Dev Tracker - Discussion

Upgrading old gear doesn't fill wardrobes enticing purchase

They keep wanting to bridge that gap between Ambuscade/Unity/Omen and content like Odyssey/Sortie/Dynamis-D. Which is great, because unless you have friends carrying you through the harder content, it's a stretch to imagine returnees progressing solo or in a small group without extra help.

I just pray they don't do something stupid like... you know, add a new HTB with drops that would help if drop rates weren't so ridiculous.

Hell, I'll even concede the following accommodation for adjustment:

Atonement 1 can be climbed vertically, right?
If you can clear Atone1 at V20 (which means all the V0, V5, V10, V15 too), you get access to Atone2 at V15. Clear Atone2 at V15, you get Atone3 at V15. Clear Atone3 at V15, you get Bumba V15.

If you can clear Atone1 at V20, then it stands to reason you can handle Atone2 V15. There you go, all caught up for 60k segs (presuming going 1/1 each fight)

Sorry for the confusion, I was specifically talking about v5. Since augments are unlocked at v1, I just . If you want to attribute r15 to v5, then I guess you have to attribute the gear to v5 as well.

Didn't quite follow the v15 farming quote that you included. Was that to explain how to cap your r15 gear while doing v15 clears?

I mean, fair enough. I guess my question is do you think those players are trying to progress in Odyssey right now and if anything can be done to help them?

It's a slog just getting to ambu +2 if you're truly solo starting from scratch. Speaking from experience.

Again I wonder why bother with all this progression, if you can just get V0 Odyssey armor and use that.

Won't a progression that allows a new player to more easily unlock V0 Odyssey T3 be better?

Not anymore. You get ambu+2 in ONE VD2, 3 VD2 gets you the whole set. Valaineral can actually tank most VD2 no problem. not all...

You have to wait 45 days to get ody R0
(They could, easily just get rid of that, it doesn't do what they want it to anyway)

This is the only logical reason behind releasing an entirely new set of gear for said players, when they could just do ambu +3. Infrastructure right there. But they would rather add a whole bunch of NMs, reposition mobs all over zones and add gear for middle-of-the-pack players.

Don't ever tell me SE doesn't have resources to do things, they clearly do, but choose to waste dev time reinventing the wheel.

(they literally threw Empyrean +1 into a blender of the same recycled stats to create +2/+3 and it took them YEARS to get it out)

This clown thinks a brand new player is doing Ambu VD lol


The only new players doing Ambu VD are mules or people replacing a banned character from their multibox. Guess what these players should also have access to: a Gaol uppies.

Yes, I'm calling them uppies

The worlds longest bridge is the Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge


Sorry, was the worlds longest bridge, that title is now held by the Square-Enix Amb-Uni-t'Omen Gaoltie Diverging bridge

They must have analytics on this, but concerned they're mis-reading the numbers. Are there really THAT many new (organic, absolutely brand new non-FFXI-lifer/mmo) players coming into the game to support an update like this? I'm all for helping newer players get up to speed for sure, but I feel like they're seeing a ton of mules and alts getting created, and some dev is going to his boss and saying "the last 6 months, new player creation has spiked by 65%, we have to DO SOMETHING for these NEW PLAYERS!!!"

And it's just some guy creating his 6th alt because he needs to solo his Prime weapon faster.

Help me out servers that are NOT locked down: are yall seeing new players flooding into the game more than usual? Just wondering what's causing this sudden "interest" in gear for "new" players.

The numbers don't lie. They're not transferring and rag fenrir and shiva go up every single day.

Fenrir is on the verge of closure. In less than a month. And no less than one more month for rag.

It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense but it's happening.

Figure they're just late to responding to the influx of players from the crossover event/id assume people remaking/moving chars to open servers, causing their numbers to spike, while the closed servers slowly dip down.

Feel like by the time they have their plans for new players fully realized the well would have already dried up and those potential new players that did stay have already outgrown whatever stuff was put in place and itll only benefit that few that trickle in over time.

Correct. Theyre slow to react and miss the boat entirely.

The fact that Phoenix is closed and it has less concurrent people on than I saw on Asura when I played for years makes no sense. Maybe the numbers were getting really high, or it could've been a knee jerk reaction due to the surge of people, but they need to be ready to undo it now or soon and not just leave it like this.

I also don't understand how open world NMs are supposed to help new people. Are these really just NMs on a pop timer or lottery spawn? Are the newbies supposed to camp out for these to spawn and compete to get some sort of intermedial upgrade toward their next gear? It seems like the worst solution if they did want to add a step for them, unless these NMs are ??? pops of some kind.

They mentioned the Unity NM system. Granted they did that to compare the quality level of the drops so that doesn't necessarily imply NMs will be popped in a similar way.

I had to spam Vol1 as a returnee. I was happy to work up to D and VD on vol1.

But I suppose you will recommend buying a VD2 run from an rmt. If those exist where the player is.

I'd like to see a progression path that does not involve spamming vol1 for months, getting carried, or buying from rmt.

