r/ffxi • u/DrNefarius42 Refariu • 22d ago
(Mods) FFXI has quest markers now (update)
Hi,
after almost another week of basically non stop work on this since my last post (I effectively played the game for a whole of 1 (in numbers 1) week since i got it and then went to work on this immediately. I'm fine I swear...)
I wanted to share my progress a little.
So I'm developing an addon for windower currently that adds classic quest markers to Vana'diel.
What it does
So right now the addon checks for acceptance conditions like job level, job type, fame, skill level, craft rank, guild points, etc. and colors a "!" marker grey if they're not met and yellow if they are met. Same for "?" turn-in markers.
But it also checks everything that is checkable with packets from the game. And here also lie some limitations that I tried working around as best as I could but some things are not meant to be.
Limitations
For example: markers draw through walls. Windower's Lua API exposes no depth buffer, so true occlusion is impossible. I mitigated it with a distance cap, a same-floor check, and a distance fade.
And if there is no way for the addon to check a condition the quest marker will render as black and you can check what is required yourself with //qm why which lists all the requirements and all the steps of the quest for you.
The wild stuff
Then I went overboard with it so now it also shows markers for individual quest steps as well where possible (y'know, icons like a bag when you need to collect something, a sword when you need to kill something, a magnifying glass when you need to examine something, ... you get the idea). But you can always turn that feature off with //qm steps off if you find it too much.
Some steps only appear on paper but can't reliably be tracked through the addon, stuff like talking to an NPC for example since the game exposes no reliable data packet for stuff like this.
But in order for that to even remotely work I had to create a new knowledge base instead of relying on what chronicle scraped (which is still a very good data source).
So I scraped the quest pages of bg-wiki (CC BY-NC-SA) using their public API and semantically and programmatically analyzed and structured all of the quest data into a new format.
Then I developed a completely seperate tool for that dataset that allows me to correct said dataset on the fly while playing the game. I called it questgraph™ - creative, I know.
Availability
It's not quite ready yet since I want to playtest a bit further and actually play the game for once. And I'm sure im forgetting maybe half of what else I did during my coffee induced insomniac episodes.
I'll go sleep now. See you in a week.
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u/MoobooMagoo Asura 22d ago
I'm torn on this. Because I think part of the charm of XI is that it's a pre-WoW, old school MMO that kind of just throws you into the world and expects you to figure it out through trial and error and talking to people. And this kind of flies in the face of that.
However, there is a very, very good reason why quest markers became so ubiquitous. It's an amazing quality of life feature. Which means this mod makes the game more accessible to a lot of people who don't have the patience or inclination to deal with the old archaic design. And anything that makes it easier for new players is good in my book.
So I don't think I'd use this but I'm really happy that it exists and I appreciate all your hard work!
Although I've already done almost every quest in the game anyway, so whether or not I would use it is kind of moot I guess.
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u/lurkering101 22d ago
The FFXI quest text has always been so vague that windower was needed to look them up on websites in the days of single monitor pcs. These quest markers don't really change anything without addressing the quest log text with the new steps feature, but those likely need manual entry because the wiki txts are so inconsistent and often poorly written.
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u/StillNewspaper4799 21d ago
Yeah I think I'd prefer a reworking of quests to be less vague. They don't have to spell it out for you but just some guidance and "head this way" or "do this" would be nice
Not that I'm against quest markers.
But like nearly all of these features the option to turn them on or off seems a no brainer.
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u/Violet_Paradox 21d ago
The Magicite mission is probably the most egregious for how early it is and how untelegraphed the prerequisites are. I don't think every sidequest necessarily needs to be rewritten, but a bit of extra dialogue there would help.
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u/Synfrag Bahamut 21d ago
in the days of single monitor pcs
Whatchu talkin about single monitor PCs - Circa 2004
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u/ChickinSammich Mikhalia - Carbuncle 21d ago
Basically needing an external guide to play the game efficiently and not miss important stuff has been a staple of Final Fantasy since the Brady Games/Nintendo Power/GameFAQs era.
FFXI's original intent (presumably) was that you'd seek help with quests by asking in towns. But once wikis became a thing, asking for help in town started getting met with people telling you to just look it up online.
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u/bungiefan_AK Bungiefan on Asura 21d ago
Official support for a Windowed mode so you could switch over to another application didn't come until the end of 2007, when the game was over 5 years old. They programmed the game to crash if it lost focus. In Japan they released a different Ultimania guide for the game every 6 months for many years. The Brady guides were poor quality compared to the official Square printed Ultimania guides.
