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

[Seig345]

People talk about how the game forced you to take your time, so 'everyone' did. The thing is, XI's 'everyone' isn't nearly as high of a number as XIV ARR's, at any point in time. The game forced you to join a party to make any sort of exp progress. It was such a slow grind that people wanted to minimize the time as much as possible by requiring everyone be completely up to snuff at all times on gear, level, subjob, etc. My favorite job was Whm, but that meant I had to also play Blm whether I liked it or not.

Well, at least spells were automatically unlocked for free as I leveled up right? Oh, wait, had to spend a ton of gil on most of them, once I actually FOUND them, and on others I had to go on some epic quest that required a group of people who could be bothered to tag along AND happened to have time tables that matched up with mine. Not just for Whm, but I had to do the same for Blm despite not even wanting to PLAY blm. Joining a linkshell was fine and dandy but even then you had to hope you could find one with time tables that matched up with yours to get anything done, and even then odds are you were having to wait until a specific day to attempt anything other than the level grind.

I'm fine with 'earning' stuff in a game, and having to play with others to progress, but the game didn't make that easy if the community felt it was necessary to allow for absolutely 0 slack (in a GAME). The game forced you to take your time, but nobody seemed to want to. In the end, 'everyone did' because everyone else who didn't/couldn't, weren't playing the game.

I forgot to mention that in FFXIV, you still see this, but it doesn't hit until endgame. Yoshi-P said 'the game doesn't start until lvl 50', and he was right, once you hit 50, that's when you're at the mercy of people willing to come down from their high mountaintop to help the plebes get anything done.

How is that any different than ARR? If you don't want to be a gimp MNK, you have to level lancer. If you don't want to be a gimp WHM, you have to level for Swift Cast. Etc etc. Do you have to? No, but good luck getting into Coil groups with a gimped character.

Yeah I see none of this in ffxiv currently.

My point wasn't that FFXIV is any better, my point is that FFXI certainly wasn't. We have a larger group of people playing because the leveling treadmill's been made solo-friendly. I'd say that and the DF are improvements, but by no means was I trying to say that the game isn't suffering from the same issues at end-game.