24th Anniversary AMAN Live (May 16th, 2026) POLL

moss on the tree says Jugner to me

Forver known as the shmoogle rod because no one knows what the abbreviation stands for.

Where do we even watch the freshly picked? I've never bothered watching one

They have fully updated the design of the main FFXI website (I think it looks worse) but if they paid for this completely unnecessary thing what does it say about future plans?

The website is more inline with FF14 designs, I would say.

I think there is possibly a strategy behind the scenes to make XI appeal to XIV players more, to get more players and possibly appeal to XIV players who are mad at the them making that game far easier (they know they are bleeding hardcore players).

The website has been "modernized", they have specifically stated they decided against sunsetting the game due to interest from ff14 players (aka we didn't matter), they had an expensive crossover event that is obviously designed to push interest in 11 for 14 players, the content within the game is moving away from the old horizontal and complex systems to a far more vertical system of progression that is far more inline with 14 (gear A to gear B to C to D etc forever and nothing outside of that).

They may even announce an expansion, but if they do I feel it will be totally different than what XI has had before and I think a lot of XI players possibly won't like it, cause it won't be made for us.

We will see today possibly!

They have fully updated the design of the main FFXI website (I think it looks worse) but if they paid for this completely unnecessary thing what does it say about future plans?

1)

(Okay, we're three minutes out. Here we go! Fingers crossed for interesting stuff!)

Pardon my language, but holy ***an animated introduction?! Is that...something that already existed?

—-

Okay, we’re going to start our 72nd Freshly Picked for the 24th Vana’versary. 24 years…so kids born when the game came out are also 24 years old now….how scary.

F: Also, we just had an animation play at our opening. That was something a… former adventurer made it for us.

There were so many parts that I really wanted to look at closer and I was just thinking of yelling “Stop stop! Let me look at it!” Well, since we have the chance, let’s look at it again.

From the first scene, it’s already really emotional. As you can see, it has a lot of elements from older FF games as well. Man, this is really awesome…so cool…!

We’re going to announce our special guest for today. The person who made this animation for us. “Hello, I’m the person who made the animation, my name (tag) is Waboku.”

Could we get Fujito-P to talk about why/how he came to get Waboku to create this animation for us? We had an event a few years ago where there was “Creator’s x Square Enix” (guessing on if that’s how they styled the name) where there were videos released by SE. That’s where we first met and he made a great impression on me. So last year just before the 23rd Vana’versary, we talked about maybe we could get Waboku to make something for us.

Waboku: FFXI is a game that made a big impact on me during my younger years and I was really excited to get to make something for it.

Can we get you to talk about what kind of jobs you were using? W: Actually, I was pretty much a solo player. My first main job was BST so I didn’t get invited to parties, so most of the time I played alone. / I really liked the idea of BST and I wanted to level it properly because of all the cute pets you could have fight with you. / W: yeah, so even if you were alone, you weren’t really alone. Also, I was an Elvaan from San d’Oria. / What was something that really stuck with you from your time playing? / W: Even though I was mainly a BST, I figured that I should have other jobs so I also wanted to use PLD or something, so I tried for a lot of time trying to farm Joyeuse. I spent hours and hours and was prepared to solo it on BST and when it finally spawned I got it down about 2/3rds of the way and (since at the time, BST needed to charm pets and your current enemy would become unclaimed) then it was stolen by someone. (laugh) That was really rough, but even now that’s something that sticks with me.

W: actually, the FFXI WS animations are what started me on the road to becoming an animator. I saw the animations and I thought that it would be cool to have a job where you could make things that are fun like this. I wanted to include as many characters as I could in the animation I made for the intro, and it’s been more than 10 years since I last played the game, but I recently came back to play and it feels completely different now. It’s like even though I played the game for so long that it’s like I’m a completely new player with how much changed, so I wanted to try and include some of the more modern feel as well.

F: We wanted to start with the origins and then slowly move towards how things changed and then have a bit of a feeling of looking forward to and moving forward into the future.

W: I wanted to make people feel the aura of Onzozo a bit in the animation too because I have a lot of memories of spending hours and hours camping for a Kraken Club there. // I wanted to just say to anyone watching who thinks maybe the game is too old school to try to play or something…now’s the perfect time to give it another shot. Please give it another go and congrats on the 24th anniversary. (Animation should already be on Youtube)

2) PREVIOUS and CURRENT UPDATE TALK

(started this section with an earthquake) Everyone who’s in an area where there’s a lot of shaking, please be careful. Are we okay to keep going on? We are? Okay, good.

F: we very recently just updated the website / now it’s a lot easier to view on your phone too! / F: we’ve updated everything but there may be some lagging of the DNS servers so some of the links may serve you the old version for a little while, but please give it some time to update and it should fix itself.

