Another FFXI Private Server.

They have patch notes on their discord. You have to scroll back to 2024 to find anything that qualifies as content, the rest is just fixes for things that already work correctly on retail or attempts to rebalance their poorly scaled custom junk.

If private servers didn't exist, maybe a fraction of those players would be paying to play FFXI. Less than 1%. Their whole allure is they are free. That's the hook. It's not "nostalgia." Sorry to burst poor Draylo's bubble there. People aren't nostalgic to play old school FFXI, they just want to play a free MMO.

The amount of friction involved in buying/account creation/installing/booting up the game in retail vs starting fresh on Horizon is insane btw lol

The whole process to start this game is asinine. It's regoddamndiculous.

It's your very first clue in your very first interactions before even playing so you know what you're in for.

I would imagine that every private server has a better launcher/create a player system than retail. It's pretty easy to accomplish that.

Nobody really got mad about private servers, until Horizon.

Horizon took it to another level. Horizon was "staff" from another server (wings) that in effect had beef with the guy running it (after he showed them how to do it all etc), and setup their own server to in effect take take everything from him. In doing so they wanted to dunk on him and make a bigger splash, it was an ego thing.

Ninja promoted the server on his stream (nobody cared about this), and after noticing they were getting some traction some people who were running / associated with it decided to mass promote the server everywhere they could for months before and after it launched, to farm players so they could dunk on wings. They did this on almost every youtube video related to XI (aka every xi retail video), they pressured / lowkey paid via donations these people who made videos/streamed to play/promote the server (and it was real obvious who was doing it), they shilled on every XI sub and every place they could do so. The amount of shilling was insane for people who take notice, and a lot of it was subtle (member berry crap that eventually had links to the new server and all started around the same time) to get around rules against it on places like reddit that don't allow private server stuff.

Previously there was an unspoken understanding that the private servers respected retail and its players (and pretty much every other one mostly does) and stayed in their lane and didn't try to farm players from retail and cause rifts in the community. Now these jokers ignored all that, acting like uncouth savages and spammed and shilled everywhere, specifically to take players from retail to boost their numbers up as high as they could.

If you're passionate about something, and go out of your way to promote and help new players for years and see this garbage it's insanely infuriating and rude. Especially when they are using the game itself that they stole to try take players away, it was a different thing when WoW and FF14 players did it cause it was a different game.

The game is already struggling to remain profitable and now we have to deal with this too.

That Spicyryan allowed himself to get wormtongued (he very much used to think about PS as Draylo and I do, till he was offered some dev access on Catseye and did a 180 like a sellout *****) and then pushed to have it infested into everywhere he had any influence (here, bg, wiki) and that really took it to another level of bullcrap. Now it's in your face everywhere, like it or not.

Personally I don't really mind private servers except Horizon (and maybe Cateseye cause it's infested some pages on wiki) and see the players and people running it as just doing their thing, but I and some others have very little patience for it when we see it posted in any retail space now cause of how far it has been pushed previously by Horizon.

A big problem in any community is that most people are nice and accommodating and do not want to cause a fuss, in an environment like that bad actors shilling take advantage and use it as a recruiting zone. So you need a few people to push back on their nonsense, to stop them being cheeky *****.

I'll be honest, the only issue I have with private servers is the ridiculous proliferation of "private server content" both here in the forums and on bgwiki.

With that proliferation also comes a dilution and confusion of XI (retail) content, aka the game, and private server "content" aka whatever the server admins decide they want (eg thf is best dd just bcuz).

Someone with no knowledge of XI looking at this forum will think PS is just another way to play "the game". Someone looking on bg-wiki seeing horizon Wiki pages will think Horizon is just another server for "the game".

Microsoft had a mantra in the 90s. Embrace Extend Extinguish.

If all is left after XI is shutdown are private servers, a poor reflection of what "the game" actually was, that would be a real shame.

If private server talk was not allowed on these forums, nor private server specific content on BGWiki, we wouldn't have to have this conversation every few months with another shill coming to advertise. Or another shill burning their bridges and nuking stuff on their way out of bgwiki.

Literally just trying to justify your shitposting. Not working at all. Honestly your trolling of private servers comes off as completely fake, given how you constantly lie about the state of Square Enix and how they are "cooked." So you troll SE, you troll private servers, you troll everything. Edit- And you don't play any games.

I mean they don't have to deal with backend systems to check for subscription status, POL ID and Playonline as awhole.

I haven't touched PS in several years and my exposure has been nostalgia for 5 minutes then i realized I much prefer retail, but I'd imagine they are still using a old terminal log in, I could be wrong but IIRC Ashita team was involved in creating it.

