Shit Server

NIN having an entirely different 2h ability doesn't exactly seem faithful

https://horizonxi.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Horizon_Changes

So it's just the minor job and equipment adjustments? I have to admit, my immersion was pretty shook when WHM got Reraise at level 25. My memories are shattered!

And Devotion at level 45 instead of as a merited ability.

Enlight, which never existed in 75 era, added to PLD. Souleater cut in half. Desperate Blows added to DRK. Ready added to BST. Chivalry added at 45. "Shield block rate and damage reduced when blocking adjustments". Utsusemi recast increased by 15 seconds. Steady Wing added for DRG. THF gets triple attack much earlier. Energy Drain drains Haste from the target. Wasp Sting buffed. Nightmare Scythe has en-terror. All hybrid WS stack with SA. Thief's Knife no longer has TH.

Yup, couple minor adjustments, you probably won't even notice.

I guess i'll give this the old stab:

I played retail actively up until Sortie was released, at which time all the people I actively played retail FFXI had stopped playing. FFXI was always about the people I played with, and i've had a great time in retail and in the private server scene. (Of which I have spent a great amount of time in both) I can say from experience that retail as stated by many others is an extremely different game than the FFXI we grew up playing, and many people in the community including myself at one point felt the itch and the want to re-experience that.

I've played, developed, and administrated multiple private servers at this point: Ranging from full custom all the way to aiming to be era accurate. Horizon hasn't been perfect by any means, but were making the strives to be better and provide a good experience for our players. Through Horizon i've had friends become family by building a project with them, and have met many many new players who I now call friends. The thing people miss the most I believe about 'Era' is the direct NEED in the game to rely on other players to progress through even the most basic parts of the game, this need to socialize and interact with other players creates a tight nit community which has caused most FFXI players to create friendships and family that will last a lifetime. We in the 'era or era-like' parts of the private server community hope to re-create that as best we can.

Anyways Horizon is welcome to anyone, and I will ALWAYS tell people that retail still exists and if you want to experience the core of the game and its stories that retail is always the first place a player should go.

See you in Vana'diel friends.

Why on earth would you think that has anything to do with FFXI? early 75-cap was balanced around the EQ model of massive grind and time sinks. Tiamat wasn't hard, it just took awhile. Fafnir wasn't hard, you just had to get claim. Kirin wasn't hard, it just took some time. There was never "hard content" at 75, it was just massive time sinks. Modern QoL has removed those time sinks, though current content still has them cause SE.

If we want "challenge", I wouldn't be doing FFXI. Most of us are older now and have lives that contain actual real challenges and difficulty with real rewards.

And if your real life is that boring, then current retail is by far the most "challenging" the game has ever been.

Haste recast is 18 seconds instead of 20? MY NOSTALGIA IS CRUMBLING

Hagun damage nerf. Added Malignance Sword. Octave club works the same as KC. Bravura got +18 damage. Claustrum got "massively buffed". Rune Chopper has haste changed from 9% to 2%.

Really minor stuff guys. ROZ earrings all changed. COP rings all changed except rajas ring.

Every sky NM pop changed. Drop changes in sky, limbus. AH changes.

Read the horizon changes page. There are massive changes to pretty much every job and most meta items. It's nothing like era FFXI.

Stat adjustments! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUH NOSTALGIA IT'S NOT EXACTLY THE SAME REEEEEEEEEEEEE

Will agree though that the Octave Club one is a bit much.

It’s named Octave but it’s just a rare exclusive normal K club.

Anyway, per our website, we are not going for picture perfect era accuracy, but rather adjustments we feel make sense while still trying to preserve the level 75 era feel.

some of the choices are very bizarre. it's made faithful to the era in some areas like nerfing movement speed by -20% which seems completely arbitrary, that seemed like a perfectly good QoL change that could have been adopted from retail. but then make very odd buffs like Perfect Dodge gives 999 accuracy and ranged accuracy, and Energy Drain now randomly drains haste

personally I'm not trying to find fault with the choices themselves and Horizon as a game in its own right, if people are enjoying it and having fun with it and able to experience the nostalgia factor, then that's awesome for them. there are plenty of other games that are a different or modded version of the original with dedicated communities that have a lot of fun with them. but from a design perspective, it feels hard to say this is "pretty close" to 75 era or a "carbon copy," it's a modified 75 era experience, and that's fine, but let's just call it what it is

All the changes were made to make the "feel" of the jobs the devs / admins and their friends like better, while crapping on any jobs / setups they didn't like. It's no where close to the actual 75-era, more like someone's drug induced fantasy of what that time could have been.

