Incoming Server Merge?

To be fair Thorn, Spaa was the reason we lost more than anyone. You can say he lost interest. But he made us lose the first five runs? So saying you kicked us to the curb is not quite the truth. We mutually did not want to continue as a whole. I did not have a problem with anyone in your group personally, but you went off on Emra/Blade/Jir publicly, while defending Spaa when he was the worst offender by far. He just sat there on most of his characters doing nothing.

I know... Seen many good players leave since Abyssea, even more so since Seekers was released and players realized what was on offer. I have very little faith that the new delve zones will introduce anything different to what we already have. The big linkshells will figure them out within the week while the rest wait on an opportunity to join PUGs that will fail 95% of the time.

Sir Comeatmebro, Sir Draylo, do you have any more witness for the court?

The jury is already debating fiercely for this important matter, I can only imagine how invaluable more depositions will be in this delicate trial.

Thorny is the one starting things 24/7. I never even bring him up and he decides to summon me in every thread by his ***talking.

Oh boy.

I remember seeing two of the three guys arguing when they were still young and one of them was a literal Stephano. Some people really need to remember where they come from.

Man what is even going on in this thread

It's funny how the mods tend to nuke any thread that may seem even remotely close to flaming (or trolling or what have you) with extreme haste but for some reason allow the same mindless drivel by the same people to carry on like on this thread.

Is this the thread where we talk about our sexual fetishes? Prothescar just offered me one.

She wanted to take off her glasses first. I refused. Living life on the edge

me and a few other people should probably stop posting here while we are drunk.

Aw, now my post doesn't make sense but was in response to someone who once again mentioned fetishes!

By now everyone should have heard about Draylo and his sniffish causeries. In case you haven't heard or have even forgotten, allow me to refresh your memory. The full truth of my conclusion I shall develop in the course of this letter but the conclusion's general outline is that if five years ago I had described a person like Draylo to you and told you that in five years he'd hamstring our efforts to examine the warp and woof of his disquisitions, you'd have thought me aberrant. You'd have laughed at me and told me it couldn't happen. So it is useful now to note that, first, it has happened and, second, to try to understand how it happened and how if you were to ask him, he'd say that he doesn't remember nourishing patronizing ideologies. Not only does Draylo have a very selective memory, but he is known for walking into crowded rooms and telling everyone there that he is known for his sound judgment, unerring foresight, and sagacious adaptation of means to ends. Try, if you can, to concoct a statement better calculated to show how slimy Draylo is. You can't do it. Not only that, but if you were to compose a list of the things that an intelligent, clear-eyed, and capable young person could do with his or her life to rouse people's indignation at Draylo, I suspect that taking up the all-encompassing challenge of freedom, justice, equality, and the pursuit of life with full dignity would figure somewhere in the first three items. Furthermore, I would bet that item nine, ten, or thereabouts speaks to the importance of informing others that Draylo has been going around saying that the world is crying out to labor beneath his firm but benevolent heel. That's a bit of a furphy. The truth is that if Draylo is incapable of discerning the mad ramblings of lubricious, ophidian kleptomaniacs from the wisdom and nuance embedded in a sage's discourse then I seriously doubt that he'll be capable of determining that even his least philopolemical vicegerents supplement their already-generous incomes by selling contraband on the black market. (Actually, his dream is to genetically engineer humans with no frontal lobe to keep them from realizing that he has a driving need to rewrite and reword much of humanity's formative works to favor plagiarism, but that's not important now.)

Draylo unquestionably doesn't want me to keep his cronies at bay. Well, I've never been a very obedient dog so I intend not only to do exactly that but also to snap Draylo's jackals out of their trance. Given his record of shady dealings, we can say that Draylo can't attack my ideas, so he attacks me. It could be worse, I suppose. He could separate people from their roots and cut their bonds to their natural communities. It would be nice to say that pathological mandarinism doesn't exist anymore but we all know that it does.

Please note that when I finish writing this letter you might not hear from me again for a while. I simply don't have enough strength left to look into the future and consider what will happen if we let Draylo project a stream of loud images of death, sex, disaster, material goods, celebrities, and other fixtures in a mock-Olympian firmament. Nevertheless, Draylo has been meddling in everyone else's affairs. That's just a tiny facet of what all of us will face if we let him ransack people's homes. Now that you've heard what I've had to say, I want you to think about it. And I want you to join me and address a number of important issues.

Wat!?!?

and....wow

Well.... Asura on NA prime time = 1063 players.... and only one shout going on.... leader has a hard time filling it's party.... we need to merge, or this game is dead for good... and it makes me terribly sad. I still love FFXI :(

764 on ours right now

a *** essay on how you feel about someone ?

lol

Which is why it wont happen before this November update that will allegedly bring people back...or cause a mass exodus.

