Asura Inflation - What's Going On?

Find me one penultimate endgame event released in FFXI over the past 20 years that got nerfed in the first 18 months of its existence, and then I'll cede that SE's "slowing down" regarding content adjustment.

OG Dynamis remained the same for almost 4 years.
Limbus never saw an adjustment beyond the adjustment to US.
Same with Legion,Delve,Omen,Aeonics,Vagary.

In truth, content RARELY gets adjusted beyond us getting stronger, or them actually keeping the difficulty levels the same while requiring fewer to enter/complete; or perhaps increasing the frequency we are allowed to do such content.

And newsflash- no one cares what worked for the Diablo IV crowd or industry standards.


Dude, I agree with you a ton. But on this, you're just way off and maybe first learn to spell Odyssey before critiquing it to its core. I'm all for encouraging those who have 'completed' content to help those new to it- but the motivation at the end of the day has to come from the player himself, not from some carrot dangled because in truth? There isn't a tasty enough carrot to get those with r30 Odyssey gear to restart the climb in today's game. So either find FRIENDS you care about, and who's success means enough to help when you don't need it- or call it a day and call the game dead.

Still haven't seen those quotes from anyone in this thread claiming they want to keep new players from getting R30 gear so they can maintain the exclusivity of their gear and show off.

It's really disingenuous to write people off as elitists who want to maintain their superiority complex when they're literally telling you the reasons they hold their beliefs.

"Nah bro, that's not what you believe, you just don't realize your own evil intentions and you THINK you hold those beliefs."

No ones ever going to come right out and admit they're that kind of ***.

But they are.

(10 years ago me would, and I'd have an absolute god damn blast doing it)

I'm still waiting to find out how the elites are pulling the ladder up.

Does the content get harder as more and more people beat V25? What changes within the content?

"Pulling the ladder up" to me implies someone stepping over others to get an easier way up then making things more difficult for those who try to follow suit. V25's werent easier for the 1%, theres no silver spoon.

Every event got adjusted downwards, you just didn't notice it at the time. Abyssea was the first time SE really adjusted events, and they did it by power growth from new gear when the level cap got raised. A handful of level 85's could kill Tiamat, and it only got sillier once we exited Abyssea. All the voidwatch era content made previous content even easier, then the start of SoA and again another pile of power with inflated stats. A crafted great sword you could buy on the AH with a weapon skill you could acquire with merits overpowered every single item before it. That lasted awhile then iLevel was introduced and all that SoA gear got even stronger and suddenly content that took an alliance could now be done with six people.

That story goes on and on and on, through each iteration of content where basic stuff from the new content made the old content easier. It's what people were expecting with Sortie, all the "OMG man, Empy +3 is gonna be so bonkers" and so forth. And while Empy +3 is another power bump, it's not a very large one compared to the V20 -> V25 difficulty jump. Sortie and ML50 have definitely made V20 easier vs it's initial release.

Going forward SE has two choices, either introduce another set of content with a power bump significant enough to make V25 achievable by Tier 3 and 4 players, or reduce the difficulty of V25 Gaol fights. Traditionally they do the former, but with development resources at an all time low that might not happen, so it's likely to be the latter.




I completely understand where everyone is coming from, you want, no you need your exclusive halo event. You want to keep it as restrictive and exclusive as possible because that makes it's perceived value higher. My point has been that it's an illusion, there never was any value in a bunch of 1's and 0's that a random dude can change tomorrow morning. Continuing to artificially restrict it serves no purpose.

This entire thread is dripping with "I worked hard for my trophy, everyone else should have to work just as hard as me before getting their hands on it". Otherwise why would anyone care how hard some random people have to work to acquire some fake internet trophy?

"power growth" isnt "adjusting content" lol cmon man.

Adding the starting chest within salvage is adjusting content.
Adjusting the Stage 4 sortie bosses is adjusting content, and I'm calling that fixing a stupid decision on their part, not a content adjustment. 99% of the playerbase was disgusted by that braindead decision to forcefully ninja-increase difficulty with no extra reward.
Adding the canteen stock to Omen and opening it to alliances is adjusting content.

