SE DMCA Against Private Server Streams?!?!?

There are numerous streamers who still play Horizon XI without ever having received a strike or takedown of any kind.

Wouldn't SE have seen all of them? Why were only a few selected?

All of the claims were made on content from November.

How might these claims be enforced if streamers do not include the words "Horizon XI" or "Private server" anywhere on their stream?

Excellent question, simple answer, have you seen how they handle "who they ban" on retail? it is like playing a lottery to see who loses, at least as far as we can tell. make an example of "bad apples" and scaring people into compliance is kind of how they do things.

Ah, good ole Salvage bans. Square-Enix is really helping the private server community relive the golden years!

Expecting private servers to have working friend's lists is a bit much. That requires reverse engineering certain parts of the game that for good reason no one has really bothered with. Other platforms that are better at communicating exist on top of those reasons, so it's low priority for most private server developers.

It's easy to criticize hobbyist programmers when you know little to nothing about what reverse engineering a game like FFXI entails. There's criticisms to be made, but this expectation that if retail can do it so can private servers is a bit naive.

WingsXI figured it out, and that's the server that Aerec ripped off almost completely wholesale.

Besides, that goes against HorizonXI's entire goal. The whole server is built on the promise that they're going to gradually release every bit of content until they catch up to and then even transcend retail, only "we're going to do it right". They've promised ToAU is going to have Besieged and WotG is going to have Campaign.

But the actual engineers at ASB don't have any of that stuff. So either Aerec is lying that his team is so good at software that "Era-Plus" is the best thing since sliced bread, or he and his team can at least figure out how to turn on the Friend List function in his copy-pasted code.

All three of these points I made in what you quoted are things other private servers have solved: WingsXI had functioning friend lists, Eden has functioning Ballista, and as far as I'm aware, no other private server has issues with its chat filters.

Okay well nevermind, Video is already back up and the strike is gone. Guess they are shooting first and asking questions later...?

Wings is open source by the way, they could rip the friends list implementation if they wanted it.

Admittedly it was not the most clean version of it though, it was extremely heavy on the database so I can see why they wouldn't want it.

Ok. I will elaborate on my second question a bit.

How can SE, or anyone, know if a person is playing Horizon XI or another private server and not streaming on an official server unless it is specifically stated somewhere on the stream?

Unless they are willing to sit and watch the stream and pick out specific details, or unless they're willing to look up the player's name to try to find out if they're online on any official servers and in the exact spot they appear to be in on stream-- how can it be known?

Another question:

Are streamers who play on official servers in danger of getting DCMA strikes on Twitch? The licensing agreement states numerous ways in which it can be violated that don't explicitly state the use of a private server.

https://support.na.square-enix.com/rule.php?id=20&la=1&tag=authc


An example:



Basically, if you play music on your FFXI stream that isn't in the game, you are in violation of the licensing agreement.

Could it be possible that people are getting DCMA strikes over these kinds of violations?

You can easily tell in a second from literally looking at the screen the difference in private servers.

(Not if they have all the addons turned off and are sitting on a level 1 in the moghouse, but actually playing. There will be a party. That's non-existent under 99 in real ffxi)

The neon hair colours, off-putting music, cluttered UI, and chat logs filled with Yells outside of towns that say stuff like "WHM-burn 4/6 PST" tend to be a pretty quick giveaway when I'm trying to sniff them out.

What? I do stuff in parties on retail all the time.

This post is going to make you angry, but you've earned it with your attitude.

If Square Enix has started banning, it's because they already felt fear; they should start by banning the RMT that infests their chat and work on creating content more often.

Creating content for FFXI is not profitable; if a streamer goes live with this game, it's for nostalgia and fun.

If you think anyone, except EIJIN, will make a living as a streamer, YouTuber, or TikToker with FFXI, you're living in the clouds. Also, you're behaving like a 10-year-old. You're around forty, behave and debate with maturity.

You've said nonsense like:

"They don't know how to program", the other servers have been active for years, and Horizon has been around for 1. Also, they program without a salary; they do it as a hobby. I'd like to see you programming content on a custom server. Why don't you ask Thorny how long it would take you to create a custom fight?

Horizon never said it would be a 100% accurate server; they always treated it as an ERA+ server. Even in their early podcasts, obviously, you didn't see them, and you have no idea what you're talking about.

Gwiveth already said it cost about 300 USD per month to maintain a server with 850 people. Now, think for a moment, how much do you think it costs to maintain a server that had peaks of 5000 last year and now has peaks of 2250 at nights?

