Dev Tracker - Discussion

Nah the main reason is changing anything costs money.

You have to go through a whole process with that sorta stuff. You have to test its working, QA it, etc.

Turning it off still requires checking "is it working right", as well as handling stuff like "how do we handle the people who have a pending migration right when we do the roll out"

It doesnt sound like a lot, but you're looking at multiple workers involved and spending at least an entire day of time on confirming everything.

Between QAing, meetings, the changes, the rollout... it's a lot of time and effort that could've gone to some other task.

For basically every company the status quo is pretty often the easiest/cheapest option, you have to get pretty decent amount of returns before a company goes "okay its worth actually changing this"

Because usually spending time/effort changing X is gonna be compared against time/effort changing Y

So even if changing X is decent returns, if Y has even better returns, it'll get prioritized, and thats how X can sit on the back burner for years as a never ending supply of Ys come along that continue to be better to invest time/effort into.

That's a long explanation to basically tell me things I already know, while agreeing with my point.

Of course, changing anything costs money, but SE was clearly making something from the server transfers for years, otherwise they wouldn't have encouraged it by allowing Asura to grow as big it has. If they were losing money, they would have discouraged it a long time ago.

Now it seems they may not be making enough, or even losing money with server transfers, as it costs them to provide the service and they need X amount of transfers to make it worth their time. They won't come out and say that, and will instead talk about congestion and equalizing populations on other servers as it's good PR for them to at least seem transparent.

I don't think they're losing money with server transfers, they have legitimate play quality concerns. You can go back years and see people complaining about various instabilities on Asura. There've been recent waves of disconnections, and missing data from Vanabout indicates they are having problems outside instances now.

They decided that if the current trend continues much longer, the server might have serious problems. They have no ability to scale single thread performance higher and don't have money to rewrite the server code. It's not (directly) a financial decision, if current player uptick continues and the proportion of them going to Asura remains, it will end up nonfunctional. They had to act.

Agreed. It was unsustainable. Back in the day when there were few instanced content and the game was smaller, it was doable to have many thousands of players per server. But in 2025, FFXI is a giant bowl of spaghetti code mixing with thousands of players stirring it, and that's only going to get worse.

I think one big thing they could do to help lower congestion in critical areas, is provide better incentive for forming parties instead of soloing ***with trusts.

There's just not enough of an incentive atm for me to party up with 5 other people and exp. Its faster but my trusts won't just randomly dip out on me after an hour.

So you end up with dozens of people in the zone, each soloing with 5 trusts, which adds so much extra congestion.

I think ambuscade gallantry, for example, is a good approach to encouraging people to party up, it's just inherently better to do ambu as a 6/6 party. You clear it faster, can run V1VD easier, and you get more gallantry.

That sort of approach for content would be good imo.

For example, if HTMBs actually provided further incentivization for partying it 6/6, you'd have less people just soloing it and clogging up the queue for them. Looking at you Cloud of Darkness fight.

Each piece is small and not majorly impactful, but it all adds up together to signal the overall trend of how people even play FFXI nowadays. Everyone just mercs everything, and everything is monetized with gil.

People run things via PUGing it less and less because your Risk vs Reward factor is so heavily skewed. If you can only run <content> once every 20 hours, then you have so much risked on the line if you group of with 5 randos.

At least trusts are consistent, or mercing it is reliable.

SE has to work towards both lowering the Risk and raising the Reward for grouping up with a party for everything.

Well they already said they're literally doing the opposite of that. Doubling down on solo play and improving trusts.

So that's how that goes.

Idk I am still kinda salty about alliance content
Some of my best experiences were omen being made alliance.

Without including older things like sky or even sky farming.

Also the joys of getting good enough to do the conent low man was an aspiration and quite the feeling when you achieved it.


With the way sortie is coded it's probably impossible to make it alliance content.

I feel like these decisions to make 6 man content while needed were exceptionally poor without a balance.

Edit
I forgot to say limbus alliance penalty is ***

we all saw the survey results.

JP playerbase especially, but also NA, highly prefer solo play now. we all have great memories of big alliance LS events, but unfortunately those days are not coming back.

I sincerely believe we got there from those players being left out

Which is in itself part of the issue, whether we like it or not.

It's like we want to gentrify the game - less people who are wealthier* and more similar among themselves. But this is inherently exclusionary and ultimately makes the game intrinsecally less accessible. So they take measures to un-gentrify it, which are of course unpopular among the "elite"* that was taking root.

