20th Anniversary Reddit AMA

I was excited... then I realised it's on Reddit.
<3 LOL

I hate XIV!

I still think people should voice their distaste for this anniversary and how they are treating the game. So i hope they give them hell during the interview but of course they wont. Everyone else should complain on forums

Legit question, not being a sycophant for SE.

Why does a segment of the FFXI playerbase think they have any leverage whatsoever? Everything I've seen in the past 8 years from SE makes me honestly believe that if XI no longer was financially viable they would dance in the streets for being able to shut this thing down. At this point its got to be more of a headache than the meager profits it eeks out.

I dont think we do, but it cant hurt and maybe people will feel better. I bet they would, what a garbage company I swear. They send damn surveys for XIV asking why ppl quit or what they dont like and for us we get ignored. So frustrating

For me, it all goes back to what FFXI really is- SE's first attempt at an online RPG.

There's a reason we remember Beethoven's 5th and 9th symphonies the most, and not his 1st. His 1st is amazing, but its not really "his"- too much influence of Mozart and instead of making his own thing, Beethoven fell back too much on the traditions of the form. But it took that 1st to lead to the Eroica, and eventually the 5th and 9th. So while its appreciated, the 1st is more often viewed as just a necessary step than a great work.

XIV is their baby. XI was their trial run, and while extremely important for the ground it broke, its just not valued by SE the way it is by us. Just sucks that us old folks enjoy the mechanics of XI so much more, and that style of game is viewed as out of touch/outdated by the powers that be.

I'm sure the developers aren't guilt-free, but I'd still place most of the blame on Square-Enix themselves. There's no way FFXI doesn't net enough profit to convert into more content. The publisher is just raking in the profit and dumping it into other projects. They probably hand the XI team like $1000 per month to keep the servers going and use the rest to pay a single person to trickle in that month's content over a few hours.

Would be a complete waste of time. Valid complaints HERE are fine, because people are just venting. Nobody actually expects anything further than what has been revealed. Very few people have the balls to call SE out on their BS to their face, and even if someone did, they'd screen that garbage anyways. Instead what you're going to get are questions regarding lore and story continuity, so people can fill in any gaps they haven't figured out. You're gonna get hundreds of questions about "what about FFXI can you tell us we don't know yet?" and they're going to reply something like "did you know Almighty Apkallu has whiskers coming out of his beak?"

I plan to ask about cactuar needles

Because instead of fixing the alex rate/difficulty to be even among the zones to alleviate crowding they put the day wait back on that zone as a workaround. Makes it fun when doing those kill trials.

Can also blame shareholders, its simply not financially wise to invest in something that is "doomed" to trickle profits vs funding the thing that is raking in the money currently or in the near future such as XIV or whatever work SE is moving towards releasing.

XI is just a pet project in its current state, its got enough financial profit to keep it afloat, but not enough to really bother on any "large scale" improvements/changes, going to come a point where the only thing youll have is ambuscade rotations and nothing else is on the horizon.

This is the thing that really rubs me raw.

A project, any project really that makes an amount of money is NEVER enough. It always gets sidelined for a project that will make more.

There is this *** sickness in humans. It's just never enough.

To be sustainable, to make (3) million dollars on a project that requires extremely little, is a god send. But infinite growth and infinite profit and infinite greed.

I do think they should go back and reconsider the drop rates on all REMA currency. The primary source for all of these currencies is now Ambuscade instead of their original events. I understand that these are income sources for people, but it’s just such a bummer that I’m better off doing anything but Dynamis for making a relic.

It's bad business, though. If bumping up their monthly budget another $1000 allowed them to maintain a $1M/mo gross profit for a guaranteed extra 4 years or so, it would be worth it.

There are things they can do literally for free, or for very little cost as well. Bear in mind, most of the global gaming population either doesn't even know XI exists, thinks it's been in maintenance mode for 7 years, or thinks it's just an antiquated XIV. All three of those things are easily solveable, and could potentially bring in flocks of new players for almost no marketing cost whatsoever.

But as we've established, Square-Enix has opted out of the video game business. I bet they've already cut the budgets for XVI and VII-R in half and are starting to siphon from XIV to focus on their "play to contribute" projects.

This is a company selling off some of the most iconic names in video games to bet big on Crypto nonsense, as you said.

Bad business is their motto.

It's sad to watch their trajectory.

The last Tomb Raider game sold over 4 million units in just a few months, but apparently that wasn't good enough for Matsuda. He's just clawing at excuses to stop making video games. Business practices that make money and make fans happy are ancillary compared to the !

