Dev Tracker - Discussion

Right now is the submissions to get a well on the OF.

The thing you want, if you want your Trove Box to work as easily as possible.

80 storage for 1 item. Minmax your inventory brah. Take a SS in your cutest lockstyle and profit. 100% success rate, cause 500 people don't even bother.

This doesn't sound like a good news for us. A skeleton crew getting even smaller.

The scope of version updates is already "ambuscade rotation and once in a while a few voracious story quests". It sounds like this new valhalla event at the end of the voracious quest line may be the final burial grounds for the game.

That's......actually kind of fitting when you think about it.

I am happy that Matsui gets to retire at peace.

I am hopeful that Yoji means what he says about wanting to keep FFXI running medium to long term, even if its on cruise control. However, throttling down the development team even further is troublesome. I already haven't played in 3 months because I am simply out of things to do. I peep the "patch previews" with great anticipation, only to see ambu-only updates. I do have hope some quality content will slip in because sometimes those HTBF like Lilith came out of nowhere without much warning. I was wishing that Yoji would take the opportunity to try to lobby the bosses for more budget to get more people from FFXIV working on content for FFXI.

It just sounds like I'll be unsubbed for another few months until Valhalla is released.

Under his watch the game suffered. Don't make excuses for them/him.

Whether it would have happened regardless is irrelevant, he took the role, he gets the blame. Good riddance.

Before you start whiteknighting and crying. I didn't say he made exclusively bad decisions. Just too many of them.

Sounds like Prime Weapons might be it boys and girls. Some nuance may be lost in translation but Fujito's plans overall read to me as "we're transitioning into full maintenance mode".

Happy 20th! Here is maintenance mode.

Hard to disagree with this, he deserves to be getting the blame (even if in truth it wasn't really his fault, we'll never know it) because of the role he covered.

Regardless of that though, I'm not sure how many of the "bad" things that happened to FFXI ever since are truly to blame on him or if he simply couldn't have made anything better given the small instruments/budget SE insisted on presenting to his staff.

The only one who can entirely be blamed for that is Tanaka I think. Back when he was still there, FFXI was still in his prime and had full (or close to full) budget and attention from the high floors.
For Matsui instead we'll never be able to know how much he's to praise for what it could've been much worse without him, or to blame because he's been incompetent in not being able to make his voice strong enough as to force SE into deserving the FFXI project more funds.

Personally I think that, in spite of all the plentyful bad choices he took, it's quite a miracle he managed to complete SoA and even RoV which I personally truly loved.

Don’t lose hope guys! Their words mean nothing!

Time Mage and Chemist are coming along with an expansion pack!!

Right brother Draylo?!!!!? …..

SE:

Anyone able to see how the JP community feels about it?

Given how the western official forums aren't exactly a "proper" mirror of the western population's overall feelings, I wouldn't go as far as to assume that the JP forums would be.
I mean they could, but I wouldn't simply assume that.

In the west world we used to have several boards but now I guess only FFXIAH remains.
Not even FFXIAH is a proper "mirror" of the western population, but I guess it's still more accurate than the official forums.

Which big communities do they still have in JP for FFXI, that one could decide to monitor?

My belief is that Matsui was very positive for the game overall, most of our complaints are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. For once the various jobs are mostly balanced and the only real sore point is that there are only 2 sets of "content" worth doing, one strips a core game component away and the other is very mage heavy. Hopefully a third set of content comes out that is more melee friendly so we can get a triumvirate.

So when they said there was new battle content at the end of VR, I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that is the new master trial. Has there been any more discussion on that or did I miss it?

I'm interested to see what all of you expert game producers would do with a shoestring budget and a team of developers who were poached to the point of having to wait for the programmers on another game's dev team to do workloads for you. Easy to talk a big game when you're a nobody who wasn't sitting in the hot seat.

People are assuming there's gonna be a new content related to Valhalla and to the upcoming complete versions of Prime Weapons.
It's what most people have been assuming over here but in truth we can't be sure and if we keep of taking that for granted, we all could get very disappointed.

For all we know Valhalla could be a super small zone with a couple of NPCs (like the one we just got in Adoulin) and the new "mats" used to complete Prime Weapons, will simply be added as new drops in current content.

