How about getting a group, getting through an incredibly dangerous zone, getting to the boss door, and finding out 1 or 2 of your party were not far enough on the quest to do the fight?
I have struggled for years trying to decide if I love or hate the fact that FFXI gave players basically no direction in how to approach quests. On one hand, it's very "old school" and forces the player to read and listen closely for clues and indications - or you know as we all actually did just go to Allakhazam and look it up, but the premise was still there. In many ways, I much prefer this over games like WoW and even FFXIV that feel much more like Skinner boxes with the new objective clearly outlined on your screen. Outside of how other MMOs quests tend to keep more to "kill x number of y", this automatic updating, while convenient for progression, removes a lot of my investment in the game world. Your 2nd point is well known to me as a life-time BRD. For leveling at least you really needed a specific party composition back in the day. There were some compromises, like MAYBE we can make with NIN work with a WHM and no THF, or MAYBE a SMN and BLM can serve as full healers for the PLD, but really as soon as Refresh and Ballad are avail, it's required. I suppose in the same way WHM became required for tele and RR; wew talk about whoring yourself out - telewhoring is the only way I made gil. The point is this was a regrettable but understandable oversight on SE's part. It made BRD, RDM and later COR the antithesis of DRG in that I often used to go private because I would get so many random invites. Even after they introduced lvl sync far later in the games life, I would get random requests all the time just to help out due to the necessity of Refresh. But yep, PlayOnline was...well is still even, horrible. I remember Christmas morning 2002 trying to install the game for the first time and spending hours on the phone because their font is such that the letter I is identical to the number 1 and almost to the letter L as well, and as my ID had all 3, I couldn't log in to my PO ID. Ah, how many years of frustration with the nightmare that is PlayOnline lay before me began that day.
All I know is thank you all you crazy and dedicated Japanese players who trial-and-error'd solutions out to all of the game's various quests over these last 16 years. Because holeeee shit would I be completely lost without access to FFXIclopedia and BGWiki.
For me it was that the reward on quests were usually beyond lackluster. I understand the need for xp parties to be the focus but I didnt do most quests till I was nearly capped out.
I had exact opposite experience with Nin, I didn't care for a THF, what I really cared for Haste as Nin. There was times I debated skipping a Rdm 40-47 in favor for Whm just for haste. Especially if we have another form dispel such as bard's finale if we need it. Then again when I leveled Nin I had, Okote, Sniper rings +1, Peacock Charm and Jutjui Gi (and hauby +1 at 59+), I had moments where I just ripped hate from Paladin as I just didn't care. The only problem holding hate was against rangers 2002-mid 2005, before the rng nerf of doom. Dear god the Pol updates where you might as well go to sleep even when broadband connection like I did when I 2003(maybe 2004)+. Why does it take like 6 hours to download when have cable internet damit.
Biggest frustration: Lottery spawn NMs. They are the worst, and I still hate them even to this day. It is literally the opposite of gameplay, as it forces you to kill some placeholders, then just afk and wait. It forces you to afk and not leave because you never know if the NM will pop or not. Also, you never knew if someone else had killed the NM recently, and some respawn windows were like 12+ hours, so there were times where you were legit wasting your time because someone had just killed it a couple hours ago, and it had a 0% chance to spawn. Then, there were also times where the window should be ready, but the NM wouldn't pop for over an hour or two, and you just had to constantly keep afking and waiting around in the same zone, instead of ACTUALLY being able to play the game. They've made the pop windows on lottery spawns a little more forgiving these days.. but it's still a pain even so.
Definitely a lot of frustrations in old skoo ffxi but they are also a reason why there are so much fond memories of it. Ex leveling down. I wouldn't trade of it back honestly. They make the game what it is.
One thing that always bothered me was that the minimum level for Outpost Warps was always higher than the level they were useful (i.e. Dunes was level 25 iirc). They would have been so much more useful if they matched with the level that would be used to exp off of the mobs there.
This sucked for Summoner as well... tell it to do a blood pact only for the mob to move an inch and now the move was interrupted and it now had to go through the cool down lol. Luckily the merited blood pacts had range to them.
Honestly, all they needed to do was set it to respond the same way as if you weren't facing the mob. You only lost the TP if they/you moved out of range at the very moment it goes off. It was a pointless frustration, given the fact you wouldn't lose it otherwise.
Play Online is still a required gateway... seroiusly?! My god. The music for Play Online actually is super postiviely nostalgic for me. I remember listening to the music forever for the release of the game and each expansion. It was neat music that meant I was soon playing new FFXI content, which i was super hyped for!
Being a 2H melee LFP before the 2H Wpn update and the introduction of accuracy food (mainly sushi). It doesn’t get any more frustrating than that. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you skipped that era.
I knew what I was signing up for! I hope pantheon can bring back some of what early EQ & FF11 were. I left EQ for FF11 because I would visit the ff11 website daily just to reread the small bit of info about the world and races. I had played MUDs and DnD but I wanted the uniqueness of a FF game and was not disappointed. Now I just want a hard MMO with people talking and grouping. Think Pantheon will deliver that?
You can chalk up one person who likes PlayOnline. The music is very nostalgic, amd sometimes I'd just turn it on for the music. I also love the "locking" sound effect when it turned back off. It's like I'm locking the door behind me, that leads to another world. And I was always eager to return.^^ I'm not saying others don't dislike it. I've only met one other person who likes it, and now I live with them. There is always a reason for something being removed. At least in Japanese games. Removing PoL meant it was not going to be the hub for pc games that like... steam became. XD
Im glad I got to experience this game pre level cap increase, just for the memories. I like what they've done with it now and it has made it easier to just start fresh and go on a nostalgia trip~
I just saw this after posting something similar about quests. I tried for some time to quest without the wiki but more times than not it is impossible. The post I made was about one of those quests "I need two components to finish this recipe: A "lightforce" and a "darkforce". I think one is an egg and one is a bone" So you have to go to a specific area to kill a specific placeholder monster during the day to spawn it's counterpart during the night for a drop of a "cold bone", that is not even guaranteed drop. Cold bone = "darkforce" okay: bone from a skeleton and egg from a bird [probably], that was easy. But since you don't know the average level of the quest you have to kill every skeleton and bird in all areas you can kill them. And if you are underleveled for the quest? well , too bad we don't need a flashing exclamation point in every single quest NPC, point of interest or else, but just a little bit more direction.
My biggest gripe was... Version...Update...Timing. Seriously, every single update was a Tuesday...fine. But, why were they always set up so Europe basically couldn't play that day and that the US, unless you were able to get home around 3 to start the version download and install, had a 8-10 hour update after 5 PM? So..... Half of the world couldn't play at all, but the players in the Asian areas never had to worry about this? It was frustrating to no end to give up a night in Sky or Sea one Tuesday every 4-6 weeks because they would never change the version update time.
Oddly enough they do version updates now more frequently between 5-6am UK time? I like that but then again the updates are much smaller then they used to be.
omg half the time it would update on my day off.... so i couldnt even play lmao.... always weould update during the day too, never at night when i was asleep so i could play ion the morning... nope... made me uppdate all day an then have to go to bed... lmao hated it SOOOOOO much
1) Narrow minded people, for many years people refused to kill anything that gave less them cap XP per kill. I would try count less times to explain to people, lower xp, much faster is actually better. People would join the party, not see cap XP first kill, then try to break the party, convince people to move camps or just leave w/o notice. In the early days you had no hMP, so when your healers were out of MP from attempting to get a chain 5 on and IT++ after the kill, you were in for a 5min or so break while the MP slowly came back. 2) This goes waaaaay back, but limit breaks were a nightmare. Depending on the one needed, items took full groups to clear, and days if not weeks of grinding for drops. The drop rate was very low in the early days, and since most people(Americans or EU) were stuck at the cap, you didn't often have a 75 around to help you kill mobs easy, unless you found a bored Japaneses person, will to help some Americans/EU. 3) CoP was a freaking train wreck for years. Only the most skilled of skilled, with a loyal group of friends was going to finish CoP, most people gave up, till years later when it was fixed. (beside just being hard a f..., gear didnt scale, you had to freaking buy gear sets for each level cap of CoP) One done you had Sea access, but again, w/o a killer LS, you were doing anything in Sea. 4) Some of the quest stages took too freaking long to do. It was no easy to get a group of people together, which might take an hour or two to form, then you have a 30+min hike to get to the boss/event, in which you will probably spend another hour waiting for everyone to actually show up. All said and done, if you got the clear, you have spent 1/2 if not most of the day getting the clear, but the upside was it also felt very rewarding, to know you got it,(and never need to do it again). 5)Damage system, while many people probably didn't feel the full force of it leveling, endgame it was bad. The HNM's, Kings, Gods, whatever, where insanely hard to hit, when you were finally able to land a blow, because of the STR/Atk Vs Vit /Def. melee hit for close to no damage, and just pumped extra TP into the mob. Pretty much rendering every melee job you spent years playing and falling in love with totally useless.
