"Human or not" a letter to Yoshi-P & SEFollow

Don't be offended please, but I will be short and to the point here since I've spent quite a bit of time posting about this subject already(both here on ZAM and in other forums)...

You are doing it wrong.

FFXI is a game heralded by most as having one of, if not THE best community in an MMO. The reason? Well a large part of it was the fact that the game didn't spoon-feed players everything. The fact that you didn't know everything, weren't told everything or didn't have a wiki to visit with all the answers was a large part of what fueled that community. You're not supposed to Alt-Tab, you're supposed to talk to people, make friends and either ask them for help or learn on your own.

I honestly felt like SE drove me up to the front gates of my home city, threw me out on my neck and flicked a few gil at me as they drove away laughing. It was cold, it was brutal and it was unforgiving. It was also the closest SE has come to RPG in ages. I hated loving every minute of it and I still have fantastic nightmares about it to this day.



Edited, Dec 3rd 2016 9:43pm by FilthMcNasty

This, honestly, is what pops into my mind any time someone gets all misty eyed about what a great community FFXI had. Yeah it had its moments sure, but there was also a definite dark side to it that people just sort of forget about.

Uh, I was talking about legitimate questions, such as "Where do you find _____?" (insert quest start NPC here)

Or "How do you get ______" (insert quest/armor/weapon/spell scroll/area here)

And the like. The answer was almost always the same, from what I could tell. It was some form of "Go look it up, (insert insult/expletive here)!"

As far as populating the wiki goes, when you have a big linkshell of 50+ players, brute forcing is easy. Get a few dozen people all trying to get the same quest done, and the information is quickly found when you got a couple dozen players scouring the zone until one says "Oh here it is, I found it!"

But how is a lone person supposed to do this in any reasonable time-frame? The quest will (sometimes) tell you what zone to go to... but that's it. A zone is large, and oftentimes full of aggressive mobs that you (back then) couldn't hope to fight solo.

And I remember the hours and hours and hours of waiting to try to get a quest done. I remember hours of seeing the same person shouting for something in Jeuno (usually Genkis) and they'd still be shouting, hours later, after I got back from an XP group or something.

I remember a few quests I needed and it took hours and when I finally DID get some help, it was 50/50 if we actually had enough help to actually do the quest in question. And then, the people who wanted paid for every little thing. My God, some people were charging 50k, 100k gil to kill 3 mobs in Xarcabard and such a few times I remember. It took like 15-20min and they were bilking people out of their last gil just to get a limit break quest done, and these limit breaks as you remember absolutely halted progress on your character until you got it done and they were NOT soloable whatsoever.

EDIT: ZAM decided to fall asleep for five min or something, but anyways, I suppose the community looked great from the top -- if you knew good people, and if you were in a linkshell then yeah, I bet you had a fun time. But if you were some newbie that didn't know anybody, didn't really have any connections really then everything was colder than Shiva's home. Very rarely did you find anybody willing to help without being paid, and people just ignored you or gave you cold shoulder. It was difficult enough JUST trying to get a group to get XP, I remember seeing people who make minor mistakes being chewed out because they were "dragging the XP down" or people would get kicked out of groups as soon as they got a certain level ("You're +2 levels... bye.") without even asking them if they wanted to at least get buffer. When you're at the bottom, the community wasn't so great. It felt cold and uncaring 95% of the time. I do have a few fond memories of a couple people along the way that I met, but most of my dealings with random people I'd very much chosen to forget. Which is why I go solo most of the time these days.

Edited, Dec 4th 2016 5:00pm by Lyrailis

I have no idea who Lord Avesta is, but to be honest, a successful MMO needs both solo and group content.

Gating EVERYTHING behind groups is a horrible, and terrible idea because you just end up with bottlenecks like you did in oldschool XI where you have lots of people needing crap that nobody has any sort of incentive to help out with, like the genkai quests. Mandatory grouped content sucks, unless there's matchmaking like XIV has. And sometimes it still sucks, if you end up waiting for 45+ min queue to get a required dungeon done.



Nowadays, this can be done solo and very easily and the game is better off for it. No longer do you gotta wait around for people to help you out of the goodness of their hearts (they usually didn't....), no longer do you have these immense massive roadblocks in front of you.

It can be done solo now, and it's far better than it used to be.



That's all great when you join a fresh new MMO, but after the MMO has aged and you join it not knowing anybody when you go in? It sucks. Everybody else is established and nobody has time for you, the newbie who has nothing to offer in return.



You got lucky. I've tried making my own groups, didn't work out. I had a variable hour job, where week-to-week was different (it's better now, but it was worse back then). I didn't know what days or nights I would have off until 2 weeks prior. Sometimes I would have a Wednesday Night off, other times it would be Thursday Night instead. Trying to make or join any type of HNM/Dynamis/Whatever shell was absolutely impossible for me.