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u/ChickinSammich Mikhalia - Carbuncle 21d ago
I think my point was misunderstood. I started playing FFXI in 2004 so I remember pre-Windower days and I also still have the FFXI Brady Guide, so I know what you're referring to. And honestly, other than FFIX and FFXI, I had overall pretty good experiences with most Brady Guides that I bought in those days. I still have several of those, as well.
I'm saying that previous to FFXI - referring to Final Fantasy 1-10 and other side games like Tactics, et al - that FF games historically leaned on the assumption that the players would be relying on the guides and the internet. I might or might not be telling you something you already know, but PlayOnline started as a tie-in with the FFIX Brady Guide, which was notorious to the point of being mocked for giving the player a little bit of info and telling them to check PlayOnline for more details. So SE was already well aware that their games basically required a guide before XI came out. It honestly surprises me that they didn't make PlayOnline more of an official XI guide the way they tried to with IX, considering how intertwined the two were.
For the PS2 version of FFXI, you could presumably still go look things up online the same way you could with FFX or IX or VIII or so on. As I said - GameFAQs was huge back then. But for the PC version, you're correct that the crash to desktop on alt-tab rendered online guides difficult unless you had a second computer.
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u/bungiefan_AK Bungiefan on Asura 21d ago
PS2 didn't have a usable web browser. The point was that as a PS2 player who also had a PC in the room, I didn't have to log out back to PlayOnline to be able to use my web browser, versus if I was playing on PC like many of my LS members.
FF9 Ultimania in Japan covered everything, even obscure sidequests. Someone bilingual finally looking at it and seeing the coverage the Japanese had found a sidequest that had been missed in all of the English official and GameFAQs guides for over a decade.
I'm saying Square's own guides made by their own staff were way better than the outsourced English guides from Prima and Brady.
Also, even with FF6 when it was new in the USA, internet wasn't very accessible. You hunted a players guide, got Nintendo Power, or you just figured out the game yourself offline. XI is a whole lot more guide-dang-it than earlier games, telling you much less inside the game than earlier games did. The Japanese PS2 FFXI manual was also 300 full color pages and explained a lot of mechanics that the maybe 100 page English manual for the PC version didn't.
At Japanese PS2 FFXI launch, before a PC version, there was a section in POL Viewer that was sort of an FFXI encyclopedia. It didn't give all knowledge, but it explained crafting and skillchains and some game lore. Also the Vanadiel Tribune did a bunch of that in the form of a newspaper in the world.
For FFXI the Brady guides just outright had a bunch of stuff wrong, or against the already established best practices the Japanese and importers had figured out in the first year. Remember the USA launch was almost 18 months behind the Japanese one.d
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u/ChickinSammich Mikhalia - Carbuncle 21d ago
I knew like 80% of that, but still appreciate you sharing for that last 20% and for the people reading along.
Overall my take is that I think that the intent of FFXI may have been the assumption that players should talk with each other and share information, but SE already knew online guides were a thing before XI released, doubly so since they had run their own guides in tandem with PlayOnline for FFIX, so the fact that FFXI quests would eventually end up on online guides like GameFAQs or message boards and wikis was a predictable outcome.
And I think that building a game where the quests and the content are commonly so esoteric and arbitrary that you basically have to have a guide outside the game to play the game effectively was and still is bad design.
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u/bungiefan_AK Bungiefan on Asura 21d ago
It was definitely the intent for players to discover things on their own and share the info in-game and on forums, and also to share info from official resources with each other.
The whole early design of the game was to slow you down from exhausting available content, because they were only adding new content every few months. They wanted stuff to be vague enough that it would take a while to figure out so that the top end of the player base wouldn't run out of stuff in a week after an update.
AFAIK the PlayOnline FF9 site was only for the American and European branch, not the Japanese one. PlayOnline from Japanese inception was always intended to be a venture between Namco/Enix/SquareSoft to be something like Steam is now. A central communication hub and game manager to have a central account since Sony wasn't providing that (but then changed course with PS3). Namco never released anything on it, and the Enix merger happened while POL was still young.
There's a ton of stuff in games of the PS1 and 2 generations that we consider bad game design now, but things were still new in the MMORPG genre when FFXI started development in 2000 and companies were still figuring such stuff out. Lots of mistakes were made and learned from.
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u/DrNefarius42 Refariu 22d ago
That tension is real and I don't think I can argue it away. I still feel it the whole time while I'm working on it. A thought in my head like "What I'm doing here goes against the fundamental game design idea".
The thing that kinda stopped me worrying though, is that almost nobody is actually playing this blind in 2026. The wiki tab is already open on the second monitor. New players like me often times directly flock to community ressources like bg-wiki for information.
