Free Campaign Is Active!

just a reminder, started today (8. November).

Funny thing normally it happens after update, this month it started before.

Waiting the dyna campaign plus. Looking the description in BG, it sounded like it can net dozens of shards. Is that correct?

The dyna plus has the ability to give shards. however its not a 100%. Closer to 10% last time I did it.

Getting 65335 CP is niiiice

Free campaign ends at the same time the dyna campaign starts.

looks like free campaign is active again. *bump*

It's back!


It also looks like there will be a version update during this time, so a good chance of getting two months worth of deeds.

Squareenix is having a loss of 140M

We must do our part and ignore the free play.

Pay to keep the game alive. Pay even if you only AFK. Pay even if you are already banned for good!

I'd give free time a try if it didn't lock all my Mog Wardrobes, hence all my gear lol.

They need to drop £1-2 off the price of the basic sub, it was fine to charge full price when it was paying wages of people to work on the game but they aren't doing that now.

I know I'm gonna catch "bootlicker" comments for this but the sub hasnt changed in 22 years: $12.95 in May 2002 is the equivalent of $22.50 today

Don't care. For the amount of updates the game gets, it's ridiculous.
Don't forget all the wardrobes and ***that are basically mandatory too.

No theyre not
You are either:
Carrying extra gear to account for every niche situation to ensure you arent taking a 0.1% DPS hit from the very few times that situation arises
or
Carrying gear for jobs you play once every 3 months

Your wages have not risen inline with inflation, which is why inflation is a thing in the first place. It's a con to lower everyones wages without most people understanding it's happening. Regardless, we were paying for staff before and are not now. It's a sign of respect to a fanbase that have supported the game for 20 years to get a few bucks off or some free wardrobes.

They have so much spare money they are not using it to do real life events in Japan, how about we don't pay for that and we get a few bucks off instead.

FFXI is one of 3 mmorpgs that exist that still has a sub, and the other 2 get updates (and are cheaper)

I defended the price when we were getting updates and people were being paid wages to work on it, now I just feel like a dumbo for paying it.

This attitude is so prevalent and I just don't get it. I'm also a bootlicker but the way I see it we are paying:

$30.00 for the game (most of us paid more when it was new)
$12.95 for access to the servers
$1.00 for each character after the first
$2.00 for each wardrobe beyond the 2nd

None of this is for new content. SE has rarely, if ever, given any real amount of content for free. In "the good times" they charged full retail price for expansions which were mandatory to gain access to their content, including 3 abyssea expansions, RoZ (in JP), CoP, ToAU, WotG, Adoulin, and all three add-on scenarios.

Almost all content in this game came bundled with and required the purchase of one of these expansions. It's not as though paying $12.95 in 2006 gave you free access to loads of new content every month, quarter, or year. It gave you access to the content you had already paid SE full price for, and if they developed something new, you had to shell out another $60 for it.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I've never understood the obsession that game companies owe you brand new content in exchange for your sub. Maybe this is what WoW does? Sure hasn't been my experience with FFXI throughout the years.

Speak for yourself, I'm making at least 4, maybe 5x what I was making in 2002. Maybe look at your life choices more closely?

This isn't about me, or you but people in general. You know what I'm saying in regards inflation and peoples wages not rising inline with it. Stop showing off, nobody cares.

2002 Median income: $42,409
2023 Median income: $59,384

$12.95 is 1/3,262 of the Median income in 2002
$12.95 is 1/4.568 of the Median age income in 2023

Not too bad.

If you want to say FFXI is unplayable without 2 wardrobes (disagree, but whatever): $16.95 is 1/3,493 of the median income, not bad! 2 free wardrobes (4 with the literally free ones)!

Inflation rises every year, do you not know the exact reason why they do that?

It's so most corporations can effectively cut peoples wages while still giving you a bigger number, and people are not taught how inflation works so they see a bigger number and don't know they are continually getting less money every year.

If everything you buy rises in line with inflation and your pay does not, you're getting less pay for the same work but the number has gone up still so people don't know it.

Again, this isn't about YOU or ME or anyone specifically. It's a general statement.

Regardless, no updates = lower the price.

Believe it or not, the fed or other countries' equivalents are not in a conspiracy to convince the public that they're not being conned.

The reason inflation is encouraged in modern economies is to encourage growth and investment. If a company has $10m but it will be worth $9.8m next year, they are encouraged to build a new plant, open up a new location, etc. This works for consumers too; if they think their money will be worth less in the future, they will hide it in their mattress rather than spending it, slowing down the economy because they didn't buy that thing. Encouraging people to buy things, invest in stocks, etc. keeps the economy flowing. This is like...the first lesson of economics 101.

It has absolutely nothing to do with trying to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers. It's to stop rich people/companies from hoarding their money.

