I have a dream! (serious nostalgia ITT)Follow

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Only if this is how you rehash the same boring overdone "WE NEEDZ CLASSIC FFXI SERVERZ" topic.

This could have been put under the FFXI Nostalgia topic only a few topics down, since you commented in the title and in your second that it was a matter of nostalgia more than anything.

I believe it's been brought up before on the Official Forums, but in general it seems that it's not something that the majority of the gaming community wants.

If you look how the majority of players reacted to the content post Abyssea which, given the "heavy grind for minimal reward" sort of feeling it had over the "little to medium grind for big reward" nature of Abyssea, was far more reminiscent of the more oldschool way of doing things, you can see that players as a whole don't care for that style. Part of what made the older stuff before Abyssea so enjoyable was simply that we didn't really know how it "could" be. We were used to sitting in some remote regions for weeks and months on end farming this one particular thing for gil or spending months, even years, in a linkshell racking up points to collect one item. Everything had to be done in large groups because there was no alternative if you wanted to participate in things like Sky, Sea, Limbus, Dynamis, HNMs, etc, and if you didn't have a lot of time to devote to the game you didn't really get that far.

The game was very slow, very grind-heavy, but we enjoyed it because, outside of playing other MMOs, we didn't have a taste for a faster, more casual friendly game. That is until Abyssea came out. Abyssea introduced such a huge change that it is easily the turning point for FFXI to which all things since have been compared, and obviously even now it still has a huge impact on things. No longer did it take a large group, countless months and years of time, and the unneeded drama related, to make progress. Leveling up didn't feel as much a chore (though nowadays I argue that it's a bit too easy) and equipment wasn't something near as hard to obtain. Granted, not all the Empyrean equipment is the best, but most of them are still really good, and it didn't take an insane amount of time or gil to acquire them. Casual players could jump in for a few hours and still feel like they're making some headway in their goals, whereas a few hours "back in the day" basically equated to a situation of "why did I even bother logging in?"

Some of the new content that's come out since Abyssea, namely Voidwatch and Legion, have reverted to a more traditional, more old school, way of how the game was. Once again you were required to have decently large groups and once again it could take you months to see something you want item wise. While Legion has faired more favorably in regards to the two, both have been met with quite a bit of criticism over being too much like how things were and content like that lost its appeal since Abyssea came out. While there are some people that enjoy the new stuff, most people, if you ask them, will probably say that they don't like the idea of that kind of content again and would prefer the more "immediate" nature of Abyssea.

Now while I enjoyed the Chains of Promathia story, I don't think that a server based on that would have anywhere near the appeal to it for Square Enix to devote an entire server to a more oldschool game style. Not to mention that it'd require splitting up their development team to work on both since it'd essentially be two different games.

Good luck finding enough masochists to populate an entire server.

Why is this an idea? Just do CoP on regular servers like normal people.

This here is important.

Imagine a whole server of people trying to be this guy. Know what kind of server you're gonna get? I'll give you a hint -- it'll be a lot like the ones we have already.

I actually pine for ToAU days more than I do CoP days. The smaller-team events of ToAU, combined with the optional big team events of ZNMs, beastman bosses, and then the giant epic battles of Besieged...

But even though I miss it, I don't want to go back. It's enough to look back fondly on those memories and let them sleep. I instead set new goals (just finished Maat's cap) and I'm playing the game in my own way now, with the few friends who are still here and with plenty of new friends.

Actually, that brings up something I hear all the time. "My friends left so I quit."

In Girl Scouts, we learned this important song:

Make new friends
but keep the old
One is silver
And the other's gold.

My old FFXI friends that don't play any more watch me on places like Facebook. And, funny thing, as they watch me having fun and doing things, every couple of weeks one of them will say, I have more free time now and I have the itch, what do I need to do to get started again?

While I doubt SE would ever open a classic server, I would welcome them adding a server voting feature. They should add an npc to Port Jeuno sort of like the npcs in the past cities that ask what your campaign strategy for the upcoming week will be. The new npc could have a list of things that you could pick 2 of that you would like to see after the next conquest tally. The list could have things like turning on HNM spawns, changing certain conditions in sky or sea, increasing server treasure hunter base value, etc.

Step 1) Buy a LS.
Step 2) Through the use of forums (server specific ones) find people who are like minded.
Step 2a) You probably only want 5-17 people. Make sure 3 equal parties can be formed. Any more then 17 (counting you makes 18) and people will get left out. Left out people tend to move on, to other things.
Step 2b) Want to level old style? Go for it. I'm 98% sure none of the old camps will be full like they were, so you might not get that "fight or spawns" feel, but at least you can strive to get chain 6+
Step 3) Run all the things you want at lv75. To really insure you get the full effect, don't do any of the Genkai's after 75. And always sync to 75 during events, just to really insure you get that "old school" feel, because unless you plan to pay for all your LS mate's accounts (aka, telling them not to level..or aka: how to play the game), most will probably want to level past 75.

No need to have a special server for this . . .

Edited, Aug 12th 2012 12:47pm by Sandinmygum

3k players on your server... I'm just going to guess here, but you'd probably be looking at what? 200-300 people online at any given time.

If you thought it was hard to find that PLD and get him into your pt back in 2007... just wait til there's only 3 server-wide.

Want Old School create mules don't do the 75-80 Limit Break and Level Sync.

Done this with my LS for a few NM's when we feel Nostalgic.

The general View from Dev's will be that there are Game Mechanics in place to achieve your request.

You people are insane.

Signed: Everyone who ever played DRG in the CoP era.