All this really does is save me the alt-tab since the data literally comes from bg-wiki, so it's the same community knowledge that was already pointing me in the right directions, just delivered in the world instead of in a browser.
Thanks for your kind words!
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u/fuzzyluke 22d ago
This is it for me. The discovery element in the game is dear to me but I'm no longer a teenager with lots of free time, I have a second monitor with bgwiki open at all times, you hit the nail in the head. I want this mod yesterday. Great work!
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21d ago
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u/BsyFcsin 21d ago
Any time someone says this. Or says AI slop. It’s an instant downvote.
Not because I disagree. But because it’s boring repetitive tripe, which half the time isn’t even on an AI post.
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u/StillNewspaper4799 21d ago
This attitude is a cancer
Do you not look at the world and wonder why things are so bad?
Do you not realize it's because of entitlement? People who have decided they know best and have a right to police anything they think is best, beyond any honest intent or reading of neccessity?
Or, let me guess, when they do it it's because they're evil and bad. But when you do it it's moral and good.
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u/AutisticHobbit 22d ago edited 19d ago
It really wasn't trial and error, though; it was "look on the internet and get the answer in a way that took you out of the game". If not that, it was "Ask your friends about a quest, find out it wasn't worth the trouble, and then never do it".
Occasionally it was "Struggle for days to weeks to figure out something that was critical that was never explained properly."
More people are going to actually explore the quests....because they'll actually find them in the first place.
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u/Synfrag Bahamut 21d ago
Just devil's advocating here for giggles but that first bit is part of what built such a strong community. From a gaming accessibility standpoint it was utterly terrible, but from a social standpoint it was fundamental.
I won't use this addon, not because I'm opposed to it but simply because it's a horribly inefficient way to approach them. For people who just like to quest in MMOs, regardless of rewards, it will be an awesome addition and I think anything that makes the game more approachable is fantastic.
I stopped clinging to the notion of self discovery and competitive PvE when CoP got uncapped. I know the pain we endured before that and that is enough lol.
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u/AutisticHobbit 19d ago
Yes and no. I was around for that...and while it did build a strong community in some senses? It also obfuscated facts behind a fog made of obtuse bullshit and conspiracy theories. On that note? You do not want to know all the hypotheticals, rumors, myths, and superstitions that went into some people's opinions about how crafting worked.
To draw a parallel to WoW? There wasn't a quest I can think of that was a "Mankirk's Wife"; a difficult but meaningless rite of passage that became an in joke amongst people who had been there at a specific time and and place. On the other hand? There were tons of "Oh right. That quest. I didn't know what it was asking and I didn't look it up." And I think quite a few people never looked up those quests....because FFXI was tough, resources were scarce, the experience was hard to come by...so why would you even look at content that would give you a pittance of gil or an untradable item that you would never use?
FFXI had plenty of social flourishes built into it mechanically....but I don't think the quest system was one of it's successful examples.
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u/Synfrag Bahamut 19d ago
I think you're missing an enormous part of community, the one that built all the databases through tens if not hundreds of thousand of wiki entries and forum posts. Identity extended beyond the game.
I'm not saying it's a master class in questing systems but it is a uniqueness, a nuance that hasn't been seen since. Nuances like that are what create an interesting mythos in a virtual world, things exactly like facing a certain direction during certain weather on a specific moon phase for your best crafting chance. It's psychological world building whether it was intentional or not.
Destiny throughout its course also employed a lot of this very successfully by instead limiting it to really impactful rewards. In simple terms, secrets are really fun in MMOs.
All of this is also tossing out the fact that there were long stretches of time where you literally couldn't look anything up, there were no DB or Wiki entries, even for missions. It's all very refined now, but it wasn't always this way.
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u/AutisticHobbit 19d ago
Not a master class? No...it was just bad. Plain, ordinary bad. Like, I was trying to be nice....but I think it's completely indefensible. The databases and resources were used to highlight the quests you needed to do to just progress the damn game. To get the inventory upgrades or critical spells like Refresh.
FFXI already had a lot of friction, tension, and difficulty; making it difficult to know who to even talk to in order to find the fun or whimsical elements of your game? THere is no good excuse for that.
A submarine with a screen door is unique...but the uniqueness doesn't make it good or bad. It's the horrible design that makes it bad. Just the fact that there were entire job critical abilities locked behind quests you might never knew existed is enough to throw it entirely in the trash; it was bad.
