What Happened Casual PT Shouts..

This is a Splendid idea.

Yeah that would be pretty amazing. They really need something that is domain invasion without the Mireu experience.

This community is so weird. On the one hand you have people talking about how they have 7-18 friends and they want alliance content because they don't want to restrict their activities to just their 5 closest friends, and yet in the same game you have droves of people complaining that they can't get a static of 6 people to complete events on the most populous server.

I guess all the people who are unable to find a static are everyone's 6th best friend? Why don't all the 6th best people get together and form a group with each other?

Maybe I'm just looking at it from too analytical of a perspective but like...unless there are exactly 1-5 loose players on the entire server...just form a group? Do you not know a single other player on your server who doesn't have a group? Are you only available for a single hour per day? What is stopping all these people from forming a group?

Word of advice: don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Even if you can't run 7 days a week with 6 players, get something started. Bring alts or trusts until you can find more members. Build habits and be consistent. Set days and times, and do it.

Because people have different playtime, log on frequency, job spread, playskill, in game goals, progression and and even personality. So making a static with others isn't as simple as inviting 5 other people and be done.

I am also pretty sure content difficulty plays a role when people requested alliance content. What people wanted was clearly "easy" content for social purpose, so they can play with less skilled/geared friends and still accomplish something. If new alliance content has extremely high difficulty that only elites in a large elite LS can clear, you'll see similar level of complaint probably.

Because at that point the member count will need to be exactly 18 all using specific job for max performance. Which is about as painful to build as statics if not worse.

Events like that bring people together and make people show up and conversate with each other. The main reason groups are hard to make is because people aren't talking to each other. I know many people because of 18-man events and that is a big reason the game is in such a shitty state right now.

I've always said this and I mean it from the bottom of my heart.

BEST GEAR IN THE GAME SHOULD NOT COME FROM 6 MAN EVENTS

OK let's take this point to its logical conclusion, you have two options as far as I see it:
-18 person difficult content which still means you have to bring the best players and don't have room for newer/less geared players
-18 person medium-difficulty content where you can bring less geared players

So either you have easy content giving the best gear in the game, or you have the same thing we have now, but getting the best gear in the game requires 18 of the best-geared players playing and coordinating well to get it.

Feels to me like a step backwards either way. IDK maybe it's just the selfish, elitist *** in me, but I don't want the best gear in the game to come from easy content you can carry your returning friends through. I also don't want the best gear in the game to come from 18-man events with strict requirements on performance and gear.

I think 18-man content for easy stuff (Omen, Vagary, Dynamis, Gaes Fete) and 6-man content for hardcore stuff (Ody, Sortie, Master Trial) strikes a good balance. I have a large linkshell which regularly fills entire alliances and has to turn people away for 18-man events. If people in the linkshell want to set up 6-man groups for the little stuff, they have plenty of opportunities to socialize during Omen, Dynamis, or off-hours to find like-minded people to group up with. Maybe this isn't your experience, but that's not the fault of the game design, IMO.

Just make Ody and Sortie 18 man events. inb4 Eiryl comes in with his typical stupid "NO THEY CANT BECAUSE MERCS"

Omen was introduced as a 6 man event and was expanded to 18 with no real change, and it had zero negative impact on the game.

IDK, depends what you consider "negative impact on the game." Seems to me that everyone sees ease of access to gear as being a positive thing and while I somewhat agree, I think that there's a real risk of trivializing the difficulty of the game and removing the excitement of getting gear if you remove all the difficulty.

6-man Ou, Kei, Fu are significantly more difficult than 18-man. Getting jobs to clear all the objectives while also being prepared to kill all the mid and end bosses is significantly more difficult with 6 than it is with 18. I guess you could say these are all improvements because now people can stand in the corner and finger paint collecting job cards while other people do the event for them, but I'd say it tarnishes the impact of getting a Regal Ring when you had 3 parties buffed to the 9s who killed the boss in 2 WS and you absorbed Unfaltering Bravado without even thinking about it because there are 3x as many bodies.

You could also allow 18 people in to Lilith and she should would be a lot easier to kill. Is that better design?

Trivial and leechable is what they want. The easier and faster it can be done so they can afk with it on the better.

Can't make them happy and the 12 who care about master trials happy at the same time.

I think there is a place for chill content like dynamis and stricter 6 man stuff. It doesn't have to be only one kind.

