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Anyone want to play FFXI before it got bad?

nasomi

Novice
Joined
Jan 9, 2014
Messages
22


Hi, I'm nasomi. I've been playing RPG's for nearly 20 years, from PnP to console to pc. I enjoy them, the story, the grinding, the fantasy. It's a good time.

I've played pretty much everything. I started with crystalis for NES, then moved on to FF1 & FF2, secret of mana on snes, a friend got D&D books and we started playing that. I continued to plow through every rpg I could find for years. I heavily favored turn based rpg's, or JRPG's to SRPG's. They just didn't do it for me, it was how many times can you press the a button to win. Then, the downfall began...

I'm really upset with the direction that "fantasy" type games are going, turn based is out and everything is button mashing, and I don't like that. If I wanted to mash buttons, there's no shortage of games that offer it. I want to concentrate on the story and relax in an immersive world.

So I decided to make my own.

I think my all time favorite video game was Final fantasy XI. It's an MMO and I joined it at NA launch. It wasn't my first, I had played Everquest and ragnarok. I absolutely loved the art style of ragnarok, and the play. It was a really fun game. RO2 fell drastically short of my expectations though. I dated a girl who made me play WoW. That lasted 10 days, I couldn't handle it. I played Everquest 2, and most others that came out. I was in first beta for FF14 and played all through 1.0, but now that 2.0 has come out, I was vastly disappointed. No open world, no wandering around finding things. No travel, you could almost entirely play the game without leaving town. When you do, it's a teleport. That made me vastly disappointed.

Anyway, FFXI left a mark on my soul. It seemed to be the perfect "everything". A vastly open world that you could walk for hours and still be in your home town. The races were unique, and I was quite fond of htem. A nice variety and not repetative. The jobs were simple and familiar, yet complex and exciting. The gameplay style was menu based, but not boring at all. The story(s), well, they were unparalelled. The depth of the game is almost unfathomable. You are in town, and some people won't offer you a quest or job because they don't know who you are, but raise fame, and they've heard of you as an adventurer. Quests aren't "kill x, receive y", they're intuative and have great story. You're a warrior, but decide you want to lay down your axe and pick up a wand and be a white mage, just talk to your own personal moogle and it's there.

In short, the game was perfection.

And then one day...

FFXI's publisher was launching their new title, FFXIV. With a religeous following for FFXI, and an obsession to "finish" things, they offered a new expansion, that would give players 3 months to play it. It sped up the leveling, and offereted teleports to get around easier. When a party of 6 players went from 10k xp/hr to 150k xp/hr, people were able to level much faster. Players finished content, FFXIV launched, thousands played, and it was terrible. So they canceled and went back to FFXI, only everything was so accelerated, people began to drop off because they were out of things to do. They started cranking out expansions, but instead of people playing them for years, they lasted weeks, if not days. The level cap was raised from 75 to 99, but then experience rates were raised to 1500xp/kill, so you could level from 1-99 in a matter of hours. All people wanted to do was play end game, and that made me sad.

Being disappointed with how FFXIV turned out, I couldn't return to FFXI, even if I started over. I would have been alone, or pressured to 99 in a day for end game content only.

Working with some other guru's, I've re-created the golden years. A game server that emulates the 2006 era of the game. No 40x experience multiplier, no 50mil gil to start. You pick a race, city, name, and starting job, then away you go into the world of Vana'diel.

It's been an incredible expereince. With 80 regular players, I"m always looking for more. While it's not perfect, it's pretty nice. Some things aren't finished yet, but a great deal are. So I'd like to invite anyone who's interested to play with us!

The server is hosted on enterprise level hardware and a 75mbit connection, so speed isn't an issue.

Instructions can be found at http://nasomi.com/

It's free, and donations aren't accepted. I just want to re-create the time when my video game enjoyment was at it's peak.

tl;dr - Come play FFXI with us!

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J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
Sounds awesome. I really enjoyed the way exp chains and ability combos worked in FFXI. I do hope you consider fixing the airship transportation problems.

Is everyone on your server in a certain faction? With such a small population are you all in the same linkshell with dedicated crafters? What is the level cap? Which jobs are/are not available?
 

Xor

Arcane
Joined
Jan 21, 2008
Messages
9,345
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I'll check it out, but I'm worried that the way FFXI is designed will be an issue. Aren't you basically required to group for xp after a certain point?
 

nasomi

Novice
Joined
Jan 9, 2014
Messages
22
It's based off the darkstar project. There is xp loss. Everyone is in the same ls, and there are crafters for almost every profession.

There's dunes parties, but you can solo clear to 75, we have a few that have done it. I think there's 8 75's on the server now. A good deal of content works, but it's not perfect. It's still under development and I spend nearly every waking moment working on it along with a handful of others.

And yes, you still lose xp if you die.

There are a few things in place to compensate for the low population. There's teleport moogles in towns and those books where you can do pages for xp, tele's, and buffs. There's a good sense of community and people help each other out. It's come a long way since it started, but I'm really happy with it.
 

Ranselknulf

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Cool, When I was watching it, the project seemed to be developing fast. Which expansion do you intend to cap out at?

