Expansions, Updates, SOMETHING?!Follow

I agree with uchi on that although an event with greater emphasis on AOE spells skills and ws would be something I think they should add. It's sad that our AOE weaponskills are only useful in a genocide of the local beastmen strong hold of low level mobs or blitzkrieg.

{sound of pin dropping}

You know, it is unusually quiet for a period that should be swarming with update previews. The last March updates were 3/7/07 and 3/10/08. It does lead to the question, what is going on? The only news has been for 2 small holiday events.

People complain WotG feels mostly empty. Well, at the moment, the expansion feels like a ship that's adrift and there's no land (features) anywhere within sight (nothing to say "Land ahoy!" at).


What do people think is responsible?
* SE fired all FFXI staff because of the downturn but neglected to tell the players.
* POL webmaster forgot to upload the previews or thinks they're uploaded but they're not.
* SE has a misguided new PR strategy which involves telling the players nothing and then surprising them by popping the update details on them at the update without any preview.
* Gerbil mind control.
* SE ninja updated the version update. It's already in the game; it's just nobody noticed the content or paths into the new zones or new abilities/spells.
* [provide your reason here]

Whatever their reason, Ive started to look at other games. I finally managed to complete the Guildwars: Eye of the North missions and Im thinking about re-activating my WoW account (which in turn means de-activating my FFXI account >.>)

EDIT: actually I think I might unsubscribe for a month if no details by end of this week or that the update will occur in April



Edited, Feb 24th 2009 5:15am by Abbottone

I still kinda hope that SE intended to bring a huge March 2009 update (and still is planning to do so), but beta-testing revealed some unexpected problems, requiring more time than initially anticipated causing the update to be shifted more to the end of March.

I hope this update will bring a completely revamped storage system, dealing with the acute shortage of inventory space, allowing us to easily store and retrieve entire sets of job specific equipment, so that a job change only takes a few minutes (instead of the typical half hour or more of muling it takes me now ).

I also hope the next update will bring a completely revamped NM claiming system, that finally deals with the frustration of killing placeholders for hours in line only to see somebody walking by by accident claim the finally spawned NM (I liked the idea of the farmed key item to force spawn such NMs).

And I expect to see a new type of event (worthy to step up next to Field of Valor) to allow low level jobs to gain EXP easily, even when soloing.

I doubt (but nevertheless frantically hope) this update will include some nice additions and alterations to the dying crafting system, making it worth again the effort and time spend on leveling crafts.

Finally I hope to see the addition of the missing Campaign Body gear items, damnit!

Your idea stop making sense here.
Everyone knows SE doesn't test updates, we do.
;P

Edited, Feb 24th 2009 10:18am by RattyBatty

It was a Fan Fest event + those who attended got a card with a Redemption Code on it. This code enabled players to obtain the key items to enter the events to do on their own, but it is a one time event...sort of.

I have the key items from Fan Fest 2007 that are sitting in my mog locker, and the Festive Moogle is holding the same items that were given to us again for 2008 + the Swarm. I agree that those events should be accessible by the whole player base via a quest of some sort because it was really fun at fan fest.

YES! Please dear God, this right here.

They said months ago they were working on this, remember the interview Elmer posted on JPbutton about the "mog bag" system and all that? That was months ago. They seriously owe us that. I too have to spend seriously upwards of an hour just to change from one of my 75's to another, and 99% of the time that is too long if some one just needs me as "soandso job" real quick. I've missed out on I don't know how many things because of it. I also don't get to play the jobs I would really like to, because my linkshell needs me as one specific job, so I don't get to have fun on the jobs I really enjoy, or even level new ones for that matter.

I'm missing out on a lot of fun, and guess what's that lead too? Me playing less.

I'm surprised they still are sticking with "Everyone loves surprises!" way of dealing with updates.

Just post up a list of what you are doing already!

Almost done stuff:
WHM buffs
BLM buffs
RDM buffs
SMN buffs

Things we are having trouble figuring out:
New avatars

On hold:
Tactical attachment work

About to start working on:
Dynamis Whitegate
New BCNMs

this is just annoying, the only way i'd be tempted for that due to updates is if they only would give us 1 in september. To tbh i plan on playing much less when phantasy star zero comes out.

Edited, Feb 24th 2009 11:35pm by Neispace

Even the lack of lore seems strange, up to WoTG we got stories about the important NPCs in the Great War, we had the story about Ixion and other small parts that lead up to the next update without saying what was in it. But we all know how good SE is at keeping promises, anyone remember the white chocobo?

