Is FFXI Dying?

FFXI idles in twilight helm/mail. No matter how many times you try to kill it...

This thread was pre-abyssea, wow.

Jaerik was spot on about the future of online gaming. Only one inaccuracy: dual transaction games didn't end up being healthier. Instead they're played for a couple months til the next one drops then dumped and scrapped. Good for the studio bad for the player. Otherwise everything he said ended up being true.

I dunno... SE side of things they bring in some new guy who downsizes the entire dev team and basically tells us to expect fewer updates and no more new content.

Meanwhile you get people using software like epic games unreal driver 5 stuff revamping stunning graphics


I'm not trying to plug this particular company. I'm also not sure how many hours of work it took to revamp the graphics this way. Considering how many loyal FFXI customers they've had, who they are still profiting from (check the Database - realistically I would estimate people have 2 accounts and maybe 5 mules total?). How much time would using something like this cost? Or, God forbid, they do it without a cost-benefit mindset considering their loyal fanbase.

I'll never forget a heated debate we all had and him saying FF7 would never be remade. Its impossible, they lost the source code! And all the likes he got debating me on it and turns out he was wrong. Not everyone on the internet being an armchair dev is correct. But I never forget!

I said it before but, every publisher says "we don't have the source code, we "can't" remake it" and so it "can't" be done, until they decide it can.

Every game. Every time. Can't doesn't exist in business, only cost:benefit.

To be fair, SE was really inconsistent in their messaging about this and I'm fairly certain they said at one point they wanted the series to move on. The most positive indication I remember hearing them say after that insane and baffling PS3 trailer was that they would consider doing it, but only if certain staff members could participate and they were tied up for the foreseeable future. They got asked about it a lot after that and the answer changed with some frequency, so the message was never really clear.

"Never" is also a strong word in this context, I'd probably have said "unlikely for the foreseeable future", which is basically what I remember the summary of their interviews saying (with a few exceptions).

You can paint it with 2024, but it's still gonna play like 2002.


People were asking if the game was dying while it still had ~700k subs. We've shed 90% of that by now so the idea of 'loyal customers' is kinda washed. Looks even worse considering most of those remaining are duplicates and RMT.

I dunno, I'm still having fun with it. After all these years, finally wrapping my head around multi-boxing. But I can't ignore the fact that I often find myself the only one in a zone. Or that outside of jp prime time my 5 characters usually make up >1% of the active characters on my server. How many other 5-6 boxers are there - prob at least a dozen or two. Not so many actual people.

that sounds not fun. i get some people like smaller pop servers, but multi box or not you ought to at least have the option to play with others if the need arises.

The entire point of the multi is literally to avoid that need from arising.

Assbackwards *** people. "fill in jobs" blatant lies.

One interesting note, is that there isnt anyone from the old 15 years side of this topic currently active in this site anymore.

The game went from a 12.95 a month MMO to a $120 a month single player game. The community in game has become an anti-social bot fest. The game isn't dying, the servers are still on but it is dead.

Stuff that was 'new' / occurring in 2009, for context on how long ago this thread was. :)

Song Releases:
>>> Gotta Feeling --- Black Eyed Peas
>>> New Divide --- Linkin Park
>>> 21 Guns --- Green Day
>>> One Time --- Justin Bieber

Movies/Entertainment:
>>> District 9
>>> 2012
>>> Where the Wild Things Are
>>> Terminator Salvation
>>> Monsters Vs. Aliens
>>> Parks and Recreation Debuts

Politics:
>>> "Miracle on the Hudson", Flight 1549 lands in Hudson River.
>>> Barack Obama is elected president of USA.
>>> Swine Flu Pandemic

Games:
>>> Left 4 Dead 2
>>> Dragon Age Origins
>>> Plants Vs. Zombies
>>> Infamous
>>> League of Legends
>>> Halo Wars
>>> Assassin's Creed II

This also was posted on youtube:

Predictions being correct or not has nothing to do with being an armchair or not though...since people make predictions using the experiences from the past and present.

Technology changes over time, business model also changes. Back in 2009 games on cellphone has poor graphic quality, indie game market barely existed, HD-2D style didn't exist back then....

These days AAA games like Resident evil village can run on cellphones, one of the most profitable business model is gacha, indie game market is big and HD2D remakes are profitable. The entire industry is soooo different from 15 years ago.

Even if you have 40 years of experience how can you possibly predict all the change 15 years later, when many of the technology and business model didn't exist back in 2009?

Just because someone made a prediction 15 years ago, doesn't make them armchair or expert imo.

I am under the impression that microtransactions IS the most logical business model.

RMT existed as long as the entire mmo history, it can never disappear because there is a demand. It can not be eliminated just like porn.

If your game don't have microtransactions, then the money goes to people who do RMT, not the game studio.

If you are the owner of the studio, would you let all those money goes to some random guy on the internet selling gold, or would you sell gold yourself and get all that money? I thought the answer is obvious.

It does not matter if microtransactions ultimately kills mmo(I doubt it), it is a direction that is hard to avoid imo.


I would blame gamers having too many entertainment to choose from for that, since modern gamers often prefer fast entertainment experience. Even if microtransactions don't exist, many modern gamers will probably RMT so they can quickly experience the game then play the next game, or don't play at all. I've seen plenty of FFXI player are like that too.

