Anyone still playing FFXI?

[PsaY]

Umm.. another one of these posts.

I am pretty burned out from FFXI after starting WoW I relize I don't miss it. But don't know what to do with a account I put so much time into.

So what did everyone else do about FFIX? or are you still keeping it and playing WoW?

[frott]

I played a WHM, my friends BLM and whatever the warrior class was. Warrior?

Anyway, in the beginning people didn't understand combos too well, and didn't get why BLMs were good. I got instagroups as a WHM, my friends who didn't play as much as me didn't. We levelled apart quickly, and after realizing the AGONY OF THE GRIND (even by EQ standards) coupled with the really, really shitty itemization in the game we kinda fell disinterested.

The nail in the coffin was the fact that it was impossible for us to do quests together once I had done them. Pretty fucking obnoxious.

FFXI lasted longer than City of Heroes for me, but not by much.

I actually liked that card game that was a part of the pre-FFXI "operating system" interface. Addictive fun.

[frott]

double post..............

[Fammaden]

The people that I played with and who now play WoW as well e-bayed I think. I plan to just let my account rot like I did with my EQ account. The difference being that from what I can gather it is very possible that my EQ account still exists and could be reactivated, while Square will soon be deleting my FFXI account.

All in all it is not a bad game but the end game has serious issues that I find intolerable. Some people thrive on those same issues, so to each their own. It really is a hardcore MMO, not just beacause of the intense and endless xp grind, but because that mentality transfers to every aspect of the game. Everything just takes so long. Great if you have huge chunks of playtime, a high tolerance for tedium, and a love of MMO's that make you work for every reward. Not so great for me and fairly annoying for anyone who finds 19 year olds that like to stroke their e-penis over the junk they can get first because they have 80 hours a week to play and/or botted up gil more efficiently than you similarly annoying.

[Fammaden]

Originally posted by frott
I played a WHM, my friends BLM and whatever the warrior class was. Warrior?

Well, there was a Warrior class but everyone seemed to use Ninjas or Paladins as tanks.

[Suineg]

Short answer: No noone is playing FF11

[Onte]

I cancelled in Dec.

The largest problem I had (probably not easily understood unless you've spent some time in the game): You start playing the game in June, your buddies don't start playing until the following January. When you jump into the wacky world of FFXI, you start questing immediately - it eventually feels as though everything you do requires a quest of some sort. By the time your buddies start playing the game, you're already hopelessly ahead of them in terms of questing and character development. It's great that you could switch jobs, no need to make 39 alts, but if you're going to actually play these jobs, you find yourself caught between your cash flow and your inventory space.

Eventually your newbie friends hit 20 and needed 6 hours to feed a fucking chocobo for a quest, then they need to work on gobbie bags but low and behold, they don't have enough fame in the smaller cities to do them, so back they go for a week or two to at least one of the 3 starter cities to work quests. Then they'll need to work subjobs - so you're back into the grind with another 2-3 jobs (that you personally know you will never use but are only leveling to hang with your friends) so they have the "appropriate" shit leveled to use with their main jobs.

And there's a lot more to the game than killing, leveling and questing, oh yes! Your newbie friends will want to craft, also! Everyone wants to experience a game to its fullest, right? So not only are they farming to buy gear, they're farming for crafting! Oh yes! And you're farming too! You're farming to buy gear for jobs you're never going to use other than leveling with your newbie friends (God forbid putting some gear drops for low levels in the game)! And by farming, I mean killing mobs 30 levels under you for stacks of fucking hornet wings to sell at the auction house because just about every decent spot on my particular server was eaten and conquered by hoardes of IGN farmers. (I won't even touch that subject.)

I started FFXI with a group of friends who eventually quit and went back to EQ. A second round of friends came over after round 1 quit, that's where my problems started. You put so much time and energy into developing this stupid, gay-looking character that you find yourself not wanting to do the Star Onion Brigade quest a 4th and 5th time with your newbie friends. You don't want to go back through the Dunes a 5th or 6th time, the shit is too painful and too frustrating. It's hard enough getting a single group to learn HOW to group, having to level up low level characters with that sea of stupidity turns into torture after about your 3rd time. And I don't know what it is about the game but new folks will not go anywhere without an escort, so guess how many stone monument tours I led. When all was said and done, my main only hit 50 but I had an entire fucking stable full of 20-40's that were leveled only to pass time with my friends who were attempting to reach my main's level so I could incorporate my main (whm) into the group. Waiting....waiting....waiting.... The game is too painful to be a game. I had fun (until all the waiting, which is no one's fault, just the game we chose) but I don't regret quitting - in fact, I miss EQ1 more than I miss FFXI.

