How Could SE Realistically Improve Modern FFXI?

I wasn’t talking about 2 box, 2 boxer is a huge plus on the player base. I think people whine about those 4-6 boxer (the one with the trains). I still haven’t seen an explanation of how multi boxer (3+) prevents them from succeeding, they just taking their jealousy (or suck-ness) on them imo.

I'm assuming when the guy said eliminate multi-boxing he meant eliminate all multi-boxing, as in 1 account per human being.

This would be a disaster for FFXI as most modern players play at least 2 characters themselves and even if they don't, most of the time they play with someone who plays multiple characters.

I think you could argue that eliminate botting (which facilitates 6-boxing) would be a positive because then you'd have more people participating in the community rather than soloing the game. I'm not sure how exactly they would detect & enforce it, but in a fantasy land where that were possible, I think it would be a net positive.

I don't think it's realistic for SE to do either, personally.

Doubt it would be a positive for anyone.

If all the multi boxers disappeared you'd have 99% dds and one bard on the whole server that is sick of playing bard and has to /anon to stop getting harassed.

Making trusts not suck would do better for the game than banning multi boxing.

Give us the gambit system from whatever FF that was for trusts. Let us choose what they do.

But that would mean less subscriptions for SE if you could get Ulmia to actually sing two marches, so they won't do it.

This is definitely happening. People 1player this game with 6 characters. I'm not aware of v25s and think it's unlikely. I'm not aware of Aminon being done that way but I could see it because the strats are slow and predictable enough.

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Also if they didn't want multiple accounts, they shouldn't have let you register them into play online or square enix account services. They want them, $$$s obviously. There is no reason to discuss the topic of trying to eliminate people from having multiple accounts. Doesn't fall under the category of realistic at all.

Lowering entry requirements for events to less than 3 is an actual solution to the woes that multi box inflicts on the experience of the common man trying to make it as a poor struggling single box player. The most obvious advantage that multi box have over single box is control over their time management because they aren't restricted by entry requirements.

While it's far from rare to see a train these days, in particular during free campaign, most characters still run around solo so why pretend multiboxing is the norm? Even among those that run a double or tripple box some don't do it full time and if you ask them they tell you that X amount of those characters aren't theirs but belong to a friend who took a break or plays a different time zone.

Running a 6 box is rather pricy even without wardrobes and something tells me people who earn top dollar don't typically spend their time with FFXI or MMOs in general, so a lot of 6 boxes you see are most likely RMTing.

By the way you don't have to ban multibox accounts, just prevent them from playing multiple characters at the same time. At that point former multiboxers had the choice to deactivate/delete them, continue playing them seperately or sell them. The last two would both benefit the community cause there'd be more opportunities to do party content.

It is the norm for people that actually play, not just login during free campaigns.

There's probably less than 10% of players capable of 6 boxing every single content alone. They are mostly doing money activities like ambuscade. They did pretty good on making people stay busy during harder fights so most have not been able to fully automate them consistently so they team up. It's not as common as some think, the stuff they are consistently 6 boxing is low tier that anyone can do, but more characters is more profit. The cost is not that high really, and there are regular Joe's 6 boxing now because of how common place most of the addons/bots are that allow it. Almost none of them doing it legit anyway but I don't think they are a direct harm to the game, imo. Unless you consider exp content...

Really it's just something lower tier players nitpick as a jab. The real detriment is lack of content over all at a turtles pace.. not people paying 100+ a month to play.

People who play during free campaign aren't the customers that SE cares about and don't reflect the values of the people that do actually play the game. People who play this game don't do it for free, it's a monthly sub on a 20 year old game that we're all still convinced is worth our time and money. Multi box is the norm by the amount of accounts that is represents, not the amount of people that it represents and SE would very much encourage everyone to do it. In fact they do, by making BRD/COR/GEO required for everything hard/efficient when there are 19 other jobs to play.


Your grasp of reality is extremely questionable.

That is how it would work. If you can't multi everything you have no choice but to foster relationships. Benefit everyone and the health of the game.

It's not like you d quit no matter how much you say you would. (No one in particular)

A ton of 6 boxers is a lot of subs but don't conflate a sub count of game health. Lack of damn near all pug anymore isn't healthy. Only playing with yourself isn't healthy.

It also seems like you think "top dollar" people have better things to do? so they will go fly around in a gold plated helicopter rather than play some silly video game they have loved since they were a child.

I am also not sure what you actually think "top dollar" equates to, but I think you could be under 100k a year and not notice the 6 box price as being a burden, you know assuming you like the play style.

I don't know of anyone else who's 6boxed bumba v25, or the more difficult T3s for that matter. But, it doesn't really matter if you can 6box the hardest content in the game.

Once people get in the mindset of gearing all their mules, they hesitate to do content they can't bring them all to. Things feel like exponentially more work if you have to do them 6 times, and most people don't ever consider scaling back to less mules long term. The mule is there, it needs the shiny. Someone who chooses not to do the content(or quits the game entirely) because they can't bring their mules isn't helping the community any more than someone who 6boxes it successfully.