What you say is true, but yes they also do it to con people to the benefit of corporations. The vast majority of lower earners get screwed hard by inflation and you know it full well. Notice there is no law to force companies to raise wages inline with inflation and nobody is taught how it works in school?

In the UK nurses, police, teachers and lots of others have to often strike to get raises inline with inflation, it's the same in the US. It's 100% on purpose what they do.

If you honestly think they don't then superman will come soon to take you to krypton, cause you're living in fantasy land.

Could we bump the "free campaign is active!" thread only when free campaign is

active?

If you're at the same dead end job today that you were 22 years ago, thats on you.

I think it's ok to bump it with the dates, since the campaign becomes active a couple of days later. Heads ups are always nice.

I agree but the official campaign date is advertised on playonline news section of the FFXIAH main page.

What isn't announced is when they flip the switch a JP midnight or two earlier than advertised and this thread helps catching those instances best when it pops into latest forum topics when that happens.

It's what WoW does and what XIV does. "Content patches" are considered standard in the genre these days. Sort of like what XI did over the years when it added RoV and all the associated content (Omen, etc) with it and even TVR would count. Naturally, the aforementioned games get quite a bit more than XI does given the size of the budgets and teams in question, but ever since 2004 when WoW was putting out dungeons and raids in content patches without charging for them above the base subscription, that's been the genre model most people have in mind.

The model is essentially: Every 1.5-3 years the company puts out an expansion at 40-50 dollars with a lot of new banner, expansion selling content like new races, jobs, zones, level cap, system features, etc. Then every 3-6 months a patch is put out containing new gear, dungeons, raids, story, whatever, but generally the level cap is maintained and the systems of that expansion are iterated on, not replaced or abandoned.

As usual in these topics I don't have the historical background on XI to say much, but in the far before times did they just sort of not do the second part of that process? I also don't know if Everquest 1 did or not, but given XI was a JP take on Everquest I could see how the models would line up if EQ didn't too. I remember reading about how WotG drip-fed missions over the course of years so there was some part of that model in place, but I don't know what else if anything accompanied that.

These days WoW is offering access 4-5 different products at once for the one subscription (retail, Classic Vanilla, Classic Progression, Seasonal Vanilla with custom content, Hardcore/Ironman Vanilla), only one of which (retail) has a box price, but they're very much the exception and have a huge bank of nostalgia to fall back on that most other live service games (Like XIV or GW2 or ESO) don't. They also have 7 million subscribers as of earlier this year and active cash shop offerings in two of those WoW products (retail and progressive classic) which understandably gives quite the large war chest to develop with.

FFXI did some drip-feeding but AFAIK it was always tied to a paid expansion, with some minor exceptions.

Sky: Requires RoZ
Sea: Requires CoP
Dynamis: I think this was base content, kinda?
Dynamis Dreamland: Requires CoP
Limbus: Requires CoP
Salvage: Requires ToAU
Assaults: Requires ToAU
Einherjar: Requires ToAU
ZNM: Requires ToAU
Campaign: Requires WotG
MMM: Might be free?
Voidwalker: Might've been free? Can't do many of them
Walk of Echoes: Requires WotG
Voidwatch: Might've been free? Can't access many of them without CoP, RoZ, ToAU, WotG access though.
Abyssea: Requires 3 addon packs
Reives, WKR: Requires SoA
Skirmish: Requires SoA
Delve: Requires SoA
Sinister Reign: Requires SoA
Vagary: Requires SoA
Dynamis [D]: Requires all of the above
Ambuscade: Free!
HTBF: Most require some of the above
Odyssey: Free!
Sortie: Requires all expansions
Unity: Free!
Master Trials: Requires all expansions

Think that covers everything, I'm sure I'm wrong about at least a few of these, but there's a pretty clear trend. You give them $60 and you get access to the next few events, then wait for the next $60 expansion. A sub has never gotten you any new content in FFXI, with a couple minor exceptions of "meh" tier content.

NA players were lucky in that RoZ shipped with the NA game, so we we started off with quite a bit of included content.

I guess you could say you paid $60 for Salvage and then mythic weapons were paid for by your subscription or w/e, I've always figured you pay $60 and get all the ToAU stuff. The sub is just for server costs, customer service, executive bonuses, profits, whatever. The expansions were where you were paying for content.

Secondary thought: maybe we're living in the absolute best time of free content in FFXI's history? We've gotten all that stuff at the end without paying for a single expansion in a decade.

We got a 4% increase last year in academia when I know many people in large corporations got 12%. I don't think my job is dead end, but it is increasingly less appealing to stay in education and then what? Good people leave and people get worse educations which has knock on effects.

AFAIK Dynamis was free, just needed to be rank 6?