FFXI - Addicted To Thrill
Final Fantasy XI by Square/Enix of Japan is probably the most complex and frustrating games I have ever played. I could write an entire book about the tactics of game play. I stopped playing the game in December of 2004 because it was eating my life and damaging my relationships with other people around me.
This is a fully online game. Approximately 6000 paid licenses per server and it runs about 100 servers since I last checked. Each license can have up to 16 characters. The population of characters runs well into the millions. The servers are mainly for North American and Japanese players which are both NTSC standard areas. All of the servers are mixed so there is a healthy helping of both societies on at all times. In order to get people of several languages to play together, they made an auto-translator with certain phrases so some communication can be done.
This is the first of Square's empire to go online, so it made the gameplay completely different. Two things that I really enjoyed was the fact that you only control 1 character. That one character you invest hundreds of hours perfecting. You have complete control of the character. You may also want to invest in buying more characters to store items that are overflowing from your first character and/or use that extra character to sell/bazaar off your items in cities while you are not there physically playing. The second part I really enjoyed was the battle system. For the first time in the Final Fantasy series you are NOT jolted into battle by random timing. You can actually see the beasts and sentient beings you may fight in the distance. They can either see, hear or smell you out. In some cases they attack depending on your health or sickness status. The mapping of the game is also laid out so that it is NOT worthwhile to stay in a really easy area and continually reap the same points/items/money because it all reduces as you get stronger. You must move on.
The nations,races, jobs and craft guilds put more complexity into the game. I myself made it as a San d'Orian Level 58 Paladin in the race of Hume (male) and I had leveled up my fishing, woodworking, blacksmithing and goldsmithing. Holly was a San d'Orian female Elvaan level 15 Monk and believe she leveled up her cooking. There are six races (Hume, Elvaan, Galka, Mythra...ect.), 4 Nations (San d'oria, Bastok, Windurst and Jeuno), 18 jobs (Warrior, White Mage, Black Mage, Thief, Dragoon, ...ect.) and numerous crafting guilds; some which are listed above. Mixing and matching all of the above attributes is a game unto itself.
Because it is online and you are a lone person, the game programmers made it completely impossible for you to go solo in this game. Soloing your character equals certain death. The higher the level, the more eccentric and picky are the other players. At level 58 the people get pretty ridiculous about details. But without those faceless people, you cannot move forward. Towards the end of my playing days, I was spending 8 hours just putting parties of people together and then another 8 to 16 hours of battling in some of the games trickiest areas. It would take almost 2 hours just to travel where your people were gathering. I remember a couple times, I would be playing when Holly left for work and I never even got up for a bathroom break, food or anything else after 9 hours and Holly coming home from work. The demand for the types of attributes I picked for my character were high. A paladin acts as the defense shield (aka "Tank") for the Curers (White Mages), Nukers (Black Mages, Red Mages and Summoners) and Damage Dealers (Warriors, Ninjas, Monks, Thieves, Dark Knights). The Paladins first and foremost job is to keep the attention of attacks onto himself and secondly to keep himself alive. Losing the attention of damage means you lost control of the battle and everyone dies. That is the most used tactic but its only one of the hundreds you can use depending on the jobs and races in your party. Not knowing the tactics means people will not want to play with you. This is the most addicting part of the game because when it is going well and you have a crack team together, there is no stopping you and the fun is endless. The downside of that is those same people will demand that you be online at the same exact time the next day.
That is just a part of the game.
You can get married to other players, it will cost you and you actually have to book time with the gamemasters at the servers. Depending on how much money you are willing to spend is dependent on where you want the ceremony and how many of your online buddies you want to invite.
You can join the conquest. The battle of power and land between San 'dOria, Bastok and Windurst which is governed by Jeuno can be done in a couple different ways.
1) Garrison - you battle sentient monsters with like nationalities at outpost to get conquest points and commerce control of the area around the outpost. These battles are timed and strictly watched and refereed by gamemasters.
2) Conquest - Gamemasters set up battles between two nations in select areas. In these areas a player must register and be a specific location and a specific time. You basically kill as many online players from the opposite nation as many times as possible during the specified time. When the battle is done the conquest points are tallied by gamemasters and control of the area tips towards who won the battle.
