Classic Servers

[Lortheron]

Yes, I agree.

Private servers are mostly about dodging the sub fee. You also can't really put too much heart into your character on them because their retention of your data is far less guaranteed. Beyond that, the reverse engineering is still highly imperfect and some things may not work the way you expect. And yes, private servers need to be maintained, but usually it's much like any f2p game, a few people with lots of money are covering for freeloaders.
Combining all the known servers to rvial Asura doesn't really speak that strongly to the merits of the idea. For one, as we said already, a lot of people are doing it because it's a free alternative where they don't have to give SE any money, and not because of any particular game attributes such as level cap or whatever else. For two is really all the other stuff I've repeated several times at this point- lack of agreement on what "classic" actually is, dividing the community, Features already existing to enable this style of play without a special server (though said features could do with some improvement to be fair), etc. etc. etc.


WoW classic works for Blizzard because WoW is such an immense game that the number of people interested in it is enough to sustain a community. But even WoW classic isn't staying locked in the past, they've already reintroduced Burning Crusade, etc, which basically proves that you can't just make a server, go back in time, and freeze it there. You have to reintroduce content over time or add new content or it's just going to get stale before very long. FFXI never had anywhere near the level of market adoption as WoW. It would require a lot of investment for far less potential return than it had for Blizzard with WoW.

It can be fun to take a trip down memory lane, but the reality is, it isn't sustainable. You'll play it for a while, get bored from the lack of new content, and go back to the main game or play another game.

Look, You have to give them points for the new master level system- the XP gain is very much like the old days, needing to kill stronger mobs in a party to get a meaningful amount, trusts aren't terribly great for it, and XP loss is something of a threat again. And the people who have access to master levels are already the people who enjoy the lengthy grinds of the olden days the most.

Agree with the last part : )

As for the private servers, I don't know, I hear many people that played on WingsXI commenting how it's faster than SEs servers, since they use top notch enterprise level servers that are better than what SE unfortunately leaves to FFXI... I can agree that MOST private servers might be full of bugs, but there is currently the arise of "premium private servers" that will probably soon require some fees (albeit less than the retail game, of course) from the players if the want to keep it up... an interesting thing to see unfolding for sure... I for once, am curious as to how this new scene will play out in the short~medium timespan.

[Lortheron]

Bugless? Cmon man, those servers are filled with bugs. They are all reverse engineered garbage, things don';t work as they should and if you think they are they probably aren't and the DEV didn't notice.

I never actually played on private servers myself to be honest. But I am on WingsXI Discord (invited by a member of one of LSs) and know many players that play both in retail and on WingsXI... what they say to me whenever I ask about the subject is very interesting... it does seems that there are two private servers of FFXI which are arising as "premium private servers" or something of the matter (WingsXI being one of them). If this keeps up they will soon have to require a timely fee (maybe something like every 6 months for example, amounting for less than what the current retail server charges of course) from the players. I'm curious to see how this scenario will unfold...

[By-Tor]

Also you are very mistaken if you think nobody multi boxes or bots on p servers.

In your rage, you put words in my mouth. I never said there is no multiboxing in private servers: I said there are servers that don't allow multiboxing (there are others that do allow it), and on those that don't allow it (the biggest pserver out there is one example), you get punished if you have an alt following you, or even a mule logged at the same time running around outside of the main cities.

Private servers are mostly about dodging the sub fee.

Directly contradicts my own experience with these communities.

For one, as we said already, a lot of people are doing it because it's a free alternative where they don't have to give SE any money, and not because of any particular game attributes such as level cap or whatever else.

Completely untrue and baseless. No one goes through the trouble of installing a private server for a 20 years PS2 MMO simply because they want to play a free game. Very patronizing too, for in truth, people do play there because of the 75 cap itemization, mechanics, social gameplay focus etc.

You also can't really put too much heart into your character on them because their retention of your data is far less guaranteed. Beyond that, the reverse engineering is still highly imperfect and some things may not work the way you expect. And yes, private servers need to be maintained, but usually it's much like any f2p game, a few people with lots of money are covering for freeloaders.

Also untrue. I won't mention names, but the old main pserver is around since July 28th, 2013. The current biggest ToAU server has been around since 2017, and has an impressive level of accuracy. Great developers.

And yes, private servers need to be maintained, but usually it's much like any f2p game, a few people with lots of money are covering for freeloaders.

