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Protecting Final Fantasy XI From the Gil-Sellers
At GDC Austin, the technical keynote for Thursday focused in on the challenging task of developing the online game Final Fantasy XI. We were treated to a broad but vaguely technical discussion from Hiromichi Tanaka, the producer of the half-a-million strong game world. He was joined by Sage Sundi, the global producer of the game, who gave a fascinating discussion about Square/Enix's battle against real money traders. Their successes have been hard-fought, and are illustrative of the problems facing anyone running one of these games. Read on for notes from the event.
Tanaka is one of the original members of Square, was a planner for the first three Final Fantasy games, and has long been the producer of Final Fantasy XI. He spends Thursday some time Thursday morning discussing a history of the franchise, harkening back to the 'poor' sales of Final Fantasy at 500,000 copies. The series has since sold over 75 million games worldwide, up through the more recent PlayStation titles. He references the upcoming FFXIII and Versus FFXIII as the definitive vision of the series for the next few years.
FFXI is celebrating its 5th anniversary, a full quarter of the Final Fantasy series' history (at 20 years). It was released in May of 2002, the first cross-platform RPG (PS2 and PC). It was also a worldwide title, both aspects of which were almost unheard of for online games at the time.
The roots of the game reach back to 1999. The Chrono Cross, Legend of Mana, and Parasite Eve teams were roped together to make the game. In 2001 the public Beta began, and was released in May 2002 in Japan. November 2002 saw the Windows release, followed by the first expansion/US Release in October 2003, the second expansion/EU Launch in 2004, and the latest expansion in 2006. German and French versions were released just this year; it took two years to translate all the content in the game. They made sure as content was released (and the new expansions) that those teams were kept up to date. There are now four languages spoken inside the game world, each inside the same servers.
Early in the development of the game, they were already working on a version for the original Xbox. The main roadblock to the game's success was the small HDD; only 2GB wouldn't cut it. When the game was installed on the PS2 HDD, it reserved 8GB. They view updates as the 'lifeline' of the Massive game. No mass storage, no updates ... no MMOG.
PlayOnline is mentioned, with their concept being a 'portal for entertainment'. It's an independent platform for content, with a common information tool for all game playing options. It's crucial for the PS2 and 360, which don't have web browsers. It allows them to keep tabs on user statistics, as well.
The game is built around the concept of cross-region play. The three regions they support (US, EU, JP) are separated by big blocks of time, allowing them to financially support the concept. There are spikes, but the spike isn't all at once across the board thanks to the 24 hour day. A graph shows the different peaks around the world, with notes that the US peak is smaller than the JP one because of the number of time zones in the country. He provides some interesting stats: there are roughly 15-20k users per world. There's a fairly equal distribution between servers, and the service sees between 200-300k individual logins per day. The number of Hardcore players means that there is quite a bit of overlap between the 'US' timeslots and the 'JP' timeslots.
This overlap can lead to poor behavior for a number of reasons. Killstealing, Player Killing, and Spawn Camping are just three examples. They have tweaked the game's systems to remove some of the most easily-exploited elements. They removed general PvP, granted possession of a mob to the first player to attack it, and put in systems that encouraged cooperation. Their most successful outlet has been the sports-style PvP games. They're team vs. team sports, and give players the opportunity to beat each other 'silly' without causing grief.
The Auto translation feature is another success in bringing communities together. It translates FFXI-related terms to whatever language a player is using. It uses simple word and sentence structures, to avoid confusion. They have tied it deeply into the game to make it easy and fast to use; it's a part of the everyday game for many players. This was crucial to overcome the initial resistance that Japanese players had to dealing with thousands of American players. Despite requests from many points of view to host regional servers, they've always resisted. They see the universal servers as a real strength, a unique feature in the industry.
Unfortunately, they've had real problems with gold farmers. They've become much more aggressive due to the success of the genre, and have rapidly expanded across the globe thanks to cheap labor costs. They're huge organizations, spread across the globe, and seek to exploit weaknesses in an economy whenever they can find them. Mr. Tanaka then turns the floor over to Sage Sundi, the global producer of the game. He worked his way up to his position from a volunteer position with the Japanese version of UO. He's here to specifically address RMT.
