Dev Tracker - Discussion

All I remember about TVR is someone going "Oh yeah, Galkas used to have a penis, then thing happened and now all Galkas are smooth like Ken dolls as punishment."

Oh, I completely agree with this. After CoD, the story for FFXI can never be as high stakes. I am more forgiving for them trying with Chaos, but that's a personal preference thing.

I think it's worth noting that Chaos hasn't been around for 5,000 years in the story. It wasn't ever really even a threat till one of the eggs was found during the crystal war and Delkfutt mishandled it's safekeeping. But also, this isn't too dissimilar from Atomos? Like, the Shadow Lord is defeated from Rank 6, the nations are saved. But bummer, there was an avatar there all along that will eat the world because of something some people are doing during the crystal war. Not defending or criticizing either, but Atomos was a much bigger insert than was Chaos.

Oh, I'm understanding a bit of our disagreement better with this elaboration. You and I have different definitions for the word "Retcon". I view a retcon to be a writer purposefully telling you that a previous portion of the story was told incorrectly. It sounds like you view a retcon to be a writer taking too many creative liberties with the blank space in a story's lore. The introduction of Chaos never invalidated any of the previous stories. It just elaborated on several blank spots in the lore (the silent period after the meltdown).

Edit: I'm clogging up the "Dev Tracker" thread again, my bad. It was a fun discussion!

Retcon is shorthand for Retroactive Continuity, and it was popularized by comic book writers (which led to many, many, many people misusing the term).

In order for something to be a retcon it has to violate a story's narrative or world building continuity in some way.

Examples of Retcon within FFXI:

Lady Lilith's Vana'diel was the true outcome of the Crystal War, and our Vana'diel is just Altana's desired outcome that she forces to happen. We were never just heroic adventurers, but Goddess Chosen with Divine Dispensation.

We didn't actually kill The Shadowlord. The Zilart Princes and Ark Angels did (in spite of our later revealed Divine Dispensation).


Examples of Not-Retcons, merely additions within FFXI:

Within the first 5000 years of The Meltdown, a draconic entity threatened the whole world. Odin and a Heroic Galka took him out behind the shed, and put him down. He entered stasis within an egg or sixteen, because he's a weird quasi-dimensional dragon that drinks tesseract Crystal juice(Creation energy).

The Olduum Civilization was all about lightning, and may have created Maroliths, and passed the caretaking of their special control staff into the hands of the Mamool Ja.

-----------------------


Use of the word can get a bit murky, because a lot of things can affect continuity. Even things added that were intended to have no bearing on the story. XI has plenty of retcons within its own framework, some of them are pretty hard asks if you really care, but there really aren't a lot within TVR. They did good with what they had to work with, as always.

I like to use SCRIPT

Suspension of
Common
Reality
In
Present
Time

Whatever happened before doesn't matter, whatever happened after doesn't matter, only what is happening now matters.

TVR feels weird. Especially the Odin parts, although I can sorta justify it as Demons being extremely biased narrators. FFXI is chock full of each race’s culture being unreliable narrators that only remembered small parts of the overall story after all.

I don’t like the implication that demon infiltration is as common as TVR made it either. A demon or two is fine, but the numbers TVR presents is a real problem when you consider the ***they could have caused in the crystal war by NOT having the various kindred openly fight when they could have easily sabotaged from within like how Tonberries were used as assassins.

And SCRIPT is a different term. It’s more analogous to Marvel time. A retcon is when you change the previously established canon, not when you dump something into a lore gap even if the new information sounds dumb. For example, the first Zilart cutscene is a retcon because it changed what happened previously. The brothers being Zilart on the other hand isn’t a retcon. You just didn’t have all of the information.

She didn't exactly force it to happen.

1. The Lillith timeline was the true timeline.

2. Altana creates an alternate timeline, where the allies won.

3. Atomos destroys fake timelines, she knows this when she creates it.

4. Altana creates a wildcard in this new timeline, where the adventurers can enter her world (the players didn't exist in the past, nor in Lilliths timeline as far as we know).

5. The player travels back in time to the past.

6. The player changes the past and allows the allies to win decisive battles (for instance the player allows Windurst to hold out and win against the Shadow Lords first attack against them, by stopping the reinforcements), so that the timeline she created now is the real timeline due to having a proper past.

She gave the 5 races a second chance and created Cait Sith to help, but the player / allies still made the current timeline real by their actions.

it's really our fault, if we had delivered all those Beastmen's Seals earlier maybe Odin could have funded more infiltrators back then

Called it!


They're also adjusting entry placement, and planning to disable EXP loss in the shared areas when the January update lands.

You did call it.

Though they should've known beforehand it was obvious.

Literally everyone knew what was going to happen.