F: Okay, first let’s talk about what we had in the April update. <New RoEs for beginners talk> In the May update, we added new RoEs for increasing the strength of characters as they level up and progress through the game. We also added more info on the RoEs if you hit the button to look at the next page, you can see what the NPC is, where to go, and things like that. We think we still have some more work to do on these, but we think these changes already make a lot of things more easily understandable.

F: We added a lot of RoE rewards that will help new players and also will be nice for current veterans as well with Abdhaljs Seals and kupons for various JSE rewards.

<Changes to Ambuscade in the May update>

F: We increased the rewards from some of the easier difficulties for Vol1 and for all of the difficulties for Vol2 to try and make it more accessible to newer players or solo players so they have an easier time making meaningful progress without feeling like they have to spend an insurmountable amount of time to get anything. Also, we added a new reward to the Total Hallmarks category as well: Trust Primer!

Next, let’s talk about the Trust updates we made.

F: First in March we added the Trust Point system to increase various base attributes to a max of 50 upgrades per category. And then we planned (and are currently in the progress of) to increase the limits and the categories that we can increase. For things like HP and MP, each Trust has modifiers on them that will affect how much HP and MP they get from those categories (with AAEV and other front line Trusts getting MORE benefit from HP, and casters getting LESS benefit). Currently they’re capped at 50, but we think soon we’ll probably be increasing these limits.

F: In May, we added combat skills and magic skills to the list of categories that can be increased with the trust points. Since Trusts can’t increase their strength past 119 because they can’t equip gear, we want to have these bridge that gap that exists between Trusts and players a bit more. A number of the WS used by Trusts have had accuracy based on weapon skill increased as part of a change to the WS themselves. These were listed in the patch notes. Some of these weapon skills were on characters that used a variety of weapon skill types and we made them get a benefit from their MAIN WEAPON’s type, so for example, even if they use a bow, it will be affected by their Great Katana skill if that’s what they usually use to fight with.

Can you explain why Morimar had a job change? F: he uses dual axes but he doesn’t actually use any BST abilities, so we thought it would be easier to make him a WAR so we could have him fit a bit better with combat systems. He should be a bit stronger because he now has different traits from his job. We hope that more people will give him a shot now that he’s been changed and is stronger than before.

Next let’s talk about Limbus. F: We’ve heard from a lot of players that Limbus is pretty…rough. We’ve made many changes already, but please remember that Limbus isn’t finished yet. (lots of comments in the chat about it being too strict/hard, having never been to it, too hard solo, the Temenos ??? is “way too shitty but you’re still not fixing it, wtf”, “instead of just cutting some of the time, you could just get rid of Limbus”, “make it so we can call more trusts)

F: and again, this isn’t finished yet, so please give us some time to finish making our changes.

<talk about the new Elite Adventurer Training Program event>

F: there’s 16 things you can find in the zone and the more you can find at once, the more points you get (it’s like a “spot the difference” event, it sounds like). Rewards: Shaded Moogle Rod +1, Trust Tome (? Manual? I forget what the term is), silver voucher, #ANV key, and #FES key. (trust thing is 1 total, the rest are 1 per earth day)

3) <A wild community team Mochizuki has appeared!>

M: We decided we wanted to get you to actually play a bit to see some of the new anniversary event. / Oh, it’s not this Moogle. It’s this Erudite one over here. Oh, it’s already started! So sudden!

F: Normally you can’t use doors in costumes like this, so for this event, we made it so that you can do it with a text command. Right now, we’re doing it with a macro.

There’s a time limit for this as you can see by the Mog Energy in the top left of the screen. If you think you found one of the “traps” you can do /stare to try and turn it in. If you’re wrong, it will say that there’s no response from the Shaded Moogle. If you’re not sure, you can hit /check to test it, if you find it you’ll have a limited time to get rid of it (by using /slap; possibly every time). There aren’t a lot that are very crowded together, so if you find one, you should move a bit to find new ones. There’s a lot of newly placed items that will end up being traps.

You should probably spam your /check as you move to see how lucky you are. You can fail if you’re not fast enough. It shows a counter of how many are left. If you fail one trap, you can’t get it again until you restart the event.

“I don’t want to play it anymore because it’ll spoil it for me. I want to go home right now and play without spoiling anymore!”

<Vana’bout Talk> We made some changes to how Vana’bout is run this past time to make it more challenging for the overall evaluation, but a bit easier for people to get things individually. We also have worked on making it so that more people can get the title from it as intended.

We wanted to make sure that there were plenty of objectives for Vanabout that are doable solo. We also saw a lot of comments about people who felt the need to do it many times on their mules. We’re glad people took part in the event so much, but we were being more conscious about things like that.

