December 2023 Version Update

The rewards are not worth the effort. Even the global rewards are just bad. Those who do Ambu already will see a minor difference in seal usage and those who don't... well, nothing changes for them. The personal rewards are mostly "meh", with the exception of the 100 deeds. Gold is 1 box, job points or exemplar points? Job points are a joke, as is one box. For Exemplar points to be worth it, it would have be ~500k or more (even at 500k it is questionable as to the worth).

Couple that with dailies being limited to 100 points a day and you have to clear all of them at least 12 days of the 13 we have, players are going to write them off (WTF SE, no breathing room at all).

Yeah, this is on SE. V1 is not great for knocking out the dallies and V2 is severely HP limited. This is assuming players have the "right" jobs for this. I feel bad for anyone who doesn't have a geared RDM at this point, being able to easily do all the dallies a one job is nice.

I duo as RDM + GEO for 2 runs and RDM + BRD for 1 run on VD V2. Focusing on 2 of the 3 elementals + WS\SC for RDM and burst\3rd elemental, for both takes 2 runs. I get the healing for both as well during these 2 runs. I have needed a 4th run every time to complete the odd missing daily but it is clearly possible to finish all dallies for 2 characters in 3 runs of VD V2.

I just do not see how you can do this efficiently with more than 2 players. If the v2 mob is in wrong stance, your burst of thunder (tier 1) will hit for 28k or your WS will hit for 30k.

Also the gallantry requirement is completely out of touch. Not because it is hard to get (it isn't) but because the dallies push the player to solo\duo for efficiency.

Should have made a platinum or diamond tier reward that permanently unlocks Cornelia Trust. That would have tripled engagement

I agree the rewards are mostly *** (personal rewards), but IDK about this one...


I think getting 30 seals for free (assuming you only do 1 difficulty) is a much bigger deal than "a minor difference in seal usage"


Use a shitty nuke set. No chance you're doing 28k with a T1 nuke in a ***set.

I've done 6 characters' worth of nukes on the V2. Cures are easy too, the hardest part is WS/SC, since you need a lot of those. It takes some experimenting but it's not too hard to do this.

The biggest issue is the rewards, as most people have said. Even the ambu reward which is, IMO, insanely good, is hard to quantify because of the way they made it work. It could be worth 18k hallmarks and 9200 gallantry every day for a month, or it could be worth absolutely nothing, depends how much ambu you do and at what level. Granted, it's certainly not worth doing EVERY tier of ambu just to take advantage of the "seal" effect, but at the very least VD + D of intense are good, that's 12k free Hallmarks and 5400 free gallantry every day.

I think that's very significant. If you do 2 Ambus a day SE gives you 8 stacks of Alex for free (or half a cape, or whatever).

SE's expectations are really weird...

To hit the base goal, 54250 players need to hit bronze tier. Even with silver tier (which is 3x the effort of bronze), it requires 18084 players. If 12520 players reach gold tier, that will unlock the base reward.

If you miss 2 days, you cannot reach gold tier.

Things that would drive engagement:
Exemplar bonus reward
Muffin bonus reward
Community vote for an extra campaign option (wildcard, but I cant imagine trolls would grind a bunch just to pick chocobo digging)
Something with Ody/Gaol (weaken V25 aura potency?)

Things that dont drive engagement:
Ambuscade bonus reward for grinding a bunch of ambuscade

Everyone can agree that the base goal was never attainable. They clearly are extremely out of touch and came up with that number with some botched calculation, either based on the previous month of ambu's preformance, or based on total players/active subs without adjusting for multiboxers and bots.... fail either way.

To argue the personal contribution rewards are also lackluster/unimpressive/not worth the effort is also an issue, but irrelevant due to the prior fact that the goal isnt even obtainable. Even if the goal was obtainable, if the rewards are what they are now it's highly unlikely they'd convince players to contribute the necessary amount.

Vana'bout will probably cease to exist or they need to overhaul the concept.

Or they could just change the RoE objectives and goal. They don't need to change the concept at all.

Literally any other campaign bonus or reward would have driven more engagement. I get that they wanted to start with a goal or bonus that would be universally appealing to all players, but also not something that would reward gdlk-level loot for simple tasks. But they just didn't think through this at all. People aren't motivated to grind even more for nothing great

If I'm SE, I would have put something outrageously good in the highest tier, which would have encouraged unsubbed players too resubscribe to have a chance to hit the goal. It costs them nothing to give out bonanza weapons to a select few; they could have easily done it here. Would have made them a few more bucks in the process. Idk, maybe they need to hire community reps or solicit player feedback for future programs. These are just not it.

