Stories from Final Fantasy XI

Final Fantasy XI is still fascinating and unique on many different levels despite some radical flaws that some players considered almost show stopping. One of these aspects is the unique attempt to build one community as an hybrid of different cultures. Mixing together japanese, american and european players. Something that was harshly criticized by many players and that I always praised as a valuable goal to pursue, despite the difficulties.

I wish I could find a very old thread on Grimwell where I discussed the merits of the approach while everyone else was trying to demonstrate me that it wasn’t a laudable attempt to chase an utopia but just a solution of convenience to spare the money and cut the risks by supporting just one centralized server farm.
(EDIT- found. See in particular Tobold’s comment on the last page)

Anyway, this is a post on FoH’s boards expressing an unusual point of view that I read and found worth archiving:

When I started FFXI it was right on the NA release, I’d come off playing EQ for a couple years and I had a lot of free time on my hands. I quickly outstripped all the other NA players on the server. There wasn’t any online sites with quests, at least in any language I could read, and there wasn’t anyone at my level that I could group with that wasn’t Japanese. But it was okay. The Japanese players, many who had been playing for almost a year, were very helpful, very friendly and when we couldn’t understand each other we usually got things figured out anyway. After a lot of bad experiences and few good ones in EQ I’d decided to keep a list of people in FFXI that had significantly helped me out, and in a game where monsters are more powerful than you and soloing is unheard of, this happened a lot. I filled up a sheet of paper in the first couple months of play, and many of them didn’t know much more english than “yes”, “no” and “ok.”

Sadly the days of people jumping off their chocobo because they see a low level playing with a non-Japanese name struggling to travel through a high level zone are over. Most of the Japanese players are still going to be polite and the vast majority who are still playing also speak English, but after experiencing NA players for the last year and a half they’ve taken to saying “no thank you” too. I know who I’d rather be playing with.

What is sad about the whole issue is how some of the awful mechanics of the game put the two communities one against the other. I believe that the divergencies came mostly as consequences of competitive PvE systems that just weren’t appropriate for the original goal of the game. I’m speaking in particular of the camping of the NM (Notorious Monsters). I don’t know directly the system but from what I heard different parties gather up around the spawn points and need to “tag” the monster before everyone else. This simple, awful (unfun) mechanic brought to many conflicts between the two communities, Especially considering how the system was perceived as unfair toward NA players. Being the servers in Japan, the japanese players could benefit of a faster reaction and so a sensible advantage over those playing from another continent.

It’s obvious how, when the cohabitation is already shaky, every little detail can break things beyond repair. In particular when a system is perceived as a “cheat” favoring the opposite faction. That’s the principle that can start a collision which can easily deteriorate from that point. It builds factions and hostility. It builds differences because the “other” is perceived as a stranger that is violating a competitive space.

After I read that post from FoH boards, I felt the curiosity to check again what was going on in the game and I was positively surprised when I skimmed through these recent fixes (1 August) to find a radical change that all the players were waiting from more than two years and that is now quickly dismissed in a couple of lines:

– Players will no longer be able to use spells or abilities to claim a monster as soon as it appears.
If players attempt to use spells or abilities to claim a monster before a set amount of time has passed since it appeared, they will not be able to use those spells etc. again for a certain duration.

Which means, explained through the words of a player:

The way I see it, this update fixes the JP latency advantage. As stated by an earlier poster, the JP advantage is *very* small. It is less than human reaction time. So that means, by the time a JP player would be reacting to a HNM on their screen, its already appeared on a NA player’s screen as well. Of course, this gives a JP player a huge advantage when spamming a macro, or using a turbo controller to spam voke. In that case, the JP player doesn’t need to react to the HNM appearing in order to claim it. This being one of the reasons why King Behemoth is one of the most JP-dominated HNMs across all servers. KB’s spawn is nothing but a spam-fest. The only other monster in the area is a lone Thunder Elemental. Much different camp than Fafhogg or Aspidochelone, which require a player to target the HNM through a field of other monsters to get claim.

So, the latency advantage give JP player’s a headstart in spamming matches. but thanks to the new update, you can’t spam anymore. A JP player can spam voke all window long, but then KB will pop, the JP will provoke, and…. oops! Nothing happens because he voked to early, and now his voke is disabled for a little while. (definately longer than it’ll take for KB to get claimed by someone else) Since spamming doesn’t work anymore, HNM camps will now be about which player has the best reflexes, not about who lives closest to the server or who can best ignore the pain of jamming the enter key for half an hour.

See? We are back at considering the development time and the absolute necessity to spend time in the community instead of being isolated from it. This was one huge flaw of the game that was almost trivial to fix. But the devs of this game are between those more out of touch with the actual situation of the game. This fix comes two years too late. Yes, the gameplay will improve considerably but it will be almost impossible to heal that wound that split the two communities apart and made them hostile (or that at least had a role, if you don’t share my simplified point of view on the cause of the hostility).

The other positive trait I wanted to point out is between those I already reported (in the edit). The players can now have access to personal henchmen that can be considered as “pets”. Not only they are supposed to help when the player cannot find a decent group, along with the modifications to the experience points from easy mobs (FFXI has huge LFG problems considering that it’s basically impossible to solo), but they became an extremely interesting feature on their own, even outside their specific purpose in the gameplay.

The fun of reasearching their (undocumented) complex behaviour and the possibilities of customizations brought to one of the most entertaining threads I’ve ever read. 460 posts (at this moment) progressively discovering the depth of the system and its possibilities. An investigation so fun (even to read) that quickly replaced the actual purpose of the henchmen to become one fun toy on its own as the new focus of the gameplay.

As a result, this is impressive. Squaresoft added once again an unique feature with an unparalleled depth and detail. Carefully planned to have different facets to discover and enjoy instead of becoming trivialized into a simplified and functional system without anything else to offer.

And that’s the “magic” of this company. They don’t plan their games just as functional systems that do their work and nothing else. Instead they add this depth and care for the personality, so that each little story and character presented has its own special role and flavor. Its own quirks to discover on multiple levels. This is what crafts a type of roleplay that makes the game so rich and unique compared to every other mmorpg out there. That’s also when a game can impose its originality and break the cliches of a genre without suffering from this estrangement from the common places.

All this brings to a game that you cannot easily trade with something else. When you leave FFXI you know that you won’t be able to find the same flavor and feelings somewhere else. This is why I felt always fascinated by this game in an unique way. But at the same time I was never able to accept its radical problems that just killed the experience for me. From the horrible patch process that doesn’t allow you to store the patches (and an insane install above 6Gb as result of an horrible port of the data files), the ridiculous billing system, the policy to delete the characters and account after three months of inactivity and the impossibility to play in a window without recurring to hacks. That’s already more than enough without even counting the actual game and the flaws of its design (in particular the insane group requirements).

FFXI is one game part of that “if only” group. It could be the best mmorpg out there… if only.

Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged:

Leave a Reply