So for May, we decided to make it a bit more of an “Easy’Bout”. Limit Rank: 600 plaudits, exemplar/exp/job points/old case+1, Gold Rank, 350 plaudits, pulse weapon kupon. Silver rank, 100 plaudits, I-Amb kupon (ambuscade items or things you can get from the chits). Since Vana’bout requires Ambuscade to unlock it, we wanted to make it a bit easier to fit the theme and to get ambuscade weapons fully upgraded. (Looks like the i-amb kupon will give you a bunch of abdhaljs xyz materials, so like 20 threads. 20/20/10/10/5/1. Matter/metal/fiber (5/15/15), nugget/orb/anima/matter 5 each. I believe one of these matter is a typo. Can also get chits and tickets and a seal.

If we pass the 100% objective, we’ll give you the AMAN Trove Gazillionaire campaign and 10,000 exemplar for the overall reward.

VBD (daily) obj: 2 a day, 40~60 points; VB (once per event) obj: 6, 2 for 25 points, 4 for 30 points. Some new objectives added: Do alchemy a number of times, take part in Domain Invasion and get a certain number of DI Points, interact with your trees in your mog garden a number of times.

4) JUNE UPDATE

F: Limbus update: NEW NMs, with these last NMs, we’ll have finished what we had planned for Limbus. We’re also adding more rewards. LIMBUS WEAPONS CONFIRMED. For today, all we’re going to reveal is the appearances. These are new designs. These are just a portion of the new weapons, so there are more coming. New BGM for Limbus! (Yay!) We’re adding two new BGM options with one of them being a remix of an existing song. When we’re fighting the new NMs, you’ll be able to hear the new music.

F: That’s about all we can say for now about the June Update.

5)

<24th Vana’versary Campaigns talk> Campaigns keep adding on with the EXP campaigns getting upgraded midway through. <Login Campaign talk> Just explaining what the login campaign’s big rewards are. No new info here. Materials to upgrade your AF gear.

June will be getting a Cactuar shield. Next year will be the 40th anniversary of Final Fantasy, so since this year is the 39th (san-kyu, sounds like “thank you”) we wanted to add something to commemorate that.

F: New and Returning Adventurer’s campaign: for your red mog pell, you can get a Trizek Ring. This is my (Fujito-P’s) recommendation (this is not MY recommendation, please don’t @ me lol). Ochre pell: you can get Shantotto 2. You can also get a book for Trust Points. If you login and already have one, you won’t be able to get another, so if you use the one you have and then zone, you’ll get the new one. Don’t worry.

<Nomad Mog Bonanza talk> We made it even shorter this time around to avoid the Inv -2 from the balls. We wanted to make it so that each time we do this it takes less time overall so ★we can possibly do it another time a year. We added Sroda items to the rewards. The Sroda necklace will give AoE Barspells (he specifically said Barfire and Barpoison, the JP disagrees with it affecting the bar-element spells, so that was probably just a bad example to use) about double the effect, for single target it’s about 1.6x the effect. This is the BASE effect. (so a base barpoisonra gives 20% resist to the effect, this will make it 40%, before any other gear that might affect it, from the sounds of it)

<Adventurer Gratitude Campaign> Rewards have changed. <Jubilee confirmed to “if you’re wearing it, you get the effect permanently”>. If you already have the vanaclock, you’ll get a SILVER mog pell now. Jubilee Ring -> Silver Pell -> Red Pell -> Vanaclock (or Silver pell). One reward per week.

F: There’s another benefit to this ring. The Jubilee ring stacks with other EXP rings. The skill up effect also stacks with other sources of skill up rate increases (I’m unsure if this is a doubling of those effects or just in addition, but it SOUNDS like it’s just added on top. So if it was 1.8 times with food, it’s 2.8 times with the ring and food. Additive, not multiplicative). The ring ALSO affects Automaton skill ups. It is only BATTLE skills, so combat/magic. Not crafting. Not fishing.

6) <Echoes of Vanadiel Discount talk>

FFXI x FFXIV collab : Echoes of Vanadiel explanation. Looking at screenshots released about the raid. Eorzea Cafe in Akihabara/Osaka are having a collab for FFXI food items. From 6/30 to 8/5. (If you’re in the area, give them a shot. They look tasty. “Prishe’s Knuckle Sandwich has black bread and it looks neat). <They gave plates of the food to the panel.>

<Made a pun about the Shadow Lord cake being “yami (darkness) flavored” and Mochizuki-san asked “ah, **yami** flavor? But that’s probably pretty **yummy**, huh? (as they’re pronounced the same in JP)” I know most of you probably dont’ care about this, but I appreciate a pun.>

<More Strange Happenings in Vanadiel event talk> This time, we’re adding in Alexander to the NMs as well. <pictures of the new gear and the weapons>

<The REAL Archduke Event talk>

(reminder to pick up the shield if nothing else, it’s fire)

<Return Home to Vana’diel Campaign talk>

7)

One last thing to add. The free trial is going to be refreshed and updated. The current trial is only 14 days and we want people to experience the more appealing parts of the game, so we thought that 14 days didn’t fit the current year, so… We’re going to get rid of the 14 day limit. NO TIME LIMIT ON THE TRIAL. And change the limit to level 75. The areas are limited like normal, but you’ll be able to play forever at level 75 on the trial in the OG zones.

