You have no idea how elated I am that FFXIV was revealed to be FFXI-2. I’ve always been a great defender of FFXI, from its unplayable beginnings to its oft-neglected updates and tweaks.

Don’taru fuck with meFinal Fantasy XI is the greatest tragedy of the previous generation. Square-Enix (née Squaresoft) first announced the game at their Millenium Conference in January of 2000, met with a resounding “buh” from onlookers. An online-only Final Fantasy? All because Sakaguchi discovered EverQuest at Square Honolulu and suddenly developed a huge MMO boner?

Flash forward nine years. FFXI players are the subject of ridicule for not playing WoW. An indefensible argument perhaps when WoW was released, but have you played FFXI recently? I mean really played it? If you aren’t the “I will never play an MMO!!!” type, you’ll likely be surprised by the strides the game has made in all that time. Being able to tweak and rebalance the game’s fundamentals in response to the user base has allowed SE to (after almost six years, granted) create a finely honed online game.

That’s exactly why I’m excited for FFXIV. As an FFXI fan, I watched SE raise this thing from an awkward and tedious lesson in grinding to something fun and engrossing. All of their fuckups have been noted, fixed, and remembered. For an idea of what FFXIV will be doing right, here are a few of FFXI’s glaring mistakes and SE’s solutions.


1. A sensible experience curve
Back in the day, players on their way to level 75 would hit the wall at level 51, where the experience points needed to advance to the next level took a sharp climb. SE not only adjusted the curve in the 4/21/05 version update, but decreased the experience points required overall to attain 75.

What’s more, SE also introduced a set of easily obtainable rings in the 10/11/05 version update that grant a bonus to experience points earned. The rings come in different values (with different time limits, bonuses, and experience caps, each equating to the same net bonus) and can be used every 16 hours. Combined with an increased level range of monsters from which players can earn experience (tweaked in an earlier update), getting through the early levels and into a party can be done in a much quicker fashion.

2. Job tweaking

DRG-on DragoonFirst example: Dragoons. These guys started off overpowered by being able to earn back TP for every hit of a Penta Thrust Weaponskill (for non FFXI players, this means that they were essentially unstoppable killing machines) before SE fixed this. After a couple years of being ostracized and neglected for having lost their only unique advantage, Dragoons were finally recognized as an effective melee class when SE decided to change their “Two hour” ability (powerful, class-specific abilites that can only be used once every two hours) to a supercharged stat bonus in the 12/13/05 version update. The previous Two-hour, “Summon Wyvern,” was reduced to a 20-minute refresh period; inconsequential as a wyvern tends to live much longer than the refresh once summoned.

Second example: Ninjas. The Ninja was intended to be a well-balanced melee class with an emphasis on stealth abilities out of battle. However, enterprising Japanese players soon discovered that the Ninja’s Utsusemi spell (which allows the player to absorb three or four hits depending on the level of the spell) allows Ninjas to tank just as well as (and in some cases better than) the dedicated tank class, Paladin. SE ran with it, introducing new gear for Ninjas with evasion and enmity bonuses, but still keeping Paladins in mind. When the Ninja tank began to outclass Paladin, SE took action by decreasing a monster’s enmity towards a character using the Utsusemi shadows in the 7/19/05 version update.

3. Love for the two-handers

Havalina grins roguishlyNinjas are also notable for being the only main class with the innate ability to simultaneously wield a weapon in each hand, a trait that can be passed on to any class when combined with Ninja as a support job; a popular example is Thief/Ninja, a job combo that relies on two daggers. When users of two-handed weapons (Great Swords, Great Axes, Great Katanas, Polearms, and Staves) started to fall behind, SE introduced an offhand equip called the strap. Each strap is designed to augment a particular class’s performance with a particular two-handed weapon; a Samurai’s strap might up Strength and Accuracy, while a Black Mage might receive magic bonuses unrelated to the use of the weapon itself. It was an interesting way to keep melees like Samurai and Dragoons up to par with other frontline fighters, as these two classes are typically restricted to two-handed weapons throughout the game.

4. First-party windower

The only way to really play FFXI on a PC is with a windower. Half of the game is looking up maps and guides, and having to log out each time is a pain in the ass. Due to the use of third party tools for purposes of cheating and game manipulation, SE banned the use of all third party programs, including windowers. The outcry from honest players who ran the game with a windower was so great that SE eventually released a first party “windowed mode” option in the 11/20/07 version update.

