The frustration of FFXI and SE's ploy

This is a followup rant to this earlier post about SE and FFXI wasting people's time. You can read the first part of this rant here: http://ascule.blogspot.com/2008/09/respecting-time-and-lack-thereof.html


So, last night we did ZNMs again... Tier III mob, and we didn't wipe this time. However, out of all the mobs, we only got one drop that someone actually wanted. This is really taking things too far SE. Let's see how much effort was put into this:


1. Farming the zeni necessary to buy the pop items. This is at minimum 6000 zeni for Tier I, II & III
2. Actually going out to kill the Tier I & II mobs
3. 14 people spending 3 hours to pop and kill these mobs for a total of 42 man-hours



Ignoring points 1 & 2, even looking at just item #3, that's a lot of people's time spent on this mob. Let's put it in perspective... Assuming the US Federal Minimum Wage rate of $6.55/hour, that's $275.10 of productivity spent on getting this one item. The very least they could do is have the drop rate be reasonable instead of this crazy low drop rate that leaves everyone doing ZNMs feeling discouraged at the end of the night.

(Just for comparison, the China minimum wage is $0.138/hour. To accomplish the same thing hiring players in China would have cost $5.82. Is there any question as to why there is a gil farmer/RMT problem?)


Similarly, on Sunday night, we had 3 Nyzul runs with... absolutely no drops. 6 people, 1 1/2 hours wasted and logging off discouraged.


The reasons behind the low drop rates is simple... SE wants to keep people playing FFXI for as long as possible. Almost all "endgame" events are designed to make you keep your subscription going for as long as possible. For example: the time limitations on how often you can enter Limbus & Dynamis, the limits you have on the number of assaults or campaign ops that you can do a single day and more. Would it really break things that much for SE to at least throw people a bone? Let's say they changed Nyzul such that a boss fight would give a 100% drop of an armor piece... a group of 6 people would still be spending 30 straight runs (or 30 days) of farming armor before they each got one full set. Additionally, the drops would not necessarily match up with what is wanted, so a little bit more time would be spent on it. Or people could end up working on multiple sets, bringing the amount of time "invested" in this activity to up to 3 months. The very least this would do is allow people to move on to something else instead of spending months or years at one repetitive activity. It would also free up assault tags to either: Do other assaults, accumulate assault points for Salvage, or even help other people do their assaults! As far as I know, very few people have actually "completed" any single event. They either grow frustrated and quit, or too many people lose interest and the event disbands.


Instead, by making it probability, they're allowing statistics drag the time out instead. 1 month stretches out to 4 months, 3 months to a year... and meanwhile, while you're stuck doing one event, you don't have time or resources available to do a different event, or help someone out, or do something fun, level another job or just goof around experimenting with other things. Adding new content to the game no longer matters as people do not have time in their schedule to actually try it out. WotG zones are empty except for people doing campaign. The [S] NMs remain untouched, and nobody (at least on this server) bothers to try the campaign ops, or to invade a beastmen territory. Instead, due to the way the game is set up, you end up going to the same event week after week, month after month, year after year. It's gotten to the point where people have been going to same events for 3, 4 years.

That's no longer a game. It's a job.