At the height of my playing FFXI, back in 2009, I had FOUR mules in addition to my main just to keep up with inventory, stationed in all 3 starter zones and one I ran all the way out to Jeuno solo at level 3 or 4 just to have access to all the separate AHs (a necessity when leveling a craft). A crystal mule, a 1-37 gear mule, a 37-75 gear mule, and a crafting/item mule. I had to max out fame on ALL of them just so I could do the Moogle quests to increase their house to 80, spent hundreds of thousands of gil on the most efficient storage options I could afford for all of them, and I would still have to use the delivery box storage for some of them at times. Even when they started letting you store gear sets and event rewards\items, I was still so full at all times it was ridiculous and I was contemplating spinning up a 5th mule when my LS broke up and I finally quit the game. Inventory management in FFXI was always such a pain in the ass! We had a static exp party that would meet on schedule which was awesome, but it would still take us an hour of coordination and muling crap around before we'd even begin to start making it out to camp. Then you get to the zone and of course every viable camp is already occupied so repeat the whole process for another 30-45 minutes until you finally find an open camp at SOME level, play for 2 hours getting maybe a level or two, if that, and rinse repeat ad infinitum. It was so bad we would actually share out each other's passwords so the people that weren't working could login and get the others ready and ran out to camp ahead of time to reduce prep time but even with that you were still looking at all that time getting ready, geared up, replenishing your stock of consumables (I was the LS cook so I'd get texts on my phone at work "Hey bro I need a few stacks of Squid Sushi I sent you the mats it'll be Earthsday at 7 want as many +1 as possible plz"...like GODDAMMIT here I go crafting between pulls again WTF). FFXI was a cruel, cruel mistress. Just came back a couple months ago and it's so much faster and easier now, but I really do miss those bad old days sometimes LOL
I agree but disagree with the comments with POL. It was an amazing piece at the time, realistically it was supposed to be a community hub/game launcher similar to Steam, Origin, etc. complete with messaging direct to in-game players. It was also cross-platform, so PS2 players could communicate out of game with PC or xbox players, no one had a system like that. It was a huge forward thinking piece of tech. News & updates, emails, seeing all your friends online etc. all made it a super cool idea. As much as I hate the music it plays, I have to admit I do get a huge amount of nostalgia whenever I hear it. Where I definitely agree, it's slow resource intensive, and very out of date. This is probably why they ditched it and stopped using it, where I believe they wanted to add more online games into it. It must be pretty tied into XI since they have not removed it for a simple launcher, and using it today is a horrible experience.
#2: I can remember a time my static (pre Aht Urghan) consisted of PLD MNK MNK BRD RDM (yep, only 5 members) in the mid-late 50s. Crabs in Kuftal were only VT to us but the pulls were so continuous and support was so incredibly OP (and MNK DoT was absolutely monstrous) that we were out XPing the standard 6 member parties I was normally in with other classes. Support was straight up broken at the time, and I _loved_ it. That being said there _was_ a low level refresh option: cooking juice. For our low level static I was a THF. You couldn't stack juice, but you could stack the ingredients. I literally skilled cooking from around 10-40 on almost nothing but juice in parties. I would continuously cook and feed juice every time we had a break where I wasn't pulling and keep the mages refreshed continuously. It was a cheap way to skill cooking that while a bit less efficient than normal meant I wasn't grinding away on a secondary skill in boring solo sessions well outside of normal gameplay with friends. Also randoms that would join our party were pleasantly surprised by the faster low level pace we could keep.
After years of though since leaving FFXI in 2009, I realize the prestige from accomplishing things that were unreasonably difficult was the whole appeal of the game. The level of RnG and low drop rates, time constraints, luck necessary to achieve things ultimately made it matter. Now the game doesn't have that. Chains of Promathia was the peak.
Getting that Raja Ring or the mage variant was like a badge of honour. I left FFXI around the same time you did. I honestly would love to replay those years I put into the game, if the game was like it was back then, but it isn't.
As a RDM, I was totally fine with Refreshers being a necessary party component. Then again, even leveling other jobs through the 50s - 70s, I never found myself all that annoyed by the party comp being Tank, Healer, Support, DD, DD, DD. The main frustration was more in the proportion of viable Tank, Healer, and Support jobs to DD jobs. 90% of the party invites I received as SMN were so I could be a discount WHM. That was kinda frustrating. The number one frustration for me though was the lack of viable solo gameplay. I didn't have any friends who played XI and I had rotten luck with getting helpful linkshells, so I felt like I was locked out of everything I wanted to do, primarily missions and quests. CoP has such an amazing story, but to get to it, you'd have to spend weeks if not months (if it ever came up at all) shouting in Jeuno to find a full and viable group of strangers all on the same mission as you, only to get in and fail. And when you did get to the story parts, I always felt pressured to race through it because there were five other people waiting on me. The sense of accomplishment at finishing something was nice, but I'd rather just be able to enjoy the story, which is something I really do love about current FFXI.
My biggest gripe back in the older days before Home Point teleporting, was how difficult it was for people to get around if they didn't have the teleportation or warp spells. Who else DC'd in a dungeon and had to deathwarp home because you forgot the warp cudgel? The refresh thirst was so real and good support players were highly revered lol.
I know this is an old video and I'm late to the party, but playonline was kind of an experience in and of itself. It was a pain to get through when you just wanted to go into 11, but the launcher itself had a lot of charm. Literal dozens of exclusive music tracks, mail, customizing your profile and background, chat lobbies, all the extras, the devs posting journal logs as in game characters for more lore and yes even tetra master. I can think back on dozens of times where maintenance was going on and I'd hop in a chat lobby and just talk with people before inevitably someone wanted to play tetra master, and we'd all take turns dueling. That was the best time and I remember it as fondly as I do 11 itself. The launcher was a clunky mess, but it very much had its own unique charm and I loved it for that.
Limited lines for each macro preventing you from swapping all your gear at once. My white mage had almost a completely different set of gear for each category of spell/ability which meant either hitting multiple macros or getting a third party windower to enable gear swaps via an outside script.
As I’ve put on multiple posts on your fantastic channel numerous times, my biggest problem was the RMT’s BUT in terms of the game itself I have to agree with the questing. There was SO MUCH content in this game that I would bet to this day that not everything has been done because there was simply no way to figure out where to go or who to talk too. I remember the tombs where I would farm wild onions outside Windy had a bunch of quest stuff in there for various levels but you couldn’t do a level 15 quest alone at 15, it was maddening. I want to start again and level up just to go back and see the hundreds of hours of content and places I never did when I originally played, I bet it’s teeming with quests. Like to even get to the places to do some you had to be twenty+levels above and then the item probably wasn’t even worth it by then, crazy. They really dropped the ball on that in hopes ppl would “be more social” HAH have you played an MMO? It’s usually all screw you gettin mine and then slow walking, peacocking like a jagoff in Jueno...pfff.
Watching your vids on FFXI makes me want to make my own. XI is way too underappreciated of a game, especially when you consider that even some of the bad things about it are closer to what people want now... with some QoL changes to make it better. The skill ups, no matter how tedious it was, felt great to see that yellow text scroll up. Any skill ups felt great to see scroll up, especially with crafting.
The biggest frustration was having friends and members quit the game altogether. I always felt sad when at the end of the month it was a guy you knew for 8 years quit. I even had 2 tarutarus give me all their things and swore I wouldn't reveal the linkshell they quit because of a terminal illness. To think their last few days they decided to share it with us, every time i looked in my inventory seeing their signature crafted items made me cry knowing I'd never see them again.
I watched my [5] brothers play it since launch. I joined the game when Chains of Promethea was released. I shared an account with one because I was still in late middle school/early high school. Couldn't really play for long hours and would be a fill-in but mained THF, SAM, and NIN. The game was really tough but I remember those fond days where before logging on, we would have a discussion on the equipment we had, the missions we would do, battle strategies we would do/try and the areas we would level up. After high school, had to leave the game when it was right after Abyssea was released. I checked back when the expansion for Rune Fencer (?) Was released and saw that many people were able to reach level cap really fast. But I noticed that some of the new players didn't understand their roles properly or had timing down correctly for party strategies. Then I checked out FFXIV when they released the expansion for SAM. Way too flashy and I see even WHM can help damaging enemies with BLM. I didn't stick around long. I would like to return to FFXI someday and try to complete missions and quests because they were very interesting. I recently heard news that someone on the internet is trying to do a HD mod for XI. That would be a wonderful time to return.
While this is not top 5 worthy, I know a lot of folks were frustrated on how you got maps. The idea that you had the layout of Crawler's Nest memorized from playing but no map unless you did the complete An Explorer's Footsteps quest frustrated a lot of folks and that map was actually kind of easy to get (if you looked up where all the stone monuments were). You want a challenge though? Find people willing to help you get the maps in the CoP crags, I had all the memospheres, but you're asking people to be willing to die... lol.
Yeah but to be fair, the maps of the crags were pretty useless anyway. Now the original way to get the map of the 'Bostaunieux Oubliette.' THAT was a proper pain the backside. You know what I'm talking about.
