July 2026 Version Update

This is the exact same argument that pirates give:

"I was never going to buy this game anyway"

Same thing PS dumbasses say:

"I would never play FFXI if not on a PS"

It's totally untrue.

OK, maybe in that one person's case it COULD be true, I don't know, I'm (thankfully) not in their heads. But we're not talking about one person's situation, we're talking about the community.

Broadly speaking, SOME people would play FFXI on the official servers if PS didn't exist. SOME people who are currently 6-botting would be playing with others, if the bots didn't exist.

Now they're not. That's a harm.

Not for nothing, but these people also post ALL OVER reddit and this forum, telling other people that they should 6-bot, how easy it is, and link them "tools" and other things to get them set up. They're not just one random isolated *** playing the game by themselves in their basement. They're actively harming the community, constantly.

the strongest argument against 3rd party tools imo is its effect on the required (or player expected) performance floor for content; those making proper use of gearswap, distance plugins, etc. are on the whole likely outperforming those who aren't. that gap means devs have a harder time tuning content that the lower end can reasonably achieve while still being engaging to the higher end. it's not hard to imagine that, from a community that at one time refused to invite the perfectly functional DD dragoon for its supposed suboptimal performance, players might also begin to enforce a push toward 3rd party tools.

world of warcraft had struggled with this for over a decade and finally did pull the plug on 3rd party tools not long ago, however this was coupled with a major push to incorporate most of the QoL improvements like damage meters, UI tweaks, and more into the base game. these are different beasts of course. XI has always had a firmer stance against 3rd party tools than WoW, and WoW isn't built for the PS2 which allows more room for improvement.

i could maybe see an argument for 6-boxing/botting harming the community through shallowing the available player pool for certain things. someone botting their own JP/CP/ML is imo harmless, but selling it to someone who might've otherwise grouped up with you is another.

Well considering mostly everything is automated, yes POSing across a zone is more risky than botting for a few hours. The system can easily detect when you kill Aita and you're at Trib 15 seconds later (or whatever order)

This is pretty minimal, TBH, but even if they don't sell the ML to someone else (depriving you of that player to play with), they're depriving you of THEMSELVES as a player you could play with. They don't need to sell anything for your example to be a relevant harm to the community.

I think a lot of people are thinking about it in the current context: the bots exist and people have to decide whether they should use them or not.

A more useful way to think about it would be to think about a world in which the bots were never made.

Would that world be better? OK, then the bots have damaged the community.

Aaaaand here's where everyone throws out their favorite anecdote about a 6-botter that helped them get a Bumba clear so actually 6-botting is saving orphans or whatever. We're not talking about individual people, we're discussing the impact on the entirety of the game as a whole. In that world where bots didn't exist, maybe you would've actually killed Bumba under your own power, with your friends, instead of having a 6-botter kill it while you watched from the ground. Wouldn't that be more fun? You still get the same armor, but you get to actually play the game and socialize.

And now that you don't need Nyame anymore, you're depriving 5 more people of a 6th they need to kill Ongo, or whatever. And so on. Yadda yadda snowball yadda yadda reddit posts, until we're at a point where everyone just rolls over and accepts that actually, botting is great and everyone should do it.

chewing on this and not ready to solidify a stance yet

do you take similar umbrage with people who solo content rather than group for it? or people who log in and sit in towns with fully functional jobs, but don't do content? should trusts be removed because they pull people out of potential groups?

i mean, fair, but also that's an extreme example.

i've heard people who actively and regularly bot MLs (which is done out in the open and generally not in super isolated spots) express concern about using movement speed in a closed instance zone that is only accessible by people you willingly team up with?

weird manufactured propaganda that this bot is patently NOT a bot and is indeed safe but every other tool is bad and WILL get you immediately sent to Mordion Gaol

because its not impossible to run a 7-10 hour ML sesh. We did this ***back in the day at greater colibri, at deco weapons, at moon, at azouph or bhaf staging points, etc etc


again, you seem to be missing the point of what the server can very easily detect. Being in "a closed instance with your friends" doesnt alleviate anything. Theres no snitch involved. You are literally traveling from A to B faster than you should be able to. There is literally a POL error that boots you from the game if you're going a tad too fast. I dont remember what the POL-number is, but I always get it when I'm doing too much running at 25% and not enough stopping to fight (ie: abyssea).

