ARR or Heavensward Classic

[Chelsei]

UP ! UP ! UP !

[KernCadfan]

Considering how much I LOVED ARR, i'll take an ARR classic server please... actually, I'd take HW too, because I also loved that era of gameplay... I loved the class structure of ARR, and I would very much like to return to it every now and then.

[TBerry]

Whatever won Heavensward that award, it likely wasn't Caster Bard.

[ArchlordPie]

another thing youre missing is wows years of homebrew private servers , Even 11 has private servers to the 75 days.

14 doesnt, not 1.0, not ARR. There isnt enough of a draw.

I'm thinking back to DSR's launch and subsequent world first race, and all the accusations of "x team cheated" or "x team practiced on a private server" flying around, only for YoshiP to make a blog post stating something along the lines of "the game won't run unless the client interacts with a bunch of proprietary code located on servers between them and the actual game server, and nobody knows what that code is except for some random engineers at SE, so what you're accusing the world first race winners of is actually impossible".

Assuming that's accurate and I'm not misremembering things, that's probably a bigger reason why there aren't already ARR or HW private servers floating around than simply "nobody wants one."

And the code for 1.0 apparently got yeeted into the stratosphere. Sure, they can attempt to rebuild it based on videos and such the way WoW Classic got off the ground (seriously, there was one Youtuber from back in the day who used to speedrun leveling and document it, and his footage was the primary source Blizzard used to figure out how things actually worked back then when initially putting 2019 Classic together), but I somehow suspect there isn't anywhere near enough external documentation of FF14 1.0 for that to be viable.

[Jeeqbit]

what you're accusing the world first race winners of is actually impossible

What he meant is they can't know the mechanics in advance because they are revealed by the server itself over the network as the fight progresses.

Would be pointless when the easiest way to do it is to practice the normal mode (use the arena to practice positioning after the fight ends). Often you can predict how the savage version will differ from the normal one to an extent - for example, automatically placed objects get placed by players instead, casts are often faster and untelegraphed, attacks do more damage, tank busters are swaps, stacks often become healer stacks, any missing patterns are often there. Not killing the boss too fast sometimes reveals savage mechanics at the tail end of the fight, because that's when it starts "combining mechanics" more and ramps up the intensity. A good example I remember is E3.

Assuming that's accurate and I'm not misremembering things, that's probably a bigger reason why there aren't already ARR or HW private servers floating around than simply "nobody wants one."

Realistically, everyone uses repositories that have commit histories allowing them to revert to a previous version of the code easily. And the fights themselves are almost unchanged since release beside the stat squish or the nerfs we got in HW. I'm sure they could do it, but it wouldn't be worth it due to the QoL we'd lose; they should just make the current game what people want to play.

[Chelsei]

UP ! UP ! UP !

Classic server pretty please, Square Enix !

[XtremePrime]

I'm a Shadowbringers baby so my opinion doesn't matter, but the game got a toooon of QoL improvements since ARR/HW times from what I saw!

[Hallarem]

Oh yeah, because doing a couple of threat combos and then switching off of tank stance for the rest of the fight, wholly ignoring said threat combo after was super engaging. This mechanic that was meaningless to competent players but a massive stumbling block for the bad ones was definitely a load-bearing mechanic.

Oh wait, no. The removal of threat as a relevant mechanic is probably the single greatest qol feature added to this game outside of the glam dresser. What was previously the number one source of vote kicks and abandons vanished overnight. Not only were tanks holding threat consistently, I also never had to deal with the middling nervous tank who sandbags their dps 25% or however much it was for the whole dungeon by never leaving tank stance.

The moment Pictomancer could rob aggro with their crazy damage, was the single most engaging thing in dungeons I've experienced as a tank. The dungeons are a snoozefest on a tank, I have can tank 10 000 vuln stacks, solo bosses and aggro as a mechanic is gone. There is 0 need to even CC mobs. You are basically running through a slideshow of sightseeing. All the bosses are just dodgeville, why bother positioning them when they teleport to the middle anyway, most of them don't even do anything that would endanger the group if I tanked it in the middle of the group, my positioning of them does NOT matter, the tank does not guide the group nor guide the flow as they do in EVERY SINGLE OTHER MMO probably. Over half of them are just wallbosses that don't move AT ALL.
If you're a lazy sightseer, Yeah? Probably great for you. If you actually want engaging content and job identity, probably not so good for the game.

[BigCheez]

While I would love to play in the ARR/Hw/Sb sandbox again, the "Classic" MMO formula isn't particularly worthwhile IMO. Who wants to play an inherently transient MMO that's comprised exclusively of ancient solved content and destined to either die in a few months when the novelty wears off and people stop playing, erase your progress through server resets, or go through the same gradual decline as the main game?

OSRS is the only game that this will ever work for due to its sprawling horizontal progression and vanilla+ design. I could also see it working for FFXI but I don't think SE will invest in that idea.

[Miradelle]

I'm not really sure splitting the playerbase further between different iterations of the game is a good idea. Maybe it'd drive more traffic to the game, but idk, seems like all the people who talk about HW just have rose-tinted glasses on.

Maybe just fix the current game instead?