The History Of Final Fantasy XI.

Hitosi was the leader of a JP HNM shell, he moved to a different server (Ragnarok? Odin?) not long enough after obtaining Mjollnir.
I remember XPing with him in KRT (I was on MNK him on WHM) and he was outparsing people dualwielding Mjollnir and some other club lol (Kraken?)

Not sure if he sold his account after that, I lost track of him after he moved server.


Which was Asura's second relic? Lordwafik's Mandau? Aurik's Spharai?

FYI for everyone who has been following this project, I just wrapped up 2005.

I've been loving reading about this, but you may want to mention more in the July 19th, 2005 update. I remember this one vividly. Ranger was nerfed hugely. It went from the only DD to lolDRG status overnight. Ninja was also nerfed with the shadow enmity update. Before this update, Ninja was the tanking king. Now with enmity troubles, it had more trouble tanking than previously.

Due to the ranger nerf, I had many friends quit the game and never come back. It was a huge deal until SE modified ranger later on in the game's life.

I will definitely expand the comments on these updates further.

If anyone else wants to comment and add more information please do and I'll add it

Regarding Ballista around this time:


The "Temporary Entry" feature was only until 18:00 game time. After this, it went back to an Open Entry style where players from any nation could join any team. (if you waited until 18:00 to sign up, you would not be redistributed)
Many players, especially Japanese players strongly disliked the Temporary Entry system, and would wait until 18:00 before signing up for a Ballista match. The auto-balance redistribution was an absolutely horrible system and it didn't consider players jobs. So in a standard 10v10 match it was entirely possible for one side to have all of the mages, or all of the melee.
Also, players who were of the participating nations during the time of the match always were locked into their nation before 18:00. This means that 3 Bastok Black mages and 3 Sandy THF would all be locked on their teams and not redistributed, making the balance extremely unfair.

This is why most people simply waited until 18:00 so that the balance distribution wouldn't ruin the match. It was open entry at this point and was easier to balance the teams. You could always count on a huge rush of players joining ballista between 18:00-22:00. The entry became a "round robin" first in style.

Added these to the page. Copy/pasta so I linked back here and wrote in your names.

Ok.

This note was funny and brings back memories.


The resistance to Lullaby was lost if you died. If you were lucky enough to not die for a long time, you were practically immune to lullaby after repeated use.

Really cool resource, thanks for all the effort put into it. FFXI really needed a compendium of this sort where old players can look back and relive some of the old glories/horrors. ^^b

That was some great nostalgia. Thanks!

good times . can remember when toau came out and saw a guy with amano and yoichi + maats cap, totaly impressed . pappy from seraph.

PS2 was overrated, because it could have serious performance problems, even before you got to the "limitations". The worst thing for me was when I discovered that bard AoE buffs would seriously hose the PS2, causing it to go into 0.1fps mode, because it did every player's VFX at the same moment, instead of staggered like WHM buffs. One time some *** D2'd me out of an aby alliance because he thought I was going AFK, but it was really his (he was the bard) dropping bard buffs every 90 seconds (much more often than needed) that was *** me over.

But the worst was when campaign NPCs really got to fighting, it would totally hose the PS2 for minutes at a time, and all you could do was wait it out, because you couldn't get your XP if you disconnected. There was one point where I died under a big NPC battle down in Eldieme. I had Reraise on, but I had to sit through about ten minutes of 0.1fps slide show before it finally put the reraise prompt on the screen.

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CoP statics? I started in 2008, but got into a CoP static right before they ended the level caps. One guy in my LS really wanted to beat it already, before it became a cakewalk. Some of the fights in there were serious ***, particularly the airship fight. 45 minute limit, that's got to be enough, right? Yeah, nah. Most BCNM records were less than half of the time limit, but airship fight records weren't even below 30 minutes. You had to seriously min max your time, with things like WHM having to use reraise earring instead of casting reraise, simply because of the time it took to get 150MP back slowed you down.

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WHM was my first job, and I mostly soloed it. This was NOT easy back in mid-2008, when the lowest XP you could get was 15 per kill. And WHM had really ***kill speed, so you would be dead before you could kill DC or EM. September 2008 patch (about the time I dinged WHM 30) raised XP per kill, and the lowest you could get was now 30, but the real big thing for me was campaign. The moment I had 150 MP when weakened at level 33 (before they lowered RR to 25), I went full retard campaign WHM. I got up to 70 by being a combat healer for NPCs. Then I cheesed fortifications the rest of the way to 75, a few months before they nerfed those. I also got really good at skilling up without tags on (actually quite dangerous if you pulled hate) until they nerfed that too.

About that kill speed? Much later, I started leveling BLU, and I was fighting EM all the time just to keep up with learning new spells, and with the better XP and level curves I was just shooting up to the top.

