This latest update included many new additions to the game. Some kinda sucked (Walk of Echoes), some changed the game (new Level cap), but there is one new activity added in that they should have done a long, long time ago. And that’s Abyssea.

When they announced this year’s 3 addons, I was sceptical. I mean, last year, we got some pretty uneven stuff with last year’s addons. Some of those missions were fun, but they were all, pretty much, the same. You paid $10 for a new piece of equipment and 1 unique fight, along with some of the stupidest cutscenes in the game. Seriously, the only cutscene from these addons that was worth watching was the one at the end of A Shantotto Ascension, and even then I did not think it was that great. Seeing what they gave us for $10 a pop last year made me dread Abyssea.

And then, they shocked me. I said, previously:

“So, the best solution I can have is to instance our xp camps. Make the new Abyssea areas instanced versions of mini-Dynamis, which give out xp on every mob and every mob can drop something. Put some sort of time limit on it (like 2 hours), and a restriction (like you can only enter once a day.) There is no crime in letting everyone get rewarded doing stuff they will do anyway.“

Well, I’ll be damned. They did exactly that and more. Yeah, there is not much of a story with Abyssea, but really, I don’t think anyone gives a care about that. We wanted new content, i.e. new stuff to kill. We wanted tons of new items, new area, and new objectives. Abyssea, as it is implemented, is the biggest home run SE has hit since Assault.

This, in my mind, is perfect.

You can choose how long you want to stay in an Abyssea zone (up to a default one and a half hours, though there are ways to extend your time.) If you leave before your time has expired, it’s cool. You don’t lose that time, you keep it. The zones have enough objectives in it that you don’t need to make people ‘claim’ the zone, since no one can possible do everything in 1 run. You get rewards on every kill, since you get xp AND cruor (which you use to buy gear.) Stuff drops from normal mobs. NM’s are all over the place. I could go on, but the point is that this is something SE should have done years ago.

Like I said, I expected this to kinda suck. Really. Last year kinda dulled my expectations. But, this really is the single best endgame ‘event’ type thing they have in this 8 year old game. I have been playing so long that sometimes, like on my 500’th Dynamis run, I get a little bored. Abyssea, right now, is akin to a breath of fresh air. If anything gives me confidence that SE is on the right track with MMO development, it’s this.

The June Update hit a few days ago, though I think calling this an update is almost a misnomer. It’s closer to an expansion. Yeah, not a whole lot of new zones, but there’s a ton of content here. Here are my impressions of what was added:

Level cap increase: This is the big one, the one that touches nearly everyone in the game. Personally, I think I expected worse here. I did not expect them to give us a slew of new abilities and traits, although some are useless. I did expect new WS’s and spells, and I have to say, from what I have seen of the new WS’s, they disappoint. I mean, does THF really need a second version of Cyclone? Really?

One of the things I did expect was massive overcrowding at xp camps, as I thought they would just add a few 75-80 camps and people would overrun them. But, I have to say, they surprised me with the amount of new camps. I expected new camps in the old level capped areas (since that would not change things for pretty much anyone.) But, revitalizing Bibiki Bay, Lufaise Meadows, and Misareaux Coast? Honestly, I did not see that coming. And it makes sense. Think about it, when was the last time you xp’ed in Bibiki Bay? Probably not since the Greater Colibri camp opened. So, why not change that to a 75-80 camp.

Walk of Echos: Tried this out the first night it was available. Was unimpressed. Sorry, but this seems like combining a Dynamis-style event with Campaign, which means you have to deal with stupidity. Coordinating 20-30 people that in this is going to be a nightmare.

Overall, if they got rid of the ‘anyone can enter’ BS, I think this would be a fine event for a LS to do. They have to understand that people like to have some level of orginization with events like these. This is just pickup Einherjar, which is about as bad as you would think.

New Gear: Holy crap, did you see all that new stuff? I expected there to be a lot of new, but damn, they actually released usable gear! They must have been rusty at it, I mean some jobs are still sporting a lot of equipment from the Rise of the Zilart days. Very nice indeed. And it’s for everyone, from mages to melee. Gear I never thought they would be bettering they have, which is good.