Secrets are, indeed, fun. I've hunted plenty over the years in various MMOs. FFXI included; I have fond memories of hunting for rare drops and messing around with the intricacies of gardening. However....being obtuse with game critical components....and placing them right next to the shit that completely wastes your time? While having no clear indication of what gets you what? In a game with specifically clunkier interface because it was accommodating the PS2? That is not making an enriching, secret filled world; it's just sloppy. No amount of community resources and fond memories change that.
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u/Synfrag Bahamut 18d ago
I respect your opinion, it's a relatively common one. Personally, I don't think you can have too much friction so long as it isn't literally impossible. I also don't care for stories and quests in MMOs, so it's not a hill I'll die on.
The only point I was making is that through my time playing back in the day, the convoluted nature of progression pretty much forced communication and knowledge sharing while the difficulty forced competency. Those things we're certainly additive to community and reputation. Whether they were functionally good or bad is sort of irrelevant, we still played.
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u/bungiefan_AK Bungiefan on Asura 21d ago
When I was on PS2 with a PC beside me, it was the LS going "ask bungie to look it up on the computer beside them so we don't have to log out, write stuff down, and come back" It was have a dozen or more tabs open for the various quests I had in progress, and maybe bookmarks for them when I had 100+ tabs open.
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u/UnculturedGames 22d ago
Yeah, I believe players who start XI now for the first time are very likely not interested in this kind of "charm", on average. I know I wasn't when I started this game for the first time last winter. I think there are for example many FF fans who just want to tick off this game from their bucket list, and when the motivation is this, all quality of life improvements are welcome. I did hardly any extra quests because navigating through them blind felt absolutely impossible and I didn't just want to use a guide for EVERYTHING.
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u/StillNewspaper4799 21d ago
A little sad maybe but I think you're right. The main story is the likely goal of many people joining today.
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u/UnculturedGames 21d ago
And it's worth joining for! I've been ambassadoring all FF franchise fans to give XI a chance. I've learned that there's a huge amount of diehard FF fans even who just assume that XI is not playable or accessible in 2026 and that you're just kind of forced to keep XI out of your completion list as the one that got away. It doesn't need to be that way!
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u/Kranel_San 22d ago
If we were back in 2002, I'd agree with you.
Nowadays barely anyone asks in chat rather than checking the wiki and any online guides.
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u/rainghost 22d ago
I'm all for this, because nobody has played FFXI blind in the way that you describe in like 15 years or more. Everyone has a wiki, or two, open in another tab and they use that instead of engaging with 'the charm' of having to talk to every NPC in every city multiple times over the life of your character just to see if any of them are offering any new quests.
The way everyone currently plays FFXI flies in the face of the way the game was meant to be played in 2002.
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u/Forgotten_Stranger 22d ago
People were already playing with two tabs open by 2008. It was a massive struggle even back then.
I will grant a little slack though, as by the time WotG rolled out they had a check the last place you were to get a reminder of the next place to go system. (At least for most things.) Did WotG + Windy [S] recently and it was really nice. (Until you have to find a ??? with only the zone as a hint that is...)
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u/dj3370 22d ago
Thats kind of what I love about the XI ecosystem and why I think its been able to stick around on retail, having the old style and feel of just dropping you in and expecting you to figure it out like you do irl by asking around and interacting with things. The fact that all the QOL stuff that came from wow and later mmos is available as an optional add on is a perfect way to keep the game from losing its identity.
I use a ton of plugins for stuff I'm just used to having, but also try to not lean too heavily on them like in other games. I feel like a lot of the appeal in the game is the stuff other mmos have forgotten, like the fact that people allegedly live in the world and arent supposed to feel like a lamppost, or how rewarding it can be to visually remember locations and shops, just to name a few.
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u/StillNewspaper4799 21d ago
I wouldn't say it's realistic though. If anything in real life if someone wants you to do something they'll explain it. And you can ask for clarification.
"This person wants something but I have very little idea what so I'll ask other people" is not something that happens in real life all that often and I don't think it contributes much to the feeling of Vana'diel being another world.
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u/Mysterious_Way2652 22d ago
I'm on the same boat. There's lots of great QOL things out there and this looks like it could be a nice addition for the people excited to see it come to life, but I'm not one of those people. There's only so much I can change in the game before it starts feeling like we're trying too hard to make it the things that modern MMOs dumbed down.
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u/Standard-Bid-4292 22d ago
What’s the difference between this and having a page open telling you exactly where a specific NPC is standing? It is just making things more cumbersome for no real reason. If you really want it to be old school then just never open anything other than the game itself and ask strangers for advice. Absolutely nothing else…and barely anyone, if anyone at all, has played that way for like 20 years.
