Losing Exemplar Points A Bit Unfair

Glad people enjoyed that post. I mean throw out 1,000 crappy memes, maybe 10 decently funny ones, and eventually one will be my best.

I wouldn't upvote my own stuff, and if I did, you would see Valefor.Aeonova or Bahamut.Aeonova in the list; all with variations of Meowth as an avatar.



I could have guessed that a meme with nostalgia would have got a lot of likes, but never would I have guessed that one using a 'The Golden Girls' Sophia's Sicily Stories template would have. Crazy.



Anyway, this is getting derailed. It's flattering, but Exemplar Points. Back to topic, plz. /blush

Hey, this is good. It harkens back to the heady days of laughing at your mates for dlvling.

Poor Thieves in LV75 Dynamis days. BLMs to a lesser degree as well.

Can we not act like jealous *** over... FFXIAH likes? Nova made a thing that made most people chuckle. It's pretty damn simple.

100 likes for super saiyan.

My impression, altough I could be completely wrong here, is that they didn't want to admit they did a serious mistake with the amount of grind required for JPs at start, and kept adjusting and adjusting and adjusting and it was never enough, until in the end they gave us all those stacking static bonuses.
Everything to avoid admiting "we did a mistake".
But maybe I'm reading too much into it, who knows.


Off topic but didn't they mention in the patch notes they added a new /search syntax command to look specifically for players' ML? Where can I find more details on that?

This might be the proper way to write out the command, but not sure. Let account lapse for break from FFXI to play other things ('Bravely Default II' and 'Octopath Traveler' second time through) so I can't test it personally:

/sea all mlevel 20

To search all areas for master level 20. If anyone can confirm that works when the below criteria are met, that would be the bee's knees. If that works then

/sea all mlevel 0-30

should work too. Just spit-balling here though.

More info on specific search rules that you may (will) need to account for from Nov 2021 Version Update notes:


Info taken from the following urls:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/58770#post639904
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Command/search

did anyone check if mobs yield more exemplar points if you deal final hit in lvl 99 gear?

Losing EXP upon death was always an incredibly stupid mechanic. Sadly, I'm not surprised SE had to mar something cool like Master Levels with it.

Especially considering they didn't implement it in FFXIV.

Yeah, because they took repairing gear from WoW which is a much better mechanic for punishing dying. Before WoW most MMOs you lost EXP on death.

gold penalty, exp penalty it all boils down to stealing your time by sending you grinding, not sure why you'd deem one is better than the other.

Wasn't Bibiki Bay not released until 2004?

Back at the beginning it made sense if you ask me.
As much as I hated it, it had a "role" in the grand scheme of things.

Nowadays it seems like a, dunno, fanservice for us oldeners?

No, it never had a role. It was always bad design, but back then people were happy to accept it. Standards for what types of incentives and penalties a mmo should and should not implement have evolved greatly over the past two and a half decades. The experience penalty on death is a remnant of Everquest, and as one of the first MMO's it was utterly riddled with horrible design choices. Beyond EXP loss on dying you had dumb stuff like

* Corpse Retrieval -- And if you didn't recover your gear in 3 days all of your equipment was permanently deleted

* NPC Factions with a stupidly complex spiderweb of friendly and unfriendly relationships. You were always "Kill on Sight" to a bunch of NPC's, most of which were vastly higher level than you.

* Paineel -- A newbie zone with a massive hole in the center of it that had no natural barriers. If you fell into that hole you zoned halfway down and died to fall damage on the other side -- in the middle of one of the highest lvl dungeon raid zones at the time no less.

That last one ties right into the corprse retrieval issue. A whole bunch of new people lost their entire progress falling down that pit because they had no means to recover their stuff. The game was marred with bad design decisions that never should have been implemented. Many of them transferred to the next generation of mmo's before being eliminated. EXP penalty on death was one of them. It serves no useful purpose; it's just an inconvenience, and s-e removed it years ago from the normal exp grind. There really wasn't a good reason to re-implement it in the exemplar points system again.

I'm not terribly familiar with the intricacies of the "repairing" mechanic, but I can't imagine how that would be better. Sounds very volatile: extremely punishing when the currency has high value, extremely pointless during inflation. Not to mention it punishes the impoverished more than it punishes the wealthy.



Granted, FFXI leaned way too hard into how many experience points were lost and I'd agree that it could have been toned down ~90% compared to what it was. But the mechanic itself seems a lot more fair than having to take both time and money to repair your stuff.