So... yeah. I'm sure most of us is hoping for new end-game activities but let's not take it for granted.
New Master Trials are coming for sure instead, Fujito himself just confirmed it.
I'll gladly welcome with open arms new super difficult content that's completely compulsory and drops cosmetic stuff.

Nothing drastic, your hands are (mostly) tied. But you can do something for the game in addition to being a corporate slave. He was 5% game health and 95% corporate. Nearly every decision was; do it more, more rng, more play time, more login, more daily, more chores, worse mechanics, worse drop rates, more skinner box. More stick and less carrot. Zero fixes in a timely manner. Objectively worst balance at any point. And zero effort to correct it.

I take more issue with spending what limited resources and budget they had on VR and story content. Admittedly adding full new battle systems like Omen and Odyssey is more intensive and presumably requires different resources to finish, but if things are that tight then IMO story content is the last thing the game needs more of. Maybe it’s all he could get, maybe the resources required for new gameplay content was too much, or internal politics were an issue, who knows, I just wish that time was spent on something that feels more meaningful.

Worst balance ever by what measure? I struggle to think of a period in the game's history when more jobs were used in strats than we have now. Just about every single job in the game has a place and purpose right now which is more than can be said about many other eras in XI's history.

This is more or less my thought on the matter. He didn't have a great hand to play, but other than one really massive misstep (remember that Golden Week where people rioted because RMEs were getting deprecated?) he played it about as well as he could have.

Also, the "worst balance ever" bit is *** hilarious. I see someone didn't play a melee job prior to ToaU.

(Also, I know people are going to take this as an opportunity to throw more dirt on Tanaka's grave. He definitely made some mistakes, but don't forget that it's his vision that's ultimately lasted two decades as a subscription game. He got the big stuff right more than he got it wrong, too.)

I think that the big part of why Matsui is being perceived so negatively is 'cause of the communication methods of S-E. Some of the questionable decisions could be in reality necessary things for the game, but with almost no existing communication between them and the players (especially Western ones), it seemed like a big mistake.

Though, I do feel like Yoji's statement means 'I will be the one who will turn off the lights' (though it could be lost in translation).

Magic damage is done nearly exclusively by melee. Corsairs don't shoot, they melee. Rangers don't shoot they melee. There's never been a weapon as pervasive as naegling. There's never been a "tactic" as pervasive as conduit, that went un-addressed. Ninjas don't even want to use katanas. Dragoons don't want to use polearms. Warriors don't want to use greatswords/greataxes.

Tanaka would've never let that ***fly.

Every party consists of 1 melee and 3 buffers, yet the game consists of 13 dd and 3 buffers.

(*)A note for "zerging" as a "tactic". it's universally pervasive, not FFXI. RTS, MOBA, CCG, All MMO, single player, all have "zerging" (it's got other names, weenie, zoo, blitzkreig, it's all zerging)

SE on the whole is just awful at communication in any form. The XIV PLLs are the _only_ notable exception and even they have their issues. I know there was an effort to try to make Freshly Picked into an equivalent, but it was kind of too little, too late, to establish the sort of foothold and presence that XIV built in from ARR onward.

Fujito is definitely spelling out that things are winding down. It's not his (or Matsui's!) fault; the bit about developers feeling stifled professionally is a very real problem even for development teams that _aren't_ working on two decade old hardware, and the only reasonable play there is to let people do other stuff so that you keep them in house (and don't lose their institutional knowledge, for when you DO need something done on your legacy codebase).

Was right about to say!

I WONDER WHY

Yeah ur right, if Tanaka were still in charge the only 2 DDs we'd ever use would be BLM and SAM

These are all pretty valid complaints! Two problems, though:

- It's still not the worst game balance ever. pre-ToaU, melee jobs (especially DRGs and MNKs) literally could not get parties. There's "my job is less efficient than others" and then there's "I am incapable of getting to max level because we can't solo and no one wants my class"

- The changes that would have to be made to address this would basically be a whole new game. Buffs in general are entirely too strong and stack too much, and there's no fixing that short of re-designing how _combat itself_ operates at a pretty fundamental level.

At every point there have been jobs left out. From day one to the end. That's always a thing. Now and then and in the future.

Buff stacking is a pretty simple fix. There's already a buff limit, lower it.
(you can also incentivize and penalize party comps)