20th Anniversary Reddit AMA

There are painful things about it, especially if you've moved onto modern games but those who experienced XI in it's glory days can often times appreciate the experiences it gave us. Due to how much time you had to spend out leveling and exploring an area, you grew to know it better. So many zones in modern MMOs, I sometimes forget the name after I zone to the next area.

I know others do not share my sentiment. I would never want to go back and do all that over again but it was the most memorable experience of any MMO I've played.

Unless you're running the server for free out of altruism, you are personally profiting. There is no way around it no matter how many semantic barriers and circles you try to run around it. Your "paycheck" is you profiting off your time. That's even when I grant you the premise you'd be getting a legit paycheck, which you wouldn't, as the bootleg developer.

I'm not a content / fair use expert but I believe the content Ejiin produces would be legal under this because it's transformative? If he weren't streaming and instead were sitting on his hands, his time would be reduced to worthless because he isn't providing a service with his time any longer to sell. He is profiting off of his time and services.

Nasomi is basically dead and has been for almost a year.

Eden and Wings are the higher player count servers, and even they aren’t super populated. 600-800 players on at peak and that doesn’t account for alts

I personally cannot confirm but a guy who used to play retail and plays Nasomi says even to this day that it's thriving. Then again, that's a relevant term.

That's higher than some of official servers, and that also doesn't account for alts.

Go play on that server and let me know how much you think it actually resembles current retail. It is not even remotely close. See my last reply to you.

It's not higher than Asura though, which is the only server that really matters

ITT Banhammer doesn't know the definition of a profit.

2 hours past the time when most Japanese log out and over 1,000 here.

He’s not being truthful. 133 distinct IPs have logged into Nasomi in the past 24 hours. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem like thriving to me.

The only reason to play on retail is because of updates, if these cease and/or queue times become unbearable because it turns into a freebie game then not only will a lot of people be far more willing to play on private servers but they will happily give money to the people running them to make them better too.

I recently moved to a private server on another game and it was pretty barren for the few years previously, until the company announced shut down orders on retail. Now it has more players than retail and the person running it is making thousands of dollars a month because people are so thankful to them they are are paying the optional sub fee for them to work on it.

The point isn't what P servers are now, the point is what they would be if Square arse around.

I'm so sick of this. Get out of the self-feeding cycle of thinking just because you see a lot of people running around that means your home matters more than the small servers.

A huge segment of those people running around are like the ranchers coming into town once a month to shop at Costco. They hate Costco, they only go when they absolutely have to and then get out of there absolutely as fast as humanly possible.

Another huge segment are players essentially employed by playing FFXI, at least in some percentage of their income.

And another large chunk of your population are 1st timers or long-absent returnees who know nothing of the game and just see the Reddit forum has connections to that server.

None of those groups give Asura a real voice that matters to SE. You're falling into the same mental trap of political analysts who see Twitter rage and think that's an encapsulation of a nation. In reality, Asura HELPS the rest of us by putting all you crazies in one place.

I'd imagine all of Nasomi is capped players farming 75 content for eternity. In that sense I guess 133 people could be considered "thriving"

I just said that to *** with people that hate Asura lol

To be honest, for a private FFXI server, that's not bad. Some people don't like having several hundred + players running around. That's the nice thing about variety, you can pick your poison.

Fair enough, but Nasomi lost a huge percentage of players to Eden and Wings, which are generally just better objectively. Eden is the same era as Nasomi with more players and a dev team that is actually chugging away adding stuff

With the knowledge you have, what's your opinion on the possibility of client customizations and patches?

To an extent, Windower and Ashita do this, obviously. More specifically, customizing existing UI elements, adding new ROM content, etc. How far can it even go without a ground-up re-write of the client? Packet structure modifications?

They very well might be, I personally don't know anything about how they are outside of what people who have played on them have stated in forums or discord. I see both sides bashing the other and praising theirs in comparison. I'll never join them as I don't have a lifestyle anymore that will allow it.

Have you ever been to Asura? It's awesome! No one does anything for free together anymore. It's home to thousands of yell bot mercs. Come, join the dark side, and watch merc spam all day with me!

Lot of abstract here. If you mean client customizations for a private server, there's a ton that you could do. Since you have the ability to require a specific launcher or port things between windower/ashita, custom packets are easy to implement. You could use those to directly send buff/debuff info for mobs and other players, allowing accurate and real-time display of those(including duration, if you wanted). You could enhance check to give exact defense and evasion values. We have enough understanding of the rendering environment to draw directly on terrain and add things like AOE outlines, if we were to add a custom packet to tell the client the size and center of a pending AOE. For the most part, the limitation is conceptualizing things in a way that doesn't negatively impact balance or appearance, not actually implementing them.