I beg to disagree?
FFXI was quite a peculiar MMO back then, it didn't follow the modern Theme Park model created by WoW (it didn't exist back then after all).

FFXI was organized as "cycles" of things to do.
You had to progress to the game and to do things you *REQUIRED* a party.
Even to level up, you required a party.
To make so this cycle was active, the game gave you reasons to keep levelling, so that there would be people looking for party pretty much anytime, anywhere, any level.
New players coming sure, but mostly existing players levelling new jobs.

I oversimplified things but this was Tanaka's idea of "cycles" and it applied to many things.
The fact that you lost experience contributed, among other things, to increase the necessity for Exp.


Did it work? Or maybe it didn't? I can't say for sure but this was their idea.
If you ask me at least for the first two years of the game's life since 2002, it sorta worked. Exp loss was ONE of the instruments that made the whole system work.
It was also quite coherent with the punishing philosophy to deep down rooted in the Japanese culture and in the game itself.


It's quite clear it stopped being an important aspect over time, and they tweaked it to make it even less relevant a couple of times, and nowadays it's... a legacy of the past I dunno, but sorta useless, something they could remove entirely and nobody would notice.
Which makes me a bit puzzled as to why they felt we all needed this dive into the past in 2022, it sounds so anachronistic, but w/e, not like us discussing about will change anything, alas xD

Funny, all those things sound wonderful to me^^

As I stated on a previous page, Weakness serves all practical purposes as a punishment for letting your HP drop to 0. Whether you're out earning experience or money, or out doing some kind of end-game event, it slowed your progress and punished your whole team for allowing it to happen. If the tank dies, the healer too suffers from 5 minutes of being unable to earn experience points.

A permanent loss of experience or money is mostly unnecessary except for one reason. FFXI wanted to be founded in realism, and having people run head-first into a bunch of enemies to blood-warp was bad for that.

I kinda remember WoW had something like that too. I remember dying one time at the base of a mountain. On the other side of that mountain was the geographically-nearest graveyard, so my "soul" spawned there.

exp loss had/still has a purpose, deliberately wasting players time cause as long as you have a task to do you stay subscribed.

tbh it's not a big surprise they resort to stuff like this again considering how sparse content updates are.

I went from 11 to EQ2 briefly and the mechanics are novel for a while, but then you realize it really sucks and just ends up being frustrating after a while. The corpse retrieval thing in particular is really irritating. IIRC (it's been a while) you had a massive stat loss until you recovered it, but I don't think you lost your gear at that point in time, you were basically in a weakened state until you recovered it. What would end up happening is you'd have this cascading series of deaths trying to recover the corpse and have to pull groups together just to get it because you were too weak. If you died in some places, you were just stuck waiting for it, there was no going back to get it.

You didn't lose exp, though, you just incurred a penalty on exp gained for a certain amount of exp. I think they did it this way to keep people from intentionally deleveling to farm the equivalent of NMs. That isn't needed in 11 because you get drops regardless of your level difference. When a mob was 'green' (basically EP), you would still get drops, but the fights were a lot harder to deal with solo, they needed to keep people from constantly farming them (although it didn't work that well).

The factions thing may also seem interesting, but it does get annoying when you can't traverse the cities in the game without being attacked by the guards. Imagine going to Bastok and getting jumped every time you see a guard. It also had this weird side effect where if two players of different hostile factions were in a party together, other players would yell at them and get really hostile about it (or wouldn't group with you). I was a PLD and ran around with the equivalent of a DRK in EQ2 and we got so many hostile/obnoxious messages from the player community when they'd see us together, some blacklisted us both or refused to group with us until the other left.

These things are novel for a while but IMO it makes for a game you don't really want to play long term like 11. I should caveat though, this was ages ago and I may not be remembering everything 100%. I just remember thinking some of it was novel and interesting, but tiring of it quickly.

The gear repairing mechanic is very non-intrustive. Basically your gear has a durability rating, and after taking hits from enemies the durability decreases. The rate of durability loss is really slow too -- you can run 20 or 30 dungeons before a piece of gear needs to be repaired (so you only need to do it once every 8-10 real life hours generally). There is no difference between 1% durability and 100% durability, but if the durability reaches zero the gear "breaks" and you lose all the stats on it until you repair the piece. Essentially a broken piece of equipment is the same as being naked in that slot. There are NPC's that can repair gear in literally every town hub and gathering point, and the cost is a fraction of what you get from clearing a single dungeon. It takes about 5 seconds to go through the menu and have them fix everything to 100% durability in one swoop. Alternately crafters can repair their own equipment directly no matter where they are or what they're doing. The repairing mechanic is so easy to work with it's hardly even a consideration.

