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

May I ask the what it was and when?

My stalking abilities says she quit in 2010, because she got sick of clothcrafting.

Youtube added a new feature to auto-dub in other languages if the uploader picks it, it's better than nothing but still amusing when it uses the wrong words.

Invincible 3v3 fighting game, what a time to be alive.

I started at NA release. XI was a social game with forced grouping and a relatively slow pace. You had time to talk a bit between pulls.

I was in for 10+ years. The last notable change before I left was the introduction of iLevel gear. Combat moved way faster, the social side suffered. Friends dropped out or moved on and it was much harder to get to know people. Trusts made partying optional.

Mind you I was a career RDM with every vaguely useful subjob leveled. I was good enough to be the main RDM in a high end HMN LS despite my refusal to use voice chat. Getting parties was never a problem, I was decent at soloing, and when totally bored I could always level shield and archery skill. I was REALLY liking /sch which was fairly new at that point but I was disliking the combat and actively avoiding it.

At the end I was logging in to see if friends were on and playing with the mog garden. Not much else.

Not to be rude, but you quit XI for XIV and for no other reason.

XIV is worse for the things you mention than XI, the combat is faster, spammy, more annoying cause you have to move out of stuff, it's all solo leveling and there is no community or co-op group play cause of group matching. When a game has auto matching, they might as well be trusts cause nobody talks to anyone.

This is a common thing I hear from XIV players, who then go play something 10 times worse for all the things they complain about that drove them away.

I can't help but feel like Abyssea and (to an extent) trusts takes the blame for something that started 2 years prior when Level Sync was added, arguably much sooner with the way linkshells were dealing with players.

Prior to being able to sync levels, players "came up" together in groups to 75. You'd usually hang around the different exp zones and see the same people, it forged a sortof meta community and is where a lot of players met, often spending a lot of time together, but the grind was also long for new (e.g. players without a 75 or exp static) players. It was slow and almost forced you into the same bubble of people unless you were out for a while and got behind. All the friends I made in game at the time were made during that grind and most of the endgame content I did, I did with people I met during that portion of the game.

When level sync was introduced, all of a sudden this went away and players largely focused on syncing down to level (often targeting ~lvl 30-35 IIRC) and it sped up the process considerably. Your level didn't matter and it was easier to disappear into the crowd since it was so much larger. Players could get to 75 much easier without ever getting high level spells, skills, or learning abilities, which became a larger frustration when you finally got there. It also pushed players to endgame that might not have been ready and, combined with the absolutely inane way endgame shells operated then, easily led to burnout and frustration. For the earlier ages of the game, 75 was THE goal, so when they reached that point, they needed another carrot to follow but the way shells handled this (and this is one of SEs biggest failures IMO) content was so dreadfully awful that it led to burnout and frustration.

You'd have thought it would've been different and high level players would sync with their friends, but the reality in what I saw was that players would get their job to sync range and then the entire server would aim for a specific level range to target sync, never pushing to higher level camps until much later. Once they hit 75, they tried to catch up, but burned out on skillups, earning gear, and trying to get into an endgame LS. So it had nothing to do with the speed of combat, they just made the biggest objective profoundly easier without dangling enough reachable carrots once you reach there, and it really distilled the social aspects, all aggravating preexisting problems with the way endgame shells worked. Of the years I've played, it was the most significant change I remember in the community.

Abyssea made this problem worse because you could get exp from chests and in an alliance even faster without doing anything other than being key ***, but at least there was a social aspect with that. Some were also butthurt bigtime their gear was irrelevant now. I don't recall a huge exodus when trusts were added years later, it seemed more like a way for people to clear older content easier and they still exp'd in groups. IIRC they were really bad at first

Abyssea is my golden age, and what I think is a well balanced MMORPG should be: both challenging and forgiving to allow you to wrap up PUG teams to farm materials, call your best friends to challenge the hardest NMs there, farm empy slowly on your own, or ally with friends to farm mats for each of them.

Also, abyssites and atmas were so good content progression, enough rewarding to incentivate you to beat all NMs, and ending up considerably stronger than before.

And I also think the lore of Abyssea so great. I will surely use it as a base for my own game at some point.

