Dev Tracker - Discussion

Boy, this seems really well considered and thought out. >.>

Lol. Do 1hr of sortie so you can do trove and get a plate so you can do sortie again?

Um..

If you do Sortie with a static then you have to hope your group goes 6/6 on the free KI if you want to do 2 in a day. Unless the "chance" is just a mistranslation which isn't uncommon these days and it's actually just 1 guaranteed free KI per day.

Trove? Why wouldn't it be a chest in Sortie?

It's probably poorly translated and it's guaranteed during the campaign. At least, I hope it's not a 'chance' that you will benefit from the campaign or that's jacked up.

Absolute horror for any group that's tight on time, managing multiple time zones or just runs late at night.

Edit: and that's not considering what could be a classic SE move and just not making everyone in the party get the plate at the same time.

Good idea for sortie campaign: 2x Gallimuffins for every Sortie run during campaign.

Why is this good? You get twice the reward for same effort.

Bad idea for sortie campaign: "Free" plate once a day.

Why is this bad? You get to spend another hour doing sortie, after spending an hour doing sortie to maybe get a free plate.

I'd assume it's a chest in Sortie. Because otherwise it's extremely dumb for reasons already pointed out by others.

Still dumb. Could've just doubled or even 1.5x the galli yield, because that's rewarding. Instead we get a "Yo dawg" meme.

Frankly it doesn't consider anyones actual time. If your doing a lot of the weekly/daily content, how are you supposed to somehow get a double sortie run in without the game basically being a full time job?

Double Gali would be preferable. Even double of just 1 random basement boss is better than punishing people with needing to spend another Hour in sortie.

Also the image attatched to the post is of sortie, it's likely a sortie chest.

What everyone wants:

• Chests have a chance to reward +2 cases

What I suggest:

• Double all Chest Rewards during campaign (100 points = 200 pts, old case = 2x old case... etc.) This will result in a decent amount of bonus points, more +1 old cases, and more stones for newer players

What people thought Lazy Square Enix would make:

• Double Galli or 1.5x.... or earn "Up to X more galli" per run, something very basic and unimpactful that is welcome but underwhelming

...
But somehow.........

...

What we get:

• Do sortie... for a CHANCE at a free sortie... when 99% of teams already dont utilize their already free sortie..

  This means if you already have a full Shiny plate it rewards NOTHING.

  This means your relying on your 6/6 team to all have the same availability to manage another full hour of sortie.. when most already operate on a tight schedule to juggle

  This means that most people will never even know the campaign exists, and even fewer will utilize the bonus shiny plate... and most will do so solo on their own time.. which is also predicated on not messing up their own teams schedule...

  And people that run w/ pick up groups or go solo will see barely any benefit.. especially for their time commitment

Leave it to *** square enix to somehow thread the needle of coming up with the most useless, insulting to its players time, and out of touch campaign possible

I cannot imagine wanting to do another hour of Sortie right after doing an hour of Sortie.

Not completely useless, just mostly useless for players who already run Sortie regularly. I'm not sure what their intent was exactly, but casuals and solo players will be able to take advantage of this.

So everyone just kinda glanced over the absolute joke of trust buffs eh

Accuracy Attack and Defense. So. ***. Hot.

Double because, why not.

"Sortie campaign" Not only has a <5% "chance" at a second run, but you have to go out of your way to open as many chests as possible and alter your normal run to do it. to TRY to get a free plate... Instead of just running your normal route.

Is it better to chest farm once and then normal run IF you get a freebie and get screwed if you don't. or just ignore it and if you happen to get one on your normal route, hurray.

This Campaign, and the new Phantom Gem Campaign, and all the other updates basically this entire year are not designed for you, or me, or most of the veteran playerbase. Like Seun said, this is for casuals and soloers, which is who Fujito has been focused on catering to since the 2024 Adventurer Survey. It's clearly not been working very well, a large amount of the players who flooded Phoenix and Bahamut causing them to be locked have left, dropping those population estimates from ~10k to ~7k each. Fenrir was climbing fast but has now stalled at ~8k. Overall active is down ~13k from a couple months ago.

This Campaign makes a lot of sense for people who don't run with a static. The reward is from chests, so you don't have to fight bosses or even any mobs at all to benefit. It is effectively double Gallimaufry per day if the thing drops and you can be just as efficient in your second run as your first. This won't be true in most cases, of course. As already mentioned, the real problem is having to spend two hours of your existence in Sortie, which veterans won't do but newbies certainly might.

I see they decided against farming and crafting celestites like they previously suggested and are just letting you buy them, at least for the first ones. It's kind of interesting that they're lackluster example has a "Lv 1" next to it though. I wonder if there's a leveling system for celestites or if they are simply organized by level depending on SE's opinion of their relative values and however the gearing system works possibly including level limitations similar to pup's elemental limits.

Boxes in sortie offer party wide loot though:
If you get an Old Case, every character in the instance gets an old case.
If you get a hexahedrite, they all get a hexahedrite (dependent on prime weapon stage)

Other than SE's penchant for incompetence, any reason to believe this wouldn't perform the same way?

The Celestite example does also imply that it's going to be a pretty useless system for lowman application of trusts. Defense, Accuracy, or Attack? I guess it's Defense for all the trusts.

Non-Veteran players have 873 things to do in FFXI. The last thing they have is 2 hours in a day just for sortie.

