Dev Tracker - Discussion

Not a huge merch guy but I'm holding out for those MTG FF cards, they caught my eye.

Claimed they featured cards from all 16 mainline Final Fantasy titles... so, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIV, and Final Fantasy XVI, I guess?

I hope they make a planeswalker Shantotto card; hard to argue a character with canon independent dimension-hopping powers doesn't deserve it.

If you don't mind it being "unofficial", you can have one. Custom fabric printing is photorealistic and pretty inexpensive these days.

Well, I’ll tell ya, I’d like some new content too. But let’s be real those “re vamps”? They’re cheaper, need fewer resources, and take way less time to put together.

Now, if I’m bein’ honest, I’d love to see some big content made for 18 players. But you gotta balance it for 12, maybe using that Odyssey V15 gear. Keep it from bein’ a cakewalk but don’t turn it into some impossible grind either find that sweet spot in the middle.

What’s got me thinkin’, though, is how Fujito-san’s gonna pull off adding new gear without makin’ the stuff we already worked for feel useless. You know, like AF+3, Relic+3, Empyrean+3, or that Odyssey V25 set.

And if they’re plannin’ on addin’ another event? Man, they better plan it right. Don’t go throwin’ too much at folks at once.

Here’s what I’d suggest:

Sortie cut it down to 30 minutes. Sure, give out less points, like 75% of what ya’d get in 60, but save folks some time.

Dynamis Divergence trim it to 60 minutes. Start at Wave 2, shave off some of those circles in Wave 3, so people can actually wrap it up in an hour.

And Limbus cooldown to 60 Earth hours, and let us run it for just 1 hour.

I mean, think about it askin’ people to do daily Sortie and Odyssey, spendin’ hours on Dynamis every week, then tackin’ on two hours of Limbus twice a week? Man, that’s just too damn much.

Next time you put your thoughts into an AI, could you please take away the "make me sound like I'm chatting with my buddies in a bar" request? This prose is so awful it makes my skin crawl. With better fine-tuning, I think I could actually make it to the end of your future posts.

Rude. Just don't read the post, I'm sure plenty of eyes glaze over on your contributions, mine and anyone else's for that matter too.

Here’s the thing, man just a little friendly advice. You need to step back from the forum. You’ve been tangling with folks in that KB vs. Controller thread for three, four days straight. And I hate to say it, but you got stomped. Lost that debate by a landslide. You couldn’t back up your points or hold your ground.

Now you’re here, looking to take it out on someone who’s done absolutely nothing to you. Listen, my native language? It’s Spanish. I like bringing my personality and expressions into English. If that bugs you, well… don’t read my posts. Simple as that.

As a companion, I’m giving you a little nudge here. Go walk it off. Get some fresh air, clear your head. Step away from the game, the forum, all of it. You’re wound tighter than a tripwire, and it ain’t doing you any favors.

I gotta say, I hate these suggestions


What’s got me thinkin’, though, is how Fujito-san’s gonna pull off adding new gear without makin’ the stuff we already worked for feel useless. You know, like AF+3, Relic+3, Empyrean+3, or that Odyssey V25 set.

For sure... nothing can be obsoleted. That's why I think the +4 Relic/AF idea floating around is a pipe dream. +3 Ambu gear could be on the table though

Sortie cut it down to 30 minutes. Sure, give out less points, like 75% of what ya’d get in 60, but save folks some time.
I may be the minority in my opinion, but I think sortie is extremely well designed. 1hr is much better than Dynamis' 2hr.
The KI distribution is the biggest gripe, as I think all modern content should have Omen's KI system. Otherwise, Sortie is a piece of content with an accessible floor for new players, a learning curve where players can transition to doing more bosses 1 step at a time, and a very high ceiling for the most competent players to pull all 9 bosses and up to 90k galli per run. I dont think the content needs to be changed at all. If your dissatisfied with it, the arguement that primes and/or empy+3 costs were way too upscaled is more reasonable. This problem can be solved with other methods of obtaining the currency... or god forbid, allowing players to trade in worthless rocks for currency

Dynamis Divergence trim it to 60 minutes. Start at Wave 2, shave off some of those circles in Wave 3, so people can actually wrap it up in an hour.
So they need to fundamentally redesign the entire content?
Where are players meant to get shards now. I get it... the content is boring and the 1st wave isnt very rewarding in terms of RP, but its Extremely easy to bypass wave 1 within 5 minutes to any competent group. I get that the 2hrs sucks, as I mentioned earlier, but its basically a staple of the content.
It's meant to be a call back to OG dynamis, and for newer groups getting their wave 3 clear may take well over the hour. I dont think its fair to disparage weaker players, and the methods to b-line it to the bosses save enough time that you can farm whichever wave you want.

