this thread seems more like a salvia trip.

I think you are confusing skill with .. something else.

Ultima Online? There is absolutely no question it takes an entire next level of actual skill. It's a Pure Sandbox with tons of Faction PvP, PKs, Duel tournaments, Stealing (now THAT took skill). UO was popular-ish because there were limited options, and the wolf and sheep were forced into the same game... which made it interesting. I personally believe this is why there are so many shit MMOs out now -- The market is saturated and everyone goes off into their own little niche.

It's really simple...FFXI wasn't as popular because of its snails pace gameplay and requirement to party with players to do anything meaningful. Don't pretend to ignore the elephant in the room. If an average person had 1-3 hours to play, they didn't like the idea of spending an hour getting a party in the dunes, with a high chance of dealing with toxic party members. So they stopped playing. Tons of my friends were weeded out before level 30 back in the day.

So much this^

The hard parts of FFXI occurred back when the community had to learn how the game worked by trial and error. Long before people had reverse-engineered the damage calculations or figured out BiS gearsets for every possible situation, the game had a high degree of difficulty and was very unforgiving if you took risks that didn't work out.

To shit on the game in 2018 by saying there is "nothing requiring skill in this game", when people play it for nostalgia's sake is kind of like calling Isaac Newton a moron because he wanted to turn lead into gold. You're just way out of context.

BS. I played during that time, I never had to do much trial and error, and the only thing lost when failing was time and a little xp. The fact of the matter is it was only a very few people that took on the "skill" required task of trial and error and recording things in a wiki.

I don't think this is an out of context thing, I think our definition of skill is just completely different.

Edit: Just for clarification, I played thru out of nostalgia too. I'm not shitting on the game, I'm just able to compartmentalize my feelings and objectively look at the game for what it is after the experience. It was by and large a dopamine feedback loop that only required the ability to spend lots of time playing.

I mean you're comparing PvP type aspects in UO that involve player skill vs player skill to a game that is hugely PvE content with static difficulty levels. I don't even see how you can compare the two. To say that a strictly PvE game is less skill based than a game that was largely PvP orientated in almost all of its content is like comparing apples to oranges. No one's expecting FFXI's content to stand the test of time even after all these years and decades of min-maxing, but don't look back with rose tinted glasses and say it didnt take skill and knowledge to get where we're at as a community.

When I started playing, RotZ had just been released and it was a big freaking deal to see a person who had a job at lvl 75. Brady Guide was the FFXI bible and I couldn't look anything up on a wiki b/c I played on PS2 and didn't own a computer. I learned a whole hell of a lot in that era via trial and error. Maybe we do have a different definition of skill, but at this point I'm not interested in arguing definitions. The game wasn't easy. It had challenges that needed to be overcome if you wanted character progression. If you found all of that to be trivial and requiring nothing more than time, then that's how you felt. I'm curious though- if experiencing this game was so one-dimensional for you, why are you here now?

Knowledge yes, skill no.

You can't make a claim, get rekt by my response, and then say I can't compare apples to oranges when you instigated it.

You are the one that made the claim that the aforementioned games didn't take more skill than FFXI. Keep back peddling and re-using my rose-tinted glasses comment tho.

Yea you are probably too old or tainted with SJW craziness. Normal people don't care about this.

How old are you? The people I know that talk like this were 2 yrs old when this game was released...

I don't think I've ever seen an MMO that actually took "skill", in the truest sense of the word... I guess WoW some with the massive amount of actions, though UIs have dumbed that down, but none of it really compares to an FPS or MOBA. That being said - I think it's probably just semantics. All of those little reasons that people get "weeded" out, or never really catch on? You say it just takes time. Others? They'd say they found the best ways to make it not be a waste of time. You can call it whatever you want.

The min/max aspects of endgame are basically perfected now, and pretending that times weren't different at NA release is just embarrassingly narrow-minded. If you played after NA had been playing for a while, and everyone had figured out how to do stuff then fine.. but the fact is that it took a lot of hardwork and days wasted getting to the point that you could post on a forum in 2018 that everything was so easy.

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