It might be bad business but it's also how most business operates, you can think of XI like an old single player game vs 14 being the more recent. How many "remasters" are simply lazily done ports that often run worse, look worse, and often even have bugs, sometimes game breaking ones.

It took almost nothing to make those glorified ports, and the company got to do some PR spin to drum up some excitement/expectation for it to be a nice appreciation of what usually was one of their better received products.

I see XI in the same light, there's just a slight more effort put into it because they do have a constant consumer base paying into it, but the feelings are similar.

All that said though, SE has been pretty bad as a business for the past decade if not longer, so it's very likely a mix of both.

How will SquareEnix being sold to Sony affect Final Fantasy XI?

Have you... have you looked at the forums lately? It's already 60% people complaining, 15% people giving SE a ten million dollar list of demands that they better not charge one extra dime for, and 25% white knighting for SE. And 0% corporate engagement with the community.

It isn't. Just speculation.

It's not even that recent, though. XIV is already 12 years old, even A Realm Reborn is close to its 9th anniversary. It just feels new because it only really started gaining steam a couple of years ago when they gave it a marketing budget.

There's literally no reason XI couldn't do the same thing with a little bit of effort. They've done a lot of good for XI since it left the public eye, not the least of which has been the inclusion of Trusts. If they brought it to light as a more mechanically open-ended alternative to XIV, they could easily cater to a whole extra audience.

Almost every complaint people used to have about the XI of 15 years ago has been solved. Look at how well XIV did after they started marketing it, and imagine how well XI could do if it received the same treatment.

...Sigh. But I know I'm just preaching to the choir at this point. You all know this.

But how would they market it to a new generation?

Hey fam, do you like yolo swag? Do you like grinding for that avocado toast? Of course not, you want shiny, and you want it right n... wait, you're already gone.

I enjoy fly fishing, Vivaldi Violin Concerti, and FFXI. Oh, and some good creamed corn....mmmm....zzzzz....

It's "new" in the sense of how it operates, you can look at most MMOs on the market, if you wanted to move XI to the forefront again youd need to overhaul just about everything that makes it what it is.

Dumb down the job/sub job system, magic, abilities, etc. because XI is archaic by todays standards, donno about you but getting anyone who's never tried this game is a chore unless they fall in love with the atmosphere due to its old style design. It's simply easier to just keep XIV "new" than it is to move XI up to that state.

Just say it exists. Like I said, most people either don't know it exists or think it's been in maintenance mode for 7 years.

Everyone else thinks it's just FFXIV's elderly sibling. If you inform people about what makes it different, it might look attractive. When someone quits XIV and they get the survey asking what they didn't like about it, let them know that XI is out there fulfilling a completely different niche.

I will probably ask why chunk prioritization is messed up in layered zones.

Making XI modern would defeat the purpose. It would make XI and XIV compete with one another. But with how XI is so different already, you could snag an audience that already isn't interested in XIV.

In theory, sure. And to be clear im not disagreeing with marketing XI more, it's been its major problem since its inception here in the west, even when it was current noone really knew what it was compared to for example WoW which plastered its name everywhere by comparison.

If they were to do so though id imagine they'd atleast want to streamline the leveling experience, remove/change some of the level break quests since those as is are just chores now to stop you every 30~40 minutes to go do them. Sure theres other things out there to tweak to make the experience smoother buuuut that takes effort.

The people I’ve convinced to try XI have not made it beyond maybe level 30. It is far too archaic for people who are coming from XIV or any other modern game.

The registration system is enough to make them quit on its own. At least coming from XIV they have a preestablished SE account and one time password.

Starting this game from scratch today is an effort in futility. Who would figure out all of the warp systems, currency systems, player systems, mission systems, obscure quest design, or ilvl progression system without someone dragging them around? At that point, are they even playing it or are you just trying to get your friends into your weird niche hobby that they’re merely trying to be polite?

Level to 99, stopping to do a random quest every 5 levels starting at 50. Start accumulating merit points. Now you need 2100 job points. Then more exemplar points! Don’t forget to cap your combat and magic skills after our power level session.

It’s exhausting just thinking about it and some people expect there to be some resurgence of people dying to cast Protect 10,000 times on a trust to cap enhancing skill? I don’t think so.

It's funny how used to skilling up and that awful system that is playonline that I didn't even think about them. The exp grind wasn't too bad til they added ML, now it feels like im getting closer to korean mmo grind which could be good or bad to someone.

I don't think the currency systems would be that complicated since most players will only care about the main ones that are actually used, imagine if we still used all these currencies regularly though. And yeah warping would need to be consolidated into say regular home point crystals rather than hp crystals/vw/waypoint/FoV warp/etc