So Why Did You Quit? (and Still Read FFXIAH?)

so much about this post is gold. I'm on a train travelling in Europe on my weekend, for work. Going to meet some nasty shareholders to push them out. I'm bored so I'm going to use this space to dump and remind myself of why its ethically right to kick these a-holes to the curb.

Business is in its purest form is altruistic and empathetic. An exchange of value.
There are two types; those that are busy meeting their customers/clients needs, wants and expectations. And those that are busy ripping them off, taking them for a ride.
Profit should be based and equally proportional to the level at which the customers/client's expectations are met, and to an equal extent, correlate to how many of them (the customer base) there are.
On a micro level, SE's history, and indeed XI's, could be told as a tale of war between the purest and the crooks.
Tanaka was the purest. He had a vision and followed through. People like him light up with positive radiance when they articulate their ambitions. Their internal value's are based on being recognized for giving everyone something that made them happy. they are altruists. And it is them who produce works of art that won't be forgotten. Elon Musk is also one of these.
On the other hand, you have the "me", "what's in it for me" crowd promising, coercing, bribing, and manipulating their way to the top with their cronies. All chasing an illusion. One that that promises them they will be happy with once they get it. it's just wealth or "i have more than you". I would say Bezos or at least amazon fits into this catagory.

The good people cannot avoid being capitalists any longer. Because stepping away from the game leaves a big void to be filled by the idiots. who burn wealth, destroy communities and cause them to decay.
The root cause to the detoriation of society is due to good, altruistic, ethical, principled people stepping away from money because there a stigma behind it.
End of rant. sorry Radial I read what I wanted to in your post because of the circumstance I'm in at the moment lol

Sortie made me quit in 2022. Not doing another daily/weekly on top of ody. Also can't come back if I wanted too as I have a daughter now.

Read ffxiah again in the last 2 weeks because of prime weapons to see what they do/if it was a new ws etc. Saw the new gear calc that finally released AFTER I left was a big areyouserious.jpg moment and made me wonder what else was new

The amusing part of some of the posts is that the feeling is that by adding content they made people quit, so the answer all along was to not add anything new it seems?

You don't have to do sortie at all, and you are the master of how much or little you do it even.

This is the problem with MMO players at the top level, if you let them do it 100 times a day they will do it 100 times a day and then get mad cause you let them to that.

To be clear I think there is a problem with this content but to quit because it is it ridiculous.

I don't think this is a totally fair representation; consider that players saw new content as an inevitability with the announcements made regarding TVR. Many were playing in anticipation of a new and exciting piece of content, only to find out that new content was weaker than odyssey, boring, and incredibly grindy. It's not like everyone had assumed we would never get anything again, then sortie came out of left field.

This is definitely a problem with MMO players, but it doesn't really apply here with the 6 month requirement for prime weapons. If you do it every other day, you're looking at a year. Weekly, and it's 3 and a half years. Players cannot be expected to pay a sub to poke at a goal for that long unless they have substantial other things remaining to be completed in the game.

they might, just haven't announced it yet. But realistically, it looks like this was their final content push.
but then again, on reconsidering, maybe not.
either way, having nothing to do progression-wise but sortie kind blows.
They could have made the upgrade process a lot more interesting by creating several challenging paths, either interdependently like mythics or across several zones/instances like empyreans.
Focusing everything into one instance, seems like a newby mistake.

I still don't know why they dont make use of 99% of the open world zones by re-introducing timed HNMs or events. Vanadiel is beautiful and huge. so much waste.

Yeah a lot more understandable when put this way.

I get why they would want to make it last a long while but the implementation leads a lot to be desired, hopefully they make some changes to it in the coming months.

Pretty ignorant post. No, no one has to do it, but some people are all in or not in at all. Nothing left to do but the dailies and it gets draining doing it for so long. People can quit for anything they want

Shinryu is grindy. Odyssey is grindy. Sortie is grindy. You would almost think it was on purpose that Matsui awkwardly stressed how long this content was intended to last. They aren't going to develop any more content so it stands to reason they would want their final implementations to sustain. Why are people confused?

All 3 of those are grindy for sure, but there is still a big difference between them.

Shinryu is dull by now, but you completely choose its pace. Do you wanna farm merits and go nuts on several fights a night, go for it! Save merits casually and do a few a week, also possible.

Odyssey is sorta similar with saving KI, and the event is rather engaging at high tiers and only 30-45min. Generally a lot less.

Sortie is practically mandatory hour per day if you want to progress and just not very fun. You spend a large chunk of it running around, and it never really changes between runs.
I'll admit it was cool that first month or so, but now that everyone has their set static/route/jobs each run is near identical. It's just not engaging content to do for 6+ months. It does not surprise me in the least a lot of players see that and are turned off.

And before someone brings up Dyna D, Omen, or other dull events, sure, they are boring as well by now but at least have alternative rewards and don't require an hour a day. Also, being alliance events they are way more casual. You can swap jobs, change strats, skip a run here and there without screwing your group over, or just watch a movie as you go without a huge effect on everyone's progress.

This is a core part of how I put a lens around their movements.

