Opinions On FFXI's Life.

you guys make it sound like FFXI is dead, see you all back on next month! keep living in denial.

Come on now it's a good game but lets not over hype it... i've played it and it's not to die for it's also something to do.

I alpha and beta tested guild wars. I would liken FFXIV more to what I expected guild wars to be like if they didn't decide to cap leveling at 20 and make endgame entirely PVP. The PVE playstyle is similar to what I thought GW would be and i get the same "I cant believe this is grinding" enjoyment from fighting stuff.

It's still going to have critical flaws if they don't release content at slightly faster rate than you can beat previous content. For an MMO to be successful you should never be want for something to do. This includes if you don't like crafting etc. The only way for FFXI to be really competitive again (imho) is to invest in more dev team to pump out their 10$ mini-expansion worth of content on a 1-3 month basis. This "5 new mission cutscenes, 2 naakauls, and level 99 garrison to hold you over for 6 months" ***wont cut it if theyre going to make all gear obsolete with each expansion.

I thought I'd pop on here, as I quit FFXI about 2 months ago, and I don't play XIV but I do get to watch my fiance play every day. He actually plays both 11 and 14 at the same time now, but because of the lack of people/events available in shouts on 11, he has mostly switched to 14. They both have their pros, but its hard to see XI taper off in population and wonder if 14 could ever match it in a social/community sense.

I cancelled my FFXIV account last night.

I gave FFXIV a chance, but I'm not impressed with it. The graphics are beautiful and there are elements of the UI that I like (such as being able to visually assign macros/spells/abilities to controller buttons), but beyond that, the gameplay feels hollow. I just can't shake that feeling that I'm playing a Final-Fantasy-themed arcade version of WoW/LOTRO, directed by J.J. Abrams. There's a little too much dazzle but not enough substance.

IMHO, FFXI is a much more enjoyable game, even in the state that it's in today. I'll probably be playing for a while yet.

Ashman--

It depends on when you came back and what you came back to. If you came back to the 200 skill buff to weapons, that made things easier for everyone. It was like having an extra bard. People being acc capped in their DT sets...was ridiculous.

New Delve will, likely, require those 200 skill weapons and damn good bards to acc cap and then all these people that think they're so hot will discover, again, that they're so not.

If you came back to an LS capable of clearing the content before the 200 buff, then yeah, maybe you could come back once a year, after they've ground out the specifics of their strategies, but who really wants to be carried?


Possibly but honestly, a lot of people have only held on to XI for friends or old memories. They severed the connection. I think a lot of people, if XIV isn't right for them, may just choose to sign off MMOs for a while, and realize what an awful job Square manages to do at management.

This is so true. Even if FF14 fails (like if they fail to put out and sustain entertaining and engaging end game content) it doesn't mean people will just come back to 11 by the droves as some people imply when they say things like "See you back here in three months when the new game shine of 14 wears off!". Honestly the futures of both games are probably cloudy right now as both can probably go either way (either continue to sustain some measure of success or just outright die in the not too distant future).

everyone is so quick to jump ship, new content is coming next month, and will continue to come in the following months, beautiful graphics doesn't make a game, game play does, alot of my friends still play XI so meh, where i will agree the new content added was made easier than we may like, the idea of boggling 2 MMO's at once will make it hard for the developers to focus on both, in the end, XI is it for me, will play it until it's dead.

Even if XIV sinks, I'm sure a company will be more likely to pick up XI and continue it if SE cannot.

^

Just because a lot of people have finally jumped ship doesn't mean people are quick to jump ship.

Myself included, I know of too many people that stayed more for friends playing the game than for the game itself.

I'm pretty sure there were friends mutually dependent on each other playing to keep themselves playing.

I sure as hell wouldn't go to Abyssea for god-mode shenanigans merely for my own entertainment, but if a friend needed seals, I went.

The developers are also not listening to the players that disagree with them, something Matsui acknowledged here, while they laser-focus on the little bit of praise they get.

I've believed for a long time that they were making an intentional effort to detach people from this game, but now I see what a terrible job they're doing at XIV's launch, and all I can see is that this a company that has no idea what they're doing.

In regards to the up-ending of the gearing paradigm in XI, it's not even like the japanese are ultimately happy about it either. Matsui is hellbent that this is how he's going to do this, and nobody is going to stop him. Shut down the servers, he doesn't care, he'll host the server on his personal laptop and continue destroying the game.