There are several ways to deal with the issue: allow it all, the company can engage in it itself, or they ignore it. They chose the hardest option: fighting it. Acting against it is a challenge, and they assembled a task force specifically for the issue. They claim that they've eliminated some 90% of the traders in the game world.
The problems RMT inflicts are: inflation, farming and monopolizing of monsters, and cheating. All of these affect the play experience for normal players. RMT would not be a problem, they say, if the people who engaged in it were polite. They have a great slide showing the huge inflation of the currency wildly out of sync with the new number of players in the game. Around the end of 2005 they detected the upsurge, and investigated.
An RMT organization is made up of several groups: Hunters are the ones who actually do the killing, and send the gil along to Bank players. The Front-End folks deal with customers, and make sure they get their stuff. The website element is also public facing; the biggest groups can employ up to 500 people. The task force went to work last year, and their two primary jobs were to analyze server data and comb through feedback. They examined server logs, customer issues, etc. The task force looks through the logs weekly, while originally they were addressed only once per month
Their conclusions:
Tanaka returns to the stage to discuss their retention policies. They've had a very rapid expansion pack policy (3 in 5 years), along with major updates every 2 months, and monthly events like holidays. Changes and live feedback are their keys to this success. Wings of the Goddess is the fourth expansion coming, with a worldwide release. There are some 12 SKUs associated with that expansion, spread across all the markets.
They still have 500,000 users, and as long as they keep playing they'll keep developing the game. They are worried that the graphical capabilities of Vista and the 360 will make the game look faded. They are working on a new MMOG, also intended to be cross platform/cross region. They're also developing a common platform for all future games, borrowing technologies from their future MMOG and FFXIII. The new MMOG will be a cross-platform title, available for both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360; Tanaka reveals that Nintendo is currently not allowing cross-platform online games. He does, however, say that it's not out of the question from a technical perspective. Soon, he hints, we'll be able to hear more about these upcoming games. With that, Tanaka ends the event by showing us the beautiful Wings of the Goddess trailer, and the keynote is over.
FFXI is celebrating its 5th anniversary, a full quarter of the Final Fantasy series' history (at 20 years). It was released in May of 2002, the first cross-platform RPG (PS2 and PC). It was also a worldwide title, both aspects of which were almost unheard of for online games at the time.
The roots of the game reach back to 1999. The Chrono Cross, Legend of Mana, and Parasite Eve teams were roped together to make the game. In 2001 the public Beta began, and was released in May 2002 in Japan. November 2002 saw the Windows release, followed by the first expansion/US Release in October 2003, the second expansion/EU Launch in 2004, and the latest expansion in 2006. German and French versions were released just this year; it took two years to translate all the content in the game. They made sure as content was released (and the new expansions) that those teams were kept up to date. There are now four languages spoken inside the game world, each inside the same servers.
Early in the development of the game, they were already working on a version for the original Xbox. The main roadblock to the game's success was the small HDD; only 2GB wouldn't cut it. When the game was installed on the PS2 HDD, it reserved 8GB. They view updates as the 'lifeline' of the Massive game. No mass storage, no updates ... no MMOG.
PlayOnline is mentioned, with their concept being a 'portal for entertainment'. It's an independent platform for content, with a common information tool for all game playing options. It's crucial for the PS2 and 360, which don't have web browsers. It allows them to keep tabs on user statistics, as well.
The game is built around the concept of cross-region play. The three regions they support (US, EU, JP) are separated by big blocks of time, allowing them to financially support the concept. There are spikes, but the spike isn't all at once across the board thanks to the 24 hour day. A graph shows the different peaks around the world, with notes that the US peak is smaller than the JP one because of the number of time zones in the country. He provides some interesting stats: there are roughly 15-20k users per world. There's a fairly equal distribution between servers, and the service sees between 200-300k individual logins per day. The number of Hardcore players means that there is quite a bit of overlap between the 'US' timeslots and the 'JP' timeslots.
This overlap can lead to poor behavior for a number of reasons. Killstealing, Player Killing, and Spawn Camping are just three examples. They have tweaked the game's systems to remove some of the most easily-exploited elements. They removed general PvP, granted possession of a mob to the first player to attack it, and put in systems that encouraged cooperation. Their most successful outlet has been the sports-style PvP games. They're team vs. team sports, and give players the opportunity to beat each other 'silly' without causing grief.
