I just googled "FFXI Old School Servers" then I found the Kotaku article about the server

I think I heard about Nasomi on a message board a few years back, but I never tried it out. A friend recently mentioned this in a group chat that I am apart of and so I'm giving Nasomi a shot since there's not many MMOs I enjoy playing at the moment.

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Hey mates, thanks to you, i'm being drawn back into FF11 XD

I had searched for "Final Fantasy XI free" and found the DSP Wiki on DuckDuckGo (I mostly refuse to use Google search). Then, I saw FFEra from there and thought I'd try that. However, after days of trying to get that to work I saw in Reddit that people who couldn't get FFEra to work installed Nasomi and then repaired the installation with PlayOnline and installed the patches to get on FFEra. Once that failed, I just installed Nasomi and tried that and after some tweaking with the bootloader and then a whole lot of fiddling with menu and screen sizes on the graphics I finally got to something playable...and then was disconnected after making a character...LOL. So after being discouraged I eventually came back to it and then I found I could logon and was in the game and...well, now I'm playing!

I had searched "Final Fantasy XI free" in the hopes of some kind of free trial (presumably from Square-Enix) actually, as ever since I (tried) to pay once for a MMORPG (Star Wars Galaxies) subscription, I've never ever felt the compulsion to do that again (it was a fiasco of incorrect charges popping up like a whack-a-mole in the first week) although I thought I might change my mind after trying Final Fantasy XI again. I had tried Runescape and WoW and LoTRO and a bunch of other MMORPG's, but really nothing held my interest in the category.

I had bought Final Fantasy XI in 2004 before getting Star Wars Galaxies, but it was so buggy for me after weeks of living with the issues that I gave up (my room mate may have encouraged me more than a little to switch over to what he played which was Star Wars Galaxies)...the irony is now that I'm NOT paying for Final Fantasy XI and the game has had a decade and a half I guess to mature, even with the few bugs I've found on Nasomi so far it has beenFAR more playable than I remember in 2004 (and yes, I think that's saying something).

So...THANK YOU Nasomi for making an easy-to-use installer/server, THANK YOU community for helping me figure out the bootloader/graphics problems, and THANK YOU everyone for making it possible for me to play this. Of course...I think I've spent more time now reading about FFXI than actually playing it, but figuring out how everything works is most of the fun for me, anyway.

I use Youtube for all my gaming news and needs. There are game previews, guides, gameplay and great streamers to interact with.

There is a streamer named "VRForce" that has a simple guide on how to get started on Nasomi Server.

Used google, "FFXI vanilla servers" or something like that, poped reddit and there was a few messages about this server

retail server facebook group, someone posting to advertise for their own new private server, someone commented suggesting this one instead, citing the server population and retail golden era setting

was browsing the ffxi subreddit once the free campaign started, someone mentioned this server. im glad they did, loving it.

Found out about Nasomi through twitch streamers!

I found nasomi via youtube videos/comments sections of youtube videos that were MMORPG related