April 2026 Version Update

I guess maybe 119/13 was the final update, though that quote does say January and it took them until April update to do it. IDK why I still felt like it was supposed to go to 15 (13 is a weird number to land at), but if this is the end of Besieged updates, that's fine.

It was originally scheduled for January, but they delayed it shortly prior to that update. I seem to recall some dev message about it around that time, saying they needed more time to make further adjustments to deal with issues that popped up. Then the i119 update actually released in April.

I'd love level 15 beastmen (maybe CL 122 for lv14, and CL 125 for lv15 or something like that?), and agreed that it feels a little awkward to end on 13. But doesn't appear that further updates are currently planned.

Besieged is a content broken in its concept, if you ask me I think the community as a whole would've benefitted way more from spending their extremely limited time resources into something else. Not necessarily new, but the simple things they did to what always was a broken content in how it was implemented doesn't seem very... wise.

At least we can hope it cost them very very very very little resources so that it didn't "steal" too much from anything else.

I like Besieged, always have.

The problem it has as content is the game engine can't keep up with that volume of information, and the UI sucks donkey balls.

Whatever happened to that XI remake with a new engine while keeping same play style and mechanics..

On the contrary, I think the updates to Besieged were practice for future server-wide content. It's very likely that some of the things they learned or optimized there also show up elsewhere, like Limbus and future stuff yet to be released.

Either that, or they were doing work on some of this stuff in connection with Limbus, then realized that for relatively little additional effort they could apply some of that to Besieged to give it a revamp too.

Idk, aside from connection limits(which apply to anything populated in this game really) the event itself was fine. the worst part of besieged was the time it took to finally begin along with its random starts, both of which could likely be adjusted

New besieged just lacks any real incentive, old besieged you had coins that still sold very highly, later gear options like the perdu line, attachments etc. New besieged theres just not much there, best thing might just be the craft cards or rr3 scroll. The gear itself costs way too much for what lil it provides

Because theyre all about dangling that carrot 500 feet infront of you when you can only cover 100 feet of ground per day

FFXI's story reimagined with voice acting, new cinematics, ability to *** jump over obstacles, and what not would be great.

Or FFXI-2, played from viewpoint of Beastmen, developing that lore more.

Never gonna happen, but entertaining the idea is nice.

While they can still at any time add a 50k+ item thats really good, right now that carrots really moldy and smells bad. They usually at least start you off with a normal looking one to chase

I didn't quite catch on to the main incentive for a large chunk of the target audience at first, but now I know: it's the exemplar points.

I play with a lot of people who don't bot exemplar. Some are more casual, some are solidly endgame-capable and well geared. I don't bot EP myself - no value judgment here, just not something I personally do.

Among that crowd, if you're just hanging out in-game and don't have anything important going on, and you see Besieged is coming up, it's a VERY efficient time:EP ratio. 10 minutes of work for 10k EP? Can't really beat that. Low stakes and can f around with friends. Or for me, I often just track the Besieged status while I'm at work; if it's on the way I go sit in the zone so that when the mobs arrive I can look up and take a little 10min break to beat up some beastmen.

Lot of those people I know might use Besieged to quickly regain some lost EP from deaths, for some weird job they don't love to actually go grind out points or do events like Limbus/Sheol on, when you're close to a ML (heck, I dinged ML35 on a job in there last week, I was close and just brought it into Besieged a couple times to hit my level).

I appreciate that people for whom EP comes... "easier", that might not be a big draw. But to be fair, those people aren't exactly playing the game the way the developers designed it, so yeah, you might not experience the content the same way a more vanilla player will.

Besieged is casual content intended to get people who like doing things just to do them together. It doesn't have to be more than that. People who like besieged will run into other people who like besieged there.

10k EP isn't some amazing reward just because you don't bot. You can still make a manual party with a decent job spread and crank out 200k in an hour with no bots whatsoever.

Cerberus has the smallest population (according to the numbers), so Besieged is a rare moment where I get to see and potentially team with players I usually wouldn't interact with.

We did two wave 13s back-to-back the other day. It feels a lot like the old days where there's some actual peril. I imagine bigger servers are still steamrolling this content in minutes, but on smaller ones, players are having to band together more to defend the capital. It helps that we have a player who has been announcing the start (with time remaining) of Besieged for years now, otherwise we could lose out. He is a legend for that.

