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.