How Could SE Realistically Improve Modern FFXI?

I mean...communicate, I guess? Have a Discord for these 8 precious friends, and then you say "Hey guys, who can make it tonight? Anyone need off?" Jim and Joebob say they can't make it, ok perfect. Tomorrow, only Sally is off, so you ask if anyone minds taking the night off. If nobody wants to do it, you have a rotation where it's fair to everyone. Since everyone only wants to commit to like 3 days/week apparently, it shouldn't be hard to have at least 2 people off on a given night (8 x 3 = 24, there are 6 x 7 = 42 spots per week).

Or just have a group of 6-7 that you go with regularly, but are chill with them if they need/want to take a day off and you just go with a substitute, a mule, or a trust. It's not the biggest deal if you kill 6 bosses instead of 8 that night.

I really don't understand how this is an earth-shattering concept. Everyone claims to be a chill, understanding adult with a busy schedule but then as soon as someone needs to take a day off you blow up your entire friend group? Guess I just play in a different culture.

Rainbows and unicorns with this guy

Sadly that's also assuming all of those people are also good with leading a sortie run. When i had a group, that was the issue. 2-3 of us knew the objectives, routes and could diversify jobs as needed.
Some people 5 months into the event still wouldn't pull up the map and kept getting lost.

Not everyone is at that level, not everyone wants to be there.

I'd be very happy getting a group that ran 2-3 times a week at an hour that i could actually focus on the game without the taru's climbing all over me. And if we just did A and E bosses and boxes, i'd be happy with that. But i agree, people want all or nothing, as much as people are chill, their time is important to them, and rightfully so.

If you reduce muffin requirements and leave psyches alone it means you can do sortie less often and not feel like you're falling behind on progress /or/ take two years to finish a weapon.

How is it harmful to the game if players can make a prime in 6 mo. by running 2-3 Sorties per week instead of 7-plus? It certainly won't hurt sub fees.

Most people are tolerant enough of understanding these things, yes, but it's no less frustrating when you have 5 people available to do stuff one day, 8 the next, 4 the next, 7 the next, and so on. By definition, this is not a static, and yes, this is exactly how it works with the scenario you propose. Inevitably this means people get left out or content doesn't get done, I mean who really wants to do that for 6-8 months?

and once again, numbers aren't the only issue. You could have 100 people available and still not align enough to make their schedules and life work around a consistent static.

I get we don't agree on this and have different visions for how this should be, but I think you need to put yourself in the shoes of the people who have explained why this is a problem, myself and others. We've observed how this ends up time and time again, and explained it several times. Content requiring a static group of 6 people is incompatible with the age of the game and playerbase. It may not apply to you, that's great, but it does to many others who would rather not bother with it because eventually you burn out trying to hold a group together or organize around a specific number of players. So yes, I'd say you live in a different world than most of the playerbase on this matter, maybe not a different culture in the sense you meant it, but in the sense that you haven't witnessed this as an issue when numerous others have. SE and you can hold onto this idea that "this is good" all while the ship sinks, it still doesn't mean it's good.

This really seems to come back to the same old idea of 'If I'm not getting 80k/day 7 days a week, why bother'. It's peak FOMO.

If you don't get a run done one day, maybe you ask your friend group what anyone needs and go kill a bunch of Kirinv2 to get someone a yotai. Do Kei a few times because someone doesn't have the shield. Farm a handful of reisenjima armor for the next DM campaign as a group, even though everyone could technically solo it. Spam T3s for beads. Clear W2 dyna NMs for TH gear. Help a friend of a member with odyssey. Do a soloable vanabout objective as a group. You know, all the stuff that used to happen when the game wasn't min-maxed to an absurd extent.

The issue isn't that you can't have a group of more than 6, it's that players are unwilling to accept anything less than the maximum possible progression and demanding that maximum possible progression be made attainable for everyone.

Remember when Omen was created as 6 person content, then was expanded to 18 man content with zero difficulty adjustments and no one cried?

no one cried because they expanded it to 18 once the content, outside of bodies, was outdated.

Yea, and then Omen became shout groups where you could sit 10 afk people to get cards while the remaining 3 actually did the run. Meanwhile, we got all of Escha in the following year, so there was still content for people who didn't want to idle in Omen any more.

Ooh i know, like everything else, Add Gallimufry Pouches to AMAN trove. Good for 100k Gall. /rolleyes
Still the best source of OMEN bodies.

Oh, and I for one think a massive reason my group has lasted as long as it has for Sortie is that we Don't run 7x/week. Our guys are totally free to run on the off-days with pickups or even make their own group that runs those days, but it allows a couple of our guys who don't want that fulltime life to still be progressing towards a weapon realistically without burning out.

