New Trust System - Who Will You Upgrade First?

This thread has really derailed from its purpose...I'm not responsible this time either! Still gonna participate though...

IMO, the fun of Sortie isn't the boss kills (per se) because the fights are, as Nynja rightfully pointed out, pretty short and generally not all THAT engaging. The thing I enjoy about Sortie is the planning, game-time decisions, and trying to optimize the run to add in extra stuff.

Depending where the Bitzers are, where the mini-bosses are, if someone made a mistake, what WC/CC you get, and other factors, each run is different from the last. Having to use your brain to think about what the best route is, whether you can afford to do XYZ objective for an extra 500 muffins, etc. is an engaging and meaningful process.

Limbus is literally just slaughtering helpless enemies in < 10 seconds each. Most of them never even attempt to harm you, and if they do it's laughable. The only threat I ever face in there is sleepga on my trusts in the middle of the area, if I decide to be reckless.

There's no competition, Limbus is MASSIVELY worse in terms of content than Sortie.

Odyssey is obviously better, it's S tier.

Ody > Master Trials > Sortie > Dynamis [D] > Limbus

To this guy:

If you're taking 10 minutes per floor it makes no sense to be on ilvl 130, IMO. Go at 119 and massacre mobs in seconds. The units for 130 are ~double? the units at 119, but it will take ~4x as long to get through. When considering matters (you won't be doing 10 runs a week solo at 130), the 119 will be much, much more rewarding.

Seeing these numbers like this is pretty gross as far as actual time doing things in Sortie. The amount of running around just to spend under 60 seconds killing a boss is unbelievable. Reminds me of Incursion. And it's even worse because many groups finish initial buffs in under a minute and objectives in about 2 minutes. 5min aminon is not uncommon. That means literally half of your run is NOT doing anything but following a path. Disgusting.

Sure, its "1700 minutes of fighting" which is still wildly incorrect. Unless you're one of those people who think "My mythic is actually free because I farm all the alex in Salvage/Ambuscade".

Its 1700 minutes of fighting and 4600 minutes of running around from one epic 45 second boss fight to the next (plus a couple other 15 second soloable fights mixed in)

Sortie is so fun, engaging and have to use your brain content that there are 100% fully automated no one at the keyboard full party bot setups that will run the running simulator that it is for you.

Oh and also do the 1% of stuff that isn't running so you get a prime in 6 months.

OMG I'm agreeing with Maletaru, someone help me out!
Seriously though I kinda agree but I'd love to point out that imho the "problem" with Sortie, if there's a problem, is in how it holds out after spamming it daily for so long.
Also the bosses seem easy/fast now after practicing on them for so long, they didn't seem so straightforward the first months. And you can farm them with several different approaches, including the Mage one!

In the end is there anything in this game that would last this long without resulting annoying or boring or whatever else after so much time spamming it daily?
Probably not.
The fact it lasts 1hr, the fact you can / have to do it daily, the fact that over half time of the event is spent "walking around avoiding aggro". These might all seem like small things, but in such a long time they become the real core of the issue causing the negative feeling a lot of people are reporting.

Having it last 30 mins without so much useless walking around or making it give way more points but with a 60hrs lockout would've been better? Yes, it would've been much better, altough eventually you would still reach the point where you can't stand it anymore.

They won't do anything about it but a lot of people pointed out that still keeping the "cap" of ~90k per run but allowing good groups to end the event in like ~30 mins while leaving the full time for all the other noobs, would've been a better compromise.
Likewise to give some sort of bonus to people who don't run daily. Still worse overall points than who goes daily, but the fact the game offer a small compensation would lead more people to "skip" days more often without feeling bad about it. This would've made it way more relaxing and burnouts less likely (altough of course still possible).

But yeah, too late for any of that, they won't do anything about it altough I expect maybe some small QoL change might arrive within the end of 2027.

