FFXI Players

[Saidosha]

Played most since NA launch until about deep into VW era shortly before Adoulin's launch. There was some good, there was some bad, but I know I tend to groan whenever I see the 75 cap purists try to strongarm their opinion on why the game was better, oftentimes during the CoP era. No thanks. If I really had to peg XI's biggest problem overall, it would have been that they had no concept of really rewarding players equally. Needed a specific drop from a niche NM? Best hope you have enough other people who want it, and if they got it first, pray they suddenly didn't start being "busy" or just ignoring you for future attempts when you still needed your turn. I generally say the fact you had to have player-run point systems and the like for most of the game's pre-Abyssea life just affirmed how terrible the reward scheme was. Of course, life felt pretty good during Abyssea, itself. Most NMs were popped, and rather easily. They didn't need alliances, or hell, even full groups if you were good. Atma offered some interesting ways to tweak jobs that you simply couldn't through existing gear. It might not have pandered to the super ultra elitist endgame raider sort, but I've never been of the mentality that any game shouldn't do that by virtue of numbers of return on investment from the devs. Making the game harder, if that's what you sought, had more of a freedom in trying with smaller parties or different job combinations instead of being so cut and dry with DPS checks or very niche formations. Unfortunately, some still don't like that, even years later.

Anyway, I largely wrapped up because the Voidwatch era was a poor attempt to try and get back to those "good old days" with alliance content, complete with atrocious drop rates and niche encounters. Just didn't have it in me to gather 17 others for repeated pops, hoping none left partway through or that it didn't turn into a disaster on the harder ones if PUGing. It wasn't about playing with friends anymore at that point. It was just filling slots with bodies. I've played off and on since then, usually during the free times, and have managed to complete Adoulin and about all one can do without jumping into the new endgame with Escha stuff. Far as I can discern, it's pretty much still the same problems repeating, too, just not as bad as VW era. Only now they went more full tilt on things like gear augment RNG. A third iteration of Dynamis also gets a hearty laugh from me, because that crap was terrible in its prime.


But yeah, I'm not sure why people are crapping on XIV for dailies and stuff when XI had them with event lockouts/JP midnights/gameday changes, too. And things like that also contributed to it being so hard for people to find help on things since attempts needed to be preserved for statics/linkshells. To me, XI is still a lot of wasted potential from SE, but at the same time, I'll generally say it's better now than it ever was. Just need to put some legwork in to modernize a few things like cross-server interactions/matchmaking and it'd generally be a game I could tell people to play through all the story content then see how you feel from there. At the very least, that could get a couple months out of a fresh player that plays a good bit. Any iteration of prestige weapon grinds they've come up with are still butt, though.

[Kemiko]

I was one of the idiots who bought the game in 2002 completely ignorant of the fact that it was a PC only game. Like many others, I got a PC capable of running the thing. ... Also eventually upgraded to DSL as Dial-up was uh... basically DSL today. I've never been on any server other than Siren that I remember. Started as a Male Hume from Bastok. Went Red Mage and never looked back. Always found the spell scroll acquisition novelty but also showed how dedicated someone was to their class. The server restrictions then, time of travel, even ships and airships, all collected early to create an interesting community. If you were an A-hole you carried that rep among the server and essentially shot yourself in the foot regardless of your skill gear or race. Solo was simply impossible back then so it really mattered.

RDM had the fun En spells, was a debuff master and could back up heal or blast but struggled for parties. Until they got refresh. That alone made you a party magnet. The milestones in XI stand out more to me than XIV. Maybe because I was younger, maybe it's because it was my first MMO (only did MUDs before then) or maybe it's because it took effort and the friends I made and kept during those milestones added to it. Unlocking the Subjob system was a huge moment for me. Heck just getting through Valkurn was an experience. Unlocking later jobs was interesting and satisfying, or particularly frustrating (DNC and SMN guhhh).

