Are You Playing In FFXI-HORIZON Server?

I suppose I do echo the sentiment about the FFXI category on stream being populated with nothing but pserver streams

Not that I generally watch FFXI streams, but ceding ground to private servers instead of promoting the real thing doesn't sit well with me.

I love FFXI but I cant imagine anything less fun than watching someone fight lvl 30 goblins in an EXP party for hours on end.

Something I never really understood is why people setup so many, you think it's because they love the game but ultimately I think there is more to it than that.

I think it's an ego / desire for adulation thing.

How many XI servers are there now, 10-15? If it was about the game they would all come together and do something as a combined force. Instead everyone has to have their own little snowflake version, struggling to update and achieving far less.

They even asked Josh Strife Hayes to play on it and he refused, becasue he said you should respect the company if they are still paying money to update the thing.

The reason they make so many is exactly the reason they want to play on a special server in the first place.

They can't play with others. Everyone wants to have the power over the ruleset. Too many wannabe DMs.

It's ironic, if they really enjoyed 75 so much, they'd be a united group with one server and so many players square would be forced to respond.

There's no surprise that people draw a line in the sand when private server threads are made here. Similar conversations happen among their communities as well.

I don't think it's that black and white. There are players who play both, or take a break from retail and vice versa, or mainly use retail as a research tool. I've seen completely new players join private servers only to move on to buy retail because they enjoyed it.

As much as people might think SE is losing subscription fees because I'm sure they are, it's also free advertising.


I'm not sure who that is. From my understanding, for the last few years there have been a lot of people capturing and recreating retail data. Some collaborating through various teams, servers, or independently.

If someone had it figured out in 2016, they kept all of that information to themselves. There's been a ton of progression in replicating SE's coding and so many nuances that aren't common knowledge. Even then, a lot of polishing remains.


Not trying to single you out or anything, your comments are good to write from.

I think Matsui said it best


This is why there are so many different servers. They all depict a different, or completely custom time frame of an "era" in XI.

Personally I could probably live with a 75 cap TOAU era server that is complete. If I had to. Wouldn't want to though.

Private servers never live very long.

The novelty will wear off once people realize that it's not exactly the same way they remember it being in retail 75-era. It'll drop town to triple digits in half a year and low numbers after a year.

Many have come before and failed, this one will be no different. It's just the latest in the line.

Horizon fun, Retail not fun, that why I play.
-Not speaking for anyone but me

i can't wait 'til these "leveling experience" nostalgia streamers start abusing SMN burn in Korroloka.

I think a big reason behind this is because theres a list of all Addons and Plugins accepted by Horizon so they stream their experience and generally get a lot of viewers since most of the viewers are other horizon players. With retail everyone's going to have a different opinion or what line they draw with addons and plugins and streaming exposes them. I personally stream but have pretty minimal addon usage.

Was more curious how they handled pets, i.e ready is already in place, pet moves have sc attributes etc, just letting ready be available already puts bst in a better spot than it was in-era, though still relies on crafters to put the jug pets up

Horizon XI has new exp camps added specifically for mana burn groups. The mobs get a large defense bonus when aggroed.

Quite a few new exp camps added in other areas as well, like apex camps but smaller. Only new camps I've used is in Highlands, Eikon worms and the Yellow Jacket/Mineral Worm camp near the zone to Vulkrum.

Normally would have been a negative aspect of the server for me, but 900 people in Dunes that second week tempered that a bit.

Definitely leaning more on the + for "Era +"

Then the "era specific" devs make non-era changes to nerf that XP tactic.

Of course if it was really era specific, then we'd would be able to use spellcast and FFXIAP.

A true testament to this was how few servers would push their changes/fixes back to the source repo. Private servers have been very terrible in the past about contributing back. They want their server to be the best so they don't share fixes that would help the community overall.

Though admittedly I'm not sure if that's the case with Horizon as I'm long out of that scene.

2 EZ 4 ME

This is the ***I dont get. Like how is exping on dinky mobs from level 10, according to him, somehow challenging? This is the type of ***they say constantly, like they literally do 0 research and assume the whole game is one shot with trusts. Like nobody soloed in the 75 era with DOT kiting/pinning or nukes. Wasn't like a single RDM soloed like 80% of the end game back in the day with these methods, or nobody was soloing BST pets for EXP or soloing in general (DRG regularly soloed EXP and on colibri.) I just dont get how thick headed these people are to completely believe these lies. Trusts came out AGES AGO, we werent soloing Delve when they came out, we werent (vast majority) soloing VD ambus or HTB at VD. They weren't soloing master trials, they werent soloing Salvage v2 or other crap when it first came out. Where are they getting this from???