They also don't have friend lists or messages.

This is patently, provably untrue, and has been refuted no small number of times. Like, feel however you like about the rest of it, but this part is straight up false.

To be clear, it remains profitable because they do NOTHING with it, so eventually they're not going to be able to coast anymore, but that day has not come yet, and isn't even visibly on the horizon.

I don't think PS have any place on a site designed to cater to the official game personally. I just ignore it when I see it but I think private servers are kinda dumb when retail exists and imo runs better. most people playing PS are either cheap or looking for nostalgia they'll never really recapture. I'm sorry but the old 75 era of this game is never gonna happen again.

Do we really know this though?

I think there's an assumption based on the sub numbers, but $2m/yr intake isn't something I would consider profitable. We don't have specifics on their operational expenses, which is something necessary to determine how much, if any, profit XI brings in. It may seem like a large-ish number, but when you consider the costs of employees in particular - it eats into that very quickly.

We know there isn't a huge staff assigned to XI, but there are at least a small group of people assigned full time to the project and in an expensive country especially, those figures get eaten up real fast.

Not sure I'd agree they are doing nothing with it, either. They aren't doing a lot, sure, but the little they are doing definitely takes dev and operational resources.

We also know the devs are part-timers from XIV.

There is no one working full time on XI, which should be obvious.

This is like the absolute worst case estimate and it still says they are making 1.3M a year. It is hard to imagine a world where they light that much money on fire to run XI.

And again the things that drive this to the minimum are listed there and a big one is "Active" account as defined by FFXIAH which would be using the ah sales or purchases.

don't forget all those new account sales from bans rebuying the game!

Also worth noting this number has been on the decline and you can watch the number of accounts drop if you do a search fall posts that bring it up

Actually better to just use the waybackmachine and look at the snapshots

They only have part-time devs on loan from XIV, and in fact the colo costs are shared with XIV as well at this point. XI effectively has no budget, just borrowed resources, which is probably the smartest way to do it, as it removes any temptation for bean-counters to get rid of a low-performing line item.

Also, as Nif points out, those numbers, while declining, are the absolute WORST case scenario. The actual numbers are very likely eight or nine times that as an absolute minimum, just because things like "assume every group of 16 active characters on the AH is one account" is just not ever gonna be true. Put them in groups of 8, you've doubled it. Group of four, double it again. Add extra mog wardrobes? etc, etc.

XI will die from lack of players before it ever dies from lack of revenue.

I hate to say it, but since the big graphics update, my laptop is literally incapable of running FFXIV... but I'd probably try to figure out how to subscribe if I could get another 80 storage slots per character in FFXI out of it.

If you can kill two 90exp mobs in the same timeframe you can kill a mob that gives 180exp, then then end result is the same. This was literally the mentality of burn parties: kill weaker ***fast. I've done exp parties in multiple new camps I never saw people at when I played retail. Good camps without any aggro and plenty of mobs to chain that I literally never saw people use for exp in the years I played retail. Instead they just crowded the same handful of camps for any given level range.

Love how I also mentioned enfeeble skill but you gloss over that and focus on INT. you're right, I forgot that all the ilvl gear has huge bonuses to all the major stats. Slow clap for you. I'll pick a different example.

Now let's say I have a piece of gear I want to use to enfeeble, like, the Estoqueur's sayon +2 which "Enhances enfeebling magic effect" Let's also say that I recently came back to the game and haven't played since they introduced ilvl119 gear. Yes, I could go pick up a piece of starter ilvl119 gear, but it's not going to have the effect of "Enhances Enfeebling Magic Effect". To get that effect on an ilvl119 piece, I would have to upgrade my Estoqueur's sayon +2, to the Lethargy sayon +2. To do this, I would need Rem's tales, which comes from battlefield that has higher-level mobs where ilvl becomes a factor.

As a red mage, I might want to enfeeble those monsters, and have that "Enhances Enfeebling Magic" effect when I do so. Except, upon doing this I am told by players 'No, you shouldn't do that because the gear is a lower item level and so will be less accurate and potent than just using an ilvl119 piece of vendor trash gear you got for free despite it not being specialized at all for enfeebling'

Or another example, if say I wanted to use an earth staff in my -DT set. Except I can't because then I lose ilvl from my weapon and sub slots which makes me squishier. Or wanting to idle in a piece of gear with +refresh but being told not to because it'll just make me more susceptible to AoE because it's not at ilvl. Now, I am well aware that eventually I would get ilvl119 gear that is better than the Estoqueur's sayon +2 or the earth staff. that is not the issue. The issue is that the gear I previously worked for is now useless. Some of it, like the Estoqueur's sayon +2 can be upgraded to be useful, while other pieces are actually just garbage and have zero use.

