Just played Final Fantasy XI

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Originally Posted by Delily

You heard wrong, that would be an immense waste of time and money on Square's part. They have 2 developers, 1 tester, and less than 20,000 active players.

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You must of had to stand up to pull out numbers like that.

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Originally Posted by Ill_Matic

This happens with any first MMO you play. Nothing will beat what you experienced when you started playing. It's like crack, you keep chasing that high you've first experienced.

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I don't know about that. XI wasn't the first MMO I played. Ragnarok Online, Lineage II were released before XI, played both and never felt as attached to either of those. Once I started playing XI, was stuck with it and rarely looked at other games. Aside from World of Warcraft that I played on and off during the years after 2008, but a good amount of my time was sent in XI up until 2015 when everyone else started leaving for other games or XIV.

XI wasn't my first game played, but it will truly be forever one of the best experiences I've ever had in MMO gaming. I do agree with the last comment though. It is like crack and chasing that high, no other game amounts to what XI did to me. As much as I'd like XIV to, it not going to happen :(

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Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus

My thoughts on Abyssea are this...

It was released around the same time as ffxiv v1. It allowed you to max out jobs fast and breeze through content at a pace not seen before in XI. That and the dismantling of content like dyna all made me come to the conclusion they were trying to rush ppl thru xi and hopefully get them into xiv. Then v1 went down in a firey rampage of smoke and criticism they scrambled to give it more life via Adoulin, which at release was obviously rushed, to keep ppl thinking about ff until xiv could be reborn.

But then they watered xiv down so badly that the people they didn't loose with abyssea either stayed in xi or moved on to other games. I know very few ppl who came here from there and stayed for any reasonable amount of time. Out of my giant ls easily having 50+ ppl on at any given time and enough regular endgame raiders to fill multiple pts, 1 person came over and lasted longer than 1-2 updates, other than myself. XIV is the polar opposite of XI when it comes to UI, skill and endgame, in the fact that XI took skill, had bad UI and intense, fun endgame where xiv takes no skill, has decent UI and lackluster endgame that is more "why even bother?" than "It's raid night! woohoo!"

I think a lot of the old XI players will show up again in either Ashes of Creation or Pantheon Rise of the Fallen, from the way they sound. As it is XIV isn't as much an mmo as it is a mobile game on console/pc.

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Pretty much this to be honest. It felt like with abysea they expected everyone to flock towards FFXIV and make it their new home so they gutted FFXI to make it easier with single parties and made it where everyone could quickly catch up and be on equal grounds. The problem is it basically killed the main reason people were playing FFXI as apposed to games like WoW, Rift, Tera, EQ2, insert other big MMO.

When FFXIV 1.0 failed and they, lets be honest, turned the game into World of Final Fantasy, the people who wanted a FFXI style game but modernized left FFXIV over time as well. My guild (Almost all FFXI vets who came with me from FFXI) went from 76 active in FFXIV to well about 5-6 now, every one of them left because of the games design and only 3 went back to ffxi. And Pantheon and Ashes are the two games they are mainly looking at currently. But those are so far out no one even knows if they will be good or even launch.

That being said FFXIV is a great game if you wanted a Final Fantasy version of WoW's core game design. Something easy to get into, extremely simplistic job/game mechanics, quick to play, casual focused, loads of instant success, gear resets to keep everyone at about the same powerlvl, with extremely mechanically challenging raids for hardcores. The majority of the today's mmo players want this... so it makes sense. For me and alot of FFXI vets who played FFXI and kept playing it because it was not these things, this game will always be in the shadow of what FFXI was (pre abysea). FFXI was just more of a mmo then FFXIV is, which I see as more of a coop final fantasy not a mmo.

Has nothing to do with Rose Tinted Glasses or anything it is just two vastly different mmo concepts. Some prefer one, some prefer the other.

Yet here we are on this forum with hundreds of people not all that happy with the game/dev team, and having it contain of thread about about XI. A game that has adapted pretty well with the times, unfortunately no large population to match. Probably doing better than it did during its prime when all those nice things it currently has, did not exist. Abyssea is just a memory there, old dead content not even used for leveling anymore.

Side note: SE made me a sad panda when they nerfed campaign into the ground, before all that, I swear it was the greatest thing they ever added to that game lol.

Been asking for the removal of blue dot and connect the world together like it did in v1.0. City and enviroment. When i played 14 it made me feel world immersed like FF11. I used to dodge the raptor when grinding in an exp pt yes i did that in v1.0. If 14 slow down vertical progression it would increase game life. 14 is fun i guess, but i just need the blue dot remove it would solve my immersion problem. Ps. 3 city music suck v1.0 is much better

Did they ever add appearance changes into the game or is that still not a thing?

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Originally Posted by Krotoan

Did they ever add appearance changes into the game or is that still not a thing?

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Still no "fantasia" option, sadly, but Windower has had the PlasticSurgeon addon (now has a new name I can't think of) for ages - so that helps to scratch that itch :X

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Originally Posted by Krotoan

Did they ever add appearance changes into the game or is that still not a thing?

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They addressed this recently and said they could not do it because of the way the game was scripted.

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Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus

You must of had to stand up to pull out numbers like that.

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Which numbers? The 2 dev and 1 QA was confirmed a while ago, and 20,000 is a fairly generous number, considering at peak times, Asura (which is the current NA server) has 3,000 people on it.

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Originally Posted by Delily

Which numbers? The 2 dev and 1 QA was confirmed a while ago, and 20,000 is a fairly generous number, considering at peak times, Asura (which is the current NA server) has 3,000 people on it.

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FFXIAH.com is showing active characters around 80k, with a hair under 3M characters total. Not sure how they determine active status, but there's another number for you.

https://www.ffxiah.com/database

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

FFXIAH.com is showing active characters around 80k, with a hair under 3M characters total. Not sure how they determine active status, but there's another number for you.

https://www.ffxiah.com/database

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Thanks, I can't find it, but I know the admin for FFXIAH, Rooks, has commented on those numbers before. I'll concede and say it's more than 20,000, but it's also less than 80,000, so my point still holds, which is it's not worth SE's time and money to create a vanilla server.

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Originally Posted by Delily

Thanks, I can't find it, but I know the admin for FFXIAH, Rooks, has commented on those numbers before. I'll concede and say it's more than 20,000, but it's also less than 80,000, so my point still holds, which is it's not worth SE's time and money to create a vanilla server.

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Yeah, I can't imagine they'd go back and make a vanilla server at this point. They still keep up nicely with updates / little patches and what not, but I can't see them doing too much more. There are private servers for that.

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Originally Posted by Rasikko

Yet here we are on this forum with hundreds of people not all that happy with the game/dev team, and having it contain of thread about about XI. A game that has adapted pretty well with the times, unfortunately no large population to match. Probably doing better than it did during its prime when all those nice things it currently has, did not exist. Abyssea is just a memory there, old dead content not even used for leveling anymore.

Side note: SE made me a sad panda when they nerfed campaign into the ground, before all that, I swear it was the greatest thing they ever added to that game lol.

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So go play FFXI? Square is more than happy to have 2 good MMOs running.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

Yeah, I can't imagine they'd go back and make a vanilla server at this point. They still keep up nicely with updates / little patches and what not, but I can't see them doing too much more. There are private servers for that.

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They also supposedly still have that outsourced mobile remake in the works as another reason not to bother.

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Originally Posted by Krotoan

Did they ever add appearance changes into the game or is that still not a thing?

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If you mean something like FFXIV's glam system, they do have a really good version of it. If you mean a race change/hairstyle change, then no. No they have not.