If this is the case then I recommend quitting. I, also, have played for a long time (since december '03) and find that the game has become quite boring lately. I don't think however that SE can keep me playing through updates, they just can't keep up with my needs and that is fine with me. They could, for example, release a new salvage like event that would take me years to do, but that doesn't sound really appealing. They can also make a faster event but I'd be done with that too soon and get bored after a while again. Only thing that will keep me playing from now on is basically the missions and other story content, quests and so on. But the rate at which they release them is so slow, that I'll probably end up cancelling my account and coming back maybe twice a year to finish the missions (although if the mini add-ons are good enough I'll probably come back every 3 months!). In that sense taking a break will make something interesting to me when I come back. For those that do not care much for these kind of things, though, taking a break and coming back later isn't that good of an option. That's why I think that moving on to other things would be best for those. I am quite sure that FFXI won't give them enough new or refreshing things in the future either.



True, I find that to be the case with low to mid level content.. it's hard to find people, especially by shouting (G1, G2, rank missions, AF3 quests..) but in the case of endgame I think SE did it better. People still do dynamis, sky, ground HNM's, sea, limbus et cetera so I don't think a fresh 75 would have a problem with catching up. For some things having a static is good though since shouting may give poor results (CoP, ToAU missions.. Assault?).

Suggesting people quit to make the game better for themselves is some pretty twisted logic. Players wanting more and SE keeping up is a balancing act that SE's rarely gotten right. Unfortunately, when it seems like our dev team is so small, then yeah, we're going to get very little over time. I'd like the money that we, as players of FFXI, spend to play, actually go toward FFXI first so we AREN'T looking at 4+ months between updates or updates so shallow we're wondering if that was really it 2 weeks later.

When it comes to updates, the possibilities are endless. New gear, job adjustments, new events, new synths, and then some are all a given. This is the beauty of MMOs over console titles, though that line has been blurred as the current generation of consoles have started exploring downloadable content. What really gets the goat of players, however, are problems where there are plenty of solutions present, but nothing changes. The lack of communication between the devs has been killing us. They want a correspondent? Pretty sure you could find hundreds of volunteers who'd GLADLY do it for free. Myself one of them.

So yeah, I'm a bit harsh because I know damn well they can do better. I don't fault who have now doing what they can, as what we get is ultimately up to the higher ups. I don't want to quit. I don't want to go to WoW. I just want to see FFXI thrive. It's all our baby.

Edited, Feb 25th 2009 7:59am by Seriha

Ok.. I might as well throw my hat in the ring.

I have sort of been playing since NA release. So for I have quit like 5 times and on my third account. I keep comming back because I end up missing the comunity more than anything. Over the last two years I have been playing mmo's while having FF account running. These include DDO, EQ2, Tantra, SWG, LOTR, plus various beta and free mmo's. at the moment Anarchy online is updating at this very moment.

But still I come back. I have two main chars on the game, one a taru SMN 75, and the other is MNK 55. Due to SMN being my first and only char to 75, I can see why people compain about the job. Prep cost, the only other job that has to go through the main of beating things to get abilities is BLU. Everyone has problems with their jobs, but SE will not make big changes to their jobs.. like no prep cost for SMN, because it would made half a ton of equips useless. The same goes for other jobs.

What I would like to see happen, is more xp gain through quest. Like in the past. You do missions in the past for xp and notes. I like this idea, and always use up my tags in the past doing the security quests.

I also agree with the idea of making a drop item for NM pops. For example, I am not a hard core gamer, I am more casual, for this reason, I will never get YY Robe for my SMN.

But at the same time, in other games, there are items that are the equilivant of Rare/Ex, but in most cases, they dont become Rare/Ex until you equip them. This would be a nice idea, but at the same time, there would be the problem of RMT'ing curtain items.

One last thing, for things I would like to see, is more info on the char, at the moment we have a details tab, and we have ATT and DEF, I would like to know EVA, Acc, im sure RNG would like to see R.ATT and R.ACC. Mages light like to see their MAB or MDB, But also as a SMN, I would like to see the stats of my pet, I have had to do testing to find out that Carby has about 980HP as a lvl 75 SMN, but does it change on day? I can not say, the other avatars dont all have heals, so working out their HP's are more difficult.

At the end of the day, I dont see SE ever doing anything radical in these updates, because it would be too easy to un-balance the game. And the other thing is, SE are currently working on all the versions of FF-XIII, and also some of the dev team for FF-XI are also working on the new mmo, project rapture. So, I can see updates being less frequent in the next year.