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I would like to think ff11 is behind them
smitty0356
Member Posts: 368
I played ff11 and it was a "good game" at the time, but it was released in the weeds of the wow explosion, and it had some major flaws:
1. It had client-side processing which allowed for hacks and modem glitches to run rampant
2. no solo content... not just "not enough" solo content, but litterally none.
3. GOLD FARMERS, this game became ultra lucrative for gold farmers, and it showed with my next issue...
4. Economy was jacked, basically if you could make it, it was worthless, and if you couldn't make it, you couldn't afford it.. this is the mantra of a totally broken economy (see PotBS for more examples)
It had some major bonuses too:
1. End game content came along nicely
2. Great IP, and didn't disappoint the FF fans
3. Addicting!!
Hopefully this game can make the pro's better, and remove the cons, and this will be the game to play next year!!
Elite poster by 82
Comments
I'm crazy, I know, but I LOVED the crafting system and player economy. No doubt it sucked having to level off of worthless items, (a nice chunk you could keep and turn in later for guild points) but it really enforced the mantra of working hard for what you want. Something MMOs these days have abolished in favor of a higher profit in the 'I want it now' crowd.
I call bullshit, FFXI predates WoW by quite a bit, and is from an era where grouping WAS everything, ie. EQ, UO, AC, DAoC
To be honest I loved the crafting system as well, but I'm not sure why. Usually I detest grinding (I couldn't exp for more than few hours at time before getting bored), but with crafting it just felt right. The progress was fast enough but not too fast, it wasn't too complex and I had fun time figuring out what synthesis recipes would give me the best profit/effort ratio or best skill up rate for the money used. I spent hours thinking about these kind of things. I also liked that it wasn't too easy to get to cap, but alas it became too "hardcore" for me in the upper 90's (not to mention the craft I picked was way too expensive for me). I'd still like them to keep it hard to get to cap though, even if I'm not one to make it there. Makes me respect those who did get there, which I find a good thing. You can excel in the game in many ways.
To answer with something informative, 2. and 3. have been taken care of in 11 already, so you can expect it to be taken care of in 14 as well. And I mean gil sellers can only harm you by sending you a nasty /tell once a day now. Eek.
Depends what you consider quite a bit. I picked up FFXI when it was just shy of 1 year after the US launch and everyone I knew was playing WoW.
...were they all in the beta? FFXI was released in the US on October 28, 2003. Just shy of 1 year later, WOW still would have been in beta; it was released on November 23, 2004.
The only thing I liked about the crafting in FFXI is it made my two primary jobs more affordable...RNG/NIN..otherwise it was pretty boring...but then most MMO's crafting systems are boring to me.
EQ2 was an exception, as each "job" was kind of like combat. I had skills I could use during the craft attempt. Problems would arise and I would have to use the right skill quickly to deal with it. Overall item quality and success depended on my actual involvement in th process..To me, it made crafting enjoyable and interactive...rather than gather parts, push button, wait....complete random outcome that I can do nothing to influence.
As for the OPs comments, as soon as he said FFXI released after Wow...i stopped reading...sorry mate.
/shurg
Frank 'Spankybus' Mignone
www.spankybus.com
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Wow, this just hit me. The prices of the economy were jacked up by the gil sellers in the RMT business. Players trying to bypass the "hard work" of making gil to purchase these very same items would buy gil from the gil sellers. The player then gives the gil back to the gil seller for him to sell to the next player, repeating the cycle. If the gil buyers had never purchased the gil in the first place, the economy would have never inflated as extreme as it did. They chose to pay off their "hard work", when not paying would not have resulted in "hard work" in the first place.
You can't tell me the economy in FFXI wasn't broken. At level 50 in order to purchase the armor that was required of me, before people would let me into groups, I needed 3 million gil when my daily source of income would run from 10k-20k on the very best of days. This was after 6 hours of farming and praying that my items would sell on the AH. The only feasible way to afford the items was to find the items yourself, or similarly priced items. You'd be competing with dozens of people on a 1 in 20 chance to get the pull, then praying the item drops. It took me months to reach the point that I was finally able to afford my Gi and Okotes, at which point I quit and forever lost my account to a stupid account management system.
