"What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk... Have at you!" Lord Dracula - [Castlevania:SotN]
it's not up to microsoft to decide if you can use a PS2/PS3 controller on your PC. It can easily be done with third party drivers. It's Sony who is to blame for not making an official driver. They don't want to do it because they want you to use their hardware.
But instead of fiddling with that, why not just go out and buy a logitech gamepad. They make several gamepads that are just like playstation controllers and they're plug and play.
My personal experience with Logitech controllers has been that they are unresponsive, the buttons wear out and start sticking and they are generally buggy. Especially if you use the wireless ones. I wore out and or broke several Logitech controls before I decided to put the effort into finding drivers for the 360 controllers and I've never looked back. The 360 and ps2/3/4 controllers are vastly superior hardware in my opinion.
Then again the logitech controllers are way easier to set up and a lot of people like them. So I guess it's a question of whether you want something that's hard to get working, or something that hard to work with. I think most people just don't want to spend another $20-$50 on something they already have.
I say this as a guy who hasn't used a PS or 360 for FFXI in years though. If they are going to cancel PS / 360 support, SE should at least thrown them a bone and support their controllers on PC.
You've had some pretty bad luck then, because my experience has been the opposite, reliable hardware that just doesn't quit. I"m using a Logitech G-15 keyboard that's almost as old as this game. It's survived things being spilled on it and lots of grabge under the keys in all those years, not to mention other abuse, and it still works fine today.
As far as controllers XI only supports directInput, which is why the xbox controller can't be (properly) supported. DirectInput doesn't support all of the features of the latest generation's gamepads, which is why when you DO get them to work, some buttons (namely the analog triggers) don't work as you expect. Xbox controllers use the XInput interface and it would probably be a lot of work for SE to implement.
Their gamepads are just as reliable as their keyboards. You might have had bad luck with one but they generally make good products.
Xbox controllers are compatible with PC but not this game because of the technology used, which did not exist when FFXI was created. It wasn't a concern in moving to the xbox 360 because the system handles that stuff. Those who do get the controllers to work find that the analog triggers on those controllers are not recognized as buttons by the game.
You could also consider learning to use the keyboard to play. While it will be likely awkward for you at first, if you can get used to it, the larger number of buttons at your disposal can be quite an advantage, especially when it comes to macro use. The only downside is movement is less smooth (though you can overcome this by learning to use the camera and movement controls in combination effectively)
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