Dev Tracker - Discussion

"The game's success has forced us to update our long-term goals for the project yet again..."

The hell is this supposed to mean?

Isn't it obvious? They had no intention of this going for so long. Players kept it alive. They never could have projected this kind of long term success, especially with as little effort they've put into the game the past decade. Their roadmaps are 1-2 years worth of a budget because they don't even expect it to continue as strong beyond that.

Translation:

"We weren't expecting to still be profitable a quarter century later, and were hoping this project died a decade ago so we could write this off as a bonus for one of the executives and move on. But y'all kept subscribing even after we banned thousands of your accounts, blocked certain servers, and made the game unenjoyable. You guys simply won't move on no matter how hard we try to encourage you to do so, so fine, we'll keep this going a bit longer since it's free money for decade's old technology and pennies to maintain."

They have said they were expecting to be "final maintenance mode" after both RoV and TVR, so yeah, it's genuinely the skeptical interpretation here.

And don't get me wrong, they are clearly happy about it! The individual humans working on XI like it! But.

Need the expansion to reach 2030.

"The game's success has forced us to update our long-term goals for the project yet again..."

I hate when he writes anything.

The reality is this game really can't be making them that much money. A profit? Sure. But it has got to be a rounding error. It has to be a passion project for someone to be keeping this thing going

More of an obligation. Doing it because they have to.

The English translation is horrible.

プロジェクトの長期目標としてはさらに更新し、30周年を無事に迎え、ヴァナ・ディールの発展をより大きなものにすべく、開発／運営チーム一同励んでまいります。

"We've again updated/renewed our long-term plans for the game and, in order to reach the 30th anniversary without issue, the entire development and management operations teams are doing our best to develop an even more expansive Vana'diel."

Is what it says.

They probably are kicking themselves every single day at their decision to not raise sub fees.

It's very much this I think.

I imagine that Matsui wanted the game to continue, he knew he was getting close to retirement and so he pressured Fujito to feel an obligation to keep it running for the players.

As such, you have someone that really has no passion for it and may want to do something else, but that will do the job and keep it running.

As a passionate player this is very sad, obviously you want them to give 110%, but the world isn't like that and at a bare minimum you want the game to continue.

Many things in relation to XI continue due to a feeling of obligation, this site itself is a good example (and many days they probably wish we would all stop using it, so the obligation to keep it running will no longer be there then), many of the programs we use are updated and kept running due to a feeling of obligation to the community that still wants them.

The thing with a feeling of obligation is that it requires feedback to often be maintained. A person that keeps a program like windower or ashita running, should get feedback that you value what they do for example, as this keeps them being maintained by people who no longer play the game.

FFXI makes tens of millions a year, it's a very profitable game. However it's also very old, and so they can't just hire someone to do the job very easily without many years of experience.

The thing that will eventually kill the game, won't be profitability but it will just be being able to find someone in Japan that is willing and able to do the job of running the game.

I think there is a lot of over-estimation of what it takes and how much it costs to keep XI running.

Just keeping it going costs very little. The biggest cost is uptime and maintenance of the various services that make up the game, and this is not just the game servers but POL services, subscription services, outside-the-game services like world transfers, game codes and the like.

These are cheap to keep running in terms of infrastructure, but expensive in terms of human cost whenever you need to change something or for customer support.

The game itself is cheap to run. Biggest cost is adding things like new battle content and new story lines. Stories require scripts, testing, QA, translation and so forth, it's not just "here's a CS and your reward, now go off and be free".

If you haven't noticed, there have been no new models and no new animations added to the game since 2016 when Aeonics were added. These are by far the most expensive things to make.

Primes are relics reskinned, including animations.

New limbus weapons are the old limbus weapons reskinned.

Htmb rewards are reskins of the old mission gear.

All the new lvl1 lockstyle gear are reskinned versions of previously exclusive weapons and armor, pissing off their owners that attached some value to the grind they had to go through to get them.

Nowdays you can get AI to slap on a new colour on an existing model at the cost of a single hamster wheel spin.

What will break the game is players abandoning it.

When the game is 100% bots hammering away at the hamster wheel to grind out that 18th prime and 18th limbus weapon, with content so mind numbingly grindy that no human wants to touch it, what game is left to play.

I didn't realize the new Limbus weapons were reskins. A few of their big updates have mentioned that they are working on the capacity to make new models with modern tools like blender, but I may have misunderstood the implication. Where can I find the pages/pictures of the originals?

Please find me the original limbus staff, I'll wait.

I mean, they didn't do precisely that, they just found new monetization angles instead. I came back to get the new event/login campaign rewards during free login and realized that wow, if I want to actually play XI again in a serious way I need to either heavily invest some time in getting my tool ecosystem set up to use Porter and Packer more effectively than I do now to wiggle around all my inventory every time I job change or spend 6 more dollars a month on Mog Wardrobes because otherwise the 2 the game gives me isn't cutting it.

