Fujito Ruined The Game!

It will take a year to R30 a single full set of armor so that's like.. Three jobs at ML50!

Fun design.

The whole odyssey moogle mastery system that was supposed to make the content more approachable for solo play is a parody.
It takes so long to upgrade that even REMA grind pales in comparison.
Then there are the solo dong blocks sprinkled in like some NMs (Kuk, Taniwha, Gloios and what ever C throws at you) that can't be soloed or only on very specific niche jobs. Don't get me started on the coffers and gold chests or the 3 jobs system for gaol.

You'll be long done with all unity upgrades you're after before getting any meaningful MM progress and even after this long grind it only opens up a tiny part of gaol for solo clears.

Odyssey wasn't good for solo play, it had interesting basic approaches but completely failed at execution.

The amount of time/effort is a bit insane atm.
It was the same for Odyssey RP (and initially it was capped at R15...) but then they released the Amplifiers, which worked even more in favour of players (and I doubt SE planned for that) with the "5% RP runs".
That made what would've been an insanely intense amount of grind, into something that's still intense but nowhere close to what it could've been.
This is just a pure, lucky coincidence. SE clearly didn't plan for that, but players found it, and SE was either too slow to react to the point they decided to leave it be, also because it was de facto "fixing" the issue without requiring any further work on their side.


Limbus is in a similar situation? Better than the pre-amplifier Odyssey I would say, but still very intense.
Will anything change in the future? I sure hope they're planning for something.
It's good having things to do in FFXI and not getting bored afk because you have "nothing to do". But too much is too much, between the "forced" daily logins, the amount of efforts to coordinate V25 kills in Odyssey, the amount of time spent to farm segments (unless you're one of the lucky ones like me who farmed enough already), the amount of time spent in daily >1hr in the walking simulator that is Sortie, which for an average group of 8bosses run it's tonna take you ~10 months to complete a weapon.

I mean... it's hard to balance things out, but it's easy going from one extreme "nothing to do" to the other "omg this is stressing me out, too many things to do at the same time I feel overwhelmed".

If anything, it's about time they should do some catch up campaigns for Odyssey, maybe soon for Sortie too.
Content has been out long enough to justify something of the sorts without making the "day one" pro players too angry about the noobs catching up to them, eventually.

The whole odyssey moogle mastery system, that was supposed to make the content more approachable for solo play, is a parody.
It takes so long to upgrade that even REMA grind pales in comparison.
Then there are the solo dong blocks sprinkled in like some NMs (Kuk, Taniwha, Gloios and what ever C throws at you) that can't be soloed or only on very specific niche jobs. Don't get me started on the coffers and gold chests or the 3 jobs system for gaol.

You'll be long done with all unity upgrades you're after before getting any meaningful MM progress and even after this long grind it only opens up a tiny part of gaol for solo clears.

Odyssey wasn't good for solo play, it had interesting basic approaches but completely failed at execution.

Balancing content so that only bleeding edge players can realistically complete it, while everyone else has no realistically attainable finish line, is terrible for player retention.

The argument that people will finish and unsub misses the point. That group is a minority, and designing around them actively harms motivation and engagement for the wider community and makes people who wait and see before resubbing less likely to even resub.

That's always been my feeling as well BUT are we sure?
Is it a bias of ours?
Does SE even have data they can use to discriminate between these different groups of people? Can they tell people who are "legitimately" playing together vs those who are multiboxing 6 accounts?
And if they can, do they even care to do it?

I'm not so sure things are as simple as they may seem at first glance.

I duoed to MM45 with a mule (GEO) except for a few Aurums in C. The NMs you named should be possible solo with trusts, but it will potentially be the only thing you do that run.

Odyssey was actually good content IMO, right up until they made the terrible RP point system for the armor sets. A is for solo, B/C for lowman, and Gaol for a full party. The problem was how long they had to stretch the Gaol content because they presumably didn't have funding to make the next content for us, which led to the horrible point system. On top of it, their weird point buildup design means you spend a ton of time just AFK when farming points, which makes it terribly boring.

Limbus obviously wasn't balanced so 'only bleeding edge players can complete it'. It's time consuming but easy and inclusive. Everyone gets the same rewards if they use their spins.

