FFXI

Games like Ultima Online and EverQuest were brutal because in addition to being absolutely punishing and time intensive, you had PvP and players screwing each other over completely within the game mechanics.

Then FFXI came along and presented a world that was just as brutal and time consuming but got rid of alignments and factions and pretty much all PvP. They united the players by making the developers the real common enemy. And it created the best community ever.

Wasn't the Absolute Virtue Boss like a massive server Herculean task to take down? I will get into XI after I'm done with Tendiewalker.

Absolute Virtue was only ever killed by finding exploits all of which got patched out afterward, it was never beaten "legitimately". Until of course they raised the level cap after 14 came out and now it's no big deal

Kek. The devs were just salty. I wonder if they will ever make a boss as hard as Absolute Virtue

i think it never got a legit defeat until level cap increase, though one method that was experimented with modus veritas (timing multiple together for an insta kill) was patched pretty quickly?

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>Wasn't the Absolute Virtue Boss like a massive server Herculean task to take down?
nah
the tl;dr of it basically is
>he can use basically every ability in the game unlimited # of times
>only way to turn this shit off is for people to react, using their own special abilities at the EXACT same time
>the player versions of them have a 2 HOUR cooldown though
>servers were kind of laggy cuz game was designed for dial-up internet, so actually timing it was pointless
>even if you turned off all of his special abilities, he was still a stupidly high lvl, had strong normal abilities and had 2 pets that couldnt be killed, slept, bound or dealt with
>even just getting to the point where you can spawn him is maybe 2 weekends of work for a group of 18 people
>for only a 30% chance for him to spawn, IMMEDIATELY after the 2nd or 3rd hardest boss in the game that was a 30min fight (so no prep/resting time)

he was designed to be an ultimate challenge that couldnt be beaten.
that was the game's whole design. no matter how good your lvl and gear was, there was always a low lvl bunny out there that could still 1 hit you.
"Sea" (the CoP expansions endgame content) was designed from the ground up to be brutally difficult.
only 20% of the player base could even beat the missions that gave you access to the end-game.
Pic related is a good example of an iconic FFXI boss that was bullshit levels of hard with almost no reason to kill him other than "we need his item to spawn the next tier of boss"
this faggot in my pic could just come back to life after killing him
10 times
30 times
some groups have had this faggot even revive 100+ times
and his item he drops needed to spawn the boss isnt even a guaranteed drop

this
after Chains of Promathia and how casualized the MMO industry got from that point onwards, we'll never get MMO content as unforgiving, grindy and difficult as this again.

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Man. I have heard that stories, but holy shit that was FUCKING unforgiving.
>pic related
Wew lad. I wish the devs decided to take the gloves off and just start kicking the players' shit in. But alas, casuals ruin everything again.

We just had a 500 reply XI thread earlier today

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>i think it never got a legit defeat until level cap increase
correct
it was unofficially beaten maybe a dozen times using glitches and exploits at different points of the game's history but he goes down in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest legitimately undefeated video game boss.
at one point players managed to glitch him inside of the terrain, which got patched
then a change to his max HP meant he could be Kclub zerged for like a week, but it was still risky, required using abilities on 2 hour cooldowns and weapons that cost 40mil gil each (18 of them)

even with his special abilities disabled and his pets kited to the opposite side of the map (needed a party of 6 to deal with each of the 2 pets), his sheer level, TP moves and regen made him almost impossible to beat as it is
t.i was in a linkshell on Hades that did extensive AV testing. I had the most "points" for Sea loot so the faggots waited until I was at work to pop and kill him 6 times during the week that he could be kclub zerged

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Doesn't mean we can't have another one. And I like these threads. Even though I didn't get to play the game before I want to know more and read about the plot/lore tidbits because I'm a sucker for that stuff.

I will never get tired from saying it: Devs need to start pushing the players' shit in again to stop the casuals.

It's not even that the game was hard that I miss, it's that we actually had freedom about how we wanted to get EXP and how we wanted to use the game's jobs, in newer MMOs all the jobs are straight up labeled "TANK, DAMAGE, HEALER" and the dungeons are just like Zelda dungeons with specific puzzles that have one way to clear them. The challenge in old MMOs was about trying to scrape by and form strategies with your limited resources, new MMOs have one set strategy and after you know what it is the only challenge becomes getting your idiot party members to understand right from left and execute it.

tl;dr I don't miss the game because it was "hard", I miss the game because the difficulty was in service of giving the players interesting decisions

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yeah the level difference was huge in FFXI
the fact he was lvl 95 and players were lvl 75 meant that even a perfectly geared, fully merited damage dealer could maybe only do 5 or 10 dmg hits to him
spells were pointless, he was immune to all status effects and resisted magic heavily
and he had something retarded like 300hp/sec of regen

this was a game where, after about lvl 10 or 12 or so, you're basically incapable of soloing a mob that's more than 5 or 10 lvls lower than you

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PW was a "Herculean task". AV just wasn't a realistic possibility because its '''mechanics''' were deliberately obscure and your only feedback for them was whether or not you were fucking dead instantly hours down the line, if your connection was even good enough to to send packets in time in the first place. Realistically if the game remained in that state without further changes and the only method of figuring out was experimenting within the game itself, the correct solution would still be unknown.

