The longest fight I’ve ever been involved with in FFXI was a very slow Kirin fight that took about three hours. Absolute Virtue is killable now with the level cap raised to 90, but he’s still a little tricky.

I personally wouldn’t recommend somebody new pick up FFXI unless they had a friend willing to get them at or near the level 90 cap helping them. Which could be done in a day or two. All endgame is now the past three mini-expansions basically. Everything previous is outdated.

Such is life, but I can see why they would wish to return to the old days.

I also think that Jenifer makes an excellent point, once something becomes too popular publishers will start making it generic. The nerdrage at the newfound trendiness of their once exclusive province is probably no different than the resentment that I harbour the casual gamers and Soccor Moms who ruined the Wii and are in the process of wrecking the industry. The people that I mention will not understand this, because all the changes being made are done so to the benefit of their particular set of tastes, to them I would appear to wish a return to the industry dark ages, before the advent of the Sims and Cooking Mamma revolutionized gaming … …

As for 18-hour NM kill attempts, I can’t imagine something like that outside of Absolute Virtue (see above), unless the people involved didn’t know what they were doing or were underlevelled. The longest battles I have ever personally witnessed or heard on GOOD account is around 45m.

I suspect the long times stated have more to do with multiple attempts.

Also keep in mind that combat in FFXI is significantly slower than in WoW.

If I get enough done to log on tonight before the raid, I will transfer them to you then. If not, tomorrow afternoon it is.

Also, there is a large learning curve to play effectively in any game. Any idiot can pick up a copy of WoW and make it to level 85, and as long as they play a DPS role, not screw everything up too badly when running dungeons. But as anyone who has ever played with a bad healer or bad tank can attest, those experiences rank near the bottom. And it’s not all simply dense class mechanics that require a spreadsheet. Something as simple as not using your “turn left” and “turn right” keys to move, but using mouse movements and strafing can be the difference between an effective player and an ineffective one.

The difference between WoW and FFXI isn’t the learning curve (which I would say is probably only slightly in WoW’s favor) but rather the transparency of information. WoW’s information is not only readily available via in-game menus (such as stat weights being displayed in your character window, along with their associated changes on gameplay) but the entire user-interface is perfectly moddable. Which means all those system functions that can remain hidden if the interface is not moddable have to be open. If there’s a threat calculation, in order for an addon to show it, that data must be accessible in game, for example. This means that you can arrive to play WoW with a battery of ways of displaying information that is hidden in other games. WoW presents all information up front to the user, and lets her decide what is important to playing and what is not (I, for instance, hide my threat meters; I know that, as a tank, if it’s not attacking me, that’s bad).

WoW’s community is also good about sharing boss kill strategies and keeping individual bits of gameplay down to manageable sizes. I recall hearing of 18-hour NM kill attempts in FFXI, which is staggering. If my guild asked me to spend more than 3-4 hours on a single boss in a new tier of raiding content, I would get suspicious. I think a ten minute boss fight is stressful. But being able to block out most of a single day just to try to kill one boss that will not die for hours? That’s too large of a time commitment for anyone but Japanese gamers and college-student-aged nerds.

The trick is striking a balance.

However, one thing this article says is that success in YE OLDEN DAYS was not a matter of skill, but rather of mere time investment. I’m certain that is not true. An example of an old (but still current, somehow) game is FFXI, where not only was a time investment required, but SUBSTANTIAL skill was needed.

And if I lived in an ideal world where I had infinite time, I would preserve that experience forever, because it provided a unique, amazing, immersive experience that still trumps anything I have ever seen anywhere else, and does so by a considerable margin. But, by today’s standards, the game is unplayable–not because of the time investment or the progression (both of which have been repeatedly adjusted until now it is practically on par with WoW), but because of the harshness of the learning curve and the relative difficulty of getting started, which makes bringing new people in nigh-impossible. The time is no longer an issue; rather, the amount of knowledge needed to play effectively is unnecessarily burdensome for any new player.

I think any serious FFXI player (someone who has actually played the whole game, through L.75) with a firm grasp of reality will agree with this assessment. We absolutely love it, we think it is the best game ever made, but we’d be hard pressed to recommend it to someone to play as a new player.

