How Could SE Realistically Improve Modern FFXI?

People are already on the server they want to be on.

I'm intentionally on a small server where I know people I want to play with and I know the people I don't want to play with. Reputations are a good thing. My queue are all very low and there was enough high level gear on the AH that I have almost anything I've ever wanted to purchase and I haven't visited Asura.

---
Also Consume Mana gets used, it's just more popular /DRK on mage jobs.

I vote for actual flyable mounts that can take you across the maps. If you encounter 6 other players on flying mounts then it will auto instance you with a 3 vs 3 ace combat style fights where the ammo is galka sausages.

Obviously we don't want it to be too easy to unlock so it will need to be locked behind some tough pre-requisites like wotg minigames but easier.

Sorry if I misinterpreted the question. I just read the title OP and posted this.

Not at all, if you lost your name that was an excellent reason to quit.

I'm sure it's been said already above, but it all bares repeating....

Rather Easy update:

DYNAMIS BEAUCIDINE [d] original dyna currency drops
DYNAMIS XARCABARD [d] original dyna currency drops
Dynamis Dreamlands [d] Muffins

+4 Relic Armors

SURGED OMEN BOSSES

+4 Artifact Armors

Promise us that in 6 years or so we'll get +4 empyrean Armors. Come up with something brand new for that.

There. You just got yourself 6 more years of paying rubes.

You got that by next month, Johnson?

All enemy stat (level)+100 all gear stat +10, "done in 5 minutes"

Zero "new" All copypaste stat+

Angra Manu [D] And Dynalord [D] might take 5 extra minutes getting creative with.

Please no ilvl Angry Mango chainspelling Death again

Did Dyna D stop being a laggy mess? I stopped running this content as soon as I could for that reason, but if that's addressed then I'm all for northlands and dreamlands. Otherwise, not worth the effort. I could ask GPT if I wanted a slideshow.

It'd still be a mess but you'd do it anyway for better gear, same as everyone else

I'll help you by listing them, I trust you can count them without assistance.

Dynamis - Xarcabard
Dynamis - Beaucedine
Dynamis - Qufim
Dynamis - Buburimu
Dynamis - Valkurm
Dynamis - Tavnazia


OK, I guess they can make everything in the entire game ilvl in a weekend then, that's good news. Can't take that long to update all stats to +10. And historically all JSE gear is just +10 stats over the previous version, so that's a simple 5 second update too.

Wonder why SE hasn't figured out this brilliant hack for well-designed content that takes 5 seconds. They must be idiots if they can't figure out what Eiryl did.

My version of FOMO is 'freedom of missing out'. By not playing XI daily, I have the freedom to do things I actually enjoy rather than things I think I have to do to keep up. This is just entertainment for me, not a job.

It's the exact same *** as iBesieged

5 minutes of table update and 10,000 hours of office circle jerk and grab ***.

....or.....
...Roll out beaucidine 4 months from now with teasers along the way.
..one year later comes xarc...

You see? It's an mmo.

Not asking for a buffet from a single sous chef. Asking for a dish 80% already done..4 months from now.

It's really not that much.

Ninjedit:
I did say "Easy Update". So ya, you got me. I did MEAN rolled out over time. My bad.

Eiryl clearly knows a lot about how easily SE could make dyna-d Northlands, since according to him its just a copy/paste job.

Afterall, he made a bunch of programs to automate FFXI so he can run his RMT business with ease, so he knows the guts of the software very intricately.

Oh wait, thats someone else who posts here. Eiryl's RMT operations would cease to exist if the people maintaining EliteAPI decided to call it quits because all his bots would break and he would have no clue how to fix them.

/* Make Dynamis-D ilvl, thanks to ffxiah for the advice */
dynamisD[ZID_XARCABARD]->level += 35

There, I did it for SE. Who do I send the invoice to?

One minute, people are saying that making older content ilvl is a worse way of giving the same old rewards while making content more time consuming. The next, we've got folks saying that having twitchy fingers over a keyboard is enough to improve the game...

They think they want grand new design and fire works and flashing lights.

All they want is literally anything to make moar biggar number. Doesn't matter what it is, they'll do it.

Thats why you don't listen to customers.

I was being sarcastic, if that wasn't clear. This type of content is more difficult to implement than some here give them credit for, yes that includes Besieged.

That said, I think there are ways they could use existing systems to update or add revised content and make it interesting again. The problem is that they won't eliminate old content in favor of revising it for modern levels/etc, so it has to be able to co-exist with the old versions and I suspect that's one of the challenges in implementation. Using Dyna as an example, they aren't going to replace OG Dynamis with a Dynamis-D zone, so both have to coexist. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with that, just what it is. The counter to that is they are supposedly redoing Besieged, so maybe they are open to wholly revising content to higher levels even if it means the old form dies, who knows.

Either way it's a non-trivial change to update these things, not copy/paste or a 5 minute job like some are indicating.

"Non-trivial" has a large runway.

Somewhere between 2 button presses and the full from the ground up build they like to think it is.

It is largely (not solely) just scaling existing mobs up. You don't have to do anything (much) more than that.

They wouldn't, because they have to pretend that it was super hard and took super long to justify their jobs though. And no budget and no devkits no staff and ps2 limitations and all that *** theyve been saying for 2 decades.

