FFXI Surprise

[atolnon]

I've had an account in FFXI for about three years, and I still haven't hit max level on any one job - a goal that can be accomplished much sooner, I assure you. To be fair, I've always prioritized real life, work, school, available finances, quality time with a significant other, going out for coffee, basically whatever over playing this particular game. Probably the biggest holdback was a period without funds followed by a period of exhaustion, combined and followed with sporadic hardware failures* and I'd say that was the space of about 8 months straight.

Even so, 3 years to hit level 50.

Anyhow, I'd totally forgotten that at level 50, you start taking quests to level up in 5-level increments, which is a major pain. I had all my equipment laid out and ready to go when I hit the exp that was supposed to take me over the limit. Without any fanfare or announcement I just stopped progressing, hitting a brick wall 1 exp. short of 8 elemental staves and newfound respectability as an adventurer.

What a drag. It's lucky that FFXI is so exhaustively documented. I would love to experience the confusion of mysteriously stopping at level 50, everywhere Than turns for help to spout the same catch phrases except for one old man hidden in a garden in the back of a palace nobody has any reason to go to. On a logistical level, it boggles my mind that one old dude who enjoys punching people is responsible for everyone leveling past 50. Or maybe it's just me, canonically, and the universe just likes screwing with this particular would-be Red Mage.

That said, I enjoy this game and I actually enjoy it more, lately. I feel like I'm progressing faster, at the expense of not being able to really keep up fully on equipment. As fast as I bring in gil, I spend it, and I haven't had luck with crafting in kind of a while. I need to level alchemy so that I can make bullets. I initially started, long ago, to make bullets for Violet's gun Ranger character and continued long after her transition to White Mage. Never really moved over into crafts that were mage-friendly or produced large quantities of consumables, but it may be time to look in that direction.

*which mysteriously just stopped one day.

Comments

[arist-one-eye.livejournal.com]

There was a lot about FFxi I liked: character designs, world designs, the races (minus your standard fantasy catgirl, wtf?), the classes, the enemies, playing with the Japanese folks...

But there's so much of it that's a drag. You have to imagine that I played right before / after the first expansion came out, so if things have changed (and a quick check on the Wiki says that there have been a lot, like, oh, chocobo breeding finally being in the damn game) I apologize, but grouping sucked if you weren't a white mage and gaining levels took forever. The areas were pretty, and I even made it out to one of those neutral big cities once where I bound and actually stopped playing around there due to boredom. The game just became a chore, I guess.

I was going to restart playing with some friends from deviantart, but like I said, my account was deader than dead. If I was going to go back to any online MMORPG now, it would probably be Everquest on someone's private server.

[atolnon.livejournal.com]

Understand that I'm not pushing you to join, but I think that they can bring back accounts from years, and are doing it as apart of their Welcome Back campaign. I didn't ever quit, really, so I don't know a whole lot more. Grouping is easier then it was before with level synching enabled - basically you can regress to an earlier level and continue to get exp as long as you're in the same party.

They've done a lot to negate a lot of my old complaints, but it makes plenty of sense just to go back to Everquest, too. Or nothing at all, since MMOs take up plenty of time.

[stacy288.livejournal.com]

You know, I would give it a go if I had the time and space and money to play again, but I have a hard enough time getting to just play my my Ps3.

You have interested me in going back and looking at the lore though :)

[stacy288.livejournal.com]

Meh, that was me posting under ana's account and I'm too lazy to fix it. Oh well.