I find the timegated part of sortie and odyssey to be the biggest failures of design since it just makes people much worse about being choosy... other than sortie just being dull content. Atleast ody has incentives like money.

I think the bigger issue isn't necessarily the time gate (that there are tags with limited use) so much as the way it was implemented (Ruspix plate). If it were the same as the Mystical Canteens, I think people would be less fussy about it.

If you want endgame content where there's no time gating and you can grind it as hard as you want with all your free time, I think maybe you should consider the implications of that a bit more closely.

FFXI is a horizonal progression game. Mentioning the concept of the "best gear" in this game is really weird, since no gear is the best in every situation. I would rather use the term "relevant gears".

If a 18 man content has medium-difficulty, it can drop relevant gears that can be used in a set. You need hundreds of gears in this game to complete a job, so having a medium difficulty content drop something like 20-30 pieces of relevant gears isn't a problem. You aren't going to complete a job by doing medium difficulty content only.

Then the hardest 6 man content can drop another 10 pieces for people that wants a challenge.

If you are hardcore you still get better gears than casual players since you have all the relevant gears from every content. And if you are a casual player you have something worthwhile to work on in medium difficulty content.

If you want every content in the game being difficult then pretty soon casual players will hit a wall and quit. Which makes the community smaller overall.

Medium difficulty content dropping relevant gears is never going to be a problem in horizonal progression game. FFXI is not FFXIV.


Yeah, those are good balance, except ALL the 18man easy stuff are 5+ years old or more. If you are a casual player that never quit would you do same easy content for 5-7 years? I think not. People are complaining because they want new easy alliance content.

Yeah, I wasn't to precise on it because I didn't know how to word my gripe with them. I don't like how the lockout is for them, but am fine with omen and dynamis. But removing them certainly wouldn't help. Unless they did something like your first run a day is the only one that gives rewards and you can run again with others.

The implications are that people will finish the content in 3 days and deactivate their account for 6 months (ie: Delve). I think Omen's a happy medium where you can do multiple runs back to back without needing to log in every day to not fall behind. Unlimited (ie: Voidstones) is even better, but I can understand the reason against it from a vendor standpoint, as entry tokens will continue to accumulate while deactivated. Sure people will look at it in 2023 as "well thats bad because people now have 10,000 stones and use an addon to botfarm it" completely ignoring the fact that in 2011, when the content was the prime content, people didnt have 10,000 stones stored up.

Content difficulty has nothing to do with how fast you can get every gear from it though. For example, it took me a couple of months of ambu to get every relevant sets, cape and weapons because of lockout. I have like 20 backpieces for cor, so that was a lot of time to collect them all even though it's mostly easy.

Likewise I think I spent a month doing Ou for cor neck after it was out since I needed to farm KI, get it to drop and win lot. It wasn't difficult, but it wasn't that fast since it doesn't always drop.

Dyna D clear for REMA was significantly faster but getting RP for all the gears on every job still need months since I can only enter 1-2 times a week for RP.

It wasn't as fast as people said it is because of horizonal progression and lockout. Difficulty has nothing to do with it.

OK but if you could get the ultimate +4 sword of badassery by crafting insect balls, it wouldn't matter if they limited you to turning in 100 insect balls per month, it would still be trivial, and that's a problem from a game design perspective.

The fact that you (royal you) have to sit in the corner of dynamis, leeching neck points for two weeks to get a neck ranked up doesn't make it any more difficult, or make anyone feel more accomplished. Nobody's incredibly proud of their BST AF hands because they AFK'd in Omen for 45 cards, but people feel an immense sense of satisfaction when they complete a V25 Odyssey NM, because they overcame a difficult challenge.

Maybe you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become EA but...sense of pride and accomplishment anyone?

There is no 18 man content left. Do you still call original dynamis 36 man content? No, it's solo content now with the level upgrades.

All the difficulty is gone with the older content. NOTHING in this game requires an alliance. So there is effectively no reason to do it. All omen bosses can be dual/tri-boxed. Dynamis-D tri-boxed, gaes-fate solo'd till helms and 4-5 people to finish it off in an afternoon, etc. etc. Ody and Sortie are the only content left that's challenging and its restricted to 6 man.

People are bitching because there is ZERO reason to 18 man ANYTHING. It's not about looking to be carried, people want a reason to do something in an alliance.

