I Am A Horizon Streamer Who Was DMCA'd. AMA

I made this post live on twitch which greatly amused my viewers. I didn't actually plan to check it but here I am lol.

Of course, I would much rather play my favorite game in the world (75 era FFXI) than my not favorite game in the world (literally any other game) but I'm not delusional enough to think that this couldn't be SE. For that reason, I have reached out to SE's legal team. If it is true, they are legally obligated to provide me with verification. If it is not true, then someone is committing fraud and perjury in their name by filing fraudulent DMCA claims, and they can do whatever they want with that information.


Streaming on private servers is against twitch TOS as a catch all to cover their ***, they don't actually care unless the company cares. There are even drops available for a warhammer private server. Either way it's irrelevant bc the way our channels were actioned on tells us what we broke - and here it would be the Materials Usage License provided by SE. link Basically nearly every single person who streams the game breaks this, and it does not explicitly forbid private servers or emulation which they COULD and DO include in FFXIV's. It could still be them, ofc.

All affected streamers and horizon staff are in contact with each other, it's not exactly a huge community, and we are currently trying to get more information about the situation. I personally am not trying to invite a lawsuit with SE. So, I will only be appealing the strike if it is fraudulent. As I said nearly everyone who streams the game is breaking the license.


I was obsessed with dot hack as a child so I begged my mom to let me play FFXI and I started playing when it launched on PS2 in 2004.

I played on and off from 2004-2012, on 3 different accounts. I left because the game was unrecognizably different at that point, and just not really a game I wanted to play anymore. I tried to play Nasomi on launch but it was so janky I couldn't so I moved to FFXIV, then Overwatch, then started on Horizon in Feb.

I am although I find self promo on these kinds of things to be cringe lol. But I am one of the largest, if not the largest horizon streamer by CCV.

I am extremely close to hitting partner on twitch so I am waiting for more information on this DMCA before deciding if I will stream Horizon again. I am playing retail, there are several very nostalgic areas that are unavailable on Horizon that I'm exploring. The quetz server is BARREN though. And starting a new character while only listening to starter zone music .... I just ... I don't think I have the strength LOL. So when my 1 month sub is up, I'll probably move to OSRS or WoW HC, bringing my audience with me who primarily does not GAF about FFXI and had never heard of it until they started watching me.

That's what's the most wild about this, to me, as I am promoting a dead game in a dead category trying to get people interested. Most of my audience have never played this game. When they ask if they would like horizon I say, probably not, 99.9% of people will not enjoy 75 era FFXI, which is why SE stopped making it. Go play retail for the story and trusts.

Yeah, I am hesitant to interact with retail streamers bc I have nothing against retail players but some of them are so miserable and hateful for no reason.

What's wrong with enjoying a game that SE no longer provides and has no interest in providing? Is it pathetic to play pokemon red on stream so I can hang out and make new friends who like pokemon red? Why are neckbeards so angry that people enjoy different things than they do? Is it not MORE pathetic to cling to a 20 yr old dead game in maintenance mode instead of moving on to FFXIV, the MMO that SE actually cares about?

I wouldn't have ever played retail again anyway. Vast majority of Horizon players feel this way. It's a different game - and that's OKAY. We can enjoy different games. If horizon gets shut down, there's not gonna be a huge uptick in FFXI retail players. We are gonna move to different games entirely.

Hmm that makes me a bit sad, so it was planned to be just a hit and run? to ideally stir us up?
well at least you came back to answer my questions so thanks for that.

FRFR, on god

One of the reasons I was perfectly fine during that "terrible" era of abyssea that so many feel marks the end of "good" ffxi was it offered more things to learn, like playing pup at the time every level cap increase was time to explore "what will my auto learn now? oh I just gained a skill level is it going to cast a new spell!" it was a great ride for me at least.

When you talk about people in a PUBLIC forum, don't assume they will never find it. I think it's a bit sad to circle jerk over a private server that harms you guys in no way in a forum where you assume they can never respond bc you literally need a retail account to post.

Part of growing as a streamer is doing bits. So yeah I pulled a stunt here - I miraculously remembered my POL pw from 11 years ago, dug up my old account, streamed 3 hours of POL updating and paid $15 just to make this shitpost. I committed to the bit. That's why people watch me.

Sorry, I edit my post to be more clear. I meant it made me a bit sad that you initially were not making an honest effort to communicate.

