When Your Family Figured Out You Play XI Too Much

When I got really fat from just sitting down and playing FFXI and I grew a beard and started eating raw meat because I was too busy farming sky pops to cook and my wife told me I had changed. I told her it's ok because I'm a Galka now.

This is a perfect video about "game ruined my life" delusion.



"somehow I found out about this game called Guild wars"

"I got so addicted to this game"

"before this I was really addicted to Halo, I used to destroy everyone with scoped pistol but anyway..."

"I played Guild wars for a few months but I started to get bored with it, so I started to look for a new MMO"

"I found one called Star Wars Galaxies, and I realized it was 100% better and I got so addicted to this game!"

"btw it cost $10 a month and my dad paid this (thanks dad you ruined my life!)"

"so anyway, I really loved playing this game and I was so addicted to it ...but then they added this new patch that made it more casual and let newbs become jedis from level 1, and I was like aww hell naw so I quit that game that same day and went to find another mmorpg"

"So anyway, we moved to this new game called world of warcraft and honestly I blame my dad because he paid the sub fee (so dad ruined my life) and my mom was like "oh son I will bring the food to your computer so you can play and eat" (mom ruined my life by doing that). So anyway the developers made this game really fun and addicting (so blizzard ruined my life)"

"I'm not blaming my parents but I feel they made bad choices honestly, cause he kept playing my sub fee when he knew I was addicted (wtf dad) and mom kept bringing food upto me while playing (wtf mom) and blizzard made this awesome game that I selected to be the one I wanted to play out of 5 previous games that were not so engaging (wtf blizzard)"

"so anyway, how did I break free from my addiction to world of warcraft? well I will tell you, I got addicted to Anime"

"World of Warcraft ruined my life"

You’re 100% missing every point I’ve established.

Who/what do you blame Radial?

Addiction questions are always a chicken/egg debate. It takes the right addictive action/substance/etc at the right moment exposed to the right person....and of course all the "rights" are just really "wrongs"- but the point stands. As such, of course we can all say both "XXX is the most addictive thing I've ever experienced" as well as "if it wasn't XXX then it would have been something else".

Just because A is true doesn't immediately mean B is false. In fact, ignore B in lieu of A often means leaving out important information. I'll always defer to wanting the whole picture rather than the succinct answer. Life is rarely that simple.


EDIT: I see a lot of "ppl need to take responsibility" type comments. Understanding one's addiction often isn't about putting blame on something else, but understanding how a person can get to that point. Because if you were the one addicted, it often can feel like you just woke up one day in a world of ***. Breaking down that timeline,etc isn't about skirting responsibility- its about understanding the journey so you have more tools to not fall back. So please, don't view most of these comments as "I'm responsibility-free!" Addicts trying to get better, for the most part, really aren't about dodging the blame.

Nah, I have to disagree with you man. But I'll elaborate to what plagued my particular case and probably many others: HNM/Endgame

Early-Day FFXI, people were OBSESSED with having the best stuff. Stuff that only dropped from NMs that were on ridiculous time windows that could only be claimed by whoever was fastest (Or whoever had the best bots). It was a severe grind and occupied a very great deal of actual time. Time that can't be reclaimed. If you were a more casual player? No harm at all, but if you were one of the sort that wanted "All The SHINY" it ended up summoning your inner work-demon.. except in a Video Game instead of doing it someplace productive lol.


Very true. I am NOT AT ALL saying it's SE's fault that we got addicted, it's 100% our fault for diving in. But I will say making a system THAT GRINDY for its time was a *** move. As I said in my first post, most of us were probably too young to notice and/or care. The game was phenomenal and kept us on the edge of our seats. We all have tons of epic stories from it.

But I remember a day when we were camping Tiamat and our LS Co-Leader Bellamy CAME HOME FROM CLASS EARLY (Med School iirc?) To help us kill the thing. Absolutely epic at the time but looking back at it now? Ehhhh bad move xD It was only one class, he was fine but still that memory is... Bittersweet?


Now This particular bit I will call BS on. I'm willing to bet many or maybe even most of us DO NOT have an Addictive personality. FFXI was the ONLY thing that has ever taken so much of my time. Never touched an actual drug in my life and have zero desire to. No weed either, only some Alcohol and even then I've never been much of a drinker. The Game itself was just that good in the early day.

All the Casuals? the Fishers, the Crafters, the Miners, the Ballista peoples and those who chased Maat's Cap, etc etc? No problem. The Endgame? All the HNMs with 3 hour windows, all the HOURS UPON HOURS of Walking places (and the extra hours retrieving those that died getting lost along the way), the 3 hour long Dynamis runs, the ZNM fights, the Salvage Runs, Sky.. Sea.. Kings.. Sandworm.. Dark Ixion.. ugh.. in hindsight it ate time like nobody's business. Loved every minute of it but damn lol.