I mean, would of it been SOOOO hard to make a Dynamis-D Beaucedine, Xarcabard or Dream Lands?!? Or ***, even a Dynamis Adoulon or Whitegate? Just tweak the difficult a bit so it doesn't get steam rolled? Wouldn't of taken much effort.

From what I can see, people aren't asking for content that REQUIRES 18 people, they're asking for content that PERMITS 18 people. So I listed the events where 18 people are permitted, so they can invite all their newbs and help them get gear, make connections, yadda yadda.

I was referring to Dynamis [D]. I wouldn't call old Dynamis a 36-man event because you can't play it that way anymore. I also wouldn't call it 18-man content (and didn't) because while you can do it with 18 if you want, it's not relevant for anything except farming gil.

Vagary still gives people unlocks, gets you items that are still relevant at end-game, JSE upgrade items. Dynamis [D] gives RP & unlocks for JSE. Omen gives cards for JSE and a bunch of relevant gear. These are end-game alliance events. Maybe you don't still need them because you've done a ton of it, but if you're looking for events to do with newbs to gear them up, there ya go.

If you're looking for alliance-level content that requires 18 people to function properly, you're playing the wrong game. The populations aren't there to hide gear behind an event requiring 18 well-geared people playing properly.

Would it be difficult to create 2-5 more dynamis zones? IDK, how difficult do you think it would be to create and balance a new set of mobs? Decide the paths for all the statues, the resistances provided by the green/blue eyes, the boss mechanics for all 3 waves, create new items (?) to go in these zones to give a reason to go there. Do they have the same tag as old dyna? Make sure they don't become the de-facto by giving too many rewards, so nobody farms old dyna, but not too few rewards so nobody does them.

You really think adding a new dynamis zone is just like...copy paste 3 lines of code and overwrite 135 with 150 and bam you're done?

There are games that delivers "sense of accomplishment" via skillcheck only, and there are games that delivers such feel with character progression(grinding). I don't think there is anything wrong with this direction since it is RPG after all.

To me, completing any relevant piece of gears for my character gives me a sense of accomplishment, because that means my character's stat is 1% stronger than before. Completing ALL relevant set delivers great sense of accomplishment because I know my character is now much stronger than before. This is what makes RPG fun IMO.

If I want a game that tests my play skill only I would go play action games. But I enjoy FFXI(or any RPG really) mostly because it's a type of game that make me feel good when I see my character's numbers grow as I play the game.

If you only ever enjoy a game from completing skillcheck but not progression, that doesn't mean the game design is bad, it means you are less into RPG mechanics. And it's not like I advocate FFXI remove skillcheck entirely anyways. I think FFXI should keep hard content so you can do your skillcheck if you wish. For people that just want to grind gears and make friends, they also deserve something so our community is more diverse.

Or....Give the community new content that vet and newbs can do together so vet aren't doing the same ***for 10000000th time since 5-7 years ago.

You can't expect people to feel excited or fun doing the same thing over and over for 5-7 years. That's why mmo needs updates and new content so people are doing something new every few months.

It's not an unreasonable request at all.

New content is the definition of unreasonable, now

You can absolutely do Odyssey and Sortie with new players. It's the players choosing not to. I've brought plenty of brand new players into our Ody seg farm runs, and I've gotten countless people NM clears in there, including V15 and V20 clears. One of the members of my current Ody & Sortie group has been playing FFXI for less than a year, maybe it's 6 months? I'm not sure. You can absolutely clear all 8 bosses in Sortie with a new player in your group. Or you can clear 7 instead of 8, so you can play with your friend.

If you don't want to do this because you feel like it's holding you back too much, I guess just blame SE because they didn't let you be efficient and also help your friend get free ***? IDK...

Oh, I've got people Odyssey 15-20 NM clears in shout before, except I had to filter out 3 other /tell in that shout because they didn't meet the job/gear requirement. There is a limit on how many slots that you can give it to undergeared people in higher level Ody NM clear runs, which depends on the strength of every other characters and that new player's jobs. adding more undergeared players the impact on the performance will be greater and put the pt in significant risk of losing 3k Segs.

I am not sure what point you are trying to make here since all you did was presenting a niche solution that doesn't really solve the fundamental problem. OF COURSE you can play with new people in Ody if you choose to carry them. It's just in a way that is less ideal than I wish it is.

If your point is "FFXI content is fine and nothing needs improvement" then I have nothing to say.