Theres also the "You were unable to enter the next area" when you zoom through a zone too fast.

i think at least in part it comes down to what aspects of the game you respect. i haven't botted ML, but absolutely understand why people would. it's boring, repetitive, and grindy, even with chatty friends and experimental builds. i do not respect the JP/CP/ML grind. that is tiiiiime wasted not having fun, but it's a hard gate to aspects of the game i do find fun.

i've seen people position-voop around sortie before, which is something i don't really get. that's just one of my lines. there are lots of things i like about sortie that separate it out from the more tedious tasks in the game.

Back again to challenge, sorry. What are the aspects of the game you are "hard gated" on because of MLs?

The JP/CP part I guess, but those are like...8 hours from 0-2100? IDK, haven't done it in a while, but it's not a serious grind, especially for established players (parties).

ML are not necessary for, I'll just go ahead and say it, anything except for the most recent master trials. You could POSSIBLY argue that 5 ML are required for a few strategies, for Super Jump, but ML30+ are absolutely not required to do any content in this game (barring latest MT), full stop.

Just don't grind ML. It will be fine, I promise you.


Eh..not really, mostly because they're not actively encouraging others to do it and when they DO engage with content they would play with a player. The people who are 6-botting are choosing to do content and THEN choosing not to do it with other people. Very different. Trusts aren't relevant for anything remotely challenging and even when you CAN kill something with trusts, it's still infinitely better doing it with people. Trusts are in a very comfy place in terms of engagement.

no i think i get it - i just don't think you need to be blasting around fast enough to get desynced from the server always, or like always having your anti-knockback stuff on.

all the characters following each other stacked directly on top of each other, and lighting up buffs synchronously are definitely not easily detectable. not at all. they're just a very coordinated group of friends.

again i don't care what people do it's just weird to see people do mental gymnastics and being so dishonest with themselves that this mindset has perpetuated to what feels like a fair portion of the community.

MT made a great point in the post above. everyone was circlejerking over getting their ML up when I came back and I didn't understand, and still don't... MLs weren't a thing when I was gone before. Now everyone acts like it's just a requirement to be ML30 to do throwaway content.

ok. trusts and solo play are fine because they're not useful for challenging/current content. so far so good.

i did not need to group up for any of my higher difficulty lilith, odin, or shinryu runs. trusts and other solo play strengths enabled me-- and many, many others --to remove myself from the pool of players that others might've called on to help with their runs. players that perhaps didn't have strong solo jobs, trusts, or the time to practice doing them alone, or to grind out VE's tragic drop rates endlessly. put another way: SOME people who are currently soloing with trusts would be playing with others, if the trusts didn't exist. now they're not. is that harmful to the community?



not to be a bureaucratic shitlib about it but this is, imo, a numbers and perception issue. even if we put ten toes down on this idea, we straight-up do not have the data to say for certain how many players are 6-boxing and how many of them would stick around if they couldn't. even an estimate is probably going to be very anecdotal, and that's a pretty hard sell for me to purchase as an existential threat to the playerbase. if someone's got data, maybe from SE, i would legit love to see it. i'm just always skeptical of rhetoric hinging on e.g. 'they're corrupting others!'

like, is it 10 players 6-boxing on a server? 100? 1000? do we know, or are we going on vibes? and if they were slain tomorrow, what fraction would stick around? do we know, or are we going on vibes? what is the threshold for that to be A Big Issue? because my anecdotal experience is that i barely noticed it and couldn't have given less of a ***. i was too busy gettin' stuff done

i'd also like to take a second to thank you for engaging w me seriously about this, this place needs some civil discourse for once

This is true.
Granted that I suspect people 6boxing are an incredibly small number.
Now if we're talking about people 3boxing or even 2boxing I suspect the number is much higher.
Is it a number so high that creates the negative effects Maletaru is mentioning?
Who knows. I think it's probably not THAT big, but I also think it's not irrelevant either, for sure.

We also have to think about the demographic of FFXI atm.
How many different players (players, not accounts) are currently active in the world?
50k? That sounds generous if you ask me but hey, I could be wrong.

