Welcome this is that post you probably didn’t expect to see. I just wanted to mention that I miss FFXI. I give a lot of time thinking about how much I miss the days of yesteryear and how much I want to go back. I know it’s an empty world (for me) and the people aren’t there. I don’t know that I could go back mainly for that reason.
I realized today that FFXI is genuinely flawed. I have to throw in the disclaimer that I haven’t seriously played FFXI in several years. I would say the last year I played it seriously was around 2009. Since then I have tried out private servers and the like and I may have run one at one point.
I was watching Mr Happy stream on twitch quite a while back and he mentioned how flawed ffxi was and how he didn’t even want to discuss it. I was a bit curious about the reasoning I mean I love my memories of ffxi. I know there’s a lot of grinding in the game. I think some of it I accepted and enjoyed maybe even and some of it I hated. I kind of didn’t understand what he was getting at though. I was thinking about the bugs and well you know some of them surely have been addressed (others are “working properly”). A few months later it dawned on me that most people playing the game in order to properly gear up for end game had a lot of hoops to jump through–we’re talking HNM (Highly Notorious Monsters) very rare monsters with days in between spawns and some spawn once a month. Sky is also draining but more reliably done I think when they switched many of them to forced spawn.
But I was thinking like Absolute Virtue and other monsters like some you would spend many hours fighting–like one fight went on for a good 36 hours and so the linkshell had to take shifts to complete the fight.
Waiting several hours for your monster to pop only to have some random person claim it before you. Finally getting claim and beating it only to have the item you were after not drop. Having someone else get the item you were after when you were expecting to get it.
There were a lot of stories of people who would cast lots on an item they were supposed to pass in these groups that set rules and there honestly wasn’t a whole lot that could be done as far as repercussions go–they can get the item.
Corruption in the groups using money gained by the whole inappropriately.
There were just too many ways that the software didn’t support its community.
My path was a bit happier it involved Dynamis which was a large scale event where 64 people could enter. You would be there for 60 minutes and there were time extensions granted by killing certain enemies. The max time granted is 210 minutes. After that you would not be eligible to re-enter for 72 hrs based on your initial entry time.
This was collaborated on a mutual forum for JP and NA players and an online calendar was kept. Every once in a while someone unauthorized would go in. Unfortunately nothing could be done and no one else would be able to enter their instance of dynamis. I’m sure people called a GM but there’s really nothing a GM can do as far as I’m aware.