You haven't been following along.

Power curve growth is exactly how game developers make older content more accessible. One of the oldest tricks in the book because it effectively nerfs content without people like yourself having aneurisms and throwing tantrums. As long as the "newer" content has easily acquirable gear that enables Tier 3/4 players to stomp content they couldn't previously do.

The period where FFXI did not do this is known as "75 era" and there is an entire community devoted to experiencing that.

Are you suggesting there were never any content updates, it was just "get new gear and get stronger"?

Well my first example of Salvage refutes that. It opened a lot of job flexibility and it eased the requirement of needing 50 hi-potions on the first floor.

Einherjar had its own content adjustment too. It started with everyone needing 9/9 wings to enter Odin, and it was relaxed to participants only needing one wing from each tier (leader still needing 9/9). It didnt relax difficulty, but it did make it more lenient to participants considering the near 5 week turnaround between Odin fights (going twice per week with 9 chambers) as well as open up extra Odin opportunities for those who were multiboxing back in 2008.

All these arguments about the elitists who don't want the event to be easier, meanwhile nobody has suggested that it should be easier and nobody has said they don't want it to be easier.

The whole discussion was revolving around whether or not "newer" players need assistance from "veteran" players or can/should form their own parties. None of this has anything to do with nerfing content, getting new gear to make the content easier, or any of the nonsense being discussed now.

I don't think it's unreasonable or elitist to suggest that people who want a clear should team up with other people who need the clear when it is incredibly clear that there are tons of players who still need it.

I'm not even suggesting that I'd be upset if they added stuff like free KI for a boss you've already cleared. What I said was: I don't think it's necessary, and I don't think the content was poorly designed for not having it. I think SE (reasonably) assumed that people who wanted to kill a boss would find like-minded people to do it, or maybe sometimes they would ask their friends to help.

The content is bad and people that cleared it do not want to repeat it, ever.

Not rocket science. If it didn't suck so much people would repeat it. See Omen.

It sucks, so they don't. See Odyssey.

What does this have to do with inflation anyway.

I mean, IDK what kind of people you play with, but everyone I know repeats events for one of two reasons:
-It gives rewards
-They're helping a friend

People aren't doing Omen because it's a boatload of fun, they're doing it for job cards or Swarts. If it didn't drop Swarts, nobody would touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Similarly, people are doing Odyssey for the gil and the RP. Once those run out, they'll stop doing it, not because of the content itself, but because of the lack of rewards. Unless their friends wanted some help with a clear (Asura translation: they're mercing).

This inflation problem, unfortunately, will likely go on forever. Square Enix alone has two MMORPGs, so I doubt those employees have had a lot of time, energy, and effort to fix a two-sided problem. If I were to work for Square Enix, I'd stick to XIV because "it's good for my career."

One of the dumbest things I've read is someone saying in-game achievements don't matter, and you should not be proud of them. This is the kind of take you normally get from someone that has never played an online video game.

When you log into a video game, all that matters to you and everyone else in the game is what you achieved in the game.

So when you're in the game they do matter, not only are they a source of pride in what you have worked for and achieved but also how everyone else views you -in that video game-

My characters matter to me, all the stuff I have earned in the game matter to me. I would be ferociously more angry if someone stole my XI character than if they stole my car.

Your character data is not yours, it's the property of SE. Tomorrow morning a dude in Japan can login, open a console, and change a 0 to 1 resulting in your character ceasing to exist. That same dude could instead open a different console, do a database query and change a different 0 to a 1 and you now have Bumba V25 clear.

Online "achievements" are illusions, they never existed and putting any value in them is no different then putting value on a mirage. The only thing that is real is your effort and experience, and that has absolutely nothing to do with your character data.

Or the ones in Los Angeles.