I think there are a lot of people who multibox themselves and feel it's necessary to downplay the impact of it. I used to be one of them, but nowadays it's pretty clear to me that multiboxing and the widespread bots that enable it are one of the primary causes of the game's downfall. SE being lazy with content doesn't help things, but we've lost players throughout periods where content was new because there's much less socializing and it's harder for new players to make inroads through any method besides leeching.

I don't think SE could realistically stop it, nor do I think they particularly want to(they'd be gambling on resurrecting a corpse against extracting profit from it's organs). The time to do something like that was a decade ago, the damage has been done now.

Multiboxing is irrelevant, trusts exist.

Posts like that make me wonder if you even actually play the game. That's all ancient content, and considered extremely easy. It's a good thing that trusts exist and allow well-equipped and prepared players to do that.

Ambuscade specifically rewards you for grouping up to encourage people to play together, trusts don't get you those rewards(by design). Trusts aren't going to get you through any level of Odyssey or turn your solo segment farm worthwhile. They don't need gear and divide your attention. They don't create fomo when you have to do content without them. They have a small portion of the upsides for the game, with none of the downsides.

The vast majority of people that play this game use trusts to do content (and they don't do the high end endgame content anyway), multiboxing is a minority and the people who multibox hard content is an even smaller minority (most people who multi, do older content that is still relevant they can steamroll) because they are not good enough at it or don't have all the automation ironed out well enough.

Multiboxing being removed would kill the game in terms of profitability and get it shut down for everyone (cause the game has no cash shop or other way to make money other than subs), and have next to no impact on people being social anyway. I often join newbie shells and try to help setup runs for stuff and getting people to group up, even when there are numerous benefits and I do most of the work is like pulling teeth. People don't want to, and prefer to solo and it take longer if needbe.

The point is, people don't want to do stuff together cause they don't have the time or inclination for it anymore. You can't force people to play the way you want them to, they will literally just quit and go play something else.

This whole argument about multibox is nonsense when trusts exists and even if they removed those too, that would just make the game totally unplayable and garbage to the majority of people who play it now. You can't make the game social again, cause most people don't want it and the ones that do are already doing it.

Horizon managed to force people to play together. They even seem to like it.

I don't think it's as clear cut as you want to paint it; people will choose not to keep groups if they can make the same progress without keeping groups. You can't be certain what they would do if that option wasn't there.

I'm not suggesting it be changed now anyway, I agree it would kill the game's profitability. I firmly believe it was a major factor in the decline, though.

Trusts are nothing like multibox, they are insanely weak compared to even a bottom tier player, they can't execute complex strategies, positioning them is a pain. They're a nice addition, but you're almost never going to choose a trust over a real player, especially when all current endgame shares loot. Plenty of people will choose a multibox over a real player, often solely for the sake of receiving more currency.

Horizon was a bunch of people who were trying to re-enact "the good old days", it was never going to be a serious thing that was able to make money for a company running a game.

Also, the player numbers have always been BS and they are especially BS now. Anyone that has ever played on any private server knows those numbers are nonsense, and it's laughably easy to inflate those numbers and you know it.



Most people will take an inferior option that lets them solo, over a superior option that forces them to group. This is just how people are.

Are they creating fake characters that participate in content, too? Guarantee Horizon has more actual groups of 3+ real players at any given time than Asura.

I don't like Horizon, I'm not defending them, simply pointing out that when the only option is grouping.. people are more likely to group.

Frankly said, yes.

MMOs are a very time intensive hobby, in particular the old ones like FFXI. Pursuing a high paying carrier is also time intensive and a day only has 24 hours.

The /sea all number isn't showing reality. You just add to the number spat out from the database when anyone types the command.

You can't force people to do something they don't want to do by banning something. People went to Horizon of their own free will, they wanted that (and most of them got bored of it really quick and quit). The reality is, doing some BCNM with 3 people is no more fun than doing Ambuscade with trusts to most people. If you try to get people to group up, you'll see how much resistance there is to it. I know cause I try all the time, they don't want to.

There are not enough players on that server for it to be economically viable for a company, most people would not pay for such a stupid wasteful experience and the numbers are bloated out anyway cause private servers can lie all they want and of course they are going to lie cause /sea all is so important to keeping people playing it.

When I played Tera there was a guy that said he worked in game development from home, he worked ridiculous amounts of hours a day and was getting paid stupid money. He barely played the game but he was always logged in and buying pretty much everything on the cash shop, including all the loot box items.

If you're well off paying for 6 accounts you barely use is a nothing anyway.

Retail simply does not have the population to sustain 6 real people parties at all times.

Not because people are not willing, but because of culture within the game where mostly everyone wants to dd and no one wants to support. We have been over this.

When all the content you have is XP-ing, it does not matter if you have support, any 6 jobs will do. Especially if you "balance" jobs to not need support and can have parties full of bsts and thieves.