Also inaccurate. The only cost of a private server is hosting, which is not *that* expensive, and the developers time volunteering to code. In all of the big pservers, as far as I know, the cost is covered by only one or two devs. And another condescending comment towards pserver players.


It's funny how you guys think you have all the answers. These boards could be more cordial and civil if you didn't act like angry teenagers behind keyboards.

[Alhanelem]

Directly contradicts my own experience with these communities.

The experience of one individual does not refute my statement. It's the primary reason these communities began in the first place, out of frustration with SE and not wanting to give them money anymore. Otherwise, there isn't much reason to be on one. If you love FFXI you should be paying the sub fee, no one can be on a private server, whether they miss the "good ol days" or not, and not be consciously deciding to not pay up. It doesn't matter how nice or friendly or cool the community is. It's great that you had a positive experience with these communities, but that isn't the point. And technically, even if users on these servers are paying their sub fee, they're still technically violating the user agreement and terms that they agreed to with SE.

Completely untrue and baseless. No one goes through the trouble of installing a private server for a 20 years PS2 MMO simply because they want to play a free game. Very patronizing too, for in truth, people do play there because of the 75 cap itemization, mechanics, social gameplay focus etc.

There is plenty of basis for this. You have no idea how many people there are out there who are curious about FFXI but don't want to pay another sub fee. I see them every day that I play FFXIV. These conversations come up all the time. "it still has a sub fee? Nah, I don't want to do that..." Even old FFXI players I know that aren't playing another MMO, it's part of what kills their motivation to come back. Your implication that people wouldn't want to go through the "trouble" to play an old game to dodge a sub fee does not jive with the fact that people are far less likely to want to pay a sub fee for an old game. And it isn't as much trouble as you're implying either.

Also inaccurate. The only cost of a private server is hosting, which is not *that* expensive, and the developers time volunteering to code

Time is money, friend, and yes, hosting isnt exorbitant, but even an independently run website generally needs some donations to make its server costs, and these illegal private servers are no exception. And as I noted before, if you play on one of these, you're taking a risk that the person or people behind it will up and shut down their server without warning and everything you did on it is erased.

It's funny how you guys think you have all the answers. These boards could be more cordial and civil if you didn' t act like angry teenagers behind keyboards.

It's also funny how you think it's okay to be judgemental and stereotypcial. This complaint is full of hypocrisy. These boards have been generally cordial and civil most of the time, and I'm a (reasonably) happy 37 year old (who's played FFXI since the beginning) who doesn't happen to think that making immature comments about other people and their opinions makes a good argument.

If you want to look good making a post like this on a forum, do it without attacking the people you're speaking to. Your comment was entirely unnecessary and contributed to this board being less cordial and civil.

[Leeto]

FF11 Classic world/server requests have to be made on the official forums in an attempt to gain more visibility, but certain folks immediately get territorial about it. We're not trying to start a revolution or argue about it, we just hope they will listen. There exists demand for an official Classic 75 era recreation, that is without question. For every Classic 75 era topic on the forums you'll see the same regurgitated and out of touch suggestions such as "just level sync yourself to 75" or "you think you want it, but you don't." And thank you, but we know all the ways to emulate 75 era.

We are asking for an OFFICIAL 75 world/server!

Many players already play 75 cap FF11 in some capacity, most just have the tact to not come parading around the official forums promoting illegal activites. I for one am still heartbroken that FF11's 75 period was dismantled months before the launch of XIV 1.0, we lost the 75 Era and then XIV 1.0 had to go and stain the very idea of ever getting it back through classic servers. What hurts even more is that I saw for myself a social media representative go on a tangent about FF11 on Twitch just because more people stream those "fake ass private servers" than they do the official game! What do you expect?

THERE IS NO OFFICIAL ALTERNATIVE! Please Square Enix, recreate the Classic 75 era!

We want to come home!

[Alhanelem]

FF11 Classic world/server requests have to be made on the official forums in an attempt to gain more visibility,

No, they really don't.

Look, this idea has been pitched many times already and has been directly shot down by SE as not happening. Continuing to post this isn't going to make a better case for it. The reasons are both technical and logistical. They'd have to divide their time between developing and maintaining the current game and this other version. They already said they don't have an old version of the game they could use as a base for this kind of thing. It took years and years for people to reverse engineer the game, the existence of a private server does not mean the FFXI team has the resources or capability to do it. They aren't going to make a good case to SE corpoorate that this would be worth investing time and money into additional staff to make and maintain this. Beating a dead horse isn't going to bring it back to life.

