Dunno about you guys, but we had an upvote system. It was called "Vote for the Homecoming King and Queen".
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I am not sure about the current situation because i have been away for a long time, but for many years, XI had very little in the realm of glamours, costumes, customization and personalization.
Yes, XI did not have a cash shop, but it also did not have a lot of things that today are a staple and we take for granted.
So while it is true that an XI sub granted you access to all there was XI related, "all there was" was much smaller in content than what we see today.
Yoshi's stated he'd rather shut the game down entirely than let it go f2p, so regardless of the cash shop and any impact it has now or may have in the future, the game is very unlikely to be anything but pay to play.
I would say that XI definitely has at least as many events as XIV, maybe more (would need to scour announcements on this one). I actually still play XI, and at this point I would say their collection of event gear is pretty massive. Granted part of this does come with being around for 13 years, but they have always steadily released new costumes and event items. Also, they now have a glamour system so this is no longer stuck being town gear only.
They also have started releasing new mounts in-game. The styles are obviously vastly different from XIV, but I think it's cool that we still get new items to this day.
Anyway, no real point here, just elaborating a bit.
Mmmm When XI was at it's peak glamour or fluff wasn't really wanted or considered needed by the community. The only reason i use glamour really is to hide gear i don't like. I remember hating subligars combined with doublets during leveling in xi because the doublet would hide the subligar making you look like you had no clothes down under. But it was a minor inconvenience, i don't have the motivation to go out collecting glamour items like a number of peeps in my ls' do. The furthest i've gone is to glamour my BLM gear to a Classic BLM look.