Xbox 360 Issues: Who's Affected, and Why?

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

Since this has been an ongoing issue for, oh, years now, I'm not holding my breath on the related bug reports on this forum changing things any time soon.

However, the anecdotes I'm hearing is that not all Xboxes have all problems, suggesting that some or all of the issues can be fixed with a new hard drive, a new Xbox, or both.

So, what problems are you experiencing, and what does your Xbox 360 setup look like?

For the record, the three problems I hear about (and experience) the most are:

• Besieged freezing--Participating in events with a lot of character models on your screen (players, monsters, etc.) eventually causes your system to freeze catastrophically. Both video and audio freeze, the controller is unresponsive, and the system must be powered down manually from the console itself.
• Zone lags--About ten seconds after changing areas, video (and possibly input) freeze for about three seconds. This happens every time, be it entering Port Jeuno or entering your Mog House.
• Disc read errors--Particularly after an "improper shut down" (e.g. Besieged freezing), attempting to start the game results in a "disc unreadable" error, until the HDD's cache has been cleared. Newer game discs seem to be more susceptible than older ones (e.g. I get it more with my WotG expansion disc than my original game disc).

So, which of the above problems do you have, if any? And if you do or don't have problems, what does your Xbox 360 look like? The big questions are:

• Is it big or small?
  • If it's big, does it have an HDMI port?
• How big is your hard drive?

Personally, I've got a large Xbox 360, no HDMI port, a 20 GB HDD, and I've had all three problems.

[Harukusan]

I've been playing for about ~7 years now, and I've never run into these problems before. I bet you can guess why.

Buy a PC!

Not trying to be rude or mean in any way, but by today's standards (mainly thanks to PS2's "limitations"), a PC capable of running FFXI will be roughly the same cost of a new Xbox (maybe less), and all your problems will vanish. I don't think more changes made by the developers will help the situations you're having trouble with.

[Zumi]

Besieged freezing is just an issue with the xbox version.

I get the zone lag freze every time I zone as well. I think its loading stuff from the HDD to the RAM which causes the pause.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

Buy a PC!

Besieged freezing is just an issue with the xbox version.

Why in the name of Altana did I think I could get something useful and productive out of this forum?

If anybody needs me, I'll be crying in the corner.

[Juri_Licious]

It's pretty simple, they ported the game over instead of making it directly for Xbox 360.
So, it's not coded as correctly as it should be so it's not optimized.

They would have to use an update patch.

[Skwigelf]

Zone lags--About ten seconds after changing areas, video (and possibly input) freeze for about three seconds. This happens every time, be it entering Port Jeuno or entering your Mog House.

^its infuriating. Me and a few others that play on xbox in our ls all say the same thing. Weird thing is we all noticed our mules dont zone lag whatsoever.

[vyhakeyo]

It's not just Besieged I've ran into that, but also Campaign a few times. I stopped doing Besieged and campaign because of the freezing problem. Maybe a patch can be thought up?

[sc4500]

As a long time xbox live users was on ps2 version then switch to the xbox version on launch ffxi xbox, yea there are some bugs that would be nice they fixed, Here some helpful tips that i have found my self or came across other messages boards on these bugs.
First I Am using a xbox slim with 120g hardrive and almost all bugs still rear there ugly hair. also had 2 other older xboxes that were rrod boxes that had on launch days of xbox 360.

1st. The besieged locked up on me on all 3 xboxes , seems happen after 30 min into besieged so if have not locked up , need go find a safe corner and just sit down, dont touch anything on your xbox contoller or keyboard, try find spot were there no one else fighting.

2nd. campaign and aybessea both will lock up on the slims and older xbox i know on campaign older xboxes never been in aybessea on old xboxes, these lockups seems to happen after in campaing 2 hrs in the same zone while campaigning , aybessea seems happen after 3 hrs in the zone exping while in alliances, Can fixed these locked up by just zoneing out then coming back into the area , resest the locked up timer. In aybessea can see when got 5 min left buy looking on the map and be all pixulated. caught that 2 times. then would lock me few min later. also if see like 3 or 4 other people start dc from lockups on xbox be good time zone out then back in, or log off log back in.

3rd. Dirty disk errors can happen to any model of xboxes , seems less frequent with newest disk and slim but still happens, To fixed this you got download a custom music song to your hard drive and play the song while disk load works 100% time or can just use a ipod or any usb custom music player and play a song through the dashboard.

4th. This has happend to a few my friends with old xboxes that have not been repaired from the RROD, Critical faluire when game loads up , you cant move your character with out the game DCing you, and stuck in that one area all time, unless got good friend can get you out that area, Usally this sign that your xbox is about RROD, GM will not warp you, and square and microsoft offers no help , one my buddy spent 3 days on there customer service systems trying get to work, finally he gave me his account info and i was able to get him out the zone. It did again to him and this time he wet towled his xbox got rrod and got fixed never did it again. Out of the 75 plus friends on my xbox live gamertag all played this game only happened to 3 people , so extremly rare.

5th Lag on zones , havent found solution on that , me and my friends believe because xbox live all broadband users , and game accept 56k dial up reason does that. Think it lower are speed each time we zone into the area.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

First I Am using a xbox slim with 120g hardrive and almost all bugs still rear there ugly hair. also had 2 other older xboxes that were rrod boxes that had on launch days of xbox 360.

Thanks a lot for the info on your experiences on multiple Xbox rigs. I guess all I would have to look forward to with an upgrade is that the frozen video will be through an HDMI port rather than component video. XD

I strongly suspect the reason these things aren't getting fixed is "Xbox Live limitations." Square-Enix is contractually bound to run FFXI on Xbox a certain way (e.g. requiring a disc in the drive, no internet access outside Xbox Live, etc.), so their hands are tied when it comes to trying to fix things that would affect how the game runs on the platform.

I think the ongoing warning to use "/shutdown" rather than the Xbox Guide Button to shut down is an example of this: Microsoft would never allow S-E to alter the function of the Guide Button.

[Chronofantasy]

I do a lot of abyssea exp ptys. I can be perfectly fine for quite a long time if there's just my alliance in the immediate area, but once another ally comes close by and is fighting in the same spot for a while, I can often freeze anytime after 30 mins to 2 hours. I also get some of the other above mentioned issues too while playing on 360. I could play on my laptop but it's not as comfy for me even with a controller since I enjoy laying on my bed while I use a wireless controller to play on a large TV. If I played on a laptop/PC then I might be turned off from FFXI soon into playing, but that's just me. I'm used to playing console games and I enjoy playing console games.