Abyssea could be a game on its own, and it would be still a very well balanced game.

I feel like voidwatch caused more of an exodus than trusts and level sync. Suddenly needing thousands and thousands of heavy metal plates caused a lot of deactivations.

IMO, my perception of history is that we had the major exodus when they made obsolete the REMs at first.

Starting Ark Angels, I think the game started to feel more empty in the less popular servers.

Square wanted to kill XI when XIV came out, they sped everything up fast so everyone could cap out their goals, killed all endgame shells, made everyone superpowered and gave XI players a free / merged sub to go play XIV.

At a point they realized most were not going to go, so they had to undo all the stuff they did or lose them to other games.

As much as I enjoyed Abyssea, it was obviously designed to be the end of the game.

It's honestly amazing the game is still alive at all and an amazing achievement of Matsui that he managed to claw it back, even I quit and went to play something else after a while and never intended to come back. If not for Rhapsodies I probably never would.

I was in a big HNM shell, Abyssea made all our gear irrelevant overnight and you could do almost everything with 2-3 people if you had atma. All old content was instantly not worth doing, only Aby was worth doing.

Every HNM shell died in the 6 months after Aby was added, thse were some of the most hardcore forever players and they decimated the scene real quick.

There were about 10 maat cap players before Abysea, within 6 months they were countless to the point they were worthless cause of aby afk worm parties.

They broke every foundation of the game with Aby, to the point nobody would soon have anything to do and no endgame shells to keep them invested.

Too much time has passed for me to really remember. I know a lot of the HNMLS on Shiva were butthurt about abyssea obsoleting their claimbot gear, but that was a minority of the server. We were booming when abyssea was released, I remember there were 50 people online in the LS, and we had closed recruitment months prior. Did abyssea for a few years, then voidwatch came out and when we figured out it was completely RNG, we all quit.

14 wasn't even a factor, just ignore RAs nonsensical ramblings.

Can you leave your “das a comspiracy” garbo in the locked thread?

Whats he saying thats flawed? A couple things may be slightly altering what I remember, and some of that may be exaggerated truths (“abyssea ruined HNM loot overnight”, no it was over several months, but you have to be room temperature IQ to not grasp the nuance) but we also didnt play on the same server and those aspects may be YMMV.

Xi was built on a foundation of preserving all content, so every piece of endgame content was done every day right up until Abyssea (Yoshida designed that btw). 6 months before Abyssea was added, were were all still doing sky, sea, limbus, dynamis, hnm etc

Abyssea made all endgame events not worth doing anymore cause all the gear was now irrelevant, it was just Abyssea (and later VW).

So once people burned though Abyssea (took about 18-24 months) and got all their af3 sets and a few emps it was over, even adding VW didn't matter cause there was no other content other than that and it was boring to just do that and nothing else.

It was death by a thousand cuts.

First domino then another then another. More left as each domino fell. and as each left they took people with them. No specific thing more to blame than the last.

Except resources being pulled from 11 for 14. Patient zero.
(It was inevitable anyway, even blaming that is silly)

Constant nerfs.
Tanaka drop rates.
Stagnation.
Ban waves.
RMT / Bots (carbuncle staged a *** occupy jueno)
Level sync made all parties happen in one zone.
"A" meta emerging. Going from 5 dd + a whm to BRDONRY RDMONRY zergonry
Horizontal to vertical progression switch.

Many backstabs but no knives bigger than the rest

Visions released June 2010
Scars released Sep 2010. This is where the OP atmas came out and the LSs started to fracture. It became more efficient to have small groups as Atmas made players rather OP, duoing bosses was the expectation.
Heroes released Dec 2010.

Voidwatch released May 2011.

How were you doing abyssea for “years” before voidwatch? By your own admission, youre a liar that spews nothing other than nonsensical ramblings and should just be ignored.

No, I played them both after the introduction of XIV 1.x. I dropped XI before the XIV interregnum but I wasn't doing much in XIV at that point either. I got into beta testing other MMOs then.

ToAU was mine. It was the only time I enjoyed main healing as RDM/WHM.

IIRC server mergers started before then.

Wasn't that the time NASA ended service? Or was that earlier?