Death Of Sortie? Gone To Soon (A Brief Rant)

History of other mmos across the last decade(s) demonstrates that locking an overpopulated server CAN work quite well, if not all, at least most of the times.
But not the way Se did it.

They should have locked the three over populated servers together, and offered free server jump for players in those servers towards low populated server.
Once the population on those three server is below a certain threshold, remove the lock.

Offering just the lock is... Something I guess? But hardly a long time solution alas.

I don't think that it would have necessarily worked for FFXI just because it worked for other games. Other game developers acted much faster when population got unbalanced. Asura had like 1/3 of the entire game's population at the time they locked it.

A one-time free transfer for characters on Asura at the time of lockdown would probably have helped, but I doubt they could implement it. Makes it a whole lot easier for whole statics to agree on leaving. But, again, the population disparity is huge: concerns like AH availability and ability to PUG other events are totally valid.

It really is a matter of time delay. Square takes YEARS to respond to problems.

Had Asura not become megaserver 1, it would not matter as much that it's not blocked off. The impact would be significantly smaller.

It theoretically wouldn't matter at all, no one would know you have to go to asura to pick up goods and sell your goods. We never would've arrived at that point in the first place.

We clearly have difference experiences in ‘shitty segment runs’ lol. I consider 9k ‘amazing’ segments.

Try 2.4k segs and 300k gil for a ‘bad’ run via PUG. And even then, at least we made it to the end.

Yes, a lot of low-person seg runs end up in the 2-3k range.

Which is fine if you do it every day and don't only go if you have a full party of decked out players that can do a full C clear.

But tell any new player to spam A/B instead of waiting for a full clear party for C and they won't do it.

I don't blame the content for that, I blame the players for their unwillingness to put in the effort to do it. The reason there is even sheol A/B is to allow the content to be done at CL119 and CL125 and also scale to CL135.

A/B are lucrative, but that isn't meaningful to people who will happily pay to skip content because it's not optimal. If segments was your only prio, you threw away hundreds of millions of gil in scales and hides you would otherwise have from these runs. You also spent much of the gil reward you got from C runs on unity upgrades. Sitting on half a million segments instead of half a billion gil...

You can also choose to spam B instead of C and keep the hides for upgrades, which is a net positive both for segs and gil.

It does require effort, which is why most people won't do it even if they don't want to admit that is the reason why.

Easier to pay RMT than daily farm B. Especially when you can buy gil to pay RMT.

Biggest miss in sortie in my opinion is the mobs serve no purpose other then to get in the way I'm not saying that it should be empty halls but realistically they may as well be the trash mobs don't need to give an exorbitant amount of muffins but I don't think it would be unreasonable to make it worthwhile to maybe just go in clear fodder for a reasonable amount of muffins. The event as it stands is hurt badly by an overly large zone with very specific objectives required to "optimize" the time limit you have

This is a great idea. Especially for more casual players who have no interest in building Primes, boosting the ability to make a respectable amount of gallimaufry as a solo/small party player with trusts feels totally reasonable. I'm absolutely not talking about matching something like an 8-boss group's returns, but tuning the normal mobs so someone just farming them can get a higher return feels fair.

Would really help people who are only going in to upgrade Empy armor. Or, nice for people who can't/don't want to always coordinate the schedule requirements of a frequent Sortie static. I'd find it great to be able to have a LS group running Sortie as an event a couple times a week (not EVERY DAY STATIC), but improve the galli returns for those who want to do extra runs on the "off days" even if they are jumping in solo with trusts. While they're at it, bump the exemplar point level up to something more akin to Limbus - it would get me hopping into solo Sorties more often for an hour of farming Galli/Exemplar.

IMO, the current design, while it captures some hardcore addicts who will grind with a static every day, does a poor job of incentivizing more casual players to engage regularly. It's actually more of a turn-off to me, whereas if Sortie was more rewarding to just hop in when I'm online at midnight and my friends aren't around, I'd do it more often. You might say, "but Limbus is there for content you can solo grind whenever". Which is true. But why not expand that kind of accessibility to one of the other most relevant current pieces of endgame content? It feels like the reason they structured Limbus that way was BECAUSE of insight from the player survey, that they can now go back and also try to apply some of those lessons to the existing Sortie content that was released before.

More variety is better. If I'm playing solo or with one friend, I'd prefer not to feel like "well, Limbus is the current content that's suited for that setup" and grind it until I burn out. But if I could also get better Sortie results with that kind of setup, can mix it up a bit more between Limbus and Sortie, it takes longer to get bored with either due to the better variety, and I'm MORE likely to engage with FFXI daily than I would if I start viewing it only as a daily grind of one event.

I get that they love dailies these days and that's the metric, but most players in 2025 are adults who aren't coordinating every FFXI daily like it's their full time job. If they want engagement from that large group who ISN'T doing 7-9 boss Sortie runs on a daily/near daily basis, they need to keep current content appealing for other setups too.

Legitimately curious, because I don't follow MMOs anymore, what other games did this and it was successful?

The only one I remember was EQ2, which moved all RMT activity to a single server you couldn't transfer out of. You could move or be transferred in, just not out, and it was tied to their sorry *** attempt at a RMAH.

I kinda hink the fill of mobs was to make it interesting for people in the beginning to try to figure out how the Sortie system worked. Now that everyone knows, though, most of the mobs are skipped. i wonder if they're just good for casual farming on a night you can't find a group, but some Galli is better than no Galli.

Some groups have shown good Gali farming in the 40k-50k range cleaving downstairs trash mobs with blus and aeolian edges on other jobs.

Better than bosses, no, but can be done low-person or with a couple alts if you just want galli.

Other than EQ2 there's GW2 and Aion but we're talking about ages ago and my memory is a bit fuzzy so let's leave those aside because actually I'm not 100% certain anymore now.

But WoW did it for the longest time, on main servers and recently even on classic ones.
I happened to be in one of those servers at least twice that I can remember.

Another game that did that at least a couple of times was FFXIV but I don't follow that MMO as much to see wether or not it was successful sorry.


With "successful" I mean that they managed to somewhat noticeably reduce the population on a few specific servers, while bumping it up on a few other servers which were suffering from the opposite issue.
Does that mean that everything was PERFECTLY equalized? Of course not, but the gap was noticeably reduced so yeah, I call that a success after all.


Going back On Topic, would that have worked for FFXI?
Maybe not, like Thorny said.
And after all Eiryl is right too, SE (as usual) moved way too late.
Still, if they announced a lock for Asura AND Bahamut AND Odin at the same time, and they also announced free server jump from those three server to any of three lowest population server, would that have worked?
I doubt Asura's population would've suddenly dropped off to 1500 and I doubt those servers which average 300 people would've suddenly skyrocketed over 1000, but I'm pretty confident the currently extremely large gap would have at least become maybe still noticeable but definitely smaller.

Whats the strategy to get 40-50k with a lowman group cleaving basement with BLUs?

Idk how much you're going to get. Pld 2xblu cor geo brd. Pld pulls, buff and cleave/ae. Can do without brd probably.

I've never participated in these runs, but I've heard reports of ~50k or so from BLU cleaving. The mobs aren't worth THAT little, you just need to kill shitloads of them to get good value.

You're not gonna do it solo though. And of course, if you raise the mob values by much (nearly anything) then they could easily eclipse the value of bosses, so even a ~25% increase in muffin values (completely irrelevant for a single newb farming 20 accuex) could tip the balance and make doing the bosses pointless (except for earring chances I guess).

The mobs are there to give people something to do with the time they have. They're there to make traversing the zones dangerous (you need to drop invis to hit bitzers, devices, etc.). They're there for the objectives.