Every Sunday the conquest points are tallied completely and the borders and commerce lines of all the nations are shifted. This seriously changes the way you may have to play the game depending on how well your nation did.
Another type of gameplay would be to only work in craft guilds. Spend all your days fishing or making Meat Mythkabobs or building weapons or armor to sell on the online auction is an excellent way to make money.
If all of that is not enough, you also have to complete quests and there is a complex story line to follow. The more quests you complete, the better "fame" you get. More "fame" equals more access to better things in the game. Some of the harder quests will give you a rank. The higher your rank, the more opening of quests and stories, faster travel abilities and respect from your peers.
The thing that ruins this game is that the game is severely tainted by internet capitalists. Internet sites are selling game money or pre-leveled characters for real money. An example would be: you can buy 1 Million Gil (game money) for approximately $800. Some people inside the game have built in characters that are solely for collecting money by any means necessary. Its basically a full time job for those people who sell. The problem is that it offsets the balance of the highly complex game and slowly the prices for the gear rise to out of control on the auction house. This makes it impossible for the honest people to play the game. If there is a place in the game where you can "harvest" or "farm" for expensive items, it is usually staked out by several people solely there to make money; not for the joy of the game.
That basically sums up what I did for 7 straight months last year. Writing all this out is really getting it completely out of my system.
Final Fantasy XII was released in Japan in December 2004 and is set to be released here in the US in December 2005. This version will NOT be online but will contain some of the attributes I really enjoyed about the last version. That includes the extremely innovative and realtime battle system. By this version being cool and not online means I will be able to have more self-control and also control the pace of which I will want to play. I believe this will be the last Final Fantasy released on the PS2. It looks like a ton of titles are hitting the shelves in November and December to buffer the time it will take to release the PS3. I am a true gamer and I will always play them but I will never let another video game take over my life as bad as FFXI did. I hurt the people I love by not being there for them and I feel like there is a huge black void of time that I lost. I have definitely learned my lesson.
This is a fully online game. Approximately 6000 paid licenses per server and it runs about 100 servers since I last checked. Each license can have up to 16 characters. The population of characters runs well into the millions. The servers are mainly for North American and Japanese players which are both NTSC standard areas. All of the servers are mixed so there is a healthy helping of both societies on at all times. In order to get people of several languages to play together, they made an auto-translator with certain phrases so some communication can be done.
This is the first of Square's empire to go online, so it made the gameplay completely different. Two things that I really enjoyed was the fact that you only control 1 character. That one character you invest hundreds of hours perfecting. You have complete control of the character. You may also want to invest in buying more characters to store items that are overflowing from your first character and/or use that extra character to sell/bazaar off your items in cities while you are not there physically playing. The second part I really enjoyed was the battle system. For the first time in the Final Fantasy series you are NOT jolted into battle by random timing. You can actually see the beasts and sentient beings you may fight in the distance. They can either see, hear or smell you out. In some cases they attack depending on your health or sickness status. The mapping of the game is also laid out so that it is NOT worthwhile to stay in a really easy area and continually reap the same points/items/money because it all reduces as you get stronger. You must move on.
The nations,races, jobs and craft guilds put more complexity into the game. I myself made it as a San d'Orian Level 58 Paladin in the race of Hume (male) and I had leveled up my fishing, woodworking, blacksmithing and goldsmithing. Holly was a San d'Orian female Elvaan level 15 Monk and believe she leveled up her cooking. There are six races (Hume, Elvaan, Galka, Mythra...ect.), 4 Nations (San d'oria, Bastok, Windurst and Jeuno), 18 jobs (Warrior, White Mage, Black Mage, Thief, Dragoon, ...ect.) and numerous crafting guilds; some which are listed above. Mixing and matching all of the above attributes is a game unto itself.
