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ffxi ranked. okay I technically played it awhile ago and was hoping to get through everything, but I've fallen back into the FFXIV field ops grind and so it's gonna be awhile. so here it is, ranked through what I've played already. FFXI is real good.

quick note before we start: both mmos are really hard to rank. the era you played them in matters so much; it's why XIV is ranked highly despite disliking the plot of half its expacs. don't think too hard about the mmo rankings. is xiv better than fft? probably not. but i've played it since 2.0 so.

- it is actually incredible how much playing this still feels like a final fantasy game. despite this, they were still right to switch to tab-target hotbar combat in xiv. ffxi's menus are very neat, but macros invalidate all of that anyways so you're just doing hotbars with extra steps.

- the ui is a trainwreck but its a game from 2003 that also released on the playstation 2 so it's forgiven. - the tutorialization is a trainwreck, and this is less forgiven. this game is SO confusing. that said i got back into destiny 2 again recently, and its still better tutorialized than that, so

- wow players will probably be like 'this is normal' but the fact that all the different classes feel unique is such a breath of fresh air coming from xiv. i mainly played corsair and its really fun to do stuff nobody else in your party can do!

- my understanding is that the grind has been SIGNIFICANTLY reduced over the past decade, and that seems like it was good. i don't think i'd have gotten as far otherwise, as i'd be prioritizing ffxiv grind over it.

- playonline SUCKS. it is SO BAD. the fact that the game is having a resurgence of popularity despite having to deal with playonline is a testament to its quality. - the maps thing is really quaint in the modern age of extremely detailed wikis. thanks for the option but i will not be buying those 👍

- it's just fun. i had a really good time playing it, esp since i was playing alongside @amyrlinn.bsky.social so it wasn't, like, a solitary experience. i would probably be playing more if not for the fact that i keep switching linux distros and fucking up my install

extra mmo thoughts: my favorite parts of ffxiv are field operations, which started w/ eureka, a zone explicitly inspired by ffxi. i appreciate that it encourages you to work together and engage with other players; i enjoy mmos because they are social games, which xiv has been diminishing over time

the occult crescent disappointed me because you dont get much of people shouting in all chat to work together to prep stuff, randomly partying to grind certain resources, etc. ffxi is from an era of mmo that centers open world, un-instanced content, and it feels more like a connected space.

there's a lot more friction in ffxi's design that you don't see much anymore, which makes sense when you consider that these things are ridiculously expensive to make and thus very high risk these days. some of it is good and deliberate, some of it is the extremely fragmented teleportation system.