My main gripe, was here with several MMO communities in particular, WoW, Rift, and the Massively.com writer that somehow wanted to go back to bad simply because when it was bad no one else wanted to play and he got to be top dog. It would be like asking Square to go back to pre-ATB battle because someone had the fastest Final Fantasy speedrun.

When MMOs were a niche game that only a few people played, to be “best” all one had to do was give up a normal, healthy human life. EverQuest _required_ that people group up to _anything_ past like, level 3. But people were not ordinarily inclined to group up with someone that might have to say 10 minutes later, “Oh, baby’s crying. Be right back.” So the only way to make friends in the game and experience any content was to be online nearly constantly and whore yourself out to anyone that would have you. The game harshly penalized negative things (like dying) so the focus was heavily, heavily on very slow, conservative play that never really staked out much risk.

Which is great if you are a college student living off ramen with a part-time job and lots of free time to play a game for 10-12 hours a day. I am sure you can get some nifty, nearly-unique experiences that way because let’s face it, the amount of people that could do that are small. And this kind of attitude is the same type of attitude people have when they are obsessed with a zero-sum view of life. If someone else is having fun doing the same thing they are, their own enjoyment of the experience is lessened.

So consider modern MMOs: the focus is on accessibility and letting people who are willing to devote a rather small amount of time (10 hours or so a week) see what’s really in the game. The old-school people who put in 10 hours a day are still there, but they just get to do stuff first. Eventually, people who put in 10 hours a week “catch up” to them in terms of stuff done and rewards received, and they feel this cheapens their experience.

I’ve spoken about this in the past, and my solution would be to add more exclusive, optional high-end content, the equivalent of difficult side-quests with awesome rewards. That way, the super-hardcore have something to do while the rest of us are catching up, that soothes their need for exclusivity, which is the path most developers are taking, and most people are happy with the arrangement. But every once in a while you get a guy who writes the linked article that says, “no, no, it was all better before we let normal people play with our toys, time to take them and go home.” Which annoys me.

http://tinyurl.com/whydoyouclickonthingsipost

Integrity!

For the most part, I agree with this article. Change to anything, nerdy or not, is inevitable and along with it will be the horde of whiners that bitch about how the previous way of doing things was better. Deny as we may, we nerds have too many moments where we act like geriatric old men, screaming for the young kids with their baggy pants and their bebop music to get off our lawns. (Yes Shawn, I’m looking directly at you.)

However, if something becomes too popular, then a certain point is reached where the nerd’s fear becomes justified. Its not just arbitrary change that they are making a big deal over, but glaring change that does significantly modify the material from what it originally was, and you see this happening more and more as things get more popular. Developers become greedy and no longer want to make something nerdy as an escape, they want to get more people and thus more money, so the pandering begins.

I should leave Squeenix alone, we use them for target practice so much, but they’re just such a good example. In the 1990s (if 2005 was the dark ages, does this make the 90s prehistoric?) Square-sans-Enix was spectacular. Not only were they producing great Final Fantasy games, but their other titles like Xenogears, Vagrant Story, and Parasite Eve were all good games too. Fast forward to now, and what do we have? Dissidia Duodecim, where Final Fantasy has been strapped down, had its throat cut open, and allowed to bleed out into a button-mashing one-on-one fighting game, where not only are the characters stripped of any value, but of their clothing too (but Aya really isn’t meant to be sexy, srsly guys we mean it). And bleeding from the jugular isn’t enough, their method of promotion has been to make a series of other slices to bleed out little useless pieces of information at a time.

I will admit that many various instances of change-based nerd rage on my behalf are probably unnecessary and just the feeble cries echoing from the well of nostalgia. Yes, my nostalgia is a small child dropped into a well. But there does come a point where “the good ol’ days were better” is justified, its the distinction between the two that is more difficult to define.

Indeed, I was leading my gaming group in 4th Edition D&D antagonism from the moment I heard it was coming out in 2008. But I mellowed out… I read the ruleset and it is a solid, well-balanced system, even if it is a bit bland.