For those who have recently started playing FFXI and had never played it before, triggering different missions from different expansions that usually play out of order is probably one of the more confusing experiences in FFXI at the moment. Zoning in to Jeuno for instance can access multiple cut scenes from different missions from CoP to Rhapsody's.
6:30 Oh my GOD, yes questing was the worst... a couple times since I've quit I've been tempted to log in during a Free Login period, and mistakenly thought to myself "maybe I'll finally finish some of these open quests" and then quickly realize I have no idea where I was at or how I'm supposed to go about completing them. Then I'd give up and log off and go play XIV, lol. I still love XI for the nostalgia, but there are very clear reasons why I no longer play it.
I talked a friend into buying the game to play with me. He bought it on his day off, struggled through playonline, and got to "play", hitting the macro wall hard. By the time I got home from work, he was done. He was so frustrated that I could never talk him back into trying it again. My major frustration was the rarity of items and spawns. the Magian weapons were an abomination, but I couldn't do endgame because of my irregular work schedule so that was all I had. Nothing about the game was made with any thought for ease of use.
For me the #1 most frustrating thing was travel time. Getting from Juno to Ro'Mave (sp?) for xping form 72-75 took a good 20 - 30 min if you didn't have outpost warps, and since I was a True Citizen of Lastok (er... Bastok), Outposts were never available.
Some of these is what made things impressive or feel like an achievment though. When you had all the weapons skills, or had a skill capped, it felt great and it also reflected in your performance. Seeing someone with gear for every aspect of their jobs was a sign of a great player.
Ah dude in all seriousness I agree 100%. You can't Break down FFXI and remove some parts but not others and still retain the authentic experience. I was truly proud of my THFs ranged skill and BLMs enfeebling. I still stand by that it could have been tweaked a bit though to be Bit less painful
Lol inventory spaces. As a WHM, I don’t need that much gear.........But throw in cooking.........That’s when space became an issue! Just spent 3 hours total cleaning out mog and mules!
See, with that first item (chronologically speaking), I think the problem was the necessity of gear-swapping, not the lack of inventory space. Without gear swapping, changing jobs would just be a matter of swapping one gearset (thief) out for the next job's gearset (red mage) and then you'd be good to go.
I remember my Dark Knight and Dragoon friends complaining about their party wait times, and as a Red Mage, I would get invitations within seconds of logging in. I had to have /anon on basically at all times if I didnt want to XP.
Hey bro how can you get your account back if you haven't log in like years lol that's for me , and did they change the summoners class now? like not consuming super mad mp ? just want to know I am thinking to go back ty.
Completely agree with the support bring-up. 99% of the time, you could get a party faster with a pocket refresher than with a pocket tank. That said, it WAS still possible to party without support, but it was probably 50% slower than a party WITH support. Especially once all support gets Haste AND Refresh.
Listen, I understand PoL was a bit of fail. But man it has good memories. I loved all the music available. The chat rooms when maintenance was happening was always a worth a laugh, greeting card, mail, there were some good time.
I honestly enjoyed the skill ups, I just wish they were gained quicker/easier at later levels. Trying to cap out healing magic at 75 was near impossible.
They simply had to have understood, even if it was initially an accident, how much money they were making on mules that were essentially mandatory if you played multiple jobs very seriously(not to mention crafting etc.). The only thing on this list I disagree with is the skillups. Skillup parties were a huge social component of the game that everyone I'm aware of enjoyed, including yourself it seems. Also, I personally enjoyed that feeling of having to "practice". I remember just tossing protect 1's out every chance I got on my redmage and how good those skillups felt while waiting for boats or what have you. High level skilling of parry/shield/guard were amazing payoffs for dedicated tanks, too! I was initially weary of the refresh criticism, but your proposed solution of a lesser, non-stacking refresh is amazing.
I actually liked the idea of having Support jobs in the game, they had they own role. Unlike FFXIV, there are 3 types, Healer, Tank and DPS. In FFXI it was DPS, Tanks, Healers, Support, Enfeebling. Also each type had sub-types DPS: Melee, Range, Magic RDM and BRD were both Support and Enfeebling In general each job was unique on their own, that was one of the beauties of this game.
PlayOnline was the reason I managed to wrack up 5+ years of in-game playtime. In most cases, I simply never logged out, because I didn't want to waste time going through POL to get back on again. Although, POL has a special place in my heart. FFXI being my first online game, going through it on PS2 somehow made my first experiences with the game feel like I was really getting into something different.
Lmao this is true, no one ever believed that my login time was “higher than it should be” because I never turned my PS2 off. I honestly didn’t hate POL, it’s just a little cumbersome now in 2019
I will say I actually love the skilling system (up until current day, now it just takes almost as long to catch skills up as it did to 99 depending on skill and job x.x) it always felt really nice and I personally enjoyed the hell out of it xD
I really do miss the supports as the fourth member of the Holy Trinity of MMO, but it wasn’t strictly necessary. I had a rampageburn party running fast VT dhalmels where I remember running it as unsupported WHM/SMN in the 60’s - with good provoke rotation, constant haste (cookie timer - the cookies had the same duration as haste, so if cookie wore off it was time to restart the cycle), it worked just fine. That I had the timing down to pull off a DS/Curaga II and tank a bit myself on nearly dead enemies (blink/sskin alternating) meant recovering wasn’t too hard.
How about the game not supporting any type of windowed full-screen mode? A third-party tool (which was against the TOS) was required just for that basic functionality.
I can’t even get play online to install on my windows 10 computer. And personally I hated the fact that aggro persisted across the entire zone, you’d see new players in Valkhurm trying to zone with three goblins chasing them only to watch them die at the zone line lol
Everyone did the return to sender loop. That's how the game was intended. PoL needed to be taken out back old yeller style ever since the tetra master stopped being accessable via PoL. Japan had a total of 5 games you could launch via PoL on PC and PS2, the idea was it was your online hub around the games. The issue with PoL now is only one game uses it!
Mixed thoughts on your quest complaints. On the one hand, I totally feel you. On the other, I play something like WoW where I'm led by the nose and never have to pay attention to anything is just as bad. I wish there was a way for game devs to balance "Read (or listen to) the quest dialogue" and just having a big golden quest arrow pointing you at whatever you're doing. I still wonder how some FFXI quests got sussed out way back in the day, but I think they'd have been hugely improved by just having a quest log that detailed the steps you'd already taken in completing it. That and some tweaks to dialogue so you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes and I think it'd work so much better and be more immersive. Related, I've found that I get lost playing modern games with minimaps, especially when they have a quest tracker. To this day, I know my way through Yuhtunga and Yhoator because the maps were almost useless and you had to actually explore the zone and really look at it. Immersion was definitely on SE's checklist, but it seems like that's been lost over time.
Well you just earned my sub after watching several of your FF XI videos! They bring back so many memories, and I miss the game so much.. Espescially the first few years. I tried getting back into it like 2 years ago, but theres so much stuff to get back into... And no friends to get advice from 😩 Any tips?
It still amazes me the first players managed to finish Zilart with no guides. Lookin at you Headstones. Edit. PoL is a pain. but the music will stay with me for the rest of my life. It adds so much charm.
That first one hit me hard... and just on my Black Mage alone, because I completely decked him out with gear... My Weapon slot alone had like 10-16 staffs lol.. I believe I had at least 3 pieces for every slot as well. I never even capped summoning skill on my summoner... and healing magic as well now that I think about it...
Man, people now start to cry if they wipe with no xp loss, and a 30 second walk back to the battle. This was the peak of MMO's, I miss they way it was.
Never saw inventory as a problem during classic ffxi. cuz 90% of people had only 1 75 job. since it took 6 months to a year to level it. quests i sorta understand, but at the same time the rewards werent worth the time invested. yay spend 2 hours running around for 6 mithkabobs, thanks. low level refresh existed although impractical and expensive. some of the more experience players (cooks) brought their own yagudo drinks and materials to craft them on the spot. it gave an additional 2mp that stacked with ballad and refresh
I think that their intent with the quests being hard to figure out was so that it would be an achievement in itself to do them first. They were in a way puzzles. But the way the veteran players guided and helped the new players was a crucial part of the game. That was a huge part of what made it great. A lot of content was cleared like that, by someone who had cleared it before guiding you through it, sometimes simply through linkshell messaging. I had lost most of my passion for the game a bit before Aht Urghan. I was a max level sam, but endgame just felt meaningless to me. That expansion sparked my interest, because it was so refreshing, and I found all the new jobs to be very interesting. For us westerners, it was also the first expansion with additional jobs. I remember jumping on Aht Urghan content really early on, and how some info hadn't been fully mapped out yet on the internet. I had to guess the answers for the BLU quest, and I remember being quite confused by the Aht Urghan content. I did some content, but mainly I focused on the new jobs, and not long after that I quit. I was an apathetic quitter, rather than a druggie going to rehab quitter. Looking back, I think the road to 75 was my primary motivation for playing. When I had achieved that, the game was never the same anymore. Looking up quest info and stuff before window mode was "fun", and this was the primary reason why that 3rd party windower popped up.