I wouldn't say it comes off as "smug", it's just merely again... you need to realize you had a LOT of good fortune come your way, a lot of good fortune that many other players didn't have. You admit you had a more easy-going job, you had consistent hours, a consistent schedule and you were able to meet people and make friends and get one or more linkshells together. You were able to do this.

Myself, and other players, were not.

It is just as difficult for me to understand what it was like to be someone like you, just as much as it is difficult for you to understand what it is like to be in the shoes of a person like me.

But all of that is irrelevant now -- solo to 99 is 100% possible, or at least that's my theory. I can only see two minor roadblocks to soloing to 99 -- Genkai #2 and I think #3? The one that asks you to go to the 3 beastmen homes for their crests, and that one where you have to kill the 3 mobs in Xarcabard. I think the beastman homes are do-able, they just need extreme caution and/or suicide runs. The mobs in Xarcabard? Depends on whether or not you picked a good DD job. I've never tried to 5-man them at the level they were meant to be done at, but from testimonials that I've read, it sounds like it should be possible.

Otherwise, solo to 99 is entirely possible and relatively easy if you know what you're doing. There's a lot of learning, and making mistakes will get you killed, but again, you're still learning how to play. Though, sadly, skillchains, magic bursts, and general behavior in parties is not something you're going to learn... but I suppose that's a small price to pay for actually being able to get things done in a realistic time-frame. And besides, the easier Ambuscades sound like a decent place to get to know group mechanics.

That's assuming people still do the easier Ambuscades.... I dunno, I've never stepped foot in one myself, I've had so much to do and I read that they reset every month, so I was waiting until this month's reset before I give it a bash.

What he's saying, and keeps being ignored, is that this isn't always the case. I myself have stood in Jeuno and shouted for literal days trying to get something like an AF3 quest or an LB quest done and gotten nothing. The community in FFXI was fantastic...except when it wasn't and the entire experience of the game was hard locked to getting community help with basically everything. I used to joke that I couldn't walk down the street and buy a hot dog without a balanced party of 6 in that game.

If you had a good group of people or you were really good at putting groups together then your experience was great. If you didn't have either of those things, your experience was randomly good and randomly awful. Acknowledging that the community wasn't always amazing doesn't mean they weren't sometimes amazing.

I don't think anybody in this thread implied otherwise or disagreed with that one bit, lol.

The main issue, is that the game itself exacerbated the small amounts of nastiness that was in the community, to make them much more noticeable.

In games like WoW, or XIV, you can just turn off chat channels and Q up for whatever dungeons you need. You run into the occasional idiot or rude person, but you can mute them, ignore them, or if it's bad enough, simply leave dungeon and re-queue.

However, in XI, you didn't really have this option, it was find a group or not get anything done at all, and if you needed something like a genkai quest, you were unable to play, period, because your character had hit a roadblock in their progression. You could go level another job of course, but what if you had no interest in the other jobs? What if you couldn't find groups? That, and shouting for both a genkai and a leveling party at the same time could be difficult, and there's always the issue that if you get a group, and say 30 min later you then get a group for genkai then you ditch your leveling party and earn yourself a bad name.

Meanwhile, XIV allows you to Q for everything you can't solo and makes use of Level Sync and provides rewards for people to help you get through something. That way, you don't feel like such a leech when some high level helps you through something. They get rewards for their time, too.

You might not be actively shouting in towns and getting to know people, but still, there is a group mechanic there, and you do end up grouping with other human players. I feel it's a decent compromise to the problem that XI had.

EDIT: Another awesome thing that XI did that solved much of the problem? Trust magic. One of my favorite things (right next to mounts!) that they added in recent years. I just wish they would have updated your Adventuring Fellow that it could compete with Trust Magic... at the very least they could remove most of the stupid restrictions and penalties for using the Fellow.

Edited, Dec 5th 2016 5:13pm by Lyrailis

No, it was cross-server from the beginning. Limited to your battlegroup, but each battlegroup was like 15 servers or something. These days it's only limited by region (NA, EU, etc).

I don't entirely disagree with you about the effects of a cross server matchmaker like this. But I will say that queue times for a server-only version would be abominable especially at non-peak times. I've been doing the CT weekly for aether oils lately and it can take up to 2+ hours to get a party for any of them and that's WITH the cross server functionality.

I think XI's community has always been bad, from the beginning, especially on Asura. There was a reason most of the stuff I did in the game it was with six (six, not a linkshell) people, mostly known IRL as well.

Also, early community efforts were generally, like most MMO, pointed to the easier solution (see Promyvion strategies with Rangers and Summoners) or sometimes ended up promoting wrong information - that was especially evident during the CoP days where most people who posted here hated the expansion and its story-focused structure (and by the way, back then the wiki didn't exsist in a complete form so most of the strategies we did with our group were improvised on the spot, with varying results).

XI however was built around the concept of party play, in this way is very "Japanese" (similar concepts can be applied to the ideas of Skillchains and Magic Bursts) and only years later it started to add more solo-friendly features.

XIV is an entirely different thing, though it plays safe too much for my tastes.

