Final Fantasy XI: Online

[Biggayshammy]

Out of curiosity, do and you of forum folks play this game still? I noticed the new xpac was coming out the same day my annual pass runs out and I took it as a sign to go play it again...

It was my first MMO and i played it from NA release up until 2009 (started to play wow when BC came out).

Like I said, just wondering if any of you lovely people play this game or use to play it...

[Shinzai]

I played it so much, I developed mild insomnia from camping rare 1-3 day NM spawns. I'm waiting to see what FFXIV.2 turns out to be like atm.

[Daytraders]

I remember killing HNMs at 6AM EST and then going to school. I loved the game.

[Biggayshammy]

yea on nights where somethign was going to spawn and i was in bed, i felt like i was on call if my phone rang and it was someone in my linkshell telling me to log on that have claim on something

[Grym]

I remember camping Charybdis with a THF and a client and he pays us on drop....

XD

[Ausr]

I remember enjoying this game a ton when I was playing in high school. I got around 40 on my RDM and 20 for WHM until the computer I was using and connection were just shit and had to give it up.

I always imagine just paying for a month and logging on to see how things are.

[Viertel]

I play it at the moment and to be honest have more fun than I've had in an MMO since TBC/WotLK era in WoW. The game's gotten old, and the new guy in charge realizes this, so he's purposely designing most content to be doable with small groups (even less than 6 player) but bonuses are given to those that bring full amounts. They're also developing a form of monster combat as a way to give players something else to do (which is kinda ridiculous since there's always something to be done in FFXI...) and revamping older content to give newcomers/dropouts a chance to experience what they've missed in the past (i.e. there's Nyzul Isle and Neo-Nyzul Isle, Salvage old and new, etc.).

The level cap's 99 and if you've not played since the Abyssea addons then the rate of experience gain will make your jaw drop. I thought it hilarious that everyone whines about how fast leveling is in WoW but in FFXI you could literally push a class from 1 to 99 within 2-3 days if you worked at it and didn't have to do most limit breaks. Hell, if you have someone helping you you could probably do it in one day. Sure, you still need to skill up the combat skills but that doesn't take anywhere near as long as it used to.

There's still a good amount of challenge and the ability to find a group for anything has gone up for current content (older, not so much but you can easily solo/duo/trio most of it).

As far as the HNM stuff, thankfully that's shit's mostly gone (I think the ToAU HNMs still exist, but older ground kings are pop items now).

[Deleted]

Out of curiosity, do and you of forum folks play this game still?

Been playing since September 2004 and still play to day, altough I've taken quite a few breaks over the last few years.
Game changed a lot, it's hard to say how I feel about it atm.
I'm torn between the happyness for seeing some things change (finally!) and the sadness for a game that it's not what it used to be anymore.

"Abyssea", a set of content that came out some years ago and that accompanied players for almost 2 years througout the groundbreaking new aspect of level cap increase, was very fun at start, but it grow old quick.
Abyssea was going in the right direction, but they overdid things. Maybe they weren't expecting FFXIV to fail that bad, and maybe they weren't expecting people to keep such a high interest in the game up to this day, so Abyssea was planned to "burn" the game out very fast.
That has consequences, but while it lasts is fun for people.
If game had ended say 1+ year ago, it would have done it with a bang.
But now Abyssea drained all of the game's "lifeforce", all of its "balance" carefully achieved after years of insignificantly small changes from patch to patch, and in the end the game survived... and people found themselves with something completely broken, which wasn't "meat nor fish", as we say in my country, it kinda lost part of its identity.

The team (which is very small, thanks to the fact most of the developers are working on FFXIV atm) is working hard to fix things and I think they're going in the right direction, but many things are broken beyond repair and, as usual, they react too slow, waaaay too slow.



So, what state is the game now? A bad state, it works only for hardcore gamers or people like me who live within the memory of what FFXI used to be and of all the hours spent within the game.
I would never suggest a new player to come back to FFXI, honestly, as much as I'm having fun on it right now.

[Deleted]

I always wanted to play FF XI, because I am a huge fan of the series but never really got into it. I am really looking forward to XiV.2 . Just want to ask:
Has FF XI become free to play?

[Deleted]

I played it so much, I developed mild insomnia from camping rare 1-3 day NM spawns. I'm waiting to see what FFXIV.2 turns out to be like atm.

Nothing like FFXI, be it a good or a bad thing depends on you.

FFXIV ARR is more like WoW made by japanese than FFXI-2 or FFXI HD. This make some people happy and other sad, I suppose. It's not a negative/positive thing per se, imho.

[Reg]

I played FFXI when it came out and for a couple years, took the last 3 years off and just downloaded it again. You can get the entire game and all expansions for $5 off Amazon, so I thought what the hell?!

