Whatever Happened To Vanabout?

Whatever happened to vanabout? There is no mention of it anymore

They probably reached their marketing quota for ffxi and axed it temporarily.

It was so off base and Vanabout didn't reach potential new customers so not a big deal.

i'd give it more time. they know it failed pretty hard, but they did ask for feedback from JP and NA so i doubt they want to give it up entirely

Square Enix should just make Dynamis Divergence Beaucedine and Xarcabard and the Dreamworld zones.

That daily ambu hallmark/galli buff was really nice last month

VanaBout failed because of their own decisions:

Create content that caters to soloing in an instanced event with limited slots, then be surprised that people complained about congestion.

The personal rewards for the event were either useless or an insult to the time:reward ratio for other attainment methods. Notable exception to the 100 Deeds reward.

The group reward was rather weak and a huge wildcard depending what the monthly campaign bonuses were.

Moreover, the Ambu bonus was tied to yet ANOTHER daily, as if there arent enough dailies as is.

I would imagine that it is going to be a hard sell for them to get the development time on. the objective appears to have been to drive more daily engagement and the feedback from both sides of the ocean was "we do not need another daily chore". the only thing I am particularly surprised about is the lack of communication, as one would hope that they would be learning from what can at best be referred to as a rather large failure. with how massively they had to slash the points required within the first week or so of release, and even then there wasn't enough interest to get the third and final stretch goal, if they ARE devoting time to this we will likely not see anything come from it for a while.

I would wager that they had a lot of the content for vanabout already planned and\or implemented but the first round showed that the player base was not happy with a daily time sync and middling rewards.

So it might be "back to the drawing board" for vanabout.

One can only hope they went back to the drawing board with the feedback they received and revamp it in a positive way.

Yet another instance where SE could've saved themselves a lot of headache by communicating more directly with the community prior to investing time in something.

I don't remember seeing SE clearly communicate the expected release cycle for vanabout. Monthly? Every other month? Quarterly? Twice a year? Nor did they explicitly say whether this was always going to be tied to Ambuscade or if they were going to mix it up from round to round.


My solution to this is to make the final tier be a random mog bonanza item in a ??? box that needs to be appraised so it drops to the treasure pool so you don't end up with a melee weapon on a mage character or whatever. I would expect lower tier rewards to remain relatively trash.

I think a bonanza weapon is a bit high of a reward.
Now having said that: pulsify the bonanza weapons and put it in a reward. Hit rank 3 x times and turn in for a bonanza weapon.

Randomize it further. They only need to make the *potential* reward enticing enough that you cannot ignore participation. Even if you never have a real (super low unrealistic) chance at obtaining it

Like give out daily special ANV key for completion, add bonanza weapons to the loot pool at an extremely low chance. Once the first person gets a bonanza weapon on their mule, people won't stop participating. Then every subsequent Vanabout will always have participation guaranteed.

Randomized weapon at a low drop rate would be very on point for SE lol

The tier rewards need to be better, but it would also help if the RoE's themselves provided some kind of minor reward beyond just credit towards the event.

Say, 10k EP, 5k HM, and 2.5k G total each day if you do it all. Not really a significant reward, but enough to add up over time and not feel like you're wasting your time. Different Vanabouts could branch out into different events and their currencies too.