It doesnt NEED a new zone. It doesnt NEED new mechanics. It doesn't NEED new mobs. It doesn't NEED drops (apparently). Just drop Sortie Fomor in Dynamis upgrade the normal dienamis statues they spawn from by 10 levels and powerup Angra manu and the dragons. Donezo. You got Dyna-Beau [d]

Killing Angra+1 unlocks relic+4 you have to buy (omen moonbow materials) and another round of void/shard. Same deal for Xarc [D] but it unlocks R20 rema that you can only RP in Xarc [D]

Take limbus, drop Locus mobs in it, change nothing, done. Chests/drops give random mat for random job just like og. AF+4

Nah, its a simple copy paste job, theres no need to test anything, what can go wrong, heres another simple copy paste job:
Want to introduce Raptor Mazurka
Copy Chocobo Mazurka
Change to level 37
Change movement speed bonus to 10%


All of a sudden, casting Mazurka in Harlequin's Horn makes you run at flee speed, a bug that previously did not exist until the addition of Raptor Mazurka.

I don't think that was the point, at all. Eiryl (and most other people using or building 'advanced' tools that rely on EliteAPI) is fully reliant on EliteAPI because he doesn't understand enough of the client to write something like EliteAPI himself. Thus, he's a poor person to set the bar for how hard it is to create content, because he knows basically nothing about how it's done.

And no, nobody making truly advanced tools is using EliteAPI. It's pretty easy to see that Ashita is the best public API[this does not mean Ashita is better than Windower for the average user, simply that it has the best environment for creating a new tool]. If you're already married to gearswap or want more existing libraries to pull from, Windower is still much better than EliteAPI for most things. But, again, nothing to do with his point.

Do you keep death on angra mainyu even though it'll (presumably) have 30mil hp to keep pace with other dyna bosses? That's not very fun design. You better set aside an extra 10 min for the chainspell death wipe, and bring a few tanks because it's going to kill them every minute or 2 even with best resist death available. Can't wait for the player complaints about how instant death mechanics are ***.

Do you reduce the HP so it feels more like an old Angra Mainyu zerg? Surely you have to keep the repeat WS nerf so it doesn't turn into a savage blade spam-fest(because everyone hates those). But, now you need a dozen different WS to be able to zerg it before the wipes. Hope your group has sufficient variety. Everyone absolutely loves forced variety.

If you're splitting it into 3 waves, how do you avoid creating the same running problem everyone hates about Sortie? Are 8 elemental circles enough for wave 3, or should you have more since it's a huge/harder zone? If you're not splitting or using those, what's stopping people from just going straight to Angra by leadening statues and killing the boss then leaving and never coming back? In any case, you'll need to place the mobs thoughtfully because a straight copy/paste would result in far too many mobs across far too wide an area.

You said no drops, does that also mean the mobs on the way to Angra don't drop anything? In that case, why do the content at all? You buy one Angra win and then never return. That adds nothing to the game. It's 18 man, so there'll be no difficulty buying it.

If the mobs on the way do drop heroism/astrals/cards/medals like previous dynamis[D], you have to be careful about how many mobs you add. Previous Dyna-D had special eye mechanics to prevent them being too easy to cleave, so you need one of those. If you are sticking with 1 wave of all fomor, you're creating the opportunity for groups to go in and get 3000 astrals in one smallman run. ***, that just removed another part of the economy because nobody will care to do old dyna-D any more, and it removes the ability for returning players to make gil in Omen.

Which zone cluster holds this new instance? Is there an instance cluster that can already provide it, or do you need to get a new server blade or requisition more server time? How is the server infrastructure split up; can one new physical server handle this for all 16 servers or does each individual server need to be altered? Is there already a streamlined way to connect the world server to the instance server for queueing, or is each prior queueing system implemented seperately and this'll also need it's own implementation?

This is far from exhaustive, and it's still primarily just looking at design decisions.. not potential challenges associated with implementing them. Maybe some of these things don't matter to you, maybe they don't even matter to the players. But, SE is doubtlessly going to consider all of them before releasing anything like this.

If I had the sum of my existing knowledge and the knowledge gained by working with their source code for 10 years, I suspect I could come up with a reasonable implementation for just Beaucedine and a roadmap for the rest in a month or two. But, they don't have even one dedicated staff member who can code.

They can't even start designing large scale content until they know they'll be able to get someone to implement it for them. It's not just a matter of 'finding a coder' either, they need someone who has worked on XI in the past and understands a good bit about it or the amount of work increases exponentially. There are likely only a few people who fit that criteria, and being able to borrow them relies on more profitable parts of CBU3 being able to spare them. So, while something like this is certainly doable over a longer scale, it's not entirely within their control and it's certainly not a quick copy-paste.

Classic blunder; it doesnt need to be good or fun or engaging or entertaining. it doesnt matter if they hate it (bonus points if they DO hate it)

It just has to be a time sink and have an end result of number go up at the end.

Clearly not true, because Sortie exists and Sortie makes number go up. By that logic, we don't need anything else because people will just farm stage5 primes forever since it's a time sink and has the end result of number going up.

A slapped together dynamis implementation is very likely going to be worse received than Sortie, and if it invalidates prior gear then it has the double problem of people cruising through it and losing interest in the lengthier content that existed prior.

It just isn't as simple as you want it to be.

It is though. The morons will do it no matter how much they hate it.

Precisely why you put as little effort into it as possible.

They keep chasing an audience that doesn't exist with over designed dipshittery, when simple solutions are sufficient.

(And yes, I'd have Angra Manu do zone-wide masterlevel -1 megadeathga to sell more exemplar points to the bots to keep them happy too)

Going to have to agree to disagree on this one, but that still made me laugh.