[Deleted]

Has FF XI become free to play?

No and I doubt it ever will, altough who knows?

There are private servers though.
Keep in mind it's a game with an UI made for a console (not a PC) in 2001. It's quite FAR from the standards you'd expect from a 2013 game. Everything would seem so complicated, slow (lot of stuff are performed server-side, so they're not "fast" for the player, and require wait) and everything asks for confirmation.

There is no visual UI or visual menus like in WoW or most other mmorpgs, it's made to be played with a Gamepad. If you play through keyboard you use that alone and not the mouse, you cycle targets through tabs and have a key to interact with targets, and a menu where you move through options to select what to do, kinda like an offline japanese RPG, but in real time.
It's very very slow, you have just a small selection of abilities with long cooldown, most of the time you use autoattack and then use the right ability at the right time when they're up.
You have no addons (well, almost), nothing to track stuff, lots of information is hidden and you have to sort out.

If you're a healer you have to manually type commands to type each person or select them with tab and then cast the spell. Or make a specific macro of course. Global cooldown is very long and if you interrupt a spell you won't be able to cast another one for a long time.
Engage times are very long as well, so are the switch targets etc.
There are no flying mounts and while over the last years players are able to teleport to a lot of places, usually it takes time to go from place to place, A LOT of time.
There are loading times between zones, and some o them are very small.
There is no jump and the game is full of "invisible walls".

If you need to remove a debuff from a player you won't have the UI tell you, you have to know which move used by which mob causes which debuff and use the right spell to remove it. (or carefully read the chat box, which is single and shared between battle information and chat text)
Exactely, each debuff has a different spell. Paralyna for Paralyze, Cursna for Curse, Poisona for Poison etc etc.

Mana is hard to manage, as is hate. Cast too many healing spells and the mob will be right on you.
Tanks have it hard too, and most of the times DD are unable to go all out because if they do the tank won't be able to hold hate on himself, except zerg situations of course, for which you normally don't use a tank.


The math of this game has been wordly reknown as the most overcomplicated there is in any MMO out there, and it really is, sometimes it's uselessly complicated.
Also, there are no talent trees or ways to specialize your character (well... sorta) and gear has a huge importance.
You can swap gear mid-fight, and are indeed supposed to do so.
The game is full and I mean full, FULL, PACKED FULL of sidegrades. You don't have tiers like in wow, you have gear that enhance that specific action or spell.
So you would be having a set for enfeebling magic, a set for dark magic, a set for nuke spells, a set for nuke on mobs with high resistance, a nuke set for specific spells, a set for healing, a set for recovering MP, a set for decreasing damage taken, a set for weapon skills, a set for normal damage, a set to enhance a specific single spell/ability, blah blah blah.

It's insane the amount of items you'd need, so most people kinda draw a line somewhere becuase it's very hard to manage them all, especially because the inventory is limited to 80 items.


Also, in pure japanese style, the game is full of "doors" that block you through the way. They add a new thing in-game? Don't expect to see it automatically available, you'll have to go through quests/content to obtain it.
They increase inventory? See above.
They add a new way of transportation? See above.
It was the same for levelling, every 5 levels past 50 you reached a cap and had to do a quest to unlock further levels.
It's more or less the same for everything in this game, there are these things that may feel familiar for people used to japanese games, but very unnatural to everybody else.


While this game seems like childplay compared to what it used to be say 4 years ago, it's still very very hardcore and requires a lot of timesink and friends

---------- Post added 2013-01-04 at 06:24 PM ----------

I played FFXI when it came out and for a couple years, took the last 3 years off and just downloaded it again. You can get the entire game and all expansions for $5 off Amazon, so I thought what the hell?!

On march the 28 a new package will come for PC. I think 20$ or € to download the WHOLE game with ALL of the expansions, miniexpansions and the new expansion (Seekers of Adoulin) coming out on march the 28th

[Viertel]

Been playing since September 2004 and still play to day, altough I've taken quite a few breaks over the last few years.
Game changed a lot, it's hard to say how I feel about it atm.
I'm torn between the happyness for seeing some things change (finally!) and the sadness for a game that it's not what it used to be anymore.

"Abyssea", a set of content that came out some years ago and that accompanied players for almost 2 years througout the groundbreaking new aspect of level cap increase, was very fun at start, but it grow old quick.
Abyssea was going in the right direction, but they overdid things. Maybe they weren't expecting FFXIV to fail that bad, and maybe they weren't expecting people to keep such a high interest in the game up to this day, so Abyssea was planned to "burn" the game out very fast.
That has consequences, but while it lasts is fun for people.
If game had ended say 1+ year ago, it would have done it with a bang.
But now Abyssea drained all of the game's "lifeforce", all of its "balance" carefully achieved after years of insignificantly small changes from patch to patch, and in the end the game survived... and people found themselves with something completely broken, which wasn't "meat nor fish", as we say in my country, it kinda lost part of its identity.

