What if you could take it all back...

[Yygdrasil]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

They don't care about us at all. Never have. Check out the official forums and read all the good suggestions... and how they lack any response from the dev team at all.

[drusslinn]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

abysea was the most progress SE has made in its MMO history they need to step up to the plate and continue with it build on it not regress and wonder why only 10% of the players are even attempting void watch . its like you step in abys and in 3-6 hous you can actually acomplish great things , in old ffxi 3-6 hours you might get a lvl or 2 . Its no comparison in my opinion they improved on ffxi with abys , just wish they take that learning experience and add it to XIX instead of hey all this great research we got scrap it lets try some new shit we nvr did b4 and lose money . So sad the game looks so amazing yet its opening was an utter fail =( ,i heard the abys team was working on it now but that may just be a rumor i hope they fix the game xi wont be around forever and id like something that i could at least feel comfortable in but i dont think SE cares about us tbh .

[Malacite]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

To answer the actual question: I'd take Abyssea back. I want them to expand the world, not make parallel dimensions of it.

Why not both? I rather enjoyed Abyssea and still maintain it's one of the best additions to the game - especially since it came and went, and while it's still relevant it's not quite the center of the universe it was when Scars hit.

They can't actually expand vana'diel sadly until they fucking axe the PS2 already since the HDD space is too limited at this point to support a full-blown expansion. Nevermind that XI's sub numbers are gradually dwindling while at the same time XIV is building momentum (though I suspect a lot of that will be lost sadly in the wake of the renewal of the fee).

[cidbahamut]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

I'll admit that I was just another screaming fan boy when they announced level syncing. Don't get me wrong, I still like it... but it was the first loose thread in the fabric of FFXI that would lead to it's unraveling.

I think level sync was less a loose thread of FFXI unraveling and more a symptom of said unraveling. I can say with absolute certainty that if level sync had not been around when I joined in 2009 that I would have grown frustrated with the leveling process and likely left the game. Forced grouping only works when there's a large base to pull from and as time has passed, that base has all collated at the top. It's the normal progression for an MMO and I think FFXI would have been much worse off if level sync hadn't been introduced to somewhat alleviate the issue. That said, level sync wasn't really a fix so much as it was an attempt to delay the decay that comes with not adjusting the core of the game once the entire environment has shifted. Forced grouping isn't gonna fly anymore, but FFXI has yet to adapt to that reality. It's making some baby-steps, but the core design is still stuck in 2003 and the game has suffered for it.

As Raydeus said, all Abyssea did was expose just how severe a lot of FFXI's flaws are.

[Ketaru]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

I could go more into detail about this. But right now, I'm just not in the mood to so, long story short:

Abyssea, at first, was a good thing for the game. It revitalized interest in a game that was on life support and was getting stagnant. Some of the criticism for it lacks perspective on the history of the game as a whole. Other criticisms could probably use a second look. With more widespread use of THREE atma (just the effects of one atma was overwhelming), it began to make the game feel more and more cheap. So I'm going to say "Keep It" because I believe the game would've died without it. It would be much too simplistic to make a blanket statement about whether it is still good for or bad for the game though.

[Raydeus]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

You know Yggy, he gets lonely fast.

[Hayde]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

Yo, Hayde. Are you playing TOR now?




Don't worry. He is always watching you, always.

Hello,

As for your ToR question, early access begins on the 13th--I'll probably get in then since I pre-ordered relatively early, but I'll be busy with finals up until Wednesday night/Thursday so I probably see much time invested into the game until then.

As for the second comment--stranger eh? I just talked to you on Skype like 2 weeks ago, lol.

[Raydeus]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

Yeah, having one consolidated server left for all the 5k players still enjoying vanilla XI after all this time sounds like real fun. XD



Edit > Wait, that could actually work. How about using one of the old servers to give players a chance to replay XI before Aby and see if it would actually work as advertised. Keep in mind it wouldn't have any new content past Scenarios, and no Level sync or FOV/GOV, but if people were really enjoying the game more back then a voluntary migration to that server could help decide things.

[Kailea]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

I would take it all back, in fact if Abyssea never existed, I would still be playing.

[Armando]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

I just started to realize that SE makes bad MMO's.

FFXI suffered from this, but I gave that a pass since SE had done nothing but traditional offline JRPGs up 'til then. It really shows in FFXI's design, especially in the jobs (e.g. melee combat consists of applying self-buffs instead of actually doing stuff.) I figured that after 10 years of running this game, FFXIV would be everything FFXI did right plus none of the things they did wrong, but they went and fucked that up. I'm not going to rail on them too hard though. At this point I'm convinced that no one can make an MMO that will give me the same quality of entertainment as a non-MMO game, because the point of any MMO is to get its players to grind.

To answer the actual question: I'd take Abyssea back. I want them to expand the world, not make parallel dimensions of it.

[Raydeus]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

I've grown up a bit, i'm not 16 i'm fucking 32

Don't worry Mister, by the looks of the birthday tab in DiV's homepage there are a lot of old geezers just like you who grew up playing XI, and have since left it behind.

