Just played Final Fantasy XI

[Jonnycbad]

XI wouldnt work today ebcause the demographics for MMO are 20-30 year olds. Back when MMO were fairly in the late 90's and early 20's most games were young teenagers who had time to devote 10 hours a day. It wasn't until WoW came out that MMOs began to standardize certain things like a Duty Finder to matchmake players across servers into an instanced battle, as opposed to shouting in towns to assemble a group, manually. The pros of this are instanced content, which is fun the first 2-3 times you do it.


In FFXIV, you queue up, it takes ~1-30 min to get players and then you instantly teleport to the content and begin.

In FFXI you had to assemble a group of 6-18 people manually, which could take hours. You had to double check with EVERYONE that they: 1) have necessary pre-reqs to enter the battle, e.g. are up to or previously beaten it, have the entrance key item, are above the level, etc. During this time, players often left/disbanded because it took forever to form. Once you finally form a group, you had to all manually get to the battlefield entrance. Often times these were DEEP inside a beastmen's dungeon, which could be 5-7 floors high (or deep) with mobs that aggro. Hell, just getting to the dungeon itself was a pain as you had to teleport to the nearest zone (often 3-4 zones away from the target zone), then walk or ride a chocobo to the dungeon. You couldn't take your chocobo into the dungeon because the dungeon was a separate area. You then use items or magic to cast Invisible/Sneak (to prevent aggro from adds, which chased you forever, unlike in XIV where they give up after a certain distance). After getting to the battlefield entrance, you had to all enter simultaneously. After all entering the instanced fight, if anyone attacks before other members are fully in, the ones outside trying to enter are locked out. Problem is, for sidequest/special battles that drop loot (as opposed to MSQ battles) you needed some kind of key item to enter, which is lost upon entry. If you die/wipe you lose this item and need to get new one (not always easy, some of them require gil or a quest or drop to acquire, or are given once every 2-3 days EARTH TIME). Fine--you're in the fight, but people die and you need to retry. Too bad though, because in XI if you all wipe, you get instantly booted from the content and all entry items lost. If players have Re-raise cast on them before, they can attempt to raise up. If they died too close to the boss, the boss might re-aggro you since you raise where you stand. If 3 or 4 people raise in safety but one person raises too close, the boss aggroes EVERYONE and re-kills you before you can get a chance to cast Raise on everyone. But let's say you managed to raise up after a wipe and try to reset. Weakness in FFXI is -90% HP and +100% slow for 5 minutes. Also every death removes 10% of your EXP toeards next level. When level capped, if you die enough, you can de-level.

Moreover, if you de-leveled from 75(highest cap for many years) to 74, all your gear that's only wearable at 75, can't be worn (imagine deleveling from 70 to 69 in the middle of fighting a primal and all your ilvl shit is de-equipped). All your abilities are still on cooldown and FFXI cooldowns are 3-10 minute each. Not even mentioning the SP abilities (which are quite powerful but with 2 hour cooldowns). Many special battles that dropped loot required tactical use of these SP abilities (similar to LBs in XIV). If you used them on your first try and wiped, good luck winning without them. Did I mention most battles had a 30min time limit, some of which took 15-20 minutes? If you wiped and somehow managed to reraise and come off weakness, you were fighting the clock. Also if you died during combat and raised, you are OUT OF COMISSION for 5 minutes. You know how in XIV if you die and are raised, you can get healed up and keep fighting, albeit, with lower DPS? In XI, when you raised, you had 5 minutes of -90% MAX HP, and DOUBLE auto attack delay (you needed auto attacks to gain TP to use weapon skills, sort of the inverse's system of XIV). So instead of swinging once every 5 seconds and getting 10 TP, you swung once every 10 seconds, and you needed 100 TP to do any weapon skill.

[ManuelBravo]

XI wouldnt work today ebcause the demographics for MMO are 20-30 year olds. Back when MMO were fairly in the late 90's and early 20's most games were young teenagers who had time to devote 10 hours a day. It wasn't until WoW came out that MMOs began to standardize certain things like a Duty Finder to matchmake players across servers into an instanced battle, as opposed to shouting in towns to assemble a group, manually. The pros of this are instanced content, which is fun the first 2-3 times you do it.

I recent that, I still find time to play...two jobs, school, and a wife -.- it can be done. Also not everyone had the same experience, those who were social were able to meet people right away and had fun doing content. Now if you were a bit anti social that is a different story.


To some points, losing xp wouldn't be to bad. It would force people to use common sense and actually stick to mechanics more frequently. Second the whole TP regeneration and MP regeneration is way different. Remember when you had to take a knee to regain MP during fights? or go BLM/RDM ? Were we used more items and food was pretty much mandatory? The days requesting time off or endless nights getting thing done? The solo Light and Darkness Skill chains and people and not knowing how they work? Going GOD!!!! the good old Magic burst of those chains? That kind of frustration can't be found on newer mmo's. Every now and then it can be a good things.

As for WOW? played it and I don't know I still could not get into it, after the Frozen throne expansion I said no more... ( GF forced me to play WoW)

[Thayos]

Here is the dirty little secret of FFXI though that made it relevant for so long for so many people....

You didn't NEED the best gear to win at endgame!

FFXI was all about group-oriented events -- and anything with a good group is often fun -- that required jobs and strategy more than gear. In FFXI, to have a few jobs at cap was actually more valuable than having amazing gear! Anyone could do Sky, Sea, Limbus, Einjerjar, etc. with stuff bought at the auction house. Good gear just helped down things more painlessly.

