Where FFXI is going / Long-term support

We're trying to bring the ZNM event to a close at this point. The content itself is mostly outdated with the gear in it being replaced by easily obtained Abyssea gear. Fuuji intends to replace it with VNMs (and is planning on starting the event earlier) with the intention of working on the "Empyrean Weapons" that SE sold us with the new Vision of Abyssea mini-expansion.

Wait... what? You mean it's not just farm rare/ex items for 3-4 cheaply assembled cutscenes and go do a final battle that has some sort of trick? Oh wait... it's much worse then that. Instead of farming a few rare/ex pop items, you have to go farm... tons of pop items to farm even more pop items to pop even harder mobs to get the rare/ex items... and do it 50 times per weapon you're interested in.

And that's just the beginning.

After talking to Fuuji last night, I decided to finally take a look at what these "Empyrean Weapons" were all about... what it would take to make one, as well as which one to get. I kinda went at this backwards, thinking about what weapon I might potentially want. The draw of these weapons appear to be their very high damage ratings with relatively decent delays, and the potential that they will grow to all the way to level 99 through "magians and other methods" as SE stated.

Job wise:
SCH - No point in a high damaging staff. I don't melee on SCH, and my staff skill is embarrassingly low!
COR - High damage gun would be fun. However, my COR's equip is pretty sub-standard when it comes to shooting, and I have no marksmanship merits. That's one of the big reasons why I use Coffinmaker on COR. I'd be hesitant to give up the accuracy bonus. It is also one of the reasons why I tend to default to Leaden Salute on COR even though it does less damage compared to Slug Shot
DRG - Potentially a good choice. As a DD, higher damage is better. I generally do not have accuracy issues on DRG due to the job's accuracy bonus trait. However, I really don't use DRG that much! The DD role is too simple for me to be entertained with in FFXI for long periods. I'm not sure if it is worth putting effort into a job which I don't use that often
DNC - Considered this for a while... normally it would be my default choice, but for a DNC, the main thing that I'm looking out for is the ability to hit (accuracy) and the ability to get more TP. Damage is a secondary concern. Ideally, I'd have two "occasionally attack" daggers for faster TP gain and simply WS more if I'm in a DD role
PLD - While tanking on PLD generally requires +enmity, sometimes I do break out my Organics to have fun with Vorpal Blade. However, in tanking situations where damage is a component, I usually try to use Atonement spam there, so again, TP gain is more of an issue.
BLU - If I'm doing my job fully on BLU, I rarely swing my sword but instead am constantly casting spells. Furthermore, Chain Affinity would also meant that I would almost never hit 100% TP, especially if I every finish the merits I want there. BLU damage is based on blue magic skill + stats + accuracy, so sword damage wouldn't do much good.

So... not looking too good. The sword at least would be useful on two jobs. For DNC, I think I'd rather be focusing on gaining as much TP as possible. The polearm for DRG might be the one that makes the most sense. However, I rarely use DRG as is... not sure if it would be worth doing.

The Empyrean Trials
The trials for the weapons are fairly standard in format, just varying in the details. They generally go:
- Kill a bunch of lottery pop NMs
- Kill a bunch of Tier II VNMs
- Collect 50 EX items from Tier IV Abyssea NMs.

The first is a pain... lottery pops aren't interesting to do and mainly involve staring at the screen. If you're lucky, you might end up spending 1-2 weeks taking care of these requirements. The second would take longer, but at least the fights would be somewhat interesting and you have potential for some interesting drop items. At this point, Tier II VNMs should be easily duoable or trioable, though doing it with a party/alliance would of course, be more fun.

The third item is a pain. We're talking about 50 EX items from a Tier IV Abyssea NM. This means that in order to even pop the NM, you need to have killed at least 8 NMs before hand and gotten the necessary pop items/key items to pop the next tier. That's also the minimum since the pop items are not a 100% drop from the previous tier. What's even weirder is that the Tier IIIs are key items, so... well... I'm not quite sure how that works.