This is irrelevant, the same argument you made can be made about the money in your pocket or pretty much anything.

Online video game achievements you worked for are not illusions, they are the primary reasons these games exist in the first place and people place great value in them. You can have your opinion, it won't impact how everyone else views these things though.

The "value" of achievements are situational. An Idris can be the most valuable thing you own if you're on FFXI and want to do something on your geo, and a coding degree or a million dollars can be worthless if you're stranded on a desert island living off coconuts.

Things can have different kinds of value, they can have sentimental or personal value and they can have commonly held value in groups. XI achievements and gear have both, not only do I value the stuff I obtained but others value it too. Which is why you can sell XI accounts.

I would be very angry is my car was stolen... like who steals a nissan altima cmon... just take the front bumper and leave the rest

Except not, you have possession of something physical in your pocket and bank accounts are regulated through various laws enforced by people with guns allowed to do violence.

If an SE employee decides to nuke you tonight, there is no law or even social contract that recover or recompense you. It's not yours and never was, and you agree that it's not yours every time you login and click that button saying it's not yours.

Your physical money does not belong to you (it's illegal to destroy money and you can goto prison for doing it), it can be taken from you if the legal system decides to do so, all the money you have in the bank will disappear in a puff of smoke if there was some banking crisis (and the gov refused to bail them/you out), it will lose value over time based on other peoples decisions due to inflation, the entire system can be scrapped and a different system can be implemented if they choose to do so. America is in a better position than most, because of its massive military force but it's still ultimately something that only has value because a set of circumstances says it does.

Also, none of us are immortal so anything you pretend you own is going to belong to someone else at some point anyway.

Online video game items have as much value as anything else and they do matter, the value of anything is directly proportionate to how much work it took to get and how many people have them.

RL achievements also dont mean *** all to the people who dont care for it.

Who won the 2023 kentucky derby? I dont know i dont care, but to people who raise race horses and gamble on ponies, its a huge accomplishment.

Back to inflation:

I think this is all mainly just because more players from xiv and established players players playing less, it's literally just short term supply and demand.

Over time the prices will go back down to what they were before, these high prices are not sustainable long term.

The main way we get real inflation on XI is when the developers add some form of UBI, sparks, choco blinkers or Ody for example. They haven't added anything new like that so prices will go back down over time.

It wont go down though. SE would need to introduce new gil drains and/or adjust existing gil drains and/or crack down on RMT. Without any of those measures, it will continue to go up.

The last time it went down was when SE put caps on sparks/accolades, and then briefly went down when they added the 1.1m npc-only synth items for Af 119+2/3. While nerfing sparks/accolades didnt syphon gil out of the economy, it was an exponential cut to the amount of gil entering the system that people had to consider their big purchases. A single char was able to generate 50 mil a week without breaking a sweat.

Do you mean like random auras which can stack? Random pet on Bumba? DPS check that requires a successful Wild Card?

Um yeah, these "stupid decisions" are in Odyssey too.

The content is intended to be cleared using 3 KI's.

Yeah which requires 6 people with a lot of specific well geared jobs that isn't feasible for too many people arguably

Its 2024, this game is nearly 22 years old. Adoulin is nearly 11 years old. Odyssey itself is nearly 4 years old.

If you dont have atleast 3 well geared jobs after that time, you dont deserve to clear the top-tier endgame content. The problem is the player, not the game.

I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about finding 5 other people with that when I took a break for years while all the people with lots of jobs did odyssey. I had multiple chars with 22/22 master years ago.

Hardest fights left in the game, it's reasonable they'd take higher/highest quality players to clear it, if you arent able to clear it there's still V15, or V20.

For tiers lower you have plenty of wiggle room on player quality, you dont -need- 5 likeminded people to do the fights period, just 2~3 of the core jobs, DD roles are all somewhat flexible until V25

Once again, clearing the top tier endgame content isnt a right. Its not like anything crucial is gated behind clearing V25.

Also the "you" wasnt directed at you. It was an in general you.