Another FFXI Private Server.

Honestly if a bunch of my old ffxi friends invited me to check out a private server (not Horizon) I would probably give it a go. Because why not? If the community is solid it could be fun. Its amusing to see RA and Draylo cry about them. All they accomplish is bumping the thread.

Livestreaming yourself using third party tools in an online game where you're not allowed third party tools is just straight up *** stupid.

Sorry, not sorry.

Having played on private servers that have level sync enabled, I can tell you the normal online population was ~1k and I never found myself waiting for parties for very long. You do find yourself in dunes parties for quite a while because of level sync. The experience is significantly different from old school FFXI where you were stuck waiting for hours if not days for a group. The player understanding of the game is so much higher now that generally dune parties are mostly melee zergs. There were some SC/MB mechanics with mages but it was far from consistent.

Private servers may make a lot of changes to content and equations lock them to an era but they are not the same experience as that era.

Fellow former Alexander player o/ it's actually kind of crazy that you showed up - the person I check here for you may know because I see a mutual friend of ours Orenwald commented on your profile lol. Do you remember Temaruma or did you know him?

It was actually worse than that. It's one thing to stream yourself using third party tools, but he was openly discussing specific details about several tools. Blatant disregard.

I remember Orenwald, he was a good guy that helped me a lot when I first started. But I don't think I remember Temaruma, no. I started in Cynth's linkshell, can't remember the name of it. Then I moved on to Slowpoke.

Gotcha no worries. Thought I'd ask just in case! Orenwald is still alive and kicking on FFXIV last I saw in Shadowbringers, I accidentally ran into him while doing the main story quest haha. Thanks for letting me know though :)

What server does he play on? I think my character is on Brynhildr.

Excalibur https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/3062729/

It's funny that you call it a "melee zerg" when it takes (best case scenario) about a minute to get TP at level 15 with BiS gear. It's more like a "melee molasses race" but it sounds like a boatload of fun. It also really exemplifies the exciting classic EXPing experience where you're constantly gaining new abilities (that you can't use because you're level synced) and equipment (that you can't use because you're level synced). Gaining a level in "classic" is so much more exciting than gaining one in retail! That's what makes the leveling experience so fun!

I also find it funny that "me and my bros can just jump on the game, do some stuff real quick, and hop off" is the appeal for PS because...you can 100000% do that on retail. If you're playing brand new characters from scratch on retail there are THOUSANDS of hours of stuff to do, all of which you can do together. All of which are bite-sized and require little to no commitment. Everything you could possibly hope to do on a PS, but also a massive amount of other content that isn't available on PS.

I think ultimately the largest appeal for PS is that they're free. It might be difficult to convince your friends to play FFXI because they have to pay $30 for the game and then $15/month after that, but you can tell them "hey, just download this free game and we can start playing it together" which has no commitment.

I'm sure that this guy's friend joined retail after playing PS. I don't think that *literally nobody* switches from PS to retail. However, you can't just take 3 random anecdotes about people who occasionally bounce between them and call it a net positive. You have to consider whether the positive of a few people choosing to switch outweighs the negative of entire groups of people choosing PS instead of retail. I don't think it does. I'm sure there are loads of people and groups who, in a hypothetical universe where PS didn't exist, would've played retail. I believe that the quantity of these people greatly outweighs the quantity of people who play PS and then later decide to play retail.

Community is so much better on Horizon than retail
Been watching a friend play it recently, and it's just so much more active and friendly
it really is no comparison

shame classic FFXI gameplay is absolute garbage

Been playing on Bahamut and I've gotta say, the community is great. I've partied up with randoms who were working on the same things as I was, people have helped me with crafting requests, have offered to help me with missions, unity NMs, and other content. I've found PUGs for Ambu, CP, joined a linkshell (which has at times been full to capacity with members) and had people to chat with, do events together, and celebrate achievements with.

The "community" on FFXI is more like 3-4+ different communities, so broad, sweeping statements comparing them will always be inaccurate at best.

Its all fake, so cringeworthy honestly. They pretend they are all "friends" playing in a classic era server and emulating how people acted back then like some kind of AI. "Hi party ^0^" "CONGRATS on your level up!" its so fake, forced and cringe honestly. Like they are trying so hard to convince themselves they are kids again and interacting like before. I was watching a streamer and it felt so cringe and he kept doing this really weird giggle every time like goofy.

All "helping" each other, which is probably just a way for them to show off their pointless gear they have. They are blinded by nostalgia and trying to convince themselves its better than retail.

