Former FFXI Player Here, A Couple Questions.

Hello, I'm "Aselin" from the FFXI server, Bismarck. I haven't played since September of 2011. Most of the issues I've had with the game were lack of finding groups to finish stuff like AF3 sets or getting a party on less popular jobs I play as-- DRG, DNC and RNG. Other issues were finishing my Empyrean weapon for RNG since so many groups would rather finish the Empy Shield and Sword first before anyone else. That and I've had issues trying to finish Relic Horn. I've been on Stage 2 for so long and haven't gotten a group that really wanted to help me with that. That and a lot of my friends have all but left the game mainly due to Square-Enix's lack of attention to the game and its players, or failing to improve content and fix issues that have been in the game since I've started playing in 2004. These are friends I've known for seven years in FFXI, which is how long I've played the game.

Towards the end it's always been hard for me to find a good group of people to play with or even a Linkshell. I've had a total of 28 Linkshells in FFXI. All broke up mostly because of favoritism by LS leaders; internal bickering and LS drama; and very rarely due to real life issues (i.e.- got a job, got married, had kids, etc.) By the time I stopped playing I didn't really have an LS to call my own given my bad experiences in the past. It became harder and harder to trust people in the game with so much favoritism and "job discrimination" over who should finish what gear first or should be invited to EXP parties.

Anyway, that aside, how is Bismarck these days?

Any of the old Linkshells still there such as ArchDominus (AD) or Lunarians?

Any "old school" players still exist? "Old school" being someone that's played since launch. I didn't start playing until February of 2004.

Game still worth playing nowadays? I play Tera Online now and it's like day and night just seeing the combat system in Tera compared to FFXI.

I'm even hesitant to give FFXIV another try given my bad experiences at launch. I don't know if at all I'll give FFXIV 2.0 a try.
Feel free to contact me via FFXIAH. I still have an account there.

http://www.ffxiah.com/player/Bismarck/Aselin

Thank you, Aselin

14 is amazing fun now, even prior to 2.0. Just puttin that out there

FFXI is self-driven now. If you don't have the fortitude to build a relic on your own, you won't. If you don't have the fortitude to get a small group going to build Empyreans, you won't. Take the lead, take the initiative, or your goals won't come to fruition.

i have to ask dose 4 do the hole 6 man party thing like ffxi did back in the day.

if so then i may want to get 14.

Gotta agree with this to some extent as well OP. You can't just wait for shouts for everything... Not to mention you have dnc.. dnc/thf kills in CoP dynamis. I've solo farmed almost a full relic in 7 months using pup/thf and dnc/thf and i took a lot of time off in that 5 months. I'd say I took about 2-3 months off worth of grinding daily cuz I got burned out doing it non-stop. You can easily do your relic horn (oh not to mention I solo'd the paper NM in glacier on dnc/nin)

Parties can go up to 8 I believe. You get a bonus for "light party" if it's 4-7 players.

The issues I had at launch when I first played FFXIV (other than my friends who joined me in XIV up and left one month after launch):
1- Lag in the cities. Terrible lag when bazaars were up. Performance issues primarily even on a very good high end system that I have. You enter a city like Ul'dah and your frames per second just drops for no reason. Any modern game has performance lag, but not as bad as FFXIV had. I can enter a city or an area in TERA Online, still remain the graphics quality and not get bogged down. XIV was like an entirely different beast altogether.

2- The Marketplace and the lag there. Search didn't help much either when it was added.

3- Lack of content outside the Leves and lack of story content. By the time you hit a certain part of the story-- I think by level 20 (not job level)-- the story content stopped. Done. Nada. Nothing after. It would take months for SE just to add more later on.

4- Combat system. Now that I'm playing TERA Online, hard to see me go back to what XI and XIV has. Engage. Lock on. Hit/Cast. Disengage.

5- Crafting system. It made Synergy in XI look easy compared to what you have to do in XIV to successfully craft a normal item. Whatever happened to "keep it simple stupid"?

I keep up-to-date with a lot of the FFXIV changes lately-- some are good and some are bad. I stopped playing after three months because of those above issues. I know #3 and #4 were fixed somewhat. #5 I've read they're planning on improving it by version 2.0. As for #2, I'm not sure if I've read that being fixed. The same goes for #1. Has the performance improved? I know for sure it'll be fixed or redone completely in terms of graphics and other assets by version 2.0. How about pre-2.0 FFXIV and post-launch?

One of my friends who still play FFXIV quit XIV for the third time last week. Another friend quit XIV two months ago and stuck to XI. And, a third friend quit XIV, went to WoW, quit that and went back to XI. FFXIV didn't live up to his expectations and didn't like how Square-Enix was treating the game and its players.

The game felt rushed to me honestly and should have just waited for another good 6 months minimum for a proper launch. Get the bugs worked out and iron out the performance and content.

Anyway, back to my original post above, I hope to hear from other Bismarck players that currently play.

