a really solid, almost ideal, timed entry KI system with Omen, why they *** didn't just stick with that for everything else after?

Because there will be congestion on Asura every Saturday or something.

Which makes no *** sense since Asura is a predominantly NA server, and SE traditionally doesnt give a ***about the NA community.

Cause it's true, and it entertains me that they get mad about it.

Agree with some of this not quite all. But the title of the thread being "realistic ways to improve ff11" I still feel my suggestion of future rollouts (dyna northlands, dreamlands, surged omen) fits.

Is it super easy? Nope. Is it a brand new expansion, though? Nope, not really.

I'm not suggesting it's just a few lines of code. But it's absolutely "realistic." And we're all gluttons for anything new and +4 relics/af would keep us all busy for years.

Then truly new to play with our new gear? Gaol is a good testing ground that already exists. Lots of mobs in the game could be just taken and made giant and recolored. The true challenge would be designing their behavior of course, but still realistic possibilities.

It's not flicking a switch, but it is realistic even with a limited programming team and ample time,

Adventuring fellow master level.

After acquiring level 99 Adventuring fellow trade signal pearl to magian moogle for master level.

Register your signal pearl by trading signal pearl to trust npc.

You can now call your Adventuring fellow via trust magic.

Exemplar points for Adventuring fellow should follow same protocos as players.

Adventuring items opens up for master levels.
Master level tactics main job (war, pld, etc..)
Master level tactics sub job (nin,brd, etc..)
exemplar adventuring fellow ring.(equip and use, will only affect adventuring fellow)

restrictions removed such as level sync and content areas.
you can level sync to your adventuring fellow or other party members adventuring fellow.
trade item level gear and weapons to Luto Mewrilah to give your fellow cosmetic appearance and stats.
Gear availability using fellow points via Ajahkeem.

Restrictions- if use of trust magic for fellowship, Forming an alliance is not possible. Use of calling fellowship via signal pearl is possible.

Bonus: Once the adventuring fellow masters all jobs to ML50. The trust magic level limit is raised to ML50.

On top of my head this is what I'm thinking would be cool. If there's any other ideas please speak your mind thanks.

The longevity of the content/length of the grind is irrelevant because it's 100% arbitrary. Look at the various systems they've used over the years: If SE wanted it to take longer for players to finish Primes and Empy armor, it would. They could have made better design choices without affecting the grind or the future of maintenance mode one bit. 30 minute Sortie with less running? Drastically higher *ite cost for Primes instead of muffins?

If you don't understand why it matters if it doesn't affect the total work required, consider the difference between two quests:

• one where an NPC kicks a chocobo

• one where the game forces the player to kick a baby chocobo

Either way a digital bird is getting hoofed, but unless you're some kind of monster one clearly feels worse. Some of the design choices they made with Sortie are the same.

"We will remove all the Galkas, but you have to kick a baby chocobo every day"

me:

On somewhat of a similar note, I'd like to see the following QoL tweaks:

1) Automaton Oil and Pet Food stack to 99. Surely that one is easy. Annoying as hell when other jobs get their job-specific consumables like Angon, Tomahawks, COR cards, NIN tools that all stack to 99.

2) Change BST jugs from items you need to use with JAs to permanent learnable "spells". This would require a little more development work, but feels very doable. Would have to adjust how the Call Beast/Bestial Loyalty JAs function (since current difference is that one of them consumes a jug and one doesn't), but surely they could figure something out for that. IDK, maybe just make Call Beast call a pet normally, and Bestial Loyalty call a pet with Pet: Lv+1 bonus.

3) Porter Moogle slips: some way to not make them take up so much valuable inventory space. Maybe that's in the form of a new storage bag that is ONLY for porter slips. Or maybe there's a way to change the slips from items to permanent KIs (perhaps that's more difficult though, I assume there's some technical reason they didn't just expand the old armor storage NPCs to hold all the crap that's now on slips).

If it were as you say it is and SE is intentionally trying to make your experience worse, they would have taken away movement increasing effects altogether.


I wouldn't have picked Besieged, but there's other content in the game more worthy of attention than Sortie right now.

So to answer some of what you pointed out. Firstly, this is a spit-balling forum, not a well fleshed out idea forum. It's not a new concept that ffxi has an inventory issue, and doing something like 14 did and just eliminating ammo would remove the customization that ffxi is known for. As far as when the inventory is accessible, I will amend my comment to this. All jobs get a 10 inventory ammo slot that specifically holds stackable ammo like bullets, arrows, bolts. yes, this will offer little to nothing to jobs that don't utilize those things, however not all jobs need to get a buff for it to be reasonable. When black magic cost was adjusted, beastmasters didn't benefit in the slightest, but we recognized why it was necessary.