And yes, I agree that the biggest incentive is the points, along with the monthly Silver Voucher. I don't bot EP and never intend to pay anyone to bot for me, so I get all my points through other means. I love bringing DNC or RDM as they are self efficient.

I imagine somewhere down the road (level 15 maybe?), the devs will introduce gear that can actually be used in endgame for a steep price. This would entice ML50 players to keep showing up.

Check task manager/processes and see how much ram XI is using after playing for a while.

For me changing characters caused a small memory leak type problem, but it took an unholy number of swaps and time for it to be a problem (like 20+ swaps a day and after a week). Restarting the game every day/couple of days stopped it happening cause I never hit the 1.3 gig danger zone (that's the danger zone for me since I use a lot of mods, it's way higher if you don't use a lot of mods).

Black zone is just where the game tried to load the dat file for the zone and failed.

The problem with Besieged is you have no idea it's even happening most of the time, would it kill them to have an announcement in Unity chat or something.

Exactly, and it's a pretty big problem.
Granted it's not as bad as it was during the TOAU days (thanks to less people and packetflow) it's still incredibly bad.
Is it "fixable" without completely re-making the network communication protocol? Not entirely but there's a lot of stuff they could've done for a "serious" attempt at revamping Besieged, but they did absolutely not, maybe luckily so I guess lol
Whichever way you want to look at it, it is a "problem". When you have these issues with how the server<>client structure works, you need to know you can't make this sort of content and make it work right. They learned too late about it with TOAU and that's fine, but then going back at it with a revamp? Seriously?


And here we come to the second part.
You make a ccasual event that happens every once in a blue moon, it's hard to know it's happening and to take part in it.
I guess given how MMOs worked in 2005 it was fine for the time, but in 2026? Really?
They could've fixed all these parts I presume way more easily than the previous one I mentioned, yet they did absolutely nothing about it.


So we're talking about a content that happens randomly, you don't know when it's gonna happen but it's pretty rare, it gets announced a certain amount of time before (with no visible timer anyway) and it's utterly lagged and slowed down to the point you can hardly see targets on screen, engage, disengage, see what's even happening or not happening, mobs die (or you die) and you didn't even know what happened.

I mean, they seriously raised the ilevel for a content like this for "casuals"?
If you ask me, plenty of better ways to spend dev resources than revamping a content like this that really has no place in FFXI's meta for pretty much nobody, imho.

It could have, if they fixed it right, but they didn't.

If it was unity chat, no one would see it.

If you beat TVR you get that bot chat thing that does announce it.

...what "we" (not me idgaf) need is a lua that displays the region menu for besieged screen full time. I can't imagine that's excessively difficult, but may overburden the servers. Probably limit it's pings to hourly etc


The large address patch fixed it (so far!), which is a ram issue

It already exists, the server already rate limits the requests by just only updating your client every 2 minutes regardless of how many times you request it in that period, I'm not really sure how much stress lots of people requesting Besieged status would have though, honestly.

Correction then; what is needed is a way for people to find out that exists, beyond the 10 lifers that post on AH

I joked about this in the past, but Besieged takes HOURS (sometimes days) for them to prepare to attack, like fifteen minutes for them to advance to the city, they are defeated in minutes, and warp out instantly. Can y'all just get your *** here faster? I'm not saying Besieged needs to be on a Domain Invasion-like cadence, but the time component of besieged is wildly off. It doesn't need to last an entire hour, but all that effort for a five minute fight is kind of meaningless. Like what's the purpose behind all that development work for five minutes of content every 2-3 days when you catch it.

And I'm not even getting into the fustercluck of system limitations within the zone attempting to display all those mobs (and half of them being dead the moment you target them and the server catches up with your client). That's a completely separate issue on what makes Besieged undesirable (random: why isn't there a setting to completely TURN OFF OTHER PLAYERS FROM YOUR VIEW?).

Also, tying new drops to the beastmen bosses DURING a Besieged but in their lairs during lv13 Besieged was weird too. Soo you kill Gulool ja ja for his Ring that helps you in Besieged (Besieged specific gear makes very little sense btw), he disappears and then reappears in Besieged minutes later to lead his army? Everything about Besieged looks like an idea chatgpt spit out without any logical human thought behind it.

