Dev Tracker - Discussion

How lucky you are.

So 666 people with multi boxers, Impressive.

My latest ffxi video got more views and new subscribers in one day than any of my old videos even after a 2 year break. So unless they are multiboxing youtube I'd say there's definately more interest in ffxi than we've had in a long time.

The private server gang loves to claim everyone on the game is just one person multi boxing every other character.

It's a coping mechanism. Like the fat person claiming every skinny kid is unhappy while crying through their donuts.

The retail gang loves to bring up the private server gang even in discussions that don't involve them.

Literally rent free

Pretty sure this is a dev tracker thread for the game, not PS.

Why even post in here if you don't play.. don't get it.

Tell that to Draylo. That was literally the point of my post.

I only play retail
I just think it's funny as *** when Draylo decides to randomly bring up PS in a thread that involves no PS discussion whatsoever because he's so mindbroken that the server lives literally rent free in his head

My comment was prompted by the, now blocked so I don't have to see it anymore, comment by person that's only ever posted about Horizon and last seen a year ago, that showed up just to claim everyone on the game is just multiboxes.

Maybe Draylo has that much of an effect on said person that they will follow them around on the Internet just waiting for them to say something about PS so they can comment how "everyone on retail is a botter/multiboxer".

Maybe Draylo is the one with the problem, or me for pointing out PS guy that only talks about PS showed up on the Dev Tracker for the game thread to claim all the people are actually multiboxers.

Maybe.

I don't play on PS and I think most the claimed growth in numbers is multiboxes. You see more and more armies of following chars all the time, and I know people that are getting more and more chars (anecdotal, I know).

a lot of people i haven't heard from in 5-10 years have messaged me to either ask questions about the game's changes or buy gil in the last 2 weeks

i don't doubt that there are quite a few new mules/multiboxes, but there are a lot of returning players too. the FOMO regarding these weapons is insane, considering their relatively limited value

whether they stay remains to be seen, i imagine many will quit again for the same reasons they did last time

Just echoing this. It's been... busy. 23 years of bad decisions and one really really really good decision to get people foaming.

This is great feedback from SE via those surveys. Active players complained about Bonanza, they handed out Bonanza weapons like candy during a free period and numbers rose. Its A Bold Strategy Cotton, Lets See If It Pays Off For Em

Granted they're really pretty underwhelming in reality, I don't see them as a major reason to stay - though some will definitely get hooked again.
Letting us choose another each year to celebrate would be nice.

It's about setting the stage for the future. The weapons don't cost SE a penny. If they can give away basically meme prizes under the guise of an anniversary while getting more active subscribers, that sets a precedent for how to reel in former/new players in the future. Bait. Literally only took them a decade to figure out who their target demographic should be for raking in the bread. But a wins a win

You don't have to give away +2 earrings to the existing hardcore player crowd who are already paying a sub and grinding every piece of content immediately, that's not their market. They will prioritize appeasing to the casual players who respond positively to freebies. This is why all casual content is a new kind of freebie (Aman trove, Shami trove, etc). It hooks and reels in NUMBERS

But we should get a +2 earring every month (week). Don't let them think otherwise.

Nah +2 jse rings inc to *** all your wardrobe plans up

If they gave you a +2 every week you still wouldn't see a perfect +2 for the job you want.

The freebie helps, no doubt, and was a good decision on their end.

I'm not sure people need everything to even be free, though, just reasonably obtainable. The problem is a lot of things right now just aren't reasonably obtainable. If players are coming back in and seeing huge mountains to climb that seem unobtainable, then they are going to burn out or get frustrated and leave, which makes it harder for other players to build groups.

There's no reason some of these mountains should still exist. If you give people toys they can get, they play with them, if you don't, they get frustrated and leave. If you make everything players do a drop in the bucket, you end up with only veteran, dedicated players sticking around and even they burn out. If you make progress reasonably obtainable, people stay.

There's obviously a balance here between giving everything away and making it unreachable, but I really feel like most of XI has leaned more towards the latter and needs to be brought back to center in a lot of content to retain players.

I don't think you realize how many noobs love coming back and getting free stuff through trove, login campaigns, gobbie boxes etc. I'm in several new player linkshells and players are ecstatic at the idea of SE throwing rare and cool toys at people. It's not even random stuff they're giving out; they gave you a kupon where you can pick your reward. That's quite different from rewarding a +2 old case where you have a small chance at what you really want. Bonanza weapons freebie was enough to draw a good amount of players back. It's really that simple. +2 cases handed out would not have the same impact on player numbers.

I know it's hard to acknowledge, but SE is a video game company. Their goal is money, and whatever meets that end with the least amount of effort possible is what they'll focus on. Their priority isn't in just "retaining" players, they want to make more money. They're already making money off the hardcore crowd who refused to drop the game even after telling you to run through purple hallways for six months, all for a pink glowy weapon or your third SCH +2 earring. That crowd isn't going ANYWHERE. For every one person who quits or takes a break because they're sick of the grind, there's another person 6-boxing. They don't notice a substantial drop in subs from burned out players, and visually I don't even notice much of a change. They WILL notice that from giving out a chocobo knife and fire swords, they get far more players than they've ever gotten recently from updating battle content. So from a focus standpoint, it makes perfect sense to shift priorities to casual gamers.

