Dev Tracker - Discussion

I thought Pheonix had an explosion of players and growth?

And Sure, I'll concede starting from scratch isnt easy... but it's not supposed to be easy. And the people that are established and have connections did so over long periods of time. I'm simply saying put your best foot forward and work with people if you want to build something

Yeah, it got locked down, and the population is dropping fast. Most of the players are very new players who are taking the game very, very slowly. People who get a 99 job then go to level another job and do not end up with a geared job. They are going through the stories very slowly over weeks/months and are unlikely to ever even reach the point of doing end game content in a consistent group. I'm in multiple linkshells to help people when I can because I'm a geared person who is knowledgeable about the game, but these people are not ready to jump into Sortie, Odyssey, etc. People end up quitting before they get anywhere in end game because they had their fill, and move on. I helped a newbie white mage as their teacher for gear, how to play, etc, and he quit the game before he got into actual end game content healing. So many people just ask to be carried through content, and get upset if you tell them they need to purchase their spells, cap their skills, and fix up their gear.

When you do find people that are 99 and have been playing for a bit, you find people who do not swap gear and are very against doing it, people who play their own way and ignore any other suggestions, people who are very very slow and afk constantly so they are not suited to doing end game content, and so on, and so on.

There are end game people and groups, and I have been doing some Sortie runs (4 boss, 6 boss, even 8 boss), but only as a sub. I still have not touched Odyssey bosses outside of a single v0 clear on Bumba/Mboze because there are no groups or people to do it with. I am actively searching and attempting to get into consistent groups, but it is quite difficult with no tools in-game to assist in finding people and all communication happens privately between people. Like I said, I've joined TEN different private discord communities around the game, but am still pushing to break through into some kind of consistent setup to running Odyssey/Sortie. Limbus is a crapshoot, nobody wants to do that.

What you have expressed is what my impression of Phoenix was. I still don’t understand why they locked the servers. The claim was ‘congestion’, but even on Bahamut I haven’t really seen it. The bigger issue was RMT spam, which is down a lot now. Like when ambuscade launched we used to have 45 min waits — I literally have never seen this on Bahamut despite SE’s claims of high congestion. Maybe it’s sortie they’re referring to? Not sure.

It's not queues and lines it's server pings

You got 8000 people injecting packets nonstop. DDoSing the server from within.

Even a couple vanabouts ago when half the objectives were ambu, the wait was like what 5-10 minutes? It was a while but sure no 45 minutes.

Now the economy is super funky being locked down.

It did... but a lot has dropped off I feel. At the height of the surge, that was right around when XIV's final tier of the XI-crossover alliance raid had come out. Quite a lot of folk started pouring in since Asura/Bahamut/Odin were locked. Assist chat was swarming with a lot of newbies and returning players, returnee/social LSs were all the rage again. But a lot of that surge has tapered off.

Yeah we are overall still higher than we were in the past, but quite a lot of those fresh newcomers and returnees didnt seem to stick around. I think a combination of the hype of the XIV-XI alliance raid started wearing off, and of course naturally I think a fair amount hit 99 and realized there was quite a lot more than they could chew off, or hit that point where they felt they didnt know how to progress further.

I moreso noticed a lot of people that transferred to Phoenix shortly before it closed to get in on the activity/surge that have stuck around though. A lot more multiboxxers/6boxxers running around. More people with merc/carry outlooks and less pleasant attitudes. I've also noticed it has rubbed off onto some of the genuine newcomers/returnees in some social circles I've been around, which bums me out but it is what it is I suppose.

@Crevox
I agree it's hard to form core groups and statics in current day; a lot of people playing are old fogeys like me who play with their main circle they met years ago, and schedules+availabilities are hard to align of course. But I encourage folks to keep trying to initiate and form groups for stuff despite how low the odds are or how many times it fizzles out. I do notice there are a lot of people who seem willing to or want to do stuff but dont want to lead and organize (or are scared to). It's understandable; sucks to be the ringleader and trying to juggle times, managing everyones roles, helping people learn stuff if needed... or just because you dont feel you can lead because you might not be an "expert" at something.