Pretty much this.
Having it as frequent as Domain Invasion would be the opposite extreme, but can we get something in between?

That was the first factor they should've thought. Why even bother working on revamping a content when it's so random and so few people can even take part in it simply because of how it was thought in 2004?

They are somewhat predictable, to be fair. I've been keeping logs of Besieged battles on Bahamut occurring for a couple months now and from my data...

General
- No army ever attacks more than once in 24h. Lowest delay I have between attacks is 29h from the Mamool Ja.
- All armies are staggered from each other, their timers for attacking are entirely independent.
- The average attacks per day is about 1.7ish, with one occurring every 13-15 hours.

Mamool Ja Savages
- Most frequent attacker, 42 attacks total, every 1.5 days on average, also the most consistent, they have never missed their window for an attack after their last attack based on my data, it's always between 24-48hrs.
- Average Prep Time: 4h, 5m
- Average Advancing Time: 16.5m

Troll Mercenaries
- Middle-ish for frequency, 33 attacks total, between the 36-48h timeframe on average, but they have missed that window.
- Average Prep Time: 3h, 52m
- Average Advancing Time: 17.6m

Undead Swarm
- Turns out death does indeed creep up on you because they are the least frequent, with 27 attacks and mostly showing up in the 48-72h timeframe.
- Average Prep Time: 3h, 52m
- Average Advancing Time: 12.1m

Misc
- Average battle length for Lv.12 Besieged is about 10m, for all 3 armies. I don't have enough Lv. 13 data to really draw any conclusions yet.

How much influence does killing Archaic Mirrors and NMs have on these numbers?

Besieged was neat and fun when Whitegate was the hub city and keeping the candy was important.

Neither of those things are true anymore. If they moved besieged to be right outside Mhaura and losing meant you couldn't do ambuscade people would care a lot more.

That colibri bot camp is pretty good, they need to make sure not to lose the candy to get there easily

Bots cant salvage either without the candy, kinda vital

(you can just have an assault tag and clip through the door... but yeah)

Of course an actual EP party is better EP/hour. But then you have to get a whole party together, go out to camp, and play for a while while actually paying attention.

Besieged you can just sit afk in a zone when you see it coming (which gives you like a couple hours advance notice if you just look at the map), look up when the mobs arrive, then play for 10 or so minutes to get your reward.

I can’t realistically set up non-bot parties during my work day, when I’m playing something else on the other screen, or when I’m doing chores around the house. But I CAN stand around in Al Zahbi when I do those things, and go have a quick Besieged break once it starts. That ~11-12k EP isn’t totally rocking my world, but it’s enough of a little bonus to make me feel like that Beseiged time wasn’t a waste.

Great data. May I ask, since you can have captured this data and can practically predict future attacks, is there any way to put this into an addon so people can just sit and watch the expected time a Besieged is going to happen? Something like Dynamis-D tracker website/WhereisDI etc where you countdown: Next Besieged >> Mamool Ja Savages >> 14~15 hours Like an on-screen widget that reads Besieged Map (or predicts based on pattern) data and tells you when it thinks Besieged may happen. I mean, nothing wrong with checking /bmap 50 times a day, but I have absolutely no idea how long it takes to go from Preparing Lv 2 -> 13. Sometimes hours go by and they gain 2-3 levels, other times they go from 10-13 in less than an hour. It doesn't make sense to me half the time.


I assume this includes the opening and closing CS? What really makes Besieged last as long as it can is the fact that all of the mobs are sitting in front of the city and most of the time you're warped to the entrance to Whitegate (or close to it), so you have to run back to the front to get to the mobs. They are also piled at the gate doors, and they gradually enter the city entrance instead of all at once. The mobs themselves die in a few seconds, it's only taking less than 10 minutes because SE staggered the Mega Boss's entry. Besieged would end in 3 minutes if every mob was instantly in the city and could be fought immediately.

If besieged ever becomes of any importance again I can already see people fighting over mirrors to drag all 3 attacks in their time zone, preferably back to back.

Originally I was hoping FFXII was going to be that game. Then FFXIII. Then FFXIV.

Then I stopped hoping and came back to XI. Sad.

XIII came the closest, you just had to grind through a 30hour tutorial to get there. They made a single player game out of MMO grind play style, then wondered why not enough people got to "end game".

Surely you meant XII?