Took a break and returned after losing my PC to flooding, thus did the cheaper PS2 option now that it existed. This time I was a female Hume, but also from Bastok (it's what I knew). Sync (eureka could benefit from this) didn't exist, so I made a handful of new friends while keeping in contact with my old ones.

Stopped playing a few years later when... we'll say life happened. It wasn't a single thing but it stretched out long enough that Xbox360 was available by the time I got back into it. On my 360. No one I knew were still active. So I started over fresh. Mithra this time. Windurst. Has a blast coming back, even with its solo options completely changing the community.

I've been on and off it for years. I still love the game. Played it extensively last year and thr year before. For better or worse, it's not the same game I stumbled into back in '02. I love the options, definitely the inventory space how quickly things go nowadays. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss the old community. I've never encountered anything like it anywhere else.

Now, I love FFXIV but it's a different game by far and 1.2 was around when my availability was spotty so I mostly remember 1.0. ARR was definitely safe for them and it worked, but it's such a different flavor from XI I don't think it's fair to compare the two. It's never felt like they have the same goals.

[Spiriel_Basanda]

Been subbed to it since a couple months after NA release to this day. Played it last night, in fact. Oh, the stories I could tell about the time I spent in FFXI. Like a few others in this thread, FFXI was my first dive into an MMO. I'll never forget all the friends from my HNM and Sky LS back when I played on Asura, and all of the people I currently play with on Quetzalcoatl. I, too, am guilty of running circles around a mob thinking I dodged hits. Hey, that rabbit MISSED when I moved! Heh, the way I met my first friend in FFXI was quite silly, and he still plays XI, along with a few others from the ole' Illuminaire shell that we made.

So the way I made my first friend was, like in any normal offline RPG I'd played, I'd run around and talk to every NPC that was just hanging out in town to see what they had to say. One of the Galka hanging out in the tavern inside of the Metalworks gave me this quest to go make Galkan Sausage by cooking Giant Sheep Meat on a campfire out in South Gustaberg. I got the Giant Sheep Meat easily enough, finding one of the campfires, not so much. I eventually found a campfire surrounded by a trio of Quadav. After killing those, I tried to cook the meat on the fire. Didn't work. Little did I know at the time, there was a very specific camp fire I was supposed to cook the meat on, and that was not the right campfire. Trying to figure out how to do it, I asked the first person who ran by how to do it. That first person was Rayearth. Good ole Ray was as green as I was and didn't know the answer either, of course, but hah! It led to some good conversation and Ray earned the coveted position of first on the friend list. I still talk to him. Yes, I did figure out how to cook Galkan Sausage eventually. Quest completed! That same quest is, coincidentally, how I got my first linkshell. Being brand new I was poor as dirt, but I was also a WHM and needed to buy my spells. So when I learned that the Galkan Sausage quest was repeatable, I just kept on cooking those things and handing them over for the grand sum of 300 gil. One night I was cooking up some sausage and this one other dude shows up. We started talking cause we were waiting for the sausages to cook. That day I became part of the AsuranBBQGuild LS and it acted as the gateway towards better things for me back in the hey day that was FFXI. We merged with another linkshell and became the Illuminati, which ended as Illuminaire, and that was my home for the rest of my stay on Asura.

Just one more memory before I stop, don't want to make this a massive blog post of "my time in FFXI", and it would become one if I just kept going, heh. I completed CoP twice on two different characters before they nerfed the missions and made them easy to do. The first time was on my Asura character, where I played as WHM. My group finally made it to One to be Feared, and OH MAN was that a tough one. The Mammet/Ultima/Omega combo fight was a grueling gauntlet of bosses. Between the sheer amount of AoE output and status ailments that would wreck our NIN tank, when it was finally over the rest of the group was singing my praises. "Best WHM ever!" "We couldn't have done it with anyone else!" and so on and so forth. One of the more challenging fights I'd done at that point. My second group though, I did as PLD on Quetzalcoatl with a group that had never done it before. That group was great. I'll never forget that Mammet fight. It was usually done by having a SMN use Carbuncle to kite one of the Mammets around to lower the damage done to the tank while the rest of the party worked on killing the other two. My plan, however, was FAR more reckless. I honestly didn't know if it would work, but if it DID, it would be so much easier then trying to kite, especially with our group comp that did not have a SMN. My plan was to power tank all 3 mammets at once using Invincible, have the SAM solo a SC, and have the BLMs MB off of it to kill the first one off fast. It mostly worked, lol. We did win, and no one died, but all my mages were running out of MP and I had used all my consumables. It was glorious!

