Atalae

In this entry I will discuss the design of FFXI’s tragic endgame scene.

The history behind Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia

With the introduction of “Rise of the Zilart” the North American public was given access to FFXI and server populations increased dramatically. At this point almost all of the player base was unaware of the game’s inner workings and play styles were rudimentary. The level cap had just been raised but only a very small percentage of the established subscribers were that high up. Harsh experience point requirements to gain levels and steep penalties for character deaths kept all but the most dedicated players at the lower and mid levels. As a result, the end game was small and manageable so the development team didn’t need to spend much time to please their high level fans. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything to do once you reached 75. There were several boss monsters tucked away in remote locations that only experienced players would know about but they would only appear once a day at maximum. The 24 hour respawn on these bosses was never a problem because players hardly went out to claim them before they actually appeared. It was a combination of the difficult leveling process, the sparse and rare equipment selection, the basic combat strategies and small end game population that kept the end game system fresh and exciting. HNM linkshells would drop what they were doing and race to out to fight when they found out a boss was alive. If these groups were defeated they would cut their losses short and come back when they were better prepared. Once a linkshell was powerful enough to confidently take down any of these ground bosses they could challenge themselves and the gods in Tu’Lia or Dynamis.

Dynamis was a different system than ground bosses. Instead of single monsters players face progressively more difficult waves of beastment. The requirements for dynamis were a step up from ground bosses since it required players to be level 65, to partially complete the storyline and to pay a million gil entrance fee. As players cleared city zones they could move to the more challenging northlands and fight the Dynamis Lord if they were strong enough.

The Tu’lia system was significantly harder than anything on the ground but was still made from a series of boss monsters. The lowest and easiest of the bosses had relatively quick respawn timers and offered not much more than a rare weapon and a trigger for the next stage. The triggers are used in a very primitive instance system that allowed players to plan out their fights against the gods of Tu’Lia via manually spawning them. Since the system challenged only the best of the best there was hardly ever competition for triggers. Victory against the gods was uncommon so the market was sparse with the rewards. When I first saw players in town with their relic and sky gear I was in awe since the difference in power was so great. At the time I was about level 50 with my first job and despite the difficult process it motivated me to keep leveling

It was only a matter of time until the high level population would begin to increase. After all, each player has the potential to reach level cap and in the worst case scenario every player will. The development team was determined to give each player that chance by making several adjustments to ease the leveling process. In addition, general strategies and methods by players improved. It wasn’t until the end of the second expansion that this became a series of tremendous problems. In my opinion these were the worst and why;

1>Reducing EXP required to reach the next level and reducing exp lost when getting killed

By doing this you obviously increase the speed at which your end game community populates. In order to accommodate the increasing population you must also increase the content available to these players. The development team apparently didn’t understand what they had done or assumed the majority of the playerbase was only interested in leveling up or questing since nothing had been done to improve any of the endgame scenes.

2>Failure to accommodate the shifting demograph. Failure to properly design content.

The ground bosses were never readjusted to challenge the new and upcoming groups. Player levels, strategies and equipment began to improve. Significantly more people wanted what these bosses had but the respawn timers remained at 24 hours and as a result players began to watch times of death and cheating occured. Only one real adjustment was made to prevent small groups players from holding these monsters. This never really fixed anything since small groups of players were capable of killing the monsters with appropriate skill. A better approach would be to simply increase the level and power of the ground bosses to make them more than a 24 hour annoyance between the players and their loot. I would have done that as well as make them a trigger system like in Tu’Lia. We can use several different methods to do this;

Beastmen Seals; If all of the bosses were put into Burning Circles it would have alleviated the problem immediately. The only problem with this method is a missing aesthetic since the monsters were specially placed in areas to make them more majestic. If this route were taken then we would probably need to adjust loot pools to make the fights worth the time and effort required to gather the beastmen seals.

Triggers: My favorite approach. If I had the power I would completely remodel Garrison or Expeditionary force and have the process begin there. It’s quite simple really, I would put the triggers for normal ground bosses into the loot pools of beastment that enter the battles and the triggers for the beastmen gods and god beasts into the loot pools of ground bosses. Finally the triggers for wyrms would come from the god beasts or beastmen gods. Triggers could also be placed into conquest point loot pools to encourage more experience point activity in RoZ and CoP zones.

3> Sea

The end game content offered with Chains of Promathia is very peculiar. In the beginning there was Lumoria, an area clearly designed to resemble Tu’lia but more difficult and in some cases agonizing. A tiered system of bosses like in Tu’lia existed but for some reason the triggers items that came from the lower tier bosses were never guaranteed from victory. What this meant is that a boss fight could yield nothing to proceed to the next and to make matters worse there were no new sets of armor/weapons like in Tu’Lia. While the trigger issue was addressed and adjusted, equipment rewards were not. With Tu’Lia there were seven sets of armor (5 pieces to a set), numerous crafting supplies with resale value and weapons that came from the gods. With Lumoria there were three capes, seven weapons/necklaces and two earrings out of the entire system. You could say there is more to be had if you include the notorious “Absolute Virtue” but we wont since development has a frustrating sense of pride over this monster. It holds a reasonable loot pool but at the time I type this article the monster still has not been defeated in the way it was intended. Even after countless complaints by the playerbase and adjustments by the development they refuse to give a useful hint. In any case, the Lumoria system pales in comparison to Tu’lia and ultimately the majority of players were never motivated enough to move out of Tu’lia’s system. Subsequently the market saturated with goods from Tu’Lia and everything shiney and grand about it became almost a standard. Another problem was that nobody really cared for what Lumoria had to offer since it was only slightly more useful than what could be bought from the auction house. More on this in a separate discussion.

