TTOF - Seriously A Serious Linkshell, Guys

FFXI has always released content that was poorly designed, lets all just sit back and accept the fact that these devs are not masters of game theory, and they are releasing content not with the goal of us having fun, but content that makes people stay subscribed for another month or two.

Seriously, lets take a look at it here:

FFXI COP era (pre sea):

Dynamis, a several hour long event that took dozens of organized people to pull off, consisting of farming a bunch of trash mobs slowly and hating yourselves, then hoping to god you are the 1/several dozen who wins the lot on an item you want, and it finally dropped. Sometimes youd farm the entire dyna zone and not see your armor for 4 runs straight, then it drops and someone else gets it. Classic ffxi.

HNMs: Monsters that only spawn every 2-3 days, with a predictable spawn time, that drop some best in slot items? And super rare chance on drop? And you have to compete to claim the mob? And then lot for it? SE ad 0 clue what they were doing here, no end game event in any mmo has ever produced more squabbling and butthurt player on player hate in communities than HNMs. It was literally designed to pit us against each other. I barely touched HNMs during this era because it was such a cesspool of rage players and claim bots. Nope.jpg

Sky: See above. Except now you have to camp ***tier mobs instead of big bosses. They found out a way to make HNMs even more grueling.

Sea was probably one of the better designed events during this time. Whether that was on purpose or by chance, I dunno. However, there was a LOT less drama involved. Limbus was generally considered a much more solid event. Same zone farming style as dynamis, but significantly less time intensive and schedule demanding. I havent ever heard anyone talk ***about limbus like they did dynamis.

ToAU era:

So we had besieged, the first of the server wide event fun, and everyone really got into that. Solid design, but... didn't have any real rewards to it. It was just a place to skill up and get some points... It was fun I guess?

Meripos: Ah, you thought you were done exping after lv 75? Guess again, now you gotta go exp so more! Except you can only spend merit points in your MH, so unlike before you have to stop exping every couple hours to run all the way back to town, then come back. I think everyone was okay with the customization merits offered though, and it was received happily.

Salvage: The entire time salvage existed as a thing to do not for funsies, but because its gear was actually good, no one ever talked positively about salvage. ***was random, and youd frequently easily get 2/3 of a piece of gear then spend a month farming the third. Even post fix its very annoying.

Einherjar: Mostly just boring. You get some people together and kill a few waves of mobs and mediocre boss or two. Rarely dropped cool looking armor no one actually bothered to get. This event was a /yawn fest. Only thing to do was grind up to odin, but outside of that it was boring as hell. Very uninspired design.

Nyzul isle: Lamps should never have been added, Nyzul sans lamps would have been a totally awesome thing to do, but with lamps PUGs became basically a waste of time, since youd always have one *** who couldnt do them. Another example of SE not actively testing their own events they made to see how fun they actually were.

ZNMs: Actually were a rare example of good design, and became very popular very fast. To bad a pretty large sum of the 'good' gear dropped from it was not actually best in slot, and lots of the good gear from it was quickly outclassed and ZNMs became a waste of time to do (since people had 0 clue how to beat pandy warden atm outside of BGs logging out trick)

WotG era (aka still ToAU era):

The only thing people will ever remember doing in WotG era, and only thing they'll mention, were campaign battles. Campaign battles were a great way to solo exp to 75, and get merits when no one was online (playing on a wednesdays afternoon? Campaign battle prolly your best bet) They were randomized, and didn't get stale quickly, not bad.

HNMs: SE literally designed two HNMs with built in *** you buttons. God damn it, why did they think this was a good idea? Sandworm and ixion had cool concepts to them, but they were also a great way to harass other end game LSes by *** the pop over...

ANNMs: No one ever did this because it actually took some skill and drops had lolrandom augments. To date easily 25% of the drops of this event are unrecorded, which I personally find hilarious.

SCNMs: Some people did it, but travel to the strongholds was long and ardous. Combined with the fact that farming these NMs required traversing around lots of true sight mobs and required a group of 18 people to maintain sneak and invis well, and at this time it was a headache way too much for most end game leaders to bother with. Groups would do a couple runs, then after hours and hours of work farming the popset, either wipe to the SCNM battle or not get their drop, then give up in disgust. I have a lot of respect for the groups that actually took the time to farm this.

Moblin Maze Mongers: Oh ***, ya'll remember this? First week you couldnt play it because the zones had capped out how many ppl could enter at once! After that, the variety of MMM runs was actually pretty cool in my opinion. Also, with a well designed team it had some of the best exp/hour in the game if you knew what you were doing. The other more solo oriented MMM runs were interesting, but I feel like they could have had more to them. SE dropped it hard though, and never added anything else post the second round of runs (MMM NMs that dropped species based weapons and...fishing stuff.... >_>;)

Finally, SE released the big augmentation update, including:

A whole lot of shitty *** NMs all over the world... most of which had the shittiest drop rates ever seen. Why SE, why? 6 people camping an NM with drops that had like a 10% drop rate on its piece of gear? *** off.

Second, synergy! A new crafting system you can do with friends! Too bad the vast majority of synergy is useless crap you will only use to skill up synergy so you can... do almost nothing with it? Known for giving you the ability to make a handful of bst jugs and... I think some ammo? Meh. OH an you can make chatoyant staff.