Let's pretend for a second it's 50k, just for the sake of making an example.
How are these 50k spread?
How many simply login to engage in social stuff, monstrosity, garden, doing missions and quests with an extremely slow pace, enjoying super casual content and playing mostly solo, rarely with other people?
How many are a few steps above them and do engage in some content occasionally, making small parties?
How many are a few steps above that and login several times a week and do several "monthly" content every month?
Then you have another step, the fourth, people who are in organized groups, linkshells, mostly static parties these days, they join PUGs, sometimes they even setup PUGs.
Then you have the last group, very strong players who tackle the hardest content, they have static, they sometimes get bored and wait in town doing basically nothing after they achieved all their goals.

Where are the multiboxes more prominent? On a hunch I would say on the 4th group, then a bit on the 3rd, not so many in the other groups.

I also suspect the 1st group has a large number of members, and they go mostly un-noticed because I'm sure most of them do not participate in communities and they probably hardly interact with other players as well, it's like we don't even know they exist. Yet, even with the scarcity of their logins, they're there and create a flow of actions on FFXI's servers, and they still pay their monthly fee.

The irony here is that botting in FFXI was responsible for the most catastrophic economic disaster I've ever seen, in any MMO. You'd be forgiven for not knowing if you didn't play 20 years ago, but... just funny that people have embraced something that almost made the game collapse.

It is interesting to think about the numbers of each group. I wonder how many fit into each category and really can't answer it other than anecdotes, of course.

The other interesting thing to consider is the cross-pollination and transfer between groups. It would be great, IMO, if people in these groups interacted with each other and played the game together more often rather than being stuck in their silos.

Some of the best experiences I have are when I play with fresh returning players or up-and-coming groups. It's great to see their ambition and drive, to hear the way their attempts are going, and be able to support them and share stories about similar issues I've faced and how we overcame them.

I also think that if some of the low key players got together and did low key ***together, they would have a better low key experience. Tons of people think they're unique butterflies because they have a dog and a wife or whatever, but at this point that's like...a majority of people on the game. You'd think these people would be very understanding of the challenges and happy to work with each other?

While 6-botters may only make up 1% of the population (idk if it's true, just to have a hypothetical), the impact could be outsized because they might cause 4 other people to quit when they can't succeed because they can't fill their group.

It's all anecdotes all the way down, but I've noticed a lot of people come to my LS, try to do content for a bit, then just disappear for 6 months, or a year or two, or whatever.

Realistically I think the game needs leadership more than anything. A lot of people want to do content, but .5% of them want to actually lead anything.

that's some real-*** ***you just said homeboy. the real final boss of FFXI is organizing. you've got to know the content well enough to know what roles/jobs are needed, how to explain it if needed to a newcomer, patience in putting the group together, grace enough to not have a chudsplosion at mistakes or suboptimal play, just a substantial energy expenditure a lot of the time. and if your groups don't go over well often enough, there's always the risk of earning a poor reputation that can make leading harder in the future

the leading problem is another really interesting facet of the game to me. most other cooperative games, MMOs like XIV and WoW as well as shooters like overwatch, have designed away from this using group finders and queues. it "solves" the problem of doing that work in some ways, but strips out some of the social elements and forces short-term encounter and long-term content design to fit certain parameters. not ideal! it's sometimes why these games can feel more like a theme park and less like a living world, i think

i enjoyed WoW's midnight expansion for a while, but once i hit a gear level where i had to pivot away from queues and into manually organizing groups i lost interest. if i'd found a larger social group to gel with and run content together it probably would've solved that problem too to some degree. but man MMO players aren't getting any younger and there sure are some wretched cranks out there. one can only hold one's nose and put up with it for so long y'know

Gatekeeping how people should spend their time in game helps how exactly.

SE's own census indicated a large percentage of players play solo and want solo accessible content and progression.

Forcing them to group up when they say they do not enjoy it helps how.

Having content only accessible by statics of no-lifers that want to spend weeks/months on something helps how.

I'm glad no one here is responsible for what content gets added or changed.

i didn't want to approach it too harshly 'cause i felt like we were coming in here in good faith but the vibe i was worried i was getting was along these lines. feeling entitled to the participation? of others? trying to regulate away the ways others prefer to spend their time in order to force them into cooperation? which on some level i get based on the nature of the game and the ToS outline, just something about the spirit of it smacked unsavory to me

Exactly. Because the game has (almost) zero tools to help with that.
You don't just need people willing to take the initiative, it's not "just" lazyness.
This game can be very complicated for pretty much anything, lots of research need to be done and all the info are in "unofficial" places that most people probably don't even know they exist.