Don't bother the vocal majority of private server folks has no clue about what even is "era" or how the game worked back then

75 FFXI is an easier game than retail, everyone good on either retail or private server know that

Neither is explicitly easier or harder. It's how you frame it.

2005 Kirin? Harder than anything in the current game. AV PW same same. (Bumba maybe)

Current game is easier.... to get to end game, where you start actually playing the game. 75 is much harder at that.

1-74 "is" much more effort than 1-98. You can't do that ***naked with 3-5 trusts (that are better than any player can be at that level) in a few hours.

Oh yeah, gil. Gil is -*** impossible- to get in 75. You can get 100m(+) a day in 2023.

Except you could. Plenty of korrokola tunnel burns all the way to 75. Plenty of parties literally camped at qufim, dunes or colibri with lvl sync all the way to 75.

1-74 is not more effort than 1-99 + job Master + ML50. We are talking about caps for both eras so don't ignore the rest after 99.

2005 Kirin without all the game knowledge we have now... AV/PW were deliberately tweaked tk not be beatable, when it was they nerfed it. Not good examples

It's been steady at 4.5k people logged on since the launch. At this point, I think overcrowding is the only drawback I encounter.

very few mobs to exp solo or in a party.
You learn quickly to form Lowman parties(2-3) to outkill the soloers.

The game feels grindy because of that.

You never drop anything because gil is a grind too.

It takes forever to get anywhere! You have to defeat the Treant NM to open OP warps after they are unlocked via the supplies quest.

The Auction House doesn't have everything yet but the crafters keep it stock with plenty of low lvl mats to get you going on a craft of your own.
like 190 gil for a stack of earth crystals and 300gil for bone chips etc.

NM drops are expensive AF.
BCNM drops are expensive AF.
Every nm camp is a battle with people.

It's actually what I remember from late 2003

I like it. especially when I get the claim, or level but most of all when I met a random person and we help each other out or just help because we can.

It feels like a community like it or not.

Pre sync. Sync didn't exist until fall, 2008.

Yup but thats where a majority of these 75 cap dummies are pulling their feels from. Thats why the majority of them have level sync already and so we are comparing only that era to now.

Here's the thing, this is coming from someone that played retail for 14ish years and is now playing Horizon btw... I'll try to be as unbiased as possible.

Current retail is boring to me. Don't get me wrong though, combat at 99 is so much better with all the gear that's available now. It's almost a sandbox at this point. The amount of things you can put on gear via augments is honestly insane. However, my favorite part of the game is no longer a thing. That being the community. 90+% of shouts are RMT or people trying to sell things. A majority of players are multiboxing or spamming trust for most things. A large chunk of the "playerbase" is bots. Why team up for malignance armor farm when I can just cleave merits and then solo easy with trust until ***drops? Sortie launched and the first thing people do is make videos on solo farm strats. It's just not an environment I personally find fun.

Every single day on Horizon I've had goals to achieve and parties of random people relaxing and beating ***up together while talking about whatever. Just yesterday I did my limit break for lv.50 and had a full party go to all 3 areas and get it all knocked out was fun because all 6 of us needed it and we couldn't do it alone. Someone dies on hardcore mode and it pops up a notification to the entire server. The entire server then proceeds to pop off about it in shout and yell. We don't have homepoint warps, and while it's annoying as *** to walk everywhere, it also makes the world feel huge again. It's honestly been refreshing to fear the overworld again instead of lighting something up in 5 seconds should it choose to look at me funny. I've done everything in retail many times over, with the exception of Sortie because I haven't played in almost 2 years now and have no desire to do so currently. So, don't assume that people that play on private servers can't hang with retail because it's "harder" or they got jaded as Draylo likes to say lol. I don't play retail anymore because what I enjoyed about the game is no longer there. If you enjoy retail then keep playing. More power to you guys :)

You were telling us the same about ff14 not long ago tho.

You would have to join a linkshell to get that community feel, there are people on servers with 300 players and they have linkshells and a friend group. It was no different back in the 75 era... In fact it was worse because there were cliques in every linkshell who excluded people for the most part. Having options is not some detriment to the game, if someone wants to solo something because they dont have time to play (like you just made a SMN soloing bst pet video... yet you hating on soloing) then who cares?