That's the thing: I've tried making my own groups. I've had problems with players not knowing what to do or lotting the wrong items. Then there were the players who got themselves killed senselessly. You give instructions and they don't follow it. Hard to find competent players when I was playing.

Or, even worse: shouting for a group and not getting anyone to join a group. Also, I refuse to pay people for help. I'm the kind of person that will never ask anything in return to help someone else out.

I used to farm Empyrean items in a three man group up until a certain tier since the NMs required couldn't be trio-ed at that point. One stopped playing due to a new job, and the other got tired of Square-Enix's attitude and how hard it was to get people to come help us out.

And, trying to find groups outside that was even more difficult at the time I was playing. Many groups or those dedicated to farming Empy and Relic items, especially one of the last two LSes I've had prioritized Shield and Sword over everything else. Especially when it came to AF3 items. Just because I chose RNG as my primary job to lot AF3 upgrade items for doesn't mean you have to refuse to fight the NMs for those items.

It seemed unfair to me to prioritize it that way. I'm paying for this game, why can't I have a fair share of the items as well that I need to upgrade an item?

That was my last experience with this game towards the last few months I was playing FFXI.

Honestly, i went into the game with the idea of "i hate this game with my SOUL"...then as i started playing it my whole entire physical and spiritual being built so much hate.

The camera based targeting system is horrible

The lag is table flip worthy

The games decision making when using abilities is *** (why would i want to cure the mob....but you can use Second Wind on me when im engaged and targeting the mob...really!?)

searching,chating,and generally selecting other characters is more difficult than it should be.

there is just a lot of things that are like "why?"

GOOD things about XIV are:

The cutscenes are AMAZING

The characters have so much expression

the animations are top notch

you can sling spells like a crackhead and be really efficient

i like setting abilities....they could open more useful abilities from other classes though (Blissful Mind and Cleric Stance would be AMAZING if i could use them on Thaumaturge....)

I honestly don't get half of the crap you're saying honestly. "How SE treats their players?" The game is vastly improving on an update-by-update basis, and it's even fun now prior to 2.0... but let me refer to your stuff point by point..

1-First off, ya need to probably stop comparing games to one another. They run on different engines. Plain and simple. No there isn't a ton of lag in the cities, unless you're on a super popular server, that's just how it goes. There WILL be some lag.

2-How on earth does the search function not help you sift through bazaars? They even added a "search fee" to where you can be lazy as all hell and not even look for the bazaar and just buy the item off of the search function...Clearly #2 was just a point you wanted something to complain about. There is literally nothing wrong with the search/bazaar functions and retainers. It actually an awesome system because I can sell stuff while I'm not in-game through my retainer.. who wouldn't want that?

3-There is a lot of story that I'm encountering, tons of quests, tons of ACHIEVEMENTS (there is a whole system and they have tangible rewards). There is the ifrit fight, the garuda fight, the moogle king fight, the advanced jobs to unlock and quest through. Their respective AFs you can attain.. Yes the game has content....

4-How is the combat system in 14 bad? I played it before the "combo system" was introduced, and it was amazing then. It was engaging because you have so many abilities at your disposal, as well as needed them to stay alive. It was always a fun system and now that they added combos it's even MORE fun...

5- LOLWUT? Are you seriously gonna complain about the crafting? It's a fun mini game... There isn't much complicated about it whatsoever. It's not only not as convoluted as you're making it out to be, it's fun. It's not "sit and watch a crystal swirl around". It's engaging... It's interactive. You have to actually WORK to make HQ stuff.

Seriously, I find a lot of your complaints just things you WANT to find bad with 14 so you can have a reason to play another game or something. Sorry just my thoughts on your posts... The game is fun and awesome and stunningly beautiful BEFORE the 2.0 version hits...

HAVE to address this (sorry if this turns out to be a double post). It took me 5s of research to fix this issue. ffxiv.gamerescape.com or some jazz is the (albeit crappy) wiki on 14. I typed macros in the search bar and got a nice lil breakdown of macro syntax. It took 5s of research and 5s of implementation and that doesn't happen anymore. You can cure people easily while engaged.

So chalk it up to your personal position in the game at the time, come back and try and fix it, or decide that it's not worth the effort. That sounds kind of drab, sorry. Knowing a few players you can trust certainly doesn't hurt though. VW is good for meeting people.

I havent gotten into much of macroing yet, but from what ive experienced solo and trying to cure myself while locked on to a mob only to get spammed with "Cure cannot be cast on monsters" then dieing is not fun at all :|

my main quip with that system is spells like Protect and Cure cant target you while targeting a mob and abilities like Second Wind immediately function on you without a second thought. I just think theres something wrong with that.

also: thanks for mentioning the combo system...that shits fun as all hell :3

Holy Connolis Aselin!

You just walk into Ul'dah and experience the lag. I KNOW they are two different game engines-- Crystal Tools versus Unreal Engine. However, why is one not as optimized as the other? All those retainers and bazaars when I was there was really bad. As soon as you walked outside and entered another area, framerates jumped up to above 30 and close to 50 FPS according to FRAPS. Ul'dah in particular would drop to around 15 to 20 FPS. That's a huge drop.