I have not mentioned Abyssea because, as I write this, I have yet to do any of it. It sounds great though, especially since you can get good amounts of xp in there. In fact, it sounds like what I was hoping for, to be quite honest. Good xp, drops, and you don’t need 20+ people to do stuff. Very nice indeed.

Overall, I gotta say, this update impressed the hell out of me. It really did. It also makes me fear the September update. I mean, this one only upped the cap by 5 levels. It is thought that the September update will up the cap 10 more levels to 90. If we get this many new camps, this many new Job Abilities and Traits, and this much new gear for 5 levels. what will we get for 10? And, remember, there’s another Abyssea to come out, and more Walk of Echos to unlock. Yeah, this update, while large, might be tiny compared to what hits in September.

Over the weekend, the server I am on (Carbuncle) unlocked Fiat Lux, aka the Shadow Lord Campaign Ops. Of course, since this is the first time it was unlocked on this server, there was a large line of people trying to get in. I mention this because, even though this game has been out for years, we are still dealing with outdated ideas and technologies.

Now, normally this is no issue. While battlefields should be instanced (and there is no reason for them not to be), there is rarely a huge demand for one particular fight. The only time there is such a demand is right after the fight is introduced, for instance when Diabolos was introduced as an avatar, and you got 100 people trying to get into the fight all at once. After the demand dies down, life goes back to normal.

Now, with battlefields this is no issue. If you want to do something, you either brave the masses or wait a week or so and do it when the furvor has calmed down. But, over-demand is an issue on another thing coming up.

The level cap increase. Take a look at this chart from last year’s Vana’Diel Census:

Do you see the issue there? There are an extreme number of people at 75. In fact, according to this now one year old survey, over 15% of people are at 75. And we can only assume that number has increased (though people have been making mules for the various Bonanzas, so that might change the results a bit.

This is an issue because, when the next update hits, you will see camps overrun with people needing to get 80 (or whatever the new cap is) as quickly as humanly possible. And, unlike where Diabolos was over crowded, when people hit 80 they won’t be all ‘well, that’s done, time to let others get this.’ Nope, they will go home, change to another job, and want to recap all over again. The amount of people who have just 1 75 job is exceedingly low.

This all means that there will have to be an absurd amount of camps. Oh, level sync might help, but most of those camps are awful, with only a couple standing out as good. Just judge it by how people merit now. If you had a choice at a Sync party or a Greater Colibri party, equal players and open camps, which would you choose?

We all know Greater Colibri will not be sufficent to get us to 80. They will be too low to be worth it. So, I think it is safe to assume we will get new camps. But, I don’t think they can add enough new camps to places in the game that would not see over camping. Even if they did start putting 75-80 camps all over the place, it would still be a nightmare trying to find an empty camp (as they would be everywhere), and people would still try to camp on top of you.

So, the best solution I can have is to instance our xp camps. Make the new Abyssea areas instanced versions of mini-Dynamis, which give out xp on every mob and every mob can drop something. Put some sort of time limit on it (like 2 hours), and a restriction (like you can only enter once a day.) There is no crime in letting everyone get rewarded doing stuff they will do anyway.

Would this solve everything? Hell no, people would bitch that getting 10 jobs to 80 will take 3 months like this. Remember, though, if you think 75-80 will be bad, imagine the remaining 19 levels, where all the old merit camps become completely unusable. Dozens of new camps must be created, but the rub is that they can’t make too many of them. If they overwhelm the game with 75-99 camps, then when the leveling craze dies off (likely by this time next year), we will have too many camps to merit in that will not be used as much (people go with whatever is the best and easiest, like the Greater Colibri camp.)

So, SE has a daunting task ahead of itself, make enough camps to get people to 80 without too much strife and hatred, but not too many to look rediculous in a year or so. Hence, why I believe that having instanced Abyssea zones that grant xp to be the way to go.

Years ago, when I first got into Magic: The Gathering, I was mainly a casual player. I would go to a friend’s house, play huge multiplayer games til like 3am, and have a good ole time overall. I kept tuning my decks to try to figure out how to beat those friends in these weekly gatherings. I had, shall we say, mixed success.

