Anyone want to play classic FFXI?

[nasomi]

Hi, I'm nasomi. I've been playing RPG's for nearly 20 years, from PnP to console to pc. I enjoy them, the story, the grinding, the fantasy. It's a good time.

I've played pretty much everything. I started with crystalis for NES, then moved on to FF1 & FF2, secret of mana on snes, a friend got D&D books and we started playing that. I continued to plow through every rpg I could find for years. I heavily favored turn based rpg's, or JRPG's to SRPG's. They just didn't do it for me, it was how many times can you press the a button to win. Then, the downfall began...

I'm really upset with the direction that "fantasy" type games are going, turn based is out and everything is button mashing, and I don't like that. If I wanted to mash buttons, there's no shortage of games that offer it. I want to concentrate on the story and relax in an immersive world.

So I decided to make my own.

I think my all time favorite video game was Final fantasy XI. It's an MMO and I joined it at NA launch. It wasn't my first, I had played Everquest and ragnarok. I absolutely loved the art style of ragnarok, and the play. It was a really fun game. RO2 fell drastically short of my expectations though. I dated a girl who made me play WoW. That lasted 10 days, I couldn't handle it. I played Everquest 2, and most others that came out. I was in first beta for FF14 and played all through 1.0, but now that 2.0 has come out, I was vastly disappointed. No open world, no wandering around finding things. No travel, you could almost entirely play the game without leaving town. When you do, it's a teleport. That made me vastly disappointed.

Anyway, FFXI left a mark on my soul. It seemed to be the perfect "everything". A vastly open world that you could walk for hours and still be in your home town. The races were unique, and I was quite fond of htem. A nice variety and not repetative. The jobs were simple and familiar, yet complex and exciting. The gameplay style was menu based, but not boring at all. The story(s), well, they were unparalelled. The depth of the game is almost unfathomable. You are in town, and some people won't offer you a quest or job because they don't know who you are, but raise fame, and they've heard of you as an adventurer. Quests aren't "kill x, receive y", they're intuative and have great story. You're a warrior, but decide you want to lay down your axe and pick up a wand and be a white mage, just talk to your own personal moogle and it's there.

In short, the game was perfection.

And then one day...

FFXI's publisher was launching their new title, FFXIV. With a religeous following for FFXI, and an obsession to "finish" things, they offered a new expansion, that would give players 3 months to play it. It sped up the leveling, and offereted teleports to get around easier. When a party of 6 players went from 10k xp/hr to 150k xp/hr, people were able to level much faster. Players finished content, FFXIV launched, thousands played, and it was terrible. So they canceled and went back to FFXI, only everything was so accelerated, people began to drop off because they were out of things to do. They started cranking out expansions, but instead of people playing them for years, they lasted weeks, if not days. The level cap was raised from 75 to 99, but then experience rates were raised to 1500xp/kill, so you could level from 1-99 in a matter of hours. All people wanted to do was play end game, and that made me sad.

Being disappointed with how FFXIV turned out, I couldn't return to FFXI, even if I started over. I would have been alone, or pressured to 99 in a day for end game content only.

Working with some other guru's, I've re-created the golden years. A game server that emulates the 2006 era of the game. No 40x experience multiplier, no 50mil gil to start. You pick a race, city, name, and starting job, then away you go into the world of Vana'diel.

It's been an incredible expereince. With 80 regular players, I"m always looking for more. While it's not perfect, it's pretty nice. Some things aren't finished yet, but a great deal are. So I'd like to invite anyone who's interested to play with us!

The server is hosted on enterprise level hardware and a 75mbit connection, so speed isn't an issue.

Instructions can be found at http://nasomi.com/

It's free, and donations aren't accepted. I just want to re-create the time when my video game enjoyment was at it's peak.

tl;dr - Come play FFXI with us!