Quote Originally Posted by Alhanelem View Post
Funny enough Star Trek Online (and another game from the same studio) both featured a custom content component (essentially, moddable MMOs, within limits- you could create custom adventures which other players could search for and play, with rewards and everything using almost any of the game's assets), but those features were eventually removed because it was too difficult to both update the game while maintaining support for the custom adventure features. So clearly, it was a significant undertaking to maintain support for that feature, which is essentially what you were describing.

But I stand by my opinion that FFXI gives you plenty of ways to play your way, and a "classic server" is unnecessary. A server frozen in a particular point of time has limited appeal because it will eventually get boring with no updates, and as mentioned multiple times in the past, you'll lose out on many of the quality of life improvements made since whatever bygone day you liked best; and as noted, if you really want that, private servers are a thing (that aren't supposed to be a thing, but there's no denying they are a thing).
That depends on how it's implemented. It would be easy to implement updates to the custom worlds I've talked about. It would be up to each Custom World holder to enable the new updates or keep the old settings. So updates for a custom world will be available if they are wanted on the Custom World. I also mentioned that the server holder would be able to add custom content and items, so it wouldn't be without updates. This would in all make private servers less of a thing, and SE would keep the support they need to keep the game running.