Personally I disagree with your #1 annoyance haha, I kinda liiked loading into that screen, I loved the music of when logging in, logging into my personalized login wallpaper, music, seeing who's on and what not. Logging in for the first time of the day and hearing that music, idk brings me a little happiness, like 'yessss finally my day is over and I get to login to some FF XI and enjooooy myself' the only thing I would prob agree with is the full day patch downloads haha.
Many frustrations lead to amazing times. But one of my worst was camping Hoo Mjuu the torrent when there was a bot also camping it and I was optimistic that I could take claim. He took it so many times over me but after many moons I was able to grab claim and get the drop. Made it that much better.
I remember the nightmare updates. Always stuck waiting hours spamming the log in button every maintenance to be the first people on to hopefully claim a HNM. So much "fun"
#2 is not really a frustration. 3-5 agree with, move #1 to #2. The new #1 would be not allowing to alt tab with out a 3rd party program. It would go with some of the others you said were frustrating, mainly the questing one.
Pretty solid list. One thing EQ had where skill trainers to help with skilling up and for the most part, you did skill up a bit faster in EQ as well. I miss the dedicated support role and it could easily be done in MMO's today honestly. I was a life long brd and cor in 11 and always loved the constant invite spam. I will disagree slightly on the combat system. I partied with numerous duo war/nin tanks and it wasn't a good experience. The everyone sub nin days where rough, cause those shadows really made people lazy, or at least on my server. Duo Sam's with seigan however, I had nothing but good experience with.
don't get me started on those damn dark and light staves. i know they are "essential" for red, white, (occasionally blue..) and black mages, and they restore mp while resting a little faster and hp too, but i never really cared or thought of a reason why i should get them, when i officially got a vermilion cloak i was like "screw that other crap! this is my favorite!" i found a new favorite in the Carbie hat too just recently since i love carbuncle as a summon.
Holy shit there are SO MANY ITEMS in this game. I think FFXI may have more total items than all of the Elder Scrolls games I've played combined, and then add in Dark Souls for good measure. Thousands upon thousands of things, a lot of which toward endgame are what are called Rare/Exclusive, meaning you can't sell them (usually), can't generally send them to a mule, and can't get another without lots of trouble. EVEN WITH the huge space we have now, I find my main AND my 3 mules constantly filling up. That is over 1,000 slots total. I lol'ed at your mention of the uragnites. I know exactly what you're talking about, and goddess bless those ugly little crustaceans outside of Adoulin. They have such high regen and defense that at 119, if you need weapon skills, just engage, smack away, go afk and half an hour later you're capped.
best thing was def the warning how you will end up forgetting you have children, friends an family... youll be sucked into the blackhole known as ff11 an you were never coming back... esp if you picked tarutaru, an they were right
I actually enjoyed the quest system in FFXI. It was hard to figure out, you had to search information online pretty frequently, but I enjoyed it much better than "?" marker or questing in general MMO that give you everything and more.
1. Camping/ToD 2. LFP as SMN 3. Someone/people not bringing silent oils/invisibility powders to endgame areas for events 4. People not announcing that they’re going AFK during event preparation. I understand that life happens but I wished they’d just said “AFK” because there was always the douchebagglers that wouldn’t participate in roll call, which made doing TP burn rotations/conveying strategy a nightmare. 5. Everyone’s first time through the d00nz.
The support role is definitely welcome, i miss having that as a thing in MMOs now. The only real downside is the fact that the only thing that makes support viable in ff11 is refresh instead of other interesting things. Also the Playonline is horrible but I have a weird feeling that if it wasn't there anymore I wouldn't be comfortable with it.
The old skool videos are cool but as you seem like a pretty casual ffxi player, seeing you tackle some new challenging content like harder unms/HTbfs, omen and new dynamis with less than ideal setups would be cool to see.
Ah skill ups.....fun times on RDM. Capping parry and shield was fun with getting a whole load of mandys and letting them hit me with phalanx on 😂 Felt good when you see all skills capped
Just watched this after starting FFXI for the first time last week and getting playonline working and finding out what the hell I am supposed to do on quests were my two biggest barriers to enjoying the game. Even with a guide I struggled with some of these quests and it didnt help I did not have a map (didnt know I needed one at the time) On one I got so lost I just let an enemy kill me so I could warp back to the starting town. A minimap would also be very nice. Only played for a few hours and honestly i wont be able to play properly again for a few months but despite its frustrations I can see its charm and am hoping I can at least get the rhapsodies of vana`diel done.
Fame grind... I came back a while ago and made a new guy with a bunch of friends to try out all the new stuff and loved it ..then i remembered to get these things i need, i got to do the fame quests (yag necklaces .Sheep, cornets ) that right there almost made me quit again
Frostbite lol yea... FFXI was beautiful and honestly the best mmorpg I have ever played. That said though, they needed to tone down the grind. The grind existed for EVERYTHING!
Yeah I came back fresh a couple months ago after being away for almost 10 years and I'd completely forgotten about all the prep work grinding that had to be done on a new character. Maxing out fame, doing the missions, the Limit Break quests, etc. It went much quicker than it did in the past but it was still a real slog doing that nonsense again LOL
Capping parrying and throwing on my NIN75 are still two of the most tedious things I've ever done in my life lol. Remember when Windows Vista and Windows 7 broke POL? Hahahaha. And we've all been lulled to sleep by the prelude music waiting 14 hours for a colossal version update to download. Have you ever used POL Chat or Mail? Did you ever play Tetra Master during maintenance? I still kinda wish they hadn't removed Tetra Master, though it was kinda silly that you had to buy a Content ID for it.
Launchers.... I wish they'd just embed the login system into the game. Would make it way easier to play on linux distros. This goes for XIV as well. That music tho.
If you didn't use Windower, ALT+TAB would kick you out of the game. So not only did pretty much every quest require a google, you'd also have to either log out or use third party software to do the actual googling.
Ok, I stopped playing shortly after Seekers came out. The Yugioh/WoWing of the numbers and scaling finally got to me. Just giant numbers, everywhere, seemingly only to make casuals feel better about themselves. When did SE let you play with a full party of bots, and how hard is it to get them? Also, holy crap, that menu. Talking about storage woes and the return-to-sender cycle doesn't do justice to seeing the huge stack of menu options now available: Mog Safe Mog Safe 2: The Sequel! Storage Mog Locker Mog Satchel Mog Sack Mog Case Mog Wardrobe Mog Wardrobe 2: A Mog Wars Story Mog Wardrobe 3: Solo Mog Wardrobe 4: R2 Returns You used to need to do quests in order to expand these slots. They varied from time-consuming to expensive, usually both. Menu Fantasy XI: Online
Finally doing some dynamis, getting sky unlocked and then my account got hacked by rmt. I sign in one day to find I got banned for harassement when I wasnt even playing. Me and my friend who played the game(name was Zanadul, remora server represent). We tried to contact square enix but they didnt want to believe there was any rmt activity.
Yeah... I have great memories of this game but never progressed far and was always poor. The learning curve was so severe. Incredibly frustrating to play.
How about getting a group, getting through an incredibly dangerous zone, getting to the boss door, and finding out 1 or 2 of your party were not far enough on the quest to do the fight?
"YEHEYEHEH, WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" -Playonline launcher
@@fancychannelname I'm shocked someone replied. I didn't think anyone remembered this
I have struggled for years trying to decide if I love or hate the fact that FFXI gave players basically no direction in how to approach quests. On one hand, it's very "old school" and forces the player to read and listen closely for clues and indications - or you know as we all actually did just go to Allakhazam and look it up, but the premise was still there. In many ways, I much prefer this over games like WoW and even FFXIV that feel much more like Skinner boxes with the new objective clearly outlined on your screen. Outside of how other MMOs quests tend to keep more to "kill x number of y", this automatic updating, while convenient for progression, removes a lot of my investment in the game world.
Your 2nd point is well known to me as a life-time BRD. For leveling at least you really needed a specific party composition back in the day. There were some compromises, like MAYBE we can make with NIN work with a WHM and no THF, or MAYBE a SMN and BLM can serve as full healers for the PLD, but really as soon as Refresh and Ballad are avail, it's required. I suppose in the same way WHM became required for tele and RR; wew talk about whoring yourself out - telewhoring is the only way I made gil. The point is this was a regrettable but understandable oversight on SE's part. It made BRD, RDM and later COR the antithesis of DRG in that I often used to go private because I would get so many random invites. Even after they introduced lvl sync far later in the games life, I would get random requests all the time just to help out due to the necessity of Refresh.
But yep, PlayOnline was...well is still even, horrible. I remember Christmas morning 2002 trying to install the game for the first time and spending hours on the phone because their font is such that the letter I is identical to the number 1 and almost to the letter L as well, and as my ID had all 3, I couldn't log in to my PO ID. Ah, how many years of frustration with the nightmare that is PlayOnline lay before me began that day.
