Random Passing Thought...

[Quixotica]

Oh god, I do remember that. Really, I didn't think much of it then, but thinking back, it's surprising to see people actually did this and waited. But certainly can agree, I do miss all the difficult things the game offered. Perhaps not even just that, more along the lines of how it would immerse you into the world.

Mages doing the casual healing and raises.. People seldom do it here, the latter for obvious reasons because there's no penalty. The community in XI was generous in that aspect because no one wanted to receive that EXP Penalty for dying. </3

I agree I miss the immersive nature of the world as well. It can be hard to pinpoint exactly what made it feel that way though, was just a little bit of everything. Monsters that only spawned during certain weather. The day of the week affecting how strong your magic was, or how weak/strong monster skills were. the general difficulty of just getting places as a low level.. knowing everyone had worked to overcome those challenges. I'm sure a lot of my feelings for XI are from nostalgia, but there's good reasons for it. Even just little unexpected things, like visiting Starfall Hillock at the right time of day to see the twinkling star lights come up around it, or the first time you see Light Weather on Qufim. I've got a couple hundred hours in XIV but I can't think of any such things in this world, possibly because you just teleport hop everywhere.

I know what you mean from War Stories though. [B]You can never forget the times trying to outrun a Rabbit you thought you could take on, to the next zone across something like... La Thiene Plateau.

Our LS had a saying: It doesn't matter how strong you get, somewhere there's a Rarab that will kill you and your entire party.

Also being from Windy, it was always amusing to see random newbies come stumbling into the city only to die of Crawler poison in the middle of the plaza.

For all the archaic difficult things XI had. It had built a awesome community of players overcoming these hardships together.

People laugh when they hear about stuff like difficult open world content. It's just one of those things that while inconvenient it was indisposable to the game.

Yeah, everyone that played knew how hard it was to accomplish just about anything even just leveling. Combine that with the fact the game encouraged co-operation (excluding NM's >.>) and the sheer difficulty just helped forge the community together. It's the reason I prefer co-operative focused MMO's to this day over ones that try to pointlessly encourage player conflict.