To me, on Bismarck, it seems the only people bothering to log on are Japanese and European players since the server actually goes over 1000 players when they're on. But, come NA prime time and the numbers are down by half that of EU and JP at their prime times on weekdays and weekends.

So, to me, what it looks like, many North American players either have given up on FFXI or lost interest in it. I was supposed to or planned on joining someone to do Delve and Legion with, but he left the game too. It's rather telling what the current state of the game is. The lowest I've seen Bismarck during NA prime time was a few days ago-- 435 to 450 people online. The day after that 512 people online.

Yesterday, I was reading a rather interesting blog post:
http://sithforchange.com/2013/08/07/horizontal-vs-vertical-progression/

And, after reading it, you realize that the game has suffered possibly irreparable damage from Seekers of Adoulin and the producer's misguided attempt at shifting FFXI from horizontal to vertical progression. On the one hand, those that wanted an easier, less grindy FFXI got what they wanted. On the other hand, the vertical progression post-SoA has in many ways ruined FFXI's gameplay.

In the past, you can be doing Sky, Sea, Dynamis, and later Salvage, Einherjar, and then Abyssea for gear. Now, it's just Skirmish and Delve, with Skirmish taking precedent over the latter.

The content has suddenly went from being multi-faceted to single-faceted, and from being hard to easy mode. Content has taken away the rather social aspect as well from FFXI. What used to take many players working together to beat something as hard as Nidhogg to only specific groups of people with the right gear, right mindset and low-manning pretty much most if not all the [SoA] content within two to three weeks.

In my opinion, that new direction the producer decided for FFXI because a vocal minority thought FFXI's content required too many people to do was too difficult, has destructively cannibalized FFXI. Therefore, the blame sorely rests on those minority of players and the producer and the FFXI team itself for listening to them.

On our server, there are people that can low man Delve and even the boss. There's also group that does it with a team of six with mules in the other party. Then, either LS members or randoms in the last party, if needed.

So, given the right people and the right gear, you can do something as difficult as Delve with less than 18 people if you are that interested in doing it.

There are also people that can low man Reives even one going so far to solo it if you have the time.

Delve isn't entirely very difficult content, but it's not easy either. Heck, you don't even need an army of alliances at WKRs. A single alliance of 18 can do it with some difficulty.

The point is: Content isn't even challenging anymore. Gather some people and go for it.

The days of large HNM LSes are gone and it's mostly just social LSes these days. Alliance-required content is pretty much not required anymore. Just find people to do them with and the sense of accomplishment is not getting the gear nowadays, it's about getting the right number of people to do something like Skirmish or Delve.

... which they should have re-adjusted the content difficulty in light of the changes to the gear stats in the first place.

That you are correct.

There isn't enough content going in fast enough at the rate players are completing them. Eventually or it already has happened, the game will stagnate if players are completing the same content over and over again with no new content coming in.

What angers me the most honestly is that I've been playing EVE Online since 2007 and they've had more updates to the game than FFXI has had since 2004. CCP Games isn't as large as Square-Enix in terms of revenue and net income. They're working on or have developed four games-- EVE Online, The World of Darkness, EVE Valkyrie, and DUST 514. With the money CCP Games has, they have at the very least done two things-- provided continuous content updates AND technical updates to the game. And, all of this with a total of 600 or so employees.

Square-Enix has around 3200 employees worldwide, and maybe a fraction of that for FFXI and FFXIV. Why is it a company with a revenue of around $20 billion USD can invest so little in one game? Or, better yet, why is it they invest unequally in two games that bring them continuous income-- more on FFXIV than on FFXI?

In the time span between when EVE Online was launched to now, CCP Games has updated the graphics engine from DirectX 8 to DirectX 9. They are now going to start the first step towards DirectX 11 update with the upcoming expansion releasing this December. A full switch won't happen for another five years or so, but there are ambitious plans such as physics base collisions and effects later on, and section-specific damage on the ships themselves. They've changed the character creator completely and updated all character models. They've updated all the ships as well, weapon effects and animations, planetary system graphics. At the same, they've fixed issues, listened to players, and provided content updates on a consistent basis. And, they grew the company up to their current number of 600 employees.

Then, I look back at FFXI and compared to World of Warcraft with their updates, FFXI is sorely lacking behind in term of consistent content updates and even technical updates.

I think most of the current playerbase of FFXI could do a better job being a producer to it than the two that have or currently helm this game at the moment. A lot of us have better ideas and better opinions what should and shouldn't be done in FFXI's direction than the team themselves.

All in all, it is really disappointing to see FFXI like this when compared to something like EVE Online and World of Warcraft.

With new MMOs coming out between now and 2015, I honestly do not see FFXI lasting any longer beyond 2015. You have Everquest NEXT, Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar, ArcheAge, Star Citizen if you consider that one an MMO, and several more coming out that will pull more and more players out of FFXI if the game remains in its current state.