Also, on a personal level, I'm sick of people talking about the 75 era like it was some holy grail of godliness. The level cap didn't kill the game. FFXIV didn't kill the game (especially when the original version bombed so hard- by the time ARR hit the scene the writing had been on the wall for some time already). If anything directly contributed to its decline, it was likely two things:
-Being held back by PS2 limitations, while other MMOs changed and evolved to greater degrees, FFXI was constrained by the system it was originally developed for
-Abyssea. Although I found Abyssea itself a ton of fun, its nature as a power playground, where you were stronger than you would ever be anywhere else in the game, meant that any future content simply could not live up to what it offered unless it also had similar power spike mechanics (i.e. voidwatch).

The game had to change and evolve though. Keeping 75 cap forever would have been worse (and an even bigger inventory nightmare, btw). Too many sidegrade items for too many abiltiies, having to do calculus level math puzzles to figure out which item was 0.01% better, it would have become even more overwhelming if a whole nother expansion was made with a whole arsenal of situational macroswap items. The game would simply remain stuck in the past, with a tinier (but admittedly fiercely loyal) fanbase than it would have had if it kept on making and trying new things.

We want to come home!

You're already home. The current game is still here and still plenty of fun. You can not recreate the old days, even on a new server, because your experience was borne of the friendships and bonds you made, the things you did for the first time, the achievements, the accomplishments. But you have already done those things. It isn't the same doing it for a second time. I've made alts more than once, and I got bored of it quickly because everything I did I've already done before and it was more fun the first time.

Really though no special server or version of the game is even needed to be level 75 again. I've said it a million times, just don't complete the level 80 limit break quest and grabs ome friends and have them not do that as well. Instant level 75 server. If it is really such a strongly desired thing as you say it is, you really shouldn't have any trouble finding like-minded players in game to do this with. All the old items, content, etc are still there (generally) and you get to keep things like being able to get to where you want to go without spending half an hour walking (if you so desire), more storage spaces, etc.

Without new content, those "75 era" servers will just die a very slow death and go out not with a bang, but with a whimper. And you don't need to go any further than WoW classic for that. WoWC reintroduced Burning Crusade, which means they'll evnetually reintroduce other expansions, simply being several years behind the base game. And with the release of it, most players will move to that, because they are hungering for new old content at that point- Beating UBRS for the 1000th time just isn't as fun as the first.

Consider this: https://massivelyop.com/2021/03/05/w...rning-crusade/

Even people who loved the early era of WoW were seemingly expecting new content (which was never promised or planned). Instead they got a reintroduction of newer old content, which they did apparently go for. But it appears that most people moved on to TBC instead of sticking with Classic. Why? because even if you loved that era and enjoyed coming back to it, the lack of updates would cause you to leave eventually. If you get a 75 server, the chances that it will get its own content updates are basically nil. The only way to get new content is to accept the version updates that came after.

For every Classic 75 era topic on the forums you'll see the same regurgitated and out of touch suggestions such as "just level sync yourself to 75" or "you think you want it, but you don't." And thank you, but we know all the ways to emulate 75 era.

Then use them! There is very little difference between just keeping your character capped at lv75 and making a special server that does that. Frankly I find the suggestions for a classic server to be the ones that are "out of touch." Nostalgia is a pair off rose tinted glasses, and it seems so much better when you're talking about it than when you're actually doing it. And I know, because I have.

You all keep talking about all the tons of people that supposedly do the private servers, but if so many people really want to do this sort of thing, I should be able to shout for people wanting to do 75 content and get a ton of responses. Well, guess what, I tried for a fair while. I got 0 tells. Now I'm not saying these people don't exist, obviously some do and they may already be on the private servers or already doing their own thing with friends and prefer to just keep it to friends. But these weasel words like "many" and "lots" that convey large numbers without actually showing a concrete number make the demand seem higher than it really is.

[By-Tor]

If you want to look good making a post like this on a forum, do it without attacking the people you're speaking to. Your comment was entirely unnecessary and contributed to this board being less cordial and civil.

Says the guy who is constantly passive aggressive towards whoever manifests their opinion in favor of classic servers. "Go play Mapple Story", "don't do genkai and stay in your 75 prison", "freeloaders".
This forum is filled with posts in which you treat people with that kind of attitude, and as soon as someone points out a few of your inconsistencies they're supposedly "attacking" you.
Grow up.