Our group is kinda in this boat but there are a couple of ways to make it work. So the cool thing about sortie is its pretty low-box/alt friendly. You can alt the BRD, COR, or RDM spots fairly easily if the other players have the dps to make up for it. We just did a five person run where i was the SAM and the BRD. Only thing the BRD did all run was sing. Can do that with the COR spot, just roll, kill fire eles, leaden botulus. Or the RDM just haste everyone, pull with distract and dia and proc D/H. Otherwise can just run around.

Other option is, assuming people have alts, the "second run" lol. Gonna admit it's probably not for everyone. But we vary from having 4~10 people who cant all show up at the exact same time. But you gotta enjoy the content for its own sake so go 2x a day and I get that's not everyone's experience :P.

But I wouldnt limit activities if you have 4+ people, if people have alts and can dbox a bit. We used to pug the 6th spot in segs all the time. Used to be we'd try pug the COR but then you'd get some just awful CORs. I found the least damaging thing to take was actually the 2nd DD. BRD, COR, tank, WHM too crucial. Now we just alt the COR or something rather than shout. Keep the segs in house. Less of a headache tbh. At this point no one minds if we don't kill everything.

One run we had 6 ppl for sort. Our SAM had a power outage right before H so like 10 minutes in.. only D was dead. He never came back. We still killed eight bosses. That was a real eye opener. If you can survive a run with no SAM dps, you can def run around with a song-only BRD and do fine. Like segs, the 2nd DD is kind of the most expendable slot. Can't lose the support.

Omen added Dec 2016
Alliance expansion added March 2017

outdated after four months??? Cmon lol

This is fair and accurate, but it comes back to a matter of time. Spending an hour at 50% efficiency, yea, I'd just rather not do it. That's also because I'm not really a fan of the content. You can call it FOMO or whatever, but if I'm not making progress I want with that time there are just other things I'd rather do with an hour, both in game and IRL.

30 minutes? I could probably accept that, I'm generally ok with risking a segfarm being less efficient because it's over with quickly, but Sortie consumes more time and I think it's reasonable to expect people to want more efficiency out of it.

I'm also raising this in context of a 6-8 month grind to finish primes, not necessarily a singular run or trying to get Empyrean armor. The proposed "solution" would drag this out to an intolerable length, once again raising that duration is impractical for a lot of people and driving them away from even bothering. If you push the carrot so far out that it isn't visible then it doesn't achieve its purposes.

Presuming 7 runs a week for 12 weeks at 3 cards a run would net you 252 cards. A full set of one jobs AF+3 is 240 cards.

The math aint mathin that it was “outdated”

Odyssey was added March 2020.

Omen was not expanded to alliance because “it was outdated”.

Omen was added in december. In January, they lessened time restrictions. In February, they added the card path and weakened midbosses. In March, they allowed 18. Pretty clear message there: It was too hard for people, so they made it easier every month until it got the numbers they wanted. Nothing to do with people capping out.

But[double checked timeline here], escha was still the primary content for most players at the time. Dyna-D came out 6 months later. There was plenty else to do.

And, the main point, you can't deny that Omen became leech content when that happened. I'd be surprised if half of all cards obtained were obtained by people actively participating in the content.

Think this just emphasizes my point more, you don't like the content, you just want the reward. Should they really make the content easier so people who don't like it can justify suffering through it for a reward they won't even have a use for at the end because they don't like the current game..?

The carrot isn't 6-8 months out. You're looking at stage 5 as the only relevant goal. A stage 3 prime can be used in Sortie if you make one for your Sortie job, and that's only 15 or so optimal runs. Pretty much all stage 4s are wildly useful for their job, and that's still only 44 optimal runs. Your 6-8 month grind to 'finish' is irrelevant if you enjoy the game, because you get the majority of the usefulness 2-3 months in even in casual scenarios like described.

Lets be real, half of all Omen Cards, Omen Bodies and Dyna Shards Come out of AMAN trove. As well as likely Pulse weapons, and disappointment.

How did we get Escha after Omen???

Omen was the reward for finishing RoV, which introduced Escha zones.

I cleared up the timeline in my following post, I don't have the update notes memorized. I was considering that the primary activity for players was still Escha long after Omen existed, and falsely attributed the timeline.

Divergence was added November 2017, 8 months after expanding Omen to alliance. There is no correlation between the two events.

I'm not going to try to argue (and haven't been, by the way) that everyone should be in a strict 6-man static with only their 5 closest friends and run every single day at the same time. My point, as ever, has been that instead of constantly parroting the idea that this content is "designed for 6 man statics" and that's why you (plural) don't do it, just do whatever you and your friends want to do.