All I know is thank you all you crazy and dedicated Japanese players who trial-and-error'd solutions out to all of the game's various quests over these last 16 years. Because holeeee shit would I be completely lost without access to FFXIclopedia and BGWiki.
Nightweaver1 wrong. Everything was started to get datamined at some point.
I'm not wrong. The Japanese were the trailblazers who figured out first how to complete content in FFXI.
For me it was that the reward on quests were usually beyond lackluster. I understand the need for xp parties to be the focus but I didnt do most quests till I was nearly capped out.
I had exact opposite experience with Nin, I didn't care for a THF, what I really cared for Haste as Nin. There was times I debated skipping a Rdm 40-47 in favor for Whm just for haste. Especially if we have another form dispel such as bard's finale if we need it. Then again when I leveled Nin I had, Okote, Sniper rings +1, Peacock Charm and Jutjui Gi (and hauby +1 at 59+), I had moments where I just ripped hate from Paladin as I just didn't care. The only problem holding hate was against rangers 2002-mid 2005, before the rng nerf of doom.
Dear god the Pol updates where you might as well go to sleep even when broadband connection like I did when I 2003(maybe 2004)+. Why does it take like 6 hours to download when have cable internet damit.
Biggest frustration: Lottery spawn NMs. They are the worst, and I still hate them even to this day. It is literally the opposite of gameplay, as it forces you to kill some placeholders, then just afk and wait. It forces you to afk and not leave because you never know if the NM will pop or not. Also, you never knew if someone else had killed the NM recently, and some respawn windows were like 12+ hours, so there were times where you were legit wasting your time because someone had just killed it a couple hours ago, and it had a 0% chance to spawn. Then, there were also times where the window should be ready, but the NM wouldn't pop for over an hour or two, and you just had to constantly keep afking and waiting around in the same zone, instead of ACTUALLY being able to play the game. They've made the pop windows on lottery spawns a little more forgiving these days.. but it's still a pain even so.
Definitely a lot of frustrations in old skoo ffxi but they are also a reason why there are so much fond memories of it. Ex leveling down. I wouldn't trade of it back honestly. They make the game what it is.
One thing that always bothered me was that the minimum level for Outpost Warps was always higher than the level they were useful (i.e. Dunes was level 25 iirc). They would have been so much more useful if they matched with the level that would be used to exp off of the mobs there.
Using a weapon skill and losing TP if you're slightly too far away. just gray out the damn weapon skill if I'm too far away.
oh my goddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd. yes.
This sucked for Summoner as well... tell it to do a blood pact only for the mob to move an inch and now the move was interrupted and it now had to go through the cool down lol. Luckily the merited blood pacts had range to them.
Honestly, all they needed to do was set it to respond the same way as if you weren't facing the mob. You only lost the TP if they/you moved out of range at the very moment it goes off. It was a pointless frustration, given the fact you wouldn't lose it otherwise.
Yeah....it's still a thing and it's annnoying as hell.
Play Online is still a required gateway... seroiusly?! My god.
The music for Play Online actually is super postiviely nostalgic for me. I remember listening to the music forever for the release of the game and each expansion. It was neat music that meant I was soon playing new FFXI content, which i was super hyped for!
PlayOnline [Impossible Gauge]
Man, this was my life for a long tiem
oɌionⓋ yup me too, the feels
Yusuke Urameshi me too and don’t regret it
Same, had well over 800-900 Days of playtime, starting on NA launch day.
Being a 2H melee LFP before the 2H Wpn update and the introduction of accuracy food (mainly sushi). It doesn’t get any more frustrating than that. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you skipped that era.
Traveling, starting Gil and equipment, dunes noobs, healer DC, ", ", ", ございます", etc.
I fully acknowledge the risk of losing my life completely lol.
It is ridiculous that I have clicked my acceptance of this for like...years
I knew what I was signing up for!
I hope pantheon can bring back some of what early EQ & FF11 were. I left EQ for FF11 because I would visit the ff11 website daily just to reread the small bit of info about the world and races. I had played MUDs and DnD but I wanted the uniqueness of a FF game and was not disappointed. Now I just want a hard MMO with people talking and grouping. Think Pantheon will deliver that?
You can chalk up one person who likes PlayOnline. The music is very nostalgic, amd sometimes I'd just turn it on for the music. I also love the "locking" sound effect when it turned back off. It's like I'm locking the door behind me, that leads to another world. And I was always eager to return.^^
I'm not saying others don't dislike it. I've only met one other person who likes it, and now I live with them. There is always a reason for something being removed. At least in Japanese games. Removing PoL meant it was not going to be the hub for pc games that like... steam became. XD
Im glad I got to experience this game pre level cap increase, just for the memories. I like what they've done with it now and it has made it easier to just start fresh and go on a nostalgia trip~
I just saw this after posting something similar about quests. I tried for some time to quest without the wiki but more times than not it is impossible. The post I made was about one of those quests
"I need two components to finish this recipe: A "lightforce" and a "darkforce". I think one is an egg and one is a bone"
So you have to go to a specific area to kill a specific placeholder monster during the day to spawn it's counterpart during the night for a drop of a "cold bone", that is not even guaranteed drop. Cold bone = "darkforce"
okay: bone from a skeleton and egg from a bird [probably], that was easy. But since you don't know the average level of the quest you have to kill every skeleton and bird in all areas you can kill them. And if you are underleveled for the quest? well , too bad
we don't need a flashing exclamation point in every single quest NPC, point of interest or else, but just a little bit more direction.
My biggest gripe was... Version...Update...Timing.
Seriously, every single update was a Tuesday...fine. But, why were they always set up so Europe basically couldn't play that day and that the US, unless you were able to get home around 3 to start the version download and install, had a 8-10 hour update after 5 PM?
So..... Half of the world couldn't play at all, but the players in the Asian areas never had to worry about this? It was frustrating to no end to give up a night in Sky or Sea one Tuesday every 4-6 weeks because they would never change the version update time.
Oddly enough they do version updates now more frequently between 5-6am UK time? I like that but then again the updates are much smaller then they used to be.
omg half the time it would update on my day off.... so i couldnt even play lmao.... always weould update during the day too, never at night when i was asleep so i could play ion the morning... nope... made me uppdate all day an then have to go to bed... lmao hated it SOOOOOO much
1) Narrow minded people, for many years people refused to kill anything that gave less them cap XP per kill. I would try count less times to explain to people, lower xp, much faster is actually better. People would join the party, not see cap XP first kill, then try to break the party, convince people to move camps or just leave w/o notice. In the early days you had no hMP, so when your healers were out of MP from attempting to get a chain 5 on and IT++ after the kill, you were in for a 5min or so break while the MP slowly came back.
2) This goes waaaaay back, but limit breaks were a nightmare. Depending on the one needed, items took full groups to clear, and days if not weeks of grinding for drops. The drop rate was very low in the early days, and since most people(Americans or EU) were stuck at the cap, you didn't often have a 75 around to help you kill mobs easy, unless you found a bored Japaneses person, will to help some Americans/EU.
3) CoP was a freaking train wreck for years. Only the most skilled of skilled, with a loyal group of friends was going to finish CoP, most people gave up, till years later when it was fixed. (beside just being hard a f..., gear didnt scale, you had to freaking buy gear sets for each level cap of CoP) One done you had Sea access, but again, w/o a killer LS, you were doing anything in Sea.
4) Some of the quest stages took too freaking long to do. It was no easy to get a group of people together, which might take an hour or two to form, then you have a 30+min hike to get to the boss/event, in which you will probably spend another hour waiting for everyone to actually show up. All said and done, if you got the clear, you have spent 1/2 if not most of the day getting the clear, but the upside was it also felt very rewarding, to know you got it,(and never need to do it again).
5)Damage system, while many people probably didn't feel the full force of it leveling, endgame it was bad. The HNM's, Kings, Gods, whatever, where insanely hard to hit, when you were finally able to land a blow, because of the STR/Atk Vs Vit /Def. melee hit for close to no damage, and just pumped extra TP into the mob. Pretty much rendering every melee job you spent years playing and falling in love with totally useless.
At the height of my playing FFXI, back in 2009, I had FOUR mules in addition to my main just to keep up with inventory, stationed in all 3 starter zones and one I ran all the way out to Jeuno solo at level 3 or 4 just to have access to all the separate AHs (a necessity when leveling a craft). A crystal mule, a 1-37 gear mule, a 37-75 gear mule, and a crafting/item mule. I had to max out fame on ALL of them just so I could do the Moogle quests to increase their house to 80, spent hundreds of thousands of gil on the most efficient storage options I could afford for all of them, and I would still have to use the delivery box storage for some of them at times. Even when they started letting you store gear sets and event rewards\items, I was still so full at all times it was ridiculous and I was contemplating spinning up a 5th mule when my LS broke up and I finally quit the game. Inventory management in FFXI was always such a pain in the ass!
