How Could SE Realistically Improve Modern FFXI?

You're talking about why you quit the game. Again, you bring up great points but it's off topic. I specifically asked how the gameplay loop of these pieces of content can be improved, not why a bigger budget would benefit the game. There are plenty of us who play the game because we enjoy it. Making it 'more enjoyable' is hardly pointless.

I think most of the complaints towards Sortie/Ody that I've seen boil down to:

-Can't play with more than 6 people
-It's daily
-Takes too long

I think the first and third are pretty damn hard to resolve IMO. If you make it alliance content it will be laughably easy and if you make it quicker to complete the content/get the rewards, you're making the "there's no content" problem much worse.

They should make the tags for Sortie/Ody a bit more storable, but TBH it's really not that bad unless you're a hardcore FOMO'er who has to min-max their points AND you also don't have regular free time every day AND you have large spurts of free time on other days.

This is basic human chemistry. Nothing to do with budget persay.

Humans only move for the carrot ON the stick, or being poked BY the stick. It is not a choice.

Sortie and Odyssey have no carrot, and no stick; ergo, no false desire to do it.
(empyrean is good, it's just a small carrot weighed against a place to use the empyrean)

"Budgetary constraints" aren't an impossible barrier to making a tasty carrot or pointy stick. They can both be done with relatively low effort.
(reskin, recolor, rezone, stat+1, whitebox)

I don't think master trials can be improved by adding rewards.

They're just not fun for the 99.9% of people that don't like sweaty "hard mode" 1hr fights. I get it's a challenge.

XI being what it is the challenge is often struggling with the UI and all the engine limitations, or cheating past them. Neither of which is a lot of fun IMO.

Budget wasn't a good proxy for new incentive structures. You're right about there being low effort methods of improving the game.

But you missed my point. Back when I first started doing Ambuscade, it was only partially because I wanted an Ambuscade Weapon. But most of my enjoyment came from the content structure and the group I was playing with. In other words,there are still plenty of us who play because the content IS the carrot (using your terminology). The grouping constraints, isolated gameplay loops, and daily lock-outs in certain new content make for some pretty stale carrots.

Any substantial power creep is inherently problematic. Increasing player strength makes current content easier, which lets people cap out and get bored faster.

The best rewards should be along the lines of what we got late 75-era. A couple stat points here and there, maybe a really good piece for a less popular job. Fillin gear that isn't BiS, but might help compensate for not being able to R30 your odyssey stuff or get empyrean+3.

I think it'd be nice to bring back traditional drops in that context, you don't have to worry so much about alliance content if everyone is lotting from the same pool. If most of the drops are middle of the road gear that tryhards won't use, you help build a bridge to current endgame. A couple of pieces that are truly BiS(not by much, and preferably accessories or very limited jobs) give the tryhards a reason to be there.

With that in mind, I'd like to see something in the vein of original abyssea(no, not escha) where you have a few zones dense with random spawn NMs and force spawned NMs that aren't blisteringly difficult and have a variety of middle of the road drops. If you really want to make it relevant, add a small segment or galli reward to the highest tiers[you still need gaol clears or aminon hard anyway].

A tiered pop system allows lesser geared players to actually contribute, even if it's just by being able to be in a different location killing easier mobs. Atma[or some similar KI] can compensate for player strength and reduce the impact of gear differences locally while not ruining the strength balance everywhere else.

Adoulin outdoor zones would be great for this: They are huge and they didn't get nearly enough time in the sun for the amount of detail put into both the zones and the mobs. Probably stray away from yet another implementation of naakuals, though.

What if the number of bosses is based on the alliance size? Like, 3 H bosses for a full alliance! lol...

3 Aminons...

Abyssea has potential.

But glavoid and chloris style pop system relying on free roaming NM returning would get a huge amount of hate from the community I bet, and any weapons needing 50 of the drops to upgrade again etc

Enjoyment is temporary, enslavement is forever. If you "liked" doing sortie, you'd do it until you stopped liking it, but if you needed the items from it, to do the next thing that "might be fun" you'd do it forever.

Anything you do to an existing content,only drives DOWN engagement. You get a spike and then it falls. Whereas as it stands you keep begrudging doing it because your options are null. You want to "keep playing because its fun" but you'll keep doing "unfun" things to justify it.