You got this backwards. Vol 1 is Intense, Vol 2 is "Normal". They buffed the rewards, so (along with the seals you get for first entry / weekly first vol 2) you get 600*3 = 1800 hallmarks per V2VD clear.

Doesn't mean you don't have to work up to it!

But 5400 hallmarks gets you a full set of armor + 15 reforge items (that's one +2), and then you can purchase another 54 reforge items to be 600 short of a full set of +2 (unless I'm missing something) - so it's actually pretty close to what eiryl said, yeah.

Server load isn't just number of people. Their single-threaded approach has very real limits for each zone server and they've been trying to do world-scale events (strange happenings, besieged, limbus bosses). Throw in players using traffic-generating addons (gearswap, packetflow, anything that touches widescan) and heavily multiboxing. They've recently started using AI in their process, that's almost certainly not improving things either.

You can see that one of their back end services is constantly delayed very easily by using party invites. Create a party on a small server, disband from it, and then try to invite yourself. Instant. Do the same thing on any of the locked servers and you get a 10-25 second period where the server believes you're still in a party. I'm not claiming delay forming parties is a problem, but that coordinating service is likely responsible for many different cross-zone functions, if it's degrading that means potential for data loss or gamewide instability.

Every time they close a server, people pile into it (RMT making reservations for future, players who weren't around during prior closure and don't want to miss it, people who have been debating getting off asura for a while). They know that the action of closing will add a chunk of volume, so they need to close before it's a problem rather than after.

Ultimately, they are better off with many closed servers that have healthy populations than one mega-server. Their strategy is working. Unlocking Phoenix just means the growth Shiva/Fenrir/Ragnarok are getting gets diverted there; there's no reason to do it. Phoenix population is still considerably higher than it was 4 months ago and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. It's over 30% above the next highest. It seems to me like you might regret leaving Asura and want Phoenix to grow to the same size; that's obviously never been the plan.

For reference, current online numbers:

Asura 1942
Bahamut 1262
Odin 1532
Phoenix 1326

Shiva 978
Fenrir 959
Ragnarok 876

Oh my bad, glad they buffed it. Thanks!

They buffed it immensely. You do 1 VD2 and get 1800 points, you get the full set of 5/5 NQ and you get 23 materials to enhance them.

Do a second one and you get 23 more materials. The third one and you're done and have a kaja weapon too.
(4/5 ayanmo + jhakri body, or 3 hiza + 2 mummu etc)

It's a dramatic upgrade over what it used to be.

If you can score a VD1 from an RMT for 5m (you probably don't have 5 if you started yesterday) or a friend carry, it's one and done.

Did they forget Daybreak existed? The Mog Bonanza (yet again) has the Malignance Sword/Pole and individual pieces of Malignance armor as rank 2 prizes... and no Daybreak in sight. (Malignance Earring is also rank 3)

(lol)

What about an Ambuscade "Challenge Mode", where you start at VE, but after every round you have the choice of continuing to the next difficulty or backing out and claiming your rewards (Nyzul-ish?). Obviously would only require the 1 primer for the whole sweep if you could do it, but rewards would be greater for the risk than just doing single difficulty runs.

Even if your solo/group is only capable of doing up to Normal, you could do a VE/E/N run and get "triple" the rewards for the same KI. You'd still be spamming, but at least it would be slightly more efficient and a third of the zoning.

Bismarck 696

It'd be great, except that'd tie up the zone for an hour a piece.

Maybe if it was exclusive to full parties. But it's pointless. It only takes an hour solo to get a full 5/5+2. They don't need anything else.

It does have considerably heavier traffic than dyna/sheol/sortie.

Man, if only the technology existed to, idk, somehow increase your compute on demand...

I like the idea, but it sounds like you'd be inside the instance for a while, which means that other people are outside of the instance for a while.

Asura/Odin/Phoenix problems. The rest of the servers probably wouldn't notice. IDK what the max instance for Ambu is, but Bismarck's Mhaura is lifeless comparatively to Asura.

Also, hypothetically, you'd tie up the zone longer, but less times, so it evens out?

This reminds me of the Gold Saucer battle arena in FFVII . I would ejoy something like this, but they'd need to put it in The Colosseum (an arena maybe 80% of players never heard of), under new battle content. Progressive battles that scale with difficulty, with a "double or nothing" challenge mode. Spectators can watch from the outside, players can do either solo in group challenges vs waves of mobs, and you can choose to progress further or back out and claim what you got. Leaderboards for scores. Live trash talk in the arena.

The system of "keep going or exit" already exists in Skirmish with Fenestral Keys.

Yeah clint, I hijacked tf out of your idea xD

Bismarck didn't need increased merit cost to reduce Shinryu congestion, but SE implements the same changes to all servers. Would probably be fine if it spit you out with a temp KI that acted as your entry to the next level(disappears if you change jobs ect.). At least that way you're cycling through turns in times of congestion or you can just go right back in if you're on low pop?