We thought about raising the cap to 99, but since you’d be able to use 119 gear and do a lot of other content for completely free, we decided that it wasn’t realistic to do it. The limits on how much gil you can have and trades and things, no tells, no shouts, no inviting people (seemingly) are all staying.

★NEW CONTENT COMING★

New NMs and things that they spoke about a bit before (only thing that was specified was NMs). This time, we’re not planning on making these all be focused on high endgame level of stuff. These will be filling in gaps between finishing Ambuscade and moving onto the next steps. So more of “mid-Endgame”. We know people are interested in how this will all be implemented, but since we’re hoping to put in a lot of things like this, please give us some time to finish making the plans and figuring it out before we can share details. Don’t expect these to come too quickly.

★<Trust changes talk: Equipment>★

We’re currently working on the Trust equipment and moving along pretty well. We want to clarify, this is not giving regular equipment to Trusts and having them equip it like a regular player. It’s like attachments on Automatons. Collecting attachments can be done in a lot of different ways (NPCs, content, crafting, etc). We’re planning on adding Trust equip to the new content NMs as an additional incentive for people to take them on. Since we can’t increase the amount of inventory that players have, we wanted to make it so that this new system wouldn’t make it harder on players by having items you had to hold.

★<NEW HTMB INFO>★

Crystalline Prophecy, Shantotto Accension, Moogle Kupo d’Etat. The first one will be coming in Summer, we believe with our current pace. Also, since it’s a HTMB, of course you need to have finished the scenarios to be able to take part in them. If you don’t have these already, buy them during the discount period cheap so you can take part in these, if you want to.

Gear images shown. Item level 119 versions of the original rewards. OG Rewards had augments you added, but these new items would make that difficult to do so they’re just pre-determined stats.

8) — <Development Environment Changes>

Is there anything else you can talk about? F: Hmm…there’s some things I can say that people don’t really care about. Like, we’ve made changes to the development environment. // People care about that! // F: no one cares, surely! (jokingly said) Well, okay. POL won’t go away! Sorry, but it won’t go away. However, we’re now moved away from using PS2 dev kits more and more and there were a lot of issues with playing on Windows that we wanted to fix.

F: Now, what does it mean now that we have done this? We’ll be able to make cutscenes much easier and we can make resources with cleaner text and able to make them easier. They’re all little things but we’re hoping they add up. Also, we had server issues last year and, as of A FEW DAYS AGO, we completely replaced them all and we’re currently running completely on new servers. We think at least for another 5 years we’ll be good. They’re not cloud servers, we’re not using AWS or anything <laughs>.

F: (I’m not the most versed in Japanese on these IT specific things, so please forgive me if I use a wrong term) Because of the new servers, we’re able to have better virtualization tools (he says specifically like having new instances of areas) and more easily able to recover from issues. Next, we’ll probably work on fixing the client.

F: Everyone is using POL Viewer and we know that there’s players who can’t get POL to work which means you can’t play, so we’re prioritizing fixing these issues. We’re also working on fixing all of the other various systems like updates and things.

F: And this was quite a long time ago that we mentioned this, but BLU Magic and attachment changes are things that we really want to get to and we’re sorry it’s taken so long to get to it, but we’re currently working on getting everything up to speed and to a state where we can implement those changes without breaking other things.

F: We know people are thinking now that we’ve replaced the servers, we can increase the number that we have. <laughs> Unfortunately, there are a lot of limits to the base systems so we’re unable to add in new zones because we’ve used all the IDs available. HOWEVER there are hidden areas that have the IDs used but we thought “well, can’t we just use those and make new areas?” and from all the people who would do that, it SEEMS LIKE WE’LL BE ABLE TO DO THAT
<NEW AREAS EVENTUALLY (probably!!)>

If, in the process of removing those unused areas that are just taking up space, we get some openings we can use, then we’re planning on making new zones.

Keep in mind that these new zones are a much farther in the future goal. F: I expect that I’ll still be talking about some of these things in our Freshly Picked in November as well. I just wanted to share some exciting news with everyone.