Someone porting stuff into Unreal Engine is not the same as a corporation that has to pay wages for people and have to actually make content for a live service game.

Also in business, when a new person takes over a project the people in charge of him effectively have no trust in him being able to retain players and keep the game profitable, so they get a massive reduction in budget.

If the new leader can show they are "safe" then they will get the budget increased year on year and when that happens they can bring people back and start making content again, this is how business works.

Because XI still offers a kind of mmorpg that you cannot get anywhere else, people are still going to keep playing it and many who stopped playing will come back when they start making content again.

It really does not matter how old XI gets, because it's never being made obsolete by a game offering something similar.


No it's not at all, the game just had to adapt to people who were not in college anymore. aka they had to offer the ability to solo things, which is great because half of us still playing only do so becasue it allows us to do that. If you want to get into a linkshell and be social and do content with others you can do that still, the problem is that many are anti social by nature and unless the game forces you to do something you lack the ability to do it yourself.

FF7R is a complete rewrite, not a remake. Depending on the context it was said in, he could be right that they couldn't remake the game to the original exactly (updating models and textures while retaining all the logic of the game) without the source code.

FFXI is dying though. Even on the most populated server how many people do you think are doing Odyssey or Sortie each day? A few hundred only. If content with top gear in that you could enter daily without competition was added this way in even 2010 it would be >1000 active players.

You do know what the R stand for right? Looks like it's creators disagree with you lol

I was in my third year at university.

2 years later I would graduate and spend one year before getting my first job.

After I had my first paycheck, I went to a game store (those existed at that time), and found a copy of FFXI for XBOX.

1 year later I have found FFXIAH.

As cringe as it sounds, this became my internet favorite site of all time (in the NSFW category)

Everything alive is dying, so yes

Unreal Engine 5 will cost them a 5% royalty on profits after their first 1m. in theory, this could mean Unreal siphoning off 5% of the monthly fees, since new sales of FFXI are cratered, and would likely be part of that profit equation (one would assume). then you have the expense of hiring a team to do all that conversion as they likely cannot expect CBU3 to keep doing the leadup to a new XIV expansion AND re-rendering a massively large 20 year old game on life support AND getting someone to plead to the investors that this will make its expense back in X unreasonable timeframe because the game IS on life support.

"BuT tHeY cAn MaKe A cLaSsIc SeRvEr AnD mAkE iT aLl BaCk"

people are not going to come and pay for that ***. aside from the fact that no one will agree on when the best era of the game was, the number of people who would be swayed to come and play the game when it actively spat in your face regarding time commitment are going to be minimal. this is the reason why Private Servers tend to have a boom and slow hemorrhage period - people come back for the novelty, play for a little while, hit the level 30+ XP climb, and drop off. this is also why XP rings frequently give out of era bonuses, as that 2000 bonus XP doesn't stretch very far even in the mid-levels.

XI has been bad at adapting to the needs of its playerbase, which is why we have hemorrhaged subs over the years, in which the majority of its casual base has less and less time to spend on its content as well as enabling that content to be completed in a reasonable timeframe. the addition of your Adventuring Fellow alone took entirely too long when players needed at least a LITTLE autonomy, coupled with badly balancing jobs and pitifully low drop rates (anyone who remembers Bhaflau Ramparts has horror stories of chasing some of those drops).

this is also why WoW started eating our players, and arguably did more damage than anything else over the game's lifespan.

Fixing the setup and login processes and giving the game a marketing budget above $0.00 would go a long way. I see new players popping in all the time, and a good chunk of them stick around.

As it turns out, there's a market for sandbox MMORPGs. It just sucks most people aren't even aware the subgenre even exists.

What I gonna say gonna hurt,

- the game ain’t dying yet, but SE is trying hard
- content is highly redundant
- Static is the base of toxicity of XI, prevent people sharing experiences, people that have accomplished stuff just ignore helping other like if that make them stand out?!?
- Asura is somehow the healthiest server (from Phoenix, moved there, then moved back) in a sense. I saw a lot more people shouting to team up there in an hour than in a month on phoenix. That itself create an healthier player base
- RMT RMT RMT…. I get it, totally automated, but why SE still give the hammer to regular folks then?!? (Nope I did not get a hammer!!!)
- the game is huge, mechanics are amazing, nothing compares
- the unreal thing will have to come from the overly talented players
- only players that are open to play with others will keep the game going
- long live XI

Do bans still happen; yes

Do they happen enough; not even remotely

The STF ban numbers get posted every month, it was 692 accounts in January, which is less than it's been since 9/2020.

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/rule/specialtask.html

Anecdotally, I know several people banned between Sept and November. These were real players, not bots or mules.

They don't give a lot of context around the numbers, but people are getting banned.

This opens a great question which is how do you measure server health?

The number of active characters doesn't fluctuate too wildly from JP, NA, and EU prime times. Our Besieges are attended and our Mireu's get killed. Wait times for instances aren't unreasonable and fluctuate upwards during weekends and near cutoff dates. You can generally find the things you want for sale. There aren't really any merc service shouts for content, just for exp.

What other metrics should we be looking at? [edit: obviously profitability for SE is the only metric that matters when it comes to server activity, but there are QoL proxies for that which keep ppl subbed]