Dev Tracker - Discussion

Why are your popsicles in bags?

Edit: to be clear I get a single popicle in a bag but usually they're sold in boxes?

They usually put them in plastic inside the box

I dunno, Canada puts milk in bags so you can never be too sure

What about almond milk?

Only breast milk should be consumed.

Cows. I meant cows.

I’m hoping all the ‘new’ HTBF fights won’t be *** gear.

That Phantom Gem campaign is quite literally worthless. There was never a problem getting 10 merit points (5 minutes of killing trash) to do a HTBF. We legit are getting nothing from VanaBout bonus. JFC that's AWFUL.

They want people to do the crystal fight daily for free

Except the loot is *** horrible

It's not a bag. It's a wrapper. You typically get 10 popsicles in a thin cardboard box in the US, and while there is no FDA regulation that says that each individual popsicle needs to be in its own pseudo-cellophane tomb, companies are still going to do it voluntarily rather than risk any kind of cross-contamination lawsuit.

Side note - do not eat the wrapper. Even if POL is down.

Isn't that one excluded?


Not that it matters. We don't want a free chance to do a fight that doesn't drop the trash it's supposed to anyways. We aren't doing the fight now, we aint gonna do it when its free. FOH SE

lul
even worse


I'll be honest, I didnt read the fine print for the reasons you mentioned.

Yeah I mean they made it into the literal worst possible version of a brand new campaign. No improved drops on gear. No personal pools. No double rema box drops. Excluded the most recent HTBF. There is zero incentive bother getting a daily phantom gem. You couldn't have come up with a worse campaign if you tried.

I said what you guys are saying in my LS and was told ‘no it’s a great campaign’ (not sarcastic, legit were arguing for it).

I’m glad to see like minded individuals to myself that it’s a terrible campaign reward.

If you have BLM, BLU, GEO, RDM/BLM, WHM/BLM, SMN, or SCH/BLM getting capped merits takes maybe 10min? So this saves you minutes a day. It is a horrible campaign.

It's to make when they give Cornelia back for 3 hours look even better.

I agree

My impression was the campaign is only good for ppl without any form of AoE jobs… like ‘I only exclusively play Pup with Rng pet’.

I still don’t get why they make her seasonal. She’s a core part of Bastok missions and an amazing trust. It only helps the returning players they seem obsessed with to keep her around.

I'm all for helping new players get more things done within the game. Giving them one extra phantom gem for free to fight a HTBF they probably can't beat alone (so they'll have you downgrade the difficulty) and probably end up with no drops anyways is just bad. It doesn't even benefit the target demographic it's supposedly intending to help. If they're struggling to get merits to do battlefield fights, what makes SE think they're going to do HTBF fights at all? SMH

PUP can cleave just fine with /dnc

Locking her behind timed/seasonal events allows them to dangle her cheeks in our face and encourage players to resub, or whatever promotion they might do for the event of choice at the time. The fact that she's really good and can never die makes her the perfect trust, but SE figured they can get more mileage out of her by limiting access to her than by making her available fulltime. They ain't really got a whole lot of tricks they can throw out at us and get a response, but she's definitely one of the hitters.

Her limited availability also encourages players to do content they otherwise would not do when she's not available, so limiting her access indirectly encourages you to get certain things done while she's available. Anecdotally - I exclusively farmed Shinryu HTBF VD solo ONLY while she was available. Can I solo it without her? Absolutely. But it takes an extra 8 goddamn minutes (not exagerrating, 8min solo with her, 15+min without her). Ditto with certain Omen bosses and other content I might consider doing by myself. If she's not available, I wouldn't even bother attempting a certain content, and then there's the question of which trusts to use. When she's available, it's a no-brainer on both fronts.

Now, I absolutely hate the limited-time availability from a player perspective, because it for sure cuts down the activities I would feel like doing when she's not around (any opportunity to NOT summon Ulmia is great in my book). But from a video game company's perspective, I can understand why they would make something so good limited (see Bonanzas, deeds, Trove Orbs etc).

I vaguely recall reading somewhere that it's something to do with why they can't add any more trusts at all and why both Cornelia and Matsui-P can't be available at the same time. Supposedly something about their ID numbers.

I don't claim to be 100% certain on this, but I'm pretty sure I read it here (i.e. the only FFXI forum that I frequent).

The official story is we needed to make space for someone's vanity trust.

That might be true from a technical limitation standpoint, but they can do anything they want to do, they just have to want to do it, and it has to make sense for their bottom line.

The game already tracks which Trusts you have, and even refreshes dynamically in Gaol with a "no repeat trust" limitation by removing that trust from your view temporarily when you've summoned them. They probably could create an NPC (or use the ones that give you new trusts via Ciphers) that allows you to add/remove trusts from your summonable list. It would be like Blue Magic: a list of all available, and a list of what's currently equipped.

They just haven't figured out how to monetize it yet.

"We can't add anymore inventory, there's no room" (people been asking for years)
"OH WAIT we can do it, you have to pay for it. By the way, you need 3 unique jobs to enter Gaol, so gear tf up!"

"We can't do race change" (people been asking for years)
"OH WAIT, we can do it NOW, you have to pay for it, and here's an event that gives race-specific rewards"

"We can't release Cornelia/Matsui-P, we don't have any more IDs"
"Still thinking of a way to make you pay for her, but haven't figured it out yet"

I'm curious what the average JP FFXI lifer feels about what the game has become, considering how popular gacha and other predatory business models are in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese games in general.

It's not everywhere in eastern game development, Capcom is a notable exception (though they still have plenty of their own missteps). But SE hasn't been a video game studio in a very long time. Just a nostalgia machine based off of 20+ year old IPs.

For Vana'Bout in particular, it has been adjusted to be literally impossible to fail, so expecting any reward to be "worth it" is silly. Same with the Limbus participation trophies. They have no clue whatsoever how to motivate people to work together or even why actual consequences for failure might be necessary.

As long as dangling Cornelia in front of your noses for a few months is enough to keep you subbed (oversimplified, but relevant to the topic) that's all you're going to get.

You see, you're misunderstanding the purpose of Vanabout as something to get people together. It's not. It's purely a fomo machine and keep-busy mechanic to keep addicts addicted and subbed.

Seems like it's working too.

The space limit for trust not be a good excuse....if there wasn't at least 40 trust they could delete without anyone noticing.

And this years-long adjustment of trusts would be the perfect time to do it along with any other changes. "Hey, we determined a lot of these are duplicates with limited usage."

Before they start deleting any that might be useful for a niche solo situations that not everyone has on their radar I'd rather have them make a new category.

Call it "Special Trusts" or "Trusts2" or whatever, suddenly there is plenty of space for new trusts.


Never re-subscribed just because cornelia is available. It's cool when she's there cause what she does is more reliable than the alternative but it's not like she is super powerful and opens up a lot of possibilities that aren't there when she's not around.

They could take a page from the way Adventuring Fellows work and create Cornelia's Pearl and Matsui-P's Pearl enchanted items that when used give a special buff which allows the trust to be summoned. Convoluted and inventory wasting - it's the perfect sort of SE solution.