The alternative option would be to make equip slots of weapons(guns/bows/xbows) for ammo, each holding 4 different types of ammo, but I feel like that would be super micro-managey, but it would feel less clunky perhaps, and would invite less criticism from other jobs that cant equip those things? I do think some kind of inventory for consumables is necessary though. ninja tools, quick draw cards are required for those jobs to play, so forcing the player to consume their limited inventory with those tools is disproportionately unfair to those jobs. (I play neither ninja or corsair for the record). they could also just remove the need for those items all together and make this point moot. as far as accessibility of those bags, whenever you're main/sub a job that can utilize those items. They could be sorted just like merits, needing to be on a job that utilizes it in order to access, but you'd have to manually place the ammo in that bag, it wouldn't me automatically sorted. this would also include quivers. The alternative would be to make them stack to 999, but that would be a much larger undertaking.

As someone else had suggested though, things like beast jugs, pet food, automoton oils should be stacked to 99, the oils/food could be stored in the food/meds bag I proposed.

A food bag would also be a good idea, but I feel like that got lost in the ammo bag suggestion, and I doubt anyone would have an issue with something like that. That would also allow for medicines as well. While another 80 inventory for such a thing would be nice, I suggested a smaller number so there would be less reason to justify charging more monthly for said inventory.

Going back to my original suggestion a few years ago, a 'prismatic wardrobe' that has different contents based on the job you're on. Anything you put in there on WAR stays there until you change back to WAR, but is invisible/inaccessible while on any other job. Anything you put in on MNK stays there until you change back to MNK, but is invisible/inaccessible while on any other job. And so on.

This would be a relatively easy thing to implement, since the client doesn't need to treat it differently than any other wardrobe.. existing systems can be used to flush it and send new contents upon job change. Don't need to be able to store food/meds if you're freeing 20+ slots per job you play with the option to free more. Smallest change for greatest gain.

They won't do this though, nor would they do your idea, or anything that substantially eases inventory woes. They want you to buy wardrobes, it's not in their interest.

So clearly I like the idea, since what I suggested mimicked that, but as the person said of my comment, what happens when you put your ninja tools in your ninja box, then go /nin to event.

Also, it's an either or situation. Either the food/med bag, or the ammo concept, I know full well they wouldn't implement both.

The same thing that happens if you put them in your mog safe then go /nin to event. You either borrow tools or you do really badly at that event.

Same thing that happens if you put your RMEA in a paid wardrobe and deactivate it.

My suggestion of a wardrobe wouldn't hold tools anyway though, you would ideally use it to hold your job-specific equipment and ammo and have that much more free space so you can organize the multi-job equipment and ammo better.

If you have issues with space for food and meds, you just plain aren't organizing well. 160 slots in wardrobe 1+2 is enough for any job's actual equipment and ammo, 20 is overkill for meds in most cases, which leaves 60 for active things you're carrying around and that event's drops. The space issue is more along the lines of how inconvenient it is to change jobs and how much total space you have to gear multiple jobs.

I get what you're saying and for the record I don't disagree with the idea of adding more inventory, other than the technical limitations. The thing I took issue with was the concept of saying it's a simple change and then making an inventory system which varies in size and restricts the items, that just seems complex to me. This is a novel design concept that doesn't exist today so it would require some pretty significant design considerations.

I mentioned the sorting thing because if the inventory is 10 while on BLU/WAR and 20 while on BLU/NIN, or COR/NIN, then some kind of system has to determine which 10 of those are inactive and which are active. I was thinking "only the top 10 items" but then you can just move the 11th item down to the 10th spot, so it effectively gives you 20 inventory except if you need 11+ items at once.

I find the consumable system fairly benign personally. One of my characters plays RNG, NIN, COR. Trump cards are 1 inventory space out of 80; the VAST majority of the time on NIN, I'm only ever using Shihei or Shihei+Self-enhancing tools, that's 1-2 inventory spaces, maybe 3 if you want to include elemental (which I VERY rarely use); For bullets, arrows, and bolts, it's just wardrobe space, same as any other equipment like a belt. I keep 1 stack of each kind of bullet, bolt, and arrow I need and only in extremely rare and extra shooty events do I ever use more than a single stack. For a RNG with every REMA in the game, pulling every practically useful ammo out, it's like...6 wardrobe spaces. Compared to the 640 we get, it's a pittance.

I personally only carry Grape Daifuku+1 in my primary inventory, all other food which I use much less frequently goes into Mog Sack and gets pulled out as I need it. My characters typically have between 2-5 / 80 inventory at any given time, including the COR, RNG, NIN character. Between Sack, Satchel, Case, and Wardrobes, it's really easy to fit all the items you need so long as you organize yourself.

Looks like people are still missing the "realistically" part of the question.