thinkin of starting ff xi...

[MF doom]

after buying archlord and having nothin but problems ( before iv even managed to get on the game) decided to not bother... played ffXi for like 2 days a year or so back,

i know the game is good but was wondering whats it like for bugs, cheats, server going down ect are the staff helpfull or non exsistant like on most mmo's nowadays ??

[Mhurron]

Re: thinkin of starting ff xi...

The beetles, bees and creepy crawlies in it are huge. They give me the heeby-jeebies.

[Jei]

Re: thinkin of starting ff xi...

Hell yea those catapilars can eat a whole taru.

There are cheaters. Most notably, the fish bots, mining bots, and the speed/position hacks. Usually it's the mining and fishing bots that I see all the time. Other cheats I rarely see any (maybe because they're careful I guess...)

Servers have been amazingly stable the past 2-3 years. Only go down when they schedule maintenance.

[Gentoo]

Re: thinkin of starting ff xi...

i know the game is good but was wondering whats it like for bugs, cheats, server going down ect are the staff helpfull or non exsistant like on most mmo's nowadays ??

Bugs:
FFXI is pretty darn good software. Legit bugs are few and far in between, and anything that's found is usually patched by the next server maintence.

Cheats:
Like any other MMOG, there are some, and SE tries to correct the situation if someone is really abusing things. Most of the cheats I've seen have revolve around automation. Fishing/Mining/Logging/Harvesting/Skilling-up bots. There are speed hacks, but SE seems pretty serious about elminating people that use them. The nice thing is, you won't need to use cheats yourself in order to play the game sucessfully.

Severs:
As stated previously, the servers tend to only go down during scheduled work, and only for a handful of hours at that. The the actual FFXI host service is designed so that if a server is experiencing problems, it can be addressed without actually taking down the entire game. For example, a server controlling one zone called Sarutabaruta may be experiencing a problem. The FFXI IT staff can take that server offline, fix the problem, and everyone in all other regions of the game can continue the game un-impeded.

The staff:

They're very present, but rarely helpful in my experience.

You can request contact with a GM in game, and they will respond. It's on a rare occurance they can perform any useful service. This, however, isn't a major detractor, since I can count the number of times I've needed to call a GM one hand (in over 2 years of play) and still have digits left over.

Technical support is easy to get in touch with during business hours, or via e-mail, but any problem whose solution strays outside of scripted answers means you'll be left on your own to try and figure things out. Fortunately FFXI has a strong community. Again, not a huge detractor since the software is pretty stable.

Customer service (billing issues, etc), on the other hand, has been pretty good in my experience.

[Aksannyi]

Re: thinkin of starting ff xi...

I was going to respond to this thread with my experiences/advice, but Gentoo covered pretty much everything.

[MF doom]

Re: thinkin of starting ff xi...

thanks guys ... think uv prety much convinced me ... any advice on which server i should try to get on ??

[Aksannyi]

Re: thinkin of starting ff xi...

All servers are generally the same, unless you have a RL friend you want to play with, it really doesn't matter where you go.

[Gentoo]

Re: thinkin of starting ff xi...

thanks guys ... think uv prety much convinced me ... any advice on which server i should try to get on ??

Try to get on a server that has a social linkshell you can join. The one thing with the game being fairly mature is that there are lots of people on end-game (high level characters only) linkshells, and there's not as many general purpose linkshells as there was early on.

Personally, I'd make a post in the All Server Conference Hall asking about operating social linkshells. Then, based on responses you get, decide which server you want to go on. After that, you can make a post the specific server forum asking for a Gold (or regular) World Pass, or just try to get onto that specific server using the random-retry method.

[MF doom]

Re: thinkin of starting ff xi...

So do any of you helpfull ones have a world pass ?? =oP

[Mhurron]

Re: thinkin of starting ff xi...

Depends on what world you want a pass to