Just a really bad Game-Life balance in it's design at least for those who pursued Endgame. That's all I was getting at. In most games you can grind for something shiny, get it, show it off and get bored of it and log off the game for awhile in reasonable time. In Early FFXI? pffft! You grind endlessly, FINALLY get your shiny (some never get it at all), and show it off in HOURS of endless Merit parties and such and just when you're starting to get bored, you either feel guilty about logging off because you want to stay and help your mates OR an update drops and starts the cycle all over again lmao.

Just like it's doing now but people can get their Shinie's and move on with life much faster.

:F

RadialArcana, do you accept that different things are better/worse to be addicted to? Do you accept that some things are EASIER to get addicted to, or that some things are easier to STAY addicted to?

It's ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Literally legalize heroin and meth then. Deregulate the tobacco industry. Let Japan legalize gambling. Those laws exist because some forms of addiction are flat-out just destructive. The very NATURE of those things is inherently destructive.

FF11 obviously isn't on that extreme level. The point is that, yes, you CAN and SHOULD hold the product accountable if it turns out to reward antisocial, addictive behavior. The way this game used to be designed was one that REQUIRED and REWARDED addictive behavior. Remember that time when that one linkshell went after Pandemonium Warden? And they fought it for like 18 hours straight and only stopped because the players literally started throwing up? People were pissed at SE for designing content like that. And SE had the gall to say: "lol well if it was taking them that long, they were probably doing it wrong."

You're coming in here with this callous attitude of "addiction is solely a matter of personal responsibility." OK, yeah, addiction lives in the brain. But it's patently false to ascribe all blame to the individual. Decades of scientific research would like a word.

i'd do it all over again, 100%!

Same! Wouldn't change a thing^^

When I started wearing an animal tall buttplug 24/7, miaowing and eating raw fish. I told my nan it's ok, I'm a Mithra.

O_O;
Lmao

you win the thread.

I think I have FFXI to thank for my career.

When I turned 18 I had a choice to make, what would I do at University. In the UK it was when the fees were raising from 3k to 9k a year. I felt very pressured into doing it.

I went and did Psychology. I despised it. I quit after a semester. I was very lost.

What I did have was basic understanding of how conditional logic worked because of Spellcast. I was able to use that to secure an apprenticeship. Windower 4 came out, and I started to experiment with it. I did some thing because I was doing 75-era Salvage at the time. I learned a lot. I eventually created another add-on, which taught me a decent amount about hash maps and functions.

I saw people using it in videos. It made me proud. I decided then that I'd go back to university, apply myself to a Bsc in Computer Science. I still played XI, but university took over a bit and I think I essentially quit around that time.

I still think that FFXI encouraged a passion in me that I was able to turn into a full time career. I went from a poor kid in a really deprived part of the UK, to a software engineer working in Amsterdam, able to buy a house, and able to sustain himself.

FFXI caused a lot of issues in my life, I had isolated myself from people. I ran home from school to join Dynamis. My first job in FFXI was BST, so I isolated myself from people in game too.

But ultimately, I look back on my time in XI positively. I might still have been lost without it.

Can you stop comparing Heroin or similar drugs (a foreign chemical you ingest/inject into your body and directly impacts your brain in a designed unnatural fashion) to the natural pleasure a video game or similar task gives you? Have you seen someone who is addicted to Heroin go cold turkey? have you seen how someone that can't play a video game acts by comparison? We are not comparing like with like.

Taking Heroin (or similar) will kill or at the very least damage your body and mind irreparably, and is a whole other level of "addiction" than a video game. It's not even in the same league of harm so lets knock that nonsense off. I played FFXI 10-15 hours a day / 7 days a week back in the day, I have no issues because of it once I stopped doing that. If I had ingested alcohol / heroin etc at the same hardcore level I would be dead in a short amount of time.

That aside

The Human brain has evolved to encourage us to perform work and achieve goals (or do whatever evolution has wired it to want us to do), this is why we as a species have achieved all we have. We perform a task, accomplishing that task releases natural endorphins (naturally produced pleasure chemicals in the brain) as a reward for accomplishing it. This encourages us to do this more and achieve more things, it's a good thing.

Anything in life can trigger this, from video games, buying stuff on amazon, movies, twitter, facebook, eating, forum posts, working out, weight lifting, growing plants...anything. Anything can be "addicting" (in that you want to do it more because of the brains response) because any of these things involve work > accomplishment > endorphin reward and desire to repeat. So if you go down this route of blaming the thing, everything is bad.

10 years ago I became "addicted" to lifting weights, every time I managed to increase the weight or noticed myself looking bigger, I was rewarded for my effort with that same endorphin rush and wanted to do it more. This is no different than a video game that is designed to offer you goals and give you pleasure for accomplishing them.

