Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

*Awards Esdain with the Random Spontaneity reward*

*rewards you with the* You should have bumped me when you had me award.

*looks at the two random topics I bumped*

This is why I am taking the kids, Vyre. You can meet me every other Sunday at Wendys.

You are my friend, but I will bite you for fun.

What?

This is the funniest:
You can meet me every other Sunday at Wendys.

What?

This is the funniest:
You can meet me every other Sunday at Wendys.

Next you'll be busting out Counting Crows and the soundtrack to Gattaca.

Listen Dinosaur Humpty Dumpty. We do what we please here.

Do you, Esdain Cook?

Music post time incoming. I guess these should be in another thread.

Are you my cat when I'm in bed and move my hands or feet?

Always find it funny Square never once mention that XI operations have been merged into XIV operations in any of their financial reports. I know why they do it, and ultimately it benefits both games but it still irks me a bit that all players and profits XI make are counted towards XIV.

The XI devs work hard with very limited resources and manpower and get no recognition at all.



https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/news/pdf/23q1slides.pdf

hopping on this trend

I don't think its too political to say....

THANK ALL THE GODS AND LITTLE FISHES THAT CAMPAIGN SEASON IS OVER TOMORROW!!!

Also if you haven't yet voted do it tomorrow, its your last chance for a while.

The ads are over, the actual "thing" STARTS tomorrow.

It'll go from nonstop ads for it, to nonstop bitching about it. (and it's extremely predictable)

Sup

Another day with hard work here. Damn Microsoft Intune is so pita…

Its raining a lot here, i almost caught a cold due how the temperature dropped quickly this last week, plus damn shower broke and i had to take a shower with cold water.

Now just gonna watch an hour of xenogear gameplay, im close to the ending, and the plot thickens.

Kinda frightening to think we could be just the lamb dwellers: living a blissful ignorance, thinking we had any sort of “liberty”, when in fact we are only playing exactly like the mastermind wants.

I made a citation today:

“You know you are manipulated when you hate someone/something. Because, if you actually had the freedom to choose, probably you would choose to not hate anyone”.
Panta, 07/11/2022

I got a call from China today. China. I will be glad when the election is over.

No recognition and they pretty much want to erase it, theres barely any mention of XI across social media. Most of the FF "fans" dont even know it exists or openly discourage playing or talking about it. I've seen retrospective videos on final fantasy where they completely ignore XI, but surely not XIV. One dummy recently saying "XII heavily influenced XIV and its core."



So sad for a game as beautiful as XI and all the energy and love put into it.

FF related though.

If it makes you feel any better at all, I have noticed quite a few people on Twitch streaming XI in an effort to get through all of the numbered Final Fantasy titles in anticipation for XVI.

While it does seem to be a mixed bag of people ranging from "Oh wow this game is way better than I expected, why does no one talk about it?!" to "When will it end so I can get to XII already?!", it's at least nice to see people giving it an honest attempt.

But you know they could have made a lot of extra dough off of the people who are skipping XI because they think it's shut down, if all they did was mention it a few times during its 20th anniversary. A lot of people are doing the 1-15 run right now to make way for 16 and they definitely would have gotten some easy returns on that investment.

I did XI for over a decade. I loved it.

Today's XI is neither the game I signed up for nor the game I left.

How many actual people play XI today? How many accounts / player on the average? Are there any actual social interactions anymore?

XI doesn't bring in a lot of $. It does bring in some. It gets some support. Should they make it more visible? OH **** YES. If they did it might bring in a few more $. But if it did would it get more support?

Have any of you gone to the WE ARE VANA'DIEL 20th Anniversary Commemorative Website? I have.

That's very true. Though I've finally grown to appreciate modern XI. My biggest gripe with it now is the scale of everything. It's so fast-paced and there's so much information to sift through all the time. Characters move like they're having seizures. And it is a little bit sad that most of the content for levels 1 through 99 is irrelevant and mundane, but at least you can still have some fun with it.

I wouldn't even care. I just want less misinformation. I just want fewer people saying "Duhhh that game was cancelled 10 years ago, how are you playing it?"

I do. I've read some of the interviews, looked at a lot of the artwork, etc. I appreciate the homage and retrospective. It's just too bad they can't/won't tell us more about the future.

Todays XI is exactly like it was during 75 era, with less people and more fast paced overall. You still have "HNMs" you still have "NM camping" (Abyssea mostly on high pop servers), you still have merit parties (master levels and job points but they are botted now mostly.)

Still have instanced events with lock outs like we had Dynamis, Limbus, Salvage, Einherjar etc. All with various lockouts and point systems. Now we have Sortie, Dynamis, Vagary, Escha, Odyssey. And you STILL have to do those old events for points for mythics or various items and accessories that are still useful. Literally everything that was there in 75 days is here now at 99 cap, theres no way you can say its not the same game. The devs have literally went out of their way to replicate all those old systems even tho they are outdated. Literally adding requirement of INSANE exp to gain master levels past 20~30.... All that ***is still there yet you have people like you saying the game is 100% different, when its not. Still do magic burst and skillchains, still have manaburn parties for various events. Still do melee zergs. I really would like someone to explain to me the logic behind saying the game isnt the same, because the numbers are bigger now?

At the macro level it's identical. (merit parties, lock outs, endless grinds, nms, shitstain players, et all)

At the micro level, it's so much faster paced. So many more menus and things you should know. The scope is many times larger. You used to need to know what gods and kings did, now there's thousands of mobs and moves and gimmicks.