Story of the world, really.

*for lack of a better term

Por que?

You couldn't have different parties killing different bosses at the same time, no, but the worst case scenario there is a few players might occasionally get locked out of boss rooms/rewards if their group is disorganized. There aren't really any technical obstacles stopping them from letting more than 6 players enter.

Sortie getting the Limbus rework treatment into an open zone with weekly reward caps rather than daily instance lockouts would be amazing, but that's probably a pipe dream.

it's part of our expectations from all those years ago, when you had to have help for literally everything. now, you don't. but the only way to distinguish yourself as better is what tier ody you can clear or how many gall per sortie run you can get. and there is still very little incentive to go out of your way to help people, that hasn't changed at all.

Now I am no expert but if you recall all the strange news about dcs in this area people turning invisible etc

The gossip previously especially about the super warp addon
Not only would you have issues with people getting locked out
But it's apparently the same room for all bosses

Give EP+30% to lowest population 4 servers, +20% to next 4, +10% to next 4.

How exactly does locking Asura down affect RMTs? they'll just infect the next most populated server. How does this change anything?

Mostly time. The move won't be instant, it'll take months to shake out. That's a lot of lost money.

Every eventual ban can't be matched with a new character, eventually they'll have to migrate and can't jump gil to asura, there's no point having a trillion gil on cerberus, if you can't get it to the buyers on asura.

A year from now asura will liquidate into bahamut and then you can start selling again, but that's a long time to keep going on 1/10th the volume.

Also if no new characters, then all the master level sellers will run out of clients eventually.

Guess I'm not understanding how it changes much if they can go to Bahamut and do the same thing. It's only a 4k character difference between the servers

It doesn't in the long term. It does in the short term.

Supply has to drop (it can't be brought in or made)
Demand has to build up enough demand to warrant leaving forever.
A new supply has to build up to meet the demand.

These things take months not minutes.

Why would gossip about addon problems equate to technical issues on SE's side? Yes, the boss battlefield is the same "room", but the entrances are about as far apart as they can possibly be.

I'm sure some groups would have cat herding issues, but that's true in any alliance content, not a technical thing. Ever lost a drop in Omen because someone hit the exit while it was still in the pool?

Asura online has dropped to 3300 and there are no RMT shouts. What is going on?

I just realized how big of a deal this is for RMT. If they are banned at Asura, they cant create new char there. If they want to sell gils to Asura they cant, because can't transfer there and buyer can't transfer from Asura to somewhere else and move back to it. oh ***lol

Well I turned off *** addon and there are shouts to sell master levels but all the ones that usually get through it seem gone atm.

I think RMT will still be around after the ban
Don't get why SE gave them the heads up
Now they will double down on more accounts before the ban
Maybe they will jump ship to another server instead

I was implying that given the weird way it's coded and not to mention herding cats that I wonder if they have already tried and tested adding more people and gave up

Also not too weird to recycle the boss room I guess

It will make accounts sold on Asura worth more I bet.

It could go either way.

Why would you want to buy an asuran account. You won't be able to get any gil once it's there.

It depends what all you cattle do. Do you make a new mega server or do you stay on a prison server.

It's too hard to guess right now.

They outright stated they'd monitor the situation and do it to other servers too if needed. Sounds like they really want equal populations amongst the servers, which tbh I don't know why the players wouldn't want that too

I enjoy my low pop server, thanks.

I counter your "I cant believe more players dont want to be on high-pop servers" with "I cant believe you want to play on a server where events have a 30++ minute queue for entry".

Immediate:
gil and accounts on all servers go up in price considerably, because there's opportunity moving it to asura

After tuesday:
price differentiation between asura and other servers begins, probably at least a 25% premium for asura

mid term (2-4 months):
if SE follows up locking down asura with bans, which would be a smart move on their part, price differentiation continues to increase

asura bleeds out players because anyone who gets a mule banned will either quit or transfer to somewhere they can remake it [nobody downsizes]

price differentiation makes buying mercs outside asura more appealing, so a new merc server emerges (maybe bahamut, maybe that ends up closed and a third ends up the merc server)

longer term (6-9 months):
another server becomes the new asura, asura reopens but never catches up population wise

optional, 12-30 months:
something brings players back again, new asura gets overpopulated, repeat

Imagine they shuffled use all around
You go to login and find yourself on the Odin server

The pick up group players would be fine
The rest would probably rage quit
Anything but my circle jerk!