When I last tried it a year ago, the first few expansions content seemed mostly there with a few bug's here and there.

ToAU and WotG seemed more incomplete (especially the jobs blu and dnc)

I don't think they had besieged or campaigns working either. Might be worth seeing how it's improved. If you are going at this with a higher quality hosting than some of the other people maybe your server will be the one to take off Naomi.

There are tons of people who quit after the nonsense with all the new Abyssea stuff.

Only issue I see is if you try to emulate the game up to right before the Abyssea changes started is there will be incomplete WoTG content. Although including that content would make it fun to attempt those missions at a level 75 cap.

In all honesty, I don't think I really have time for a mmo right now but maybe some day.

But if you want a suggestion (and haven't already done it), try setting up something like FFXI Auction House for your server. It really is helpful for the game. I know a couple of the other servers have done that. Also remove the auction house sale limit or at least raise it. Those are two changes I think most people wouldn't care about.
 

nasomi

Novice
Joined
Jan 9, 2014
Messages
22
Initially, it was only RoZ and CoP, however I enabled ToAU at player request so they could unlock blu. Blu is done. I never played WoTG, it was released and I bought it as did everyone else, but after 2 days everyone went back to ToAU stuff on my server.

Normally, I wouldn't do something like that on a whim because one person requests it, but he was the first 75 and has been there since about the beginning, he joined with his friend and i've never met them in real life. They just came and played, alone for a long time.

Initially I ripped the qty and price history for the AH off ffxiah.com. However, as the population grew, an exploit became appareant and a bunch of players made off with a billion gil. That's a destroyer for any economy. Over 4000 AH purchases were made before I learned about it 3 days later. I didn't want to roll back progress, so I wiped out the gil and any items purchased on the AH those prior 3 days. While I was at it, I wiped out the auction house.

It may seem harsh, but it actually was a blessing in disguise. Quite a few higher levels were starting to bore a little. There was no point in crafting because gil was abundant and the stuff existed on the AH already. Wiping everything out, people were really cranky for a day or two. But then, people started crafting and came around to the thought of just working to make progress. Tons of new players were now throwing their crystals on the AH and the older ones were buying them up and crafting, putting teen gear on the AH.

That was just over a week ago, and everything is recovering extremely well. We're building an economy, price fluctuation is down because players know how much stuff would be. People have mules in selbina, our rollanberry fields mule parking lot, because it's easier to get to for most of the newer players.


Higher quality hosting? HAHA! I have invested THOUSANDS of dollars and HUNDREDS of hours! It's all in house, too, on a 100mbit fiber line. I have a 24u rack with 7 servers on it for this game.

First server is a dual quad core 1u supermicro with 8gb ram and server 2012 running hyper-v. It has a single virutal machine on it, and that virtual machine is the router. It's lightning fast, too.
Second server is a mirror of the first server, in the event of hardware failure.
Third, forth, and fifth servers are Dell Poweredge 1950 III's, with 16gb ram and 4gbit nic's. They make up the hyper-v failover cluster, hosting virtual machines for the game servers, web server, and testing envrionments.
Sixth server is the highly avilable high speed file server. It's a HP Proliant Dl380 G5. It has 4 146gb 15k rpm SAS drives in Raid10 for the OS, and 4 180gb enterprise Intel SSD's in raid10 that hold the vhd's that the hyper-v cluster uses. It has a 10gb nic so there's no bottlenecking when the failover clusters stream VHD's.
Seventh server is the long term storage server, with 6gbit nic and 24tb(4x4tb,4x2tb) storage capacity. It performs scheduled archives of all VHD's on the high speed storage server every 4 hours and keeps a rolling 5 days of backup to avoid any potential loss of data.

Every machine has redundant power supplies and redundant nics. I could host about 3000 players by my estimation if I scaled it out from current resource usage.

Then, tying it all together? a 48port gigabit layer 3 managed switch, the Nortel Baystack 5510-48T. If it fails I have 2 extras I can throw in place.

Now I know what you're thinking. "Single shared storage server? That's a single point of failure right there! It dies and everything stops!" Well, you may be right. I am, after all, a man with limited financial resources. But if it does fail, I can copy a backup vhd from the file server to one of the cluster servers in seconds and fire it up and be back in business, until I get the shared storage server back online.

When I started, it was a single vm on a single 1u dell. I decided that I was going to go all out and do it right.
 

Ranselknulf

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I'll keep you in mind should I look to start up FFXI again.

There is no way I'd ever play on the SE servers as it's not a game I would enjoy. Your server seems more to my tastes should I take this up again.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
How is it possible that someone could solo to 75 without being a beastmaster? The FFXI I remember required a group past level 10 or so.
 

nasomi

Novice
Joined
Jan 9, 2014
Messages
22
My slush fund for toys ran out. I also need new UPS's. When I first powered up the new system, i completely fried my old ones and blew the breaker.

Here's hte rack with the old linksys srw2048 that was a giant POS. I'm finishing the basement and building a server room for it. The basement is to hot to sit down in now, even though it's 2F outside.
d7OEben.jpg


The origional testing station when I was trying to figoure what would do what:

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Ranselknulf

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How is it possible that someone could solo to 75 without being a beastmaster? The FFXI I remember required a group past level 10 or so.