If you think this is my point, I think maybe you need to re-read my posts? Here are some cliff notes:
-I don't believe FFXI should get new, difficult content for an alliance
-I don't believe FFXI would benefit from new, easy content for an alliance
-I don't believe current party-level content should be opened up to alliance without modification
-I believe the current content landscape allows for community-building and supporting new players

I will say that I think Sortie or Ody could've been designed to allow alliances in, but I think it would either trivialize them, or make them extraordinarily difficult, especially on smaller servers. I do not like trivial content where you have 3x as much damage, buffs, healing, and tanking as you need. Omen is not fun, it's boring as all hell because nothing can even slightly challenge you and you can't lose, and half or more of the characters are AFK most of the time.

Maybe most people would prefer to beat 6-man content with 12 of their friends/mules/alts/customers chasing them around getting free items, but I think that's going to be a boring snooze fest, and completely defeat the excitement of finishing a prime weapon or a R30 piece of gear that someone's third mule got by standing in the corner.

I agree with your point about it being an RPG and the excitement of making your character get 1% better by adding another piece of JSE. I take umbrage with the idea of accomplishing this without putting in work because, to me, the level of excitement I get by improving my character is commensurate with the difficulty of accomplishing that thing. If I could buy prime weapons off an NPC for 5m gil, I would do it, but despite the power of the weapons and the upgrades to my character, I wouldn't feel the same excitement.

Adding extra party slots isnt a linear increase in damage.

DPS using skillchains are stepping on each others toes.
Nukers relying on said SC for MB are getting stepped on twice between dps killing the burst window, and the nuke wall when those bursts go through.
Extra tp fed = more mob TP spam

Treasure wise:
The loot pool remains the same (unless youre in salvage before sept 2009). Non-lootpool currency goes unchanged (cruor in VW, plsm from salv, ichor from ein, cards from omen, points in legion) or minimal cut depending on group size (nyzul tokens, *** nyzul tokens)

It's not necessarily just about damage though, going from:
BRD, COR, RDM, WHM, SAM, DRK
to
BRD, COR, GEO, RDM, SAM, DRK
WHM, WHM, PLD, RUN, COR, GEO
SMN, BLM, BLM, SCH, COR, BLU

Is a pretty significant increase in not only damage but also buffs, debuffs, support, etc.

You can just sacrifice a tank for each of the Sortie boss mechanics, who cares?! You've got 2 now and you had 0 before! You don't need a healer in your party, so throw a GEO in there for more damage/survivability, and throw one in the tank pt for even more debuffing bubbles! Add a couple WHMs for arises and nice easy Yagrush debuff removal. BLM party can burst (where possible), stun, add even more debuffs (ES Impact on everything, elemental debuffs, helix), you've got BLU debuffs too, they can do MDB down, 33% defense down, whatever you want! Or bring a party full of mule CORs and wild card 6 times, you can SV/Bolster/Yaeg/Soul Enslavement every boss!

IDK...you certainly can't say it would be harder. Or you don't add any extra DPS, buffs, debuffs, or anything. You just bring in 12 mules/alts/friends/customers and get 3x as many rewards (segments, gil, muffins, earrings, etc.) for no more effort! Win-win! With autojoin, even if you're asleep if you have a tag to burn, might as well AFK at the entrance and get a few thousand free muffins, it doesn't cost anyone anything. Could get ~8k segments for free too!

I wasn't the one who suggested changing sortie/Ody though. I only suggested higher content diversity in FFXI and I wish new content isn't static based since we already get 2 static based content.


It depends on the design. Omen wasn't a snooze fest in 2017, nor dyna D in 2018-2020. Both still required people do things and pay attention to pt chat.

Maybe those are snooze fest now, that doesn't mean it was the case when it was new.

Idk why people automatically assumed not THE hardest content = snooze fest. This seems extreme.

I didnt say it would be harder tho
I said the increase in dps isnt linear and theres a slight increase in TP moves the party will deal with, which increases risk.

Bring 3 BLUs, 2 SMNs, and 2 BSTs and do TP drain on them then, problem solved, with people!

MNK Penance rotation, and every party gets a SMN with Siren's Avatar's Favor!

Or bring 6 PLD and 6 RUN, and use Intervene & Odyllic on every boss! Their TP moves ain't dangerous with 1 macc and 1 acc!

Are we including Gaol here? Cuz i mean, no ones ever done this for previous alliance content. Such considerations were never used for Delve, Vagary, etc…why start that now?