Things Only FFXI Players Will Understand

This is probably the #1 thing.

I've played several MMOs and a few with Asian people and this was the only game that had this problem.

It annoyed me to the point where I started doing "EN ONLY" in my search comment when leveling my Bard. Being the top job that people wanted in EXP parties, I actually felt good about doing it at the time. What was funny was that I had JP and NA players calling me racist yet when they did "JP ONLY", we were supposed to "just accept it" or "that's just how it is."

That's pretty accurate. It wasn't fully jp onry that was the problem it's that jp/na have different play styles and a lot of the people seeking "non na approved" jobs would've been happy to join jp parties instead of seeking for literal days. Autotranslate system is terrible and players are just lazy, they won't even try to communicate. I could understand not wanting to invite someone to say... glavoid, because there's no efficient way to say "hey *** don't heal it, this is how you don't heal it" but for exp/merit parties it's a nonissue- Gekko skillchain ok? and that's it.

(lack of any and all balance built on that anger as well)It's obviously not unique to XI but the amount of people trying to be ruthlessly efficient on this game has always been "too damn high". language barrier is not something that works well with "ruthless efficiency"

EDIT: I just noticed someone already linked the JPONRY video on the previous page. So much for that.

But yeah, I agree. The language barrier was annoying as hell back in the day. But then again, a LOT of old school things were annoying as hell. Between excessive runarounds to get from point A to point B, bigger hoops to get access to content and then much harsher punishments for failures, and many many systems operating silmultaneously alongside each other, most with lockout cooldowns to artifically extend duration the bottlenecks to getting equipment was vastly higher. Between scheduled runs for Limbus, Dynamis and Salvage on one day, Einherjar Assault and Sea the next, and then throw in camping Land Kings and it's a recipie for chaos. Plus with the Land Kings you had equipment that everybody on the server would want, with probably 10,000-15,000 active players on each server at the time, and you only allowed the system to produce one or two two hundred copies of said equipment every year. In the case of Nidhogg,50-70 drops of any given piece annually with that kind of server population was obnoxious. The fact that you had to camp him for upwards of 2-3 hours only to lay claim with bot wars wasn't very agreeable either.

People like to talk about the 75 cap era as the golden age, but it had a lot of inherent flaws. There are great and amazing memories from that time period, but many of the design concepts were outright frustrating.

The poor Goblin Bounty Hunters are still roaming the shores of Buburuimu Peninsula to this day. The little guys haven't seen a payout in so many years they're probably running around in the streets begging for scraps at night.

"Oh I slept enough don't worry, I only stay awake 1min every 30min".

Then people think I'm exaggerating when I laugh at their WoW tales like "OMG THAT RAID WAS SO HARD, TOOK US 8 HOURS". My sides, Khimaira's window wasn't even 30% gone by the time you completed your raid.
Or when people are like "you are crazy, you can't have such a sleep schedule, it'll kill you". Hahaha, if they knew.

I've played a couple MMOs that had a mix of races like this but you are not wrong, no game (at the time) required the assistance of others like FFXI did.

The flip side was that most people could easily do an experience party without understanding what the group is saying other than {The Boyahda Tree} {Crab} or something similar. Plus, you knew your role. With simple translator comments, you could communicate what you wanted. Some people just didn't want to bother. One of the leaders of top LS on Levi's history (JP LS) who was bi-lingual told some members of my LS why "JP ONLY" existed. She explained how it didn't mean the same coming from all JP players. Some meant it as "I only speak JP" but would glady party with NA people. And some did it because they legit hate North Americans. Racism against Americans was far worse than against Japanese.

I couldn't believe the amount of hateful JP back then. Honestly gave me a bad view on them after that. I used to have so many SS of how racist they were lol. Remember that one pic someone posted here as a joke, where it was like a JP person and a NA person asking to team up and each time the JP was like "..." then after that tsunami, they said "team up?" and the JP said "ok".

Draylo, I've been trying hard to find this one screenshot of a JP player who's search comment had some Japanese characters in it but also said something like "RMT, {Steal} all started with NA release".

NAs didn't act like that when they added German players to the mix. :(

never faulted a JP player for wanting to "PLAY" a game with speakers of their native tongue during their recreational time, versus dealing with the very limited auto-translate. We NA players frequently were more concerned with progress and becoming 'l33t' than just enjoying ourselves, so even while in party setups NA parties for the most part were quiet business-like affairs.

I've always given SE a huge amount of credit for tackling the concept of a multi-continent, multi-platform, multi-language playerbase instead of making localized servers to separate the players based on language. It was a huge undertaking, and while they didn't make some perfect environment for this, they did a damn good job for a first attempt in the gaming industry (as far as my knowledge goes).

Maybe I look at this naively and think the best of people, but I've never taking "JP Onry" as a knock on us as players or people. They just wanted to be able to chat freely during party-up times. I'm probably a little too far on the forgiving aspect, and maybe those so negative are a little too far the other way. The reality no doubt lies in the middle.

