The Future

So with all these changes coming to FFXI, there are obviously a lot of questions and a number of different schools of thought. I'm gonna blog about some of them today as they relate specifically to Obsidian.

As most know, Obsidian is expanding it's scope of events beyond Dynamis and Einherjar. A lot of our members are already committed to these events elsewhere. This leads a lot of people to say "too little too late". Part of me initially believed that, but then reality set in.

We started Einherjar nearly a full year AFTER SE made the event reasonable and look at where we're at right now. Yes, I realize that means we have a lot of people who don't want to f**k with kings who have yet to pick up any of the gear from them and a 30 minute event twice a week affords them the opportunity to do so.

It's through that event that we really took notice of people leveling new jobs, that didn't already have some of the gear from sky or sea for it and made the decision to expand.

So far so good needless to say.

We started sky up this past Friday with less than a few days for the announcement and had anywhere 14-16 people there at any point in time just for the farming. Even more impromptu was the diorite farming that happened after Einherjar on Saturday and after Dynamis on Sunday.

(On a sort-of side-note...Diorite sucks.)

End results of our farming were two complete pop sets and about half of a third. Next event will end up being Gods and I'm expecting a larger turnout for that since, in my experience, no one likes to do the legwork.

Which probably explains why we have a number of people in the shell w/o all the sky gear they need...

Anyway, I digressed a little.

This post is about the future.

With SE's announcement of Abyssea and, essentially, AF3, there are many that believe Dynamis will fall by the way-side and accordingly, shells like Obsidian will struggle. I fully anticipate some decline in attendance right when the level cap updates are released because people will be out trying to max their job levels out again. Which there's nothing wrong with.

However, what most don't take into account is the fact that all of the news coming out of Vanafest has regenerated a ton of interest in this game. You can speculate however you want on what their intentions were, but it's pretty clear, they're intent on keeping this game going as long as they can. Just in the last week, I've had several people remark over I.M. that they'll likely reactivate or know someone who is going to reactivate when the level cap gets increased.

There's also a few who don't want to continue playing since they feel like their job or their gear that they've poured years of their lives in to will become obsolete or because they don't feel like going through the level grind again. Personally, I think the number of reactivations/returns will greatly outnumber the deactivations/retirees. This likely bodes well for Obsidian, especially once we get expanded.

Now a lot of this is going to depend on how SE implements things like Trial of the Magians and Abyssea itself, but there's one thing they made abundantly clear.

They want people to enjoy content like Dynamis or Einherjar in smaller numbers. They've stated that implicitly. Anyone concerned about Abyssea killing off Dynamis runs is probably over-worrying this fact. On top of that, depending on how they implement Abyssea, it's entirely possible the shell focus shifts to that with more specific runs aimed at finishing relics instead. Linkshells have to evolve with what the developers are tossing out there. The ones that do not are the ones that fall by the wayside once newer, shinier stuff shows up.

This is one of the primary reasons Obsidian has been around as long as it has. We knew that people generally don't want to invest 3-4 hours of their lives twice a week to killing the same things over and over and over again. Once they got what they wanted, they'd move onto other things. There are few exceptions to this. We kept the door open for the application process and returns to the linkshell specifically for this reason.

With Obsidian expanding into other areas like Sky, Sea, and ZNMs along with the potential for staying ahead of the curve this time in regards to Abyssea, the future is bright. This linkshell is not going anywhere for a very long time.

(Unless you're Gawayne...who has to rewrite the website...but he's already got a line of people waiting to have his babies as a result...including me).