The Auto translation feature is another success in bringing communities together. It translates FFXI-related terms to whatever language a player is using. It uses simple word and sentence structures, to avoid confusion. They have tied it deeply into the game to make it easy and fast to use; it's a part of the everyday game for many players. This was crucial to overcome the initial resistance that Japanese players had to dealing with thousands of American players. Despite requests from many points of view to host regional servers, they've always resisted. They see the universal servers as a real strength, a unique feature in the industry.
Unfortunately, they've had real problems with gold farmers. They've become much more aggressive due to the success of the genre, and have rapidly expanded across the globe thanks to cheap labor costs. They're huge organizations, spread across the globe, and seek to exploit weaknesses in an economy whenever they can find them. Mr. Tanaka then turns the floor over to Sage Sundi, the global producer of the game. He worked his way up to his position from a volunteer position with the Japanese version of UO. He's here to specifically address RMT.
There are several ways to deal with the issue: allow it all, the company can engage in it itself, or they ignore it. They chose the hardest option: fighting it. Acting against it is a challenge, and they assembled a task force specifically for the issue. They claim that they've eliminated some 90% of the traders in the game world.
The problems RMT inflicts are: inflation, farming and monopolizing of monsters, and cheating. All of these affect the play experience for normal players. RMT would not be a problem, they say, if the people who engaged in it were polite. They have a great slide showing the huge inflation of the currency wildly out of sync with the new number of players in the game. Around the end of 2005 they detected the upsurge, and investigated.
An RMT organization is made up of several groups: Hunters are the ones who actually do the killing, and send the gil along to Bank players. The Front-End folks deal with customers, and make sure they get their stuff. The website element is also public facing; the biggest groups can employ up to 500 people. The task force went to work last year, and their two primary jobs were to analyze server data and comb through feedback. They examined server logs, customer issues, etc. The task force looks through the logs weekly, while originally they were addressed only once per month
Their conclusions:
- The biggest RMT groups are connected.
- With a few small exceptions, most larger groups are using common funds to do their work.
- Removing Front-End folks and Bankers is not enough. It is effective in removing large amounts of currency from the game, but it will encourage the Hunters to increase productivity for their new masters.
- The real goal is to eliminate the Hunters. This helps players by removing irritating experiences from the game world. It indirectly weakens the RMT front-end folks by lowering their supply of goods.
- They'll be back. It doesn't matter if they're banned, they'll be back soon with new accounts. The company needs to keep cleaning, despite the 're-spawn' rate.
- You have to maintain a good back-end data system to ensure these people can be identified.
- Systems must be tweaked as often as possible to minimize Hunter success. Security holes must be closed, etc. At the same time, these efforts must be not harmful to the players. As an example: they added a monster to a high-level fishing area to ensure low-level Hunters were kept at bay. He's easy to kill for appropriate-level characters, but the low-level Hunter avatars run to the zone to do nothing but fish are easily destroyed.
- It's critical to construct 'fair' guidelines to determine what is and isn't accepted. You can't ban all accounts from a country, for example. Don't encourage witchhunts among the players.
- It's also important to keep it an internal discussion with the legal department, to get consensus with everyone on board.
Tanaka returns to the stage to discuss their retention policies. They've had a very rapid expansion pack policy (3 in 5 years), along with major updates every 2 months, and monthly events like holidays. Changes and live feedback are their keys to this success. Wings of the Goddess is the fourth expansion coming, with a worldwide release. There are some 12 SKUs associated with that expansion, spread across all the markets.
They still have 500,000 users, and as long as they keep playing they'll keep developing the game. They are worried that the graphical capabilities of Vista and the 360 will make the game look faded. They are working on a new MMOG, also intended to be cross platform/cross region. They're also developing a common platform for all future games, borrowing technologies from their future MMOG and FFXIII. The new MMOG will be a cross-platform title, available for both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360; Tanaka reveals that Nintendo is currently not allowing cross-platform online games. He does, however, say that it's not out of the question from a technical perspective. Soon, he hints, we'll be able to hear more about these upcoming games. With that, Tanaka ends the event by showing us the beautiful Wings of the Goddess trailer, and the keynote is over.