Eventually, I decided to try my hand at tournaments, with a store right down the road from me having weekly tournaments. Now, to be blunt, I was awful in these. I would routinely get my ass handed to me, week after week. Mind you, my deck was something absolutely awful. See, back in those days, everyone around here played what was called ‘Type 1’, otherwise known as ‘Vintage’ now. What is that? Well, in these tournaments, most every card released is available for use, with some being restricted to 1 per deck, and very few cards banned outright. Many of the older cards are expensive, and, at that time, I did not have them. Thus, between my lack of experience and my lack of good cards, I pretty much stood no chance. Or so I thought.

Eventually, after getting my ass kicked for the umpteenth time, I had an epiphany: make a deck that specifically countered the most popular cards in these tournaments. So I made a deck with card called Blood Moon. Why that? Well, everyone played with cards called ‘dual lands’, which are ‘nonbasic lands’. Thus, I would stop their entire deck by playing this one card. At least, that was my theory. How did it work out?

I won the tournament for the first time.

Now, was this particular deck good? Hell no, it was shit. So, how did I win? I metagamed. I won because I understood the particular environment, and planned for it. No one expected what I did (one of the better players was outright shocked when he overheard my game), and I took that to win a little money.

How does this apply to FFXI? Well, for us, I don’t think it matters much, if at all. Yeah, we have to figure out some fights, and how certain things happen, but that’s not metagaming. In my eyes, the metagaming in a MMO comes from the manufacturer. They try to figure out how we play, and use that knowledge to make new challenges for us. Most of the time, companies are successful. Ask yourself, how many mobs or events in any game stay stupidly hard for any length of time, there just are not many of them. The only one I can think of off hand in FFXI is Absolute Virtue, and SE is doing that very intentionally.

While I do not believe SE (or, really, any MMO company) understands truly how we play, there is no way for them to know. They might have stats and the like, they might watch how raids and NM’s are killed, but I still don’t believe they have a full grasp of it all. There is no way, like I said. There are way more players than there are developers, and we all have different styles, all shells have different ways on doing events and killing mobs.

So, they metagame as to how to make entertaining events and the like. They realize, ‘hey, people like short events’ and go with that. They use knowledge of how certain things are to keep us playing, to keep us paying. They stack the deck so that we want to continue playing, by doing things like adding new gear or upping level caps. You think they are doing us a favor with updates? Ha! That is how they keep us playing, and giving them more money.

While SE might not have a clue on how we play, they do have a clue on how to get us to keep giving them our money. They play us, and we all know it.

Over the weekend, it seem like my role in my Salvage static changed from ‘random DD’ to ‘co-tank.’ Oh boy, that changes things, mainly cause my Samurai gear is not set for that, and honestly, I have never gotten it due to not having the need to. Now, I find myself needing to improve my SAM in a hurry, which pushes back plans to finish my subjobs in advance of the June update.

Mind you, I think highly of my SAM, I think it is pretty damn nice (lack of Usukane Sune-Ate not withstanding.) With those boots and Hachiryo Haidate, my SAM would be very much done for gear (unless, of course, I want full Usukane or something.) But, in some areas, it is just plain awful.

For instance, my Polearm skill is woefully low. I know, I know, gimp SAM not leveling Polearm, but honestly I have not had the time to get that up to snuff. As of last night, it’s now at 196, which is better but still 40+ under cap. My PDT down set is worse, honestly, since I am rocking NQ Arhat’s head and body, but at least I improved that over the weekend with finishing up A Shantotto’s Ascension.

All of this makes me realize, while I have a ton of gear, I don’t have all the situational stuff that I might need. For instance, outside of a few pieces, my THF is done. But, I don’t really have an evasion set for THF, mainly because I have no use for an evasion set. Now, if I pulled in Dynamis, or loved soloing random shit, then maybe. But I don’t do either, so I have no Evasion set.

The odd thing is, I have 1 situational set all there that I have not used once. My RNG has a MND build for a Holy Bolt set (just lacking an Neptune’s Staff and Faith Torque), but when I use RNG, it is with my Archery set. Why do I have that build? Because before I had my Vali’s Bow, I was an Othinus’ Bow RNG, rocking Holy Bolts all the time. I did decent damage, but once I got my Vali’s Bow, I never looked back once.

So, now with me actually doing stuff that requires a tank build for my SAM, I have the motivation to improve it. Unfortunately, getting this gear will take time (not gonna overpay on anything), but at least I have a good reason to get it. And I need to finish my Polearm skill. Anyone wanna help with that?