Dev Tracker - Discussion

:(

is it actually projected for service to end? like has anything been said in response to the post made and that the new director is actually taking questions about the status of the game? i understand downsizing the dev team again. but who knows whats going to happen, i just don't want to see the game end yet

Nah, they haven't said anything about service ending.

All Fujito-san said is that development is further scaling down. So the lack of updates we had is now even.. lackier.. of updates.

Surprised there was even a new storyline with VR, but for sure that is the last new content to be added, if there is even any new content at the end of it.

I gotta say, as someone who bashed 14 for a LONG time, it is in an incredible place right now and just got two of the best expansions in all of MMOs back to back. 14 is keeping a large chunk of the company afloat.

Kinda the opposite. They said they scaling update down to secure longevity.

That being said, SE can make dynamic choices and if even less updates will mean people unsubscribing, then they might cut it down at some point, but that would be the only reason.

When XI is no longer profitable, that's when service may come to an end.

No company would terminate a profitable product that costs them very little to maintain.

14 is cool until you catch up. The fact that your gear/progress is reset every 6 months really kills the long term appeal.

What they should do is put out a request for volunteers to further develop the game. If someone at home can set up a private server, then surely develop and control the retail server under the watch of the producer, I'm pretty certain it would continue.

Having the players tune the game into what it could be would be big PR for them too. Seems like a missed opportunity....

Companies can terminate the product that brings profits as long as they estimate that using the same resources for other products would bring them even more profit.

This is probably what makes Draylo think that a flop of the further Final Fantasy titles could be good for XI. If S-E would decide that expanding XI is more profitable than creating new games, they would relocate their resources back here.

Though, I doubt that it would ever happen.

I wonder if going into uber maintenance mode will lead to a reduction in subscription fees.


SE:

This is what keeps me from playing MMO's like WoW and FFXIV, the hard reset every expansion. I don't mind gear getting better as time goes on, but I really dislike how the scaling works with leveling. When you level, you get weaker. I understand why they do this, but it really leaves for a bad experience in gaming for me.

Meh. Never liked posting in a negative way since people enjoyed the game still.

My gripe for a long time now is how a five billion + dollar company is treated like an indie studio.

Well those who work on FFXI do it part time, it's just what happens to older MMOs. Nobody wants to be stuck on the same project for more then a few years tops, heck most devs want to move on within a year or two. They are all assigned to other teams doing stuff and are budgeted a certain number of hours per week they can put into FFXI.

You are playing it wrong. People want new gear for cosmetic reasons. Besides, in this very thread people are complaining that soon there won't be any new content to grind. Whick is it, new gear bad or new gear good?

FFXI is a slow burn. My Apoc turned 16 just 12 days ago. I still carry and use my Dring etc.

14 is a hard reset. You can literally drop all your gear every 6 months and do endgame that same evening.

We want content drip that expands the incredible 11 world.

Well you normally have to do some sort of MSQ or Quest line first to get the NPC's available to buy the new "better then raid" gear off them. Might take longer then an evening but definitely can have it within a few days.

Maybe I'm reading the announcement wrong, or stupidly hopeful, but I don't see maintenance mode, I see them trying to focus on other things than content to provide a reason to produce more content.

The game is hitting a point where they struggle to input new coding without messing up things or the hardware is extremely aged.

I read this as, there is more to the game than patches and by working on content, even in a limited fashion, we don't have time to fix somethings that really need fixing.

That being said, I think this is also a litmus test to see if the community sticks around. If we do, we might see that "medium-long term" they refer to. If we don't, well, we don't and they won't need to worry about making good on it.

The hope I have is that they release the final content for this TVR, and hopefully its a big long term content like Escha was. That would last us quite some time, probably years and maybe they will get a budget approval somewhere down the line. There are already news articles online running with this story so it seems most people took it the same way.

I did see those :(

It's worse than this: the max level content is always, without fail, braindead easy except for savage/extreme fights. This is fine in the abstract - I can't fault a game for wanting to be accessible to people - but it really puts a cooler on the desire to get that gear even in the short term. You just don't need it for anything!

Every big new raid patch they release new crafted gear, which is the same iLvl as normal mode raid sets, not optimized, but can be forced to be better with pentamelding materia.
This crafted gear serves all of the World First groups till they clear that same week, and serves regular raiders until they get their BIS, which getting BIS takes anywhere from 4-5 weeks to several months.
Though, because of the mercurial nature of groups, it's not uncommon for regular raiders to never attain BIS before the next gear comes out that obsoletes said BIS, with the introduction of Ultimate fights being the only actual reason to ever actually strive for BIS. And those are trophy/achievement fights, which get a new BIS usually sometime in the next expansion with strangely upgraded gear (Eureka +2 for UCoB for instance).

Meh, people have reported that XI is going into maintenance mode before. Remember this?

https://massivelyop.com/2015/04/03/final-fantasy-xi-developers-explain-the-games-upcoming-maintenance-mode/

It's not good news to see the development team scaled down, but it also doesn't mean there will never be new content beyond TVR/Prime Weapons. Either way, there's still so much to do that I am not worried.

It's more they have no one on the team with the ability to update the game. They have to ask other divisions for help. Makes you wonder what the skeleton crew actually does lol

The skeleton crew was cut long ago. All thats left is their "head of ffxi" who has to beg ffxiv division for help. The ffxiv crew doesnt really want to work on an old game so there's no passion, just feed the masses the minimal and use psychological systems to keep the players logged in every day.

We have a head of ffxi that is grandfathered in and at least remembers the old passion, but he wont be here for long so when he retires soon, what then? That's my forecast of the death of ffxi.

Hey, its still fun to play now!... (even though I unsubbed awhile back).

What ffxi has always had, is the players, that kept it alive for far longer than SE wanted it to go. Then there's the players that incorporated lua into spellcast then gearswap then all the other automated stuff which is awesome.

There's also dedicated players that created and are committed to updating the encyclopedia of knowledge (bg wiki and ffxiah) and help out the greater community which without, the game would have died earlier for NA.

Now that I think of it, there's a whole division of NA players that basically are the dev team. Boy, they should cut you guys a check.

The game has been in maintenance mode since Dyna-D or longer. Either they will occasionally throw us a bone or they won't. You can still play with friends and work on stuff together. Nothing has really changed at all

You're right.....if you eliminate Odyssey, Sortie, and TVR.

people will complain the game is going into maintenance mode and then turn around and log into a 2003 server in maintenance mode

Looks like we've reached the real endgame of FFXI. This news is a double edged sword for me, because being away for a year means I have quite a bit left to do. But then, what do we do after we've finished it all? If the updates are even more compact than they were... we won't see hardly any new battle content. Perhaps once a year they will throw out some new battles? But it's unlikely to be anything substantial. There won't be anything new as evidenced by the content we got the past few years.

I guess for anyone returning they should look at it as an experience for however long it takes to grind until you can't do it anymore. And then you shut down and maybe return 2 years later to do more content, if it's still around. It's akin to playing a standalone game for 60 hours to 100%, and then just messing about on it until you get bored. Eventually you have to move on, and that's a sad thought.