Half a million people are still playing that? Wow. I'm half tempted to give it another look, since I was sort of an early-adopter on PC and their tech support wasn't exactly English-speaker-friendly at that time. But it really seemed like a grind - from what I remember, there was sort of a noob zone, say, level 1 - 8 type stuff (*pulling numbers out my ass here for example's sake*) and an intermediate zone, say, level 15+ stuff, but getting from 9 to 15 seemed like an endless grind of noob monsters. Maybe I was just doing it wrong? It was my first MMO...
Unpleasantries.
Let's see how many non-FFXI players try to comment to this thread without knowing anything about the measures taken from SE so far to reduce RMT.
Cough....WoW.....cough......
he spends Thursday some time Thursday morning discussing
Usually I like to start off my Thursdays with Thursday mornings.
Monstar L
FFXI was Japan only for ages before finally being released in North America and then Europe. All the Japanese players were already maxed out and already camping the best spawns, even the noob level spawns that dropped special items were always camped 24/7 by max level Japanese players.
And its still not really a worldwide game, as all the servers are in Japan and so playing from North America there is really bad latency, bad enough that mobs can chase you and hit you while you run away, but you can't hit them while you chase them.
And the auto-translation feature is both painfully awkward to use (even more so than the rest of the horrible UI), and so lacking in words that its unusable.
FFXI is quite possibly the single worst MMOG ever played, and people only put up with it out of desperate love of the final fantasy name and franchise.
As a longtime FFXI player (3 1/2 years now), I noticed a big change in how Square-Enix approached gilsellers/hunters/farmers. For a long time there was very little from SE on the issue, and the in-game consequences were very noticeable. Normal players would be killed by groups of gilsellers merely for being in the area of one of their camps, the economy was inflating crazily, and there was no competing with them in certain economic areas. People were becoming depressed and leaving, at least in part because of the bad environment.
And then SE decided to pull themselves together and really address the problem. Month postings detailing the number of banned players for various reasons were posted. We started seeing long-time gilselling groups disappear from their usual haunts and then from the game entirely. And most importantly, a sense of optimism started to creep in among the general population.
There are still issues with the economy of course. There has been a large deflation as billions of gil were removed by banning accounts. It's hard to make a living crafting, and people seems to be on much tighter budgets these days. But I don't think any of us would want to return to the time when gilsellers roamed free.
I'm very thankful SE took a stand and put in so much effort to crack down on this problem.
When I left the game inflation was out of control, making good items ridiculously expensive. You couldn't hunt for the special items because of the campers. You would save up for a month and then the item you wanted would be twice as high. Stories that it might be improved are interesting.
That and it was impossible to find a party if you character didn't fit certain molds, but that was more a powergaming problem then gilselling.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I've been playing FFXI since around 2004. I think a lot of FFXI's RMT problems stem from SE's insistence on many items being rare, and their implementation of it.
The original endgame system worked where a highly desired item would be a uncommon drop of off a monster that spawned once every 1-3 real life days with predictable spawn conditions. This might have been fine when there were few players at the level cap but as endgame became more crowded this became more and more of a source of conflict between the players. There were also lesser monsters that dropped rare items that were on shorter timers, but still had predictable spawn conditions and low drop rates.
Naturally, players started resorting to 3rd party tools to outclaim the other guilds in the game and RMT soon realized that they could set up shop 24 hours a day and then form their own in game mafia of sorts and monopolize these monsters and basically extort the players. While a legit player would unlikely be online for that 5 am Simurgh spawn, the RMT were on all day and knew when everything would be up.
SE played dumb while this was happening, letting the RMT slowly take over the game's economy. Everything of value was being perma-camped by packs of RMT.
Fast forward a few years, and two expansion packs later. The matter is further complicated because the population has become even more top heavy with more and more players reaching maximum level. The additional expansion packs had basically failed to break the original expansion's dominance in the game. Much of the original expansion's equipment is still the most highly desirable and fought over equipment in the game. This seems to run contrary to most other game's expansions where the old content is quickly forgotten about when a new expansion is added.
SE finally started listening to the playerbase and changing some of the monster spawn conditions, but it was basically making an already annoying process more convoluted.
