Returning Player (after XI years :P)

Hi guys! Just got back into the game and wooooow I’m so happy that there are still so many people playing. I’m going to be leveling and gearing BRD and want to ask three questions.
1. How do we exp nowadays? I’m a 50ish BRD.
2. I would love to reminisce in old areas, is there a way to access them quickly now? I still haven’t collected the home point crystals n such everywhere (which is what I’m working on also.)
3. How’s the PvP scene on Asura?

Any help or links to guides you can share would be so greatly appreciated!

Your profile indicates you're currently on Lakshimi (and lv99 PUP). If you haven't already transferred, I'd reccomend that you stay where you are unless you have active friends on Asura. Asura is overcrowded and there can be wait times to access some contents and network performance issues that you won't see elsewhere.

1 If you aren't starting over and still have one or more level 99 jobs, I'd honestly reccomend sticking with those as there are multiple new and lengthy progression systems in Job Points and Master Level. But as far as leveling 1-99, most people do it solo with Trust NPCs now. Leveling up 1-99 is drastically faster than it used to be and if you simply grind out T-VT mobs for your level, it really won't take long- especially with EXP rings. Once you're

2 Home points were added all over the place. Every battlefield zone has a home point just outside its entrance, and multiple additional home points have been added in various places, including some field areas where entrances for certain contents are near.

3 Much as I always enjoyed it myself, PvP is basically dead, in no small part because since they never updated it, particularly after the later progression systems that were introduced. On asura there may still be a group that does it now and then, but I'm not sure. As recently as a few years ago on Shiva I could still persuade some people to do it as a one-off for a livestream, but I've been struggling to make that happen today. (The other reason PvP faded so quickly is there's basically no rewards, and any MMO content without rewards is basically DOA.)

Wow thanks. I appreciate all that info! I actually already moved to Asura :(. Lakshmi had literally under 200 one time I searched the server lol. After a little digging I saw that Asura and Bahamut are the places to be but I mostly chose Asura because (at least last year) there seemed to be a decent amount of people who did Ballista. A friend of mine would upload the videos on YT lol. Another reason is cuz I mostly play after midnight so ideally the congestion wouldn’t be as bad as prime time hours.

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Lakshmi had literally under 200 one time I searched the server lol.

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You really shouldn't pay much attention to concurrent user numbers. You can still do pretty much anything you want to do, you just need to join the right linkshell. Shiva is a little bigger but it doesn't matter. There are a lot of perks to being on a smaller server- little to no RMT, everybody knows everybody, no lines to enter content, better network stability.

It's really just better for everyone if the population is more evenly distributed rather than big pops on one server and low pops on another, and when people post on Reddit and say EVERYONE GO TO ASURA it actually ends up making things worse for both asura and the other servers.

Fun fact: For a while people couldn't create characters on Asura at all, with it giving a "server is full" error message, something that had never been seen before. The reason for this was specifically the name database had been filled to its limit, rather than a limit on the number of simultaneous connections. This was later fixed in an update though.

Bahamut is in a better spot, to be fair: It's pretty close to what was typical back in the day, and while I have no intention of moving, if someone wanted to insist on bigger server pops, I'd direct them there, as Asura is just a mess.

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I saw that Asura and Bahamut are the places to be

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well thats what im trying to tell you. Pure player numbers don't tell the story. Asura is legitimately overcrowded- it's larger than any server was at the game's peak and this means that you constantly run into issues of all camps in an area for grinding being taken, lines for content, etc. etc. Sure, you can find groups more easily, but so much of FFXI is done solo now, even on Asura, that it isn't really that important.

If there was a regular community for ballista I'd actually consider an alt to take part in that, but outside of that I wouldn't want to be on Asura for the reasons I previously stated.

That said, I suppose that since Asura leans heavily NA, that there probably is a signifcantly larger variation in activity in peak vs offpeak hours, whereas many other servers have more steady populations because the NA and JP are most active at different times.