Because it is online and you are a lone person, the game programmers made it completely impossible for you to go solo in this game. Soloing your character equals certain death. The higher the level, the more eccentric and picky are the other players. At level 58 the people get pretty ridiculous about details. But without those faceless people, you cannot move forward. Towards the end of my playing days, I was spending 8 hours just putting parties of people together and then another 8 to 16 hours of battling in some of the games trickiest areas. It would take almost 2 hours just to travel where your people were gathering. I remember a couple times, I would be playing when Holly left for work and I never even got up for a bathroom break, food or anything else after 9 hours and Holly coming home from work. The demand for the types of attributes I picked for my character were high. A paladin acts as the defense shield (aka "Tank") for the Curers (White Mages), Nukers (Black Mages, Red Mages and Summoners) and Damage Dealers (Warriors, Ninjas, Monks, Thieves, Dark Knights). The Paladins first and foremost job is to keep the attention of attacks onto himself and secondly to keep himself alive. Losing the attention of damage means you lost control of the battle and everyone dies. That is the most used tactic but its only one of the hundreds you can use depending on the jobs and races in your party. Not knowing the tactics means people will not want to play with you. This is the most addicting part of the game because when it is going well and you have a crack team together, there is no stopping you and the fun is endless. The downside of that is those same people will demand that you be online at the same exact time the next day.
That is just a part of the game.
You can get married to other players, it will cost you and you actually have to book time with the gamemasters at the servers. Depending on how much money you are willing to spend is dependent on where you want the ceremony and how many of your online buddies you want to invite.
You can join the conquest. The battle of power and land between San 'dOria, Bastok and Windurst which is governed by Jeuno can be done in a couple different ways.
1) Garrison - you battle sentient monsters with like nationalities at outpost to get conquest points and commerce control of the area around the outpost. These battles are timed and strictly watched and refereed by gamemasters.
2) Conquest - Gamemasters set up battles between two nations in select areas. In these areas a player must register and be a specific location and a specific time. You basically kill as many online players from the opposite nation as many times as possible during the specified time. When the battle is done the conquest points are tallied by gamemasters and control of the area tips towards who won the battle.
Every Sunday the conquest points are tallied completely and the borders and commerce lines of all the nations are shifted. This seriously changes the way you may have to play the game depending on how well your nation did.
Another type of gameplay would be to only work in craft guilds. Spend all your days fishing or making Meat Mythkabobs or building weapons or armor to sell on the online auction is an excellent way to make money.
If all of that is not enough, you also have to complete quests and there is a complex story line to follow. The more quests you complete, the better "fame" you get. More "fame" equals more access to better things in the game. Some of the harder quests will give you a rank. The higher your rank, the more opening of quests and stories, faster travel abilities and respect from your peers.
The thing that ruins this game is that the game is severely tainted by internet capitalists. Internet sites are selling game money or pre-leveled characters for real money. An example would be: you can buy 1 Million Gil (game money) for approximately $800. Some people inside the game have built in characters that are solely for collecting money by any means necessary. Its basically a full time job for those people who sell. The problem is that it offsets the balance of the highly complex game and slowly the prices for the gear rise to out of control on the auction house. This makes it impossible for the honest people to play the game. If there is a place in the game where you can "harvest" or "farm" for expensive items, it is usually staked out by several people solely there to make money; not for the joy of the game.
That basically sums up what I did for 7 straight months last year. Writing all this out is really getting it completely out of my system.
Final Fantasy XII was released in Japan in December 2004 and is set to be released here in the US in December 2005. This version will NOT be online but will contain some of the attributes I really enjoyed about the last version. That includes the extremely innovative and realtime battle system. By this version being cool and not online means I will be able to have more self-control and also control the pace of which I will want to play. I believe this will be the last Final Fantasy released on the PS2. It looks like a ton of titles are hitting the shelves in November and December to buffer the time it will take to release the PS3. I am a true gamer and I will always play them but I will never let another video game take over my life as bad as FFXI did. I hurt the people I love by not being there for them and I feel like there is a huge black void of time that I lost. I have definitely learned my lesson.
posted by Benners at 6:46 AM
3 Comments:
Love the game. MISS the game. Love you and glad to have you back in the real world, well, as real as it can get.
You're lucky. I left my boyfriend of 3 years over that game. Any game that starts out with a reminder to not forget your priorities: e.g. work, family, school and friends - is trouble.
I got the feeling that a lot of relationships were ending with the people I played with online. Relationships end over addictions all the time. I'm guessing this type seems more severe because its a new type of addiction and its more obvious. I miss the game too, Holly, but I also miss smoking and I will not do either of them again.
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