But it was still PUP that was the most fun to take to 75 and 99. PUP was a lot less lol post-75, and you had your brass buddy who worked most of the time. In the end it was great how much regen I could stack on that little bucket of bolts.

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A friend of mine had played FFXI and quit by the time I started, he told me about what it was like before the aggro-loss despawn patch. The entrance to Crawler's Nest was hell, because of all the aggro mobs that would end up there as people ran away from them and zoned out, leaving the mobs behind. And of course BSTs could drop mobs anywhere to grief people, especially obvious RMT.

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Rolan-Mart was a thing before bazaar taxes in Jeuno were removed. Different servers sometimes had it in Sauromugue, but Fairy/Sylph had it in Rolanberry. It was pretty awesome, dozens of AFKs all in one place where you could find almost anything for sale. Things just weren't the same after Adoulin, some people would bazaar in Jeuno, some in Adoulin, still divided when I quit two years ago, still divided when I visit on free weeks to work on fishing.

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When RMT discovered that they could make big gil from planting Wildgrass seeds, that was some interesting times. Sure, you had to go to Whitegate to buy the seeds, but that's not going to stop RMT. The price of water crystals shot up, and I would go through Pashhow nuking elementals. It was funny seeing the RDMs thinking they were so leet poking them with swords, when I would just get on BLM and one-shot the blobs. I think they were paying 4000 for a stack of water crystals, and I made a few million gil selling them on the auction house, to obviously RMT buyers.

There was a literal ant trail in Bastok Mines between the MH and that galka nearby, because that was the shortest MH-to-vendor route. They would plant wildgrass seeds with water crystals on trial accounts, then sell the loot to the galka a few days later. That is why they made gardening only return a single item until after you had been playing for 45(?) days.

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And the only time I ever got to play Ballista was when 360 support was going away, because of the people who wanted to get the last achievement while they still could.

You brought me back to the glory days. Rolan Mart, checking 150 bazaars for one item.

Just finished up 2006!

If anything was left out, please let me know. At this point, some of you might have good screenshot submissions. Please link me and I will add them. Particularly, I want a picture of players crowded on one of the first ferries heading to Whitegate.

Also since the last update when 2005 was added, many topics of interest were updated. Below are links to the ones worth checking out.

• Castle Zvahl Charge

• Load Fishing

• Turtle Curse

• Unsho & Unji

• Garlic Farmer Conspiracy

• The March Festival

• 7/2 patch from hell

• Vana'diel Clock

• Movalpolos Water Festival

• Bone-Bone Fantasy

• Vrtra appearing at Spook on Lakshmi

• the Silver Hairpin Festival

Appreciate all the work you're putting in to this. It's fun to read about all this and remember the things I knew about but also find out about a lot I didn't know.

Your welcome, it's just as fun researching and putting everything together.

If anyone finds inaccuracies, by all means let me know.

Can't wait til you add people dyin irl from PW and them 4-5 hour beseiges <.< back when Lak and Siren used to compete and Lak finally lost one D:

I look forward to your updates Funkworkz. 2007 is coming up!

Hands down this is the best thread on ffxiah. So much nostalgia. Thanks a bunch funk.

I have nothing of value to contribute but what an incredible read and great job putting this out there. I've been passing this around to friends for some heavy dosages of nostalgia, but also just getting our minds blown at what it must have been like to play before certain features.

Not only that but there's some interesting oddities in there that really gets the noggin joggin' like:


Overall, it's a blast to read this stuff just to think about how wildly different FFXI could have been had they not rolled out certain patch adjustments or not. The way they handled enemy difficulty and scaling in 2002 certainly feels like one of those things.

Are there any famous (or infamous) foreign players for the Japanese?

Not me, but the people I play with hate all NA players. They put them on the same level as Chinese RMT. Germans, on the other hand, they like.

Do they now

Thanks for sharing with your friends!

Wow that quote must have been a copy/paste job that I forgot to cleanup. Thanks for quoting it, I'll get to it tomorrow.

Just went through some of it. It’s a nostalgia bomb. I remember looking up info and screenshots all the time at RPGamer.com before the game hit the US.

I remember the NA vs JP beef with that whole ballista royale fiasco. was pretty clear SE set up the NA team for an ambush.

Also I remember watching that Puppetmaster reveal video for the first time. When the room erupted in applause, I got chills. To this day that is still one of the hypest job reveals in the game.

...you must really like Puppetmaster

JP have always been racist in this game.

2007 is now up!

As usual, please reply with corrections or anything you feel needs to be incorporated. I will be sure to add it.

If you have not yet seen this project, the main page is located here.

Awesome!!

Edit: I just realized 2007 isn't linked from the bottom of the 2006 page where the table of contents is displayed. 2007 year shows up but is not a clickable link

Thank you Funk! I really enjoyed reading this!

Thanks for reporting this, but it is only a cache issue. It should fix itself soon.