There are many changes that have me scratching my head too, as well as some QoL improvements that I believe they should adapt(Ephemeral Moogles being a big one), but I don't think it's a stretch to say the game is pretty close to 75-era. The core of the game is 90% the same.

Apparently though if you're not spamming Hagun SAMs at things and forcing people to pick Suppa as their DM reward, you've lost the core of the game somehow.

Horizon is like a "inspired by real life events" movie version of 75-era FFXI.

What gets me aren't even the job/balance changes. Those are so tame they might as well not even exist. Except Ninja, which has been rendered unusably bad, and Thief because that job wasn't already the most-played job in the 75 era due to its conveniences so it needed every buff imaginable.

It's the things like the bazaar taxes, item drop rates, the music and graphic replacements, the severed heads on login, the lack of item sync, and just the overall lack of care and attention that you'd imagine would go into something with such a big budget and so many fans. Every streamer I've interacted with who plays on Horizon has the mentality of "I know it sucks, but if I just hold out, it'll get better". But it doesn't get better. It's been live for a year, and they don't seem interested in fixing any of the glaring issues.

While people are zoning into the void or having hours of progress lost on a quest because something doesn't trigger properly, the devs are gloating about how strong their characters are. Y'know, because making tons of changes and not telling anybody what those changes are gives them exclusive insider knowledge of buffs and nerfs that they can abuse. It just feels dirty and lazy, I dunno.

This one is definitely a headscratcher. I honestly don't know why they bothered to keep this unless they couldn't figure out how to remove it.

It really depends what you're looking for. Horizon's biggest asset is its population and the "promise" of what's to come. If you really wanted to just experience FFXI as it was in the past, servers like Eden are just that.

There's private servers out there that rework the entire game from scratch, making an entirely different experience from both modern and past retail. Then there's private servers that lock onto a specific era and keep it that way.

But Horizon is kind of a weird "worst of both worlds" scenario, where it doesn't feel anything like any era of FFXI and also not having any of the balance or interesting unique content of other servers. All it has is a really good PR team and the fallacy of high population equals good. Meanwhile people are claimhacking Crawlers for a fraction of a chance at a Meteorite for their Compound Eye Circlet.

It's very easy to manipulate. It's a design choice. Every out-of-era change is a design choice, outside of things that are lacking. Things like a functioning friend list, Ballista, and item sync (that may have been added and I'm unaware) that are omitted because they take time and effort. Aerec even said that he wasn't going to add item sync purely because it takes too much time. The server also opened up with monsters walking back to spawn, which is another thing that's a simple Yes/No toggle in the code. They backpedaled that decision when they had to nuke Valkurm once an hour.

I guess they changed the bazaar taxes to a global thing, but I remember when the server first started, they had it only in the starting cities and their surrounding areas, in an effort to (and they said this themselves) push people towards Jeuno.

I think it feels pretty close to the late CoP era, but with a little bit different meta. High population is undeniably one of the most important things for an MMO to have, so I'm not sure why you're trying to pretend it isn't strongly correlated with being good. I think that's actually one of the things that makes it feel like the 75-era.

Also, people in this thread keep mentioning claimhacking on low level enemies. Was this a thing on launch? I'm leveling a job in Saruta right now and there aren't any people out here fighting Crawlers.

Bazaar taxes and the like are a way to vent excess gil from the economy and curb inflation. That's all things like AH fees, XIV's teleportation costs, and the like have always been. Every MMO has them and always will, unless they like, don't have a common currency at all (suck it, RMT?)

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but after looking at that list of changes, this feels pretty on the money.