Ew ew ewww
Despite all my hate for Odyssey (which has other problems entirely compared to Sortie) I can't in all honesty say there's no merit in it. The fight are challenging, the content is rewarding. The way the points farming work is bonkers but players found a "solution" by exploiting tri-runs and Amplifier.
I don't like how to ramp up difficulty they used the same identicaly approach for every fight (Specific DT and 2 adds). I would've liked to see some differences and more special things for every different fight, but I guess they needed to do something global to save on time/effort on the dev-side.

Master Trials too are good content in the sense they offer a challenge. It's not exactly something you want to spam regularly so I'm not sure how to classify it compared to the typical MMORPG endgame content (stuff you have to spam to farm/grind), but I guess there's gotta be space for stuff like this as well. The fact it offers "just" challenge and cosmetic reward instead of powercreep was a very smart way to find a place in the game's ergonomy, imho.

I think Dyna-D deserved more love in your tier list. It was good group content for me, very good. It was ruined by the apocalyptic levels of lag and the fact it's so old now we can't really be impartial about it.

Ultimately I kinda agree with your list though, Limbus included.
I think a lot of things in Limbus are better than many of us want to admit, considering the target it wants to cather to, but at the same time I can't deny it still feels like... something clearly is off.

Real confused, lol.

Dyna [D] is decent content, at least while you're learning it, but ultimately if you're in a good group with a good strategy/setup it's REALLY boring. Essentially trash mobs for 99% of the event, with "exciting" moments at like...the W2 boss and that's it? The W3 boss is just "stand in one place and spam the same WS for 10 minutes".

Don't get me wrong, I do it twice/week and I have for years. Because I enjoy hanging out with my friends and chatting, not because the content itself is fun and engaging.

It's not nearly as bad as Limbus though, there's a little bit of fun trying to figure out which path to take, how many statues to kill, and things like that.

Odyssey is peak FFXI though. Removing subjobs, restricting jobs, and adding multi-KI fights is incredibly fun, difficult, and interesting. Obviously I'm not referring to RP farming...the bosses are the fun part.

What I don't like about the way they are making content, is that it heavily implies they know the budget is going to get cut in a year or two again (btw this game makes tens of millions of dollars a year, so this is just about maxing out profits) and so they are making everything as insanely grindy as possible so if they do cut support fully you'll still have "things to do". Like exemplar ever grind, or sortie or limbus

The problem with making things this grindy, is lots of people will just opt out of it cause it appears (and is) too much. I've already done that personally, and I was looking forward to a crumb of content that I want to do and they won't even give that. I'm not going to continue to pay a sub for a trust update system that a) sucks compared to what they said it was going to be and b) is dragged out for money.

Square Enix are failing everywhere across the board in almost everything they do, they are flailing their hands around cause everything they make is losing money and flopping, so they cutting the budgets of things that do make money (specifically in this case, ff11 and ff14) to paper over the disasters elsewhere.

I still expected the 2nd stage of updates to be decent, but it's not going to be is it. It's just merits for trusts, sword skill, shield skill etc At least with merits I could go kill some collibri with music on and it be a reason to login, this isn't even that.

This describes the entirety of FFXI for me. When it moved beyond biweekly dynamis hanging out in voice chat to 3-4 daily events plus job points plus master levels plus trust points plus whatever else, I eventually realized that it sucked all that joy away.

No matter how strong you make trusts, the impact on ability to solo Odyssey, Sortie, DynaD etc. because of their strength is extremely small. Sure you can grind CP/EP a bit more efficiently if that matters to you, but you're still effectively locked out of a ton of content as a solo player.

I know I catch a lot of crap for this opinion but honestly, this is good game design. Forcing (strongly encouraging) players to group up by making the solo experience so bad/inefficient creates incentives for players to get together, make friends, and have a good time together.

These are the things we both enjoy about the game. It's not a good solo experience. So much of the content is boring, repetitive, mind numbing grind. The only thing propping all that up are the systems that reinforce it.

Your team needs a SMN so you can kill mboze, so you go farm a Nirvana
Your linkshell needs a GEO so you make an Idris
Your group doesn't have a good BLU so you farm some empy gear and put together, farm the spells, buy a neck and some pinga

The actual process of doing those things isn't fun (for most people), nobody enjoys doing einherjar or farming attestations, but you do it for your friends.