The problem with blaming the thing that gives a person pleasure is that

A) the person wants this experience and will vigorously search it out, and indeed drop a thing that does not give them the "addiction" they are searching for (as shown by the person that instantly dropped a previous mmo that went casual and went to play another one)

B) it allows this person to live in a fantasy land where all their failures are the fault of a thing, and not taking into account they would of just found something else to get addicted to anyway. Hell, I have a relative that is lowkey addicted to buying crap on Amazon, to the point it's not even about buying the things to use anymore and just about the buy > wait > open package routine.

I would also go further and say the "addiction" an mmorpg offers was not only far less damaging (and so a safer option) than other things people could of become addicted to, but also that I would say that overall it was probably a good thing to them at that point in their lives when they obviously needed something to engross themselves into.

Here is the reality, most people who want to play an mmorpg have social issues of some kind (or did when they played it heavily) and on one level an mmorpg is a kind of alternative life for us at a time when we need this kind of experience. Hell a game like this can give some people a reason to keep going, a reason to get up and carry on. This is partly why so many came back to these kinds of games during lockdowns imo.

I was "addicted" to FFXI back in the day, I liked having something that was so engrossing. If the developers had a attack of stupid and nerfed the game I and most everyone else like me would of immediately moved to another game and so they would have solved nothing but ruining their own business.

I don't regret my time playing FFXI at all, I met lots of cool people and managed to get a lot of enjoyment into my life at a time when I honestly had very little else going on and was really depressed. I and many people like me may not even be alive if not for the really engrossing pleasures this game offered us at low points in our lives when we were younger.

Also, just to point this out: even when developers create these kinds of games that "respect muh time" the people playing them still end up having thousands of hours in them and being "addicted" all the same. It's less about the game making people this way and more about the game attracting people who want to be so (or at least want to be so at certain points in their lives). Less hardcore games just end up attracting people who require less goal oriented stimulation to become "addicted"

Anyone make some friends for life playing FFXI? I made two good ones, which is awesome.

However, I lost one to FFXIV. :(

This is somewhat similar to my own path.

My most hardcore FFXI time was in college on the PS2. It probably kept me from having more adventures irl and I would have a longer RL friend list, but I met/dated my wife, did undergrad research, and graduated with two degrees in four years so I don't have real regrets.

After moving on to grad school, my PS2 finally died and I switched to PC. A friend set me up with spellcast and I joined the windower IRC to pester Aureus and Arcon with stupid questions. Windower v4 shortly came out and I started writing addons for it. I had some experience with coding from years of being a nerd, but I wrote way more lines for the Windower Lua repo than anything else I had touched at that point.

I got my PhD in neuroscience and faced bleak job prospects (no one hires neuroscientists in industry), but I took 6 months off after the degree, relaxed a bit, learned more Python/ML, and pivoted into data science. The fact that I had so much coding experience from FFXI made the transition viable. None of my formal training or research had ever involved scripting and I would have been SOL without the time spent on Windower.

Now I am on job #3. I moved towards software development and then back away, but who knows where I will end up.


PS. I do joke with my parents/spouse that playing FFXI was the productive part of my PhD and no one really knows what to say about it.

sigh...can we get back to mithra tail buttplugs and piss bottles? Somehow that was a lot less depressing than reality^^

When I set Fire to a sheep and harvested its meat after it died. The farmer phoned the police and I tried to explain to them that I was getting experience with Black Mage and skilling up Cooking. My wife didn't understand, so I Poisoned her.

That’s an excellent point actually. It’s thanks to FFXI that I’m so proficient at typing and thanks to spellcast and gearswap I’m as moderately savvy with software. I’m a Steamfitter GF by trade but I still show up some of our Engineers from time to time and it’s hilarious.

Also I write all my job notes in XML on Notepad ++ and they think I’m some sort of wizard. (Or alien? Idk)

FFXI is how I learned to type as well. I got insanely good at typing for a while, like 100wpm at one point. I even started typing my actions out in XI because it was more flexible than using macros without losing much speed. I'd only use macros for often-used spells or combos.

It's funny to think that flaws of things like the UI and love of the game lead to people putting hundreds of hours into creating programs to fix them, and that then lead to better career opportunities.

It's weird how negatives can lead to positives, if FFXI had an amazing UI a lot of people may have had totally different lives.

I leaned how to touch type through playing FFXI too. I learned how to type one handed from another addictive activity.

Playing FFXI led me to darker things like 4chan, efukt, motherless, and losing my faith in humanity.

Nobody really loses faith in humanity, people just say it to be stupid online.

No, I really do believe humans will become extinct due to human nature. I have no faith for human salvation.

you guys had faith in humanity at some point?