Just gotta keep trying to til you can find folks who are in similar boats, are willing to learn, willing to fail (this one is really important! Lot of grown adults out there that I see still throwing tantrums and hissyfits over bad runs which can happen to anyone...). I agree it would be nicer if they implemented some sort of content seeking/grouping functionality to make it easier for people in game to connect and find people with similar situations & schedules instead of the current "keep LS hopping and joining tons of discords".

And if you /yell occasionally to try and advertise building a static for x times/days etc. and anyone gives you crap, just blacklist them. Those people aren't worth your time and 99% chance unbearable to play with anyway.

I'm one of the people that transferred to Phoenix... I logged in for the anniversary just to check things out and ended up playing a bit more. I wanted a fresh start and was a bit exhausted of the things on Asura, and saw the Phoenix server was closing... heard about all the new players and wanted to help out and do things together so I made the jump.

The assist channel is completely silent now... there's still some newer players in my linkshells but much less. I'm still helping players daily with the knowledge and power I have but many stopped logging in. I realize it's a bit counterintuitive to leave Asura to jump to a server with new players and complain about having a hard time getting into end-game content groups, but I still want to do those things. Asura is the peak of the things I don't like about this game (bots, extreme multiboxers, blatant cheating, extreme elitism, etc) so I wanted to move away from it. That still exists here on Phoenix, but it has been lessened to a degree (unfortunately, not as much as I was hoping).


For some reason this has always been the case with FF11 compared to other games... even when my friends played they acted similarly. People don't want to try things because they are very afraid to fail, and they take it poorly when they do. The penalty for death in this game isn't what it used to be and is less than other games, so I'm not entirely sure where it still stems from.

This has been my experience with a good amount of people since coming back :/
My previous ls, 2019-2022, before I took a break was great. There was basically always something going on and they were trying different pt setups and still cleared things fine.
But since coming back and having to get a new ls, I've seen on way too many occasions that people just won't do anything unless the dude who bots 6 m50s is on, even for stuff that doesn't need that kind of setup. That dude has been on break for the last two weeks and will be until next week and we've had one other multiboxer run some events but when both of them aren't on, which is common, the ls just ceases to exist.

It's honestly kind of pushing me away from XI again, because I really don't want to pay a sub to wait around for one or two dudes to decide to do things so the rest of us can, since most of the ls seems too afraid to do things without them.
What happened to the playerbase in the last few years?

Leveling/story content and endgame are essentially two different games in retail XI (maybe they were that way in 75 era, too, I didn't play back then). Someone checking in because the XI crossover in XIV interested them or someone that wants to just cross off all the story content (except TVR) on their Final Fantasy Bucket List has a month or three before they run out of content with no promise of future stuff on the horizon. At that point you're playing the world's slowest, most stratified ARPG gear collection game which is only going to appeal to people that the battle system really speaks to (without 10-20 years investment in the account and communities like long-timers have), and you have no way of knowing that until you actually hit endgame and try a bit. Certainly the first time I actually had to figure out what my buttons even did on RUN and PLD was in a LS's Omen runs (since Ambuscade aggro works weird). At that point I'd rather just play Runescape if I wanted the long-form classic slow progression, at least Runescape is the company's flagship product with committed development and support.

Doesn't help that some of the coolest bits of the battle system, the pet jobs, aren't super viable in modern endgame so everyone dissuades new people from pursuing that, or that most new people end up capped with THF, DNC, and maybe WAR at best and don't want to work the support mines. I've healed a lot in XI, you fight the UI way more than any modern MMO expects you to.

Which is all to say the dropoff on Phoenix more than makes sense and is exactly what I expected, XI's endgame is a very specific taste mostly geared to long-time veterans that wants a lot of your time (organized, scheduled time with a set group of people) if you want to succeed in it and there are a lot of other games out there.

Leveling in XI has slowly degenerated to the quick and dirty mess that it is, since about 2009 when Level Sync was first introduced.

