SE's announcement of the Community Team tour of Pet Food Alpha, He Says She Says and Limit Break Radio has brought up some thoughts about how SE interacts with it's playerbase and things I would certainly like to know about how SE operates.
First and foremost, I would like to know just how many teams SE is carrying around that are specifically related to FFXI (<----HUGE F***ING HINT HERE KALLO). It seems like every other week, there's an interview with a team no one's ever heard of. Granted, there are some good tidbits of information that come out of these interviews from time to time, but the vast majority of the questions the playerbase want answers to are answered with:
1. I'm sorry we cannot comment on that (at this time).
2. That's (insert name here)
I figure if we know the list of teams, we can eliminate half the canned responses SE likes to give us during interviews. Got a question about AV? Go ask the CoP team. Question about seasonal events? Go ask the community team. Question about the salvage bannings? Yeah good luck finding the team responsible for those decisions, but it was a team nonetheless (guessing sub-team of the STFU).
What is really the point of these interviews if you're not going to answer the questions the players want? I'd rather no interviews happen at all if these are the only answers we're going to get. Circular finger pointing and non-answers just frustrate the people that are paying you guys. I get that some things should be kept a secret, but hell...you'd think 3+ years after it's creation we'd get more than a vague video zooming in on various bits of text in regards to how AV is taken down.
The only point I get to these interviews is that SE has an agenda to push in regards to update details and cares very little about the fandom at this point in time. When revenues start to slip, we'll most likely get answers, but until then, SE is going to work harder to guard these answers than they will to improve the game even more. I'm not saying the game isn't awesome (otherwise I wouldn't keep paying for it month after month), but it really seems detrimental from a revenue building standpoint.
Actually I should qualify the first sentence of that last paragraph with SE has given the fans a lot of what they want. Unfortunately, what they've given us lately were things that should have been implemented a long time ago. Extra storage space, closer NPC's for outpost warping, XP ring rechargings from anywhere etc.
Very little of it has been directed towards the end-game community...which is generally the portion of the community that makes up a good chunk of their consistent monthly revenues. SE gets a boon from fair-weather players each month, but those do not make up their core playerbase. This is what SE needs to realize a lot sooner than later and stop feeding us with these canned responses to legit questions. End-game got a whole slew of new critters to kill with the ZNM system that can be downed in less than 10 minutes for the most part, but didn't get answers to how they can kill AV or PW w/o needing 60+ people (and even then your chances are slim). End-game got a reduction in dynamis fees and an increase in drop rates, but didn't get instanced dynamis. End-game got additional places for king abjurations to drop, but the drop rate is even more horrible than fighting the kings themselves and the problem of botting kings still hasn't been fixed (instance it in their respective spawn areas and raise the difficulty). End-game gets plenty of new stuff that keeps it entertained for a couple weeks, but the things that they have really been wanting for years now haven't been addressed at all.
Anyway, I've ranted long enough on that subject...now for the other part of my title.
Short-term goals.
Aside from the obvious gear-related goals (Ares Legs, N.Head/Legs, White Tathlum, and Cuchulain's Mantle), I have several other goals that I'd like to accomplish within the next few months. So a quick bulleted list of what I plan on doing:
- I've decided after I get PLD to 75 next week that I'm going to take DRK to 75.
- Cooking to 60.
- Smithing to 60.
- Goldsmithing to 60.
- Goldsmithing Key Item for making vivified mythril.
- PLD Merits (haven't decided which yet).
- DRK Merits (haven't decided which yet).
- Maat Jobs to 37. RDM (32), BRD(1), SMN (2), BST (24), MNK (15) and RNG (28) only ones left.
- SCH sub for WHM.
- Likely another support/mage job to level. Looking at SCH or BLM.
- Stage 3-4 on a 2nd relic that I'm going to keep as a surprise for now. :)
By the end of July or August, I'll come back to this post and see how many of those things I've actually accomplished.
Two weeks after a major update is the dead period? We may not hear much from SE for a while, but we're still exploring augmented items from ANNM and ACP and FOV. As soon as somebody finds Haste+3 or Refresh on an earring (or Refresh+2 on any piece), those areas are going to be swarmed until the end of time.
ReplyDeleteYou are, of course, right about SE evading questions and giving meaningless answers, avoiding actually fixing endgame, and generally trying very hard to drag out our subscriptions as long as possible. Dragon's Aery is a neat concept, not so much a neat daily commitment for the rest of my game-life.
If you level DRK as a zerg job (since you have DRG for normal DD needs), put a merit into Dark Seal. It's the difference between 350hp DrainII and 27hp Drain II. KC/OC/Ridill/Kris are not optional, and a kris user with equivalent gear does half the damage of a KC, or a galka Ridill.
Did you give up on the DRG mythic weapon? :)
--cele
There's still some exploration being done, but the limits on augments have pretty much been fleshed out and it's purely luck at this point what you get out of an ANNM augmented item. If there's a super nice item out there, like some of the items from ZNMs have turned out to be, then yeah I would expect a lot of traffic just like any other area with a good item, but it doesn't give that "fresh off the update server" and "ooo i was one of the first to get it" feeling.
ReplyDeleteAnd I might've been referring to Ryunohige as the weapon I was considering upgrading...then again I might not have been :)
You should upgrade the Relic Bow, on your other character, Yoteo.
ReplyDeleteSE can, and need to learn a lot from western MMOs. FFXI is my prefered and only MMO right now but all you have to do is play a game like WoW (Oh noes!) to see how user friendly a game can be.
ReplyDeleteYagrush tbh
Drk ~BAM
ReplyDelete