What could have possessed me to dive into another one of these games? Clearly, I was getting something valuable out of the Massively Multiplayer genre, something that neither solo games nor life in the outside world at the time could offer. The ability to chat over text and voice with a group of people who were into similar stuff (video games), and who wanted to play together and work towards accomplishing shared goals, is an incredibly powerful draw – especially when you don't have a group like that outside the game. For me, MMO games were in many ways simply a better context for social interaction.
Outside the game, I did have friends, but they didn't really need me in the same way that a low-level Taru White Mage running from a massive spawn of bandits did. The people I met online, they needed me simply because of the context of the game – it's always about the challenge of survival, against the environment or against other players. There was a reason for us to work together, to learn about each other. And this, apparently, is what my brain needed to help me be a more social person – a blank slate, and some context.
Plus, in FFXI, you could tame a big yellow chicken and ride it around. So there's that.
Final Fantasy XI did a great job of emphasizing that "work together" feeling -- sometimes too well, as I would find out late in my FFXI career. The game world was just as dangerous as EverQuest's, with solo leveling almost impossible after a point very early on. In fact, at certain points, you were simply prevented from gaining any more experience until you completed the next "Genkai" quest, to "limit break" and unlock further levels. These quests required groups from small to gigantic and often required rare drops or travel to remote locations. The final one even required you to duel a copy of yourself to the death, burning a rare "cannot carry more than one" tagged drop every attempt. Talk about punishing.
In its favor, Final Fantasy XI was catering to a specific kind of player -- players who had cut their teeth on games like EverQuest, Ultima Online, and even the Korean grind fest MMO's such as Lineage. These players were more organized and more hard-core about the game. They formed "static" groups with coordinated schedules, so they could level at the same pace throughout the game and quickly reach a high level. They utilized FFXI's public character profile tool to detail all of their statistics, so that when looking for a pickup group people could see what you were about. And they paid damn good attention to those statistics, especially Accuracy – which often meant the difference between getting your powerful skills off and contributing to party damage, or just sitting there thwacking away with a wiffle bat.
Unfortunately, I somehow managed to devote significant time to the game and yet still not be serious enough to keep up with those crazy players who chased the top-tier challenges – I was splitting my time between work, school, and the game, so many of the static group schedules didn't work for me.
I also had the misfortune of picking the class that I wanted most to play – a Shadow Knight – and not one that would be essential and always in tremendous demand in every party – such as a White Mage. In theory, the game was balanced around the same "holy trinity" role concept as EverQuest -- tank, healer, and damage. However, no one likes to play tanks or healers, because that's boring. So, at the exact moment in the game where leveling starts to require a well-balanced group, you suddenly see is a massive surplus of classes such as Shadow Knights, Dragoons, Thiefs, Explodey Magic Guys, and anyone else who focuses on sticking things with the pointy end. Tanks remain in high demand, while healers become a kind of rare gemstone or fantasy creature, like unicorns, the memory of which you treasure during hard times.
Of course, FFXI's developers also learned the lesson from EverQuest that it's important to design your game such that the relative hierarchy of class usefulness isn't obvious in the early levels, because otherwise you'll just drive off players who want to play a specific class. If you wait to spring this unfortunate fact on them until later, then they'll already be committed to their class and will likely keep struggling on. And struggle we did.
I did manage to glom onto a few consistent groups for a few levels here and there, but for the large part I was on my own. As I sat in the capital city, Jeuno, I would watch the airships fly in and out and wait for hours for a possible party invite.
I would sit there, regularly spamming my name, level, class, and the tag "LFG" (looking for group) in world chat. Sometimes I would log in on the weekend and sit for several hours without hearing a peep, or accomplishing anything of note. I revised my little paragraph of character profile text over and over again to try and make myself sound like a more desirable, friendly, and well-mannered group member, boasting about my various statistics. Comparing that profile to a dating profile would be apt – its composition was certainly as much if not more so guided by desperation.
On top of the class issues, the language barrier added to the difficulty of finding a group on your own. One interesting aspect of FFXI is that there was no service split across regions – Japanese and American and players from other regions throughout the world all played on the same servers. The game incorporated a "keyword" language system to help alleviate communication issues, allowing you to use predetermined chunks of language in chat that would be automatically translated to whatever language the viewing player was using. It was still exceedingly rare to actually play with people speaking other languages, though, since the keyword system was pretty limited.
However, on very rare occasions, the system would enable something magical. The rule was, if you ever got an invite that was composed entirely in auto-translated keywords, you took that invite. Because that almost always meant you had hit the jackpot… An invite from a Japanese group.
Oh god yes, pick me, pick me!
Japanese groups were FFXI's true target audience. Uniformly full of players dedicated to the game with complete mastery of all its mechanics (at least, that's how many of the US players saw them). The fact that they were inviting me, someone who at the time spoke no Japanese, was further testament to the utter confidence they had in their abilities. They just wanted an average player to round out their amazing group and contribute a little damage. This mediocre role was one I could fulfill admirably. I might even rise to the level of "above average random damage guy" if I worked extra hard, perhaps earning a future group invite!
These groups would kill monsters before I could even walk up to them, use routes and leveling areas that I'd never heard of, play with bizarre class combinations and skill sets that somehow worked amazingly well, and generally wipe the floor with the game. I was invited to maybe 3 or 4 of them, ever.
Sometimes these players could even work magic alone. I remember my friend the Red Mage very well. I had just joined a party that was almost full, at 4 of the 5 required five players, getting ready to go off and hunt lizards in a cave. However, we had no healer. This was obviously a problem because of the whole Trinity thing. Naturally, we couldn't find a White Mage – so we were looking at imitation options, such as a Red Mage who was using White Mage as a subclass, which give them decent healing potential.
After 45 minutes of waiting, we finally found a Red Mage. He was Japanese. Perfect! The only problem was, he adamantly refused to use the White Mage subclass. He was using a purely damage focused subclass – a weapon-based class, no less.
None of us had ever seen this before, and we were extremely skeptical. We tried to communicate over and over that we needed healing, that we would prefer if he used a healing subclass to augment his skills, but he said again and again – through keywords – that it would be fine.
We thought about kicking him out. But we were desperate, and, after all, he was a Japanese player. How could he be wrong about anything? So off we trudged into the caves, with a Red Mage using a 100% weapon focused subclass, a Paladin tank who could sort of heal himself, and a bunch of damage dealers.
It turned out, we didn't need much healing, because this Red Mage ate lizards for breakfast. He had found a bizarre combination of weapon enhancement magics and skills that made him a lizard killing machine. He was doing at least twice if not more damage than any other single party member. Lizard corpses littered the cave, and we showered him with praise for his unconventional and incredibly effective build.
Although I did have a lot of fun with FFXI, and met some great people, I'm still surprised at how long I persevered with the game. It was just so difficult to make progress, and yet it felt so satisfying once you finally got there. I completed all of the limit breaker quests and got very close to the maximum level; I amassed all of the rare weapon skills for my class, however useless they were; and I acquired all my class armor, and even joined a few high-level raids.
I think FFXI and EverQuest taught me an important lesson – when you're playing the kind of game that can become a lifestyle, you want that game to have some flexibility. You want to be able to enjoy it on your own or with a group. FFXI was great fun when the alchemy of the game created a balanced party, but it was god-awful unplayable alone, or if the conditions weren't right. And even if suffering sweetens the reward, you should never allow that to become the rule. We've at least got to drape a nice cloth over the Skinner box, right?
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