SE had a great chance to fix their RMT problems by designing a new endgame system that couldn't be monopolized by the RMT in their newer expansions and making the original expansion obsolete. But their insistence that the original expansion's items remain rare and powerful has held the game back. Not only does it leave us fighting over the same 3 year old items but it also begs the question of why bother adding a new expansion when everyone is going to rush off to camp the old monsters (lolFafnir) moments after going live.
One of the most applauded features of the current expansion pack was giving us a few new methods of obtaining items from the original expansion pack. What a joke. I think a lot of FFXI's RMT problems would fade into the woodwork if SE would stop insisting that this 3 year old expansion remain relevant and let their new expansions shine on their own.
. It was released in May of 2002, the first cross-platform RPG (PS2 and PC). What? Ignoring all other examples, FFVIII was released for both PS1 and PC.
FFXI has some of the best, and some of the worst, features of any MMO I've played.
... goblins. When you're level 30, you're fighting goblins.
The best:
-Seasonal Events - Not to be understated, but this is really the game's greatest feature. The holidays were always something to look forward to, as there were unique games and events that really built a spirit of community.
-Audio and Video - The graphics for the time were breathtaking, and it appears that the new expansions look just as good. The sound effects and music were top notch.
-Class Systems - So many different jobs to choose from, and the best part was that you could switch it whenever you felt like it. Dual classes made for some very interesting strategies.
-Crafting Systems - So many recipies and craft items to work with, you could literally spend all your time just making stuff.
-Quests - Really quite varied for the standard Fetch/Kill/Courier mission structures we see in all MMOs, the cutscenes were the true payoffs.
The Worst:
-Leveling/Grind - Difficult to solo past level 10, after 30 you're practically forced to be in a group, and some classes can take hours just to find one.
-Market - The Auction house was a total lagfest and a nightmare to browse. Letting players sell their items directly was a nice touch, but the inventory was too limited and the economy decimated by farmers when I left
-Spawncamping - It wasn't bad enough that spawncamping was the only way to get certain mission-critical items (The key quest was a waste of a weekend), but training and aggro bugs made it easy for one high-level magi to run through a map, "steal" spawns for their group, then annihilate the entire bunch with a few spells and give the rare/bind loot to his low-level friends.
-Variety (or lack of) of mobs - When you're a level 2, you're fighting goblins. When you're level 20, you're fighting
Actually SquareEnix was a huge opponent of the slimline PS2. Statistically, SquareEnix has pointed out that most Japanese FFXI players play the game on the PS2 so when Sony removed hard drive support on the slimline PS2, they essentially killed most Japanese FFXI gamers (since the Xbox 360 version has nearly no demand in Japan). Oh and the lack of PS2 hard drives on the (used) market hasn't helped.
I lasted about 6 weeks in FFXI. The iconic experience of my time there was when I entered an area for one of the low level quests and found a player around my level farming there. The player inspected me and informed me that I was high enough level to equip earrings. I asked what type of earrings I should get, and he told me. I went back to town to check the AH and discovered that the earrings in question cost 10K gil each. I had a few hundred.
FFXI's job system is a clever attempt to reconcile forced grouping with new players starting the game and not having people their level to group with. In fact, ALL players are required to level at least one job other than their preferred class to half of the level cap. While this does have the benefit of ensuring that there are more low level characters online at any given time, the issue is that almost all of them don't actually want to be there. As a result, there's a tremendous pressure to optimize your characters with the very best gear, food, subjobs (yes, sometimes you may need to level a job you don't care about because it's the optimal subjob for the optimal subjob for your actual job), items to prevent foes from aggroing as you travel to the area you want to go and farm (yes, even travel is a group activity) etc. If you've got all these things, and an ideal group, you might be able to shave a day or two off your time in low level purgatory, so players jump at the chance. And don't get me started on how access to airship travel is restricted until you get to a very high level (that will be very hard to reach without airship access).... unless you come up with 500,000 gil from somewhere.
In short, cash is a bad place to put your timesinks. If you create a gil sellers' paradise, you can't be too shocked when they show up.
Yeah, yeah I know, a SOE game, ruined by "updates" that never left beta. BUT it did try some new ways of doing an MMORPG that overcame much of the problems of the likes of WoW, Lotro and Final Fantasy Online.
Loot drops as such barely existed in the game (yes sony in their insistence to ruin the game did add them later) and in fact the economy was based on player crafting.
