Dev Tracker - Discussion

FFXI after SE implements zero tolerance and bans all the botters, takoers, windowers, RMT, etc etc


alternative one: I coulda just put all 1,100 people on Bahamut or Odin, but people from that server would get mad at me for picking their server to get annexed.

Alternative two: article from a well known gaming website with FFXI's eulogy.

it's safe to roll the dice on new versions of old rewards

New Brutal Earring > Double Attack +10% / Store TP +2

I think its safe to assume the nms will be not be popped with zone points

Amazing update, Can't wait to do World bosses at Limbus with other players, plus besieged #.# is becoming more fun eqch itteration.

You forget they brought back EP farming because people kept whining about the old EXP system/parties of the Golden Age FFXI.

I've never been one of those screaming to have that system back, but I sorta (partly) enjoyed it back then so I was happy they thought about it.
They've just been way too hardcore about it.

To be fair even the Capacity Points system was incredibly grindy at first. I remember Byrth doing a calculation that showed it would've taken years to even cap job points on a SINGLE job.
But then they adjusted it, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, until we reached the point where it was very easy, fast (perhaps too fast?) and didn't feel like a grind anymore.
One would've expected some small adjustments to come to the EP system too and yet it's been years and other than more camps and locus mobs, nothing happened.

Icing on the cake is the Death penalty. Making so death matters is good, in theory, but we didn't have such a harsh penalty not even in the original FFXI (it got changed like in late 2004 or early 2005 with a "cap". Dying generated a % loss in Exp, but that number was never higher than a certain fixed value, a cap. There's no "cap" in EP and dying at ML50 is ~80k EP loss, which is huge).

But then the FFXI silver knights defend the system saying "but but, you don't NEED ML to do endgame!"
And to a certain extent I can't say they're wrong, you don't.
And getting the first 20 levels is fast, gettin to 30 is not too bad either.
I wonder if they would've said the same back during the original Job Points System, or during the golden age "but but you don't need level 75 to play endgame!"
And to be fair you didn't, at least for the first few years. Altough honestly, while extremely grindy, I'm not sure levelling in that era was THIS harsh.

18+25 floors, most of which can hold 2-4 parties easily. Should be enough even for Asura

Exactly why they should let people make Idris without the bs gatekeeping

Or just auto warp people after x hours in the zone. At one point they were definitely doing this to people botting EP. I've witnessed it first hand.

Oh great, now they can only bot for 18 hours at once before they need to reset, problem solved! They need to hire geniuses like you.


I've never heard a single person ever tell me this happened to them, online, from my friends, in discord, or anywhere. I guess it could've happened, but (in case the sarcasm wasn't obvious) I think it's a really stupid idea that wouldn't solve anything.


This brilliant take completely ignores the disparity in the quality of the floors. There's a huge difference between a floor with Turtles, Wyverns, Pixies, Ghrahs, or Slimes and one with Goblins.

I've accidentally left my bot running for 36 hours when I made a typo on my timed warp script. I've seen people bot cards for shield desynth for days on end without leaving area.

I'm sure more people can corroborate that they've ran bots for days on end without issue than people can corroborate that they've been auto-warped by some timer.

I'm pretty sure what you witnessed was you going out somewhere for a few hours with bots running and coming home dying and home pointed.

I've been warped, but it was over a decade ago and I don't see any reason to believe it was an autowarp. That char got banned not long after, too. More likely a GM has the power to manually warp people if they choose to do so, and it gets followed up with an investigation.

Don't see any reason they'd use a system like that to deter bots. The good ones will just code an immediate run back, and if they're going to the effort of identifying them they could always do more permanent actions.

I agree. Perhaps my initial post was worded poorly; I meant that there aren't enough camps in the game and using something highly scalable like limbus would be great. I just also get the argument that double dipping isn't fair, so it'd be nice if they made a dedicated zone full of camps.

No, I am literally telling you I have seen it in person while watching my screen. It was happening every few days for a while (a while ago now). I would come back and find myself in town, check logs and it would just say "Area: Norg". I walked past my PC one day with the monitor on and literally witnessed it happen right in front of me - warped, zoned. I did not die.



No warning or ban thankfully.