Finally, the Tier IV you have to kill only has a chance to drop... maybe two of the item you need? So... rinse, repeat a minimum of 25 times for one person. And these are mobs that take an alliance to kill, so multiply the time it takes to do this by the number of people you're doing it for.

Of course, once the level cap hits 99, we'll probably be able to do it a ton faster instead of having to go hunt NMs for 18 different people. We're still looking at a minimum of... (25 + 25*8)*6 = 1,350 kills for a party of 6 (or 4,050 kills for a full alliance!) That's minimum... remember that the mob probably can drop 0-2 of the various items, so... multiply that by how unlucky you think you'll be! Assuming that you can kill one NM every 30 minutes, you can kill a maximum of 8 mobs per week in Abyssea (assuming the default 20hours/stone, 30 minute stone), meaning that it will take 169 weeks to get all the items for a single party(or 506 weeks for an alliance of 18... also known as 10 years!!) Maybe you know a way to speed things up, but there will still be overhead like travel time, gathering time, etc.

Long-term FFXI 
There's one big unknown at the moment... that is, how will SE update this, and the rest of FFXI? The release of FFXIV just around the corner (supposedly in just over a month's time) is another factor here. How will SE handle this?

Well... let's think of how they will handle it from a business point of view. No matter how much you think that they will be loyal to the fans, or that they won't do silly things, at the end of the day, SE wants to bring in money and the decisions that SE makes will reflect that.

Currently, FFXI actually brings money into the company... barely. SE can do a few things to improve this like stop spending as much money on it. i.e.: Reduce the support staff (when was the last time you actually talked to a GM? Or talked to someone on the phone? Or gotten anything more then a stock reply on email?), reduce development costs (Hello mini-expansions and content that an unpaid high school intern could probably put together!)

If FFXI stops bringing in as much money as it did before, SE will have to either reduce costs by taking even further steps (consolidate servers, basically put the game on life support) or simply shut the game down. FFXIV is an interesting point in FFXI's life. Basically, if FFXIV pulls enough players away from XI, SE will have even more incentive to reduce the amount that they spend on XI.

On the other hand, if FFXIV flops, then SE will want to keep XI active just so that they can continue to draw money from the paying customers, as well as to claim that they have something in the MMO market. Sequels do not always succeed. EverQuest 2 and Asheron's Call 2 were good examples of games which did not do as well as their original game. If anything, I can't think of a single MMO sequel which has actually done better compared to the original... Lineage II maybe?

So, SE has every incentive to keep FFXI on life support. Basically, keep whatever player base still stays with XI entertained enough that they keep paying the monthly subscription. You can see that they are basically stretching their existing content out as long as possible and throwing in randomish content to keep people entertained. WotG was released... 3 years ago now? And we still do not have a conclusion. In fact, most people have given up on bothering with this content since there hasn't really been any reason to do so.

FFXI on long-term support
Which... brings me to back to the Empyrean weapons. At first glance, it almost appeared that SE wanted everyone to do the weapons since they advertised it as being associated with the first Abyssea mini-expansion, kinda like how the first three mini-expansions were presented. However, if you look closer at the quests and requirements themselves, you'll see that the effort to even get to the first level 80 phase isn't a minor undertaking. Who knows what the next few trials to get from 80-90, then 90-99 will contain.

While a part of me was hoping that SE would eventually adjust the requirements for these quests, I realize that SE really has no reason to do so. The next update will be when SE is hoping for an exodus of people from XI to XIV, leaving only the FFXI loyalists still playing. For SE, there is every incentive to make things take as long as possible so that loyalists will always have "content" to play. Just think about how long it has taken for them to finally adjust the dynamis drop rates... It was only after they had enough other time-sinks in the game that they bothered to do so. For Empyrean weapons, they have every incentive to keep things as convoluted as possible to keep the hardcore subscribing while they spend fewer and fewer resources updating XI.

Thoughts?

As a side note... I noticed that nearly all the FFXI blogs I frequent, including people who play with us, haven't really updated in months. Even my own blog, which used to update about twice a week, has gone to a once every 2-3 weeks schedule.