Combat player would either gather resources and/or money, sell these to crafters, who turned them into items, that the combat players could use.
This had a very simple effect, camping a spawn was rare (yes it happened for some drops used for some items, but these items were usually not the effort) for instance say that a spectactular resource appeared in the world (the quality of resources, minerals mined and meat hunted, changed over time) then suddenly you would find a lot of players in that area trying to get it, but that area was an entire planet with more then enough space to accomadate ALL the players on a server.
By not having the best equipment be rare drops, you avoid camping. In SWG the best items were only limited by the willingness of people to gather a resource.
A second difference was that SWG had very few quests. I am currently playing Lotro and while its quests are very nice and tell a decent enough story, the simple fact is that it can often be a pain to assemble a group who are on the same stage of a quest.
In SWG, you mostly did basic missions, which meant that finding a group was trivial (well apart from when Sony screwed up with the doc buffs and you got the SWG only creation of the Solo Group (don't ask)), as everyone in an area would usually be doing the same type of mission.
Most other MMORPG's seem to purposully introduce elements that encourage RMT and asshole behaviour and then never fail to first ignore it, until people are leaving in droves and then complain how the RMT destroyed their game.
No, sorry, you the designer did. Lotro too at the moment is being slowly overrun by gold sellers, yet does Turbine show any concern about this? Hell, it won't even tell you that they banned an account after it has spammed advertising. Now they introduced a free trial. Oh yeah, that always worked wonders before and never has been a RMT traders wetdream. Free, unlimited accounts to spam with.
Like many MMORPG's companies Square is now left with a small userbase because at no point in the design process did they think of what their design decisions would mean to the eventual ingame economy.
Can you de-TLA the term RMT?
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Do you seriously think nobody who has played the game is reading this to point out your bullshit? 2 jobs can solo, BST always could, and then when they added PUP it could too (since its the same damn thing). BLM? DRG? What kind of crack are you smoking? A DRG can't solo any better than every other fighting job, you'd be just as well off trying to solo as a DRK. And a BLM is even worse, what the hell are you talking about? RDM is better for soloing than a BLM. And BLU is perhaps less horrible for soloing with than most jobs, but its certainly not capable of productive soloing like a BST or PUP is.
WTF is a gil? What is RMT?
Are these general terms in many multiplayers games, or specific to this particular game?
I have to say, this might be the best thing Square Enix ever did for this game. I was around a couple of years back, and the inflation was absolutely terrible. I'll give a simple example.
The whole crafting system is based around the use of crystals, which drop from mobs if you've gotten your nation's signet cast upon you. The going rate for crystals was about 1000-2000 gil per stack of 12. I remember, within a span of about 2 weeks on my server, the price of fire crystals going from 2000 to 7000 gil. It was outrageously bad! I was a newbie, and there was no way I could afford good equipment or spells because of the massive inflation of everything. Items that used to cost 100,000 gil went up to a million or more. The list could go on and on.
I recently came back to the game, and I am very happy with what has happened to the economy. Crystals are down to 700-1500 per stack, and other things that were once ridiculously expensive - even low level gear - went down to more normal prices, meaning you didn't have to spend a week farming to get one piece of EQ.
The economy's fix, coupled with the introduction of items that make leveling a bit faster, makes this game a bit easier. To anyone who's looking to take a break from WoW or another MMO should check this game out. Be warned - it is very top-heavy, with most of the players already at 75, so finding people to group with may be difficult during non-peak times. However, due to the ability to change jobs at anytime, and the advent of the new expansion, I think there won't be a shortage of potential party members when WotG comes out.
Although it'd been used before FF4, the official line is that the currency is named after Prince Gilbert of Damcyan in FF4.
RMT = real-money trading, as someone else above explained.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I honestly don't see it being as bad as people are claiming it to be. The battle system is by far more interesting and strategy oriented than WoW. The only complaint that I can understand is that since it is party-based, if one person is a moron and screws up, everyone suffers. That is the frustrating part.
If you really wanted to solo on FFXI, though, you'd play a BST (beastmaster). They are the only job in the game that solo quite effectively.
