Bugged NPC Names!

[Alhanelem]

Okay so I have been racking my brain the past week on why names were coming up weird and why certain dialogues were empty. So I was like "Hey lets try and validate the file through the game FFXI config program". So I open up FFXI config and clicked the validate files button and began launching the game as per normal. Guess what? It noticed that a few files were missing. It ran a proper download of all the missing files and everything works again.so here are your steps:

1. Boot up FFXI and find the "Validate game files" button and click it, then exit FFXI Config.
2. Boot up Playonline and let POL run the validation process.

If this doesnt work for you try reinstalling the game entirely.

I wasn't aware there was another way to check files besides the button in the login menu of the playonline viewer. And it produced different results? very weird.

[Dragoy]

I wasn't aware there was another way to check files besides the button in the login menu of the playonline viewer. And it produced different results? very weird.

It's new... ish. I think it was implemented with the changes in the May. 10, 2019 (JST) Version Update.

I don't think it should produce different results however, but it is different in that if you trigger it from the config utility, the game client acts as if there was an update available, and performs the steps similar to that when launching the game. I would not be surprised though, if it checked entirely different things than what the check via the PlayOnline Viewers start screen checks... but it would be at least a bit weird.

That said, testing them out now after a long while, I do notice that the start screen check mentions going through 59464 files while the "version update check" went through a little over 47000 files, so there's that.

It is interesting that there was such an issue here, since the changes to the areas seemed to be a server-side only, meaning there was no game client change required, and only the areas in question were unavailable for a short while. Perhaps there was something else going on as well that managed to upset the local files.

(As a sidey-note, I also play on Linux, via Wine, but I don't use anything that would alter the game behaviour or otherwise interact with its data. I was online in game during the time the change was reverted, checked the areas in question after they were done, and indeed the issue was gone with that for me.)