Oh, Ninja paid for the server; maybe he made a donation like the 10k USD Gwiveth mentioned. But until AEREC, KIPLING show the receipts and accept it publicly, it's not certain. Also, it's in bad taste for someone donating to throw it in the face of others on a stream.

In conclusion, "Oh" I'm glad they're banning the content creators from Horizon.

Do you know how difficult it is to create content? Have you ever tried editing, streaming regularly, making shorts, and all that?

Why don't you do a 6-hour stream of FFXI-RETAIL and show your static run of Odyssey, Sortie, then give a tour of all the escha HELMS, the unity KINGS, a 3-man of the omen bosses, show us how you complete wave 3 of dynamis d, and finally try to entertain us for 30 hours a week, okay?

At the same time, create content for YouTube, 10-minute videos with text changes, gifs, videos, photos lasting no more than 3 seconds on the screen, three weekly, plus the 30 hours of streaming.

Also, make 6 weekly shorts for TikTok, 59 seconds each, changing transitions every 1.5 seconds.

All of this for 30 days, okay? And then you can make fun of content creators who have received strikes.

Oh, are you a Horizon lover? I'm not. I've criticized them heavily in their Discord, but I also don't behave like a brainless hater who throws hate just because "someone" doesn't like something. I'm not five years old, sorry.

Several servers have had many of the same issues because not all of the code is shared. Until recently the codebase has been a bit of a mess because of that. It still is in some respects, which is why ASB (Horizon) has plenty of bugs. They didn't fork Wings' code, it's LSB's. It's possible they borrowed bits of Wings' code, but from the sounds of it probably not. As for having Besieged, we'll see. At the least they are one of the most actively developed private servers and they've done a lot of custom stuff no one else has bothered to do before. If anyone is going to get besieged even partially working it's probably going to be them. It's a huge undertaking though to do it right.

That's the point I was making though. Reverse engineering FFXI and doing a good job of it in some respects is an enormous task. As much as some developers rely on wikis for certain information, they lack so many minute details about various content. For instance, it's old content now, but original Salvage was not as well documented as some would lead you to believe. A few minor details were never properly recorded, but those details matter if you actually care about proper emulation. In order to find those details a lot of research needs to be done. Most don't have the will or the time to commit to those tasks. Through hard work private servers can get close, but I won't say Horizon or any other server will ever be 1:1 to retail, that's impossible without a leak of the source code, which will never happen.



Yes? There's plenty of examples of Japanese companies sending out DMCAs even for things like reviews and the default behavior to places like Twitch and YouTube is to cater to any and all takedown requests. It's a ridiculous standpoint until you understand the hosting providers don't want to deal with anyone's bs or get sued.

Damn... you care... LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I apologize for getting under your (and probably others') skin. That was not my intent. I've been trying to use as subjective language as possible, but I guess I haven't done a great job of that.

I'm worried there's some misunderstanding here, though I'm open to you finding a quote of mine to prove otherwise. I haven't expressed any joy at the bans, nor even the situation. My only beef with the server is how difficult it's been to ignore, and I'm only hoping that these bans shut the community up.

It's been a very roundabout conversation. HorizonXI community members come in and say "HXI is the best way to play FFXI", then someone will point out how the server lacks content and features present in Retail and other private servers, to which the community responds with "but all of that and more is on the horizon! that's why it's called Era Plus!" But then it's pointed out that the HXI team has no development experience, to which the community (including yourself) are saying "But you can't expect them to have experience! This is a passion project!"

So... which is it? If Aerec isn't an expert in development, how are his promises of Era Plus ever going to bear fruit?

Frankly, I thought the idea of Era Plus was kinda cool. Where other private servers pick out one patch that they thought was best, HorizonXI's philosophy of "no one era was perfect, so we're going to climb through the content together, fixing the original devs' mistakes along the way" is a good way to do it. But then there's the rub again: Aerec nor anyone on his team has any idea what they're doing. They're never going to be able to make good on that idea. So far the only changes they've made to the CoP era of FFXI have been awful for balance.

Get a job lil bro.

No, you don't. You aren't exping in dunes or partying with 5 bsts, or farming sky pops as 75 <job>

And if you DID dunes party for some dumbass reason you'd be done in 15 seconds. Not make an entire stream out of gaining 1 level.

I don't think most people are to aware of things that might be missing when they are playing but, you might zone into an area but never see any mog tablet effects, also more obvious things like the server message, login screen, stating it out loud to your stream or in a response to a question like "what server are you on?", Missing NPC like walking by places where guide books or a maws should be. Most of those things would require someone pretty knowledgeable to even notice so idk if the employee reviewing it would know any of that.