Adding new ROM content is well understood. Making significant changes to existing UI elements would be difficult for me, but doable by someone like atom0s with more reverse engineering skill. It might still be more practical to hide the existing UI and replace it with something else in a private server scenario though.

If you did that, you could overhaul all of it and use your own memory management and packet schema to fix all of the packet issues. You'd be able to integrate context menus, batch operations on items, presets for spell lists and blue sets and puppetmaster directly into the UI. You could even increase the size of inventories or wardrobes to a much more modern value if you replaced the UI and used custom packets. If you look at existing projects like remapster, there's amazing potential for improving the user experience without tying it directly into the old UI. The biggest challenge would be keeping it in line with the styling players are accustomed to.

If you're talking retail, there are still things that could be done, but without access to custom packets they're far more limited. Keep in mind that basically nothing we have now is designed around custom packets, because neither ashita nor windower is specifically affiliated with a private server. The best case scenario for something like this actually happening would be a single high-budget private server aiming to long-term replace retail as retail dies off.

If anyone can type Japanese please post about the kickstarter idea on the JP official forums, that's about as good as it gets from a sticking it under their noses situation.

The company and the Japanese players do read our threads from time to time. It's still the best place to bother trying to bend their ear. Whether anything comes of it or not is another story.

Or it would also be nice to know how the JP feel about this lackluster event. It really saddens me to see XI go down this path, there is no reason for it. It had so many more stories to tell amd experience.. and there is no other game like it. I practically grew up with this game since I was 12 and it just seems so unfair. I know they plan to continue with lackluster updates but we can all see the writing on the wall if they considered this to be something to get excited about.

Definitely some interesting details in that response. Since reversing at that level is such a specialized skill, I could easily see an undertaking like that cost a significant amount.

Investing that amount, even if XI was shutting down tomorrow, to hope to see a return or profit through server ops is without a doubt fool-hearty though. SE will enforce its copyright as they have in the past. People might not remember, but private server development has been C&D'd in the past.

Absolutely, it's not something to be done for profit, and very unlikely it would be done in general. It's still more feasible than using a kickstarter to change the mind of a company like SE, though.

More like, some really questionable folks have claimed to be C&Ded to freely wave away any blame in abandoning their servers. If SE were sending out C&Ds, there are plenty of other servers that should have been hit. I don't see any reason to believe anyone was C&Ded personally, though I do think it is likely if a server grew to the point of threatening retail. Current private servers are nowhere near that level.

an announcement from SE that they had served just one C&D would shut down the vast majority of private servers out of fear (and rightfully so, not calling them weak) and be a helluva lot cheaper than having lawyers serve dozens of them. The fact that SE hasn't made a big deal about serving one is enough evidence to me that they aren't concerned about losing margin from those servers.

SE has done very poorly defending FFXI from their IP being misused or anything of the sort.

Concerning privates, Nasomi had mainstream media coverage, was the most popular and populated server for years, and has used official artwork on his site for years. He also resides and hosts here in the US. No C&D.

Wings has a very public Patreon used to "fund the server" when Ninja was streaming the server on Twitch and dwarfing the views that lolEjin pulls down. Nothing.

There's a poster who posts here on FFXIAH and has recently been showing off his super derivative card game he created and is selling very openly. Nothing.

There's a guy all over social media who is shilling his 3D printing of FFXI art assets for profit. Nothing.

Unless you're doing something egregious, I think the chance is pretty damn low.

Many privates and the upstream emulator proper aren't breaking any laws, btw. I know a lot of folks seem to think so, but it's perfectly possible to operate one without doing so. No, I'm not going to respond to any dipshits who think otherwise.

dang. Didn't know about the level of blatancy some of those private servers were not only using the IP, but charging for it. I appreciate the info^^

Gotta admit though- I'm more surprised about the 3d printing of their chars/models and not going after that than even the private servers.

On the other hand, it is free advertising.

There was a fake C&D on Eden that they decided to shut down for around a few weeks or so. It was done out of an abundance of caution and nothing ever happened.

lol that is small change to them, do you know how many people are making money off images or designs from games? It's all over etsy, ebay, redbubble, etc. Anywhere people sell fan stuff, not sure why that surprises you.