They still had the explorer moogles on most of the darkstar project servers. They were an add on just prior to Abyssea that gave out "Kill X amount of Y Enemy for Z Exp reward" type quests. The rewards significantly increased the speed of leveling, although no where near abyssea, it still made many old leveling zones obsolete and worthless.

There is a switch to turn it off for the project but it really comes down to how many people are playing on the server. If you can find a group then it would make sense to not have them, if it's low population I can kind of understand it, although any server I would play I'd prefer them not to be there, but I enjoy BST also.
 

nasomi

Novice
Joined
Jan 9, 2014
Messages
22
How is it possible that someone could solo to 75 without being a beastmaster? The FFXI I remember required a group past level 10 or so.
Honestly? I'm not sure, I've never done it. The first two guys to join were hungry for it, one hit 75rdm and one had 75thf inside of 3 months. They played non-stop, sometimes together, sometimes seperate. Then a few others started and did it.

I think the fact that the books are there really helps. They were part of wotg i think, and are in the game. You get a "kill x monster, get y gil and exp". Then you also get tabs, which can be used to teleport, or purchase buffs from the books.

I have no intention of soloing to 75, most of the fun I got from the game was playing with other people. It is nice to have the support of higher levels though.
 

Ranselknulf

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I know there use to be a bug that let you do those book quests on level 1 monsters and still get a huge exp reward, I'm sure it must have been fixed by now. Lots of people reported it.
 

nasomi

Novice
Joined
Jan 9, 2014
Messages
22
How is it possible that someone could solo to 75 without being a beastmaster? The FFXI I remember required a group past level 10 or so.

They still had the explorer moogles on most of the darkstar project servers. They were an add on just prior to Abyssea that gave out "Kill X amount of Y Enemy for Z Exp reward" type quests. The rewards significantly increased the speed of leveling, although no where near abyssea, it still made many old leveling zones obsolete and worthless.

There is a switch to turn it off for the project but it really comes down to how many people are playing on the server. If you can find a group then it would make sense to not have them, if it's low population I can kind of understand it, although any server I would play I'd prefer them not to be there, but I enjoy BST also.
Explorer moogles teleport between towns, the book gave the quests to kill stuff. It was more like bounties, ffxi has real quests. I don't consider the things in the books quests.

I haven't tried them, personlly. If we reach a couple hundred players, I'd probably turn them off, but as it is it would be punishment to those that are higher level and can't get a party of 6. It promotes farming as well, which brings materials into the world for crafting.
 

J1M

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Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
Hmm, maybe this isn't for me. Grouping was the only part of FFXI I enjoyed. (And by extension, figuring out which job/subjob combos were optimal in groups.)
 

Ranselknulf

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FFXI really is a hard thing to get started on standard rules, it's the type of game that you need a large population to come in and all start together.

I'm not sure you can go with a server that starts out with easier rules / settings then drops down to regular settings once a sufficient population arrives but who knows. It might work.

At least it's there in some form and if enough people get interested in a pre-WoTG server without all the junk, then it could be set up and be successful.
 

nasomi

Novice
Joined
Jan 9, 2014
Messages
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It may not be perfect, but we do have about 15 NEW players that are all in the dunes. There have been multiple parties and since it's relatively close nit, players are pretty friendly.

Also there is level sync, and people do use it for parties. Not many want to solo, and not many do. At minimum most of the new players party with 2-4 after they reach 10-12. We're just getting the first whm's through the dunes now, so it's possible to have viable parties. We've had a population boom int he past 2 weeks.

If you're on the fence, hop in game for a couple days and see what's up. Maybe it will be something you do enjoy. There are 60+ people playing, where-as at thanksgiving, there were about 20. I've found new places to reach out to people in early december which has boosted population a lot. I made the mistake of following the "if you build it, they will come" mentality. I'm terrible at advertising, and had no idea where to even start looking for interested players.
 

nasomi

Novice
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Jan 9, 2014
Messages
22
Currently the AH is limited to 7 items, but you do have 16 content id's per account, and there's quite a few that made mule accounts to bazaar in selbina and put extra stuff on the AH. I know where hte limitation is for this and how to increase it, but I haven't had the time to test that it works properly.
 

Scroo

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Cool. I'll check it out, wanted to try FFXI for ages but never got myself to buy it. I hope there are some noob friendly people around.
 

nasomi

Novice
Joined
Jan 9, 2014
Messages
22
If you've never played FFXI before, the controls take some getting used to, and aren't very apparent.

Ideally the game plays best with a ps2 style controller. If you don't have one, here's the default controls.

Placing your fingers on the home row, wasd for movement, ilkj for camera. Tab cycles targets and enter brings up the combat menu. - brings up the start menu, escape backs you out. H heals you for HP and MP when you need to recover it and have no target. If you have a target, it will lock/unlock target. R is auto run.

I've seen many players give up because no one explained the controls to them. I use a controller, but when typing a lot I'll use the keyboard because it's easy to start typing, then start doing stuff again. I don't use the number pad.

Here's a full layout:
key-en07.jpg
 

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