We had a static exp party that would meet on schedule which was awesome, but it would still take us an hour of coordination and muling crap around before we'd even begin to start making it out to camp. Then you get to the zone and of course every viable camp is already occupied so repeat the whole process for another 30-45 minutes until you finally find an open camp at SOME level, play for 2 hours getting maybe a level or two, if that, and rinse repeat ad infinitum. It was so bad we would actually share out each other's passwords so the people that weren't working could login and get the others ready and ran out to camp ahead of time to reduce prep time but even with that you were still looking at all that time getting ready, geared up, replenishing your stock of consumables (I was the LS cook so I'd get texts on my phone at work "Hey bro I need a few stacks of Squid Sushi I sent you the mats it'll be Earthsday at 7 want as many +1 as possible plz"...like GODDAMMIT here I go crafting between pulls again WTF).
FFXI was a cruel, cruel mistress. Just came back a couple months ago and it's so much faster and easier now, but I really do miss those bad old days sometimes LOL
I agree but disagree with the comments with POL. It was an amazing piece at the time, realistically it was supposed to be a community hub/game launcher similar to Steam, Origin, etc. complete with messaging direct to in-game players. It was also cross-platform, so PS2 players could communicate out of game with PC or xbox players, no one had a system like that. It was a huge forward thinking piece of tech. News & updates, emails, seeing all your friends online etc. all made it a super cool idea.
As much as I hate the music it plays, I have to admit I do get a huge amount of nostalgia whenever I hear it.
Where I definitely agree, it's slow resource intensive, and very out of date. This is probably why they ditched it and stopped using it, where I believe they wanted to add more online games into it. It must be pretty tied into XI since they have not removed it for a simple launcher, and using it today is a horrible experience.
#2: I can remember a time my static (pre Aht Urghan) consisted of PLD MNK MNK BRD RDM (yep, only 5 members) in the mid-late 50s. Crabs in Kuftal were only VT to us but the pulls were so continuous and support was so incredibly OP (and MNK DoT was absolutely monstrous) that we were out XPing the standard 6 member parties I was normally in with other classes. Support was straight up broken at the time, and I _loved_ it.
That being said there _was_ a low level refresh option: cooking juice. For our low level static I was a THF. You couldn't stack juice, but you could stack the ingredients. I literally skilled cooking from around 10-40 on almost nothing but juice in parties. I would continuously cook and feed juice every time we had a break where I wasn't pulling and keep the mages refreshed continuously. It was a cheap way to skill cooking that while a bit less efficient than normal meant I wasn't grinding away on a secondary skill in boring solo sessions well outside of normal gameplay with friends. Also randoms that would join our party were pleasantly surprised by the faster low level pace we could keep.
After years of though since leaving FFXI in 2009, I realize the prestige from accomplishing things that were unreasonably difficult was the whole appeal of the game. The level of RnG and low drop rates, time constraints, luck necessary to achieve things ultimately made it matter. Now the game doesn't have that. Chains of Promathia was the peak.
Getting that Raja Ring or the mage variant was like a badge of honour. I left FFXI around the same time you did. I honestly would love to replay those years I put into the game, if the game was like it was back then, but it isn't.
@@ominousflames14 /examine
As a RDM, I was totally fine with Refreshers being a necessary party component. Then again, even leveling other jobs through the 50s - 70s, I never found myself all that annoyed by the party comp being Tank, Healer, Support, DD, DD, DD. The main frustration was more in the proportion of viable Tank, Healer, and Support jobs to DD jobs. 90% of the party invites I received as SMN were so I could be a discount WHM. That was kinda frustrating.
The number one frustration for me though was the lack of viable solo gameplay. I didn't have any friends who played XI and I had rotten luck with getting helpful linkshells, so I felt like I was locked out of everything I wanted to do, primarily missions and quests. CoP has such an amazing story, but to get to it, you'd have to spend weeks if not months (if it ever came up at all) shouting in Jeuno to find a full and viable group of strangers all on the same mission as you, only to get in and fail. And when you did get to the story parts, I always felt pressured to race through it because there were five other people waiting on me. The sense of accomplishment at finishing something was nice, but I'd rather just be able to enjoy the story, which is something I really do love about current FFXI.
My biggest gripe back in the older days before Home Point teleporting, was how difficult it was for people to get around if they didn't have the teleportation or warp spells. Who else DC'd in a dungeon and had to deathwarp home because you forgot the warp cudgel? The refresh thirst was so real and good support players were highly revered lol.
I know this is an old video and I'm late to the party, but playonline was kind of an experience in and of itself. It was a pain to get through when you just wanted to go into 11, but the launcher itself had a lot of charm. Literal dozens of exclusive music tracks, mail, customizing your profile and background, chat lobbies, all the extras, the devs posting journal logs as in game characters for more lore and yes even tetra master.
I can think back on dozens of times where maintenance was going on and I'd hop in a chat lobby and just talk with people before inevitably someone wanted to play tetra master, and we'd all take turns dueling. That was the best time and I remember it as fondly as I do 11 itself. The launcher was a clunky mess, but it very much had its own unique charm and I loved it for that.
Limited lines for each macro preventing you from swapping all your gear at once. My white mage had almost a completely different set of gear for each category of spell/ability which meant either hitting multiple macros or getting a third party windower to enable gear swaps via an outside script.
As I’ve put on multiple posts on your fantastic channel numerous times, my biggest problem was the RMT’s BUT in terms of the game itself I have to agree with the questing. There was SO MUCH content in this game that I would bet to this day that not everything has been done because there was simply no way to figure out where to go or who to talk too. I remember the tombs where I would farm wild onions outside Windy had a bunch of quest stuff in there for various levels but you couldn’t do a level 15 quest alone at 15, it was maddening. I want to start again and level up just to go back and see the hundreds of hours of content and places I never did when I originally played, I bet it’s teeming with quests. Like to even get to the places to do some you had to be twenty+levels above and then the item probably wasn’t even worth it by then, crazy. They really dropped the ball on that in hopes ppl would “be more social” HAH have you played an MMO? It’s usually all screw you gettin mine and then slow walking, peacocking like a jagoff in Jueno...pfff.
Watching your vids on FFXI makes me want to make my own. XI is way too underappreciated of a game, especially when you consider that even some of the bad things about it are closer to what people want now... with some QoL changes to make it better. The skill ups, no matter how tedious it was, felt great to see that yellow text scroll up. Any skill ups felt great to see scroll up, especially with crafting.
Getting a craft skill to 100 in FFXI made you feel like a god.
The biggest frustration was having friends and members quit the game altogether. I always felt sad when at the end of the month it was a guy you knew for 8 years quit. I even had 2 tarutarus give me all their things and swore I wouldn't reveal the linkshell they quit because of a terminal illness. To think their last few days they decided to share it with us, every time i looked in my inventory seeing their signature crafted items made me cry knowing I'd never see them again.
"Because you never knew what you were supposed to do!" Yup that was the best part lol
I watched my [5] brothers play it since launch. I joined the game when Chains of Promethea was released. I shared an account with one because I was still in late middle school/early high school. Couldn't really play for long hours and would be a fill-in but mained THF, SAM, and NIN. The game was really tough but I remember those fond days where before logging on, we would have a discussion on the equipment we had, the missions we would do, battle strategies we would do/try and the areas we would level up. After high school, had to leave the game when it was right after Abyssea was released.
I checked back when the expansion for Rune Fencer (?) Was released and saw that many people were able to reach level cap really fast. But I noticed that some of the new players didn't understand their roles properly or had timing down correctly for party strategies. Then I checked out FFXIV when they released the expansion for SAM. Way too flashy and I see even WHM can help damaging enemies with BLM. I didn't stick around long.
I would like to return to FFXI someday and try to complete missions and quests because they were very interesting. I recently heard news that someone on the internet is trying to do a HD mod for XI. That would be a wonderful time to return.
While this is not top 5 worthy, I know a lot of folks were frustrated on how you got maps. The idea that you had the layout of Crawler's Nest memorized from playing but no map unless you did the complete An Explorer's Footsteps quest frustrated a lot of folks and that map was actually kind of easy to get (if you looked up where all the stone monuments were). You want a challenge though? Find people willing to help you get the maps in the CoP crags, I had all the memospheres, but you're asking people to be willing to die... lol.
Oh my god you are so right. Stumbling the eff around in deadly zones with no map looking for vaaaague coordinates.
Yeah but to be fair, the maps of the crags were pretty useless anyway. Now the original way to get the map of the 'Bostaunieux Oubliette.' THAT was a proper pain the backside. You know what I'm talking about.
I have a completist attitude, I had to get all those maps and yeah, Bostaunieux Oubliette was a pain
For those who have recently started playing FFXI and had never played it before, triggering different missions from different expansions that usually play out of order is probably one of the more confusing experiences in FFXI at the moment.
Zoning in to Jeuno for instance can access multiple cut scenes from different missions from CoP to Rhapsody's.
