My FFXI experience...

[Oddsocks]

I spent a few months with FFXI about a year or two ago, and here's some things that really got me about it;

-You only get to make ONE character. ONE. Unless you're willing to pay more money to get additional character slots. That is such blatant money-grabbing I just could not get my head around. I understand that with one character you could master every class, but when compared to every other MMO out there which allows practically unlimited character creation slots (10 for each server usually, which shows gaming companies have nothing to lose from allowing multiple character creation), how does FFXI get away with this?
-The whole idea of MMOs is being able to play online. A lot of people will buy the same MMO as their friends so you can play together, only how on earth is one supposed to play with their friends if one cannot even choose the server you allocate your ONE character to? I went through the process of having to recreate my ONE character over and over until the desired server was magically landed on. Also, whats with the server allocations? So random that a few times I, an EU player, would be thrown into Japanese servers where I could not understand a thing being said. It was ridiculous.
-The character movement was slow, tedious and motonous. At times it was cluttered and hard to navigate around the unforgiving scenery. Of course, with practice, this could me remedied but in comparison to most other MMOs it was not too far from appalling.
-The races were horrible. Horrible.
-Forming a new political party and reaching US Presidency would have been easier than putting together a party in FFXI, and quicker. Even when a party is formed the exp is so heavily drained it slows the lvling down so much it renders almost all battle pointless.
-Even after cancelling my account, billing was continued. I emailed Squaresoft (or whoever, I forgot the FFXI billing address) and they assured me my account was cancelled and I would no longer be billed. After being billed again the next month, I had had enough and cancelled my bank account. This, paired with the single character creation scheme, leads me to further believe Square have strayed away from the aim of fantastic game design to money-grabbing bastards from video game hell.

Feel free to correct any mistakes, false statements and so on, even rant back at me. I really needed to say this, and also that in my long history of MMO gaming I look on FFXI as my darkest hour. Had this game not been branded with the FF logo, I fail to see how anyone would still be playing it at all. What a shit-stain on the historical scripture that is Final Fantasy.

 

[Sugosuke]

- Really, why would you need more than one character? Keep in mind FFXI is a PS2 game, and many of the limitations have something to do with that. Trust me, in FFXI having more than one character just means a lot of work with the time it takes to complete missions/quest and get some of the better equipment. You wouldnt want to repeat all that.

- I agree the whole server select system used to be kinda of a dumb, but even then you could just grab a world pass for your friends(5) to get them on your server. The servers can only hold so many players before there are problems, obviously people would favor some servers to others. Now you can choose your server when creating a character. Also there arent any JP,EU or US servers, players are all mixed in together(EU,US,JP,PS2,PC,Xbox360). Its what the autotranslate is for, with it you can communicate pretty much all you would need in making a party atleast.

- the races are horrible how?

If you had that much trouble making a party and gaining exp, it isnt the game's fault. You were probably dealing with bad players.

I know FFXI isnt for everyone. I can understand that, but its really just a matter of taste. It isnt a bad game just because you dont like it.

 

[Gray Fox]

Sugo pretty much touched on everything I was going to say.

To add to the first part about character creating. There really is no need to want to create many characters on this game. Players that have been playing on the same character for 6 years still haven't gotten half the things they want. Its fairly impossible to 'beat' this game and get everything with one character. I find other MMORPG's to be far to easy in that aspect and is why you can have more characters. Because in ones such as WoW you can do everything in months.

-I don't have to touch bases on the character / sever thing I guess. Things have changed, now you can land on any server you want. Also back then all you had to do was have your friend go find you a world pass instead of creating a character over and over.

- I loved the moment in this game, more so then any of the other MMO's I played. I'll admit I was rather annoyed at the start but in time it became VERY fluid and special to me.

-Finding a party to level is very easy IMO, you must've had bad luck or something.

-Also about the billing, you have to delete more then the account to get the billing to go away. Unfortunately a lot of people didn't realize that a while back so Square had to issue a statement and show people how to get things delete to end the billing.

 

[Raikyo]

I wanted to knw was there any way on playin a trial FFXI without giving credit card number

 

[Gray Fox]

I can't remember if you have to use credit card but you get a 30 day free trail no matter what when you get it. Most likely though, you still need a credit card.