Deepest, Darkest FFXI Confessions, Let's Go!

bro the LFG Days man was *** epic

I remember being a BRD and was like oh snap I control this *** boat - Like fully 100% controlled the group - I didn't need party lead if I was singing my jams - Any moment I could spin a bottle and whoever it landed off I could tell them to *** off - Went like this "Yeah - *** this whm - get a new one - or I'm out" - BOOM that whm was packing their *** bags cursing me out as he warped to jeuno

You would get a group here and there that would be "Don't be like this" And "You're wasting people's time" but I liked to switch my merits around a *** lot and so begin the Nick makes his own parties "Arc" where I would tell the party to *** off and then bring an entirely different party to the same camp spot as they suffered looking for a new bard.

TAKE ME *** BACK

I played BRD fulltime during ToAU and was constantly barraged with /tells to get merits on Greater Colibri. I would even get them /anon and was getting annoyed so I started putting "I will only party if you have a BST with Guttler" in my /seacom just to be an ***. I got a lot of nasty tells, but someone did eventually have a Guttler so I had to go out and pull for merits.

Note to self: Summon Dekar by making Guttler

Why guttler though? Wouldn't it have been smarter to pick a piercing relic to ensure if the party happens the exp was solid? I imagine if you chose for rarity to avoid partie invites there would have been better picks, too?

The best beastmasters in those days never grouped up. They soloed for their merits. Relic weapons took a long time to make, so there wouldn't have been many Guttlers around. Therefore, finding a Guttler BST in a party would have been a really low chance of happening.

I know, I used to play BST.
It's just looking at something like claustrum and how it compared to elemental staffs there had to be less of them than guttlers right?

Here im expecting some illegal, immoral, kinky secrets, crimes, bribery, robbery, but all i see are some FFXI nerdy stuff.

Ooh, yeah. On greater colibri, asking for a black mage with claustrum would have meant literally no party ever would fit the bill unless they deliberately set out to do it out of spite. A useless weapon, on a job that was basically shunned from the entire expansion?

Gwen, I was expecting a lot worse than what you wrote, you didn't need to delete it. It wasn't even that bad.

Could tell you about the 10 year+ in game love story that eventually went irl.

I always prerered Gwen than Mary Jane.

Mary Jane is a terrible person.

There weren't that many Guttlers back in the day and I liked seeing what BST could do in a party.

FFXI is a very well-coded game with absolutely zero flaws.



This bug existed as of 2022 and I bet it still does. (you can't use it for infinite gil cause it only works at the Salvage NPC afaik)

edit: oh there's another fun one where if you mess up one parameter in the Adoulin waypoint warp packets you can get charged 150 kinetic units for any warp, including one to another Adoulin waypoint, so you overpay by a factor of 75 or 150 or whatever. never did get that one to work in the other direction but it miiiiight be doable, not like anyone cares

It still does and it's an awesome way to get banned if they investigate you, which doesn't happen often but it definitely happens if you get reported for Salvage botting.

Is this another case of "the server will blindly trust the clients request"?

what I mean is:
it does the check for points client side
the client will then permit or block sending the "give me permit with X points" packet
and the server just blindly accepts the "give me permit using X points" packet without actually verifying points

Not an evil confession, but one I cringe at everytime I recall it:

It was '04-'05 or something, my brother and I both played the game though he was more established socially ingame at the time and I had just finished CoP 2-3 on my character(the Minotaur one in phomiuna aqueducts). Brother was away that week so I offered log onto his character and take him through the mission, we both played whm so it was easy for me to pick up his character and go.

Anywho, as all such missions did at the time; it's been like 2 hours but the Minotaur's down and we're just at the iron gate waiting for a key to drop. Parents were pestering me to get some chores done for sometime but we're literately on the last leg of this hell. Well parents keep getting more and more distracting and one thing leads to another and I accidentally switch to brother's teleport-taxi macro page...

I goto click his Cure3 or something macro, look away to argue why I'm not in-fact not being a lazy bum to me mom. When I look back 5/6th's my party is standing in Konschtat with my last party message saying something akin to "Thank you for traveling Air CharName", and my party was the tank party so I do what anybody would in my situation and I just sit there dazed for a minute.

And all I could do was pretty much then respond, "sorry clicked wrong macro, also I really gtg... so bye". I think I worded it better but I know the whole alliance pretty understood it as above.
-
To this day that one memory haunts me on occasion.

yes, but most people used it for wyrmkeeper not salvage permits. i thought it was removed personally, but haven't verified

yes, the packet says how many kinetic units you're spending; this has been known forever because superwarp didn't handle it right for years despite having hundreds of users


just to be clear, the server doesn't 'blindly trust the clients request' on any widespread scale. there are small instances like this where it is not verified, and when they start to have meaningful impact they get patched and bans get handed out. this isn't an indicator of widespread bad code, it's a mistake by an outsourced team (toau and adoulin were biggest culprits of this). helix is just trying to get attention for something that's been relatively well known in some circles for over a decade

(no, i'm not going to list other instances, none of them are anything to write home about. if you want to permanently drop your account to negative nyzul tokens for an areuhat, you're a moron: it only takes like 10 hours to do it legitimately anyway)

Theyre “small instances” and yet they almost always seem to be very crucial instances:
Medals
Bypass nyzul farming for mythic
Fast travel to areas unvisited
Force HQ synth exploit (this ones *** wild lol)

Thats what I can think of off the top of my head and Im sure theres more.