One way to deal with farmers is make them not needed! WoW has done this by creating daily quests. You get an average of 12g per quest along with faction rep. So basically you are giving players a steady cash flow. With the ability to make enough gold to eventually buy one of the epic flying mounts, it deters most players from buying gold. Granted it may take a year if you do not do them every day, but you know it will happen. Just like granting epic gear through pvp, you need to pvp a certain amount of time in a battleground or arena (arena you have to win) and you are awarded points. You know it will take a certain amount of points to get said piece of gear.
Some may say that this takes some of the challenge out of the game but on the other hand some of these quests are not the easiest and it allows you to spend time doing other things instead of camping a mob all day.
Three things I like about WoW compared to FFXI:
1. It is only a time sync if you want it to be. I can jump in game and do something really quick and jump out, whether its a few BGs, arena or just doing some fishing.
2. Experience gain is greater and allows you to make it to mid level fairly quickly which makes it easier to catch up to friends and join them in end game. Also the quests are design to get you levels appropriate to the next set. By the time you hit the next zone you are at the level you should be for that zone.
3. Soloing - this goes back to #1 on the list. One MAJOR thing I didn't like about FFXI was waiting around to join a group just to kill mobs for xp.
Now the things I liked about FFXI compared to WoW:
1. The community was better in FFXI. Having to play with people from Japan it forced you to be polite to others. The community in a whole seemed more intelligent. If you don't believe me, spend a day in Barrens Chat or the Trade channel on WoW. You will grow dumber just reading the crap that flows from there.
2. Group mechanics - yeah I like to solo, but I also like some social interaction. Much of FFXI required you to be in groups at low levels. so by the time you got to end-game content you should know your class and how it works in the group. WoW makes it TOO easy for people to rush to 70 and then you get someone with a pet or totem that keeps breaking CC because that pet keeps attacking anything nearby.
Ok, thats all. These stories always get me going.
One thing FFXI can do to improve on fighting farmers is give the players more gil through quests or mob drops making the need to use the farmers less.
Dewser - all around techy "In the immortal words of Socrates - 'I drank what?'"
Went alot like this - level a class to level 8 or so, go to Valkurn (or something) Dunes - spam level 9 Monk LFG for 2 hours and hope the group that finally takes you doesn't break apart in 5 minutes when the Japanese tank decides he'd rather just play with Japanese players. Take your intrepid group of 6 (or was it 5?) players and kill a single crab (you can maybe take 2 if you're good or lucky) repeat times 1000 until you hit level 18. At level 18 kill a zillion ghouls until you get the ghoul skull you need for the subjob quest. Repeat the steps above to level your subjob (it won't get any experience - you have to do it seperately). At level 20 spend several hours feeding a chocobo so you gain the ability to RENT one at specific locations which shortens your run from zone to zone from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.
And well, thats as far as I made it - level 20 monk/10 warrior - in about 3 months worth of effort. I couldn't stomach the thought of going to a slightly higher new zone and killing a different color crab for another 50 levels (crabs were the scourge of FFXI). Its too bad too, because there was a fun game buried in there someplace amongst the tedium and frustration.
*note - this was in 2004 - so its improved a bit since then, though from what I read about the updates not much.
You know, they went after the supply side of the system... It would be a lot more effective if they used a bit of FUD to influence the demand side. Start banning people that bought money. They already have a list of people that were RMT's, just ban all the people the RMT's gave money to.
I have never bought money online. I don't even like to receive money or help from friends unless I've tried to do it before myself.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
I have been soloing and duoing BLM since level 40 and up to my current level of 64. If you know where to camp and what monsters to kill, you can make more exp per hour then if you were in a party. Around level 48 my friend and I were making 8,000 exp per hour pretty easy as BLMs duoing. Without exp bonus ring on we had a chain 5 of monster kills for a total of 2,600 exp and that was in about 20 minutes. These monster did not have to be sleep/nuked either; we just bounced hate between us for the 3-4 spells that it took to kill the monster. I can solo the same monsters for better exp per kill just as easy; but it is more fun hanging out with a friend.
Black Mage is a very powerful solo job. There is 99% chance that if any monster can be slept, a BLM can solo that monster (Excluding Gods and some NMs).
They have a list of people that *received* money, not a list of people that bought money. How do you think they can tell who bought money? You think the gilsellers care who pays them or who they give the money to? They just do what they're told. You think there aren't Joe Jobs?