Dev Tracker - Discussion

Okay, so your group added 2 extras that played with them. Then it took 10 people out of shout, a few of which would have done a real run otherwise. In what world is that a net positive for grouping?

Allowing 2 leeches for every real character is just too much. Loosening restrictions is probably a good thing, but when you loosen them that much the cost of leeching the content goes so low that you entice people who would have done the content to leech it instead. How many people are actually participating in an omen card farm, instead of leeching off a friend or shout that's doing it? Same goes for a dyna w3 clear. 18 people sitting in zone, 6 or less are active.

Oh no
Players networking with each other instead of sticking to their own multibox cliq in a MMO, the horror!!


Me when i invite someone from a shout whos afk at the sortie entrance
/pcmd kick leech
/blist add leech

there's no easy solution i guess, i would love to do casual sortie with more than 6 people, but even without mercs it would be a nightmare to organize in pugs. it's unfortunate a lot of groups seem to have just 2-3 too many people that want to go, but it's probably better not trying fit the square peg into the round hole by allowing up to 18 to enter 6 man content.

i'm definitely more of a big linkshell planned event 2x a week kind of guy, but that age has passed i think.

It's just too bad the game never allowed us to make groups of 12. That would've been a really nice number for a lot of content.

Honestly if people are concerned about RMT / mercing in a 20 year old game ... I don't know .. go touch grass or something?

People who started FFXI on NA release would now be close to if not older then 40. The bulk of the population has to be past 30 by now. We're well into the IDGAF phase of a games lifecycle.

Would've liked to see how the game functioned with a party of 8, 8 Seems to be (the claimed) magic number of "but my two friends"

But limiting songs specifically to 5 and rolls specifically to 2, so no 3 cor bard 2 geo 1 melee party.

All but one of my Ody group unsubbed because Primes are such a BS grind. If primes didn't require muffins(just *ites) and were balanced around 2-3 hours of play per week to finish one every 6 months, we'd all still be subbed and paying for years to come.

Five Psyches per month limits how fast you can make Primes AND means you have to stay subbed, and that's all SE needs; The muffin grind is an entirely gratuitous "f*** you" to players.

Huge miss on SE's part.

The *** you is what you're paying for.

Dommy mommy SE and her high heel ball torture.

Your friends may have finally decided enough was enough but the rest say yes keep pegging me, and harder.

As he gives SE 10 grand a month skewing their perception of how small the playerbase actually is.


AAAAAAAAAANYWAYS
If I'm not mistaken, isnt Thorny involved in RMT business himself? I'm not asking as a dig, its not an attack, its not an insult, etc, I'll get to my point in a second. We know Eiryl is involved in it, but one person has done plenty of good things for the community, and one person just whines and *** about how SE are incompetent shitlords.

Why do the two people vehemently against the idea of opening the current endgame content, Sheol since March 2020, Gaol since Jan 2021, Sortie since August 2022, to parties have ties to RMT as sellers? Not that the number of participants in this discussion is massive, but the Venn diagram of "doesnt want alliance content" and "wants alliance content" are two circles of "sellers" and "non-sellers" that dont overlap. Whats the concern?



Sorting how long the current endgame content has been out vs the start-to-finish release time of expansions:
Sheol: 49 months
Gaol: 38 months
WotG: 37 months
TVR: 33 months
SoA: 20 months
Sortie: 19 months
ToAU: 16 months
CoP / RoV / Abyssea: less than a year

Sortie and Gaol have been out longer than it took to release WotG from start to finish, and there is not one past or present ffxi player who feels the three plus year release timeline was not too long.

Nothing in this topic will ever have even the slightest amount of influence on what SE does. There are no incentives here. It doesn't matter if I convince every NA player there is to think the same way I do, it's not changing anything. So, your attempt to imply a personal or financial incentive falls flat. It's beyond tiring to have my opinions continually dismissed based on a perceived bias, I've had to answer this sort of response a good dozen times here. I have a better understanding of the game than most, both in terms of gameplay and software, and I enjoy sharing my opinions on it.. like many other people posting on these forums.