I'm sure most players that actively engage in endgame and aren't just here to see the story then dip out or work on one REMA over 2 years have at least an extra wardrobe or two, then maybe some mules (more character fees) or a full on alt account (less likely) for boxing. Add in paid transfers, though that's less relevant these days with the big servers all locked, and paid race changes and there are a lot of ways they're getting more than the base sub fee out of people without needing a cosmetic cash shop or the like.

I know it's fashionable to be negative about literally everything on here, but actually the fact the sub has stayed the same is a positive. Adjusting for inflation, the base sub should be $22.61 per month by now, but we've actually had no increases at all.


Yeah, no, "old Limbus weapons" aren't a thing.

Didn't they say the limbus weapons are ilvl versions of.. something?

There was a set of weapons you could augment back then, I don't remember what they were called.


Limbus weapons are in fact new designs. My mistake.


The new HTMB rewards are reskins of the old non-ilvl gear from the missions.

Please tell me you aren't being serious with this point? Limbus has never had weapons it was just a way to +1 your AF gear and farm ancient beastcoins.

Nah I just love all the ackshually.

I don't think this is true. Matsui described Fujito as someone who was very ambitious for FFXI. And while I would write this off as a PR statement, Matsui is also the guy who has told interviewers that FFXI isn't a particularly notable MMO, and its contributions to the genre are modest. That is to say, he doesn't seem to have an issue speaking his mind about things.

Furthermore, if you read any of the interviews with the core development team, it's pretty clear that the few still working on the game are very passionate about it. Fujito and Sato (lead writer) have both expressed desires to do new storylines/expansions that take players to the unexplored continents (and Tavnazia). I think if any of these people wanted positions within SE that would benefit their more profitable projects, they would gladly pull the FFXI devs off FFXI. But we are still getting updates.

If they were passionate about FFXI Limbus and Sortie wouldn't be so dogshit

I could just as easily turn this argument around. If they weren't passionate, they wouldn't bother making the sliced pole easier to obtain. A perfectly unnecessary change they wouldn't have had to bother with, but they improved, much to the relief of a tiny fraction of new players. Passion isn't the same as efficacy or quality.

I'm absolute dog-water at playing most jobs in this game, that doesn't mean I'm not passionate about it.

It's possible to be passionate about something and still misguided or *** it up. My issue is that they seem out of touch with the average playerbase and, may be passionate about keeping the game moving forward, but I don't think they actually play the content they create.

The issues with Odyssey early on. Balance of Odyssey bosses (esp Bumba) and their TP moves. The whole WS wall being broken for so long thing (this should've been immediately obvious when they tested v25). The enraged Sortie basement bosses (which they doubled down on, don't forget). Recent master trials. I'm sure there is more. It seems like they throw ***on the wall and see what sticks

I feel like all of this would've been obvious if they actually did the content, but it really doesn't seem like they do and that puts them out of touch with the state of the game, issues it has, and the playerbase. Just because you are passionate doesn't make you competent.

there are just very few geuninely new ideas. and the ones that are new rely entirely on old assets to accomplish, so they are extremely limited in what they can create.

reforging AF to 109 was added in 2013. let that sink in.

Bring back Shadow tanking and Stun rotations!

Absorb-TP is the new Stun rotation lol

What in the crackhead *** AI vibe coding dogshit ***


...lol these *** are going to wait until the last day of free play and do Emaint so everyone gets kicked out

Stats are built in 2-3 passes over items in order of index. R.ring and back are the only slots higher than l.ring. Presumably, something they did is overwritten if any higher index item is parsed at all. It's feasible a human could have made that mistake.

Still, given the recent redesign of their website and the insane amount of bugs in the last couple patches, AI seems like a strong bet.

AI vibe code is probably what started the blackscreens being way more common too.

Whats more efficient than just not loading a zone. Who needs pictures of walls and floors anyway. AI logic.

As an addition to this:

The game as a standalone product isn't even that valuable in itself cause the company spends almost nothing on it, it has immense added value due to things like Windower (updated and kept working for free by people being nice to you), Ashita (the same), FFXIAH (the same, it makes money from ads but not a lot).

Would you keep playing FFXI, if all these things that you don't pay for and that the people running don't make money from stopped working tomorrow? Would you really?

One of the problems in any community is over time they start to take things people do for free for granted, imagine if the things I listed above all stropped working tomorrow. Would you still pay to play the game without them? No more addons, no more community from the forums, no more QoL things.

The game is effectively being held up by the generosity of a few people in "the community" who don't even play the game anymore, far more than even the developers (who are least are paid to do this), and if they stopped doing that some other person isn't just going to be guaranteed to take over.

If you use Windower, Ashita, FFXIAH be aware these people are absolutely doing as much or more to keep the game running as the developers working on it, as I said most of these people haven't even played the game for 10+ years and so they are not doing it for the game but for you (the community)

No, definitely and without any doubt, and like >90% of the people on these boards would give you the same answer.

I honestly wonder though, how big of a % people like us represent over the whole population of people paying the FFXI monthly fee.
I truly have no idea how large or small that is compared to the overall current player base.