Old School FFXI Linkshell?Follow

I played FFXI roughly 2005-2011.

I quit after the "leeching" got out of hand. I made a linkshell on Fairy/Sylph. The main rule in the linkshell was zero leeching. Old school six member party only to level. Period. Until you were 75. People would remove their pearl, go into abyssea as anonymous....and still leech. So my effort was short lived. I just don't see the point in grinding to 90 (or whatever the max level is now) just to get that level number. These players will have no idea how to play their job and have no skills to go with it. When I was still playing, a RDM90 asked me "My healing skill is 20, is that good?" I think that proves my point. I have no problem with Abyssea if it's used appropriately. I think raising the entrance requirement to 75 would stop a lot of the leeching, but that will never happen.

Then there are the book burning parties. It is my understanding that people build an alliance, go into Gusgen Mines or somewhere, get the book page, and just run around and kill stuff. Well, that doesn't really teach your class, either. Anyone can just kill something. WHM need to learn to buff, heal, remove ailments, etc. Thieves need to learn how to SATA and/or return hate back to the tank. PLD NIN need to learn how to tank and to keep hate, and the list goes on. Late in my playing, I was healing in a party in Wajoam and the PLD was not provoking except to get it off the fisherman. So we asked why she wasn't provoking. "I'll get hit" was her response. Again, proves my point, doesn't it?

I quit FFXI because I couldn't form six member parties anymore. Most people were in Abyssea leeching. I played FFXI for the fun, camaraderie and knowledge you received from being in a six member party. Sometimes it got crazy when you got a linked mob or if the tank died somehow. But I tell you what. Most of the time it just down right ROCKED. When I couldn't build parties anymore, there was not much point to playing.

No offense to SE, but FFXI used to have integrity, and a lot of it. It used to be important, and sometimes difficult, to get the things you needed done to progress your character. Now, people can just grind away xp and get to 90+ without much effort. I just don't see the point in that. I really don't. If you are a SAM90 and have a GK skill of 20 and don't know what the weapon skills are, etc., you aren't going to be much use to anyone. Sure, you can go to different areas and kill things to get your weapon skill up. But there are still no six member parties. What's next SE? Take away the weapon leveling up altogether like WoW did so long ago?

It's not just Abyssea. CoP missions and things like that got a lot easier. I finished CoP the old way, the difficult way, and I was a bit upset when they changed that since people that hadn't done it yet would get it a lot easier than I did. I didn't think it was fair.

Anyway, I would love to see an old school linkshell. I would gladly come back to build some parties.

gypsyjanetATgmailDOTcom

AH HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Oh man, those rose colored glasses.

Your post is just one gigantic mess of nostalgia painting false memories.

Now, now, guys, grinding crabs, beetles, and crawlers for dozens of hours taught me the critical skills I needed to take down behemoths like Odin! How could you not see the benefits?!

The trick was to fight mobs with paladin set as both their main and sub job AND had a massive defense bonus ws, and then cast the most mp inefficient spell in the entire game to kill them!

God we were so dumb in 2004. Why did we fight crabs?

Edited, Dec 19th 2014 2:58pm by Rachel9

A lot of us have endured the gamut of arguments that basically boil down to, "You're not playing the game the way I want to play!" I went satirical in my intro post because as someone experienced in the good ol' days and MMOs on the whole, those scenarios did little to actually prepare the player for a specific event or the unique mechanics of a given encounter. All the leveling process of the olden days was, in the end, a time sink. The tenth crab showed you nothing different than the hundredth. People functioned on their stereotypes of ideal parties. Even now, you'll see demands like reading a wiki or watching a video because heaven forbid someone actually have to spend some time explaining things to someone.

So, just recapping, we had things like an "Abyssea killed FFXI!" argument. There was a "CoP was the best expansion of all time!" flavor with the mention of its prior difficulties, nevermind the realities of why people actually found progressing through it difficult. Overall, any changes meant to ease the issues of a diminishing player base and completing antiquated content are swept aside because you, in your admitted absence, want to believe that would lead to a better game when many would argue sticking to pre-2009 concepts would've led to a far greater bleed, if not outright death of the game.