The other day Mr. Tasky was talking about the trials and tribulations of old age and how his body wasn't what it used to be.

[ShepardG]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

I loved FFXI, hell still do, but i don't play anymore and I'll atribute that decision to this question I pose to you all:

"Do you still play NES/Sega master system/Genesis/N64/Dreamcast/PS1 games on a regular basis?"

If so, I can understand how you can want that older style of FFXI. It's not a bad thing, In fact, I still turn on an emulator now and again, and play some old shinning force, or shenn-mu. Those games were fun, and to me, offered an experience that I enjoyed and continue to enjoy. However...

I've grown up a bit, i'm not 16 i'm fucking 32 (shutup) and as much as i will cherish those games, I can't play them all the time. I'm talking 3-4 times a year will i sit down and run some old ROM's and play around, but I don't sit down with all my free time and beat them all over again. Admittedly these are single/two player games, not MMO's so there is a difference there.

If you've moved on from your old systems, and games, I can see you, like myself, having moved on from 11. I went to 14 and quickly realized, through the game itself, forums, and maybe a bit about SE, that the MMO FFXI was dead for me. In all honesty, there isn't anything wrong with the game. It's just dated. It didn't evolve like WoW, or EQ. It just stayed the exact same, until abyssea. Even with the slight changes they made before hand, It was still just an old NES game to me. Fun, but not something you banked on keeping you entertained for days/weeks.

I blame alot of this on SE and the mentatlity that they took going into 11 and then into 14. They can't to this day adapt. The playerbase asks for something simple like a fix to voidwatch loot, or relic/emperyean/mythic balancing, or WS's that don't just suck, and they get ignored. Abyssea changed that alot, and litterly it seemed to go away. I won't get into the developers/producers changes that occured during the last 1.5 years, but it leads one to believe that there are folks at SE that are killing the game with stupid decisions. And the payment system was just whore-in-does.
I just came to realize that this was the way this company was, and they weren't going to start changing until they started losing player's money.

I played my 2nd ever MMO a few months ago, Rifts, and it was one of the major nails in the coffin also. I saw rift, with gorgeous lag free graphics, and an interface that made adventuring so easy, and a log in system/ payment system that made SE look like fools that I started to realize that there were better ways for me to get my entertainment, instead of tri-boxing 3 accounts to get my phurba. Rifts has it's problems, don't get me wrong, balance in that game is way out of wack, however, they designed the game to be adaptive, and when i quit shortly after patch 1.5, I knew that if they made the right decisions the game would have a long life.

I loved the FFXI story, and I loved the 14 story (what little i've seen) but SE's overall decsions in regards to 11's stories (aka. after WoTG they haven't had any, abyssea was bullshit crap, voidwatch even have a story behind it?, and their lack of anything remotely even comparable to an actual expansion) caused my final demise. I loved zilart, cop, aht urghan, and would have loved WoTG but could not bring myself to participate in a story that litterly took SE 3-4 f'ing years to complete.

I just started to realize that SE makes bad MMO's. They have great story's, but their MMO's are horrible. Compared to Rifts, FF's stories blow them out of the water, however, Rifts got the actual gameplay things right. If SE every made a decent playable game, along with their capabilities regarding stories, they'd have a multi million player MMO on their hands. But instead, they stick to their guns even when it's clear their guns are failing.

Anyway I sort of rambled, I love/ed abyssea, and felt it was a step into the right direction for 11, and if it had an engaging story line (maybe missions or quests that actually take place in regular vana'diel would be a start) It would have been, imho, what all the players are looking for. Good gameplay, good story, and you could have expanded on it even more, and carried winning aspects of abyssea even further in FFXI's life.

[Squiggs]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

I wouldn't go back to the way it was for anything. I consider myself a casual player (two or three nights a week for a couple hours and one day while I'm off if I'm lucky). I never did any kind of "end-game" activities before Abyssea came out. I hit 75 on WHM shortly (like a week or so) after the first Abyssea came out. I don't know if I would have been able to do Dynamis or Sky or Limbus or Einherjar (I could still do the latter three the same old way, for now). I do know that I can do Abyssea on my schedule, not the schedule of a dedicated shell. I know that between myself and a few of my close friends, we can take most of the mobs in Abyssea, and that is very satisfying for me.

Like Cid said, I miss the story aspects of the game while in Abyssea, but I can still get that from the older stories that I haven't finished (final fight for Zilart, last half of ToAU, most of WotG, and the three mini-expansions). There is still a lot of story for me to get through before I am starving for more original content.

[Raydeus]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

"Too Little, Too Late."

Yo, Hayde. Are you playing TOR now?

Hey there stranger... >.>

Don't worry. He is always watching you, always.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: What if you could take it all back...

It's also got the worst aesthetics of any expansion I'm familiar with so far.

Oh you don't like re-skinned zones with purple skies?

I'll tell you the 1 thing I did like... and I forget who pointed it out to me. I like that L. Plateau, T. Canyon and K. Highlands are all missing their respective crags. It makes sense and I was happy that they put enough attention to detail in to remove them. Apart from that, I was disappoint.