Edit: also it was both chars warped... so yeah, definitely no dying or misinterpretation or anything. I know what I saw and around that time it happened every few days.

I wasn't saying this was an autowarp, but that they could add it as a feature if they wanted to.

I really don't know how it happened, there wasn't anything in log like [GM]Dave casts warp, but I zoned right in front of my eyes. I was fighting (can see the VS above) and then just zoned. No use of ring or anything.

They just need higher level locus mobs in the game for higher EP gain.

There are already good locus camps - bibiki, KRT, locus imps. Just need more of them and higher level.

Not really a fan of bringing in the old 75 XP areas and just changing mob names to locus. Yeah, I get the "hey you asked for old-school XP what's more old school than this!" irony, but you then have the problem you had at 75 with only a few decent camps and everyone else left fighting for scraps.

The apex mobs in promy were a good idea, the EP gain is too slow to make them worth fighting though. Back to needing higher level locus.

That said, a 140/150 content level limbus would have higher EP gain than the current locus mobs, which top out at 139.

Apex Cog(s) are 143-147, but theyre too difficult/annoying for most people (aka: cant bot in the middle of them because theyre magic aggro) so people just default to syncing down to easier targets that are in the 133-137 range.

There are plenty of ways to deter botting and anyone acting like it's some great unsolvable paradox wrapped in a riddle is just exposing their EP botting side hustle. Stop playing dumb.

It doesn't matter if we all know they could easily stop botting, they need to be willing to give up the revenue from all the people who are paying a sub just to gradually increase their ML while AFK.

Of course it's solvable. The manual labor argument isn't even that meaningful. Go to the common camps and poke 20 parties a day, ban the ones who don't respond. Shouldn't take more than an hour. Repeat for a month and you're good until the fear dies down. 30 billable hours for an intern that probably had nothing to do anyway, less cost than the subs of the people being banned. zzzzz.

These two made me think about what are imho the "real" issue of this system, and I made a list. Some are important, others are really meh.

1. The levelling curve becomes way too steep than it should (45-50 takes more than 0-45, for instance)
   

2. EP per kill is low even on the best targets
   

3. EP per kill degrades the higher your ML gets
   

4. There is no CAP to the 2% EP penalty when you die, meaning it's ~80k lost at ML50
   

5. The amount of EP you get from limited/gated high level content is really low
   

6. There are no daily/weekly/monthly incentives to go and do EP
   

7. It's hard to find an available EP camp, the "good" ones are botted 24/7
   

8. There are no means to boost EP other than Cor roll and Master chains
   

9. Master chains are much harder to mantain compared to all other chains in-game
   

I don't think all of these aspects need to be solved. The main problem here is that many of these act in synergy with each other, making the final scenario more problematic than it would be otherwise.
But if you remove even a couple of them, then all of a sudden the remaining ones are not so scary.

Like 9. This is made harder by 7 and 8. To solve this you could make the master chain work like all others, or you could add additional ways too boost EP/kill. And suddenly what used to be one of the only ways to boost EP/kill, isn't as "necessary" as it used to be, so even if you lose chains it's not a big deal anymore.

Or take 3.
This is pretty annoying, and makes 1 even worse, maybe worse than intended.
Either make the curve a bit softer, or make the degradation a bit slower. Don't need both, even just one of these would make things much better.

For 5... technically it's not low at all. It's just that the EP you get is connected to a formula that uses the highest ML in your pt and the level of the target you kill. Being that mobs in endgame content are tipically high level, the EP you get is not bad at all.
When people claim this point is an issue, I think they mean something else.
I think they mean more than EP from bosses or from completing a certain gated content, should have a bonus, in addition to what you would normally get. This would make the EP you get from that content slightly higher. It wouldn't make them efficient EP farm since it's still gated content, but it would feel better for everyone I suppose.

And the idea of Weekly or daily or monthly RoEs that if you do something you get a big bunch of EP just once and you can repeat it next day/week/month is a very nice idea, I wonder why they don't do things like that more often honestly.

Concerning point 7, I guess that's a problem only on Asura and maybe on Bahamut and Odin. Pretty confident all other servers have no problems at all finding good camps completely free.

I'm suspecting certain players of doing something.
I've had the same happen, but just warped in the zone while I'm there not to HP.