I don't know what that was supposed to be in response to because it's not what he posted, it isn't even what you quoted.

He's saying that you pretty much have to get in on the ground floor of an MMO to have a decent chance. While I don't necessarily agree 100% with that, I think it's pretty much right. The most recent FFXI example I can think of was when Delve was introduced and parties were demanding that everyone have a Delve weapon to do Delve with. Which was of course impossible without doing Delve. This was like a week or something after the system was released. And I've seen far more absurd examples than that in other games.

The conclusion of what I posted was at the end of the paragraph...



FFXI is the highest grossing FF title to date. That was announced before Abyssea concluded and the game really started opening up to solo play. Based on that, it's pretty clear that a game doesn't need solo content to be successful. That is unless, Lyrailis has some special criteria for being successful.

You disagree?


Does it really come as a shock to you that experienced players would seek out other experienced players to group with? Real talk, if you spent your time trying to make or join a group of players with similar experience to you instead of rolling your eyes, you'd probably be more productive.

Hard to dignify responses so I'll go ahead and bow out here. Good luck with whatever game you play, but you should be more active. You'll have much better results.

As Callinon said, obviously FFXI is the "highest grossing FF game to date" because it's a monthly sub game. Obviously.

As for its "Success", you only need to take a gander at some subscription charts. We're not comparing FFXI to other FF games ('cept maybe XIV), we're comparing FFXI to other MMOs. Here's a quick google stats I found for 2009-2011 (back when FFXI was still being actively developed and in its "prime"):



You'll note FFXI is 7th on the list. Mildly successful, but nowhere near the top three. Now obviously these numbers aren't perfect but they should be in the ballpark, rough estimates.



No, but you need to understand something: After the initial release of content, the number of Experienced Players to Inexperienced Players skews drastically.

When a new raid is released, it might look something like this:

(Inexperienced:Experienced players interested in doing the content, where "Experienced" are people who have fully cleared the content at least once)

At the beginning: 100:0
A week later: 70:30
A month later: 50:50
2 months later: 20:80
6+ months later: 10:90+

So basically, if you're at the beginning, then EVERYBODY is inexperienced with the new content. A week later, you've got several groups who've made clears, and a month later is when you see the "must have achieves!" shouts.

The problem with this, is if you just arrived later-on, you have nil chance of finding enough inexperienced players to fill out a whole group capable of doing the content, and as such you will need experienced players to fill slots.



Dunno where the salt is coming from to be honest... but I didn't expect you to understand, most of the people I've talked to/with who have the raiding guilds and linkshells never understand, and have never understood our point-of-view. You're one of the very many who just fail to understand the problem with MMOs and wide-spread elitism.

What numbers are YOU using to determine that he's wrong?

In any event I think it was more an illustration rather than a statement of hard data. Over time the number of people who both want to do a particular piece of content and have not yet done that particular piece of content goes way WAY down, and it does so very quickly.

Obviously I don't have hard data on this either so I can only speak from my own experience, but even right now trying to get (for example) A5-9 done.. normal mode.. so I can move on, is totally impossible. Nobody wants to do it. I don't blame them for not wanting to do outdated content that has nothing for them, but it gates me and that's a problem. I had this same problem back in 2.x when I was interested in joining the parties looking to learn T10-13 but I hadn't cleared T9 and nobody wanted to touch that thing with someone who'd never been there. This happens over and over again and it's a problem. If I'd been there when the content was new, I'd have no issue, but I wasn't...

It always seems like anyone who can't understand the concept that the older multiplayer content gets, the harder it is to do (as intended), were probably among the early clears or soon after. Some of this is due to lockouts if they exist. Some of it is due to costs if you need consumables. Some of it could be the content just wasn't fun (to do for the nth time). And if it's old enough, it's probably not worth doing because the rewards are no longer pertinent. As this issue pops up time and time again across MMOs throughout the world, sometimes devs try to address it, but other times not at all.

When it comes to XI, me harping on CoP probably seems like old hat to some, but the level caps were a hurdle that exemplified the issue of content aging decreasing accessibility. Once one finished a mission, the only real reason to backtrack was out of the goodness of their heart. And a lot of the time, doing so was urged to be a less a hassle as possible with aggro avoidance taking priority because 99.99% of mobs in the way of an objective were a waste. One might even argue SE forced mob engagement by sprinking so many true sight/sound mobs out there. It wasn't about making the world dangerous, it was just trying to artificially slow players down.

Otherwise, it's pretty dumb to assert that everyone should play the same way or else they're fundamentally looking at the genre wrong. Solo play is important to MMOs no matter how much the haters reject the sentiment. Matchmaking tools for when it isn't quite an option are just as important, which XI horribly lacked. So, yeah, for all people were "forced" to interact, it had a dark side those who merrily did get whatever done perhaps didn't notice. Further, I know I at least had a vast majority of groups being more about advancement, and if that wasn't be achieved, GTFO. Socializing wasn't at the core of that, and sometimes even discouraged through inaction or implied conformity.