Hi! As you all well know, FFXI is a huge time investment, so I want to make sure where i'd be landing

- Is there a decent EU population ? EU LS from "social" to "endgame" ?
- What are the differences with back-in-the-day-ToAU, if any ? like XP rate ? rare/ex items ? Anything I should know in that regard ?
- I see ~200 online at a time, good enough for endgame competition but probably hard to level right ? Need to start with pretty much a premade group or easy to find people to level with ?

I'm basically interested in knowing anything relevant to this server (read: mostly different from back-in-the-day-server).

Thanks in advance !

There is some EU pop but as you may expect, it is smaller. I don't think there is a very serious endgame EU shell. Social, sure.

We don't have most of ToAU. All the monsters in ToAU zones are level 99, no missions etc. It's CoP with ToAU jobs unlocked. Think of it that way. XP rate is not boosted. NMs don't drop rare/ex version of items.

200 online is very low compared to normal. Yes, if you're EU, you will have a harder time, but I managed to get to 75 within a few months without much issue. Make friends with jobs that are in-demand and you'll be fine. Even if you don't, we have 20 level difference level sync.

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Ooh I totally forgot about lvl sync ! How come it's limited to 20 though ? Wasn't like that back then or ?

Also, what are the most useful yet lacking jobs on the end game scene at the moment ?

Is NM hunting viable ? was thinking leveling THF as secondary job.

I haven't been here for very long, but with my limited research I'd go ahead and say that the Nasomi Server is a bit more hardcore than vanilla XI. Rules and decisions seem to land more in favor of the origninal developers intention rather than the original developers end product. Mix that with an upaid skeleton crew doing this out of their own love and support versus a well backed corporate machine with a paying populace and shareholders to appease and please the design decisions seem to fall on the side of "the playerbase is here because they want a sense of community, they are not priviledged customers, but brothers and sisters coming together for a common cause."

I'd wager the implementation of level sync, on this private server that is going for retail release design mantra, was a bit of a controversial decision to begin with. Level sync was implemented a few years into retail to entice newcomers and assuage veteran players worries with getting their friends to play with them. Right away the populace began to skip leveling spots in favor of convenience. People would be dropped from parties so that they could fit in a lower level person to sync down to and not move for days on end from a leveling location. Now certain areas that were supposed to be overflow experience camps or feasible alternatives were becoming even less populated and the leveling meta began to infect the original development teams design intentions.

On the other hand, the concept on the whole is not a bad idea, especially for a low population server with a development team that's more interested in implementing new features, squashing bugs, and forming a community, than they are in providing player convenience.

Full level sync homogenizes areas and the leveling process as a whole.

A low population without any level sync whatsoever becomes a masochistic endeavor for newer players in the near and far future.

I'd say the compromise the team made to reinterpret level sync's footprint on the meta behavior of the Nasomi populace was not entirely an easy choice nor a bad idea. I find it a fitting compromise for those who really want that vanilla feel, but along with that vanilla feel comes a sense of community, that you might not get if the population dwindles too low or homogenizes too much.

From some of the posts made on this forum I see a lot of good and a lot of 'why' kind of smh posts? For the most part, I see a community coming together to relive a bygone era. On the other hand I also see some players that want to take advantage of being on the most populated private server and don't want to pay a retail subscription fee. If I were to be so callous as to assume this dichotomy applies to all players.

For the life of me I don't really understand why a player would put themselves through Vanilla XI just to 'game' the systems and get to level cap as fast as they can. There are a lot of other free private servers that give out exp, gil, and progress like Halloween candy. I'd always thought the thrill of vanilla XI was the challenge and community and being in a community overcoming challenges. From what I've seen, and from the Nasomi population numbers, and from the general dismay of many FFXI veterans with the modern interpretation of retail, it could be argued that vanilla XI may have been a niche MMO in terms of gaming on the whole, but to the veteran XI audience, it was the primary example of what an MMO should be.

Sorry, I'm getting rambly again.

TL;DR It might be easier to see the Nasomi server as a "purist" server rather than a "vanilla" server. Remember, vanilla retail was all about profit motive for Square Enix. FFXI, to this day, is the most profitable game in the franchise. Remove profit motive and what motive would you have to develop a vanilla XI experience, or even play a vanilla XI experience? I'd say all that's left is developer interpretation of the original vision.... and a sense of community. This may be Nasomi's server, but the community is more than just players, and they're literally not paying customers, so why are we here? I'd say we know why we're here and from seeing some of the Nasomi server design choices, I'd say they want to keep it that way.

Hope to meetcha sooner rather than later! ^^b

There is no "development team" or skeleton crew here Rhomagus, its just Nasomi and whatever he chooses to work on and implement.

Ah, I thought there were other contributors, but now that I think about it I must be thinking about the DarkStar project as a whole. Or maybe I was just witnessing volunteers and assuming they were operating in some sort of heretofore agreed upon capacity. I guess the Nasomi server and it's goings on would just be a part of that then ya? Well, either way it's still a huge resource gap, I'm here of my own volition, and don't really have expectations of anyone else, while if I were paying a subscription fee, that sentiment would be very different.

Regarding endgame content and the coding of HNMs, there was outside help from a player who's recently quit. Other than that, It's just Nasomi himself performing all the updates.

Kami,

I think you should give the server a try. You're not going to hit 75 in a week, and maybe not a month (unless that's all you want to do) but I think you'll find a rewarding an nostalgic experience filled with in-game financial opportunities you can take advantage of to help properly gear your character. Take a look at the marketplace bazaar and start researching items you're familiar with farming from retail.

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Actually started 27 days ago and having a blast!

Will soon make a (probably) long thread to celebrate my first month here with some thoughts, suggestions, shoutouts etc!

-Nanomidgy