6:30 Oh my GOD, yes questing was the worst... a couple times since I've quit I've been tempted to log in during a Free Login period, and mistakenly thought to myself "maybe I'll finally finish some of these open quests" and then quickly realize I have no idea where I was at or how I'm supposed to go about completing them. Then I'd give up and log off and go play XIV, lol. I still love XI for the nostalgia, but there are very clear reasons why I no longer play it.
I talked a friend into buying the game to play with me. He bought it on his day off, struggled through playonline, and got to "play", hitting the macro wall hard. By the time I got home from work, he was done. He was so frustrated that I could never talk him back into trying it again. My major frustration was the rarity of items and spawns. the Magian weapons were an abomination, but I couldn't do endgame because of my irregular work schedule so that was all I had. Nothing about the game was made with any thought for ease of use.
For me the #1 most frustrating thing was travel time. Getting from Juno to Ro'Mave (sp?) for xping form 72-75 took a good 20 - 30 min if you didn't have outpost warps, and since I was a True Citizen of Lastok (er... Bastok), Outposts were never available.
bro i skilled up guard to like 230 took months! of just getting smacked by mandys for days lol
I have no idea how you had the patience to skill up guard haha
me too. guard, evasion and shield :) fun times
Some of these is what made things impressive or feel like an achievment though. When you had all the weapons skills, or had a skill capped, it felt great and it also reflected in your performance. Seeing someone with gear for every aspect of their jobs was a sign of a great player.
Ah dude in all seriousness I agree 100%. You can't Break down FFXI and remove some parts but not others and still retain the authentic experience. I was truly proud of my THFs ranged skill and BLMs enfeebling. I still stand by that it could have been tweaked a bit though to be Bit less painful
Lol inventory spaces. As a WHM, I don’t need that much gear.........But throw in cooking.........That’s when space became an issue! Just spent 3 hours total cleaning out mog and mules!
See, with that first item (chronologically speaking), I think the problem was the necessity of gear-swapping, not the lack of inventory space. Without gear swapping, changing jobs would just be a matter of swapping one gearset (thief) out for the next job's gearset (red mage) and then you'd be good to go.
I remember my Dark Knight and Dragoon friends complaining about their party wait times, and as a Red Mage, I would get invitations within seconds of logging in. I had to have /anon on basically at all times if I didnt want to XP.
#1 annoying thing. Needing a Castle Oztroja coffer for AF but having THFs run around picking them as soon as they spawn so you can't get your AF...
Hey bro how can you get your account back if you haven't log in like years lol that's for me , and did they change the summoners class now? like not consuming super mad mp ? just want to know I am thinking to go back ty.
OMG, yes, the inventory frustration was real!! XD
Trying to find a alliance for Apocalypse Nigh...Never got that done.
airship
aaaaaaairship
Completely agree with the support bring-up. 99% of the time, you could get a party faster with a pocket refresher than with a pocket tank.
That said, it WAS still possible to party without support, but it was probably 50% slower than a party WITH support. Especially once all support gets Haste AND Refresh.
Listen, I understand PoL was a bit of fail. But man it has good memories. I loved all the music available. The chat rooms when maintenance was happening was always a worth a laugh, greeting card, mail, there were some good time.
I honestly enjoyed the skill ups, I just wish they were gained quicker/easier at later levels. Trying to cap out healing magic at 75 was near impossible.
They simply had to have understood, even if it was initially an accident, how much money they were making on mules that were essentially mandatory if you played multiple jobs very seriously(not to mention crafting etc.).
The only thing on this list I disagree with is the skillups. Skillup parties were a huge social component of the game that everyone I'm aware of enjoyed, including yourself it seems. Also, I personally enjoyed that feeling of having to "practice". I remember just tossing protect 1's out every chance I got on my redmage and how good those skillups felt while waiting for boats or what have you. High level skilling of parry/shield/guard were amazing payoffs for dedicated tanks, too!
I was initially weary of the refresh criticism, but your proposed solution of a lesser, non-stacking refresh is amazing.
and now they make that money on mounts, glam, lvl skip, story skips and fantasias in ff14s store
I actually liked the idea of having Support jobs in the game, they had they own role. Unlike FFXIV, there are 3 types, Healer, Tank and DPS.
In FFXI it was DPS, Tanks, Healers, Support, Enfeebling. Also each type had sub-types
DPS: Melee, Range, Magic
RDM and BRD were both Support and Enfeebling
In general each job was unique on their own, that was one of the beauties of this game.
Bogys. That was my original frustration.
PlayOnline was the reason I managed to wrack up 5+ years of in-game playtime. In most cases, I simply never logged out, because I didn't want to waste time going through POL to get back on again. Although, POL has a special place in my heart. FFXI being my first online game, going through it on PS2 somehow made my first experiences with the game feel like I was really getting into something different.
Lmao this is true, no one ever believed that my login time was “higher than it should be” because I never turned my PS2 off. I honestly didn’t hate POL, it’s just a little cumbersome now in 2019
I will say I actually love the skilling system (up until current day, now it just takes almost as long to catch skills up as it did to 99 depending on skill and job x.x) it always felt really nice and I personally enjoyed the hell out of it xD
I really do miss the supports as the fourth member of the Holy Trinity of MMO, but it wasn’t strictly necessary.
I had a rampageburn party running fast VT dhalmels where I remember running it as unsupported WHM/SMN in the 60’s - with good provoke rotation, constant haste (cookie timer - the cookies had the same duration as haste, so if cookie wore off it was time to restart the cycle), it worked just fine. That I had the timing down to pull off a DS/Curaga II and tank a bit myself on nearly dead enemies (blink/sskin alternating) meant recovering wasn’t too hard.
Biggest frustration for me was always the prices and how difficult it was to purchase the gear you needed as an average player
How about the game not supporting any type of windowed full-screen mode? A third-party tool (which was against the TOS) was required just for that basic functionality.
I can’t even get play online to install on my windows 10 computer. And personally I hated the fact that aggro persisted across the entire zone, you’d see new players in Valkhurm trying to zone with three goblins chasing them only to watch them die at the zone line lol
you can start by dropping those colibri beaks
Nah, NPC those things, they go for like 250 a pop.
Beak???
Everyone did the return to sender loop. That's how the game was intended.
PoL needed to be taken out back old yeller style ever since the tetra master stopped being accessable via PoL. Japan had a total of 5 games you could launch via PoL on PC and PS2, the idea was it was your online hub around the games. The issue with PoL now is only one game uses it!
Getting a party ready, getting to the camp, and having people dip out two pulls in.
1600+ xp?! Jeezus wasn't it capped at 99? I remember never seeing higher and that was with chains as I recall
Mixed thoughts on your quest complaints. On the one hand, I totally feel you. On the other, I play something like WoW where I'm led by the nose and never have to pay attention to anything is just as bad. I wish there was a way for game devs to balance "Read (or listen to) the quest dialogue" and just having a big golden quest arrow pointing you at whatever you're doing. I still wonder how some FFXI quests got sussed out way back in the day, but I think they'd have been hugely improved by just having a quest log that detailed the steps you'd already taken in completing it. That and some tweaks to dialogue so you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes and I think it'd work so much better and be more immersive.
Related, I've found that I get lost playing modern games with minimaps, especially when they have a quest tracker. To this day, I know my way through Yuhtunga and Yhoator because the maps were almost useless and you had to actually explore the zone and really look at it. Immersion was definitely on SE's checklist, but it seems like that's been lost over time.
Well you just earned my sub after watching several of your FF XI videos! They bring back so many memories, and I miss the game so much.. Espescially the first few years. I tried getting back into it like 2 years ago, but theres so much stuff to get back into... And no friends to get advice from 😩 Any tips?
One other frustration of mine was no gear swapping in Ballista. It was a lot of fun, but people stopped doing it because of that (mostly).
Love XI so much. 14 years of my life in that game. Lost relationships because of it lol. I regret nothing!!!!
It still amazes me the first players managed to finish Zilart with no guides. Lookin at you Headstones. Edit. PoL is a pain. but the music will stay with me for the rest of my life. It adds so much charm.
That first one hit me hard... and just on my Black Mage alone, because I completely decked him out with gear... My Weapon slot alone had like 10-16 staffs lol.. I believe I had at least 3 pieces for every slot as well.
I never even capped summoning skill on my summoner... and healing magic as well now that I think about it...
I can't even make it passed the playonline boss. It confused me, I got frustrated and just gave up.
My most frustrating thing in old-school FFXI: Trying to get gil to get the good stuff that was unfortunately marked up so high due to RMT.
Nowadays gil is so easy to get it's np.
ya RMT used to be a huge frustration fo rsure
having to keep 30, 40, 50 and 60 cap gears for level capped fights was the most annoying (before they synced gears)
Man, people now start to cry if they wipe with no xp loss, and a 30 second walk back to the battle. This was the peak of MMO's, I miss they way it was.