Prior to Level Sync, you had to engage with and know Vana'diel, so that you could find EXP camps, in case all of the common ones were taken (heck to even just know the common ones anyway).

Often EXP camps featured you fighting VT to IT monsters in quick succession, with a party making it to EXP Chain 5 being considered, "Good." and Chain 6 being, "Really good." And anything beyond that... you were endgame meriting or had a PL.

Fighting an IT mob in EXP used to be quite taxing. Especially if it was an IT++ before debuffs. This essentially made every EXP mob into a mini-boss of sorts, and often, EXP mobs were just as deadly as mission fight mobs. (In RoTZ and the base game, often mission mobs were just regular mobs with NM names anyway). At least until the Ark Angels and Zilartian Princes at the end of the mission line.

Chains of Promathia would be the first mission storyline to introduce low level, specialized unique boss monsters. Starting with the Empty NMs in the Promies and progressing towards Omega and Ultima 6-4 airship fight and beyond. Extra strategies would need to be employed to beat these bosses, but the fundamentals from fighting IT mobs in EXP stayed right there with you, for most of them.

But a common problem in MMOs rears its ugly head here. That's the average player wanting to be given grace and to be carried in some form. A lot of players in XI got through EXP in the old days by engaging, and AFKing until their TP capped out at 300% (or longer). So a lot of players couldn't handle CoP mission bosses, because they didn't really know how to even handle regular monsters. They got their EXP for showing up, and so what if someone said they sucked? As long as they weren't causing a wipe and getting grief from all 5 people, it was cool to let it ride.

It's kind of a side of the playerbase that people forget about, as folks like that mostly didn't stick around long term. Though they definitely piped up about missions being too difficult at the time.

See the pattern repeating?

But yeah TL;DR - Leveling in old, original XI was much closer in difficulty and feel to the difficulty of story missions, than leveling in new, real XI. In new XI you don't have to get ML50 just to beat the story, but in old XI you had to get 75 and even then you might get smoked by the story (with Level cap of OG CoP fights being a way to let newbies come do new expansion stuff without that massive leveling gate completely in their way).

You're misremembering a few things Vyre-kun.

It's true there were hard lvl 75 requirements for things like nation rank 10, yet the fights themselves were not difficult.

There was only one exception at the time, the original alliance Divine Might fight.

The story fight was 6-person, the alliance version had the extra earring reward, which was BiS at the time and everyone wanted. The difficulty there was you had to fight all 6 Ark Angels all at once, and 18 people to manage. Once you had a good setup and everyone knew their role, it was not that hard.

Now CoP - initially yes that was sold as "leveling is hard and we want people to experience new jobs, so CoP starts with a lvl30 cap and increases at each arc".

Problem was, there were a megaton of newbs at the Lvl30 tier of story missions that had no effing clue what they were doing, got constantly lost, aggroed, wiped everyone, or afk-ed in the middle of a 2hour slog up the promys and ended wasting everyone's time.

And because you had no choice but to group up with other lvl30s, you could not just take your 75 and blast through it. And at the time you had to carry actual lvl30 gear prior to gear adjusting to your level.

As a result a lot of vets got stuck at the earlier parts, particularly aquaducts, and never got to the later lvl60 capped fights. CoP 6-4 in particular was a sticking point and one of the hardest fights to clear - you needed both a particular setup and vets that knew the jobs inside and out. Ranged setup, sam/rng, well geared brd, whm, multiple tanks etc.

Myself I had multiple jobs that could fit into that setup, endgame brd as well as BiS Sam/rng and rng, but was stuck at the 40-cap story. As time went on no one would tackle those parts either - aquaducts needed an alliance to get through the damn tunnels but the fight at the end was 6-person.

So a lot of people got stuck, then quit. Was one of them. When the inevitable nerfs and later lvl cap increase came it was a bit too late for most people.

Now current XI is split into two. Story and "endgame". Endgame is the actual game. You get to 99, gear up, then tackle what progressions you can do.

