Is FFXI Dying?

I'm sure I'll get nuked for this but I honestly have no problem with the prime grind (other then not being able to trade unwanted earrings for some damn muffins.).

None of them are in any way required beyond epeen and, for the "go-hards" (ie bot ppl) well good on ya. No bitterness here.

As a pure white driven vanilla player I think of prime weps like I think of social security. I slowly donate something into it in the hopes the whole thing will still be around when my time comes.

If you treat it as October's target you will hate ff11, life, your dog, etc.

Same. The new weapons seemed like they had a chance to inject new life into some jobs and do some neat things, which a few did, but the amount of Sortie required is just...well, we've discussed that ad nauseam at this point.

There was speculation leading up to the release of Primes that it would involve multiple endgame systems: Odyssey, Omen, Dyna-D, Sortie, etc and be spread out across the endgame systems that existed, also. Kindof like mythics, which despite the nightmare they were at release, I thought sounded like an interesting way of spreading the effort/focus out. The end implementation just took the wind out of my sails to ever do one.

I feel like there were so many directions they could've gone with the weapons themselves and the way to obtain them and they just went with one of the worst possible options. It could've been worse, but I think they could've put more effort into making it something more people wanted to do, too.

Nobody who read that interview objectively came away thinking that "a few players will finish by the end of the year" (which was 8 months at the time, not 6), was directed at solo players.

That one's on you man.

It's really amusing to me that half of the top 10 most popular games today, came out ~7+ years ago? (Fortnite, etc).

Executives have been trying to figure out how to keep a $60 game a part of your life for much longer than past generations of video games.

I think they should take a few notes from FFXI.

(Meanwhile, if FFXI were to come out today, the graphics would be amazing, but there would only be 6 jobs, 3 WSes per job, 25 spells, and you'd effectively be playing checkers instead of chess. In-game outfits would cost $20).

If you don't like the group you are with, don't have a group or are forced to multi box 10-20k galli at a time.. you will either burn out or give up long before 7.5m galli.

With a group of people you like playing with you can do Sortie 3-5 times a week and have a good time.

Rather do that than bang my head on RNG-jesus over and over until the stars align enough to beat all the v25s + Bumba then quit because "nothing else to do".

Enjoy the ride rather than chase a goal.

This seems to be the trend of the last page or so. It really shows what people value when they keep citing the 6 month grind for primes. I've said it numerous times, but you can get plenty of enjoyment out of a stage 3 or 4 prime, and that's not really more of a grind than your first mythic.

I assume most people cheesed their mythics with ASA and the like, then again people prolly cheese these somehow too. Anyways all I was getting at it because of that, that doesnt really say much. (Tho i suppose ichor is the real grind on a mythic.)

XI isn't dying, there will always be more than enough people playing for it to be profitable and worth continuing. They have more money than they even know what to do with, and they have said this a few times.

Dying and dead are different things, dying means player losses to the point it's not profitable. That's just not going to happen to XI for a long long time, and we all should know that.

Dead means the company decides to shut it down for operational reasons.

The only real "dead" will happen if nobody wants to take over running the game that understands how it all works, which is a problem since they seem unwilling to take anyone else on and who carries on after Fujito.

One of the big problems with XI is that for the longest time Matsui was the main guy, he had all the technical knowledge about XI is updated and nobody else really did (and they obviously didn't really train anyone else). So when he left they were just SoL. It's like if you have 100 people at your company, but only one person knows how to run all the computer systems, and they leave. Well now you can't do anything with those 100 people, cause the critical person isn't around.

My thoughts were they were buying time so Fujito or someone else could learn how all this stuff works and take over from Matsui on a tech level, and then the people can come back and they can carry on. But who knows if that is happening or not, it's been over a year.

This is what I do, play casually but every day. I just play for enjoyment, not chasing BIS or whatever. I used to have the mentality I need to get everything right now.


Call me optimistic or inhaling to copium/hopium but I don't think the game is dead or dying either. I still think we'll get new stuff over time. I'm not at the end of endgame where I feel there is missing stuff for me to do, so maybe I have a different perspective.

I don't think we'll get a ton of new stuff, but that doesn't mean it's dying either. This thread is always made or bumped by people who are personally bored with the game and need others to validate their opinion. If the public consensus is that it's dead or dying, they will feel justified in quitting.

If it was actually dead or dying, they wouldn't have to post it, because they'd know it to be true.

I mean how you could possibly arrive at the conclusion that it isn't dying, is beyond all logic.

Not dead, dying. It's clearly lost all (99%) forward momentum. It's clear cut.

Less come back each time. It's a clear and obvious downward trend. All AH/bazaar activity is slowing. It's dying. Unequivocally. On the down-slope of the bell-curve. Past it's prime. Pick your terminology.

Case in point, Eiryl has been hoping it would die for years because he hates what he does. So, he's always first in line to say it's dead or dying.

I don't disagree with this, but there's a big difference between being over the peak and being actively dying. You wouldn't say people in their 40s are dying just because they aren't ever going to be in better physical shape than they are now.

I mean, 1 minute olds are infact dying. Their fuse is lit from minute zero.

XI is undeniably unhealthy. And that is just a fancy way of saying dying. Slowly, quickly, instantly, doesn't matter.

(It does, quite infuriatingly, never die)

A double; I'll make it so easy a 5 year old can understand.

A live service exists in 3 states, it's growing, it's homeostatic, or it's stagnating. That's it.

Stagnation is decay is dying

It's not an issue of understanding. A 5-10% year-over-year decline is not impending death. I assume everyone understands that FFXI is currently declining.

Folks who want a reason to quit, and want to convince others to quit with them, use the terms dead/dying when they really don't fit the situation.