XI had this strange mechanic that made it so that if you only aggroed a mob and didn't hit it or anything, no amount of healing would pull aggro off of you. So relying on that I focused everyone on whatever Mammet I was targeting so I didn't have to try to keep hate on all 3 at once, which would've been impossible to do with how much cure bombing I was going to need once Invincible dropped. That's how power tanking worked, anyways.

That's enough of memory lane, I suppose. Point is, I've enjoyed all of my time in FFXI as well as FFXIV, and have made some truly lasting friends and memories of my time there. Even post level 99 and in the days of ilevel. Not all of my old friends are still around and that's a shame, but some are, and I have since made new friends that I enjoy hanging out with as well.

[Gemina]

I played XI from when it launched in NA back in 2004 to about 2009. I tried to come back to it during Wings of the Goddess, but found myself more nostalgic than reasonable looking for a gaming experience that was no longer to be had and hung it up for good. I didn't start playing XIV until early 2016. I think that was between patches 3.1 and 3.2. I know there was a lot of talk about Sephirot EX back then, and I kept thinking, "Do they mean Sephiroth? Is he really in this game?!"

When I left FFXI, there was a lot of talk about FFXIV, and I believe the 1.0 version was available as I remember on the FFXI forums people were talking about that it was unplayable and would just stick with FFXI. I opted to not play 1.0 and regret it to this day. Sure it was a mess, but I could've been part of something I consider to be historical in the gaming world when Yoshi dropped a moon on Eorzea.

[Saidosha]

Most looked at Abyssea as XI's last hurrah since they presumed SE wanted people to jump from it to XIV. Unfortunately, 1.0 happened, so that plan didn't really work out if it was truly the intent. It's also why I pretty much call Voidwatch garbage because it wound up the desperation holdover content until Adoulin. For the more casual player, there was pretty much nothing new between that and Shinryu, and even Adoulin's launch could be considered questionable with how it handled Delve and early ilvls. Was a good time to be a MNK, though, I guess. Was also around the point the game devolved into RMEA or GTFO for PUG content.

[Stanelis]

I found the first video I ever put on youtube, relevant to the topic at hand x)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdUFEdwMsdI

[Jkap_Goat]

snip

Please do continue,I do.. Really do loves these stories from ffxi players, they are so interesting and fascinating. Bonding, meeting new friends and forging memories by just random encounters or missions or spawning a NM...


I love it all and I wish FFXIV world was really dangerous sometimes as FFXI but I know it probably would never happen. I love FFXIV but I wish the world wasn't so easy

[Spiriel_Basanda]

Please do continue,I do.. Really do loves these stories from ffxi players, they are so interesting and fascinating. Bonding, meeting new friends and forging memories by just random encounters or missions or spawning a NM...

If that's what you want, I don't mind, heh. Reliving all of the greatest moments I had from XI even for just a little bit pleases me greatly.