It was a very different time.

Not going to say it wasn't frustrating trying to level some classes (even classes that were considered mandatory/highly suggested subclasses)
Though, I mained WHM a lot. Which was night and day compared to leveling anything recommended to be its subjob.

The world was designed around things taking a lot of time and teamwork. Which got the community to coaless in a way we'll likely never see again.

Hell, I'd kill to just see the interesting combinations that the subjob mechanic brought to the game in other games. But even its successor XIV has fallen into the holy trinity is the only way mold.

It would make normies suicide irl because of how anti-casual it was. I loved styling on n00bs by getting exp chains off of IT mobs solo as bst.

I can't find the source but I'm pretty sure in like 2019 one of the XI producers straight up admitted they didn't intent for AV to be beatable and the "hints" were bullshit. This was of course well after AV was obsolete so it flew under the radar a bit.

Until you find out the economy is permafucked by 4-5 guys and you'd better suck up to them or you get no parties.

This popped up on YouTube, how much am I going to hate this video Yea Forums?

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Due to their culture and biology Mithra are probably very forward and even aggressive in seeking relationships with them. They will ask you out, will try to win you over, and compete with one another to win your affection.

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>in newer MMOs all the jobs are straight up labeled "TANK, DAMAGE, HEALER"
i hate this shit too
XI did jobs right, they all filled a specific niche in some way, shape or form

yeah makes sense
no-one wants to play a game where everything in the game is beatable
knowing there's always something out there that can fucking end your shit at any time makes a good game worth playing

>Devs need to start pushing the players' shit in again to stop the casuals.
unfortunately filtering casuals doesnt make money and we live in a time now where games are about making max $$$ first for maximum Wall St investor returns
its also why vidya gfx etc havent really improved, every game now is made to be able to run on 10 year old hardware so it can be sold to the maximum possible amount of people

watch Mr Happy's let's play instead.
its a good time watching a happy old FFXI vet return to the game after a 10 year break.

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I remember in Wings of the Goddess when you finally meet a male one the entire female army is drooling over his dick

All mithra are biological males. It's true, I read it in "Welcome to the NHK" and that's a real novel.

>Anons that played XI in the 2000's, what was it like at the time?
Well it was this whole alternate reality and culture of its own. This other life I escaped into. In terms of gameplay the world was bigger and more dangerous. It took time to traverse the map and to speed it up, some, you'd pay white mages for warps to certain areas or ask a black mage to teleport you home. It took time, knowledge, and some preparation to reach certain areas.

Well, that made XIV successful in sales, but I get your point. Class identity is almost non-existent these days.

Don't care. Don't follow e-celeb scum.

>also why vidya gfx etc havent really improved, every game now is made to be able to run on 10 year old hardware so it can be sold to the maximum possible amount of people
More gameplay, not necessarily more graphics.

From waht I remember it's actually an okay review, despite being an e-cuckleb

>they all filled a specific niche in some way, shape or form
Except the ones which were just bad and you'd get laughed at for playing.

Bard was amazing because it wasn't one of the generic 3.

>only 20% of the player base could even beat the missions that gave you access to the end-game.
man i miss that
back then, getting access to end-game was a ~4 month SLOG of the most brutally hard dungeons and boss fights to unlock
that first time entering Sea felt like such a fucking achievement.
now MMO endgame content is just locked behind a $30 paywall that literally every cunt gets access to the nano-second after using their mom's credit card

They probably go after any hume or elvaan man that visits Windurst too. If too many Mithra immigrated to the other nations I'd bet the hume and elvaan women would support a ban on that immigration and the Mithra's expulsion.

chains of promathia had so many god damn filters it's crazy to think about in retrospect. even the promys were huge filters but then there was 6-4. motherfucking 6-4, the airship battle with ultima and omega was so brutal if you didn't have polymers and the worst part was it took away your exp when you died so getting filtered could end up with you losing multiple levels.

they truly made you work to see the story content but it elevated the fuck out of the story content when it followed an extremely difficult fight and there were no youtube videos or streamers so only a handful of people had seen those cutscenes. it felt special, especially the ending cutscene to CoP was was just amazing at the time.

>chains of promathia had so many god damn filters it's crazy to think about in retrospect.
It's part of what broke me back in the day. I had put a lot of effort into trying to complete CoP and reach {Sea} but it kept running into road blocks and having to start over. That, coupled with other things, made me just give up the game entirely.

I think the biggest strength of XI from a design standpoint was that it was a game where metagaming wasn't possible for everyone because you almost never had optimal resources and conditions. Yes this guy on the wiki says the fight is easily cheesed with a Paladin and 3 Summoners but it might take you days just to find people with those jobs leveled who will help you. And because leveling a job took months you couldn't just do it yourself. So you have to try and new strategy with the jobs you CAN find. It's true there were also elitists and people who refused to even play if you didn't do things 100% tested-and-approved way, but if you went in the cracks and found other people willing to experiment and takes risks that's where the real joy was. While you might never be the first person to clear a specific fight you had a good chance of being the first person to clear it with a certain party makeup, that is if you were willing to risk your EXP

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Modern players can't appreciate how much time and effort it took most us to reach 75 back in the day or get some relic armor.

eh i did Maat's Cap twice
every job excels at doing something or a handful of things
unfortunately the sweaty WoW-raid types who min-max everything only cared about using the 3-4 job classes they were most familiar with.

yeah
>Brd excelled at crowd control (low cooldown sleepgas) and buffing
>Thf excelled at enmity control and improved your groups drop rate
>Sam excelled at setting up skillchains
>Drg did fucking insane dmg to flying type mobs and could also front-line heal and do stupid amounts of burst dmg
>War could do a bit of fucking everything. tank died? no worries. mob is weak to an obscure weapon? gotchu
>Bst could solo bosses that needed 8-10 people to fight, in a group he could provide frontline DPS without needing to be healed
>Smn did disposable hateless damage nukes while providing healing support with their fuckin ridiculous mana pool
>Rng did stupid amounts of damage from far away in perfect safety
>Blm did big dmg nukes and crowd control (with a long cooldown but much more potent sleepga)
>Mnk did constant & stupid amounts of damage over time which was perfect for mobs with fast enmity decay
>Whm did the best heals, hands down
>Rdm excelled at debuffing and had an endless mana-pool so it was a good healer for long long fights with no rest
etc etc you get the idea

now everything is
DO I HIT STUFF?
DO I GET HIT?
OR DO I HEAL GUY WHO GET HIT?
casualized zoomer shit

So could end up losing LEVELS from dying too much?

>died so getting filtered could end up with you losing multiple levels.
could you imagine the modern ass-pain and Kotaku articles on Tumblr and Reddit these days if a new game came out where you lost 10% of your exp and could delvl, multiple times?
not to mention ignoring the fact that losing 10% of your exp meant you just lost 2 hours of that exp party you were in last night

In the old days, yes. Though you'd have to die several times to level down. If that ever happened to me it wasn't more than once or twice.

It was the first MMO I ever played, and I got to play it with my highschool friends. Though I never got to play it much because it was on my friends dads credit card and eventually was cancelled when I lost contact with my friend, but the time I did play it was incredible, there was no other game I felt as excited to play.

>divine might with 1 paladin and 12+ black mages
>had to spend like an entire week to find the black mages for it
>many players had their job/class hidden so you had to actually know max level black mages to ask them
Now there'd be a group of 12 Black Mages and 1 Paladin ready to sell you a run at any time.

I mean, I know about losing EXP from the old Korean MMOs (RO and what not), but delevel. That's fucking rad and punishing.

this is what i like about XI private servers
people are still chill and cool like the old days, for the most part
i remember I needed a Dynamis Windurst clear on the Era server, so I just started a run with like 4 randoms
we kept shouting and advertising the run in the all chat.
30min later half the server had showed up to help out, kill shit and get people clears, just so they'd have more newbros to do Dynamis Xarc with

From what I've seen the interface is still kind of fucked and not optimized for widescreen monitors; am I wrong? I'm planning on playing it one of these days.

yeah man nothing like putting on some fresh gear to go out leveling and then end up getting deleveled and have to do the naked walk of shame back home

and this fucking sound and graphic fx played when it happened too
EVERYONE around would hear it and see a naked dead guy on the ground (cuz all your gear has been unequipped cuz now you cant wear it anymore)
youtube.com/watch?v=iTIwBDNDO4M

Like I said, it usually didn't happen too much. Sure, you might die in an EXP party but you'd get a raise and you just lost maybe 30 or 45 minutes of experience points.

Is ff11 just the mmo equivalent of an arcade game designed to eat quarters

>Now there'd be a group of 12 Black Mages and 1 Paladin ready to sell you a run at any time.
You mean like in current retail nuXI and on private servers? yeah

I haven't played this game in 10 years but I despair every day that I will never cuddle an olive-skinned amazonian catgirl

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On dying you lost, iirc, 10% of TNL in xp, which if it pushed you under the amount you've built up since leveling, would drop your level.

Getting Raise cast on you restored some of that loss, which could level you back up.

In general, you got 100-200 xp per mob. And it took a few thousand to level up.

FF11 was considered easy compared to the MMOs that came before it.

Yes but resurrection spells would lessen the penalty for dying. The highest one that only White Mages had would give you back 90% of the EXP you lost so it wasn't so bad, the base one was only 50%. People would pay high level White Mages to come out to obscure locations to raise them because it was much better than the alternative. White Mages were in an amazing spot to do it because they had access to teleport spells and many would sit in the main hub selling teleports to people so many were interested in earning extra gold and would happily come raise you for the right price.

Same

Mithra will always be among my favorite fictional races

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Though, that stopped once you hit the cap, right? Still, that sounds like a fun mechanic.

Now that's a proper use of Raise to rake money.

Which private server should I play on

And now it's even easier, I hate what it has become but understand why it is the way it is now (trusts, books, increased XP etc)