Ambu -> Omen -> Ody lower tiers -> Sortie or vice versa.

Doing any non-story content means you need to understand the battle system beyond the surface level "oh there's a menu and you select abilities". Gear swapping, hate mechanics, debuffs/buffs, knowing multiple job's role etc.

A lot of people get stuck on the knowledge part, and understanding why they should do or not do certain things, as well as the battle system itself.

They may have someone hold their hand and make sets for them, but that is still not enough. The luas don't help, sure, but even vanilla it's not easy - harder even, debatable.

Even if they have all the gear and all the sets, they might not have any idea how to play. And there's no helping that, you either bother to learn, keep focus enough to do your task, or you don't.

A lot of XI players that I see lack the required focus to be decent at the higher level content, Sortie, Odyssey. It's not a gear problem, nor a sets or lua problem. It's a them problem.

There's no fixing that.

What people are saying wrt statics is how a lot of multiboxers get started. Having trouble finding groups, can't do content on your own, perennial sub for random groups.

Yeah, well, add a box or two and suddenly you can do a lot more content while not having a static. That inevitably leads to more, and suddenly you have 6 and don't need to group anymore.

Sad, but is a result of a lot of things. Lack of people, lack of people with both motivation and ability to do the content you want to do, you name it.

I'm not optimistic something like a better group finder would fix a lot of these. Content is hard enough that it needs a leader and the group is not going to magically know what it's doing without being told.

The intersection of people that can play the game well, know what they are doing and want to lead others can probably fit on two hands across all the servers.

Absolutely.
As a matter of fact, I completed CoP as a level 70 MNK in a group of other people with similar skills/levels to mine (we had 2 people who had level 75 on 2 jobs, rest of us were 70 or slightly above with a single job).

Yes, we found some fights very difficult (The 4 pots at the end of CoP, the Promathia fight itself. The after-cop fight with Eald'narche and Kam'lanaut was easy).
I completed DM at level 72 on MNK but that was with a full alliance, there were other noobs like me but there were also very skilled lv75 players, so you could say I got "carried" there.

The concept itself of "difficult" was different then because of other important aspects:

1) Lack of gear (there weren't a lot of options available)
2) Lack of skill (Me and many othere were completely unskilled and we were hardly swapping a couple of pieces here and there for macros/WS, we were using "1 set to rule them all" for most things, and we had extremely limited options, uncapped haste and whatnot)
3) Lack of game knowledge - in 2024 the knowledge of the game and its mechanics was primitive, and that little knowledge wasn't, yet, widespread among players
4) Lack of tools - I think all of us, or most of us at least, were playing completely vanilla back then, with lotsa "cool", annoying and RP-like Macros with /p messages to announce our moves lol
5) Game was absolutely relentless back then - in terms of QoL the game was very unforgiving compared to now, because of a plethora of core element differences
6) Lack of external knowledge resources - this played in synergy with point 3, it was hard to find places to share and learn that little knowledge that was already there

Add all of these things together and of course it felt so much difficult, at least to me I can swear lotsa of those fights felt very, very difficult and in hindsight I'm kinda surprised a group of complete noobs, completely outside from the inner circles of "good players" who were doing or were about to do endgame, managed to complete those story fights before many other "pro" players who were doing endgame.

I mean, really, how the *** did we even manage lol? And yet...

Games moved away from harsh punishments and the punishments for XI are higher than in most other games even if they got tamed on one end (exp loss) they are still harsh elsewhere.
1hour is now on cooldown which adds more wasted time to go and reset or KI being lost so no retry for that day. Exemplar loss is still harsh at higher ML and maybe someone used pricey food and had hoxne active so that gil is gone, too...

The game is also slow, runs themselves already take long, no automated party finder adds gather time during which you're forced to be in town, then you need to discuss strategy and what everyone is supposed to do which adds even more time at least for shout parties. This active organizing of parties adds a lot more stress to the members and in particular the leader than it would do in duty finder games so it's save to assume at least the leader is always kind of on edge.