I don't believe anyone thinks: It's dying TOMORROW OHMAIGOD

But that as subs drop, as less people comeback, as more burn out, a future update may be the last update.

Coming to terms with the eventual death and realizing now was the moment to stop increasing their sunk cost.

(And if Square keeps *** up this badly, they may go bankrupt/sell and the game will close regardless of dying or not.)

Idk about the game dying, but the servers are starting to go to ***. I'm on a small server. The only time I've had issues with DCing was an early graphical issue tied to dyna D. Now I DC when walking around or engaging mobs and the game lets me back in quick. Much worse and more frequently in the mornings, I DC when zoning and have to fight with it to get back in for a couple minutes. Login in on my 2nd character on the same PoL doesn't kick my main off.

I assume that server issues are generally worse on the larger servers but that was one of the reasons I have stuck to the server I've been on since abyssea era. I'd say I didn't notice anything substantial before the beginning of the year and it's just getting worse every month.

Sortie also seems to be following this trend. When you zone into basements in Sortie, there is significant delay between the buttons presses and JAs or spells going off. Lots of rubber banding in sortie. Lots of display issues with invisible not showing up visually when the character has the buff.

I'm going to take my tinfoil hat off now, but I think my perception of the stability of my play experience has gotten worse in the last 3 months and that it doesn't line up with my historical perception of the service of this game.
---
I don't think the game is dead/dying as I can still play it regularly with other people that don't live near me. Which is the point. I also don't think technical issues are going to be the end of the game. I'm just curious if other people have started noticing issues where they didn't perceive them before.
---2nd edit:
my game crashed while i was writing this

I think a lot of this has to do with your personal internet connection, addons, or PC.

I DC about once every few months maybe? I can't remember the last time it happened, and it typically happens when there's a storm in my area. I've never DC'd while zoning. I've never logged in a 2nd character on the same account without kicking the main off.

I do experience some lag in Dynamis [D] and rarely in Odyssey, but I would say there's rarely if ever "significant delay between the button presses and JAs or spells going off."

I'd say I get the invisible buff thing once/month, maybe less.

As long as the client can run without having to be majorly overhauled, I doubt they are going to pull the plug and shut the game down anytime soon if ever. It seems cheap enough for them to just leave it up and let transients come/go who want to see the content they missed out on 10 years ago, of which there seem to be a lot. They'll play for a few months then quit but enough people fall into this category that they can cover expenses.

I think what will kill the game is some architecture shift in the future that makes the client require some major update that they can't pull off, but I doubt we'll see that anytime soon.

Veteran players perceive it as dead when 90% of their friendlist has retired/quit/banned/sold, they have 4 empty linkshells, and there are no meaningful updates to bring anyone back. The veteran player population is dying out and people aren't quitting in recoverable ways, they are being banned or selling their accounts. They all know there is no meaningful new content added, Sortie only has so much life, and they either finished or burned out on v25, so what's left to come back to? This population is fading out and when its you seeing it, it's easy to see the game as dying, even if it doesn't mean "plug pulled dead" it means "dead to me" when most of the people you want to do stuff with have moved on or the pool of people to pull from to do endgame content is much smaller.

This absolutely varies with your own behavior and your teammates' behavior. Primarily, using multiple sets of equipment swaps in rapid succession will quickly fill your own packet buffer. Because the server has to respond to all of them, and there's limited space in each udp packet, and the server doesn't adjust timing.. anytime you have more pending data than can fit in one udp packet you will have some of that data delayed and eventually lost.

This is much more prominent for gearswap users, because hitting a macro multiple times will send all of the packets multiple times. If you're using the Ashita options or ingame equipsets, your action gets sent only once per second, and resends use the same sequence ID so the server still only responds once. Obviously, if you're using the ingame sets, you are also likely to use less unnecessary swaps (you may not bother going back to idle if you're immediately doing another action, and you likely use less pieces for a pre/mid swap, for instance). If people are using any of the more questionable tools to locate Bitzers, those are creating additional sources of packet bloat as well by sending an additional request constantly.

I'm not going to say it's not an issue, because it definitely still happens from time to time in action-heavy circumstances (warping into a new area also means many more mob updates to receive). But, using PacketFlow and correct swaps, I have not noticed it becoming worse.

If your connection round trip exceeds 400ms, the server will have to resend things because the client didn't see them in time. This will have a profound negative effect and lead to extreme difficulty in any instanced content. But, that shouldn't be common in most parts of the world.

I rarely get crashes due to the game, it crash more due to the fact I primarly play on Linux and have to rely on Wine.

The servers are often laggy however but I suspect that's a side-effect of people using Gearswap and the like.

The paranoia on this thread is so sad.

FFXI has supposedly been on life support since January 22nd, 2009, when the game was less than 7 years old, and would be dead within a year. It just passed its 22nd anniversary.

Level sync was the life support. The game's popularity had already started to decline before the mass ban.

This community is so negative. I hope all toxic players quit or get banned. I realy Don't care if it dead or not, I just log in do stupid things log out. it is a game not a job you no lifers.
we don't need content or anything. people still enjoy playing tetris, and no one asked for ages for any new modes or content.

this is on your end

I for one am quite entertained by this thread lol.

If you don't enjoy playing the game even on a very casual level of doing nonsense here and there then just stop playing it. Its a very simple concept. "Dead" or not has nothing to do with enjoyment from playing a game.

That's exactly the same as telling someone "if you don't like doing it, just stop smoking" You know, just don't, it's easy.

I know, right. Same as a heroin addict. Right? Can't just quit a video game!

Yeah, addiction totally isn't a thing and they're all super happy.

That's why they keep playing.