Quote Originally Posted by Nyarlko View Post
From what the devs have said in this past year regarding things like this, (the answer was a resounding "No." btw,) it sounds to me like there may be some licensing issues involved. Sony was involved with original development of FFXI, so this may be simply an "impossible" task.
Also, it isn't anywhere near as simple as ppl might think, like going back through their archives for a particular build or whatever (and apparently they don't keep all of everything from past updates). But as I said in the past, there are problems with the idea:
1) What is classic? it depends on who you talk to. Who decides this?
2) Does it get updated? Unlock the later contents over time? How does this all work, because the game WILL get stale and the server will die if there is no updates, as tantalizing as a blast from the past may be.
3) Community fracturing. There is a considerable possibility that adding a special server with different content could fracture the community.
4) Rose tinted glasses. Nostalgia is great and all but you will quickly realize that without the community in the state that it was at your desired time period of the game, it's not going to be the same. Without packed servers, your experience with grinding for XP/merits/etc in particular isn't going to be terribly different from the way it is now, you'll either need alter egos or spend hours to form a party the old fashioned way. You're not going to be able to gather 20-30 people for classic dynamis, there's just a lot of things that simply won't work the way they did in the old days even if they did activate an old version of the game on a special server.
I think a much better idea than a special server with a special version of the game would be simply improving existing functions like level sync to make it easier to enjoy older contents in a way that is closer to what they were originally designed for. Currently it's a hassle to try to get things just right, and that hassle often turns away people who might otherwise be interested in fun self-imposed challenges.


Agreed, but why is that stopping them from making a classic server? They can do what they want, ToAU, before ToAU, up to the point in WoTG where level cap changed. They don't even need to call it classic just name it 75 cap servers. I understand this game doesn't have much support from SE but I would think they can actually make money from it. Since tbh that is what decides yes or no
While the money to be made isn't nonexistent, the potential income has to be weighed against the cost of implementation. The devs have weighed in on this issue in the past and shot it down, basically suggesting that the cost-benefit outlook isn't good. I had a continuous subscription for over a decade, and I don't have any friends that aren't still playing that would likely be swayed back on the promise of a classic server. The fact is MMOs today are very different from when FFXI came out, and we're all older and probably have jobs etc that we might not have had before, and FFXI's depth and complexity, as awesome as it truly is, is too much for today's gamers it seems.