Exactly, but it would give people hope and the risk of time wasting:reward would be just right for the skinner box

I didn't think we'd ever see 104k active characters on FFXIAH in 2025, especially after Fujito's doom and gloom message when he first took over. I was expecting a die off until all that was left was the truly hardcore/addicted folks. This was a nice surprise, but I'm curious to see how things are in three months.

The fact you could return and instantly get a weapon not far off an ultimate in terms of power is enticing. Otherwise, you would have had to spend months farming the gil and/or doing the quests to build something on that level. It's like giving new FFVII players cheats at the touch of a button so they can recover health and speed up gameplay if they feel it is too hard/slow. There are many casual players who really wanted to get into FFXI, but couldn't because the grind from start to endgame was too much.

Sure, veterans know how to do it, and happily so, but we have the experience/knowledge to do it efficiently. There are new, young players trying this game for the first time, and I find it refreshing that SE has thrown us a bone for once. They have traditionally been very stingy on giving anything decent for free. AMAN trove/Gobbiedial/Other freebies are mini gambling machines that encourages paying for extra characters. Wardrobes are paid for. The race change is paid for. So, for them to give out weapons to brand new characters with decent power (but not ground breaking) is a massive carrot dangler for casuals and potential returnees. It's about time SE figured this out.

SE could literally give a fully upgraded REMA to any account that doesn’t own one. That would help tremendously all those returnees, people struggling, laggard and so forth.

I honestly expected the ROEs to be monthly.
It would seriously encourage a lot of the less hardcore playerbase to do Aminon somewhat regularly.

Many of those would come with missed lore and having to auto complete quests they didn't do. It would greatly impact server economies, as there would be less players making weapons, so prices on materials would drop due to lesser demand. Giving out free Mog Bonanza weapons with nothing attached to it other than getting extremely lucky was the simplest and least hurtful way of doing it.

Edit: As an example of missed lore, when I got my Epeolatry for Rune Fencer, I found out something about the job that I never would have known elsewhere had I not gone looking. As a result, I was more attached to the job and the weapon after months of grind.

The REMA process is a good example of what I was trying to communicate above. The barrier to completion is way too high IMO unless you swipe a card and buy the stuff to do it. The alex/HMP requirements are way too high for new players and they see numbers like 30,000 combined with the cost, do the math, then it feels out of reach esp when they look at what it takes to AG it. It's an unnecessarily overwhelming process that seems to frustrate new players, I'd rather see this dialed back and made more obtainable by actually playing the game. No one is practically farming 30k alexandrite in 2025, so it's just a gil barrier to most players and a big scary number to new ones. Particularly when you combine doing other aspects of these weapons that involve actual gameplay.

The free stuff they give away is great - in this case it was really good for the game and brought a lot of players in/back. I think if they want to retain those players, the non-free content needs to be more reasonably balanced so that things can seem obtainable, especially when it's not something massively game breaking.

The 6 month wait on Ergons, the REMA requirements, AG requirements, drop rates on some HTBFs, segment requirements for r0 Odyssey gear, galli needed for s3/s4 prime weapons, and other stuff I'm surely forgetting. Adjusting these things could keep people engaged with approachable, obtainable goals, especially new players, but the way they are right now is just overwhelming unnecessarily IMO. The carrot seems too far out there for more casual/new players. Admittedly, some of this is community driven by requiring all of these things unnecessarily - but some things like r0 Odyssey gear could be legitimately beneficial if made more approachable, but new players see what it takes to do these things and get frustrated or burn out. I'm already seeing it in a few cases.

Some content should remain hard/expensive. r15ing weapons is fine, v25 should be a challenge, master trials should be difficult and mechanical, finalizing a Prime at stage 5 is excessive still IMO but should take time/skill, so on.

The issue IMO now is going to be retention and I already see some of these new players feeling overwhelmed looking at these things. The card change was a good move in this direction, but a lot is still needed if they want to keep people playing and engaged.

A huge % of players are solo, giving away strong weapons (even if they are not BiS to the most well geared people) is a massive QoL bonus to people struggling. Boosting trusts is very much needed too. Hopefully Limbus is as good as it sounds, in terms of being more casual content for less geared and solo players as well as higher geared people.

The work they re doing on the group building chat channel sounds good too.

If they can make the game less soul destroying for solo players they will aid retention greatly.

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/guide/development/census/2024/

Mythic and Ergon requirements are *** dumb in 2025. Needing to redo all assaults is *** and should be removed, and halve the Einherjar points, Nyzul points, and Alex requirements.

Only losers that wasted their life building so many will rage, as if they would have done anything but make even more mythics if they cost half the requirements that they did back when they made them.

Imprompteurs can suck my *** too. I am not being coerced into doing menial tasks half a dozen times a day for 6 months to get Idris. This is like a humiliating, controlling, abusive relationship.

P.S. I still think they are working long term on converting FFXI to an offline RPG game one day.