Its not all bad (a lot of it isnt perfect), almost any type of play in ffxi has benefits and we could just sit back and enjoy the roses.

There is no confusion. Sortie is boring and an hour, you also have to do it every day or lose progress. That's the problem. This other content is much shorter, even if it does get somewhat repetitive, I also find it a lot more engaging personally. People don't mind a grind if it's somewhat enjoyable, in a tolerable amount of time, or can be broken up with lower consequences. Sortie is none of those things.

This keeps getting repeated. I understand some people like Sortie and that's fine, but the people who don't like it keep saying the issue is these factors combined. The people who are quitting because of Sortie have already done everything else and don't feel they want to spend that much time in Sortie just to...do more Sortie with the weapons they obtain.

All that said, phase 3 Prime weapons could change up the party compositions a fair bit if people are willing to embrace it. It opens up new SC opportunities with potentially powerful weaponskills, which optimize runs and breathe some life into it via new job compositions. I think that may be the goal, but I'm not sure how these folks are going to want to do 20+ days of Sortie on the off chance the community is willing to shake it up rather than stick with one of a handful known strats. The idea of using some of these in there with different jobs seems interesting, but will it still be interesting in 3 years the way Odyssey has been? I'm not certain.

Not making progress isn't the same thing as losing progress. Finishing a weapon doesn't unlock any further content so it's not holding you back from anything if you can't/don't run everyday. You would still get the weapon and continue doing the other things you normally would have been doing.


My point was that players weren't encouraged to push to the point of having nothing else to do. Of course you're bored if you're finished.

I (temporarly?) quit FFXI 2 weeks ago because of

- Other people's Butthurt
- My own Butthurt:
-- They gave us endless Sortie
-- Odyssey is almost as bad as Sortie
-- Bots everywhere
-- Too many people multiboxing everything.

More reasons:
- How long am I supposed to multibox this myself? I already spent about 13.000€ on just the game, not counting costs on electricity.
- Everything becomes impossible as soon as I just run 1 account.
- Could use a break after 3,5 years of not miss a single day.
- Same stuff over and over just got old. (Not as fast as FF14 tho, that gets old after 1 week)

I expect myself to be back tho, because in 20 years I've always been back.

You will be missed!

Although, enjoy the ugly word out there without Manthras and Galkas.

I quit bc i got stuck fixing / rebuilding a car i purchased.

I am almost finished with said car (hopefully) and will return to playing then.

I just now started reading again as prime weapons became avail.

Personally wanna see a yoichi that doesnt suck even if sam isnt on it.

IDK why I upped and quit, think the game just ran its course, I had my fun but the fun dwindled away once I achieved most of my goals. Think I still visit forums like this cause I like to see the new items they add and keeping up with story content. Despite the game not being worth the $/Month, FFXI has some of my favorite itemization in any game, its the standard I hold other MMOs too and why I usually don't play other MMOs for more than a week or so.

Nothings a bigger turn off in an MMO for me than no build crafting and poor itemization, boring *** White/Green/blue/purp tier ILv gear systems where the greatest build Diversity you'll ever see is making Skill A to 3% more damage or Skill B have 3% less cooldown. FFXI (And Diablo 2 before it) spoiled my ***.

I still dip my toes in every so often during free-events to finish up story missions and such, but once the game stopped giving me content that I liked I stopped liking the game.

Btw: The amount of bi-monthly content we get for FFXI is less than some F2P MMORPGs right now.

Which is why its a little funny when SE says "Wow, look at what we've been doing, it's so awesome, we are SE, we gave you another grind, enjoy because that's what our highly paid team of developers and executives decided that's what's best for you and the game!"... and its like outrage and bread crumbs from our viewpoint.

I recently came back after 9 years of not playing. I stopped around 2014? Maybe 2013?

I've been playing for about 3 months, as a guilty pleasure mostly. The shine wore off about three or four weeks after returning. It's not that the game is a grind, or that there's bots everywhere, or that people are multiboxing an entire party, or that there are dailies that made me put it down.

It's that I was using the game to kill time. And that's all it does. It kills time. Any amount of time I can spend improving a digital avatar that offers me no reward except killing time is time wasted. There is nothing I got from FFXI after I stopped playing it 9 years ago, essentially. It was just something I did to kill time, the best you could say I got out of it was some friends for a while, parasocial relationships where all but one faded quickly within a year.

Getting a REMA? It does what? You spend a number of hours to get a digital item. Then you spend more hours to get a digital item that helps you in the digital world. As a time killer? Works mostly OK. Manipulate digital avatar to empower digital avatar. Previously to returning, I spent my free time more productively - I got something out of the time I spent, whether it was extra money from extra hours worked, learning from reading, health benefits from exercise, etc. I took a break from that stuff to kill some time, but within a month I knew I wouldn't play for long, by the second month I was almost turned off.

