I might get hate or banned but hey w/e

[Lan_Mantear]

I also think people remember it with a rose tint.
One of the big drawbacks of XI was that it took you hours to do ANYTHING progressive. You were so dependant on the community.
Nothing is perfect. I remember some amazing TP burn parties, but I also remember hunting/fighting the claim bots for that 8 legged bastard for my Husbands Joyeuse.
My favourite was soloing the SMN fights. These fights seemed to make everyone heart beat increase when soloed XD

LOL, my wife and I camped Charybdis 1 week straight to get that damnable sword! I also remember camping Shikigami Weapon for days to get Yingyang robe. Running around Ro'maeve casting spells to make an invisible NM appear in the middle of a high level zone where mobs aggroed magic was an experience!

[Lambdafish]

Challenge means something completely different between the two games though.

FFXI's challenge was primarily in how inconvenient things were, rather than the actual battle content being difficult. That's not to say that all the fights were completely devoid of difficulty, but you could reasonably expect to get through even the toughest mission battles in less than a dozen attempts. The vast, vast majority of them wouldn't take more than two or three attempts.

In FFXIV, it's not unusual to put in over a dozen attempts on a given fight in a single sitting, and not be at all surprised if you don't advance your group's overall progress by even a single phase.

When you compare the hardest content of both games, XIV wins in my opinion. The raid content is tuned to the max, but is contained within a small bubble concealed away from the sunshine and rainbows of the rest of the game, that is the difference. I don't want them to make the sunshine and rainbows disappear, I want the hardcore bubble to be bigger, with some midcore content scattered about.

I also think that XI's difficult is bad design though, so that might skew my view.

[Keramory]

This game is not FFXI-2, though it very much used to be. We got FFXI-2, it was called FFXIV 1.0. It didn't work, so they tried something different.

Uhh... No it wasn't. Was I the only person who played 1.0 anymore? The reason Ffxiv failed was because it was no more ffxi then this game was, and it was terrible. In fact what immediately murdered the game was the comparison to ffxi and how almost nothing was similar.

[Critical-Limit]

FFXI made me feel extremely rewarded for anything I did, because the value of nearly any item was always high and I didn't have to worry about wasting days or weeks to get a NM drop. Or something else, because you didn't have to worry about future content destroying that piece of gear.

[Krazymagic]

Played FFXI for 4 years, in the early 2000's, just after it was released in North America. Ive played lots of MMO's since then, but ffxi is still the most rewarding MMO I ever played. The MMO landscape took a huge shift with the release of WoW and its huge success. You couldnt design a game like FFXI now and have it do well.

[Tolmos]

Nostalgia is an amazingly powerful phenomenon

[AlphaFox]

I actually enjoyed 11 for the difficulty, from the moment you walked out the door it felt like you should have a person with you and thus my brother decided to join as well. Granted we played for a few months but I think the best we had to show for it was a level 30 and a level 10 or so of the class we wanted to really play. Granted this was sometime back, don't even remember. One the upside I guess, is suppose to be coming to Mobile so maybe? Then I notice Nexon is having a hand in it.

[SendohJin]

Making a thread like this is how you make people hate on FFXI.

Have you ever seen someone goes on FFXI forum and make a thread about how XIV is better than XI? If someone does that, they'll be called a troll, or a rude person.

Because it's incredibly asinine to pick on older things for being old. FFV is so ugly they should've made it look like FFXV.

[Lexia]

It always amazes me how people love and praise XI for it's challenges and hardships, and then we have XIV where nobody wants to be bothered with a grind at all; so everything gets dumbed down.

That cause for most the population of XIV, it more general MMO players then XI players.

[Dement]

I do miss FFXI and overall I liked the 10 years I spent there more than the 3 I have spent in FFXIV. Having a challenging overworld, the need to build community relations, and the huge variety of content were all nothing short of amazing. Couple that with the feeling of accomplishment when you did manage to get high end gear that would serve you for years to come and it was beyond words.

That being said FFXI was part of my life because it worked better for that stage of my life. I was in college, working part time, staying up late with no real responsibilities that I had to keep up with. I could devote 40+ hours a week to attending Dynamis, sky, sea, Limbus (Is that what it was called), Salvage, NMs, leveling, crafting and a myriad of other activities because I had that kind of time. Now-days my gaming time is much more constrained between family and work and I can't stay up until 4:30 in the morning on a Tuesday camping an NM. I need to be able to get in for a few hours, make some progress and get back out again. FFXIV is the MMO that I need to fit the stage of my life right now.

Ultimately, it seems to me that FFXIV has evolved from FFXI to serve its customer base from 14 years ago. It is the natural progression of life that your free time becomes more constricted the older you get and FFXIV now meets those requirements so I'm thankful for it.