Matsui: "Don't Throw Away Your R/M/E Weapons Yet"

I'm just happy people like that are getting their swift comeuppance.

inb4brokeorcasual

AND I have no sympathy for the people that spent exorbitant amounts of gil on ***that has been outclasses,by inches or miles

No - I'm OCD as ***
I farm sidegrades that I will use for 3 days until I get something better

But when JPs start vocally cancelling subscriptions you have a problem on your hand

This is not at all true. The #1 complaint was that hitting rocks and trees is *** boring.

Not according to the JP developer /magazine interview (the one that pissed JPs off and finally got a dev response)

Where are you seeing JP's doing that?

I think you're stretching my concept a bit too much.
Please allow me to elaborate.
I said I fully and wholehartedly enjoyed Abyssea content (I wasn't on a break or anything), I wouldn't have been able to do so if I believed Abyssea was a bunch of crap, don't you think?

If I were to sum up my thoughts about Abyssea I think they moved in the right direction (away from a paradigm that, as you mention, had become too much anachronistic), but in spite of the fact the "direction" was right, they overdid things, underestimating many things and destroying several pillars upon which the core of FFXI was built on.

So, despite a good direction and good intentions, Abyssea still has produced several big negative consequences for the game, its balance and the playerbase.
They finally started to address all of this over the last year+, which is way too slow compared to when they should have reacted, but they did it so it's all good.

After seeing them work steadily, even if too slowly, in this direction for the past year+, of course you can only be confused by the appearent direction the game seems to be going after these last two patches, it all looks a bit schizophrenic.



But the "Gear ladder", which is a linear progressive model, cannot work good in FFXI as it works in other games.
Most other MMOs have this progressive-linear model where after a certain amount of time new events are released, and progressively people move to the new stuff forgetting about the old one, at the same time new or returning players are helped to reach up the other players even if they skipped some content (or "tiers" as they are commonly called).
Gear is more linear too, you tipically have an "item level", and the amount and quality of stats item gets are directly relative to this item level. Aside a few exceptions an higher item level item is always gonna be better than a lower item level one.

FFXI doesn't have this model. It's completely based on parallel progression where you have a large amount of different but equally useful events and people decide what to do, even all.

This is reflected in itemization too. In other MMOs you cannot swap gear in real time, so you need items to be clearly better than others because you're gonna have to fulltime them, most of the time.
FFXI has been able to survive all this time with such a different model exactely because it allowed gear swapping, making gear being sidegrades with some occasional upgrade every now and then. People collected several types of gear for the same slot to suit different jobs and to suit the same job too, in different situations (idle, nuke, precast, ws, regen, movement speed, JA enhancements etc etc).

Demanding FFXI to become a "linear progression" game would be the same as demanding them to make a completely new game, you understand this, no?


The problem here is not just in gear being updated. We've hardly ever seen such a level of "fast pace of outdating" for gear over the last 11 years, but it happened to some extent, nobody is really whining about that.
Yet this never really happened for weapons (aside beginning of Abyssea) and even when it did, it never went as far as this.
We're talking about ~100 base damage difference, that's a very very big (and unnecessary?) difference.

One thing is closing the gap (I'm all up for that), one thing is making slightly better weapons, one thing is creating this new huge gap and destroying the balance making events related to those weapons (Salvage, Dynamis, etc) completely useless instead of "an interesting option".
Seeing this happen after they worked so hard to "revamp" all of the old content cannot generate any other reaction than a big "WTF?"

In the OFs before the mods nuked it to death

There's a pretty large amount of JPs posting stuff like "I'm quitting now", but most of those posts have since been deleted by SE. You can see the deleted posts here.

I'd love to enjoy the content, if only I were able to, you know, access it :'D

Matsui clearly said Delve is an expert-tier event. Clearly the NQ Naakual gear is the casual goal whereas the omgbroken ***is for people who actually do the *** Delve content and get to farm Naakuals2: The Revenge.

Casuals are happy because they get something *** powerful and the experts can pine over something that we couldn't even dream of a year ago. You know, incentive.

When PUG alliances are downing delve content, give me a ring and we'll discuss how OP it is that you can just walk in and get handed expert tier gear. You know, the Abyssea discussion.

Hot damn, that's not very cool at all.
Oh well...
I think people are overreacting, we still didn't have time to see the content all the way through. I mean, no one even managed to kill a Boss Monster yet, come on...
It really is hard to understand where this whole thing is going. If only the staff was a bit more open about their plans.

barring the fact that the recipes are already getting to be known for the tradable stuff and most only require 1 unknown item, if you think current damage range weapons are staying good for long you're pretty deluded

Why would they tell you "hey,in the next 3 months we're gonna do something to you so bad you'll quit" and throw away 3 months worth of subscription fees?

They have been pretty open about telling us new stuff would replace our other stuff... They just left out to what extent.

NQ Delve weapons (which are still massive upgrades over current options) seem to drop from the regular Delve NMs out in the field (which can then be bought with plasm after being defeated)

We were able to down one with an unprepared alliance on the third try with mostly unbuffed DDs

And this is my #1 complaint behind Lair Reives being useless and Skirmish parts being WAY too *** rare and Ionis not giving you Bayld on kills.

Somewhere, in Japan, Tanaka is sitting at his desk in his underwear reading the forums and having a drink. He's thinking to himself, man, I'm so glad I don't have to deal with this ***anymore.

Almost right. Tanaka's posting under an assumed identity, crying out as a player for the second rise to glory of the mighty Tanaka.

I believe it was directed at people saying these weapons will only be obtainable by top tier players when in reality they seem to be for everyone and their dog.

And most of the unknown items are Naakual related drops. Unless these items drop in the NQ battlefields (the public ***) expect obscene prices that will crowd out casuals and will cater to the top tier.

This doesn't even factor in those Legion drops I see SE using once again for synths and the markup crafters will apply. But hey, 40m synthables are totally casual!

Unlike a lot of you it seems - I actually don't give two shits who does and doesn't have gear or whether I'm on top of anyone else

If that is the impresson you got then perhaps you have some self-examination to do because I don't believe that I have ever said anything that could even remotely hint to that being an element of my concern

I play PUP and DNC - I don't care about being on top - I just do what is fun for me and try to help people figure it out on my way

Delve is going to be an entertaining event but the direction they have rocketed themselves in is not sustainable

I'm sure the HQ versions will be boss only or something - but the development team has said that Delve is the content level above Skirmish etc

(and that they will adjust the content for the players who follow the highest-tier players --- implying that something even bigger is to follow that)

If going up one level is +30-40% damage to your melees ... I mean what

Either way, the game isn't sustainable because the overarching indications from SE is that this game is going down in flames for A Realm Reborn. We've been floating by on fumes for how long? Dev shortages? Clear indications they don't want to maintain FFXI? Matsui clearly isn't getting the resources he needs to run this game and Tanaka phoned in everything he managed since at least the end of TOAU.

So we can get the road of "balance" which really just means bad sidegrades in reskinned content with obscene markups for a +1 here or there or we can get a gear ladder that will fall apart when coalition ranks start going down the tubes, people stop doing the NQ Naakuals and the cliques coalesce as they did for Legion.

So what's the options here? This magical happy candyland of "multiple events" hasn't been a reality for some time and the very discussion on this forums some months back was how Salvage II upgrades were meh, everyone has R/M/Es and that the game was starting to stagnate again.

Truly a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.

And I'll put it out right now - I think that Delve is a very well-designed event

Out of curiosity and sorry if it has come up in the last 17 pages, do we know what the Airlixir does?

The correct answer is 7

I would guess from the description that it's used for augmenting the new gear.