But curiously only when there is a lot of competition for mobs and with like 3 pairs of 6-boxers in the same camp area.

Moved camp, no warping.
Tried old camp with 6-boxers, and I was warped again.

Moved camp, have not been warped since.

You don't have to give up any sub fees, just make the math stop adding up for the service being sold in populated player areas. Even a week timout that never accumulates into a permaban accomplishes that. I don't actually want to get rid of botting in its current form and use cases. It's not hindering anyone.

EP really should fall under the same bonuses as XP and CP already do.

Meaning Vana'clock should work on EP, there should be rings for EP bonuses like there are for CP bonuses, CP bonuses in areas like Adoulin should work for EP as well, the passive CP bonus from Kupofried should work on EP as well and so forth.

The only reason there are no EP bonuses in the game other than corsair roll which is probably just a bug that was never fixed is to artificially make the ML grind longer.

And you know all the existing bonuses will magically start working on EP too - in about 10 years time.

Well...
I dunno man.
I mean I've never been one of those moral police kind of FFXI that wanted to nuclearize anybody who uses botting, or RMT or whatever else.
I'm more a live and let live kind of guy.
So in that sense, I couldn't care less if there's a lot of bots and they do stuff etc.

At the same time though, it's hard to say it's not "hindering" anyone.
When there's 20 chat lines every 2 seconds and 19 of them are from bots/rmts, it kinds of hinders you.
When there was constant inflation due to the lack of a weekly cap on Accolades, which was slowly but steadily rising ALL prices up, well it was kind of hindering everyone else.
When you can't find a bloody camp to make EP parties because all of the good ones (if not just all of them period) are kept busy by bots, it kind of hinders you.

I mean, as if EP farming wasn't bad already in itself, even if you're masochistic enough that you want to make proper parties with other people, it kinda kills your enthusiasm or your will to do it when you know you're gonna have a hard time finding a free camp.


So, again, I'm all for botting, botters, RMTs, hacks, I don't care for all that stuff and I'll never be the one feeling morally superior pointing his finger down to bot peasants.
At the same time though we have to acknowlege it sort of influences all of us, even when we don't immediately realize it.

I used to think that too, but then I remember there was a patch early on where they "fixed" COR roll which wasn't properly working on EP, so unless I'm mistaken, I'd dare to say the fact that COR roll works on that is very intentional and not a bug.

I understand their will to release stuff that's super grindy/harder/annoying for a certain amount of time, but they should make it slowly easier/faster as it gets old.
They've always done that, with pretty much everything.
Well... not Odyssey or Sortie I guess, not yet.

Either way what I wanted to say is that the EP system is old enough that I'm honestly quite surprised we haven't seen not even a small bone thrown at us since then.


Edit:
I lied, they gave us Princess Peach and Vana'bout EP bonuses. I guess... that's something after all.

I'm on a smaller server but bots barely even show up im my notice. So its probably more an asuran issue than a game wide issue. I'm fairly sure orher small servers will be mostly fine.

I'm on a smaller server but bots barely even show up im my notice. So its probably more an asuran issue than a game wide issue. I'm fairly sure orher small servers will be mostly fine.

KRT is usually full with parties of people pretending not to bot.

The other camps are empty.

Someone more knowledgeable can correct me here, but there is this legendary tale of there being, at one point, at least one well known, openly available, open source bot, that had a backdoor, and the person who was distributing this backdoored version was, allegedly, able to HP you on a whim if, say, he wanted your camp.

#mythsandlegends

Lmao that definitely sounds like the kind of urban legend XI players are likely to make up.

As a returner, I really, really hope they remove this "3-man" entry nonsense. It makes zero sense.

If I have cleared dreamlands, let me enter solo in my Ambu+2 gear. Heck, let me enter with no gear on. So what if I can't kill anything, that is besides the point.

Do you know what it does do? It means I can unlock Reforged Armour on particular jobs. I can then just entry, try and die, so what. Then i can progress along the natural gear routes, without having to beg/ask someone either ride on their runs (which means waiting when convenient for them - IF they have room); or ask two others to throw away their entry time.

Repeat for multiple jobs.

Stupid gatekeeping is stupid, especially for new/returners, and especially on content that has been out for years now.