I disagree. I do not know anyone who regularly uses 30 seals a month or anyone who wants to run Ambu once a day for 30 days. Your circle may be different but mine is not going to get that much of a benefit. When we run Ambu, we normally do so in blocks of 4-6 runs. With the bonus, VD and D are worth running with the free seal. N is worth it if you are running VD without a seal.


or they will lie, and make up numbers that make it looke like the player base completed it

Nobody uses 30 seals a month on Ambuscade because nobody has 30 seals a month to use. People Seg farm and Sortie every single day for 30/60 minutes, never missing a day, for normal points. People would be thrilled to spend 15 minutes or less daily to get double points. It's just another quick thing to do every day vs doing blocks of 4-6 runs at once.

If they put bonanza weapons in ANY tier it would be completed by 80% of the server and they'd be common as dirt.

I guess the good news is the objective would be completed, so it would be better? than this.

Exemplar bonus campaign
Segment bonus campaign
Double/triple unity upgrade mats from Odyssey (drive people to do Sheol A / B?)
Gallimaufry bonus campaign
"Free Ruspix Plate" Campaign (2 runs a day)
Sortie campaign where all boxes dropped are now +1
Cornelia / MatsuiP unlocks (perma?)
Extending the current, known Campaign rather than an unknown future one...
Guaranteed "PLUS" on the next months campaigns is a small ask
If a stretch goal is met they could offer Brand new campaigns (not my job to think of content) or hell... offer an Additional Bonanza?

BETTER REWARDS FOR PARTICIPATION.... would it kill them to offer a track of rewards to drive participation that isnt useless?
A Starstone / +1 Box
Pulse Coupon
Venus Orb
Rainbow Mog Pell
A Coupon to get any login point item (to let people get things they missed)
Plenty more meaningful/valuable things to get people salivating.
They should also just be handing out Maat's concoctions like candy at this point, if they're offering 10k Exemplars for random events + daily BCNMs like it's nothing.


I mean.... sure they could... but it seems both the JP and EN side of the game are painfully aware of the state of this, and vocally disappointed. I think it'd require a director note and apology rather than a fudging of the numbers

Maybe for your group but just getting setup for the first run is 15~30 minutes for mine.


No one I know wants to do Sortie or Odyssey everyday. They do it because they have to do it in that format and the rewards are worth it.

2 ways I can see it going from here

A) Letter from Fujito telling us how they *** up and giving us the campaign as a gimme

B) nothing, swept under the rug

Suppose they could also find a way to blame us

I don't even see this as a problem anymore, if people worked for the reward. The weapons have been out for some time now and they have already been indiscriminately awarded to alts and mules by mere chance. It would have made more sense to put an actual desirable reward in this challenge to entice people to do it and get the shiny on a main, but also encourage resubs. Like I said, the weapons cost them nothing and they could have even set it so high that only players who met the goals perfectly every day could even get it. It would have benefitted SE and players get something for their efforts. Instead, people look at the reward and scoff at the grind as not worth it.

They're not even that good... save for maybe the Katana? while ninja is vastly underutilized in the current meta... The staff? cute. The weapons are all cute and by no means competition to the current REMA hierarchy

Maybe the real Vanbout reward is the unification of the player base on how stupid it is, at a time when basically every other thread has everyone shitting on each other.


It still kinda blows my mind they put the development effort into those, some of which have new-ish mechanics, for such a small subset of people to ever see them. Seems like a waste and, in the current phase of the game, I'm not even sure how useful most of them are. I'd rather Rank 1 be a finished Prime than anything on that list (although having a sword for DNC would be nice...)


My issue with the katana is that the entire group has to be built around it and NIN, even with full damage reduction gear, isn't really equipped to get hit like that in most endgame content now. The enmity generation is insane but it kinda sucks if you can't be hit and so much bypasses or erases shadows. OTOH the utility of having AoE Utsusemi would be interesting, but the utility of that seems like it'd be outweighed by the enmity generation when the NIN pulls hate and gets smoked

I don't even care about how strong or good the bonanza items are, I'm just using them as an example. I mentioned Cornelia earlier. It's just a little annoying they give out decently designed unique weapons as random hat drawing prizes, but actual global effort goals nets you something a HTBF from half a decade ago gives. They didn't even TRY to make people care about this challenge.

I'd be 200% down for a Cornelia unlock. Make it part of the objective every month or just a permanent thing.

