Dev Tracker - Discussion

I know this is an unpopular opinion… I did V0/5/10/15/20/25 grind. I don’t think it’s fair to myself or others that did this due to ‘too much work to form, allow us to skip to v15’.

Instead give incentives — or reduce segment cost — to those who have the clear to help others.

It'd be unfair to cure cancer now, think about all the people that died from it already. So unfair.

This knife cuts both ways, so how far do we want to take this train?

"Back in my day, I had to solo my own V15s for pitiful RP, everyone else should have to suffer like me too." We don't want to do the "fair" thing, do we?
/s

Honestly, I certainly get your point that it doesn't feel "fair". But I also can be reasonable too. I did the entire grind across every boss, but when Odyssey Gaol was the hotness, so I benefitted greatly from having access to a large pool of players. The climb wasn't terrible either, and I kind of enjoyed the unique job diversity it offered. Probably the most fun I have had in FFXI in two decades. I looked forward to leveling and gearing new jobs so I could fit different roles for different bosses. But that was then. And not everyone is me. Gaol could use an enhancement to lessen the "burden" a bit for players who are simply not as invested in Gaol as some of us were during it's high point.

Not that I want to water down what I consider to be some of SE's better designed content, because Gaol is extremely unique. But just like how they made getting Malignance gear easier (because doing 500 runs just to get the last piece was absurd), I wouldn't be mad if they found a way to make Gaol a bit less taxing on the remainder of players (translation: vast majority) who have zero interest in touching it, because the progression model is kind of dated at this point.

Just my 2c

Considering MoglophoneII is only burned after entering a fight, it should be rather trivial to introduce a helper flag:
Participant doesnt burn moglophone however they:
wont get clear for win
cant gain RP
cant charge amps (byproduct of not getting RP)

Atleast one person in the group cant have the helper flag set if you want to enter the fight, otherwise it defeats the purpose of the helper flag.

Shinryu HTMB was adjusted to have a higher merit cost in order to break up the congestion. You only need to do that when there is actually congestion, so would you be upset if they reduced the cost to 10 merits?


Forcing players to clear lower vengeance was a measure to keep players from clearing the content too quickly. It's now years later, so 'too quickly' is no longer the issue. So you have a bunch of roadblocks and detours that were meant for a period of high traffic, but you no longer have traffic...

So what? There's a lot of examples of S-E going back and making content more balanced or more accessible, and Odyssey is clearly not working with the community as it's currently implemented.

1-Shinryuk HTMB was reduced to 10 merits last patch
2-What?? Gaol was released in stages. Atonement 1/2 was released Jan 2021, Atone 3 Feb 2021, Bumba Mar 2021, Amps May 2021. At this time, the cap was V15. This was raised to V20 Jan 2022. V25 was added Dec 2022. Additionally, Segments were added Nov 2020, giving players two months to stockpile segments, though no one knew what they would have been for at the time as they had no immediate use.

I’d also comment we got ‘easier to get coalition assignments finished before easier to get ToAU Nyzul Tokens, Captain Rank, or Ichor finished’ or ‘easier to finish Empy weapons’. So SE is clearly not easing content in terms of date of release and it does feel kinda random to me.

Much like the Mog Bon weapons, they only provided this in a short campaign rather than making it permanent. Meaning if you were away or inactive during that time you get screwed. Idk why they didn’t just make it a permanent thing. With Mog Bon weapons they could have easily made a NPC like ‘all players, one time, can get this free weapon as a catch up mechanic’.

For clarity… I’m not against catch mechanics. I just don’t want it to be a huge nerf. MMORPGs are all about competitive advantage and ‘showing off’ to friends. It’s an achievement grind basically. All we have right now are REMAP, rare HTBF drops, master trials, limbus armor/weps (kinda), and Ody clears. It just feels like to me if they give hand outs instead of providing reasonable incentives or encouragements then it diminishes the achievement factor of the mmorpg.

Ex: If they tomorrow made Prime stage 5 a 2 week grind, I’m pretty sure more than 1 person would feel salty about it.

Except nobody noticed because trove invalidated the need to rollback the change, years ago.