That's why I always encourage people to team up and stop trying to solo or 6bot the whole game. It's boring as all hell without other people to enjoy it with. I think most people will burn out and be bored/miserable playing ffxi as a purely solo experience.

Idk, I'm sure some people derive some satisfaction from "programming" their bots to be effective at clearing content, but in my experience, people who play solo or 6 bot don't last anywhere near as long as people who have friends, groups, and linkshells.

Aaaand to bring it kinda-sorta back on topic: I'm glad these updates aren't making trusts strong enough to enable more people to solo the whole game. That would be a huge blunder IMO.

Eventually trusts will be strong enough to solo things you could not solo before. 9 boss sortie? No. Dyna wave 2? Probably.

How do I know this? Because they said they're making trusts more powerful so that they can be more useful when soloing which is how most people play the game.

While it's true XI is an mmo and mmos are best played with others, that doesn't change the fact that most people spend majority of their time on it solo.

Why would SE make more hardcore 6+ player content when a tiny minority enjoy and do that content. The people on these forums are not a representative sample of the wider player base.

Everquest legends is everquest tuned for solo play. Apparently there is a market for solo MMOs.

Imho it's either implement a rock solid party finder or eventually end up with something similar to everquest legends.

Right, this is the issue. We can go back and forth forever about how people "ought" to play the game, but that's player preference and beyond the ability of the game to influence one way or the other. What the game CAN do is facilitate these playstyles, and that comes down to raising the ceiling of what a player can achieve solo or reducing the friction for grouping up.

Even as a die-hard solo player I'd much prefer a robust party-finder system that players of all levels of skill and engagement could use effectively, but this game is just fundamentally not built for that. Improving the solo experience is actually feasible, though.

But one thing I'd add: I see the idea of there being a market for "solo MMOs" a lot and that people consider it a contradiction in terms, but that's not exactly right: what there is a market for is LIVE SERVICE RPGs. The appeal of an MMO to a solo player is not the online portion per se, but rather that there won't be a finish line. So if developing characters in an RPG holds some appeal for you independent of the start-middle-finish journey of the story, MMOs are the best way of expressing it.

King Behemoth
Fafhogg
Aspidochelone

2003 to 2010

Obviously they have to start somewhere and supertrusts will eventually (probably) be worth the effort, but how about

--removing all 3 man entry requirements, monitoring congestion as needed

--drastically reduce mogphone2 cost

--drastically reduce time required to spend job points to augment DynaD wave3 equivalent REMAs

--cut exemplar totals in half (one semi-rare campaign for the flan bcnm, really?)

and any number of other changes that would immediately improve soloability.

So <thing deliberately designed to waste as much real time as possible> should waste less time.

Uh huh, I'm sure they will do that.

A "duty finder" will literally never happen. It functionally cannot exist. It is impossible.

There are too many hurdles with gear and swapping it mid combat.

The menu required to customize what this party slot needs would be re-god-damn-diculous.

"Hey, did you hear they added supertrusts to FFXI so you can solo better?"

"Yeah, now I have to spend months giving my trusts steroids on a drip feed, so by next year I can solo wave 2 dynamis shared."

not all content is for all people, y'all are impossible to satisfy as proven time and time again

The Japanese are still using /seacomup with the appropriate tags. Whenever you see one shouting for an extra body for something (which is extremely rare, even during Asura JP primetime), they usually have their message up waiting for someone from their community to /search and group. They have done it this way for years; it must work for them, but it's incredibly inefficient for NA because we don't search for party members like this anymore since...the Abyssea days? SE must have thought this was a good system because the JP community still fills in search comments, but this is not a proper system, at least a modern one

There is nothing for casual players, all the old content they did is being capped out and there is nothing to move to cause they refuse to do anything outside of the narrow path they want people to follow.

Casual doesn't just mean open to them, it means content that isn't so laughable steep, long winded and intimidating that they won't even engage with it in the first place.

Sortie and Limbus are a travesty for casual players, who make up around 50% of players at this point.