If you really want an open RMT perspective, here you go. The amount of people buying gil by the billions just to feed it to ML sellers isn't small. The same people will absolutely buy gil just to feed it to Sortie sellers. People are constantly asking me to buy Sortie or Odyssey directly, and I don't sell either because it's wildly impractical with a 6man limit and the current lockouts. Most of the people who are selling rare V25s, segment farms, or Sortie are directly asking for $ not gil atm. There is 100% a profit opportunity for me if they open to alliance, either by using my existing automatic segments tool to carry a group or automating Sortie to carry a group. I've 6boxed Bumba V25, so I'd be one of the few people able to sell that(and adding characters won't make it that much easier, either, as anyone familiar with the fight can attest).

But, having that carrot just out of reach gives people a reason to keep improving their jobs and playing the rest of the game. If you make the final carrot too easy, they quit outright. It's not black and white whether it's beneficial or harmful to RMT, you're trading a short term profit opportunity for a hastened demise of the game. The only argument against it from a RMT perspective is the belief it will kill the game, which should concern anyone who enjoys the game.

As a "seller", or a creator, or a player.. I want FFXI to last. You are convinced that trivializing Sortie into an alliance grind will be for the benefit of the game. I'm not. I've explained why; I believe that creating an environment where everyone can buy the content for dirt cheap reduces incentive to make real groups, rather than increasing it. There are limited groups for anything that is widely available to be merced, precisely because most of the people who want the carrot enough have an easier time getting the gil to pay a merc than they do creating a group.

Edit: Not sure if I missed this, or it was edited in?
Absolutely. I'd be all for releasing a new content that outdates Sortie and Gaol, then trivializing them. This is how content releases go. But, since getting a new content seems to be out of the picture, the consideration has to be made whether it's a good idea to trivialize the last content we have.

1/2 duration, but double points would make sortie better. We're never going to get away from fomo daily poo model. I just don't want to spend an hour on an event that is artificially longer that could be shortened.

The solution to making sortie less balls is just there being less of it. They can cap it at like 90k galli if they still hate us, or uncap it to be the qol adjustment once it's old and worn out(which is now imo).

That's the thing, adjusting sortie by allowing friends to actually play with friends would not effect max muffins collection rates. Six man groups can already do 8 boss Aminon runs, no amount of adding more people would change that. At least 40~50% of sortie is just running from Point A to Point B, the bosses already have mechanics that dictate they must die fast or the fight can escalate and become unwinnable. Adding more people will not reduce the already low kill speed and Bolters Roll run speed of existing groups.

Now what it might do, and what posters here are really afraid of, is allow lower skill groups to get the same cap muffins as elite six man groups. Those people would no longer be special, everyone would have the same trophy as they do. I could understand this in a younger game, but at 20+ years... it's time to find a new ladder to climb.

SE should just add Incursion-level choices to Dyna-D, 140-160.

I was pointing out the fact that the only two people against the idea of expanding to alliance just so happen to be two RMT sellers and was questioning what the correlation was, if any. You're getting offended by your own over-analysis into it.

I already answered this one and why its probably wont apply the way you think it will: RMT cant run 24/7 sortie bots. You replied saying that people will give RMT their account information to log them in, and this is the dumbest *** thing I've read on these forums this decade. I'm not saying it doesnt happen, but you have to be -insert ableist slur- (yes, that word because thats how stupid it is) to give RMT your account information so they can log you in and run you at their time. These are the same people who give their bank information to a Nigerian prince.

Since you have your thumb on that pulse, just how many people do you think are giving RMT their account info to run them through Sortie?

