Quote Originally Posted by Scratchs View Post
Seemed to be easier back then for me.. I remember in Kirin fights and those other sky monsters a lot of people would be afk, etc and we still won. Also Dynamis tons of afkers and you could still win. Only thing harder was the extreme time it took to travel. This game it seems harder and less forgiving every player needs to be doing their job or you just don't win.

I had the literal opposite experience and so did virtually everyone else. That why you hear echoes of horror about the infamous Valkurm Dunes. You had to work hard just to get past lv10. If even one key player messed up in a giant alliance in FFXI, everyone wiped. It took tons of hard work and dedication to get anywhere in that game. CoP took me nearly a year to beat. Even the very first CoP missions sometimes took me more than 10 tries and prepping for those were super expensive and time consuming. Hard work was rewarding and satisfying. Failure was punished. Everything was extremely intricate and complex enough to make it feel like a real living world but it worked behind the scenes enough so new players weren't too intimidated.

I can count the times I've died in this game on one hand. I ran out of fingers and toes to count with on my first day of deaths in FFXI. It was brutal. I raged hard but I kept at it. Then I took up the most brutal job of all: Beastmaster. And this was back in the day when you had to leave your pet to get full exp. 20 deaths a day for a Beastmaster was common. And the exp loss from that sometimes lead to negative total exp gains for hours of hard work. But you gained more skill. You learned your environment. You timed everything perfectly. It was like improving at Chess or Go. It was exciting and every time you leveled up it felt really good.