(I am still admittedly baffled by the lack of gil drops however, very odd behavior)

Primes don't really have any use either though, do they? Inb4 the new master trials, hardly anyone does those. Fun, yes. Needed for content, hardly.

The cross section of people that have primes and the people that do master trials must be as close to absolute zero as possible.

Not needed for content. I think SE original plan was to release the primes, then Oddy V25, where the primes would have been somewhat useful. We remember how messy the Sortie rollout was and it got delayed to the point where release V25 was a way to put out the fire.

These are just speculation, of course, but the added wall to V25 makes me believe that the intention was to use the primes as a way to overcome it.

We ended up beating V25s without the primes anyways, so, now the primes have no use.

I'd probably wait until we see master trial clears before deciding that primes aren't necessary for them; I'd wager that Loughnashade is absolutely necessary even if Shiraj's crew manages to pull off their RNG strat without ranged primes. We know basically nothing about the new one yet. If the damage check is set similarly high, it's quite likely whatever setup becomes viable will require their primes to beat it.

There are certainly V25 fights that primes will make easier, and since Sortie is pretty clearly easier content than V25, it seems likely that there will be people farming primes to aid in their V25 clears[yes, I know they don't help *every* fight].

I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make anyway though, if you have a 'last' content then you inherently have gear with no use. You can snapshot any point in the game's history, and the only point of gear from the last content is to do the last content easier.. people farmed it for the player growth fantasy and the assumption of new content down the road that will need it.

The difference now is that any large scale content is extremely unlikely, so creeping power and invalidating older content creates a new dynamic where it's easier to cap out[and subsequently quit]. The carrot is a necessary part of the addiction mechanism, and the developers obviously realize that, even if players would rather be handed everything.

This is 100% true. The first couple master trials the game got was when the devs thought they were mostly done with FFXI after Rhapsodies. They seemed to have assumed the endgame meta done, and offering rewards from Master Trials was pointless from a game design perspective. The money kept coming in though, and the cycle repeats itself.

If the devs added new content that elevated strength past the ilvl.119, mlvl.50, REMAP meta, it would only serve to shrink the endgame of FFXI. After hitting the new strength cap, all the other content would be too trivial to retain players.

I guess I disagree that power creep will make everyone quit. Some section, yes. Same section that would probably quit if they got all the stuff they wanted to get done too.

Not that I disagree with comments on addiction. But for me the point is to have fun. And power creep is hella fun. Why not roflstomp all the stuff you had trouble with before. Why not uncap the dmg limit.

Half joking. As I said before, the game is fine as it is minus a different method to obtain empy upgrades.

There are those that want to seriously gatekeep and ensure the peasants never lay hands on the almighty Trophies. Meanwhile those peasants just say "nah I'll go play game X instead".

The #1 most important party of a video game is to be entertaining. MMORPG's are just shared power fantasies. Trying to take away the "power" from that equation just leads to stagnation.

Or to put it another way, those same people would be absolutely ecstatic if all Primes / T3 Empy gear required an item that only droped from a 70hr world spawn NM. Lets just all stop and process that for a minute.

Power creep turned the elites into crybabies because their precious E.Bd was no longer meta.

I'm all for power creep.

I doubt weapons with PDL aftermath and a new PDL song were intended to help beat bosses on which you can't cap attack.

Master Levels were the power creep mechanic added to make Ody(and everything else) easier.

I'm all for power creep as long as they can replace the current endgame with another pool of content equally as comprehensive. Knowing current SE, if they made Sortie 2.0 which power crept as hard as lvl.80 or ilvls, all there would be left to do in the game is Sortie 2.0 and some new Master Trials. They have the man power to pull off another Abyssea or SoA.

SE might wind up doing this though if someone told them that they could use the money from returning players to fund their next 12 NFT projects, rather than reinvesting it into the game.

Can you not cap attack or is it the 25% -dt (at v25) they have that makes the dmg so much less than normal.

Have you heard the definition of a straw man argument? Think you exemplified it pretty damn perfectly there.

Nobody was crying that the entire playerbase needs to be able to obtain a relic or ebody at 75. I'm assuming your argument is fixated on everything becoming easier/attainable over a long enough timespan, but it's a false premise once you realize nothing else new is coming. Fortunately, SE doesn't seem to agree with you, because they are not rushing to undercut their remaining content.

Please, go on about how I'm gatekeeping trophies I don't even have myself, though.