Odyssey was built from the ground up to be scalable so anyone could work through it at the level they could handle and progress(RP) still saves if you ever move onto higher levels. If you actually did V15s for RP before V20 was released, you cleared V20s a lot faster. You do need to group, but it's a MMO.. that's to be expected. You don't need an amazing group to clear V15s or V20s with gear that's now widely available like emp+2/3 and limbus armor.

"But Thorny, it would take sooooo long to do RP at v15 and then do it again at v25!" ... That's what all the 'cutting edge' players did, though. We capped our gear at each release so we'd be ready for the next one. It's even easier than that now, because you can just ride-along for V25 RP.

Same goes for Sortie. You don't need amazing gear to clear a downstairs boss with a few people, metals, and 1hrs. You can still get a stage 4 prime doing that, it'll just take ~6x longer than a group doing 9/9s.

It doesn't seem to me that SE is designing content for bleeding edge players. Everything has a slower and easier option. Seems more like people who are still playing a game that's never respected your time are upset the game doesn't respect their time. Add a side dose of being upset that having a coordinated group and better gear gets you more progress than soloing with trusts.

I said it already I'll say it again.
We'll never know for sure but I seriously doubt they specifically planned the tri-runs, the amplifiers and the 5% thing for that end.
It's just an "exploit" players found, and SE decided to let it survive.
I'm very very skeptic that was their plan to begin with.

Sorry but, what content is this referring to?

Odyssey: anyone who can fog a mirror can farm segments. People in ambu gear can clear v0, get ody gear, and clear v15 (at least)

Sortie: anyone can farm sortie. With a group of human beings above room temperature IQ, you can easily clear the majority of the bosses without intense gear or skill requirements.

Limbus: grindy, but easily soloable by anyone.

The only thing "locked" behind being an "elite" is faster achievement of your goals, or maybe v25 bosses in gaol. But that's not really locking much, is it? You still have like 95% of the content and gear available to you. I guess you could argue HM Aminon is "locked", but that's piss easy if you dedicate a whole run to it.

We're looking at two totally different games, brother.

I get your point and I agree to a certain extent, but I would say it's not true that SE never "respected their time".
Granted that's extremely arbitrary and subjective, it's quite clear how the game was more demanding back until the lv75 era (different times, different standards in the gaming world back then, many other different variables), it got much easier and "respectful" of your time during the Abyssea era, with a lot of complaints from the "pro" players of the era if you recall.
Then it started to get progressively a bit more hardcore with Voidwatch and Legion (but still miles away from the 75 era if you ask me) only to become way more accessible for during the adoulin era (not at launch) for many years after.

Up to the point in recent years where the game started being more "demanding" of your time and effort, but for different reasons.
They had to maximize the amount of time players were busy, while minimizing their time developing or adjusting stuff.
Which has always been true to a certain extent, but never as much as it has been over the last few years.

But overall yeah, I think you put the focus on the right stuff. It's mostly people being biased for the reason you emphasized.

When Sheol was released (March 2020):
Gaol/Segments (Jan 2021) didnt exist
neither did Sheol B (Jul 2020) and C (Sep 2020)

It was strictly to farm Lustreless Scales.


It had an even slower rollout than Limbus, and the game wasnt even in maintenance mode yet. Bunch of revisionist theory haters up in here.

Segments was indeed added before Gaol in Nov 2020
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/57421-November-10-2020-%28JST%29-Version-Update

My bad, was going through edit history on wiki instead of update patch notes. You got me. Segments were so important that no one bothered to make reference to them until mid January 2021 when Gaol was added.

I guess everything in my previous post is invalid now because of that.

Not everything, this is still very valid. Ody was nothing more than a roaming exp party with lustreless mat drops for 6 months and 2 additional months with added segments.

As a bonus, the end goal touch reward wasn't added until May 2021!

"Players can now earn additional mog segments by examining the Otherworldly Vortex in Sheol A, B, or C based on the number of mog segments they have earned during that foray."

Which is why I as asking why aren't the people against limbus as a concept, also against odysseys initial release. If they have forgotten or just skipped that first almost year of odyssey.

I finished off my original post as such: