Please Open If Horizon Had A $1 Monthly Fee Again

You know you can just set the flag in the account settings right?

I actually move between countries every time I post just to make it my sock accounts look really authentic.

This entire web site is actually just two people.

Rofl at who called Niflheim a sock account.

Thats boring

Retail players just want to try to get more people to pay and play retail. We know not everyone who has played it before likes the current state of retail. Either classic or gtfo or XIV only. I know, I've tried.

You would think they'd be nicer in public spaces if that were the case, but in my experience it has pretty consistently been the exact opposite, just a ton of gatekeeping and trolling.

I play retail anyway but I can see why a lot of other people wouldn't want to, its not hard to have a negative interaction that would turn the average person away before even installing the game. The subreddit has gotten better over the last year or so, but everywhere else is still a cesspool.

This is why I play the more superior MMO.

Thats why Horizon stans are spamming MrHappy with "COME TO HORIZON WERE BETTER", right?

I don't remember implying that both communities weren't shitty. One is just shitty in public.

I know
thats why we constantly remind the Horizon stans how shitty they are.

Nobody has more reason to hate Horizon than I do, but even so they aren't the only ones out there.

Its not hard to understand why people dislike it though. Mainly the fact most have been playing for over a decade and grew up w/the game, they are actively paying a subscription and others are stealing those same assets for free and lastly they are actively trying to recruit anyone interested in XI to their space. Just imagine if someone created a private server for XIV and went to XIV forums and youtube videos and spammed comments saying "COME TO MY P SERVER ITS BETTER" they would be shot down so quickly by the entire community. But because most have become jaded ex XI players, they are content shitting on the real deal. It isn't the entire XI community, most don't even post on forums.. just people posting in response to them. Most other private servers aren't in the same position so we mostly ignored them for ages.

It irks me a little that I keep seeing FFXI [RETAIL] on all youtube videos now.. like really.

SE is a very strange company. I mean, if SE were SEGA then XI would have been shutdown a long time ago, and we are forced to move to XIV with no other options.

Oh hey, PSO private server is still alive, right?

(No, I am not publicly welcoming people to try out Horizon. I think it has enough active players.)

That isn't that weird. Lots of MMO content creators across lots of different games do this.

I've been paying my subscription fee since 2005, it has never lapsed. Even when I wasn't playing anymore it was one of those things where I was like "Yo that game was amazing and I want them to have my money." I get that I'm probably the minority when it comes to that, but probably not the only one. I did the same with WoW up until Shadowlands, which was so bad it made me cancel finally after almost 20 consecutive years. :(

There is a lot of speculation that this would have been XI's fate as well had they not made it a main series title. Square hasn't been averse to shutting down other games that have stopped performing that weren't main titles. (The First Soldier and Chocobo GP come to mind right away.)

"Hey, if you're interested in coming back, there's a popular private server called Horizon that is pretty close to the FFXI experience you remember."

If the above line actually recruits people to Horizon instead of Retail, that speaks pretty poorly of Retail.

And of course, anyone who reads the above comment would see Draylo REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEing over the mention of Horizon, which probably acts as a deterrent for people who might be interested in retail.

I think its less to do with the content available and more to do with the actual act of advertising, which Square does exactly none of.

So yeah even if they're doing the world's laziest advertising, its still better than the nothing that is done for retail.

I seen those job adjustments

Wait actually I lied, some of the best cards in the Final Fantasy TCG are XI cards. Then again, they also do a piss poor job of advertising for that product as well.

I stand by what I said. If the 20+ years of retail content can't sway someone over a sentence from an internet stranger, that's pretty telling.

Was worried this thread was dead for a bit, phew

I mean I'm not saying you're wrong, just pointing out that honestly it is probably even simpler than you're making it out to be.

Beyond just that though, private servers have also made sign up and installation completely brain dead. Yet retail still has the world's worst onboarding process known to man, and that's before you even so much as manage to give them your credit card. (And I hear its the same for XIV too, yikes.)

FFTCG is actually kinda sick but nobody plays it cause nobody knows it exists, its a sad circle of life. It also has a lot of really great art for XI characters...

One of my irl friends just came in second place at their world championship last weekend tho, free trip to Japan was probably nice.

Things like this serve as a testament to just how great of a game base FFXI is. There's a Mt Everest of dumb ***associated with playing the game and it still managed to be popular.

FFTCG has some pretty nice-looking cards. both of them cakes looking delish.

So I'm confused, do you or do you not want people to play retail? Cause uh...

Homsar isn't anti-retail. He just isn't anti-HorizonXI.

And he's right. In spite of everything, XI still has tens of thousands of players. At its core, FFXI is a very good video game. It has a cool world, deep game mechanics, and more stuff to do in it than most people could ever hope to experience. The fact that we put up with crap like PlayOnline is testament to that.

I don't care if people play retail or not.

To be clear, FFXI has tens of thousands of auction house using characters which can include dollar mules, alt accounts, etc... the number of players is up for debate.

I know a guy who has like 100 characters all on his own...

Sales rate is ALWAYS by server; the difference in browse vs item page is that one is more heavily cached, so you're seeing drift.

HA. Zero chance. Sorry.

The reason that I use the pessimistic math on the database page is because there's so many possible scenarios for those AH transactions. For every dude filling 15 mules with AH goods, you've got someone like me, with a full boat sub, who hasn't made an AH transaction since November 2021. Server on-line population would potentially get us closer, but it wouldn't account for hexaboxers or people having staggered playtimes unless you started just polling every server all the time, which seems a little pointless given how far off your dataset would still be.

tl,dr: Not even I know how many people actually play retail, and I have more data than anyone except POSSIBLY the Windower/Ashita teams, and even then, we have different and potentially conflicting information. Well, and Square, but they're never telling us a damn thing about population, you can be sure of that.