It is possible, it does seem pretty dumb that twitch's process removes the footage being identified so the streamer can't even see what got them struck, they have a time stamp but no video to review XD so that I do agree is a bit broken on twitch's part.

But one thing is really true for every game, you only get to stream their content because it benefits them. when they perceive your stream is not benefiting them they it is within their power to remove you.

tell me about it.

just last week, for lunch I decided to try a local chinese restaurant for the first time. the staff was very friendly. as they rang me up at the register, one worker nudged the other and pointed at my shirt I was wearing. no doubt my official Final Fantasy XI Meat Mithkabob shirt caught their eye, I wear it proudly whenever I have the chance. but, I thought it was very strange, their smiles faded from their face and they suddenly ran into the back through the kitchen doors, and I heard a bunch of yelling. they finally came back blank faced with my food and rudely threw it on the counter. when I got back home, I opened my fortune cookie and saw this inside:

*** private servers
Look Actual Genuine players are now Flocking from FFXIV to try FF11 And Private servers are ruining FF11 retail revenue, so yea *** horizon
There is already a comment there Please check horizonxi lol

Dude said creating content and streaming is hard and time consuming

Cmon man, the only hard time consuming part is the initial setup. After that, its just log in and click "Go Live".

Yet that goes entirely against the philosophy of Era Plus, and contradicts every single point made in favor of HorizonXI. I know it's hard, I know it's a colossal undertaking. But that's the whole point of the server.

You're defending the inadequacy of the server by saying it will never be as good as other servers.

Really depends on the quality of content. If you're just logging on and playing while bullshitting, easy. If you plan out how to make something enjoyable and prepare visual aids and set up your stream deck (or other device) to make them easy to display.. it's considerably more work.

If you want to do bare minimum and stream to an audience of no one. Sure. There are plenty of people who do that.

Should I stream ffxi retail...

Nvm... I don't think people wanna hear me chewing on popeyes chicken strips while I fumble with my controller to kill v25 tree.

How many "Go live" streamers are there for every Logical?


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Am I missing something? I dont know ***about twitch or watching people play games. I'd rather play games instead of watching people play games, so its very possible I'm missing something here.

I kind of wish you weren't trying to use something I said to represent your point because there are a lot of things you aren't accounting for here that make your point invalid.

1.) We were spending $255 a month, but we also hosted three servers, not just one. We also were paying to have a dedicated hardware server instead of a virtual server. We had issues with getting DDOS'd constantly on our first host, so much so that because they hosted our VPS on a server box with many of their other customers, they threatened to suspend our service multiple times to "protect their other customers." To avoid that possibly being an issue again in the future, we rented our own dedicated hardware through a different company. I'm sure you can see why that would be more expensive.

2.) Wings ran on a software called Topaz. Topaz was significantly less efficient than LandSandBoat, which is the software Horizon is based on. I forget the exact number, but processing complexity and speed is improved by something like 2-3 times, so really there wouldn't be much reason for Horizon to be spending much more than Wings was. They had more time to hunt for a good deal than I did, so I bet they are paying less.

3.) I'm actually really glad that the money Ninja tried to donate never actually went thru. I actually don't think Ninja is a bad dude or anything and I don't think he would have even done this, but I could see a situation where someone who spent that sort of money might feel like the server is obligated to bend to his whims. I'm pretty stubborn so I don't even know if I'd have let him, but I am glad I never even had to end up in that situation to begin with. He and Aerec are long time irl friends so if he's giving them any money, (I guess he claimed he did, idk) I suspect it is just because he wants to keep playing 75 capped private servers but doesn't want to put in the work to learn to do things himself, and it is a good way to help support his friend at the same time.

To add to #3, Ninja specifically has at least tried to do things "the right way" by reaching out and trying to start a dialogue with Square about the possibility of paying out of pocket to have them do an actual classic server, and they left him on read. When I found out about that it seemed like a pretty clear sign to me that even if they thought there was money to be made by doing classic, they just aren't motivated by money. So I think people here are right about what's going on right now being a point of pride more than anything else.

No doubt it's all garbage content, it is on Horizon after all. I was just saying that some streaming does require effort to produce. I can't honestly say I've watched any of them to comment on if they put that effort in.

There are some decent XI streamers, Sly and Alr jump to mind immediately. I also like watching Ashenbubs when he occasionally plays. There was also that one dude for a while who was streaming himself playing XI on the oldest/crappiest hardware he could find, that was always a trip.

Horizon server costs are $414 a month right now, Ninja did make a sizeable donation to the tune of $5k, total donations to the server are $18,223.