The team (which is very small, thanks to the fact most of the developers are working on FFXIV atm) is working hard to fix things and I think they're going in the right direction, but many things are broken beyond repair and, as usual, they react too slow, waaaay too slow.



So, what state is the game now? A bad state, it works only for hardcore gamers or people like me who live within the memory of what FFXI used to be and of all the hours spent within the game.
I would never suggest a new player to come back to FFXI, honestly, as much as I'm having fun on it right now.

I hate to be an ass, but this is the typical overblown "ABYSSEA RUINED ALL!" post. Abyssea brought about the ability to people that haven't played, or stopped playing, a way to catch up in gear, levels, and combat/magic skills in order to be on par with the current endgame of Voidwatch, Neo-Nyzul, and Salvage and DYnamis 2.0.

The only thing "broken beyond repair" is the hate system and that's been borked since the original level increase from 50 almost a decade ago. They've admitted and are working on it (as well as a UI overhaul), but considering their own self-designated tank class (Paladin) has always been utterly powerless before a Ninja or (at times) Red Mage shows how badly designed it was before.

Abyssea's fun, allows you to feel really powerful (and despite what some people think there are still some fights in Abyssea that'll drop you like a fly if you approach them nillywilly), but outside you still need to know how to gear swap, macro, and the other pertinent information. That hasn't change and never will.

The only thing wrong with Abyssea was the developers gave atmas but didn't give out fights that REALLY tested players with the best atmas because it would have led to the catch-22 -- you can't kill the boss because you don't have that atmas, and you don't have the atmas because you can't kill the boss. If there were optional, additional popspawns besides Azdaja, Pankokrator, Smok, and others that really required the edge provided with BiS atmas then it wouldn't have garnered this moronic "IT RUINED IT ALL!" mentality.

Usually the problem people have with Abyssea is that everyone else could now get the shinies that he or she already had from years ago, and it pisses off their ego. Same bullshit as WoW and other MMOs: hardcore entitlement.

[philefluxx]

Ooohhhh the memories.... or where they really nightmares?

[Deleted]

I hate to be an ass, but this is the typical overblown "ABYSSEA RUINED ALL!" post.

Either you read through my wall-o-text too fast or I failed to convey my feelings about it. Likely both things

I *loved* abyssea with all my hearts. Tbh I was having more fun in Abyssea than I am now where everybody is only focused on farming more and more relics.
Especially up to level 90 cap Abyssea was insanely fun.
But still, it's pretty clear that it ruined the balance of a game. You can't do in one month more changes than you've been doing over the previous 8 years, it's obvious something will break.
And, indeed, many things broke due to Abyssea and the level cap increase (which isn't directly related to Abyssea, but happened during that window of time).

Was Abyssea fun? Oh my god a lot, so very much!
Did it break things? Sadly yes, it did, a fuckton.

To put it in a metaphor... think of FFXI as a bus carrying people (players) very very very slow. Not many will like that lack of speed, but the game needs to carefully balance the speed it goes at to avoid running out of fuel from one gas station to the next, and to avoid uneasing passengers, who are used to that level of speed.
Then someone turns on a superturbo button (abyssea) and goes on the highway. This is uberly fun, lots of fun, and its fun power is multiplied ten thousand times by the fact the passengers were used to a completely different level of speed.
Sad thing is that the bus, using that superturbo mode, runs out of fuel before reaching the next gas station.
The driver of the bus (developers) probably didn't care when they pressed the superturbo button, because they were expecting all the passengers to go down from the bus way before the fuel ended.
Problem is: it didn't happen.

I hope this metaphor conveys better my feelings. The developers have been careless in a desperate attempt to keep players playing the game in a time when FFXIV had utterly failed, while their program before that was to make players jump from FFXI to FFXIV.
Abyssea was DEFINITELY going the good direction, they just overdid things jumping from one excess (the old FFXI) to the opposite one (the new one). Something in between would have been perfect, imho

The only thing "broken beyond repair" is the hate system and that's been borked since the original level increase from 50 almost a decade ago. They've admitted and are working on it, but beyond that I fail to see what's utterly broken.