And how many people have quit outright because the grind is repetitive and boring as ***? How many people have quit because their group of friends exceeds 6 people and they got left behind / fell behind (you missed that V25 bumba clear that took us 30 tries to finally get because its a luck based fight? damn that sucks, but Im not doing it again sry)? How many people have rage quit because no matter how good they get, they just cant beat V20 or V25?

how many people got their prime weapon, said "peace out girl scout" and deactivated their account? How many people killed V25 Bumba and deactivated?

Current active players: 68,809
December 20, 2023: 76,673
Maintenance mode announced March 2023, wayback machine has no snapshots to work with between the above and below dates.
January 30, 2023: 104,593 (this active char report is likely influenced by a return home campaign)
November 17, 2022: 87,496
September 25, 2022: 97,541
July 7, 2022: 98,866
June 30, 2022: 111,851 (return home campaign influence I think)
January 23, 2022: 108,020

I wish I had more 2023 datapoints, but I dont think ~10% of the active players quitting in the last 4 months is a sign that the current status quo is good for the longevity of the game.

I didn't say they would, I said they are. There are over a dozen Sortie runs by chinese RMT every day on Asura already, and most of the characters they use are buyers' not their own. In addition to those, there will be all the open slots coming from any current groups that realize they can sell the extras.

The rest of what you're saying is just speculation. The game is going to lose players regardless, because SE isn't putting any meaningful resources into it. You're arguing that allowing alliances into Sortie would reduce the speed at which players are lost. I'm arguing that it would increase it. Neither of us have any objective data, we've both presented our viewpoints. I don't really see the point in going back and forth on something that can't be proven.

For every player who *needs* 80k galli a run and to make a prime in a given time frame, there are probably 5 players who are small manning Sortie 10-20k at a time and working toward empyrean armor. Giving them the option to pay a few mil and walk away with their whole set in a week isn't going to make them want to play longer.

I'm inclined to think a considerable amount of the people who want alliance inclusion just want to sit their mules in for free points, because they aren't satisfied with progressing one character.

You are severely underestimeting the actual state of the RMT situations. People giving their login infos to RMT happens all the time: Mythics for farming ichor/token, Ergon for Legend status, Master Trials back when you couldn't really have a leech spot, Gaol bosses clear (you give them your char, they unlock+level cor, plop a Rostam r25 on it, farm 5/5 Nyame r20 and a Kaja Sword, and it's good enough), Sortie, and likely much more. It's popular and "safe" provided that the seller has a good reputation, which you can easily verify yourself on the various forums/discord where these services are offered.

You need to stop talking from what you feel and listen to the people who actually do those things, or at least go research for yourself what happens on RMT websites because it's a lot more than you think.

Remember that on this website here there's maybe 0.5% of the playerbase that actively posts, and less than 5% that are registered at all (pulled these numbers out of my left *** so ymmv). Being active here or ingame on your specific server in no way gives you or anyone else a good snapshot of the community and its habits. Selling ***to people on all servers, whether you like it or not, does.

I kinda understand because I've put years of playtime into my account since the game launched. The sentimentals are strong so you value it more than it's actually worth. Truth of the matter is, if I hacked your account and dropped all your ***today, Thorny could have you right back where you were in 3 short months!

Lili do you make people give you deposits or do they pay up front?
Asking for a friend.

Will say it again - that kind of RMT presence only exists on the couple servers with enough population to support it.

People literally move to Asura to pay RMT for Gaol clears.

While I am sure opening up Sortie to alliance would mean RMT sell it, that goes for just about anything else - again only on heavily populated servers.

"But RMT would sell it (on Asura)" is not really an argument when literally everything is for sale (on Asura).

(This is not a hate on Asura ((this time)) - just pointing it out).

(disregard if not on Asura)
I get it that 15 years ago people hated RMT and for good reason. But as many have stated before (recently), "what's the big *** deal"?
1) it's never going away.
2) use ***.lua and not see them.
3) go on with your day.

Unless you're trying to farm your own crafting shield and only getting your drops in Pally Mines or you want to make an EP group and decide to go in lower KRT, they literally don't impact your game anymore. I think my only huge gripe on them is that at any point of the day it takes 20 mins to get a lamp for Einherjar because it's spammed 24/7 on Asura. That might not even just be RMT.

