Do people still do chocobo racing/pankration/ballista?

There's a lot of interesting minigames in FFXI. I never got into them when I used to play due to the ever present need to grind exp and gil, but with a lot of stress alleviated I figure I can get into it...

but do people still do it? Are there still many hurdles to overcome? Say with Ballista, I was walking through jugner and heard the announcement... do you still need to trudge all the way into the jungle for an event that divides you based on city allegiance?

Pankration, when I first heard of it I thought "HOLY CRAP POKEFANTASY XI!?"... but I've never, ever heard of anyone doing so. Do you have to trudge to some specific, forlorn part of Vanadiel, at a specific timer, under specific conditions, to be engaged in that too?

Chocobo racing, same as above: is it time consuming and restrictive to get involved?


The level grind has been alleviated for XI and people continually burn through the new content, it'd be cool if the entry bar (and convenience barriers) of other content could also be adjusted for today's FFXI.

some people do chocobo racing, but not against eachother, so this doesn't necessitate spending much time in the circuit. Pank, no idea. Ballista, kinda depends on which server you're on. The latter of which has had several threads asking for improvements to make it more attractive.

Chocobo racing had so much potential.... I really hate how they implemented it. An FFVII-like player-controlled race would have been awesome.

I never got in to Pankration. Seemed like a time sink.

I don't see a lot of Ballista happening either. They really should open the Colosseum in Whitegate and allow for a straight-forward PvP system. That could be fun.

Ballista is straight-forward. It's just not easy to access and it lacks incentives.

I'm taking a break from the game, but I did do a daily chocobo race in the circuit when I was playing. The real grind of it is raising a chocobo, which takes at the very least 30 days. Also don't expect to win much unless you invest more time and gil into the bird.

The secondary grind of it is raising your Solo Victory Points to be able to compete in higher tier races. Depending on your luck and the stats of your chocobo, you may get this done fast or slowly, since you don't get any victory points when you place lower than 3rd, and you may only compete once a day.

If you're into the story element of the game, there are also "mission-type" races that you can go through (not linked to circuit races, so you can do them even if you raced in the circuit that day).

Summed up, chocobo racing does take some time to get into, and you can only race a limited amount of times a day (unless you count the unlimited free-runs). Because of this, you don't need to spend your whole day working on this "event".

Not many people do racing, and the wall of text is probably useless because of that XD

I've never done Pankraton, so I have no information on it other than I don't hear anyone being crazy about it ;/

Ballista is more popular than either of them on some servers, but a lot of people don't like the equip change restriction, myself included. This limits its availability since you can't play with yourself. inb4masturbationjoke

The entire game of FFXI is a time sink to me, pokemon battling is one of the things I'd like to try out.
It's a shame to see such interesting subsystems be unsupported by S-E though

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OgreBattle

The entire game of FFXI is a time sink to me, pokemon battling is one of the things I'd like to try out.
It's a shame to see such interesting subsystems be unsupported by S-E though

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I would gladly do pokemon if it didn't require so much inventory for the pics. they need a npc that holds all that crap.