I think the thing that really locked me into FFXI was what happened not long after I hit level 75 WHM, my first job to hit the level cap. Honestly I suspect that if you seriously read XI player stories you've probably already heard of this, but this is my take on it. I made it through almost all of the Rise of the Zilart mission content and all that was left was everything that happened in Sky. I was at the part where I needed to fight the five Ark Angels. You could either fight each one individually in a group of six, or you could fight all five of the Ark Angels at once in a group of eighteen. The latter was a fight called Divine Might. The VERY first piece of endgame content I did was Divine Might. I can't express through words how intimidating it was to step into a group of eighteen players to do what was one of the hardest fights in the game at the time, as a rather fresh level 75 healer. My gear wasn't good, but they took me anyways. That's what linkshells do, heh. To be very clear about how hard that fight was, at the time, almost every group's plan A for Divine Might was "Kill two of the Ark Angels and run to the back, wipe, reraise, rebuff and finish off the remaining Ark Angels after Weakness wore off." Yes, the actual plan involved dying. My group actually managed to complete Divine Might without having to wipe, it was kind of a miracle. It was exhilarating that I did good enough to get us through that, and at that moment I knew that I was in the right place and that was where I wanted to be. I suppose, thinking back on it, Divine Might played a fairly big role as to why I've played MMOs for so long. I still shiver when I listen to Fighters of the Crystal due to that experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsLkGEDwLLc

A less combat mission oriented memory, I was a Goldsmith in FFXI and I had become advanced enough to use anima in my synthesis to make items with enchantments on them. In particular, Reraise Earrings. Reraise Earrings/Hairpins were a heavily sought after item on the AH since everyone could use them, and being able to use Reraise on yourself without needing your healer to dump hundreds of MP on raising you was invaluable. The problem was, while I was advanced enough a Goldsmith to make the Reraise Earrings, I was not advanced enough of an Alchemist to make the anima I needed to make them. I had a couple stacks of each anima I needed so it wasn't an issue, until one day I notice that every earring I listed had sold, and there were none on the AH. Seeing the gil making opportunity in front of me, I sat down to make earrings, and to my surprise they sold faster then I could make them. I very quickly ran out of the anima needed to make them due to this. At that very moment my linkshell's Alchemist, Jeicen, logged in like some kind of Alchemiac Super Hero sensing that he was needed. I sent him materials to make anima, begged him to turn it into anima and thankfully he obliged. I made hundreds of thousands of gil that day, and I gave him some of it as thanks for refilling me on anima when I needed it most. Oh I miss Jeicen, he was a good guy.

One more for now. In the post-99 world of FFXI, I met a guy on Quetz who ran a linkshell with his wife while leveling out in the dunes. Joined his linkshell after we spent some time leveling together, named Demonic Wings. His name is Wingstriker, I'm still not sure if that was on purpose or not, heh. It wasn't a very big linkshell, so we low manned what we could. It amazes me that this is the case, but despite my Asura character having spent years doing endgame content, Wingstriker got my Quetz character killed thousands of times more then my Asura character. It was all in good fun though, so really, I just found it funny when I noticed the death tallies between the two characters. I knew a few people on Asura a lot like Wing, but nobody got me killed as much as he did. I logged in one time and got asked to come help kill the Iron Giant in Abyssea - Altepa. "How many people do you have there?" "Four. You'll be five." He really wanted to fight an Iron Giant with such a small group, heh. Iron Giants had this nasty habit of removing all of your armor and inflicting Encumberance at the same time, which stopped you from putting all your armor back on. We still won..........sometimes. The rest of the times we all went back to our home points, some of us naked. Good times, hah!

[Jkap_Goat]

That's a wonderful story. I'm sorry about your friend thought, Jeicen. He seemed like a person I would have love to meet.

I listened to the Fighters of the Crystal from let's play of Disiddia on the PSP and I loved it.

Your stories are really wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing. I know I will never relive those events since I started the game last year but man , I wished.

[DaiNah]

I played FFXI from PS2 release until just before the FFXIV ARR beta started. One of my earliest memories is riding the ship from Selbina to Mhaura and having the Sea Horror pop on us. Someone tried to kill it and it went on its usual rampage. There were about 20 to 25 of us on the ship and no one was a high enough level to do anything with it, except die. Which we did. It went through and killed everyone on board. I still remember having all our dead bodies dumped on the Mhaura dock in one big pile. I gotta find the screen cap I have of that.

Good times, good times.