So just curious but how come there's no ff14 private servers?

[VeyaAkemi]

Search "Project Meteor", it's private server of FFXIV 1.0, they certainly exist, it's a matter of knowing where to look.

[dspguy]

The reason is because other games did something major to make their players want to go back to a previous version of the game.

Spot on.

FFXI has a few private servers. At the time, they were limited to the first expansion (which for NA players was the original release). Over time, they worked through the level 75-capped expansions. I think they stopped there. It was what some players would have called the golden era of FFXI. One benefit is they bumped up experience gain, added ways to solo effectively (in relation to a game made in the early 2000s), added some teleports and removed the countless hours of grinding for gil.

However, I think they suffered from too small a population. For a game that required you to have 6 people to run certain boss battles, it could be difficult to get people together to do anything.

[Jeeqbit]

ARR to current version is just inferior version of the same game.

That's exactly why. It's another way to put it than the way I did. You would just go back to less quality of life.

No flying in ARR, no cone targeting, buffs and abilities don't reset when you die, you can't teleport into a boss battle if you get locked out, no cross-world PF, no world visit, lots of useless abilities your class doesn't need, needing to level other classes for essential abilities your role needs, useless stats like elemental defenses and Parry which are used on many tank mits, annoying stats like Accuracy, much slower ground mount speed, less class/jobs available, less content.

The benefits of going back would be slim to none. The only content we have even lost access to that I can think of right now is old Diadem, old Toto-Rak, Cape Westwind, Steps of Faith, old Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium, a few pvp arenas, a GATE and a few fights were redone such as Keeper of the Lake, Sohr Khai and Atherochemical Research Facility. Does anyone really care about these changes enough to want to go back? Doubtful. Most of them had problems that players could see needed addressing and that's why they were changed or replaced.

[Oizen]

I have a hunch that SE would be significantly more ruthless to a FFXIV private server than any other company.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

You say you don't want to know the technical know-how's and whatnot, but that's a very large part of the issue itself, it doesn't matter how much actual interest there is if trying to achieve what they want to achieve with the private server is technically infeasible. There are a small number of private servers out there, but they are privately owned by one or a small number of individuals entirely for the purposes of datamining aesthetic stuff in-game before the latest patch goes live, as said servers have zero combat / enemy AI functionality.

The biggest issue with trying to make a private server akin to WoW or other games is the fact that unlike plenty of other games where boss scripts are saved with the client thus massively expediting the process, FF14 entirely saves its enemy AI scripts server side (as well as most NPC scripts). Meaning to create a private server for FF14 that effectively isn't just 'walk around and enjoy the scenery', you'd effectively have to re-program the entire game, every encounter, every NPC, every mob by hand; a monumental task for what is ultimately a small payoff with insanely high risk.

Because lets be realistic, as much as people love to chalk up Heavensward / Stormblood, those expansions are lacking so much QoL the game experiences nowadays that very few would actually want to go back and play it in any long-term capacity, just for a short bit to go re-live combat nostalgia, so any private server would have to do all that work for ARR + two expansions for the majority to even have the slightest interest, because ARR by itself isn't gonna be turning any heads on its own. But then what is even the point of all the work when a single cease & desist letter from Square would render months, if not years of hard work manually reconstructing the game nullified in an instant?

As for your example of a private server of RP - why would you bother making a private server that would be played by such a minuscule amount of the playerbase for RP when the live game already has many RP-thriving worlds filled with thousands, if not tens of thousands of potential RP partners?

[R041]

That's exactly why. It's another way to put it than the way I did. You would just go back to less quality of life.

No flying in ARR, no cone targeting, buffs and abilities don't reset when you die, you can't teleport into a boss battle if you get locked out, no cross-world PF, no world visit, lots of useless abilities your class doesn't need, needing to level other classes for essential abilities your role needs, useless stats like elemental defenses and Parry which are used on many tank mits, annoying stats like Accuracy, much slower ground mount speed, less class/jobs available, less content.

Yeah, but if you could make a private server with quicker snapshots / tickrate.. Mmmmmm

The idea behind private servers is that you can manage your own rules, events, systems, exp rates, and it's free. It's not just about going back to an old version of a game.

The reality is - There's no reason to even make a Private Server for most MMOs these days when there's a lot to choose from, and we have a ton of tools to just make our own game if we really weren't happy with something in particular (If you're skilled enough to do so). The private servers we typically see are from older games with simple mechanics or games that have been taken offline completely and still have a large enough dedicated fanbase. They take a lot of time and effort to make. We missed the curve of free shard reign by about 10 years, so the pool of engineers that would even attempt it over spending their time on something more productive is pretty low already.

I prefer the ability system and active open world of ARR, but the server would need to actually be relatively complete for me to want to even play. It's not because FFXIV:ARR is the best MMO ever made, it's because there's typically better things to do with our time, XIV is already free for like 100 hours, and SE has a beast legal team that takes everything down.

It really has nothing to do with XIV being the best version of itself, when 1.0 is out there. lol

The biggest issue with trying to make a private server akin to WoW or other games is the fact that unlike plenty of other games where boss scripts are saved with the client thus massively expediting the process, FF14 entirely saves its enemy AI scripts server side (as well as most NPC scripts). Meaning to create a private server for FF14 that effectively isn't just 'walk around and enjoy the scenery', you'd effectively have to re-program the entire game, every encounter, every NPC, every mob by hand; a monumental task for what is ultimately a small payoff with insanely high risk.

Yeah the server would literally have to be devoid of all Trials/Raids, and just an Open World version of XIV. I can't imagine someone ever wanting to rewrite all of those over just making their own game. It'd be lunacy.

[CaptainLagbeard]

I think it's a case of too much of the data for the game world is stored server side.

So unless a hacker somehow manages to get access to the devs machines and dumps literally everything somewhere on the internet, you'd have to recreate every NPC (including enemies) and their AI, every quest, interactable object and what not by hand from scratch.


For the same work you would have to through to recreate FF 14 on a private server, you could just as well make a completely new game using some bought pre-made assets from whatever store. And without having to deal with Square slamming you with lawsuits.

[R041]

I think it's a case of too much of the data for the game world is stored server side.

So unless a hacker somehow manages to get access to the devs machines and dumps literally everything somewhere on the internet, you'd have to recreate every NPC (including enemies) and their AI, every quest, interactable object and what not by hand from scratch.

Yeah, sometimes what happens is when an MMO is taken offline, some disgruntled dev ends up leaking a lot of it. Otherwise the project needs to be so old, and the engineers need to be so dedicated, that they manage to rewrite a large portion of it from scratch. Basically SWG / WoW style. But those projects also started during the Private Shard reign around 2005-2010, it wasn't even that WoW was considered bad at that time, there was just a massive market for free shards. People forget that a lot of free shard projects have been running for 10-20 years by now.

So let's come back to this question in 5-10 years. lol

[Atelier-Bagur]

Probably because FFXIV isnt as popular to create dedicated private servers based on expansions like in WoW where people make servers with custom content such as Ascension or Turtle WoW.


The only one Im familiar with is somebody making a 1.0 private server but its only for experimental purposes and not for general use for the community

[Larirawiel]

Private servers are made for very specific reasons. As long as SQEX does not offer that reasons then it is very unlikely, that someone will start a serious FF14 p-server project.



Cheers