Not that this ruined the game though, FFXI is still one of my most nostolgic gaming experiences to date.
The only thing that really annoyed me about FFXI was the fact that even at the US release we were all behind the Japanese players who dominated each server. It felt like joining a game a couple of years after launch because, well, thats pretty much what happened.
Getting groups were easy at first, but after a while the Japanese players began to shun a lot of the western players (can't say I really blamed them in a lot of cases....). And getting on to a server that your friends were on was a pain in the arse due to the game selecting the server for you at random and the incredibly high costs of world passes on most servers.
Hopefully none of this will exist in FFXIV, because in all honesty I liked FFXI.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
I'm pretty sure my pros and cons are right on the money. There may be more, but there certainly aren't less.
Elite poster by 82
Because most of the data was on the client, it was easy for hackers to modify for their own needs.
The less data you have on the client, the harder it is to create hacks (or mods) for the game.
And frankly, too much of XI's data was client-side as opposed to server side. You could change a lot of features freely without SE even noticing a thing (like armor models, UI, music, even graphics etc.)
I once downloaded a mod of Windurst Mog house which frankly looked better than XIV textures so far. Too bad it's a lot of work to recreate the textures like that for the whole game.
2. and 3. are things of the past though, but if that's what you were aiming at, then yea.
In the case of XIV we should look at the present and not the past, though.
I completely agree, the key is to put the cons in the lessons learned column and make sure they don't come with the pros!
Elite poster by 82
Graphics, music, etc is always on the client, for every single game. I think ff11 took around 8 GB to install. Virtually all of that 8 GB is graphical and audio assets. The game code itself is a couple megabytes at most. Having to retransfer that every single time you play would obviously take a huge amount of bandwidth and make gameplay impractically slow.
With that said, there were some coding decisions that may have been better. Two biggest examples are position data and fishing results data.
For position, in ff11 the game prioritizes position over direction and speed. Every so often the game client lets the server know the position of the character, if that doesn't match up with how you're moving, the server didn't care. That's why there were so many speed hacks and teleport hacks. This was done to make the system flexible enough to adjust for lag spikes, but it did give room for abuse.
For fishing (after the update), when you get a bite what you caught is given to the client immediately. Therefore, there were hacks that let the player know what they caught before they fished it up, and there were also hacks that automatically depleted fish stamina so there was no work needed to "reel in" the fish.
There were reasons behind these design choices (those largely being lag), but clearly SE can and should do better.
------------
On the separate economy topic, I thought ff11 was pretty close to perfect.
Somebody previously said that armor at lv50 was 3m while they were only making 10-20k. There definately were ways to spend 3m at lv50 to make your char better. But that was never necessary to find a pt or to perform well. You just had to know what you were doing.
This ties in to game difficulty and complexity a bit. You can play on a tight gil budget, but to do so you need to understand game mechanics well and play well. For example, you can buy NQ STR rings instead of the HQ, and they function nearly as well for around 10% of the cost. But you need to know that you have to be using acc rings for melee and STR rings for weaponskill.
Food also improves player statistics immensely, usually on par with all your equipment combined for a large part of the leveling process. And they're super cheap. But many people either don't eat food or eat the wrong food. For example, suppose you're a ranger and through equipment and abilities you have approx. a 90% hit rate against IT enemies. Now, you can either eat a squid sushi and raise your accuracy another 5%, or you can eat a dhalmel pie and raise your attack damage by 25%. The right choice is obviously the pie, but many people choose to stack accuracy.
Knowledge played a bigger part in performance than equipment. If you separate the two and talk strictly about the economy, imo the system was designed and executed very well.
-a
Grouping was far from EVERYTHING in eq. Some classes could solo, and did.
I disagree with the part about the economy being executed well. You cannot have a player run economy and give one section of the world a 1 year headstart in a mixed server MMO. This, along with certain "tricks", allowed the Japanese community the ability to pretty much max out their gil. Once the rest of the world became intergrated into the servers, those idividuals pretty much had us by the balls.