5. World Transfer / Level Sync

I’m a Ninja, I’m a Hoodie NinjaIn the past, it was notoriously difficult to play (much less party) with your friends, a plight best illustrated by this Penny Arcade comic. SE addressed these concerns first by introducing the World Transfer Service, which (for a small fee) allows players to transfer any and all characters to any desired server. This was certainly a step in the right direction in uniting friends in Vana’diel, but what of the strict party system?

Critics have railed against FFXI’s leveling system since the beginning, and for good reason. To earn a decent amount of experience, all members of a six-person party must be within a range of two levels. If a key member of a group (the tank, for example) breaks this delicate range by leveling, the experience curve would then be wrecked, the tank would have to leave, and the party would probably end up disbanding. The Level Sync system, introduced in the 9/9/08 version update, fixes all of this by allowing the leader of a party to set a “maximum level” and level everyone down accordingly for optimal experience gain. Equipment is scaled down as well, meaning that you don’t need to tote around equipment for multiple level ranges (a problem that had also affected the game’s various level-capped fights).

6. Curbing MPKs

It’s always been a popular activity, whether by gil-sellers or socially-stillborn retards, to kill other players by training vicious monsters on them. SE recognized the problem and corrected it by altering the way in which monsters confer enmity on a player. If a monster aggros a player on its own, goodnight. But now, if a malicious player tries to sic a beast on another player, no dice. The monster will automatically disappear if brought outside its limited spawn range and left with zero enmity by either a suicide or a zone/warp.

Additionally, SE adjusted monsters’ AoE (area of effect) attacks to limit them to the players with enmity. This means that it’s no longer possible to train a goblin to some hapless party’s camp and wait for the beast to drop a Gobbie Bomb, decimating the party, as was common practice back in the days of bitter assfuckery. Partying areas are safer, and everybody wins (except the douchenozzles who decided to instigate that shit).

7. Economic recovery

You must’ve been a Dance Commander, giving out the order for funShit is expensive, sometimes rightfully so. That’s capitalism! And FFXI thrives on it. But when gil-sellers and marketeers get their rotten claws on a commodity, everyone loses. SE fought skyrocketing inflation through three means: reducing the sales tax imposed by the Jeuno Auction House, adjusting the formula used for determining Chocobo prices, and (most importantly) crippling gil-sellers through some crafty item recatogoriziation.

It worked like this: most rare monsters (known as Notorious Monsters) drop valuable gear that everyone wants. Gil-sellers took advantage of this by camping these monsters in full force to gain a monopoly on the rare gear trade. Items like “Leaping Boots” and the “Emperor Hairpin” soon reached prices upwards of three million gil on most servers. The only way for impoverished gamers to earn these items was to camp the monsters themselves, but how could we? Their camps are crawling with gil-sellers eager for a slice of cash.

Enter SE. In the 7/19/05 version update, all of the valuable, over-camped items were replaced with Rare/EX versions of their originals, meaning that the drop becomes unsalable and is confined to a single character once acquired. The original items still exist in the game, but were relegated to BCNM (Burning Circle Notorious Monster) fights, which gil-sellers just don’t have the patience to get into. The original “Leaping Boots” dropped from the Notorious Monster “Leaping Lizzie” became “Bounding Boots” — same stats, new name, and (best of all) unsalable. The “Valkurm Emperor” now drops the “Empress Hairpin” rather than the “Emperor Hairpin.” Economic balance is restored, and everyone but Chinese bottom-feeders wins. Plus, it allowed me earn this pimp-ass Peacock Amulet.

Dodge thisLook, I’m not saying you should play FFXI. I may be saying you should have played FFXI. My point is that, while it may have launched with a host of issues that dogged it for years, FFXI was eventually tweaked into one of the best MMOs out there. I don’t want people to think FFXIV is going to suck just because FFXI initially did. Give it a chance. SE has learned so many countless lessons about maintaining an MMO in the past six years that it would be silly not to expect a good game at this point. You can also expect the ‘snatch to be on top of future announcements for the game, because we have every reason to believe it’s going to be awesome. My cohort Brandon says it’ll be the first MMO he tries, and he hasn’t even read this yet.

(Addendum: I don’t usually do stupid in-jokes, but the title of this post is a jab at the English-speaking FFXI fuckwits who think that autotranslating the words “May” and “bee” alongside each other somehow equates to “maybe” for Japanese players. IT DOES NOT. It only cements your boneheadeness, Vegetaroth.)