And Limbus cooldown to 60 Earth hours, and let us run it for just 1 hour.
Who's doing Limbus in 2024... and whos even asking for this to be redone. And you want it to be the same as Dynamis? SE kind of already recognized that Dyanmis's cooldown is an unnecessary bottleneck, which is why they adjusted the KI last patch. I dont think more limited content will be helpful

I mean, think about it askin’ people to do daily Sortie and Odyssey, spendin’ hours on Dynamis every week, then tackin’ on two hours of Limbus twice a week? Man, that’s just too damn much.
I mean, every game will have its activities and limits, especially dailies. If you add more content, it wont be IN PLACE of these things, it will be In Addition To. The best thing you can do to alleviate old content that takes up too much of your time, is the make it more rewarding so that people can complete it faster. More RP in Dyna W1/W2? more cards from omen. Once older stuff gets stale, add catch up mechanics to incentivize players who had been finished with the content to go back in and reap rewards, while also getting new players/jobs up to speed faster

Limbus is already a 1 hr cooldown with Rhapsody KI, but I also haven't done Limbus in a decade or something.

I bought a fair amount of merch last year for that very same in ten years reason.

Truthfully it depends on your views with merch, if you have to have only official stuff then sure. But I've had a lot of custom stuff made for shirts, mugs, figures etc from all different sellers and most of the official merch is usually the cheapest looking ones. Thankfully the gsme is obscure you csn usually find stuff easy on secondary market and cheaper than most, so no real danger of missing out. I've even seen the tarutaru set being sold all the time now.

Can't agree there. People are generally asking for the things that maletaru is willing to comprehensively provide like high level strats. Maybe just a solid discusion.

Nobody is looking for a wall of text that is a rambling mess with syntax errors that is a chore to read. That's the only thing crazyvic knows how to do. There is never any concrete info or helpful tips for other people. So don't do the everyone's allowed to have an opinon so they're the same, because they aren't the same. One is being asked for, one is not.

Crazyvic can still post whatever so long as it hits guidelines for posts, just like anyone can also tell him that his posts are terrible and that he's barely communicating. Maybe he'll care and get more effective at communicating. Or he won't, it's not like he's going to get worse.

I'll never understand why people keep bringing up the omen entry KI system as the shining example of how to do it right.

I don't have any problem understanding any of Vic's posts, and I don't usually have any problem with Maletaru either. Maybe I'm in the wrong here, but that specific post just seemed a bit harsh and not genuine criticism from not being able to understand him. Either way, I think I'll take Vic's advice for myself and take a break from posting for a while. Happy adventuring all!

When it comes to FFXI, I’ll admit it Malateru’s got more experience and is a more well-rounded player than me. He’s the kind of guy who’s gonna give better advice, no doubt. Me? I’m just your average X-DD main. If we were talking rankings, from bronze to diamond, I’d be sitting in silver while Malateru’s off in some higher league altogether.

As for Dex, I don’t even bother responding to him anymore. Ever since that spat over the MNK guide, I know he’s had it out for me.

Now, you? You’re kinda doing the same thing, but in this sneaky “politician” style. You toss your jabs, then act like you didn’t. You’re subtle about it, Vic, but it’s still there like a backhanded compliment with a smirk.

Here’s the deal: if someone doesn’t like the way I post, there’s this handy button called “blacklist.” Go ahead and click it. Makes it easier for all of us, no drama, no wasted time, peace

I never said I couldn't understand anything. I also have no problem understanding his words. He's quite articulate for a non-native speaker of English. Some posts, including and especially the one I originally quoted, have a really weird tone, like a "stream of consciousness" with no filter, and a lot of strange word choices/abbreviations. It genuinely looks like ai wrote it (or assisted with it).

I don't hold personal grudges or consider a person's history with me (or others) when writing my posts, i just give my opinions on the topics at hand and the words they wrote. So whatever all this clique and feuding nonsense is, I'm not interested.