Speaking as a Smither, this put me in a huge hole before i even got started. This might differ for some, as i had a huge JP population on my server, but none the less unfair. The upside for the consumer was that there was no gear progression, so it was easier to save up for that one item, knowing you'd have it forever. This of course hurt the crafters because everyone and their mother was pretty much crafting the same exact items. NQ items became a huge loss and unless you HQ'd frequently it was a lost cause for certain crafts.
What he was getting at is grouping was the most viable way to progress through those games at a decent rate. In all the old school games people could solo. Thing is it wasn't the fastest way to progress your character. Death mechanics and paying attention really mattered in games pre-WoW. Grouping made it easier to progress with less of a chance of failure.
In todays games you can solo your way through the game progression as fast if not faster than grouping up. Failure means nothing today which leads to people really not needing help to progress thus making grouping really just a 'social option' until you hit a dungeon or end game.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
"max out their gil"? Really? I think you're overestimating the advantage of a 1 year headstart.
JP players might have had an advantage as far as raising more gil (camping high level NMs or mining in high level areas), but there's no reason anyone should have been sitting on mountains of gil and nothing to spend it on. And in any case, inflated prices for finished goods means inflated prices for materials. I remember slapping my forehead about 12 hours into the NA release as I found out that the nearly-worthless Fire and Wind crystals that I had been vendoring all day long were actually worth a lot of money on the AH (or at least it was a lot of money to me at level 6). The nature of the free market makes it natural for the wealth gap to close fairly quickly.
As far as starting crafting a year behind half the server, I think it's pretty much a given that it'll be tough to make that profitable. That would apply to any game, though.
I remember feeling like kiting should've been a bannable exploit because of how risk-free and efficient it was. Classes that could kite were like gods in classic EQ. Mobs never reset no matter how far away you ran or how far you took them from their respawn point, and they didn't put any proper kind of diminishing returns or exp cap on killing a mob way above your level.
I think you're forgetting the head start on fish botting rusty caps in Raboa, which helped the JP's gil supply. As soon as NA's were made aware of that, it was patched. Sort of like how JP's were using the Salvage dupe trick for a year, which the devs knew about from JP forums, and didn't get patched until NA's found out about it and started taking advantage of it. I know Salvage is a bit off topic, but it shows how any head start in a player run economy is unacceptable. We won't have this issue with XIV thankfully.
Aye, kiting was in a way cheap (and I was a Bard, so I am guilty of kiting... please don't hate me...) but the point is even with kiting, soloing was still the slower way to go thus not as effective as grouping. But I did have fun soloing in EQ when I did it, which was usually to see if I could without having myself killed and doing the naked corpse run back.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
The Salvage bans happened long After the NA's found out about them.
The reason for it was because some idiot on Bluegartr let out the secret, and soon it was public knowledge (and after that SE figured it out too).
But they had taken advantage of the trick far before SE found out. They kept the secret quite well tbh, for at least ~6 months. Jp's were the ones to figure out the trick though.
First of all, I think the economy if FFXI was one of the worst out of any game I've played. RMT was ridiculous. More importantly, I think they could have added WAY more equipment options. There were very few options for gear. I wore a couple of pieces of RSE on my summoner even high level because there were no good choices for upgrades. Now if you added more items, you wouldn't be so aggravated when you tried to camp an NM for a drop, just to compete with the RMT you knew were already going to be there before you. I think it was too easy for bots to control the stuff that you had to have.
Also, I loved the crafting system. There were a lot of factors that you had to think about before you started making or growing something. I really hope they bring back to possibilityy to grow mats. Although, I never really made stuff for a profit.
And to the OP, I believe they have stated they are gearing this one more for smaller groups/solo combat. I just hope they find the right balance. I don't want to solo my way through the game, but I also don't want to be rejected from groups because I'm not the right type of DD with the ideal build.
Amen, an invite to a party should revolve around what skill of a tank, DD, healer you are, rather than what kind of one.
IMO it would be even better if an invite to a party didn't revolve around the tank/dd/healer holy trinity.
If you could solve this problem in mmo's, you would have either created a bigger problem, or you are the next mmo millionaire!
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