Yea I'd call that progress and something healthy to maintain the games life. I'm being a little facetious because I know hes probably one of those people with nostalgia goggles welded onto their faces but really, its way better now. The problem is the population and thats because a large swath of players like him quit and abandoned the game. Then the DEV stopped giving a ***and the parent company defunded the game. It's such an unfair situation but I'm glad its able to continue at the least.

When I started my LP character last year, I actually was invited to a social Linkshell when I was around the early mid level 30s unlocking all of the jobs.

They were pretty friendly, and it was about 16 or 17 members big. Varying from ilvl 119 folks running Ambuscade/other stuff constantly, to the leader who was some Galka PLD who refused to level past pre-Abyssea era (So level 80, since the 80 cap dropped ever so slightly before Abyssea did).

They talked a lot, and lots of the newer players asked questions, and there was some dude who was almost always on trying to get people to 99 ASAP and trying to get them into Ambuscade basically just screeching every night for someone to play with him.

And there was this one dude playing a Mithra that took Synergy to the minimum level to make a Fotia Gorget in a 4 man group, and I went to Jueno and helped him along with two other guys, make his Fotia Gorget in the Synergy furnace with him only at 20 Synergy lol, the rest of us at 0.

They had a Discord for their LS and invited me to it. It was pretty quiet but nice to have.

Unfortunately, after Endwalkers came out last December, I left to do that, and only popped in occasionally. Both in XI and in their Discord. At some point, the leader decided he was quitting XI, and he broke the shell, and on the Discord they decided to make a second shell that I don't know the name to, because that Discord also imploded.

For as much as people say they want XI to be more social these days, the only way you're getting it consistently is to go to a high pop server, unless you're already in a long time XI committed friend group. Even then, if you're unwilling to get to max ilvl right away on a job you probably don't want to play, then you can't really come to events. When people are on XI, they don't really seem interested in chatting even though it's slow enough and there's wait times for stuff like Odyssey.

Nah, it's not really. Like sure, it's comparable. It is the same game engine, and a ton of the same concepts still apply.

However, with Trusts, RoE, and iLvl, progression through today's XI is tumultuous at best (unless you already know what you're doing).

I think it says a lot about it that attaining level 99 is seen as a basic / intro RoE objective. There's so many EXP systems in XI, even just leveling is no longer straight forward.

For like half the jobs too, job specific merits are now seen as something you should change on a whim on a per NM basis to have the best advantage you can get.

Since REMA are easy to make/grandfathered at this point, anyone new to the game is also contending with that point of progression when they do hit 99, in addition to Merits, JP, and eventually EP. But since the old salts generally don't have every REMA, the old salts are still competing against any new blood that shows up. Whereas back in 75 days, competition was still fierce, but you didn't have to have one to be considered putting in maximum effort for your job.

In 75 era, skill gain rate was faster than leveling for almost everything. Now it's reversed, so much so that you hit 99 without even being closed to capped skills, and need to eat skill up food for a good long while / find the exploits to skill up faster/better / buy the Sparks skill up books.

75 era also didn't have iLvl disparity. In today's XI, once you are at 99, there was very very very few pieces of gear that are pre-ilvl that are good for you to incorporate into a set of any kind. In 75 era, some of the earliest NM drops still held water at the maximum level. Stuff like O. Kotes on Monk, Fuma Kyahan on Nin, Eurytos Bow on RNG( you know a level 55 bow better than almost all 75 options), and I could list more.

Probably because most know that they will just quit again, so why bother conversing? To be honest, its something happening in all MMOs. XIV has it the same too, people barely talk there either. You're more likely to encounter more talkative people given the population size, so that makes sense.




Yeah, as someone that has been playing almost nonstop since day1 NA, it really is the same. It just kept up with todays pace of gaming... Most of those adjustments were necessary given the population and average day gamers. To me it still feels the exact same, except most of the playerbase that was around became jaded and left from update to update. If we still had the same playerbase people would be having linkshells and weekly schedules like the old days of events, but as games age it loses players.


The switching merit things is not required for almost anything, I've never even done that as often.


Still dont, there are options right off the AH that are sometimes better than REMA... or Naegling that comes from ambuscade and beats out a lot of REMA. Its not required for almost anything except maybe some highest tier Odyssey. The same progression that was there, is still there. There are so many ways to gear up to become competent at end game without requiring REMA. I will say that job points are the baseline but that can be compared to back in the day getting to level 75. The new Level 75 is job mastered and it still takes less time to achieve than it did.


Uhhh this is a non issue... You can cap skills literally AFK with trusts and auto attacking something. There are items to use to skill up with, there are foods and campaigns are regularly in effect. It's way faster than it ever was before.


This isn't true at all, we still use accessories from 75 cap all the way thru abyssea to current end game... There are always older pieces that are still in use in obscure builds. Not that long ago I had to run a mule thru Limbus to get the stoneskin pants. There are random items from those BCNMs in the beastmen strongholds in the past that give stoneskin mufflers and some other obscure item that improved shield bash. Tons of examples like that... So I don't see what you mean. Also why does any of that matter? So its nothing like it was in 75 era because old 15+ yr gear is outdated? This is the exact mindset that gives people that title of nostalgia goggles imo. Progression is healthy for any MMO, or it stagnates.

I jam to the Cranberries from time to time. Dreams is one of my favorite songs ever and I'm not even a big fan of the genre.

I really don't like the Cranberries' live stuff, though. Then again, I pretty much don't like any band's live music. I think the one and only live recording that I like as much as the studio recording is Hotel California.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1589522591374807040

This seagull doesn't give a ***