But, for the briefest time ever (I think we had it for 2 months...?) we had.... Ebon/Ebur/Furia gear! And I have to say, that was one of the things I enjoyed the most at the time. Clearly they put a lot of effort into the system. Dozens of armor sets all different looking, you build a base set, then customize it, and then you can add 3 augments to it YOU GET TO CHOOSE? NONRANDOM!?! whoooaa- oh... The augments are all 'vs species' augments? Jesus *** SE you were SO CLOSE, SO CLOSE!!! WHO THE *** WANTS 'ATTACK+5 VS LIZARDS ON THEIR HANDS? DAMNIT SE

VNMs: Whats better than counter camping someone? Counter camping someone on a mob that is invisible until you claim it!

And then they promptly trashed all of that and raised level cap for the wonderful world of:

ABYSSEA
Abyssea was okay, but also had some serious flaws that to date havent been patched because SE is like "meh, damage has been done. *** it"

From this point forward, SE just gave up on balance and decided letting us have broken *** ***to break the game with was fine. Cleaving was the worst thing that ever happened to ffxi. No good was to come from players being able to go from 30-99 (or whatever cap it was at the time, 80, then 85, then 90...) without doing anything. Just afk, come back 12 hours later and 'ding' you were 99.

Ever since this became practice, the average player has 0 *** clue how the game works. Eating food became a thing to do if you were hardcore, not a standard. (remember when players not bringing food = /kick em and rep em with a non-idiot?), players wearing their higher base damage weapons on offhand because 'why does it matter, lol?' (ugh), and as said before, the me me me mentality.

Magian trials: In my opinion, best thing that has ever been designed for ffxi. Magian trials filled the gap a lot of people don't consider, and thats down time. You know, those times when no one else in your end game ls was on, no merit parties going, nothing to do... go work on a magian weapon! Having essentially an infinite amount of end game farming to do you can do solo is awesome, and its vague requirements (go kill rabbits somewhere, for example), meant you could go do your trials in places you enjoyed to spend time. It was freeform, fun(ish), passed the time, and rewarded you with non random stuff. Progress wasnt based on randomness, it was constant and you knew eventually you'd hit your goal.

The only thing I wish, was for the trials on empy weapons to be "Kill ____ x times" and not be "Trade in x ___s", this would result in people making the same empy paths teaming up and working together... not competing for drops. Some other party of 6 farming briareus? Sick, lets team up and pool our popsets and get double the progress! Nope, instead you have to counter camp them and fight with them... ugh. So close, but still, really solid well done end game event!

VWNMs + Walk of Echoes: Holy. ***. Everyone gets their own drops? Check. Everyone gets rewards for helping? Check. Progressing gives you rewards too? (teleports), check! VWNMs were an example of SE trying out new drop systems, and it worked. People didn't need to fight with each other for farming, they worked together!

We won't talk about the 3 mini expansions. Nope.jpg.

Then, SE gave us: Seekers of adoulin!

Right off the bat, they gave us ilvl 119 weapons on the first update. People quickly started obtaining them, completely and utterly negating every piece of gear except a couple accessories. HAste on everything! Stat vomit on everything! *** all the rest of the gear, this ***was miles better.

Within a few months, everyone is now able to quickly obtain gear that blows everything else out of the water. Coolio. SE gave us the best in slot weapons first, THEN gave us stuff that was WORSE then it in the next few updates.

Delve was fun, but unless SE gives us gear that is slightly, ever so slightly better than current 119 gear in the next expansion, it will make even more players rage.

It will either be gear outclassed by 119 SoA gear, or gear that outclasses and shits on 119 SoA gear. Either way, people will rage.

Why didn't people rage when gear got outclassed before? Because it got outclassed by gear that took months and months of farming to get.

I got my entire set of alluvian skirmish gear in a whopping 1.5 hours, 5/5. It took me a whopping 15 minutes to buy a tonne of the augmenting rocks to get 5 dual wield on all 5 pieces, and cap my -delay on dancer and thief now.

Im fine with us getting super awesome gear that is new best in slot.

But jesus christ, don't make it so damn easy to farm! Killing tojil once on a 6/6 run I believe damn near lets you buy your entire set of delve geasr, I think it is slightly short and you can get like 4.5/5 of the set? Dont remember. I got into my first big delve run with a friends end game LS, we cleared beat tojil about 2 hours after we started gathering the crew. Tojil dropped 2 pairs of HTH, first pair went to player next in line for it, second pair was freelot.

I won lot against like 2 other ppl. In 2 hours I had essentially gotten 5/5 manibozho gear AND Oatixur. Skirmish v1 took me a whopping 3 hours to farm up full skirmish sets for my dancer/thief AND another full set for my smn. Augmenting them took barely any time.

Delve and skirmish have been fun, yes! But goddamnit SE theres a pretty fat line between "I spent four months doing dynamis with my end game ls and still havent seen my rdm hat drop" and "I joined a skirmish PUG and got 5/5 gear in a couple hours. Neato Burrito. Now all that gear I spent weeks farming is useless."