Can we summon the Meteor already?

Private servers have the Draylo stamp of disapproval? Guess that means they must be pretty good.


Honestly the biggest thing I've learned playing on a private server is just how bad we used to be at exping back in the CoP/ToAU era. Exp parties used to chase down ITs hoping for 200exp per kill. On the PS I've been playing on, parties hunt T/VT mobs. Kills are faster, chains are more consistent, and overall exp is faster. Kill speed still depends on party composition and gear, but just in general a smaller gap between party and mob level really helps with the accuracy issues and makes it much less of a slog.

Not quoting the whole thing to save space.
The problem with this concept on Retail is ilvl gear and general power creep. When I played retail after a long break we had gone from level 99 to ilvl119. As I was still upgrading my gear, I would have lower-leveled pieces that had say, Macc or INT or another stat I wanted for an enfeeb or nuke... and yet I was told I shouldn't use level 99 gear for any slot with ilvl because the ilvl made more of an impact that any stats I could get on the gear.

One of the great things about the '75 era' was that old gear maintained relevance, like Byakko's haidate. That's an item introduced in zilart endgame and maintained it's relevance as a BiS piece of gear until Empy+2 gear gave everyone insane stats.

or the moldavite earring, a level *57* earring that maintained relevance well past hitting max level and starting endgame. Or Okote, Fuma Kyahan, etc. Equipment had staying power, and finally getting a piece after hours camping an NM felt good because you had something that was gonna be useful for you for a long time.

None of that matters anymore. Why bother camping any of that gear when you can just stand there naked and let your 5 trusts steamroll you to 99?

They're not even useful as intermediary gear because you'll just get carried through high-tier battlefields and get gear from there.

Essentially, FFXI went from a game where the journey of getting to max level actually mattered and there was a ton of fun stuff to do before even thinking about endgame - to yet another MMO where the game doesn't matter until endgame. And that's what a lot of people, including myself, like about private servers and the 75 cap.

Frankly if I had to have an active retail xi sub to play on the private server I'd gladly pay that sub, and I've heard a significant number of people say the same. Being free is a nice perk, but it's not the reason people play on PS.


Does cognitive dissonance not bother you? You started off your post being a grumpy old man about how slow old EXP parties were, calling them a "melee molasses race" - which means you understand that the 75 era is a fundamentally different experience than retail - but then turn around and act like the two are so similar that if the PS didn't exist all those players would just turn around and play retail as if it's the same experience. Both Runescape and WoW now have 'classic' server versions of their game, and in both instances there are thousands of people who will only play classic and refuse to touch retail - and if the classic servers went away would just quit the game, and vise versa. 75-cap private servers are no different.

People who play 75cap servers do so because we prefer that version of the game over what exists now. It's not perfect - far from it - but some people still find it more enjoyable. You can disagree, and that's fine, different people have different tastes. But never forget that FFXI was a game that used to have some 150,000 daily logins in 2006 - and nowadays can't even manage 5% of that. And you can't just chalk that up to the age when WoW, WoW Classic, Runescape, and Runescape Classic all have many multiple times as many daily logins as retail FFXI.

Okay there's a whole lot going on here but I need to address this:


People ***on that gear, but I think people have forgotten HOW BADLY the average player was geared in those days. That stuff was a legitimate step up for a whole lot of players (which meant better experiences for anyone who ended up partied up with them). I will tolerate no slander of them.

Anyway, I have moved this to the Private Servers section where it belongs.

Private servers have the SpicyRyan stamp of approval.

Gonna be real honest here, I don't understand most of the objections people have towards PS. Like, they're 100% not my thing at all, but some of the objections I see don't really make any sense.

In particular, the whole "They're stealing players from retail!" thing; I mean, probably not. PS all tend to be locked in on earlier eras (I assume that's a LSB thing?) and modern retail isn't the same game AT ALL. They are two totally different games wearing the same dress at a party. If anything we've seen people make the switch from PS->retail because they liked the game itself but didn't like something about PS in particular. That probably goes both ways, but I can't imagine it's a statistically significant group of people in EITHER case. Player attrition in XI is purely the result of maintenance mode; any other argument is ridiculous.

The only real objection that holds weight for me in this discussion is that PS are hives of sexual harassment, which has been shown for a couple of the big ones, to be sure, but that's also true of like, Discord servers. That's not specific to PS, that's specific to "male-dominated groups on the Internet". The notion that they ALL are, somehow, feels flimsy to me.