I won't say you're alone in your beliefs, but I will say they're misguided and ultimately selfish. And if you're like others I've had the displeasure to bicker with in the past and have phrases like welfare epics, dumbing down, and casuals are killing <whatever> in your ******** then we can pretty much just skip all the pomp and come to the conclusion that you're not interested in actually playing with others, but feeling superior to them. MMOs aren't hard games if actually fairly tuned. Unfortunately, what difficulties do arise tend to be outside the player's control. That is why things like leveling are treated of lesser importance or older things get eased. The environments of 2005 simply do not exist now. We know better. Devs have learned from mistakes. There's actually competition striving to please players instead of frustrating them.

XI isn't perfect in its current state. I'd be one of the first to jump up and explain why. Yet I'm also mindful that it is no longer SE's golden child. For better or worse, that distinction now goes to XIV. Though, I'll venture a guess you'll hate that, too, peppering it with WoW Clone term. Yeah, we've been there, done that. Gets old. Still dumb. Sorry if your feelings were hurt in the process, but pandering to nostalgia only goes so far. See: Wildstar and its post-launch plummet into obscurity.

Edit: Oh filter, you so silly, blocking a-r-s-e-n-a-l. :|

Edited, Dec 19th 2014 7:10pm by Seriha

Yeah this was pretty much the reason. Their only AoE move was an extremely weak hit with a very minor STR down effect that wore off quickly. Plus, they were *everywhere*.

Worms were squishier but also had the ability to get spells off, two AoE moves, and Accuracy down (big no no). They also didn't move so required people to go out of the normal (at the time) "Pull back to camp".

There were a lot of mobs that were fairly squishy and had weak TP moves. The problem is there just weren't enough of them, they roamed over too large of an area, or were mixed with monsters *way* out of reality checks (i.e. 50 with 20s, 70s with 40s, etc.). It didn't help that as the expansion went on the mob AoE movelists got larger and larger with more and more debuffs so people just stayed "home" to level.

Edited, Dec 20th 2014 9:59am by Viertel

Please try me sir. I occasionally come back, but I haven't had a reason to play longer than two weeks and that has more to do with being lost through the ages and not knowing where to go.

I personally believe that there could have been more of a happy medium. There were a ton of flaws, stupid systems and needless grind before, but now they kind of reduced a lot of what made the game what it was. I'll say, what I miss more than anything else is the people. I miss all the people that used to play, all my friends.

I do think the whole opening-boxes to get to level cap thing is a bit silly, but I also think the way the grind used to be was very silly as well. I to wish there were still EXP parties, but instead of requiring a set number of people and taking forever to get to the level cap, I wish it was -almost- as quick as abyssea, but had some sort of structure other than opening chests or just soloing. There are definitely people who take a job to level cap and have no idea how to use it, but I also agree that killing the same crab 10,000 times over the course of a year is a bit... Overkill. I think some times both sides have rose colored glasses on and there always was and always will be people who defend everything SE does, whatever it is without looking at both sides. There were flaws then and there are flaws now. I think SE's biggest problems come from an understanding of how to balance things, I think most people would agree that SE isn't the best at balancing things.

The good thing is, like some one above mentioned, most of the content can be done with 6 person parties and things like WKR can be done with strangers (I love content that can be done with strangers). So all is not lost. If you find a old school group of folks that you can enjoy the 6 person content with who actually know their butt from a hole in the ground you'll probably have a lot of fun.

Edited, Dec 26th 2014 12:13am by AlmightyApkallu

You can actually do exactly that very well now. 2-3 person parties can easily get 30k+ exp/hr with bad gear at low levels with bad gear. Easily 50k+ at 75+ with real gear. It's nothing spectacular, but reasonably quick exp, and trusts let you have a decent party no matter what.

I've been playing with a friend who just started playing recently for the first time, we've been fighting mobs about 5 levels earlier than i would have years ago, due to various buffs, skipping over camps that had long travel time (read: don't have a warp/home point within a minute or two of camp), or that were just annoying, entirely.

You literally just described MMM. You can fine tune the difficulty, type and amount of mobs, etc, exactly how you want it. It's limited; you can only do it once per day per character (no limit though if you have a million mules), but otherwise it's actually pretty good exp.

For people who like old school parties they actually are back in the form of capacity point farming. Seriously. If you want a favoured jobs only six man party - welp - capacity point farming is the event you've been waiting for.

Better get started on getting decent gear though... no one wants a scrub messing up their chains.