Ofc, lots of people enjoyed abbyssea and the expacs after and still enjoy retail. Nothing wrong w that. I personally like 75 era bc I enjoy grinding exp parties, the climb to 75, playing a game that is unsoloable (#DeleteBST), don't care about the story at all, enjoy knowing that if I work for an item for months it won't ever be worthless bc of an update/level cap increase, etc etc.

They are two different games and there's nothing wrong w enjoying either one IMO.

How is just wanting to relive some old nostalgia or having others play it for the first time as is in the mid 2000s pathetic?

I guess you never listen to any old songs or rewatch any old clips of shows or anything??? Only new things for you, new iphone every year as it drops, just delete any pictures you've taken ever instead of storing it to look back at later too huh? What a completely ignorant thing to say.

The only stupid thing they did was posting on official SE Forums about the private server that was a smooth brain move, like chill on all the advertising, you're not Ragnarok Online or WoW private servers.

But for all the people that say dumb stuff like "its against ToS it detracts from getting people to play retail and keeping it alive, they're the reason the game is dying"

You're the group in every dying game that just wants to blame everyone but the devs and the company's decisions that they made that killed the game (WoTG and Abyssea, putting it on life support/maintenance mode)

Does ANYONE remember when Fortnite's Ninja streamed FFXI to his tens of thousands of viewers but he still did it on a PRIVATE SERVER yet somehow there was still a pretty big uptick of players to retail and he never faced any backlash for it but instead praised?

This us vs them mentality is so toxic it's ridiculous and cringe asf.

This one is wild to me, the same people that complain about HXI but continue to watch a guy 6 box a 20 year old game is completely hypocritical. All this "it's illegal, cheaters bad, retail better, you can find socialization on retail too if you tried you degen."

Yet there they were in his chat of 100+ viewers (only same regular 6 chatters), watching and supporting someone who went against ToS, 6-boxes, only plays with 1 or 2 other people at a time. I'm a fan of Ejin but his chat is mentally challenged because not only does his stream not offer the "big social community you'll find if you play retail" or the "cheater bad I play legit" while 6 boxing, using gearswap/lua and other addons that you can't see on screen (like EVERY FFXI/XIV streamer ever you'll just never see the programs and apps on screen anymore), but he's been banned multiple times.

Like, is it REALLY about "private servers" killing retail? No obviously not. The player base that had been complaining against HXI are just miserable old farts that can never be happy and hate seeing others be happy.

Edit: Realized that it's the "quote" feature and not reply so had to go back and edit 2 posts lol.

Idk who all thinks "private servers are killing retail" most don't cause anyone to bat an eye, with 1 exception horizonXI because it either has:

• haters so mad they will post EVERYWHERE to tell people to go play it in hopes to turn more people off.

• "cult" followers who run around preaching the gospel to every corner of the web.

• a paid ad campaign that is being run by someone to lazy to think before they click go on their post bot 3000.

if it was in fact haters being mad lads they did a good job.

Yeah replay just doesn't do what you expect, and is arguably some bad UX (sorry Rooks/Scragg)

One group is paying customers who pay to use the assets created by the devs/artists, the other is freeloaders using those same assets for free while shitting on the real deal and labeling us paying customers as "boomers" out of touch. Why should you get to use the same assets for free that we are paying for? Trying to say that we are part of the same community is ridiculous in my opinion.

Most of us could go back to ignoring the existence of the real neckbeards who can't let an era of a 20 yr old game go, but they are literally a plaque. Across all social media, gassed up by a millionare who propped this stupid server up. Commenting on every single thing to the point long time content creators for XI are FORCED to put "REtail" in all their videos and content. Obnoxious, the fact we have to label the game as the real game is so stupid to me.

FFXI's community has always been divided. SE caused it in hopes of everyone to move to FFXIV 1.0, ARR, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, Endwalker, (dammit) Oh, here's the incoming new graphics Dawntrail! Also, you are getting Echoes of Vana'diel! It's a win-win for everyone.