Again, I'm not a PS guy (despite having a friend or two who work on them) but I also don't see it as something to get worked up about in the general sense. No one can do more damage to XI than SE can, anyway.

Just complaining to complain. If not this it's something else.

They come. They go. They're inconsequential in every way, but the same people just have to comment on it.

Their only goal is to have the thread de-mained. The outrage is completely fake to the point they just make stuff up. Which in some cases, is completely normal for them anyway.

Stop being reasonable and fair!

Most accurate statement in this entire thread.

I suspect that they are concerned that if enough people stop playing retail that SE will shut the servers down and so people playing a PS for free instead of paying for retail present an existential threat to the existence of the character they've spent decades on. The excuses they come up with are just copium because they either don't want to say the quiet part out loud, or they haven't actually parsed their feelings out loud.

There are a handful of 99cap servers, but like, 3x as many 75cap.
Not sure if the 99 servers are using something other than LSB though.

That's what I'm sayin'

I haven't actually seen this on the server I'm on, though I haven't been playing very long - but yeah this isn't an issue exclusive to FFXI private servers. There's plenty of sexual harassment everywhere on the internet. Not saying the PS that are like that should get a free pass mind you.

Private servers were neat until I realized sitting in dynamis for 3 hours two nights a week getting someone else a relic wasn't fun.

Had you played when the game was actually like that you'd have already known. Welcome to 2005.

You're getting the "authentic" experience.

I mean I did but being much younger and less jaded made it cool lol

Correct for me. I feel no desire to play FFXI atm because there's nothing to do and it feels entirely pointless. Before the announcement of Limbus I couldn't bear the idea of doing daily Segs/Sortie for items that had absolutely no use beyond a skinner box gear treadmill. There is no point in gearing other jobs because the content requires such precise job setups that playing out of that is actively hurting your progress or downright impossible in some fights.

At least with Limbus I sort of want to come back for that, although I expect it to be another dumb daily FOMO event that SE thinks will help with player retention somehow, but actually has the opposite effect.

Every year I resub for a few months and every time there's less and less people trying to do stuff in yells (RMT business is booming though, as always), the community feels dead unless you're in an already existing linkshell to do stuff with. This is harming retention significantly more than a PS ever will.

Limbus really is the last chance for me, if it ends up being another daily FOMO content, then I'm done with retail. Even though I hate the gameplay of classic FFXI, it's at least got more going for it than retail does in terms of developer activity.

Because T mobs in actual FFXI give like...75 EXP for a party of 6. IDK what nonsense numbers the PS throw around to keep their flock playing, but getting 90 EXP is not a very efficient way to gain levels, and you'll quickly empty the entire camp if you try to chain them. Especially if there's more than 1 party in the area (which there frequently was "in era").


Yeah...we have this too. There are literally hundreds of items that you work really hard to get, they feel incredible when you get them, and then you wear them forever. You can get this experience hundreds or thousands of times over on retail FFXI. It's still happening for me on a daily/weekly basis after 5+ years of rather hardcore play.


Let me repeat my point again for you, because you don't seem to have gotten it the first time:

If PS didn't exist, a portion of the players on those servers would be playing retail.

Do you genuinely believe that if there was no such thing as a PS, 100% of those human beings would just forget all of their nostalgia for FFXI and decide to play WoW Classic, a game they might have never played in their entire lives, instead? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.

I will grant you that endgame retail FFXI is quite different to PS. Also consider: you can get "the PS experience" on retail. Leaping Lizzy still exists. Every one of the BCNMs is intact. You can fight the Shadow Lord, and camp Faust, and pop Jailer of Love and try to kill it with your alliance of BLMs. In a world where PS didn't exist, if people wanted to pretend it was 2005 and EXP in the dunes, they could.

I'm not saying that the exact population of all the PS combined would be added to retail in this theoretical world. All I'm saying is that the 5 players who have come from PS to retail are not outweighed by the hundreds who are taken away.

As an aside: every time someone says "I play PS and retail both!" without fail, their last AH transaction was from 3-10 years ago, so I have my doubts.

I'm not trying to force anyone to play retail or anything, but I don't buy the BS of people who say that these two player bases are completely, 100% separate people with nothing in common. The games are different, obviously, but the venn diagram isn't two separate circles and splitting the fan base into two groups, one of which doesn't pay anything towards the company who made the game and who is pirating, isn't a good thing IMO.

***, they should devote a couple minutes of one of the devs' time to update the wiki then.

The dumbest thing about the horizon wiki is it's just people quite literally copy pasting from ffxiclopedia, 2010 timestamps and all.