The reality of this game (or any mmo) is that RMT exists and at least for this game, they're not even taking over to the point that you can't play the game without them. Take your Midol and do your daily segments and sortie.

i do agree with thorny that they do reduce the available player pool for a given event. when was the last time you saw someone try to pug a w1 dynamis clear? it never happens, people either go with their own groups, multibox it, or pay. people have become accustomed to paying for everything on asura such that they only do it by merc, which hurts the community.

Literally nobody has made the argument that the fact RMT exists is hurting you. Yet, there are a dozen dudes making the same exact strawman argument that RMT don't matter.

The argument I have made is that allowing 10-12 leeches with every sortie run will devalue the content enough to reduce rather than increase the amount of active runs. It doesn't matter if the people carrying are RMT or normal groups. It matters that over half of the people gaining galli are likely to be straight leeching. That isn't engaging gameplay.

You remove every incentive for people to improve and make a better group. You completely remove reasons for anyone who can't farm 40k+ to do their own run, when they can be told to stay out of the way and get 80k for leeching off a friend. It increases output, but it doesn't make the game more enjoyable.

Someone comes back to the game fresh? Great, hop in my Sortie, you'll have full emp+3 in 5 days. That's not a better gameplay loop than working through the content and seeing everything FFXI has to offer. It's literally mobile game handout.

If they were going to make alliance sortie, I would want their to be adjustments to it, to incentivize alliance Optimization. For instance, have galli and key items be floor wide including boss rewards. So the alliance can split up into 4 groups and do all 4 bosses at the same time on first floor and then do all 4 bosses at the same time in basement, and then move to aminion in one run. Trying to optimize 9 bosses + Aurums + 4 nakuuls would be fun imo. There would be a lot of room for optimization and job diversity I think.

Idk if I was the only one to experience this... But back when Dho Gates was 'good' Job Points I distinctly recall RMT stealing mobs in an noncompetitive manner and making it a nightmare to get points.

They would speed / POS hack. You'd see them teleporting through the walls to Diaga all mobs near your party -> vanish through walls -> all mobs disappear/chase after RMT.

Albeit, it was kinda interesting that this did not seem to occur during JP hours and only NA. I suppose because JP reports actually get RMT banned.

I generally don't care if people bot or whatever, you do you boo. As long as you aren't actively making other people's game experience worse, I don't really care what ppl do. Hence why I never cared about bots in Sih Gates, albeit botting in Dho Gate's "good" spots would get you a Blist from me.

No reports get anyone banned. The STF is a glorified boogeyman.

They aren't watching you. They aren't reading reports. They aren't investigating. They're letting a program pick a couple people at random and hoping people will be scared by it due to your 1% chance of being picked.

After existing on Odin for a few years, I'm entirely convinced mass JP reports to SE do indeed get people banned.

Accidentally shared Scoreboard in /say near a bunch of JP? 'Nice knowing ya!', or so the meme goes on Odin.

Yeah

Stop giving bad advice, Eyril.

Go watch a movie.

Let your keyboard to rest a bit, will you?

If you want to be afraid, by all means cower in fear. Makes no difference.

That is the goal after all, save money by scaring you instead of paying for the hours to do the work.

Share scoreboard in /yell during JP prime time in Rabao on Odin.

Spam it out every 10 mins for 3 hours over the weekend.

Record how fast it takes you to get banned doing this on Odin vs. Asura.

I've quit a lot over the years and may have missed it, but has the game ever really been in this position before? Where the last thing to do is grind for gear to make the content you already beat 0.1% easier/faster to make more gear you don't really need with SE explictly saying there'll be nothing more?

At least when it was Kings, Sky, Sea, Salvage, Delve, etc. we were grinding but knew there'd be newer content that needed it, or the gear made things more noticeably easier and faster.