That's fair. Thanks for the explanation.

I do like the idea of using crafting for stuff like that.

No your summary of corpse retrieval and NPC factions is pretty spot on. The faction kill on sight mechanic would be the equivalent of being a citizen of Sandoria, and whenever you zoned into Windurst you would have to steer clear from Shantotto's mansion or else she would randomly teleport out of nowhere and nuke you for max damage. It really hindered the adventuring aspect of the game because there were entire areas of towns or even whole zones where you just couldn't explore because every NPC in the area was out to kill you. It sounds novel as a concept, but in practice it's just gets obnoxious after a period of time and you grow to hate it.

The corpse retrieval concept went through several iterations, and by everquest 2 it was like you described. In the original everquest every time you died you beft behind a corpse and spawned back at your home point naked. Getting beck to retrieve your gear was a stupid chore because some locations were very remote and the foot travel time could be half an hour or more. The corpse deletion after 3 days was a system countermeasure to keep the world looking clean (it got really ugly when you saw fifty copies of the same guys corpse scattered around a 10 foot radius that he never planned to retrieve), but real life things like business trips and family vactions happen. Imagine having all your rank 25 oddy equipment, every REMA you owned, and all your JSE deleted in an instant because real life prevented you from logging in for a day or two.

So yeah, a lot of older systems were pretty bad design. Experience loss on death is certainly not the worst thing to ever be conceived, but the mastery rank grind is already pretty steep and the gap between levels from 20-30 is already growing significantly. Losing exemplar points on death may not be the harshest penalty, but it wasn't really necessary to bring it back in the first place. It doesn't bother me that much, but I still disagree with the decision to reimplement it.

Good to know I wasn't totally off base. It's been years.

The thing that cracked me up about EQ2 was that you could die crafting. Walking into the crafting area (guild maybe?) and seeing a bunch of folks taking damage, then dying from the crafting tables still makes me laugh.

I was also around when they decided that plague was a good idea and the entire player base would be running around and randomly puking everywhere. I know people think SE is not responsive to issues, but it took them way too long to decide that was a dumb idea and fix it.

The problem I have with this approach is that it's meaningless busywork. If it's just a 5 second NPC discussion for a relatively nominal fee, why even bother implementing it? Just to make people click on a few more things and have one more obnoxious task to possibly forget?

If it was an actual mechanic to really encourage people to seek out crafting services from other players, or to motivate people to level some crafting themselves and repair their own stuff... well, I personally wouldn't like that (I'm not much for crafting in MMOs), but at least I could understand the rationale for the system.

It could be a way to remove gil from the economy and limit the botting going on by requiring them to leave town and repair their gear every so often.

It wasn't intrusive in EQ2, you were in town, you repaired your gear, went out, and did whatever you were going to do. It was rare I was out somewhere and my gear broke, forcing me to return. It wasn't like Diablo and similar ARPGs where it breaks constantly. IIRC the cost scaled depending on the tier/quality of your gear, which was a little annoying considering you had to pay a high price to get it in the first place, then to maintain it.

That said, I thought it was silly there and I don't see where it has a place in 11 especially given the considerable level of effort required to obtain certain pieces of gear (e.g. mythics). I also think FFXI is a little different in the sense that people tend to have wild swings in the amount of gil they have, some will have 100m one day and blow it all on alex or crystals then have less than 1m a few days later. I think given the overall cost of obtaining most gear, adding a maintenance cost would just be burdensome for minimal benefit. I think it makes sense in other MMOs where getting high tier gear is a lot easier, but that cost is already so high in 11.

I also think it would require rearchitecting gear in a way that SE is unlikely to do in the game, it'd be too much work to implement tracking the state of gear, degrading it, and breaking it (I would assume).

Capuchin was criticizing the reason for the system's existence in FF 14, not suggesting they should implement it in FF 11. And you really can't forget about it. When you queue for an instance in 14 you'll be notified that "the durability of one or more pieces of equipment is getting noticeably low", and this notification pops up about 5 or 6 dungeons ahead of time before the piece actually reaches zero. So if you ever actually let your gear get to the point it runs out of durability it's your own fault. It really is just a minor system though; probably just meant to help with the feeling of immersion.