A lot of those were not added until MONTHS AFTER LAUNCH. Why were they not available at launch to actually keep me playing? I can be a patient person, but that was really pushing it. Garuda and Ifrit weren't added until many months later post launch. The same goes with quests, Leve quests adjustments/additions, artifact armor, traditional Final Fantasy jobs.

The "search fee" again was not added until after I stopped playing. There wasn't much at launch when the game came out to keep me interested long enough to continue playing.

Square-Enix took its dear time to add them much, much later especially after the complaints and criticism it received.


Again, the changes to the combat system weren't fixed/added until months after launch. It still followed the traditional method of setting your character to be engaged with the enemy, locked onto the target, and hitting a button on the hotbar.


The only "craft" I did find engaging in FFXIV was fishing. It was more fun than it was in FFXI. The same goes with mining. At least there was a sort of mini-game to make gathering involving and interesting. It was probably one of the things I enjoyed doing in FFXIV. Crafting on the other hand was like Synergy-- waiting to hit the right menu choice at the right time and hope it didn't break on you. Yes, it's much more involved than it was in XI. But it still seemed convoluted to me.

A lot of these changes you say I'm pointing out as problems I'd like to complain about were not added until AFTER I stopped playing FFXIV. I still have some people I know who still play XIV that tell me about the changes-- good and bad. These are not the same friends that said they'll join me on a server but left a month later. These are FFXI players I knew outside those on the Bismarck server. A lot of the changes hasn't really jumped my interest to give the game another try. I'm waiting for what FFXIV 2.0 will bring and make another impression/judgment/decision then.

Prior to FFXIV, a lot of FFXI players felt SE was ignoring their complaints and issues with the game. Everything from minor bugs in FFXI PS2 version that were still there including performance issues with the game engine for FFXI. And then you have the lack of acknowledgement of any new content such as full expansions instead of add-ons. To a lot of players when I've read them on the forums (even before and during the release of the Final Fantasy official forums), it seemed to the players that how SE "treated" us was of ignorance and not acknowledging the issues at hand and refusing to fix them or provide us with expansions to new areas.

By the time FFXIV was released and the complaints and criticisms got to a certain point, it was by then SE probably got an epiphany and decided to listen to us for once. But, that took how long? Many years after FFXI launched and months after FFXIV was released were changes being added to both games. I pay attention to these over the years since I've played FFXI for so long.

It seems FFXI will not get a new expansion anytime soon or even in the near future as much of SE's energy and effort is going towards improving FFXIV and some upcoming non-Final Fantasy-related MMO they haven't announced yet but hinted at.

A lot of what SE has done to FFXIV has been good which moves FFXIV 2.0 into a more positive light than it was at launch. Hence, I'd rather wait until 2.0 is released because a lot of the additions look very promising.

Well I didn't get into macros either until I ran into the same issue on PUG. But really spells do that because they have targets. Notice that all of your pug JAs are self target and self target only. That's why they function the way they do. And macros are MAD useful. I made only 3 so far, but they help tremendously.

Holy Batman it's Angeleus. Do you still play? Lol.

How have you been doing?

Heh, my psuedo-main class is ARC but i ALWAYS set Second Wind because of the issues i was having with Cure not targeting me. never have any trouble with free instacureallHP 8) I would like to get into macroing...especially since it seems like its not limited to any ammount of lines

I think its like 10+ lines or so permacro but you can make like a billion lol

maybe after this maint i'll play around withem

Where is -my- invite Jos? ;-;

It's called growth of an MMO. If ALL of this content was out at launch, people would have gotten ridiculously bored with it and EVERYBODY would have quit by now. Not just some.



locking on a target.. then hitting buttons on a hot bar.. Well that sounds like EVERY MMO to me...



It's really not that complicated :(. You're making it out to be way more than it is. There are abilities you get to help you synth and help you HQ stuff easier, but it's a fun mini-game system. It's nothing like synergy. You don't just hit 1 button at 1 time to try to not blow your crap up. There are actual mechanics involved and abilities to ensure smooth crafting based on your skill. Again, it beats "stare at a crystal and pray for an HQ"

I play when I can! D: and yeah, on Bis until I get $$$ :P
I was just messin' with ya :3 I might have to work. :(

Only when, I have days off from work and school.

I'm neva quitting! Unless, I end up having 4 kids...

Coming back to XI? I wouldn't bother unless you have a whole linkshell bored out of their minds ready to farm you ***that you've always wanted.

Wanting to give XIV another try? I encourage you! The game changes drastically every patch, and there are many patches to go until the coveted 2.0 gets released.

Hi Aselin. Come back to bismarck I have been back and wondered where you went. I have known you for years and FFXI needs people like you back in it, I pledge to help you and give you my linkshell to your disposal. I want my friend back please send message in game.

Hi ase, I'm still on with nobody to play with also, due to my late pst schedule lol. You can come join me I'll always help^^

This^^