I also don't blacklist people. It's not productive and there are very few people who never contribute anything of value. If you don't want your posts criticisized, don't post.

I can't say I wouldn't hate Sortie less if it were shorter, but with all the running around and all the silly time-consuming objectives to complete, a 30 minute Sortie would basically only work as a boss rush, you couldn't engage with the content as designed that way.

What if we went the other way? 2 hour Sortie, reduced points for objectives, more for monster kills, but the monsters are six levels stronger. Juice up the bosses - basically make this hard mode for them - and make them produce more points, maybe drop their items a little more frequently. Make this version alliance content, give it a 60 hour lockout, and make it an option for players when they go to enter normal Sortie (both share the same cooldown, so alliance Sortie locks you out of normal Sortie for 60 hours too, normal Sortie bars you from entering alliance Sortie for 20 hours.)

On paper I kinda agree with you, but then again AF and Relic "upgrades" (not necessarily +4, but what else could it be?) were specifically mentioned by SE, whereas Ambu+3 wasn't, so...
But yeah, I'm a bit skeptic myself.

Granted that for AF allowing for a +4 version (+5 to basic stats, +X to some, not all, of the special stats, and +2% to WSD to bring it in line with empy+3) doesn't seem like it would break anything, would it? I mean maybe a couple of exceptions I can't think of atm but for the large majority of items it wouldn't really change any current tier list.


Yes, appearently it's like you said. But realistically I think they "feel" different, and this is because of the following reasons.
First, Dyna you couldn't go more than once every 3 days and this makes a huge difference in the burn-out process, despite being 2hrs instead of 1hr.
Second, while there's a lot of incentive in continuing to do Dyna, you are not "forced". Want to upgrade a SU5 item to R25? You're done in max 5 runs per item AND you can upgrade it with items instead of runs (or mix & match) if you so prefer. So you have options. One is clearly much better than the other, but you still feel like you have a choice.
And you can continue to do Dyna for money or whatever else, but you don't "have" to. You don't have that bad feeling you get for missing a single Sortie run.
In Sortie you have a lot of pressure if you want to keep that ~6 months schedule of farming the necessary points. And for >95% of people who only do at best 8 bosses runs, you can't afford to miss more than a couple of runs every month.

Psychologically this feels incredibly worse compared to Dyna and it all works in synergy towards the point of creating burnouts.

I wrote ambu+3 off just cause it seemed like that's what emp+2/3 became, as far as getting your foot in the door towards ilvl 119 revision 4 or 5, whatever one we're on now.

But if they want to keep ambu as i guess a core part of the game cycle then thad be one way to do it, cant say id be against some stat bloated improvements on the already good pieces either with likely additional DT and the like tacked on

Nice.

Still a hand full of slots they can do JSE

This is literally the reason why me and my friends quit the game (we're a group of 6 players).

Doing Odyssey and Sortie daily felt like coming home from work and going back to work, after a few weeks it was exhausting and VERY tedious.

I've been playing the game for many years, but the daily Odyssey and Sortie design seems to me to be the worst design FFXI has ever had, and this past year was the first time I cancelled my subscription.

We'll see if this new content is any good and it's NOT DAILY, because I'd love to get back into the game, but I hate daily tasks.

And I'm surprised Squareenix would make this mistake, they already had excellently designed time-locked content that never felt tedious like Nyzul Isle, Assaults, Salvage or ISNM to name a few examples.

By the way, I wish they would release Nyzul Isle V3 and Salvage V3, they seem to me to be the best content that an MMORPG has ever had.

The problem with Sortie and Ody isn't that it's bad content, it's that they are allowing players to do it too much and that there isn't much variation. Serious mmo players have very little self control, because they feel they are in a rat race with their peers. This will lead to them burning themselves out.

As an mmo developer you have to treat your players like children and act like their mom, if you give your kid a massive tub of ice cream it's gonna eat the whole thing, get sick and puke all over the cat.

They need to limit how often you can do these things to a max of 3 times a week, so people create a rotation of content as with Omen or Dyna D. Also boost the rewards to take into account the fewer entries.

In general I agree with everything you said with your post, and the mom/children/cake metaphor is quite effective at conveying the core of your message.