If you want to run with 4 one night, go for it, the content is actually great for that
If you want to run 2, 3, 4, 5 nights a week instead of 7, go for it, the content is designed great for that

The only thing stopping anyone from having a flexible schedule about their Ody/Sortie is their own FOMO and the FOMO of the people they're running with. If everyone else is a sweaty tryhard then sure, I get your frustration. What I'm hearing though, is a bunch of people telling me I'M the sweaty tryhard and most of the population are chill 45 year old dads with lots of responsibilities who just want to do a chill run a few times a week. If that's the case, it should be pretty easy to dad it up with each other as many times/wk as you see fit.

I don't think they should design an end-of-life game for casuals to be able to complete all the content in a year, I'm sorry. You'll get the tryhards finished in 6 months and there goes your leadership, experience, and subscriptions. Death spiral.

They aren't correlated. The point is that there was lengthy content[escha] currently active alongside Omen, and new content came shortly after. Turning Omen into leech content didn't destroy content diversity, because Omen was a small bit of content that complemented everything around it. Turning Sortie into leech content would do a lot of damage to content diversity, because most of the empyrean armor is unilaterally better than prior equipment. If you can get all of it by joining a leech shout, there's no longer any reason for players to work their way up and.. we are back to the same argument as the twelve other threads this has been brought up in. Just waiting for Saevel to show up and give the trophies line.

but yeah tbh once you've done 8 boss... or 9 tbf.. what is adding like 3-12 more ppl to the run gonna do for you? We're already pushing the limits with 6, expanding it to 12 or even 18 if that's the only other option isn't gonna break the game in a muffins/day sense. Psychs still the limiting factor.

Leech content = “this will be a problem on Asura”

I'm willing to do content for a while that I don't particularly like if there is a reasonable reward that can be obtained. I'm not willing to grind it for that long particularly at 1 hour a night when there is content I'd actually rather do. I'm also not the only one.

I'd also advocate Sortie isn't difficult, it's just tedious running around aside from enraged Aminon. It's a time sink that is mostly not that difficult once you learn it, then you do the same thing on repeat for weeks or months. Personally I'd rather see it made more challenging with less time commitment, but I don't really consider it difficult in its existing form, just a time suck. Doing four Ody bosses in an hour, I enjoy that, running around Sortie for an hour for months, not so much.

This is all still missing the point. The point is they designed content tailored to static groups for any level of efficiency, this is not compatible with the age of the game or the playerbase. If people are burning out with groups and content, then quitting, something is off and that is exactly what is happening. We can hold onto the idea that "this is ok" while sub numbers trickle lower than they ever have before, but at what point are you going to admit something needed to change?


As opposed to what is happening now?

The people wanting to expand Sortie aren't pulling 8/8 or 9/8 runs with six characters, they're looking for ways to match what those runs are doing and keep up....or add other characters of theirs to get those muffins while along for the ride with their main.

We have something like 10 people that run with us. It sucks that we can't bring them all. Sometimes the core group would go a couple of weeks without skipping so 4 of us just sit out or pug.

They could have made it like escha bosses where HP scales with the number of alliances. It's that simple!

I don't like Asura any more than you do, but you'd be an idiot to think this won't apply to every server. Too profitable, there will absolutely be at least 1 9/9 run available for sale and several 40k+ for free daily for every server within a month of 18man limit. Even if your statement is taken at face value and it only changes to leech content on Asura and Bahamut, it's not hard to realize why those would matter the most to SE or the game's stability in general.

Weird generalization.


/yell Sortie 9 boss run do you need it buy? 20m.

They would deff have to scale up bosses, otherwise it will incentivise mercing even more, which would break the content for pugs.

It's a flawed premise to assume that anything SE could do with their current budget would allow a game this old to retain players without losing any. They cannot compete on an even ground, their best strategy is to target prior players who are already interested in some sense or another.

I have seen tons of players firsthand that come back, get carried straight to the top of the game, and quit within a couple weeks because there's no point. This happened during Abyssea era, it happened during Delve era, it happened during Aeonic era. If carrying gets you all the way to the top, then people catch up only to have nothing to use all that strength for and abruptly stop playing.

I can't prove to anyone that stricter setups and less handouts make the game last longer, but the opposite is true as well. There's a perfectly reasonable argument in favor of them: it keeps older content relevant and returning players take the time working their way up instead of boosting to the top and quitting.

Sure, I can see how the current endgame population would like to be able to take more than 6 in. I can also see that most of the current endgame population doesn't like Sortie at all, and considers it a chore rather than something fun. I don't think that means the answer is to allow every new player to leech an emp+3 set and then come along to Sortie until they get bored. Pretty sure they'd have more fun working through old content, even if it feels difficult.