[[ Why do we miss the old FFXI community ]] What made it special ??

[AdvancedWind]

People are often too quick to dismiss people enjoying FFXI as "Nostalgia or First love syndrom"

It's a flimsy place to start your argument, why not tell us why you think FFXI wasn't good instead of just dismissing people with a wave of your hand. Everyone understands that XI wasn't perfect but it was a unique beast among a sea of clones and it did what it did with a passion. I personally don't feel the same passion in XIV currently hopefully we will someday.

The problem here is that many of the things people equate with how FFXI was "great" really are either oversimplification that ignores all the bad parts and focuses only on the good, a result of completely personal experience or yes, pure nostalgia speaking.

FFXI did do many things right, but many of the "buzzwords" thrown around about FFXI actually mean just one of those:

"Social interaction" => Shout for 3 hours to find a party because you're not the right job / talk with your party to kill the boredom of long grinding nights / complain about how bad this leveling party is in linkshell chat.

"Feeling of accomplishment" => Overcoming many of the game's timesinks that are extremely boring to finally manage to do one cool thing (then have to do some other obnoxious task for the next "accomplishment") . Oh hey, I feel sooo accomplished for losing 40 minutes of my playtime just to go from town to the actual place where I'm now gonna grind for hours. Oh, I feel so accomplished for finally managing to outclaim the claimbots and engaging this 48 hour spawn NM! Oh, I feel so accomplished for using the same weaponskill over and over and over and over on the same mob family over and over and over and over to acquire this weapon! Oh, I feel so accomplished because it takes hundreds of hours to level a single job!

I believe there has to be a better balance between plain hard work and gratification to truly enjoy a MMO. FFXIV perhaps is too skewed towards gratification and could use a slowing down in some areas, but FFXI was way too heavily skewed towards spending weeks for suffering for just a few hours of actual fun and progression before you're back into suffering.

[Faelart]

#2 Thing i would say here is, yeah you had Job Based discrimination rampant in the high levels, which is what helped me put the game down, i was a DRK/WARorTHF and well we weren't really that great compared to say WAR/NIN, only a slight upgrade from a DRG (man im glad they have a spot in 14, i still feel bad for their end game treatment in 11)
Discrimination is human nature, we want our avatar to become the best, first and foremost. Then you want a group of online associates who have a similar mind to socialize with, well some people are only going to want to associate with other players who can help them advance their own at the most expeditious pace. So DRG & DRK [No Thanks] [Ninja] [Do you have it?]

#3 thing i want to say has been said, but same-server grouping made players accountable unless they re-rolled and acted differently, or later, world transferred and hope no one talked bad about them on Killing Ifrit or Allakhazam lol.

There is currently no reason to have "Servers/Worlds" now that they have cross-world dungeon finder, except to help keep the anonymity of rude or poor players anonymous.

And why people can't chat with server side while in duty is the most novice chat setup i've ever heard of. That hurts community outside of LS/FC.. can't whisper those friends on your FL while grinding dungeons about "Damn that boss kicked my butt what are you doing in 15 minutes i should be done by then?" Nope.

[Pandastirfry]

People are often too quick to dismiss people enjoying FFXI as "Nostalgia or First love syndrom"

It's a flimsy place to start your argument, why not tell us why you think FFXI wasn't good instead of just dismissing people with a wave of your hand. Everyone understands that XI wasn't perfect but it was a unique beast among a sea of clones and it did what it did with a passion. I personally don't feel the same passion in XIV currently hopefully we will someday.

A unique beast in a sea of clones? I think you mean " An EQ clone in a puddle of a nascent genre"

[Phai]

Reputation ment everything

[AlternativeOne]

FFXI was a world that exist and moved along wether you where in it or not. things happened when they did and not when ever you wanted. miss that airship . you got to wait on it. FFXVI every thing is instant so there is less reason to care about what's happening and when cause you can do anything anytime with a button click.
that's literally the only difference between the two games. every thing else is the same. even the community.

[MarkH]

Ahhh, my apologies to AdvancedWind for being unclear, I wasn't referring to the fact that 2-3 hours of grinding makes me feel bored so I had to start talking. I was implying that I used to grind level in a party, and when there are downtime (i.e. between pulls) I talks. Right now I grind level solo, in FATEs, and when there are downtime (i.e. between FATEs) I watch youtube videos.

[KyteStones]

I will never forget the many times I was taunted to be raised, to have the healer looking down on me saying "boy that looked like it hurt. Hmmm what to do what to do.." but it was for the laughs. There indeed were "elitists" who could and would charge an arm and a leg to do content or raises. Hell, a raise cold cost you anywhere from FREE-10K gil. It was just different then but they were always nice about it.

[Malamasala]

While i don't think FFXI's players were any more friendly or "special", it is fact that the gameplay of FFXI required more socialization. That alone is bound to give people good memories, or at least strong memories, whether they like it or not.

Every FATE party I've been in and talked, someone responded. So the socialization is no less in FFXIV than FFXI, people just seem to have stopped taking the initiative and expect others to talk first. It seems more like the complaining people are actually the ones causing themselves to complain because they do not even try to enjoy the game.

[Orsnoire]

*Everyone* isn't. But most people are. If you look at the threads involving praising FFXI and asking to implement FFXI style systems, the amount of likes on comments here in the forum are heavily on the side of the people who support FFXI.

This is extremely biased, and incorrect.

The "like" wars in the beta were never conclusive. At BEST the people clamoring for more FF XI are 50% of the forumgoing community.

The only reason it looks different now is that FF XI white knights make up a much larger portion of the forumgoing community for FF XIV, due (in my humble opinion) to the fact that they tend to be more dissatisfied with XIV and therefore more likely to spend time on the forums.

To claim that the forum community is reflexive of the in-game community is incorrect. As the beta forums showed conclusively, there absolutely is NOT a heavy lean towards including FF XI mechanics. (in fact, in beta VERY few threads asking for FF XI system implementation had a significant ~i.e. greater than 100~ # of likes; most of those threads were SEVERELY weighted against XI).

[Orsnoire]

Yeah all that started in the post Abyssea Era and with WoW. Certainly no one at k NA launch if XI had lvl Cap WHM's standby and heal their party as they took on mobs way beyond their lvl, No one got their lvl 75 friends to solo the skeletons in the Necroplois for their papyrus, Certainly didn't get lvl capped friends to help them breeze through the Genkais or AF quests... Nope that's a recent development.

LOL...what?

People were doing all those things in 2004. I don't know what game you were playing, but run throughs and having a WHM healer outside of the party happened WAY back at NA release.