Dev Tracker - Discussion

That's surprising because one would be led to think that a large amount of Eikondrites will be required for at least Stage3 of Prime Weapons, right?

Not really. Eikondrites only drop when you have a stage 1 prime weapon in your inventory. Once you upgrade to stage 2 they don’t drop anymore. That should be enough to tell you that you don’t need them beyond that point.

It's they just deterring you from collecting them...

Also; Meebles V1. Probably bump it on the weekend.

Mantis two months in a row?

No. V2 December is Harpy

They gave the hint about how this month's V2 works, also

They do "how to do this month" and what's planned for next month at the same time.

i have katana on stage 1 so i stacking eikondrites just incase lol and other weapons 2 hehe

So many apologies but zero repercussions. They really should stop apologizing, it's not on accident if you do it literally every month.

It's a complicated situation, one with no solution in my opinion.
Delicate balance between fans, us, who would likely take any pile of ***for the sake of being able to continue playing our beloved game, and them, who are struggling to keep a game on life-support going on, a game they do love wholeheartedly despite their frequent lack of competence, but a game that the higher ups likely wanted to shut down completely some time ago, but have been unable to.

I wonder if FFXI is still profitable for them by now?
I guess it must be.
But is it barely profitable? To the point they can cover all the costs but barely manage to get some incomes?
Because sometimes I get the feeling FFXI atm for SE is way more profitable than they want to give it credit for, more than they want us to realize.

It's a clear feeling I'm getting and that I can't shake off, even though rationally it doesn't make much sense because if I were one of those who makes decisions for that company... I would put more budget into a stuff/game that's producing good incomes.
Wouldn't anybody do the same?
So the fact that SE isn't doing that makes me think that maybe things are more complicated than they appear.

I’m not sure it’s that complicated really, the calculation is “are we keeping players with our current update schedule” and “would we gain more customers if we did better more frequent updates”

The second? I doubt it. FFXI is no longer new player friendly. It’s too bloated and endgame focused.

The first? People are staying. Why invest anymore.

It’s gamefreak and Pokémon. We are making money off the bare minimum so why bother doing better?

Are we getting another Apex/Locus camp?

This does make a lot of sense but honestly I would do it for a matter of "company pride" or "game pride".
They seem to have an unusually high pride when it comes to the FF brand if we're talking about main, numbered FF titles.

I wouldn't raise the yearly budget of FFXI by 1000k$, but surely I would hire like 2 more people?
How much would a low level programmer cost them in terms of monthly gross salary? 3,5k$?

I mean, that's what I would assume barely a difference in their yearly budget, would keep the (small) community happy, would do great in terms of reputation and users fidelization and, last but not least, it would be what I would call highly ethical to a player base who has been this loyal to the company and the brand for so many years.
And they would still keep the incomes positive.

Clearly the "sorry we don't have enough people in the staff" excuse starts being one very weak excuse when with a small budget difference they could hire 1 or 2 more people to put in the staff, no?

Its always been a weak excuse, especially cause any professional would be like "get your ***together".

SE doesnt want any new players for ffxi, they want all to go to ffxiv since forever.

This is why ffxi is a dying game that SE wants to strangle and die.

They have no problems apologizing and giving poor performance cause they secretly want to drive players away.

just a realistic observation, nothing miserable and pessimistic there except SE viewpoint on ffxi.

so much new content? that is delayed rehashed scripted to bore and keep you logging in for random chance opportunity?

If there was any kind of new content that wasnt the mess that ody is or the literal rat in a maze dog jumping through hoops sortie I'd still be subbed.

New content is ffxi terms is years old.

Maybe I missed something, ffxi has new jobs/lands/missions/story that isnt rehashed and stretched out ody/vr/sortie?

I can't see why not. That is a pretty safe assumption.

I really think it has always been a weird pride thing as well as not wanting to anger fanbase too much. Finally, like Sechs was saying above, its just profitable enough that they can't leave it completely which has some unsettling conclusions about how the players are viewed.

FFXI makes money and it doesn't cost a lot to keep going. They can keep the current Devs because they want to continue working on the game and they generally don't let new people on this game because it's a dead end as far as a career path. They can slowly release content on this game like they've been doing since TVR started and so long as the player population stays around, SE is happy to let it continue.

If FFXI didn't make money, it would be gone.

If SE didn't want FFXI to continue, they wouldn't put out any content.

Yeah, otherwise they would market it more and put more resources into it. They are just squeezing the last bits out stringing us along. Most of us enjoy the game so thats "ok".

Yeah you can't market it more because it's the least new player friendly game in existence. That's just throwing money into a hole.

There isn't a pay off for them to develop a new tool kit to easily make new resources and certainly there isn't money to clean up the existing code to anything serviceable by modern programming languages. That is all fantasy.

So some of the people responsible for this game are doing the best that they can with what they've got and others are corporate vampires that only care about profits. With that being the stakes, I personally enjoy the game still so long as I can play it with other human beings and that is "ok". I don't expect any renaissance or resurgence (certainly not a Voracious one) of the game which is heart breaking but not nearly as heartbreaking as trying to pretend I like playing games on my phone or FFXIV after going through the first 2 expansions. Modern games generally suck, and even old and tired, this one is still pretty fun.

Vampires. Stakes.

Hilarious

Someone called in sick and now TVR is pushed back to next month. I’ll just go with that.

if someone votes with their wallet but no one's around to hear it, does it really make a sound?

I don't know about you guys, but I'm stoked for the Vengeance increase in Odyssey so I can ignore that ***even *** more than I have.

What do you think we're getting for December login reward? Maybe sleigh mount since its Xmas month? :O

Imagine roaming around Vana'diel in Santa's Sleigh? That's would be freaking awesome, lol.

Give us a T-Rex Mount!