While I guess it could be true that FFXI's future may be tied in with FFXIV's future (so long as both titles are under SE) in the sense that if 14 fails it could put 11's existence in jeopardy that really wasn't my point. My point was that while 14 did indeed draw people away from 11 it wasn't the sole reason for the decline of its population nor was it even the spark for its decline.

The population was noticeably dwindling even before 14 came out so to think that should 14 fail 11's population will just magically rekindle is a bit blindly optimistic. It's not like 11 suddenly became a different game than what it was before these people quit. 11 wont ever reach the populations it had in its prime (a given since its an 11 year old subscription game competing against dozens of newer MMOs many of which are free to play) but any significant increase to its overall population will have more to do with their devs changing the direction or philosophy of the game to better sustain and draw in player interest rather than 14 failing and people just going "oh well 14 was a bust, time to hop back onto 11."

Welp, one thing is for sure:

Ain't NOBODY gonna be coming back to FFXI when they can't reactivate old accounts. I'm sure a lot of you have heard, or seen first hand, that attempting to activate old POL ID's via the SE Account Website yields an error that it is down for maintenance. Been that way a while apparently. Personally, I like the hold times on the phone and live chat queue--

"You are currently number 128 in the queue. You should be connected to an agent in about 01:30:24. The average amount of time a customer has to wait is 01:40:30."

Bismarck had a pretty steady 2k players on at any given time of the day, so as faras dwindeling prior to 14, not so much.

Former 14 players rushed 11 shortly before SoA came out. I saw many 14 players farming for empy and relic weapons. 11 will remain so long as SE can make a profit, because at the end of the day, no matter what culture, nation, or continent you're apart of, it all boils down to one thing: the almighty dollar dollar bills y'all.

Not to show my ignorance and I'm not questioning you at all, but sincerely asking... do you have an example of this happening with another game? If you have one off the top of your head I'd love to look into said game to see what kinds of things happened after changing companies on an existing title. If this is fairly common and thus reveals my general lack of gaming knowledge then I apologize, but I can't deny that something like that is intriguing.

And as a side note, I'm not hoping this happens to ffxi or anything, just wondering purely for curiosity.

While FFXI certainly has some redeeming qualities, if you look at it from a systems design perspective, it is objectively terrible and extremely high maintenance. Even on a high performance machine, the game runs like ***because they refuse to drop support for hardware that is over a decade old and update their engines. The game is practically unplayable without third party software, and you need to spend a completely ridiculous amount of time laboring over annoying tasks which add absolutely nothing to the game (skilling up, changing jobs, managing inventory, making macros and gear sets, keeping them up to date, writing and perfecting spellcasts, etc), instead of actually enjoying any of the content. On the whole, I would describe playing FFXI as a very tedious experience.

The only reason I have played the game so long despite all this is because I enjoy the company of some of the other players. Take the same players and put them in a less tedious game like XIV, and I will gladly follow them and leave XI behind with no regrets. I suspect many others are in the same situation.

The fact of the matter is that there are too many MMOs out there that are simply better than FFXI, most of which are free to play.
I think FFXI has always largely owed its success to brand loyalty, rather than to actually being a good game in its own right. There are many people who will continue to be loyal to it, but many more who will leave for the newer, more attractive option that carries the same brand name. And if there ever was anyone who would have started XI as a new player these days, they no longer have any reason to do so, and so the FFXI population will inevitably continue to decline.

Server merging and adding new content will certainly help keep XI going a bit longer, but it will never again be what it used to be.

I play the game perfectly with no third party software, you just suck I guess if you can not function without them.Certainly not unplayable.

I think there is a bit of difference between "can't function without them" and "don't want to". This is of course an opinion. Some people won't play a game if parts of it annoy them, and if you take those parts away, they are okay with playing.

As for myself, I have 0 interest in hitting 3 separate macros to swap in to my ws gear, then hit 3 more to swap back. It isn't fun. Again, an opinion but enough people shared this opinion to make a program to fix it, among other things.

I play the game through the vanilla PlayOnline Viewer just fine. I also feel your comments about the game always relying upon the Final Fantasy brand fanboys to be misplaced. This game was wholly disperate from the MMORPGs it contended with in the past, and that was precisely why it was successful; people didn't play FFXI because it was better at doing what WoW did, rather because it accomplished what WoW didn't. Whether FFXI is still a relevant MMORPG is another matter entirely (spoilers: its current direction is not), but it's pretty unfair to say that the game is flawed to the point that only diehard Final Fantasy brand fanboys and Windower plugins can make it playable.