Never saw inventory as a problem during classic ffxi. cuz 90% of people had only 1 75 job. since it took 6 months to a year to level it. quests i sorta understand, but at the same time the rewards werent worth the time invested. yay spend 2 hours running around for 6 mithkabobs, thanks. low level refresh existed although impractical and expensive. some of the more experience players (cooks) brought their own yagudo drinks and materials to craft them on the spot. it gave an additional 2mp that stacked with ballad and refresh
I think that their intent with the quests being hard to figure out was so that it would be an achievement in itself to do them first. They were in a way puzzles. But the way the veteran players guided and helped the new players was a crucial part of the game. That was a huge part of what made it great. A lot of content was cleared like that, by someone who had cleared it before guiding you through it, sometimes simply through linkshell messaging.
I had lost most of my passion for the game a bit before Aht Urghan. I was a max level sam, but endgame just felt meaningless to me. That expansion sparked my interest, because it was so refreshing, and I found all the new jobs to be very interesting. For us westerners, it was also the first expansion with additional jobs.
I remember jumping on Aht Urghan content really early on, and how some info hadn't been fully mapped out yet on the internet. I had to guess the answers for the BLU quest, and I remember being quite confused by the Aht Urghan content. I did some content, but mainly I focused on the new jobs, and not long after that I quit. I was an apathetic quitter, rather than a druggie going to rehab quitter.
Looking back, I think the road to 75 was my primary motivation for playing. When I had achieved that, the game was never the same anymore.
Looking up quest info and stuff before window mode was "fun", and this was the primary reason why that 3rd party windower popped up.
@hunt4games I think you forget about consumables that could negate the need for a refresher.. just no one ever wants to drop the gill
Most beautiful graphic style in a game ever, wish 14 has it and it's simple magic
Personally I disagree with your #1 annoyance haha, I kinda liiked loading into that screen, I loved the music of when logging in, logging into my personalized login wallpaper, music, seeing who's on and what not. Logging in for the first time of the day and hearing that music, idk brings me a little happiness, like 'yessss finally my day is over and I get to login to some FF XI and enjooooy myself' the only thing I would prob agree with is the full day patch downloads haha.
Many frustrations lead to amazing times. But one of my worst was camping Hoo Mjuu the torrent when there was a bot also camping it and I was optimistic that I could take claim. He took it so many times over me but after many moons I was able to grab claim and get the drop. Made it that much better.
I had a great xp party with no brd rdm or cor. we went with 2 whm with 1 of them subbing brd for ballad 1. it went fine. no downtime at all.
I remember the nightmare updates. Always stuck waiting hours spamming the log in button every maintenance to be the first people on to hopefully claim a HNM. So much "fun"
#2 is not really a frustration. 3-5 agree with, move #1 to #2. The new #1 would be not allowing to alt tab with out a 3rd party program. It would go with some of the others you said were frustrating, mainly the questing one.
Pretty solid list. One thing EQ had where skill trainers to help with skilling up and for the most part, you did skill up a bit faster in EQ as well. I miss the dedicated support role and it could easily be done in MMO's today honestly. I was a life long brd and cor in 11 and always loved the constant invite spam. I will disagree slightly on the combat system. I partied with numerous duo war/nin tanks and it wasn't a good experience. The everyone sub nin days where rough, cause those shadows really made people lazy, or at least on my server. Duo Sam's with seigan however, I had nothing but good experience with.
Playonline doesn't slow down your computer, some of it's animation is just really low frame rate
don't get me started on those damn dark and light staves. i know they are "essential" for red, white, (occasionally blue..) and black mages, and they restore mp while resting a little faster and hp too, but i never really cared or thought of a reason why i should get them, when i officially got a vermilion cloak i was like "screw that other crap! this is my favorite!" i found a new favorite in the Carbie hat too just recently since i love carbuncle as a summon.
Holy shit there are SO MANY ITEMS in this game. I think FFXI may have more total items than all of the Elder Scrolls games I've played combined, and then add in Dark Souls for good measure. Thousands upon thousands of things, a lot of which toward endgame are what are called Rare/Exclusive, meaning you can't sell them (usually), can't generally send them to a mule, and can't get another without lots of trouble. EVEN WITH the huge space we have now, I find my main AND my 3 mules constantly filling up. That is over 1,000 slots total.
I lol'ed at your mention of the uragnites. I know exactly what you're talking about, and goddess bless those ugly little crustaceans outside of Adoulin. They have such high regen and defense that at 119, if you need weapon skills, just engage, smack away, go afk and half an hour later you're capped.
best thing was def the warning how you will end up forgetting you have children, friends an family... youll be sucked into the blackhole known as ff11 an you were never coming back... esp if you picked tarutaru, an they were right
I actually enjoyed the quest system in FFXI. It was hard to figure out, you had to search information online pretty frequently, but I enjoyed it much better than "?" marker or questing in general MMO that give you everything and more.
1. Camping/ToD
2. LFP as SMN
3. Someone/people not bringing silent oils/invisibility powders to endgame areas for events
4. People not announcing that they’re going AFK during event preparation. I understand that life happens but I wished they’d just said “AFK” because there was always the douchebagglers that wouldn’t participate in roll call, which made doing TP burn rotations/conveying strategy a nightmare.
5. Everyone’s first time through the d00nz.
The support role is definitely welcome, i miss having that as a thing in MMOs now. The only real downside is the fact that the only thing that makes support viable in ff11 is refresh instead of other interesting things. Also the Playonline is horrible but I have a weird feeling that if it wasn't there anymore I wouldn't be comfortable with it.
It's much more than refresh nowdays
The old skool videos are cool but as you seem like a pretty casual ffxi player, seeing you tackle some new challenging content like harder unms/HTbfs, omen and new dynamis with less than ideal setups would be cool to see.
Ah skill ups.....fun times on RDM.
Capping parry and shield was fun with getting a whole load of mandys and letting them hit me with phalanx on 😂
Felt good when you see all skills capped
Just watched this after starting FFXI for the first time last week and getting playonline working and finding out what the hell I am supposed to do on quests were my two biggest barriers to enjoying the game. Even with a guide I struggled with some of these quests and it didnt help I did not have a map (didnt know I needed one at the time) On one I got so lost I just let an enemy kill me so I could warp back to the starting town. A minimap would also be very nice.
Only played for a few hours and honestly i wont be able to play properly again for a few months but despite its frustrations I can see its charm and am hoping I can at least get the rhapsodies of vana`diel done.
Fame grind... I came back a while ago and made a new guy with a bunch of friends to try out all the new stuff and loved it ..then i remembered to get these things i need, i got to do the fame quests (yag necklaces .Sheep, cornets ) that right there almost made me quit again
Frostbite lol yea... FFXI was beautiful and honestly the best mmorpg I have ever played. That said though, they needed to tone down the grind. The grind existed for EVERYTHING!
Yeah I came back fresh a couple months ago after being away for almost 10 years and I'd completely forgotten about all the prep work grinding that had to be done on a new character. Maxing out fame, doing the missions, the Limit Break quests, etc. It went much quicker than it did in the past but it was still a real slog doing that nonsense again LOL
Capping parrying and throwing on my NIN75 are still two of the most tedious things I've ever done in my life lol. Remember when Windows Vista and Windows 7 broke POL? Hahahaha. And we've all been lulled to sleep by the prelude music waiting 14 hours for a colossal version update to download. Have you ever used POL Chat or Mail? Did you ever play Tetra Master during maintenance? I still kinda wish they hadn't removed Tetra Master, though it was kinda silly that you had to buy a Content ID for it.
Launchers.... I wish they'd just embed the login system into the game. Would make it way easier to play on linux distros. This goes for XIV as well. That music tho.
In response to #2: Pineapple juice was a thing. As was hMP gear. You very much did not need a RDM or BRD for refresh.
If you didn't use Windower, ALT+TAB would kick you out of the game. So not only did pretty much every quest require a google, you'd also have to either log out or use third party software to do the actual googling.
POL great #1! Between the volume and the time hit it right on the head.
Ok, I stopped playing shortly after Seekers came out. The Yugioh/WoWing of the numbers and scaling finally got to me. Just giant numbers, everywhere, seemingly only to make casuals feel better about themselves.
When did SE let you play with a full party of bots, and how hard is it to get them?
Also, holy crap, that menu. Talking about storage woes and the return-to-sender cycle doesn't do justice to seeing the huge stack of menu options now available:
Mog Safe
Mog Safe 2: The Sequel!
Storage
Mog Locker
Mog Satchel
Mog Sack
Mog Case
Mog Wardrobe
Mog Wardrobe 2: A Mog Wars Story
Mog Wardrobe 3: Solo
Mog Wardrobe 4: R2 Returns
You used to need to do quests in order to expand these slots. They varied from time-consuming to expensive, usually both.
Menu Fantasy XI: Online
Finally doing some dynamis, getting sky unlocked and then my account got hacked by rmt. I sign in one day to find I got banned for harassement when I wasnt even playing. Me and my friend who played the game(name was Zanadul, remora server represent). We tried to contact square enix but they didnt want to believe there was any rmt activity.
Yeah... I have great memories of this game but never progressed far and was always poor. The learning curve was so severe. Incredibly frustrating to play.