Yes you are a jaded player, and like most liking posts that are negative towards XI. You just explained it in your post, you felt that everyone solos and nobody teams up. You wouldn't do Lilith on E because its ***, VD has a much higher drop rate and is easy to take on with some friends. You are just looking at everything thru rose tinted goggles... cant wait until they all reach end game and see how truly boring it is and annoying have to depend on other dummies to get anything done.

Sure it can be fun to try something different, but they could have all came to retail and made the community there instead of a pirate server. You keep trashing on retail though, dont act like youre happy if someone enjoys it lol

And I still play FFXIV lol. Your point? I actually really enjoy the PVP in FFXIV and play it quite often.

W-we.... MISS YOU! ( T_T)

Let the guy play whatever game he wants. Obviously, he wasn't good at retail and needs a community to carry him.

People mad at Horizon server should be laughed at tho. People play buggy indie games and trash all the time. Let them play with that pile of garbage.

I think the problem is that a lot of the difficult endgame content is walled behind time gates, gear, jobs, and participation. Once you hit 99, you aren't going to waltz out of a zone trying to reach Jeuno and get murdered, so it seems like a lot of the risk and challenge that existed before is gone unless you go deeper.

Some guy getting on during free login that heard the game was super easy can't walk up and try Kalunga v25, for instance, or even do Odyssey at all for 45 days. They aren't locked out of Sortie but they are never going to get to the more difficult bosses without effort and a group (ironically these types also yammer on and on about how there is no community despite there being a lot around Sortie and Odyssey in particular). Similarly you aren't going to see them in Dynamis-D. These require groups, gearing, and time, no different than 75-cap endgame content, but they never got to that point so they don't know that.

My feeling is that a lot of these types never made it past the 75 grind during 75-cap and never participated in endgame content then, so for them the grind through the levels is the 11 experience. When they login and see how trivial it is now, they brush the whole game off as easy, because they get to 99 and think they've beat the game (I've heard at least one person more or less use those exact words). Sure they can look at the wiki, but there is no way for them to go and try some of this content to see how difficult it actually is. Now a discerning person would see some of this and think they should read more on it or try it before passing judgement, but they aren't in that category so they just run on about how easy it is and cancel their sub.

There is also a really strong echo chamber effect about this, where some of the thumpers go on and on about how easy the game is now despite the fact they haven't experienced any of the current content. It gets repeated even though it isn't true.

I mean, no ***. content from 4/8/12 years ago is trivial in a MMO. That shouldn't be a groundbreaking revelation and is true of almost any MMO out there that is receiving updates.


Yea, there are solo strats for Sortie. Have you tried them? They aren't efficient and you'd be lucky to get 20% as much as a group would.

Keep in mind Sortie was specifically designed to be a bridge between other easier endgame content like Omen and Ambuscade to Odyssey. SE said it was aimed at lesser geared players and soloable to an extent, so yea, there are going to be solo strats because some people need to work up to being a group. No one I know doing well in Sortie and getting a lot of +3 gear is doing it solo.

As for the community complaint, that is just not the case. There is absolutely a strong community component to current content, Odyssey in particular. I'm in one Discord that is specifically aimed at coming up with strategies and forming parties for v25. I've met a lot of players I've never run with before doing that content and we're all coordinating/discussing strats. The fact this doesn't exist for easier, dated content like HTBFs and Omen is because it isn't needed, but that element absolutely still exists.

This is more or less highlighted by my post above. The endgame content now is really difficult to break into and try for people that aren't already really well geared and already have progress on it, it's time gated and resources to enter are limited. It's also punishing and time constrained, which doesn't leave a lot of room for people that aren't already experienced in it. It's a sort of chicken and egg problem, but these things you complain about being an issue in retail really aren't as much of one as you probably think.

There are legitimate reasons to prefer 75 cap, that's fair, preferring Horizon is fine, but if you aren't doing the current content then you really shouldn't be commenting on what it is and isn't.

i'm wondering if those complaining about parties forming for specific endgame content have taken the initiative and yelled themselves to start a group. or did they just sit there in town mouth breathing as their chat scrolls.

Maybe my recollection is wrong, but I don't recall much shouting to PUG endgame content during 75-cap either. It seems like most of the endgame content was coordinated through linkshells, which people applied to or brought their friends into. If you weren't in those groups then you were SOL. That seemed to start changing around Abyssea, but maybe I'm remembering wrong.