The only aspect of MMOs that are somewhat worthwhile boil down to some logical functioning (figuring out how things work, min/maxing) and (para)social interactions. I still like FF, and it's fun to check in and see what's up, analyze how the game has evolved, but that's all that I need out of it. When I look at things going on in the world, people referring to gamers as "useless eaters", it's hard not to see most of gaming and online gaming in particular as not only a time killer but an overall detriment. I didn't bother with the latest Zelda either, even though as far as games go it's clearly wonderfully made. My gaming time is limited almost exclusively to the occasional game that has a story with real meat and depth.

One thing that is so very cool about ffxi speaking of logical functioning, is the gearswap/ashita component of this game where we can program our characters.

Great post, I completely understand your points ffxi vs healthy society/life.

I really wanted to spend 500+ or whatever to set up a zelda experience, but it seemed bland from the reviews.

You're misusing the term "parasocial relationship." That refers to one-sided relationships where one party doesn't know the other exists, e.g. the relationship between a streamer and the viewer.

Online friendships, while potentially fleeting and rarely as substantive as real life ones, are absolutely real social relationships.

But... yes, to your overall point. Welcome to our late stage capitalistic hellscape, where everyone is distracted by screen time and entertainment of various kinds, overworked and overstressed, riddled with anxiety and depression, all combining to form an extreme malaise about contributing to much that matters.

YoshiP is in charge of the division and he cut the budget for 11 so he can spend more on 16.

inb4 tinfoil hat, no he did exactly that. half the dev team was moved to go work on "something else" out of nowhere and "they can come back in the future"

20 years ago we really had few ways to communicate online with others, so when we did in a video game or whatever it meant a lot more. Today we talk to people constantly online and so it means nothing, it's near impossible to make friends in video games these days.

Maybe a misuse of parasocial. Not exactly. You might talk to relations from a game about a daily life, the occasional personal relationship - but it's not the same thing as your friend, who you engage with in actual reality. Parasocial doesn't quite perfectly fit, but it's pretty close. There might be need for a new term for social relations that take place purely in digital form, and digital relations sounds ew.

I don't think it's a late stage capitalistic hellscape however. It's much more like entry into digital and socialist style hellscape. I'm old enough that I know people a few years older than me that worked essentially shitjobs, i.e: selling Walkman's, CD players and mp3 players at Radioshack for a decade who owned their own homes before they were 30. When normies got to the Internet, that's when ***started getting bad. It's even less the above than it is moving from modernity to post-modernity.

There's definitely something to this.

I don't *** around with MMOs anymore, but those I know that do? It seems like a totally disconnected experience where people come and go almost every month, if not weekly, and everything is interchangeable, you just talk to whoever is around in the moment.

The major LS I was a part of back in the day had a guy who made it NFL tryouts, a bunch of college kids, a cop, a chick who used to strip, a guy who ran his own business, a wallstreet guy etc. It was genuinely a mishmash of different aspects of real life. Now? You find like 20 people who all desperately want to be Youtubers and complain about work. Weird ***happened.

Man, I mostly just roll my eyes at your ***, because no one can possibly take this stuff seriously, but let me help you out here.

The move of developers to other places within SE was widely discussed here when it happened, but in case you overslept that day, here's how that works: stagnation in the tech industry is a death sentence. If you work on the same thing for too long, people stop hiring you for anything new or interesting. Which means, the XI developers were facing a very serious choice: stay at SE and eventually be completely un-hirable elsewhere (and potentially not even useful within SE), or leave while their skillsets are still somewhat relevant. Fujito/Yoshida/whoever you want to blame for this cut that off at the pass by letting them transfer internally. This serves two goals.

Firstly, it rewards people who stuck out a project that they may have had true affection for, but was actively damaging their career prospects.

Secondly, it keeps them within Square-Enix, so if they DO need people with XI expertise for some one-off thing, they have the people in house.

Also, if you think XI's budget is anything more than a rounding error in XVI's budget, well...

You believe what you want to believe, I don't buy that at all.

These developers worked on 11 for the past 20 years, suddenly now it matters they need to widen their horizons and that means it's acceptable for us to have 1/2 the staff now for the same sub? You think that would fly on FF14 or something else that is also 10 years old now? Also why do planners need to do that so badly anyway? They are not coders or graphics artists that need to learn a new engine.

Nonsense honestly. Also we are paying their wages to work on this game, you don't just move people off a current project and let us pay the same unless you're saving money. I don't care what they said in the producer letter, they get told what to say.

What a co-incidence it happens right at the time they get to make that pos garbage 16 and the pc release.

There may be all this documented evidence and science to "prove" that the Earth isn't flat but I'll never *** believe that ***!!

We had 7 developers working on 11 and they were making content.

Suddenly now this is too much right around the time pre-orders are looking real shabby for 16, and we had to lose 4 of them and Matsui has to retire out of nowhere suddenly when he said he was going to stay a lot longer. Never fear tho they might come back in the future!

This did not come with a reduction in the sub fee, we still get to pay the same but now we get to pay for the 4 developers to get "retrained" like it's a charity or something.

Leave alone the billion dollar company.jpg

You believe what you want to believe, so will I. YoshiP isn't hecking based, he is a corpo suit with his neck on the line for 16 and he is short changing 11 players with a reduced budget and stuffing more garbage in the 14 cash shop for prices that would make blizzard blush.