75 era did not have this problem, which is what I liked about it. If, for example, I have a Cere's Spica - a level 43 staff with 6% cure potency - for my white mage. Yes, I should eventually get a light staff once I can craft/afford it, however in the interim I can keep using my low level staff. I do not have to get a higher-level staff that doesn't have cure potency just to boost my level so that I'm not gimp. I boost my level by, and hear me out on this one, getting exp and leveling up. Tying your character's level to their equipment effectively served as a soft reset of the game. Old non-ilvl gear can no longer even be used as a transitional piece without it gimping your character level, and therefore has no value. In 75-era, if you strolled up to a qufim party with leaping boots as a THF, nobody would tell you 'oh you need to use beetle leggings instead because they're higher level' - no, the +DEX and +AGI for THF were useful, and the level of the gear doesn't matter. This is no longer the case and it makes 99% of the items and gear you pick up as you level to 99 absolutely meaningless.

Understand that my issue here isn't an emotional attachment to a piece of gear. My issue is the design. Getting to max level in the 75 era was part of the game. There was value placed on taking the time to farm and camp items like the Monster Signa because they helped you bring value to parties and exp faster, as well as being a transitionary piece into something better at higher levels. There was value in doing lower-level BCNMs because they gave useful spells or equipment. Missions had capped fights so you got to actually go in and experience the fight with friends and get that experience instead of just having someone solo it for you, or summoning trusts. You progressed your gear with your character's level.

Modern mmos like WoW, FFXIV, and FFXI retail are all about the endgame. It doesn't really matter what gear you pick up on the way to max level because there will inevitably be a quest or vendor that will give you a set of level-appropriate gear once you hit max level. "The game doesn't start until max level" is the common phrase for these games. 75-era didn't feel that way. The game started at level 1.

It's funny, I remember back in 75 era how many FFXI players would ***talk WoW and talk about how pointless it seemed to spend that much time raiding for a 'tier' gearset only for the next expansion to drop and have that gear be immediately replaced in the lowest-level zone for that expansion by a shitty green item from a quest for collecting 3 flowers and delivering a letter to a guy 5 feet away. I had always valued the fact that FFXI didn't design gear that way... and then they did. And look, if that's the kinda thing people like, then by all means enjoy retail. I prefer the old way of doing things.

This has less to do with gear design and more to do with the inclusion of gearsets and the fact that SE ignores the player using gearswap/luashitacast.
I used to keep hate and live longer than paladins with better gear because people didn't like to make massive gearswaps for everything. Their sentinel macro put on their Relic Boots. My sentinel macro was 3 macros long and also included as much +enmity as I could.

And in-fact most of that depth and complexity wouldn't be possible without gearswap. I'm not giving SE points for that. The /wait command is not fine-tuned enough to allow you to incorporate 80% fast cast on a cure. The spell goes off before your midcast gets equipped. Some private servers have gearswap/luashitacast too - and we're allowed to openly talk about it without worry.

Once you get to max level, sure. Again, I like the old feeling of the journey to max level mattering, and the gear you pick up along the way having an impact even once you hit 75.

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No I get your point - it's just that as someone who actually plays on PS, and interacts with players on those private servers, and speaks to them about how they feel about retail - I know for a fact that the majority have no desire to ever play retail again. It is not the same game to them. If SE released an FFXI classic server, they would play the ***out of that... but they will not go back to retail. Again, there are many times more people who play OldSchool Runescape than there are who play modern Runescape. When you pay for a subscription in Runescape, that subscription is for both OSRS and Modern RS and yet despite that, if OSRS went away a great many of those players would cancel their subscriptions rather than move over to Modern RS. It's not about the money, it's about the difference in game feel. We do not see 75-era FFXI and current retail FFXI as the same experience - and it's the experience we're looking for. If you don't see or feel the difference in those experiences, then good for you. Many of us do though, and luckily for us, your feelings have zero impact on our choices :D

Last time I played retail I actually saw a pair of people trying to do this. I saw them shouting for hours for people to do some older capped content for nostalgia. They shouted 2/6 for over an hour before giving up and this was during peak hours so there were no shortage of people on the server. Point being, yes, you can try to do some content the old way for nostalgias sake, but it's actually hard to find people who are interested in going along with that. Meanwhile on the PS I play on, it's incredibly easy to find people who are willing to help with capped fights or farm gear - because that's the experience everyone on the server is there for. Hell, if you pop an NM there are people - complete strangers - who are willing to come out on THF and give you treasure hunter just to be friendly. It's an actual community, and it's honestly great.