Bypassing Nyzul in exchange for leaving a permanent notation that you did it on your account is not a good deal, in my opinion. Obviously you could farm enough nyzul to get back to positives, but at that point why cheat for a loan? It's silly. This is also assuming it actually still works, and I'm pretty sure I remember being told it doesn't.

The other 3 you mentioned were patched years ago. There have been plenty of other large instances in the past. I've systematically checked every packet system and NPC since the medal fiasco and have not found any that I would consider impactful enough to get fixed.

And you sound salty that he does. People outside of those "circles" seem to find it interesting.

Can we get a "trust me bro" on that one?

I wasn't even! I just thought I could automate it and save myself a few clicks!

(I wish I had known you could have just gotten W. Areuhat that way, lmao. Not even remotely surprised that I reinvented a far-less-useful wheel or anything)

Stop chasing clout helix! Us elites knew about this way before you did, that clout is ours!

I like to make things up that I pick up while playing

like bst gets stronger with axe if you use scythe first because scythe is a heavier weapon so you can switch to your axe and swing with more force

and
dragoon does more damage if you also use a pet haste/dbl attack build to share damage with your wyvern because the wyvern gets excited and then you switch back to normal tp gives you a rest and makes wyvern happy

or
pld can cap exp if you hold a group of incredible tough mobs long enough not exp for lvl but exp for tanking and only you know when you need to cap your tanking exp from a feeling some updates raising the tanking exp cap

You'll fit in really well here.

20 Year Confession, The Kraken's Curse - A Tale of Betrayal and Revenge (disclaimer: I used chatgpt to help me come up with this lame title and clean up this text o wall so it's readable)

I’ve been playing FFXI since the JP import in 2003, though casually at first. When the NA release hit, I dove in deeper on Midgardsormr server. I had two characters: Zslash, my Hume 70 PLD (that I lost to identity theft but that's not what I'm gonna talk about today), and Foxdiel, a Mithra THF. Back then, endgame LS names like Rzero, Pandavas, and Valor ruled the server, though it’s been 20 years, so forgive me if I’ve forgotten some details.

My confession begins with Foxdiel. I leveled her to 60 as a THF and discovered the lucrative world of farming Oztroja coffers for Astral Rings. I was making serious bank but screwing over every RDM, BRD, DRK, and fellow THF who needed their AF gear from those coffers. I’d sit in seek mode for EXP parties—sometimes waiting 2–3 days without an invite—but honestly, I didn’t care. I was rolling in Gil and living my best adventurer life.

Around this time, I got invited to a random LS led by a Hume PLD who, frankly, was a walking disaster. His reputation was so bad that no one wanted to party with him, let alone follow him. I can’t remember his name, but let’s just say he was about as inspiring as a wet paper bag. The only reason I joined this mess of an LS was because they were dragging a big group through Zilart missions—unlocking those in 2004 was a big deal.

Now, if this LS was a circus, the leader was the clown. But there was one shining beacon in that mess: a player named Sacsac who helped the LS as an officer. I’d actually met him a few months earlier as Chrisz when he helped a group of us noobs with the Rank 5 mission. He was an incredible player from Hong Kong, and this time, he’d joined the LS to watch the chaos unfold firsthand.

Case in point: this dumb LS leader decided to bring all 18 of us to fight Capricious Cassie. It was a total disaster. We wiped because the LS was undisciplined, uncoordinated, and just plain bad. Imagine 12 melee DD's meleeing it simultaneously. Sacsac used teaching opportunities like this to humble us. He grabbed two other HK friends, a WHM and a BRD and trio’d Cassie right in front of us. It was both humiliating and awe-inspiring for someone who didn't realize what TP feed was yet.

Inevitably this LS broke up over some stupid drama over DKP systems that the leader corruptly ignored in favor of the inner group, we know how that goes all too well.

Sacsac’s core group of HK players—names like Aznnutts, Hotohori, and Seal—also stuck around in this doomed LS for the laughs and afterward created their own LS named Furuba. Sacsac noticed my skills and started pulling me into their tight-knit group along with 3-4 others from the now-broken LS. We ran static EXP parties together and tackled smaller NMs like LoO, Amikiri, Serket, and Roc/Simurgh and CoP missions to unlock Sea access. I became a core member of Furuba and helped lead/organize low-man HNMs.

Eventually, we all hit 75 on our first and second jobs, gearing up with things like Scorpion Harnesses, THF’s Knife, and even a couple Kraken Clubs. It was thrilling to low-man so many NMs back in the 2004–2005 era. Things were going so well.