[Magnum PI]

That was so depressing Onte I just shot my dog. Damnit that's twice now. Hate this messageboard.

[HydroponiK]

I pretty much stopped playing once I got into WoW open beta, and have been playing that ever since. My FFXI account is still active but it will probably be cancelled once I give away all my gil & gear to my friends that have decided to stay with it.

While the game was very solid gameplay-wise, there are just too many fucking time sinks inplemented into the game to stunt your characters growth. I got to level 63 on my main in about a year's time, and am some what sad I never got to see the end game, but I don't think I can put myself thru that torture again. I've had my fun while it lasted, but it's time to move on.

[AladainAF]

At last check, FFXI has over a million subscribers. I would imagine most are Japanese though. I enjoyed FFXI up to 52, then it just got.. i dont know, too.. fake?

What really nailed it in the coffin for me though was the mass nerfage of the game a few months after the US release. I mean, come on. You have the game out in Japan for over a year, and then release it in the US to play on the exact same servers as a bunch of level 70s, and then the game gets beat to hell by the nerf stick? Just a bad idea. It started the notion that Square catered to the Japanese audience more than the NA audience, and most people really didnt like that and quit.

[0hz]

I played to lv7 then quit because the game bored me to tears and ran like shit on my PC.

Amazingly though, some people certainly enjoy it. Two friends of mine played the game in every free second of their lives for a year. I introduced them to WoW and they loved it but they still haven't made it past lv33. One of them is an eternal lv28 who hasn't logged in since mid-December.

[keflex]

I quit at ~30 after realizing that this game was, in every possible way, slower than EQ and in some respects, much, much worse.

Bot fishing was kind of fun, though.

[Onte]

I haven't tried WoW or EQ2 yet so I cannot compare. But next time I play a game where someone starts yapping about scheduling a "static group"...I'm going to jump out the window after deliberately setting my hair on fire. (I live on the bottom floor, it'll be a killer 2 foot fall)

[Erathlyn]

there were a lot of aspects of FFXI that were good. I played it about a year and a half before quitting. Quit because of a lack of an end game (imagine competing with 3 other groups for 3 hours every night just for a 1% chance of getting an item that would improve the overall effectiveness of your character by 3-4%. Just stupid... not to mention, imagine having to pay 250pp in EQ in order to get 2.5 hours in plane of fear, pre velious... that sums up dynamis)

I think SEX (square-enix) really screwed up the release and could have gotten a lot more customers if they didn't disperse english players way too far. FFXI is a very community/group oriented game, and fragmenting the english player base was one of the worse things they did. Everything falls apart when you can only effectively communicate with 1/4-1/7 people in a group/person focused game.

FFXI also suffered a lot from mob competition problems... Zone instancing would have done absolutely beautiful things for this game. Nothing more frustrating than getting an exp group together just to find out you have nothing to kill.

Things that were good about FFXI:
AH system easily the best I've seen in a MMORPG. WoW sucks here.
Server reliability , patch upgrades were near flawless. Probably has to do with Japanese quality standards and the fact that they were making the game for the PS2 also (not as much room for bugs). Clearly clearly superior to WoW here.
People focused game - if you had friends who played with you a lot you could do quite a bit here. An MMORPG where you actually interacted a lot with ppl vs a lot of the solo aspect in WoW.
BCNM battles - hard fights with (ffxi standards) good items
Game storyline - pretty good, one of the more involved storylines I've seen in a MMORPG. WoW has good storylines also but the approaches are very different in both games.
Class flexibility - nice being able to stick with one character yet try different elements of the game. Main job/sub Job also created more flexibility (even if it was limited to viable combos - still created more interest).
Very well designed game world - FFXI is one of the very few games where I can say I literally went everywhere... there was no corner of the map I hadn't seen, and all the times it was because I was doing something that I wanted/needed to do (no exploring just to explore). WoW has a lot of areas that some people never set foot into (no need). A lot of art/ambiance of the game world was well done.

Just to be clear I'm not praising FFXI in its entirety, but there were some aspects of the game that were/are very good.

[Cybsled]

The class flexibility of FFXI was also a downside, in that you had to level each class seperately. Given how hard it was for certain classes to get pickup groups, you can see the issue depending on which class you chose. That topped with the insane XP grinding.