Nevertheless, I am a paying customer to play FFXIV so SE is still getting my money.

true, but have you also listened to pserver streamers talk about retail? it really, really goes both ways


i'd say nothing, and i know a lot of retail folks that agree. the problem is just they're exhausted by the pserver (horizon esp.) cultism. "What cultism?" just look at the way most pserver enthusiasts respond to even the slightest (valid) criticism of their chosen server/community. it looks a lot like how the ff14 community reacts to criticism of their game, and the ff14 community is very often roasted for resembling a cult

you even have a*r*c trying to emulate the whole "yoshi-p" thing. wild.


i hope this just means anyone that's mad about someone enjoying something else is a neckbeard, and not calling retail defenders specifically neckbeards. as someone that's played pservers far more/longer than you i can assure you the neckbeard descriptor is far more apt for most pserver andys :)


which is why i think SE is just throwing away free money by not offering official classic servers, given their relative popularity these days. but to reiterate i've never thought classic servers was the issue. it's horizon; the sh*tlords who run/operate it and their most annoying defenders/enablers

You're not wrong. There's a decidedly non-zero amount of mediocre-to-bad UX floating around the site, but most of it is so OLD that I'm hesitant to change anything. Lord only knows which feature someone's been using in its broken way for ten years

What's wilder is that there's a lot of things people don't even know works: it took me like three or four years (as a user, pre-admin) to figure out that you can just highlight part of someone's post and hit quote and it'll just quote THAT part, for example

Like this :)

You can also quote multiple ppl, by just clicking quote on each. I kinda like the UX, or at least Ive gotten used to it.

WTF! This new knowledge will give me enough time savings to solve world hunger

certainly doesn't help that the guy in charge of budgets for both games is running ffxiv and clearly views ffxi as a competitor. no matter how often he's said the right thing, as ever, actions speak louder than words

though i guess to be fair he doesn't even give ffxiv the budget it deserves :D

It's interesting that Horizon players always talk about this better community but I don't see it. I see Horizon players harassing retail players, trying to rile them up like this thread and having to advertise their server everywhere because the playerbase is waning as they always do with private servers. Certainly not the kind of 'community' that I want to be part of that's for sure.

If you want to play on a private server then fine, do what you want, but don't be an *** to retail players.

well it's just like the ffxiv "great community by the way" meme, isn't it? sure the community is great and nice and welcoming... on the surface. as long as you enjoy the game the way they want you to enjoy it and never offer any criticism, no matter how valid. but if you break that cardinal rule the toxic positivity brigade tries to get you shot into space

***, I use that all the time. Well used to.

I'd rather not deviate away from the topic at hand too much but the 14 community for sure has it's problems (as does every community including 11) but I rarely see 14 players going into retail 11 streams/videos and say they should play 14, at least not as often.

You're presuming that a majority of these people would PAY to play on a classic XI server.
I'm not saying 99% of the population is playing because its free, but I'd stake my reputation that atleast 50% are on it cause its free.

Not trying to deviate, just commenting on how i find it interesting/funny how both communities are culty in their promotion of their games & both share a strange "why are you attacking us? we're the nice guys" mindset when there's any pushback- regardless of quite a lot of evidence to the contrary


hey, that's valid. i think personally if i was going to play classic i'd MUCH prefer playing on an official server where all my hard work wouldn't go up in smoke the second some scandal broke out and the server vanishes overnight. but i suppose a lot of people play private servers specifically because it's free

People would get bored of an official classic XI server pretty damn quickly. Especially if they had to pay for it. Why do you think Blizzard have had to introduce other expacs, a hardcore mode and now seasons of discovery to keep players engaged? That's a lot of dev work and money that will never be spent on XI.

I'd say people already are getting bored.

Sunday primetime and theres only 2600 online. What happened to 4000+? Who knows how much of that 2600 is bot-population and mules too.

At LEAST half right?

As a horizon player, I don't play on it bc it's free, I play on it bc it's the game I wanna play. Do you guys really think people are just *too cheap* to play on retail? That's some grade A copium lol.

SE will never offer a classic server bc the potential customer pool is abysmally small. I wouldn't play on retail classic bc SE has a financial incentive to allow multi-boxing and it seems, from talking to lots of my friends who play retail, that cheating modding/multiboxing/speedhacks/etc is just accepted and allowed as long as it's not shown on stream.

Also yes neckbeards go both ways. There are definitely people who play pservers who look down on retail players, and as a pserver player, they aren't harassing me so I don't see the harassment. I do see very dedicated retail trolls sending fake c&ds and spamming pserver chats and false reporting tho. Lol.

As for Horizon staff, I didn't know any of them before playing here - several of them come to my stream and I have nothing bad to say about them. But I'm also not gonna defend people I barely know either. I have no clue about their personal dramas. I just enjoy playing on their server and have met lots of friends there. I've really only had to block like 2 people in all 8 months I've been here for being sucky.