Lot of work for that, and people are rightfully scared of people just willing to lead but without an idea of what to do. Joining such parties can be frustrating and leads a lot of people to be "*** that I'm gonna play on my own!"


Now I don't want to exxagerate, not everything requires super specific strategies like V25 etc. A lot of stuff is surely easy and doesn't need really that much of a preparation other than a "standard" setup of 3+ people.
It's more a matter of knowing those content even exist, being able to tell them apart between those who can be useful for you and those who are a waste of time other than "doing them once for completition / because I have fun when them" etc etc.
See what I mean?

But yeah having people able to lead in a LS willing to help younglings totally makes the difference. Been there, done that. Spent so much time and gil to help them.
I'm on a mixed stance. On one hand I can't deny I sorta enjoyed helping them and doing content I neglected for a decade, on the other hand sometimes I probably spent too much time/resources on them, only to be disappointed to see them go a couple of weeks after =/

Said it before and I'll say it again: SE listened to all the solo players when they released all their latest content: sortie, limbus, besieged, the world boss *** for JSE. It's all tailored to solo players.

And it's incredibly boring, milquetoast content that everyone and their mother lambasts for being boring and unchallenging. Because that's what you get when you hamfist solo content into an MMO.

Also: that's not what gatekeeping means.

I'm not forcing anyone to do anything, I don't have that power. I'm simply encouraging people to rethink their supposed barriers or restrictions, because a lot of the stuff i hear parroted, including by you right now, completely misses the forest for the trees.


What exactly is this referring to? Odyssey? People do 9 boss pick up groups so it sure as sbit isn't sortie.

Compare the public opinion of sheol gaol to that of limbus and get back to me about which content we need more of.

Outside these forums sheol gaol completion rate is in the gaols.. (lol)

At least limbus is somewhat soloable. Grindy and boring af, but soloable.

Sortie catering to solo players? Talking out your arse.

The best data we actually have access to is [REDACTED] Patreon info, which is about 1800 subscribers averaging $6 a month. No way to know how many of those are at the basic $3 tier which only covers 3 characters, or who is paying $12 a month for full features but not running 6 accounts because that ***sucks.

when aminon was released 9-boss PUGS definitely weren't a thing. that took years and thousands of runs collectively to solve the chest conditions, work out the meta, and suss out effective strats. it certainly was challenging when there was no consensus on how to do it effectively yet

aside from the obvious damage type restrictions and overall Big Damage in gaol, what separates it from high tier sortie runs is RNG. there's very minimal impactful RNG in sortie. bosses behave predictably, their TP moves are manageable. you can pin your hopes of a successful v25 ongo or bumba on getting the right auras and SP

There's also lots more that don't have to pay a sub for botting tools.

The idea that you would pay $60+ a month to multi box this game but not $6 a month more for the best tool out there for facilitating it stretches disbelief

I'm sure they're out there but "how many FFXI players do an extremely poor job of maximizing their own enjoyment of this game" is not a thread I care to tug too vigorously

Point is you're gauging 6boxers that bot based on *one* bot. Do you think that under or over estimates 6 boxers that not?

I said it was the best data we had. But if you're asking what I think, I think there are fewer than 1800 4+ account multiboxers, because doing even cursory research about multiboxing in FFXI brings you to [REDACTED]. Unless you've been 6-boxing for years and are too stubborn or lazy to switch things up I can't imagine not using it.

If there are 1800 subs with an average of $6 and every sub is paying either $3 or $12, then 600 of those subs are paying $12. I'd imagine plenty of people are willing to toss a few bucks at a tool because it's thought of as the best, even if they don't have all the characters to use it. There are probably some who go straight for the higher sub to support the project or because it's so little money they don't care. Maybe they still get value out of it on one or 2, maybe it makes life easier for them, whatever.

There are definitely people 6boxing with private tools, some of which are considerably better. They're not more than a drop in the bucket. I would assume there are more people who pay for the sub and don't use 6 characters with it than there are people who 6box without it, so there's a ceiling of around 600 6-boxers.. which still feels crazy high to me.

Also, this whole conversation breaks:
and honestly feels like light advertising.

Fair enough. Redacted.

In any case, I too was actually surprised to see the revenue was that high. If there are that many bot armies, they certainly aren't standing around outside of Odyssey or Sortie where I can see them.

Are there any testimony of the new bc solo on vd?