The problem is how rushed/half baked it seems with 0 thought put into the rewards, going with bare minimum effort almost like throwing a dart at a board... despite the content getting delayed

Except the bonus is once a day. Most groups (or multiboxers) would rather set up shop and burn 1-2 hours doing a couple V1VD back to back and get it done for the month, or a handful of runs a week for the seal RoE. They dont want to do one fight and do it again the next day.

This bonus benefits the low-tier soloers who take 15-20 minutes per fight on V2VD and V1VE/E and are likely to be doing Ambu as a daily.

The critical first (in this case, mis)step SE missed was thinking Ambuscade is enough of a draw on it's own. It's not that the rewards aren't good, but many players are beyond the rewards that are specific to Ambuscade, i.e. I don't need any more weapons, armor or capes so why would I want to be forced to play daily when I can farm other content for currency at my leisure?


The second misstep was making it a daily. Ambuscade has one weekly RoE quest. This should have been the other weekly. I don't/can't play daily and I understand not penalizing or holding back players who can play daily. If the idea was to have everyone contribute, they shouldn't have made it daily progression.

Realistically... None of these events in any game that serve as a carrot on a stick if players "group together and do x objective x times" should ever be close to failure... the premise is, we want our players to PLAY the game, but if they play a little extra or do this thing we want them to do more, they'll get a little reward for their effort.

For it to just straight up fail, and by an astronomical margin, is completely unacceptable and antithetical to the purpose of the event in the first place.

I don't think moaning about it here will change anything and it's all been said a million times already... but its definitely having an opposite effect of what they wanted. People who would have joined in for a community event are seeing how ***and unwinnable it is, and just avoiding it, or not playing at all.

Hell we're 3%(?) deep in 2 or 3 days of the 'Bout, so we'd need 8-9% contributions each day for the remainder to hit the base goal... the base goal should ALWAYS have been going to happen, even if players haphazardly made progress... the stretch goals should have been the real push for the community to tryhard it.

If it were just get 1 billion hallmarks it'd get done. Good rewards, bad rewards, wouldn't matter. Pure bonus. (1b/3600 = 46000 6 member runs without seals)

Overengineered ***. Convoluted for no reason.

OR make it miserable but make the carrot irresistible. Both options work. And work well. Don't reinvent the wheel.

Omen KI's were perfect... then we got Odyssey and scratched out heads... Ok sure, we'll get 1 a day but can store 1 if we choose not to run. Not the worst but definitely a downgrade.

Then we got Ruspix plate.. and just why.

06am _20k / 250k / 400k
12pm 210k / 500k / 800k
06pm 260k / 750k / 1.2m
12am 330k / 1m / 1.6m
06am 421k / 1.3m / 2m
12pm 575k / 1.6m / 2.4m
06pm 625k / 1.9m / 2.8m
12am 697k / 2.2m / 3.2m - Where it needs to be

Ruspix KI would be the perfect system if the #s were changed. Even with the numbers now it still serves a purpose, it's just not the purpose/design that the players would like.

Ruspix as it is rewards you with bonus time in smaller increments, so you can slowly save up an extra free tag. You can't do this with any other system in the game. Omen, Ody, Dynamis, etc. have 20h tags, but most people go every day so the extra 4h go to waste, unless you're willing to *** your whole schedule up chasing it around the clock. Ruspix allows you to save 1h of those 4h and "gain" it back later.

The issue with this is that it saves at 1/4 the rate, so if you miss a day you're not gaining a whole day's tag, you're only gaining 1/4 of a tag. If it saved at 1:! ratio it would just be an objectively better system than anything they've ever released before.

Presumably they didn't do this because they wanted to encourage people to go every day (by reducing the incentive for storing time). You could argue this is bad design and how everyone hates dailies and FOMO and whatever you want. Regardless, in my opinion, Ruspix plate system is better than Ody, Omen, or any other daily lockout they've ever implemented, with the asterisk (if you like) of the rate at which it charges. If you Ody every day at the same time you're wasting 4h of time every day, if you Sortie every day at the same time, you're slowly gaining time and will get a free entrance after N days. Ditto Omen, Dynamis, etc. Plus you can spend it in smaller increments. If you only have half a day's time saved and want to go 12h early (to go with a different group, to change the group's time, to go before a holiday, etc.), you can do that. Can't do that with Ody tags.

Making the recharge 20h (or 60h for Dyna) instead of 24h/72h is to balance out the long FFXI-Tradition of people coming late to scheduled events. You've got the wrong idea speaking of "wasting 4 hours".

Another thing overlooked:
If you miss a day (or two if you stayed up late/woke up early on day one), you're out of the running for gold tier.

This runs from December 12 to December 25...Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Two days where people generally celebrate the holidays with their family, not play games. Doomed.