Most of the issues I had with playability was linked directly to the plugins I chose to run. On vanilla PoL I rarely had severe playability issues. What I did have issues with is the outdated UI and the amazing lack of useful tools within it. Even things like the display delay and lack of adaptable macro commands to deal with the level of situational gear. At least half of the reason people talk about needing 3rd party programs is the paradigm of gear customization expected in relation to the inability of vanilla to accommodate it.

I agree. I don't think anyone can dispute the fact that SE created a user interface that isn't very compatible with gear-swapping. It's a bummer that SE 'still' hasn't taken the time to really update the user interface, and I completely understand why nearly everybody uses the Windower program. It just irks me when people delude themselves in to believing the game requires it.
You would think that SE would take the ideas of the Windower program and implement them, allowing them to begin dispensing punishment for Windower plugin abusers (I'm looking at you, fishbots), but I suppose that would take a modicum of humility and effort.

Since when did windower have a fishbot? If this is true then a lot has changed in the 9 months I've been away.

I've seen it said that they won't increase macro size because it would make it easier for people to automate stuff. And I call ***. Adding 20 lines isn't going to let anyone do anything fancy and people who bot would still bot anyway. Hell, you still have to hit 2 macros. One to start an action, and one to go back to the other gear. And for mages, you'd need to hit one to put in fastcast and start the spell, then another to put on the appropriate gear, and a third to go back to idle gear.

It is possible that they may do it with the UI update but only if they've changed their minds. I personally think the only reason they didn't do it is LAZY or their single programmer doesn't know how to do it.

If they were smart, they would implement item sets and make it so you can use a single macro line to call an entire set. Then they don't have to increase the macro lines and people would be able to complete an entire cycle with one single macro.

Now that you mention it, you're right. I apologize for getting my programs mixed up. Fleehacks are the ones that run through Windower, not fishbots. I apologize to the fishbots on Phoenix (don't spit in my salmon filet).

That's just what I've heard though.

We can stop talking about third party hacks now.

For those of you who say that you can play the game "just fine" without Windower, the question that must be asked is how fine is "just fine"? At the point that you are hitting 7+ macros for every single command (at least 1 for precast, 3 for midcast, 3 for aftercast, not even accounting for all that situational gear) in order keep up with a Windower user, you are without dispute playing less effectively, because now are slowed down by having to cycle through a million macros in order to do anything, probably making mistakes while hitting all those macros, and most importantly, you are hindering your ability to pay attention to other game mechanics. This is only one of many, many features Windower offers which raises the standard of what one might consider "just fine." Of course I am aware that you can get by without Windower, but you can't even pretend that you wouldn't play at least somewhat more effectively if you did use it.

This argument aside, playing without Windower pumps up the tedium of this game to a whole new level (as if it weren't tedious enough). Perhaps I should have been more clear when I used the word "unplayable." I meant that I would simply choose not to play the game if I had to deal with the default interface, because it is not fun to constantly worry about micromanaging all of my gear swapping.

Unfortunately, the default interface is not conducive to the type of gameplay that has been envisioned for FFXI. This is a major problem with the systems design which is glaringly obvious even to new players, and this will deter them from giving the game a good try even after it goes free to play. I concede that what I said about brand loyalty was a bit of an overstatement. But when the first thing people see in the game is the crappy interface, most of them won't stick around to see the other reasons why the game has been successful.

Edit: Started writing this and didn't see Aelius' post until after I hit submit, but in any case I am talking about Windower in the context of the discussion, not just for the sake of talking about 3rd party programs. Sorry if that's not okay.

A lot of people find a lot of fun and challenge in setting up macros in a functional way. I know a few people who played either on PS2/3 or vanilla PoL that were every bit as effective or moreso than anyone using tools. I can't say that they would be any more effective with tools, as their performance was rarely if ever lacking by that standard.

There are plenty of small changes that could be implemented within the vanilla client that would remedy the reasons a lot of people use tools.

@Aelius - Are we not allowed to reference the existence of 3rd party tools in how they fill design flaws of the standard game? Obviously most of them don't offer an unfair advantage anymore than they fix design oversights like windowed mode or multiple instances.

Windower along with plugins and add-ons are fine, I mean hell we have a windower section on the forum. It'd be a bit weird if we couldn't talk about it.

I've been given the impression from prior discussions and warnings given by mods that what isn't allowed is conversation about bots/speedhacks, where to acquire such things or how to use them.

On the topic of performance, there is no contest for a dd or a mage. A spellcast/script user will win given similar levels of reaction time and player skill. Buff jobs don't really need it but I wouldn't play brd without it...