I'm not even saying the changes are bad; things like Devotion showing up earlier are probably pretty welcome changes, but a lot of things on that list feel like change for the sake of it; jobs that needed REAL balance improvements seem to have either been left alone or gotten weird tweaks that don't address the real problem(s) the job had.

Higher population is good, but only if it's balanced for it. Lower drop rates with high population makes things crazy competitive, and you can't get anything done if you've only got an hour or two to play the game. And weak job balance means anyone wanting to play a specific job is SOL.

I remember they said the reason why they lowered drop rates was so the economy doesn't get flooded with items with the higher population of people... not accounting for the fact that a higher population would also be consuming more as well.

By lower drop rates do you mean the TH chart provided by SE? That’s what we use. The only “lower drop rates” were when we created a ton of new level 1 mobs for the first few weeks of the server to help leveling congestion. Otherwise, it’s era TH.

Horizon is to XI as My Immortal is to Harry Potter

Guess I feel like I haven't seen the "crazy competitive" thing ever come up. The area I farm to make gil is almost always empty and the things that are competitive have always been that way, like Spook or Leaping Lizzy.

I'm also not sure what weak jobs are getting left out on Horizon, but weak jobs getting left out has always been a thing in FFXI, even now. Seems like a weird thing to specifically rag on Horizon for.

It just seems weird to make changes but not actually address problems, is all. Like if you're going to stray from The True 75 Experience, why not fix some of the balance issues?

It's not my bag in any case and if people are having fun I'm glad for them, it just feels like a missed opportunity.

That's exactly what I was thinking. They could have taken this opportunity to make White Mage the #1 healer like it should be in theory, giving Red Mage a stronger identity of its own. Instead, they slightly nerfed Convert. It's still in direct competition with White Mage, and still has every advantage over it.

Thief, for example, was always one of the most-played jobs in FFXI. Even though it wasn't as welcome in parties, its solo ability with Bolts, farming power, and presence in late-game still made it strong. But the Horizon team:
1. Added 999 Accuracy and Ranged Accuracy to Perfect Dodge
2. Increased the damage of Daggers, to a point where some of them have equal DMG to Swords, but still at the delay of a Dagger.
3. Increased the power of Dagger Weapon Skills by a huge margin.
4. Lowered the level of both Triple Attack and Assassin.
5. Removed the dependency on Thief's Knife for TH, allowing for another damage-oriented weapon (in fact, TK is given Occasionally Attacks Twice, so now it's just better anyway)
6. Lowered item drop rates across the board, making Thief the only reliable means to acquiring basically any item at all

Nope, no favouritism at all here.

I think they fixed many of the balance issues, even if it's not perfectly balanced. I don't know of a job that gets specifically left out these days quite like MNK or DRG did back in the early classic FFXI days. I hit 75 WHM recently and I partied with every job on many different occasions. While some jobs perform better than others, I feel like the differences aren't nearly as drastic as they were back then.

I think they fixed many of the balance issues, even if it's not perfectly balanced. I don't know of a job that gets specifically left out these days quite like MNK or DRG did back in the early classic FFXI days. I hit 75 WHM recently and I partied with every job on many different occasions. While some jobs perform better than others, I feel like the differences aren't nearly as drastic as they were back then.

I’m interested to hear what you think is missing so we can evaluate (we do this on our discord too with suggestions and job discussions). Our general design philosophy was to start with era balance then adjust as we felt necessary to bring all jobs into the realm of feeling useful/having their own niche since some didn’t in era.

Anything not-THF and for awhile not-BST is left out.

That and the admins just ban anyone that says anything bad about them, even if it's on a private discord server. In any case I stay away from anywhere that the devs / admins take an active interest in screwing with the population. Indifferent neglect is always a better outcome then active tyranny.

I'd also like to use this avenue to air my grievance with the general disrespect and in some cases contempt for the people who did the work finding and publishing tests, numbers, and facts that are used as a basis for this kind of ***from developers and armchair developers related to Horizon.

Very funny that you use our work to build the server and ***on us in the same breath. Not everyone does it but I've been given enough examples of it to be annoyed.