Well, many things have been "fixed" compared to, say, one year ago. Enmity system sadly is not one of them.
Coming out of abyssea the game is starting to give importance to all those aspects that lost importance during Abyssea (Accuracy, Evasion, anything that wasn't crit+ and crit damage, MP, etc)
They kinda fixed or are fixing the debuff thing (the immunobreak patch was lovely!) but many things are broken still.
Think about the careful balance there was in the previous' game cycle.
You needed people to level up jobs.
But if you reach the cap you won't level anymore, unless you need to level more jobs. So if things were like this, game would have reached a point where there weren't enough people seeking up XP (and sadly, this almost happened many times.)
So how do you keep the cycle working?
By "forcing" people to keep looking for XP, levelling new jobs, new sub jobs, making them lose huge chunks of xp by dying, putting merits in there.
People were afraid to die back then.
Think anybody cares about that now?

I mean, exping or meriting in the old FFXI was way too hardcore compared to nowadays' standards, we agree on this? Time to look for party, xp per hour, people getting elitist etc. (and this is one excess)
But exping right now is too fast! It was fun the first months when you've been able to level up jobs from 30 to 99 in 1-2 days, staying afk.
It was fun levelling in an alliance instead than a party, it was something original and different, allowed even non elite jobs to have fun together with the rest of players.
But... it kinda grew old fast, didn't it? Or are you telling me you still enjoy levelling your jobs in abyssea? That's if you don't have all at 99 already.
This is the opposite excess.
Why couldn't we have something in between? Something more accessible to noobs, something faster than the old xp pts, something less stressing but... at the same time not something that gets you 30-99 in one day as you're afk watching a movie with your friends? (only to find your char with lv30 skills, and then the fun of spending 2 days afk with bots skilling up for you begins...)

Seriously, why couldn't it be something in between?
I think most people didn't realize this until it was too late, they've opened a pandora's box, gone past a point from which it's impossible to come back.



Anyway, we kinda went off topic.
I just wanted to say that I'm not an elitist moron from BG or any other similar place. I *loved* abyssea and enjoyed it a lot when my semi-naked PUP was outdamaging someone elses's super leet Apocalypse DRK lol but I can't deny it kinda ruined the balance of the game on the long run, together with the hasty level increase.

---------- Post added 2013-01-04 at 06:54 PM ----------

If you don't trust me and think I'm a super-elitist moronic person you can check my profile on FFXIAH.
Despite having quite a lot of gear/achievements pre-abyssea (full-salvage sets and much more, but no relics/mythics), I welcomed Aby and the level cap increase with open arms, altough with some doubts, like when you get too many good things and start wondering "where is the trick? This can't be true, when does the moment come when they will put me on hands and knees to fuck me from behind?", but overall I was filled with Joy, I swear, anybody who knows me also knows I kinda never whined about abyssea but enjoyed it thoroughfully.

I'm online atm btw, on Asura server

[CJack14dt]

Has anyone tried the new expansion on this? I played it for 6 years from the JP launch and always wanted to be a Geomancer but alas that day never came in time... until now..... 6 years later.... There is precious little on the net about how this new expansion is. I still have a burning desire to finally play this class but has anyone experienced this expansion yet? I want to get some feedback!

[Rukh]

I played like crazy about 5 years ago maybe? Had samurai to 75 with a few merits, mnk to 71, and ninja and ranger in the 60+ range. Had a pretty good sky farming group and all the sky drops. Did dynamis each week, I can't remember if we killed or nearly killed the shadow lord. We had done limbus some and were just starting to farm Al'Taieu or whatever it was for drops to do jailers when I quit. Left around the time of whatever the near east expansion was.

[Punxi]

Oh the days of sitting in Dragon's Aery waiting for Faf/Nid and all the old asura server drama being unleashed on KI, after going back a few times what ive noticed is the community is in shambles compared to pre-abyssea.. still a number of players alot of old ones returning aswell but the bonding via being rivals is all but gone. As stated by akuma they really did go to far with it, barely feels like you earn anything anymore granted stuff still takes time but compared its childsplay.

[philefluxx]

Has anyone tried the new expansion on this? I played it for 6 years from the JP launch and always wanted to be a Geomancer but alas that day never came in time... until now..... 6 years later.... There is precious little on the net about how this new expansion is. I still have a burning desire to finally play this class but has anyone experienced this expansion yet? I want to get some feedback!

Got a buddy in my old Linkshell that was posting some picks on FB today. Apparently the new city is the biggest. Im patiently waiting for RR though, I dont feel like messing with XI, takes like a whole day just to get things setup and looking nice just to be reminded I dont have the time I used to have to be able to get anything done hahaha.

[Biggayshammy]

i think i spend just as much time on wow as i did XI but its easier to get things done and caught up on wow than it is XI. FFXI will always be my first true love of MMOs its still has quite the player base for such a old game. i cant wait for the relaunch of FFXIV