And sure, I can go camp LL on retail, but why would I? LL is a pure lotto spawn NM - meaning it could take hours to camp it. Why would I do that when I can just level from 1->99 in a day at which point the boots are useless.

Have you ever considered that if people are willing to stop playing their retail characters in favor of starting from scratch on a private server that maybe the problem is retail and not the private servers?
This just sounds like "PS players should come back to retail even though they don't enjoy it as much because my dying game needs more players". Honestly if all the PS shut down and FFXI retail became free to play, I would just end up playing OSRS instead 'cause that's closer to what I'm looking for than retail.

And I'm saying, as someone who plays on a private server, the number of people who would go back to and enjoy retail are a stark minority to the ones who would just never touch FFXI again. Private servers are buggy, sometimes laggy, missing content, and have other issues - why would we subject ourselves to that if we could just play retail and enjoy it just as much? we wouldn't. Majority are playing PS because it's the only option for us to get the experience and community we're looking for.

Yarr harr fiddle-dee-dee, bein' a pirate is okay with me.
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free, I am a pirate~

This is probably true, and what is actually happening is Yoshida is simply pulling staff and budget away from both 11 and 14 (less so) to work on other projects like with 16 (and whatever nonsense they are currently working on). Which is partly why I complained about 16 so much.

However I don't feel confident enough to take it for granted, and the more money the game makes the less likely Yoshida is to let it go down if he can help it.

We may not have a ton of details, but back when Fujito took over, weren't the broad strokes of his plan to let everyone else on the XI team move on to other projects until it was just him?

He got the server replacement(and presumably virtualization) done, tweaked things like ambuscade rewards to require less manual work every month, and he seems to have a decent process in place to borrow scraps of dev time from other groups when they aren't in crunch(sunk cost, baby). There may still be some other people on the XI team who haven't moved on yet, but once that happens, XI is going to be just one guy and a tiny line item in the XIV infrastructure budget.

A few mil a year might not be much profit, but as long as senior leadership doesn't see XI as a distraction from SE's AAAI blockchain/NFT market domination goals(lol), it's just bonus money.

Welcome to dealing with RA. I'm sure he will try to spin it into some kind of win for him, which is doomed to fail.

You pirate triple AAA Games silly...

Anyone who pirates a MMO is a *** loser.

edit: and a brokie

I don't recall that, but with most interviews being in Japanese and scattered around, it's likely/possible I missed it if that was the case.

Last I understood there were 4-5 full time staff still dedicated to XI, they pulled resources from XIV for any other major tasks and that crew managed the smaller/more regular things. Not sure how they accounted for other staff like GMs in that.

Keeping in mind that dealing with legacy products like this - at least in my experience - there are often people whose foundational knowledge and experience are too difficult to replace, so they get kept on until they retire. I'd assume it's not as easy as just yanking people out of XIV and telling them to go work on XI, there's spinup involved and they'd need time/resources to get familiar, something that's a lot easier mixing in with other devs who work it full time. It's easy to handwave the effort off, but adding the things they have, as small as they are, are likely not small feats you could just yank a few people off and expect them to know what to do.

Then again, maybe they've improved their processes enough to where that is possible, I just find it unlikely. Legacy code can be an absolute nightmare to deal with and I struggle to think Fujito alone is holding down the fort on all the technical work and using borrowed staff for everything else. I know some work is done that way, but I can't imagine the more specialized tasks are

Sure, but they're not pulling random people from XIV, they're pulling ex-XI devs, ex full-time devs anyway.

Didn't Fujito say in the beginning of the year that the development team will not be "full-time" on XI anymore?

Maybe? I have no idea, I don't recall but again it's possible I missed it.

Ugh. I can't imagine having to context switch between XI and XIV. Pretty sure I'd quit, that sounds like a nightmare. If they really do have their entire dev staff doing that, that's gotta be an angry group.

the more you do it the easier it is, plus it is a pretty effective way to avoid burn out.

I have north of 30 different code bases I am responsible for at work, switching between them is usually a nice change of pace. And I work in a manufacturing operations environment so those changes come suddenly and without notice when a user suddenly bricks the whole system because he clicks this button and that button at the same time.

Oh and they are all "crappy" old code bases that are mostly older than I am, but still have their charm... here and there... I might have stockholm syndrome