[Alhanelem]

Says the guy who is constantly passive aggressive towards whoever manifests their opinion in favor of classic servers. "Go play Mapple Story", "don't do genkai and stay in your 75 prison", "freeloaders".
This forum is filled with posts in which you treat people with that kind of attitude, and as soon as someone points out a few of your inconsistencies they're supposedly "attacking" you.
Grow up.

But you continue to do the same thing now. Why not be the better man if you think I'm so terrible and so "passive aggressive (false)?"

You were not "pointing out inconsistencies." You made personal attacks. And you're continuing to do so now. You really should take your own advice. Reread your own comment:

"It's funny how you guys think you have all the answers. These boards could be more cordial and civil if you didn't act like angry teenagers behind keyboards. "

How is this not an attack? I don't see any way to read this and not come to the conclusion of being attacked. You're calling people you don't agree with "angry teenagers behind keyboards" and implying t hat they aren't coridal and civil (which we are, usually.) What did you really mean with this sentence if not to be abrasive/rile people up?

And if you want to know why I'm so against this, well, it's quite simple really. The dev team for FFXI has a limited budget and resources. Asking them to make a special server for special things (which they can't simply conjure up as they said before, they don't have old versions of the game archived, so the most they can do is simply make the level cap 75 and say "go have fun.") would mean that they'd have take resources away from the current game, which plenty of people still enjoy, in order to get a historical time warp that they can already get, either through features available in the game now, or by using a private server. It would harm the experience for the people playing now.

We are better off with, and far more likely to get, a remaster/remake- a new project that can get a new team and new budget for a new product release which can potentially get far more players than releasing a special server would. I wish I saw more people asking for that, as I could definitely get behind that. Classic gameplay with everyone starting fresh in an even more beautiful world with cleaned/tightened up UI and modern back-end tech that allows for better solutions to the problems faced by the original game.

[Leeto]

I've said it a million times, just don't complete the level 80 limit break quest and grabs ome friends and have them not do that as well. Instant level 75 server.

All you do is reply to every post to serve as a detractor and continue to make it obvious how little you care what Classic 75 era means to those who enjoy it. But hey post count +1, right? There is an entire community of 75 cap players who dabble in both retail and private classic. We want an official representation of the Classic 75 era. You're showing your true colors at this point, your quick and easy solutions and assumptions about walking for half an hour clearly show your bias. You dwell in the forums constantly posting on behalf of SQEX with no badge or certification whatsoever paraphrasing with "they said this" and "they said that" playing the role of executioner in the replies. Nobody appreciates you replying to every single post just to naysay and have the last word. Stop it.

Meanwhile those of us asking for Classic servers literally recognize each other from multiple other communities. We already know 75 cap is a good alternative and that it can be done. Yoshi-P already implied he could recreate it at minimum. We want to see that come to fruition. We want to see the FF11 category on Twitch full of streamers playing OFFICIAL FF11 Classic, not private servers. We want the option and an official recreation of Classic 75 era,

and until it exists?

I encourage everyone to continue to show demand and keep asking for it!

[By-Tor]

How is this not an attack? I don't see any way to read this and not come to the conclusion of being attacked. You're calling people you don't agree with "angry teenagers behind keyboards" and implying t hat they aren't coridal and civil (which we are, usually.) What did you really mean with this sentence if not to be abrasive/rile people up?

Pointing out that you're acting like an angry teenager everytime you treat people who make posts about classic server proposals like shit could, perhaps, be considered an attack, yes. I check this forum every few months and you're always telling people that they're deluded, seeing classic gameplay with rose tinted glasses (I, for one, never played retail back in the day, but prefer the snippets of what I saw from it through pservers over retail). If you're not doing that, you're telling them to do the impossible and be sattisfied with current retail while imposing some ridiculous restrictions, as if someone who plays say, P99 could ever be satisfied with current EQ1, for example.

When you're not directly targetting them, you're liking posts like the one in the last page, where some guy suggests that there's gotta be a linkshell who would take the OP out of these forums, just because he's for classic servers. And OP has been so respectful.

In my first ever post here, completely innocent and just trying to be heard by Square, telling how I dreamed of playing on an official, modern 75 cap server, I was greeted by your usual snark telling me that's never gonna happen, while also liking posts from people saying they "don't understand how someone can want to play classic", and that they should stop posting.

You really should be more respectful with people you disagree, instead of being mad at someone who's had enough of your bs.