Complete miss on this campaign except for the most hardcore players. (Whom probably have more Galli than they can even spend)

Well, this campaign is a miss but at least this means they are open to campaigns for Sortie in general. Hell - make a Limbus one while you are at it, SE.

Except its literally the worst *** option for a Sortie campaign.

The Sortie campaign seems to be for soloers and newbies. I would have killed to be able to enter Sortie twice back when I was first learning it/doing it solo with trusts.

And back then, when I did it by myself, I always made use of my plate, promptly.

When my static was on its way to our first stage 5s, we also used our plate promptly. Once we had our first stage 5s, the group opted out of weekends. And then we stopped using shiny plate, except to correct for a goofed Aminon or something.

It'd obviously be way better if the campaign was an easy gallimaufry doubling. We're all thirsty for organ soup. SE just likes being obtuse!

We've heard people complaining about doing an hour of Sortie, so the time limit has been reduced to 30 minutes. Also we extended the hallways and added a cool, unskippable animation of Fujito dancing when using any teleportation devices in the zone.

I already see a lot of JP twitter mutuals of mine voicing displeasure over this lol

At this point I feel like a potential compromise would be adding a feature to the bonus plate system where you could choose to use it to apply an amplifier effect instead of refreshing a whole run. Have it grant a small multiplier to gallimaufry earned on your next run (maybe even old case/case+1 rate up too while we're being saucy, or make that a feature of a monthly campaign). Keep the old feature of allowing a whole run for people who prefer/want that.

As it stands my group is like Vyre's, we mostly only use it to sweep a hiccup run under the rug and retry. Very, very rarely we'll do 2 full runs on a weekend if the stars align, but most of the time we don't have the gusto for double runs anymore.

Either that or the option to cash in unused plates for a lump sum of galli equal to the amount of the previous run. Then you've got a choice whether to reclaim time or re-do the run if you've got other objectives you wanna hit or to farm earrings or just *** around.

The Sortie campaign should be to randomly locked you out of Sortie for a week.

Sortie Sorta Sucks

OK, now let's hear from the people who don't have completed empyrean armor and prime weapons. Those are the people who the campaign is aimed at, so those are the opinions that really matter here. I really can't understand why people who are ahead of the curve would be upset. They should pivot to the trust debacle.

They coulda turned Old Cases into Dusty Cases that have a 10-15% upgrade rate instead of a 2% upgrade rate (think Nyzul where the boxes are named differently)

They coulda given a daily double Galli up to X amount (10k or whatever, theyre not gonna give uncapped double Galli so people can get 200k/day, cmon lol)

Coulda doubled Galli from boxes or adjust old case+1 rate from boxes.

Literally ANYTHING would have been better than "You have the chance to do another hour long Sortie". Obviously its not useless, but I cant think of a Sortie campaign that could be implemented any more poorly while not being useless.

Even just starting out having to do twice as many Sortie is absolutely miserable compared to just getting more from doing one run. It doesn’t matter if you are a veteran or a newbie. I returned this year and the prospect of doing Sortie every day for six months to get the final upgrade sounded so horrible I decided to just work on +3 gear. Having to do it two hours every day as a “bonus” is exactly the opposite of what I want to hear.

How would any new player prefer going twice as long versus just getting a reward amplifier for just doing the first hour? That would be like if the old Dynamis campaigns just doubled the time we could be in Dynamis over giving bonus loot. How do you look at twice the time investment as a positive over just increasing the reward from the same time investment for anyone regardless of how long they have been playing?

People have listed significantly better alternatives that would make things easier for the noobs to get stones/galli to upgrade empyrean armor and prime weapons.
A chance at doing double sortie is a *** you to your personal time.


Also what do you mean "and prime weapons"???? If 10k galli and a sapphire is a struggle for someone, how the *** are they getting 1 million galli???

Might legit be time to simply acknowledge that veterans are simply not FFXI's core audience anymore, as evidenced by, well, pretty much everything they've prioritized within the past 3 years. Which is kind of sad. The only thing they've given hardcore players was grindier events (that everyone hates), master trials (the majority aren't bothering to do, or are YEARS after the fact), or Mastery Rank, a quite LITERAL time sink scorecard that has no impact besides a number on a screen thats effectively a virtual thumbs up.

None of the recent updates have any meaningful benefit to this demographic, everything is catered to new/returnees. Even bonanza, trove, strange happenings, and every campaign iteration is to help lower level players. VanaBout rewards are also pretty much a joke for players after a certain point. The recent HTBF was complete trash of gear, and HTBFs by nature are intended for low/mid level players. Server closures were done to discourage mule/alt creation, which facilitated too much multiboxing/gear hording, which is a veteran practice to put it plainly. Now you have to spend real money to go to a server to create copies of yourself to play with yourself. Race change, the one thing veteran players actually got that they've asked for for years, requires payment (not me, dressup is free). And even that was implemented alongside race specific shards to coincide with their Limbus update, the grindiest, most boring content to date. You have to be blind to not realize SE ain't fking with veterans no more. They simply ain't listening to a damn thing regarding updates that benefit veteran players, unless they can profit off of it. Those surveys are put out in sightly bad faith to give the illusion of inclusion; they're just gonna prioritize whoever can net them the biggest profit at this point, and that's returnees/new players.

The message is clear: if we do anything for veterans, you're gonna pay for it or is going to be so overtunef/low reward ratio that most won't bother. Everything else we do is going to be for the majority of players at the bottom. Hya's comment is spot on.