This topic is kind of a lost cause because any real improvement would require effort which creates costs (unlesss you outsource it somehow to the community) and at that point, at least according to many here, it's already unrealistic.

I don't know about you guys but my first one or two days of free campaign is typically spent doing the RoE for silver vouchers. Not later than the campaign or besieged one I already start loathing the experience.
Rest of the campaign it's solo farming odyssey chests or objectives and sortie, both for a abysmal amount of points and moogle mastery (lol). Throw in some HTBF and maybe a ambu V1 VD invite if you're lucky and that's it.

At this point I can't even be bothered to trade my silver vouchers for orbs because of the tedium it would entail muling every rare drop in order to avoid losing duplicates.

None of it made me reinvested in FFXI because none of it felt fun nor rewarding. Imho they meticulously maneuvered themselfes into a dead end.

I personally just threw my Riddil's on some ***.

DT has nothing to do with PDIF.

The simplest way to put it is that without an unnerfed frailty, theres really no way to get the atk-def ratio high enough where the extra PDL from primes makes any difference.

I'm not really convinced this is true when you consider you're running 1hrs and using jobs like WAR and DRK with huge JA boost(especially under mighty strikes). Even without frailty, there is a pretty solid chunk of defense- to be stacked. But, many of them are still going to be the best damage without using the PDL, and they all diversify the WS wall, so they're still a considerable boost regardless. The limitation is the strict damage type and job setups currently in use, but those job setups were largely formed without primes available.. so give it time.

DT obviously doesn't effect ratio, but it does change perception of whether you're capped or not.

Easy way to find out is do two runs on same setup, one with SV Aria and one without.

If there is an increase in WS dmg with Aria then you were attack capped. Will probably have to be under berserk or some other JA attack boost or JA def down.

Bring a RNG or a COR and you can test whether aria helps in 2 shots, it's not difficult to test.

If you want to be pedantic you can probably build a party with no other goal except reaching the attack cap(WAR DNC RDM BRD COR GEO?). Building a group that can handle all of the other V25 mechanics while hitting the cap is a different story.

Primes aren't bad weapons in V25, but it does feel like things were designed so that the influx of PDL from Sortie gear did not trivialize V25 fights.

We got both Aeonics and Prime Weapon access without having to pay for an accompanying expansion. I'm not saying anything as silly as we owe SE, but it doesn't suprise me either that the current end of the road, for now at least, is something as uninspiring as Sortie because we certainly didn't pay for better. A lot of the contentious arguing that goes on I partially attribute to that we haven't had the option to pay for better. Sure we can pay for 8 wardrobes, but we can't pay for expansions. We either get them under passion project circumstances or we don't get them at all.

There are plenty of expansions, add-on scenerios, and abyssea-likes they could sell me that I would admit to paying extra for and just as many that I would pretend I wouldn't pay for(i still would).

The current balance of power is a little abnoxious because you can hit 99,999 too easily. SCing may or may not be substantially viable. And Prime Weapons basically make these problems overkill. I would be readily accepting of horizontal content that had significant DT but allowed SCing to get the game back in line with how the game generally operated. I would also accept a damage cap increase over 99,999 even if it was linked to something like fully upgraded REMAs or even just Primes in general.

I hope I'm not going to pay for them redoing old content with minimal changes. Again because I would pay for any additional content to give me something other than Sortie to occupy me.

Final Fantasy Dissidia Opera Omnia (Materia rest its soul) did this. The extremely higher tiers of special equipment would allow characters to break the damage cap; DDs for just themselves, supports for the entire party to a lesser degree.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how they could implement this without releasing a new line of weapons that would make current weapons irrelevant, or adding it to existing weapons (via an additional afterglow effect, maybe), or...

Well, there's a lot of ways they could do it, but do we want "Master Job Points" that require you to have 50 Masters Levels and there's 2100 of them? And each one takes a week to grind out?

I'll add real quick that once the damage cap increase thing kicked in, there was a truly outrageous bloat in the HP things have. Imagine if Dancing Edge could do/did 199,998 damage per hit, there was no cap for skillchain damage.

Now, following the Opera Omnia model, ultimate weapon WSes would be able to further break the cap, and might have an additional upgrade step beyond 119 III that further boosts the weapon skill; imagine Pyrrhic Kleos with 16 maximum hits and 4.0 replicating fTP, or just a 60ftp 3kTP torcleaver hitting for 399,996, etc.