I think I missed this part

So based on the notes Omega/ultima is just going to be NMs similar to the Job themed ones and killing them (or being on a server that kills them maybe) will allow you to get their item from your weekly 5 chests.

The gear will come from turning said chest items into the furnace and probably has ranks that work exactly like the current accessories.

I can probably no longer put off farming this -_-
I hate Temenos but Apollyon isn't so bad

Honestly kind of expect both of the new gear sets to just be the new starter point gear given that limbus is a more casual/solo/entry level event.

An accessible set of gear that comes with a level of meva/dt that previous entry level gear was lacking.

Alabaster Matter is the new 1500 point item, lol. Does this mean January login will be Murky Matter?

That's annoying as someone who has done a lot of limbus and can say the points are much more of a limiting factor than the matter, especially if you've been rotating your chests.

It would have helped a little early on when the cap on points was still low at least so if you haven't done much limbus yet its decent I guess.

Wonder if they're upping the level to 140 with this patch.
That would mean, potentially, more points per time spent doing limbus!
Emphasis on that "potentially" because at a certain point you need to balance points per kill vs killspeed, I guess.

I think they would have told us they're doing that by now

Big financial mistake on their part but hey, you do you SE.

Very disappointed they are not instanced.

Should have been instanced: Each tower gives a KI, need all 4 to enter Omega/Ultima in their respective zone. Everyone that enters loses their 4 KIs like Ou.

Instead its just more trash mob Limbus for weeks on end. I am not even sure how they fix this event fumble.

ONE limbus matter for a month of logins is pretty insulting

That's a hell of a follow up after the draw that an old case was, to do that. How embarrassing. I'd rather have a savory shank.

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/campaign/login/login150.html

This has been Fujito's vision for the game and he's said as much since he took over for Matsui. Limbus, Vana'bout, Besieged, this is the kind of content I think we should be expecting during his tenure. The playerbase was very vocal with their disdain for 6-man content in Odyssey and Sortie, and this is about as far from it as you can get. The issue is there is absolutely zero way to balance open world content in this game to be challenging, fun, and beatable for all levels of player interaction and gear level.

I was hoping they’d change up the limbus rewards… like getting units per kill similar to ody segments or sortie muffins, ontop of the floor progression reward. Or getting a good chunk of units for downing an NM or something. 6-7 kills for like 80 units is big sadge.

locked 6-man content is fine provided the content isnt:
a-gated by a daily entry
b-uses individual currency
c-a fine line in player skill, gear and knowledge can be the difference between an 80k galli run and a 20k galli run

Skirmish was 6 man content, no one complained about it.
BCNM's were mostly 6 man content, no one complained ever. ENM's were a bit restrictive with their 5 day lockout.
Assaults were 6 man content, but you didnt even need 6 for most of them.
Ambuscade has been 6 man content, no one complained.

I'm really not sure what other major endgame content over the years was tied to 6 people. Meeble Burrows maybe?

Also Matters dont have the CanSendPOL flag, so you cant even get them on alt's and send to main.

I would of liked it instanced the same way Omen was, you could do it with 6, or with 18, players choice. Each tower or area ends with a mini-boss and KI. Turn them all in for a Ultima / Omega super fight. That would of been awesome while still allowing our friends to tag along and not limiting us to a six man static.

I think it helps that Dynamis, Omen, and Delve were relevant 18-man content at the time to compliment that 6 man content. There was variety. Now it's all 6 man only for relevant content. Dynamis and Omen are still relevant in that it's useful for people gearing up new jobs, or new / returnee players, but it's the last 18-man content we've received in almost a decade...That being said, it's really fun going in and steamrolling stuff while helping people. Nice change of pace compared to the min/maxing high-paced Sortie / v25 progression, while in a big group setting.

yeah that's why I said it was a poor financial decision by SE, everyone's alts they activated for this past month for old cases are gonna be deactivated lol.

It sort of depends what you would consider as 'relevant' content, but for endgame content we have:

6:
Ambuscade
HTMB
Odyssey
Sortie
Sinister Reign (lol)

6+:
Divergence
Geas Fete
Limbus
Omen
UNM
Vagary
Delve
Besieged (lol)
Domain Invasion (LOL)

Again, depends what one considers relevant. I haven't done Domain Invasion or Besieged in months. Now whether players choose to actually engage in 6+ man content with that many characters is a whole different story. But you can, in fact, bring more than 6 people to them, even Limbus (though nobody does).

I'm on the fence whether the preview image is new mage/melee sets, or Fujito is trolling us and it's just a BLM and WAR in +5 AF/Relic.

Upgrading doesn't normally change appearances, but a lot of the Limbus rework is a break from what's been normal in the game for a long time.

That's not blm af, it's ark angel TT armor, you can tell by the hat.