You didn't use them to buy scales, hides and wings? Almost as good a deal as buying starstones with galli >:D

Really easy to forget how things actually used to be after so many years, this is inaccurate
https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/%22Rhapsody_in_Azure%22

And let's not forget that empy weapon mats have been added to login points several times over the years

Ah, I had forgotten. I concede.

Plenty of people noticed
Nobody gives a *** because the good loot from that fight has five different items all sharing the same drop slot that has a 0.2% load rate

I got the drops I wanted from the HTMB, but I'm not mad that other people can get them through trove or for a reduced merit cost. Restrictions are supposed to ease over time. It's normal.

congrats?

Say that to the people gatekeeping their V5 and V10 clears

This is like when the gas light in your car comes on, so you pull over and put air in your tires.

Ok. We can give them universal V5.

That’s just gatekeeping dressed up as fairness. You already got the reward for doing the full grind. You had the gear and augments years before everyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you because the catch up process becomes less tedious.

It’s the same broken logic as “I had to pay off my student debt, so nobody else should get relief.” Past inconvenience is not a reason to preserve bad design forever. You benefited from being early. That does not entitle you to demand everyone else repeat the same pointless slog.

Like I said before, bring on the salty tears from the "I did it the *hard* way" contingent when Odyssey inevitably gets nerfed.

Circa Cop 6-4 level cap removal.

The thing about that is because it's an obvious thing they need to do, they will literally do anything but that. So. Yeah.

There are no new players to FFXI

But V5/10 fights are being gate kept, because no one wants to waste segments on these boring old fights

But there are no new players to FFXI, so these are all existing old players who arent even doing Sheol at all, not even A/B for money.

But you want to open up V15 as a free fight for these random few new players who want to skip the segments grind.

But theyre being gatekept by others somehow???


You cant spare 3k "useless segments" to bring a friend into a V15/20 fight and clear it for them with 5 people? I say 5 people, because that 6th is likely very useless.

This isnt a gatekeeping problem, yall aint got friends.

Theres so many *** arguments being made.

So someone got carried through to have access to upgrade their armor to R20, but they dont have any segments, so what the *** are they going to do with it? They obviously dont have a group, otherwise they wouldnt need this no-longer-gatekept CarryGaol, so theyre farming 1.5k segs a day? Every three days they can enter their V20 fight with an amplifier and hopefully survive long enough alone to get the mob down to 94% and earn 1425 RP on that NM. And remember this person has shitty gear, so that 6% push is gonna be rough.


Wait; I dont think you can even enter a V20 fight unless its Atonement one, you need to unlock everything prior too. Oh well, clear the other V20 fights too, its not a big deal.

I never said they had to repeat the slog.

The catch up mechanics in the game right now is that you can fight a higher difficulty and unlock previous tiers instantly. If I was a real ***-hat I’d say ‘let’s remove that feature’.

I’m just advocating for some alternative mechanism to instant access without doing the fights (some ppl has suggested giving everyone v15 access). Like I’d be totally fine with forever 2x segment gain, or as others have discussed earlier a ‘no-segment-cost’ to help others. Not saying to not make it easier, just provide ways to alleviate the grind.

I’m literally proposing catch up mechanisms. Just not the ways you guys are. It’s not a debate about ‘no don’t help them’ it’s a debate on ‘how’.

Ex: recently we had a coalition assignment 2x credit for people trying to get legend. Why not something like that for Ody?

51000 segments to being someone into and beat V25 atonement 1s and V20 atone 2/3 and bumba, you know “easy fights”

Thats three days of sheol:
Day 1,3,5: pick up key item
Day 2,4,6: do back to back sheol C

Your friend that needs uppies can now:
Upgrade atone1 loot to R30
Upgrade the rest to R25
Enter atone1 V25 3x to supercharge amp and enter a lower V to use amp
Enter any other fight at V25 with amp, provided they can get the mob down far enough alone (this might be an issue since they have no gear)

All at their own leisure

But thats too much effort for some people here, great friends you are :)

Never mind segments, they can't even enter T3 to get any RP to upgrade their armor.

Congrats on the V20. It's equivalent to a V0 since you can't RP it, gg.

Go do the climb from T1 V1 until you get to T3 V15 again so you can use an amp to get RP.

But hey, at least you "saved time" by unlocking V20 straight away, right?

Noob.