This made the game highly engaging and "easy" to keep up with, even if several pieces of gear were incrementally better than what you were wearing. The hardcore HNM groups and event linkshells could grind to their hearts' content without ever hitting a wall, and casual/midcore players could go at their own pace without ever honestly being left behind.

This is why "elitists" in XI had such bad reps... because elitism was literally unnecessary.

The farther I get from a game like XI, though, the more I like it's basic structure. It did cater to a wide range of gamers without sinking into appointment gaming, which is basically glorified smartphone gaming.

[Delily]

/10characer

[Mahri]

{Hmmm...} that Eureka info.

Clearly one of you FFXI nostalgia junkies has the monkey's paw.

Haha you did a funny sarcasm! (I think that's what you were shooting for, right?) I'm objectively saying that 1.0 used better servers, better coding and had better graphics than XI. Also, that 1.0 had a fantastic storyline and was full of open-world mobs that were impossible to solo, so when exploring, you felt a sense of danger - it was a challenge to get to all of the aetheryte gates and get the associated achievement.

I know, I'm just being a jerk. :v I don't know about the coding, and the "better graphics" thing came at ludicrous system costs (it was FFXIII's engine, built for single-player) and an overabundance of recycled terrain configurations that rendered exploration moot, if not actively discouraging.

I'mma give XI credit for this, in comparison: Exploring the zones was neat, from a given perspective, considering half of them were off-limits unless you had a group or stealth spells. From the other perspective, though: Being needlessly punished for trying anything remotely off the straight-and-narrow. That was basically the experience.

I cannot believe I'm actually tempted to check out Eureka, though.

Maybe it'll hurt good.

XI wouldnt work today ebcause the demographics for MMO are 20-30 year olds.

Bingo.

Real talk: The primary fuel for my basic disdain for XI is the fact that I never tried it (or any MMO, for that matter) until well after college, and being utterly baffled as to how the designers of the game expected to retain any kind of player who actually had, like, a job, bills to pay, and things to do with free time other than playing one single game.

[Thayos]

Being needlessly punished for trying anything remotely off the straight-and-narrow. That was basically the experience.

The mainstream community of XI definitely bought into the "flavor of the month" jobs. Fortunately, I had a great linkshell (and an amazing CoP) static, and we simply found ways to win that didn't require the cookie-cutter setups. Heck, we went through nearly all of CoP with a lineup of taru nin, rdm, rdm, bst, thief, blm, although the bst changed to blm for the snoll fight.

That is the beauty of having unbalanced jobs, though -- while there's more mainstream job discrimination, the fights are infinitely more creative and interesting, and there is far more room for actual innovation.

FFXIV, by comparison, is basically just "maximize DPS while doing dance X." That's not only because of job design, but that certainly plays a big role. The devs seem to have balanced themselves into a corner here.

[Mjollnir]

XI wouldnt work today ebcause the demographics for MMO are 20-30 year olds.

FFXI is working today, but it's not the game you describe, which was the FFXI of a decade ago. It has changed with the times.

[Spiriel_Basanda]

The mainstream community of XI definitely bought into the "flavor of the month" jobs. Fortunately, I had a great linkshell (and an amazing CoP) static, and we simply found ways to win that didn't require the cookie-cutter setups. Heck, we went through nearly all of CoP with a lineup of taru nin, rdm, rdm, bst, thief, blm, although the bst changed to blm for the snoll fight.

One of my most fond memories in FFXI was when I took a second group of people through CoP because all 5 of them still needed their progression. None of them knew what they were doing, but they listened well. I came up with silly strategies for every fight based on our composition since we didn't have a very flexible group job-wise. For the whole thing we were PLD(me), SAM, BLM, BLM, WHM, RDM.

This was SO GLORIOUS! On the Ancient Vows fight against the 3 mammets, where the normal strategy was to bring a NIN or a SMN and have them kite one of the mammets, my plan was to power tank them. I told everyone to do *absolutely* nothing to any of the mammets if I hadn't claimed it yet or it would ruin the strategy entirely because, I could tank one mammet while they're going all out easily, but keeping hate on 3 would've been not possible with the cure bombs I was going to be taking. I figured that the SAM opening with Mekiyo-Shisui, Tachi: Enpi -> Tachi: Enpi = Distrotion + Blizzard MBs would torch the first one fast enough to almost dead at least before Invincible wore off. It was a really intense fight, I had blown through all my ethers and such and it looked grim with the WHM and RDM running on fumes. When the RDM hit Convert, I knew we had it in the bag because the last mammet was almost dead. I'll remember that fight forever, probably. So yes, it WAS possible to win fights doing silly things that weren't the mainstream strategies or requiring the FotM jobs.

[Mahri]

Yeah, there's another matter of perspective: I dropped XI around the time WoW came out (not a coincidence.) That was still pretty early in it's life cycle.

This was at the time you had to have ninja subbed (if not your main) in order to tank anything, anywhere, because even if you did find a healer, healers hated healing. Attempting to play ninja, with the monetary upkeep it's exploitable blink spell required, remains to this day, in my opinion, the most unbelievably un-fun activity a video game has ever expected of a player.

It's possible it got better since then. Probable, even.

[Spiriel_Basanda]

Heh, yeah, it's not like that at all now. All the endgame monsters wipe shadows so fast that even NIN mains, with their Utsusemi: Ichi + Ni + San, can't tank effectively. So NINs no longer tank, it's all PLD and RUN. At least, I haven't seen a NIN tank in forever. Maybe the rare one or two is still out there, or maybe another server still uses them, I dunno. But in my experience NIN tanking has died entirely.