There is also the limited player pool from which you can draw for party building. If you do shout parties and fail you get a bad reputation quickly and people stop joining or you don't get invited anymore.

I think getting mad and calling each other out is on one side the expression of helplessness to change the outcome of the situation and on the other a strategy, although maybe a subconscious one, to emphasis the blame isn't on them in hopes they don't get excluded next time.

Sounds like a good reason why people should be required to do the V0 climb up instead of just starting right at V20.

Huh, no day 0 objectives on the next Vana'bout.

It's funny they put finally on the day zero feedback.

As in, we finally listened

The idea was to remove V5 and V10 because they're the same thing. V15 seems fair since you can raise your gear to R15 with the unlock, but they still need to make clears more rewarding.

Except they're not the same thing. I'm only looking at the important V levels

V0: Only fetters after trigger moves
V5: gradual increase in stats (this is actually from V1 to V25), no debuff aura.
V10: Introduction of debuff aura at ~50%
V15: Debuff aura at ~75%
V20: Introduction of first add and regen*
V25: Introduction of Second add and more powerful regen*
*add dependent

There may be other mechanics at play between V0 and V15 as well such as TP frequency, availability/frequency of certain moves, specific NM quirks.

New Vanabout start time this month! Also, another mog bonanza!

SP? Sure, there are slight differences but I mean by difficulty level. You don't easily beat a V5 then struggle with V10 before getting comfortable with the changes. Mostly the same difficulty.

How it started:
Where we are:


So theyre not the same difficulty.

Same meaning similar, not identical. The fact that we don't actually know the exact differences means it's really not enough to make a meaningful difference.

Says who? Who made you the judge and jury for what is and is not considered "a meaningful difference"?

Your experience does not equate to the experience of others. Because if anyone gets to be judge and jury, then everyone whos already done the V0-V25 climb can be judge and jury based on their experience and tell the stragglers to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Y'all didn't just 17 BLM + 1 PLD this? I think that's how we did it on Seraph back in the dizzle.

Nobody has to stop between V5 and V10 to alter their strategy or adjust their group composition.

Not sure what all the judge and jury bs is about. I never suggested that nobody else could have an opinion.

Lol, newb. (joking)

Nah, our setup was Pld + healer, Pld + healer holding two, thf + brd kiting one mob, dds zerg two, then kill the two the plds holding, then the kited mob last.

I forget what was the kited mob, bst I think. Blm was first to die, then the other mage.

Our first Dynamis Lord kill was blm army though and two tanks which became one tank after the other got one shotted.

No one said voluntary stop

Their gear could be so *** or their individual skillsets could be so *** the stat jump on the NM and earlier aura is the difference between win and loss.


Again
Because YOU had no problems with it doesnt mean everyone else did.
Again
There are plenty of people with unauged/capped at R15 armor, I see it all the time.

“I have no problems with 9 NM sortie, therefor its the standard lolz”

>> me seeing plenty of AECG shouts because the perceived standard isnt the actual standard.

Why not let people covert copper vouchers to segs? (also galli and limbus units (maybe beads and other currencies could be added?), i'd say ISA too but that's probably completely broken) The opportunity costs already exist for the voucher and for times where a group wants to go but one person is low they can blow a few vouchers on segs. And even sub par players would be more efficient doing the event rather than farming vouchers although its a nice bonus for anyone.

I'd also give players with the win a free amplifier if someone in the party does not have the clear (allow it to stack with an amplifier even)

Maybe allow the RP to convert back into gil and/or vouchers.

At the very least it should incentivize people doing RP to help with clears, and help people feel a bit less locked out by segs.

Is this an argument to maintain the v5/v10 clear requirement? I don't see the benefit. Yes v5 might be easier than v10, which is easier than v15, but isn't the fight essentially the same? Please don't say using a 2hour ability and putting an aura is a meaningful difference.

Does clearing a v5 successfully teach you more about the fight mechanics than a v15 attempt, successful or not? You're definitely not making your character stronger for your troubles since v1 through v14 all unlock the same R15 augment.