I won't deny there is a problem with Odyssey and Sortie daily-grind resorting to people getting a burnout out of them, as a matter of fact I complained about this multiple times.


Yet "something" tells me it's not as simple and this thing isn't the only aspect that plays a role into this scenario.
I think about Omen, you could do Omen everyday too, you were compelled to actually, yet have you ever heard of people complain because they burnout on Omen?
I mean, maybe there's someone but I really never seen anything of the sort.
So what is different here, I wonder?

Omen had:
-1% drops to create a chance of excitement every run
-very useful drops with medium rates from mid bosses (with a roughly 1/9 chance each, a party of 6 needed several months to cap on them typically due to variance)
-niche but desirable mainboss drops that could take quite a while to cap on (melee rings being the biggest, but ammurapi is nice too)
-Fast and variable. Each run was a different boss, so you didn't do the exact same thing. It was less than half the length of Sortie for a good group, even relatively early on. The bosses/runs were all very similar, but different drops created more excitement when your boss was up.

Sortie has no interesting drops besides JSE earrings, and the emotional satisfaction of seeing a slightly better augment is much less than that of getting a piece of gear that's finished/complete. A +2 earring is nice, but if it's not also maxed you can't completely check it off your list. Droprate for your job's earring(regardless of tier) is considerably lower than the chance the item you want will show up on a given Omen boss. Design mechanisms like spreading earrings between NMs might have increased engagement; you'd feel more excitement doing the NM that dropped the ear you care about.

On top of that, Omen existed alongside escha/reisenjima, which were lengthy and challenging content that encapsulated a large portion of player attention for years. The only other notable piece of content that endgame players currently have is Odyssey, and I would wager a considerable portion have either written it off or completed it at this point.

Don't worry i took that survey
An ***all over Odyssey and Sortie
Probably ban worthy haha

If he's writing it legitimately, he's definitely an interesting individual. I don't think he is, though. It's more apparent if you look at his older posts from 2022, where he was unable to form complete sentences but kept the same disjointed style. Perhaps English isn't his first language, and he uses the AI for our benefit. It's still jarring to read chatgpt prose coming from a forum user, though. I don't have a great solution if he needs it to communicate effectively, but it doesn't feel right to engage with an AI-written post either.

Very valid points.
To which I would add the freedom (or illusion of such) of choice.
You could do daily runs if you wanted, but you could also store KIs and do runs twice a week, or mix & match something in between.

This aspect plays a big and synergic role with some of the points you made, towards the end of noticeably slowing down the building of "burnout".

The negative part we can say about Omen maybe is the lack of challenge. Granted at launch with 6men limitation I wouldn't say Omen was particularly easy, but that didn't last long, they enabled alliance entry a few months after release, not years.

So yeah, people who are looking for a challenge certainly weren't satisfied by that, which you can instead find in Odyssey V25 and I guess in Sortie 9bosses runs.
Granted that people with this necessity are probably a very negligible percentage of the overall player base, but still, they should be thrown a bone as well at least every now and then.

Not that I have much experience with it, but I don't see Ody v25 as a gameplay challenge at all. More of a "build up 18 jobs between 6 people that all have the same goal and motivation to stay together for X months/years until they complete it because the content is designed around 3KI fights at the higher tiers or you're just hoping for RNG-Jesus to shine upon thee".

When the reward is a pretty much insignificant in the grand scheme of things 5% bonus to already existing stats from v20.. it becomes very hard to justify that kind of time investment, given the game is old enough to vote and drink in the continental United States and its population is quickly approaching retirement age.

That might sound like a reach to people more experienced with the content than I, not sure.

With Sortie at least you don't get a feeling of complete and utter failure by losing at 25, 15, 10 or even 1%. You get some points towards armor/weapon progression, some old cases and so forth.

No, there is nothing sneaky or subtle about what I was saying. It was concise. The opposite of rambling. That's in your head. I'm not going to waste a bunch of time trying to offend you because that wasn't the point of the post.

I'm also not going to block anyone because that means I see less of a forum. That's just stupid.

If you don't appreciate that maletaru wants to communicate with you and is willing to be straightforward with you that you grammar is terrible, then don't get better.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to show support for people who take the time to post well thought out ideas that are easy to read. If they weren't here, I wouldn't be here. With Prothscar dying and Simon hopefully enjoy life, there are fewer of them here. Show your appreciation for people while you can.