Once I learned the truth about "JP ONLY", it made me calm in some ways but more upset in others. You couldn't assume what each person meant but knowing that there were people who just blindly hated NAs, it was disheartening at the time.

Today, I look at everyone the same. Since my return, I've not seen "JP ONLY" or anything remotely similar once.

Just one of those things that were annoying and you happened to be there to live through it.

I dare not judge a population by the actions of those members of that population who did that hell of HNM camping. I and sincerely hope no one judges the entire NA population by the actions of our HNM campers back in the day. I laugh my arse off at "Throw some Ridills on that ***" but I'd be scared as hell if every JP person who ever played FFXI thought all NAs were like that.

i got banned while i was on vacation i was literally 2000 miles from my character who was apparently being rude i came back and it said i was temp banned for 1 day for "online manners" lol

My server was mostly JP back in the days and the opposite happened (fat boy etc.) while this never happened.

No big deal anyway, I don't think anyone really cared about racism except a few Americans. Back then, their racist culture hadn't spread to the world yet. Nowadays, things would be very different I think.

linked servers were a big mistake. i think the argument for it was there would be always someone online playing, the language barrier and the very reserved mindset of certain groups (JP only) basically nullified that argument and lead to way more frustration as finding a empty server at 3am would have caused. this should have been, amoung many other things, very forseeable by the JP devs.

the whole "JP only" thing was mostly born out of the language barrier, you didn't just get rejected for beeing north american but simply for not speaking japanese. there were plenty of JP players around, so they didn't have to put up with autotranslate, i'm pretty sure in a reversed situation you'd find NA players acting the same way.

of course there are also JP players who hate NA people but again i'm not convinced you could put all those in the racism category.
i guess its just something to be expected if you drop napalm and atomic bombs on civilians of a enemy thats already on the ground out of base motives like revenge or having a new toy you just got to see in action once... or twice.

Speaking of LM-17...

They are not racist just lots of them when the game was released were young/school and not so good in English, I was in Phoenix server when I started and actually learned Japanese playing with them, even random shouts "JPs only" were fine when I say it in Japanese that my JP isn't so good.

The game's population/culture went down hill with the EU release.

Not all of them were, but many of them were. The top LS on my server was a JP LS and one of the leaders had a talk with a few in my LS one time when we teamed up at KB. She said that many put "JP ONLY" because they meant "that's all I speak" but would happily party with NA players. But she did say that many JP players do not like Americans and do not want to play with them. That's racism.


Which is why myself and many others did not judge the entire JP population on the whole "JP ONLY" or other questionable comments. Most took it as a person by person basis.

not necessarily.

Not liking someone because of what country they're from isn't racism?

Seems pretty cut/dry.

Only if said country's population comprises of exactly 100% of a specific ethnic race.

Unfortunately, America doesn't fit in that description. Neither does Japan for that matter, as there's mixed races in every country.

It's still bigotry, but it's not racism.

Potato, potAHto, all circumstances included, aspects of it can be considered prejudice and/or discrimination. Either way, it's not a good thing.

I am glad as of today, it's no longer "a" thing at all. But man, the memories of living through it.

Now we have discrimination against people who dont have masters on their job and dont have a rema weapon with 1000 days+ play time

That goes along with most any MMO. People will find or invent a reason to exclude someone. It becomes hard because there are legit reasons (person does not even have their geo equivalent spells, wanting to do well above 119 content wearing 109 gear, etc) but not being a master or having a REMA is pretty funny.

There was more to it than that.

If they surrendered and accepted the The Potsdam Declaration the first time, this could of been avoided.

Sorry for turning this into one of those threads.

They tried to write a check they couldn't cash and got spanked, hard.

Japanese did not believe believe in surrender. Did not want a complete and total surrender. They had to be completely and utterly demoralized.

They lost the war, they should move forward and stop holding grudges about the past. (which many have)


Not to mention we helped them rebuild and they became a global trade power. Our military has their backs so they had to waste less money/time/effort on one and focus on infrastructure/social issues.

It's not like we just bombed them and said "Ok thx bai"

Japan is one of our best allies now, everything that happened was in the past. War is hell, but now we are at peace. Now they are a global power that does not have to rely on military might (I'm kind of jealous about this).

TLDR: Holding a grudge about a war that ended 74 years ago is stupid. Very hard decisions had to be made, not all of them were pretty or ethical. It's done and over with, so let's try to make the world a better place and get along. Enemies are now Allies/Friends.

The Japanese are solid and good people. The ones butt hurt over WW2 are a minority.

For the sake of example from Merriam-Webster:
A country of any racial or ethnic composition can possess racism and bigotry and the two concepts are not mutually exclusive. Not liking someone because of the country they are from is xenophobic and inherently bigoted, but can also be racist if the source of the dislike stems from a belief of racial superiority. Care should also be taken to not let racist attitudes of a portion of a country be representative of the country's people as whole.

Use your best analytical skills and, if FFXI shouts have taught me anything, remember that the remnants of FFXI players may not always be the best resource to tap for this kind of subject.