But life has a way of intervening. After a couple of years of playing daily, real-life responsibilities caught up, and I had to make the hard choice to take a break from the game. Since I was the main THF with TH4 in the group, it made sense to let them borrow my account while I was gone. (Yes, cue the “oh no, you didn’t” here) I figured I’d be gone for a few months, maybe a year at most.

I didn’t log in for about 8–11 months—can’t remember exactly—but when life settled, nostalgia hit me hard. I wanted to come back to FFXI, to my friends, and to the Mithra THF I’d worked so hard to build.

What I didn’t expect was to find out my “borrowed” account was no longer mine. The LS had brought in another IRL friend from Hong Kong, who’d taken over Foxdiel. I asked for the account back, but I was met with, “Sorry, it’s his now.” Just like that.

This was the same LS I’d spent two years playing with daily. The group that had become my second family in-game. To be fair, I’d been gone for almost a year, and things changed, but it still hit hard. To their credit, they all committed to helping me rebuild a new character from the ground up, but it wasn’t the same.

I reluctantly took their offer and started over. They even let me use one of their shared LS accounts—a Hume WHM & RDM 75 with a Noble’s Tunic—to PL my new character. That account also had a Kraken Club. Using this PL account to start my own EXP parties as I grinded back up to the 70's once again. But as I slogged through missions and watched the LS chatter about their endgame shenanigans, not being a part of that led to brewing resentment.

Eventually, I hit my breaking point. I’d been betrayed by the group I thought had my back, and no amount of PLing could change that. One night, I said, “Screw this,” and moved all the gear and the Kraken Club from the PL account onto my new character. Then I logged off and never came back.

I didn’t care about the morality or consequences of my actions. For once, I felt vindicated.

I stayed away from FFXI for another 6–10 months, but word traveled fast. A couple of my IRL friends who play on the same server told me the LS was livid, combing the server to find me. I just shrugged and said, “Reparations.” Call it rationalization, call it toxic—I don’t regret it to this day.

Eventually, I made a new character. Lost it again to SE ID shenanigans when that rolled out (Don't ask how, it got linked to someone else's SE ID so I lost access). By 2012, I started fresh one last time and swore never to lose this account. I’ve been playing ever since, starting on Bismarck (where refugee Midgardians ended up) and transferred into Slyph sometime in 2016-2017, happily grinding away as Pve on Sylph server to this day.

I realize doxxing myself here is probably moronic, but let’s be honest: half that HK Furuba group is probably dead irl by now, and who’s reading this forum 20 years later?

Obligatory *** you to Seal's IRL friend who took over my account I'd put in 2 years worth of sweat and blood into and thinking it was ok to play it right in front of me.

Anyway, I have another story about how I created a monster on Sylph that got 10–15 people banned in 2022, but that’s a tale for another time. It’s 12 a.m. where I am, and I need sleep.

Also hello to players from Midgardsormr if you're still out there!

EDIT: To those wondering, I sold the Kraken Club to fund my new character when I played again but I did eventually obtain another one that I use to remind me how fickle linkshell connections can be.

rly?

TLDR:
He joined a LS, started simping for the secret leader, senpai noticed him into leet hong kong LS. He joined events and built up his lvl 60 THF to resident treasure hunter applier status but he eventually quit and gave his account details to senpai.

Roughly a year passes, withdrawls kick in so he returns to find his char beeing given away permanently to senpais new hong kong bro. They offer him access to leet power level mule with all the goodies including kraken and Noble's + help with bringing new char up to pace for compensation.

He accepts but got jelly while overhearing hong kong bros having too much fun during endgame and decided to pull a uno reverse on the betrayal front.

Nah man, negative *** points aren't nearly the worst thing us goons know of, it's only one of the funniest.

For what it's worth, I was visibly behind getting both the trade exploit(medals) and qiqirn quest exploit patched despite them having the potential to generate infinite gil. I don't want exploits in the game, they reduce the advantage my bots provide because any idiot with a slightly edited windower addon can do exploits. From that, a reasonable person can conclude that if there were any that stood to alter the game economy, I'd be trying to get them patched.

I understand that nobody has any reason to trust me, though. I would probably say the exact same thing if there were any; it directly harms my bottom line and the game itself to spread that kind of thing. I'm able to draw a line between my ego and a direct negative.

There are a handful that don't effect gamewide balance(no way to make gil with them) but allow forms of personal character progress. Most of them are pretty well known already. I'm sure the Asura discords pass them around like candy if you're into that sort of thing. Some have been mentioned on these forums too, both directly and in a vaguer sense.

Would you say the same thing to Stephen Hawking on a physics forum? Thorny is probably the most, if not among the most, prolific coders and crackers in the FFXI community. I'm not saying we should trust every word out of his mouth, but I don't think heavy-handed skepticism is necessary for certain people's claims..

Man, that sure is alot of words to say you huff your own farts and don't know what the *** you're talking about.