A while after Lumoria the development team introduced Limbus. Similar to Dynamis, Limbus offers progressive rewards to participants. Instead of all the possible rewards being randomly dropped from bosses the players are given coins to trade in for what they want. Plenty of what is offered in the rewards pool is desirable but if you carefully examine what you can earn you realize the development team doesn’t understand how to play their own game or at least how the players play. With Limbus you are given a chance to boost an old set of quested artifact armor. Unfortunately the boosted equipment is marginally better(sometimes in a way that doesn’t even effect the job) and jumps from level 55-60 all the way to 74. In most cases the gear is situational and only offers one or two decent pieces of the 5 piece set. Limbus is also tiered like Tu’Lia and Lumoria. With the completion of a lowered tiered area the players are rewarded with chips they use to gain entrance to the two bosses, Omega and Ultima. These bosses randomly drop pieces of armor from two different sets.

With simple readjustments to artifact +1 sets and the Limbus reward tables Chains of Promathia could have had the popularity that Tu’lia did and saved players a lot of RMT and cheat related grief (explained later).

With these problems and the development team failing so miserably it seemed FFXI was never going to offer a decent endgame to it quickly maturing community. But then Treasures of Aht Urghan came and shaped up nicely.

Treasures of Aht Urghan indeed.

In a sense ToAU was everything that RoZ and CoP is except for one very important compotent. A buzzword that makes its way around the MMORPG scene these days; Instance. ToAU is almost entirely instance content that also takes tiered structures from RoZ and CoP. The best part is just how much there is to do compared to the other expansions and how it even scales to lower levels if needed. Assault can be done by groups of level 50 players if needed although it’s safe to say that at ToAU’s introduction a majority of the playerbase was already at 75 with more than one job. Some would argue that Assault isn’t endgame content but I would disagree considering the higher rank Assaults require a level of skill that can only be found in end game players. Then as a result players are allowed to participate in Salvage. Salvage is also instanced but feels a little like Limbus and Dynamis combined. The farther you get into it the harder it becomes and the rewards are awfully sparse. Einherjar is exceptional in my opinion. It too is instanced and offers tremendous rewards to those who are successful and a point system to those who don’t benefit directly from item drops. Then comes the fantastic tiered bosses.

The development team took one of their failed pieces of general content and made it the basis for an amazing end game activity. Pankration was a silly attempt to give players the ability to duel each other outside of PVP (more on this in a different discussion). When the players stopped caring about it the development decided to lure them back in by using the pankration soul trapper as a starting point for different content. Players use the soul trapper to take pictures of monsters and then they can either a) trade in the plates for points require to buy triggers for new bosses or b)use the plates and try out pankration. This boosted the participants in old content (by whatever tiny number we may never know), opened an entirely new market for players to make gil and offered a new way to progress outside of the standard farming method (players didn’t need to kill XX of a certain monster or wait X hours for respawn). The system offers thirty new bosses that get progressively harder and several nice pieces of equipment. The only drawbacks are the final tiers. Like early Lumoria your weeks of collecting triggers from lower tier bosses could result in absolutely nothing since the final tier will not guarantee the item required to go to the final boss. And then the final boss itself was an even bigger mess than Absolute Virtue ever was. If you don’t know what I mean just google the term “Pandemonium Warden” and read all the blogs/news articles about it. While this system wasn’t instance the way all the other activities in ToAU were it really didn’t need to be. The bosses are so far and varied that the chances of bumping heads with another group are very small and even when you do run into a group ahead of your own you are more inclined to support them than to grief them since the thing you trade your trigger to reactivates almost immediately after the bosses defeat.

Failure, RMT and cheating

In a brief reflection let’s look at how the development learned from their previous mistakes when designing and polishing ToAU. Let’s also analyze why RMT was such a tremendous problem in FFXI.

When players are faced with an arduous process they are going to find the means to make it shorter or less enduring. For a time in FFXI’s case it was gil. Gil was extremely important to the community because too much of the most powerful or popular gear was available through auction or trade. Let’s pretend for a moment that an item like the scorpion harness was not available through the auction house. Let’s think what would have happened if Ochiudo’s Kote was rare/ex to begin with and obtained through quests followed by a Burning Circle fight. The problem was that there weren’t enough steps in between the player and the good pieces of gear. Those steps were experience points and gil. The development team eliminated one of those steps when the experience points were adjusted and that only left gil. As a result large groups of gil farmers formed to offer their services to players in exchange for real world cash. These groups formed fastest in the RoZ era of FFXI and didn’t begin to fade well until ToAU was released. I remember entire areas on lockdown by RMT groups after a single piece of equipment. These groups ravaged the game and all but destroyed the economy. Because of their involvement, rare pieces of gear are now standard and inexpensive. But it’s very rare to find RMT groups like this after monsters in Lumoria, Limbus or Aht Urghan since almost all those rewards bind to the player immediately when they are obtained. Therefor resale is impossible and gil is only a small part of the process.

Cheating was also a result of the experience point adjustment. Larger amounts of players were reaching the high levels and wanted good gear to go along with it. The good gear was on monsters that only spawned once a day or seldom so bottle necks formed. People monopolized the bottleneck with cheats to claim monsters the very instant they appeared. And to make matters worse, some of these good pieces of gear could be traded or sold. Do people feel the need to use cheats like these in Aht Urghan areas? The answer is “no” because most of it is instance or trigger content. They don’t need to cheat for their chance at the good gear since as long as they take enough pictures with their soul trappers or do assault frequently they can get those nice pieces of equipment.