The content that is difficult to purely multi box favours teaming up. Sortie, Odyssey. Still even there support jobs are usually boxed because again, hardly anyone plays them at the level needed for that content.

Going round and round on this, nothing will change. Keep playing that dd-onry Nin and people will keep boxing support jobs instead of bringing a dd-onry nin. /shrug

I would disagree here. I don't enjoy solo play or playing with trusts. It's boring. The whole point of the game for me is to play with other people. All the gear in the game is meaningless if I don't have content to do and friends to do it with. And I think the biggest contributing factor to people leaving the game right now is static groups breaking up. I've seen it multiple times now. A couple people get bored and leave the game for whatever reason, then the group disbands. Without the social interaction the remaining members stop playing too. FFXI has always been an event driven group oriented environment. That's why interest has declined so much since it's been put in maintenance mode.

Per Week one might work 40 Hours, Sleep 56 hours, spend 20 hours working on your career skills (for me this is exploring programming technologies, working on personal coding projects, reading text books or blogs, I also include OT in this time slot as well)

That leaves 52 hours to do with what you will. I choose to spend some of that time playing 6 characters on ffxi.

I even have a husband and kid eating up some of that time too, but you got to find sometime for yourself to do what you like. Even when your career is something you love to do, burn out would be an awful thing to go through after investing all this time.

What is this sorcery

It also gets really frustrating when you are a part of a static that then disbands, only to form another, have that one disband, and that cycle continues. Or you have people rotate in and out it becomes the Static of Theseus.

To the point I'm sure will inevitably get raised like it does when we mention this as a problem, yes there are other players to form statics with, but it gets really irritating going through the form/schedule/disband cycle over and over. Eventually it's discouraging enough you just move on to other things or accept it's not going to happen. It's also not like they form overnight, it takes time and commitment, which makes it all that much harder when they fail.

This IMO will be the biggest issue to people completing v25 in the coming months and years. In my observation it started the week after the content came out, half the people I started doing it with were gone within 2-3 weeks of it coming out (the flubbed release didn't help) and I've watched it continue since then, seeing a multitude of statics break up when one or two people leave.

Stop trying to square peg the round hole.

Interact with other humans in the multiplayer game. Don't meet one and make them your only friend until they quit. Just setting yourself up for failure.

You find 5(or2 2boxes whatever) and form your life around them. Your identity is based on their existence instead of meeting the other 9,997 humans in the pool. Just sad.

“Multiboxers are bad and horrible and evil and ruin the game”

The current endgame would be even shittier without multiboxers. Use it or lose it 6 person dailies, events that cant really be done anywhere as efficiently with less than 6, means when your 6th is missing, you cant fill the void. You can make friends with a 7th, who is essentially a bench warmer until they find a new group, at which point theyre no longer your bench warmer.


What primary event had a 6 person restriction with use it or lose it mechanics??

Lately we've been using our extra slot (or two) in seg farms and sortie farming runs to help out newer players in the linkshell. They get some segments or muffins and we get another human to play with. They may not be perfectly optimal but it's good enough and we can still kill 8 bosses in Sortie or full clear Sheol C with them, provided we don't make any massive mistakes.

It's really not that big of a deal, people act as if you bring one sub-optimal player suddenly your run is going to go to ***or something, it's fine. If you get 52k muffins instead of 70k or get 11k segments instead of 13k, you're going to be OK, I promise.

I'll lay out exactly how this happens, because the last few times this came up, the answer was basically "nuh uh!".

1. People play together, hey we like each other and don't suck!
2. Static forms, schedules align
3. Do content for days/weeks/months
4. Fun happens
5. Uh oh, the BRD just had a kid/got sick/has to go out of town/whatever
6. "We'll just PUG one"
7. PUGging goes on for about a week when you remember PUGs suck, efficiency drops
8. Person #2 leaves because boredom/inefficiency/goes to another static/etc
9. We'll pug
10. Circle back to #6
11. Static down to 3 people and they call it quits.

Like clockwork. There are certainly groups where this doesn't happen, but I can't even count the number of times in the past 2 years I've seen or been in this very cycle.

I have never met a competent multiboxer who refused actual players instead of their alts. Not a single one. If anything they mitigate the effect above so when players quit or have to leave for a while, they can pull their alt in and the static continues. Again, I've been a part of statics where this prolonged the static. If a real player wanted to join then they'd never say no and bring their alt, IME that just doesn't happen.

Sure, it might prevent someone from fitting in the missing role via the PUG, but facing reality 19/20 times you pull someone in they suck, are an ***, don't work with the group, schedule doesn't work, etc. Even if you did, it's just a matter of time before the cycle happens again. This cycle is exhausting and frustrating, so is the uncertainty of getting on and wondering if you'll be able to fill the slot or not.

It's more volatile than I think people in long running, multi-year statics recognize and it's absolutely contributing to the demise of the player population.