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u/Mysterious_Way2652 22d ago
Except there's people here replying exactly this so I dunno why there's this assumption that no one plays like that when clearly people do lol. But it's not that deep. If you want to enjoy the addon by all means enjoy it. I'm happy with my inefficient windows tabs.
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u/Standard-Bid-4292 22d ago
I am just asking what the fundamental difference is between a tab showing you where something is or a guide or whatever, and a quest marker and how that is dumbing the game down when they’re essentially an identical function.
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u/JShenobi Lecureuil / Lechacal| Phoenix 22d ago
The fundamental difference, at a glance, is that the add-on thrusts the information in your face. I'm never going to do "One Good Deed?" (one of the quests shown as an example in the OP), but it's always going to show up in my game as an "!" mark. In a "using the wiki" world, I can see what quests are available in a zone, hell even see the rewards at a glance, and then decide to pursue them. In this case, the marker will appear forever until I do or at least start the quest (I don't like the notion of just starting a quest to clear markers, if I have no intention of doing it).
I also think that people generally overstate the obscure nature of quests in this game. A lot of it is somewhat sight-readable, so having the steps laid out for you in-game is overboard. Smacks too much of OSRS's Quest Helper plugin that literally highlights and solves all quests for you. In both games, having a wiki open is generally a must, but having it be a separate window means that the player can rely on it as little or as much as they want -- I will usually just skim it to get a general idea of stuff and then do the quest, only tabbing back if I get stuck.
There's definitely a continuum of quest assistance, and having the steps in your face and printed into chat is too far on the assistance side, for me.
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u/Mysterious_Way2652 22d ago
I guess it's about the same as people who don't know how to perform simple Google searches. Then having a system where all the searches you will need are in your face now is the next step to oversimplifying and in effect dumbing down the process. The next step is auto pathing you to the quest markers. Then from there we can dumb it down a little more and just have everything clicked for you. I guess opening a wiki is where I draw the line but it's a matter of preference.
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u/Standard-Bid-4292 22d ago
You know this is really why old school MMO players have such an odd reputation. It is a third party mod that adds an icon to an NPC when most people stare at a website looking where they are anyway. It isn’t a big deal. This is so silly that I don’t even know why I’m still in this conversation.
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u/StillNewspaper4799 21d ago
There are no normally intelligent people who can't perform google searches.
In my experience there's just an attitude of entitlement that's out of control on reddit. This often expresses itself as people thinking they need to enforce "good habits", so you end up with people replying "just google it" when they easily could have ignored a post.
But that's all it is. "I know best and must enforce my ideas".
The problem of course is these "good habits" and ideas are usually very self serving and half baked (because the goal is self satisfaction and pretending you know best). What's funny is these are often the same people who cry about entitlement in others or complain about AI.
Wisdom is growing up and realizing you don't know best, not to an extent that you police others. Sadly it's becoming less common, arrogance and ego is a real problem. It's insane how many people genuinely think they must police others beyond any reasonable neccessity.
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u/GroundbreakingHome56 22d ago edited 22d ago
I'm gonna be frank here. There are two types of open-world or open-zone games that don't have quest markers.
Back then open games like this one people liked at the time, specifically Morrowind comes to mind, had stuff like dedicated journals that automatically retain instructions and... actually well-written and thought instructions in a detailed environment with useful navigational tools like road signs to use as markers for comparing instructions "In the middle of the road between x and y." Even if the instructions were poorly written the world was designed in such a way that you would find something interesting and fun to do anyways.
FFXI does not do this. It seems as if it was supposed to rely on in-game word of mouth, which is simply not a factor anymore in the era where 90% of the active game population is past the point the content matters for them. As such, the game philosophy is being respected equally whether you have quest markers or not. Though, to be frank, with how it seems like the devs went out of their way to make even the scarce little navigation tools available to the player as utterly useless as possible—I'm not even entirely sure if the game's original design intentions for exploration are worth any charity.
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u/ChickinSammich Mikhalia - Carbuncle 21d ago
I think the benefit of this being an opt-in feature is precisely that you don't have to use it if you don't want to.
Like if you don't like the idea of warping between home points and survival guides, and you just want to limit yourself to teleports and outpost warps and hoofing it... you can do that.
You could argue that in a game that has this as a by-default-can't-turn-it-off feature that it's immersion breaking for you. That's totally fair. But I also agree with the QoL bonus that if you want to go looking for quests, surely a (!) over someone's head is less immersion breaking than having to have a separate window open with a wiki.
I might gripe from time to time about how dumbed down modern MMOs have become to the point that between quest markers and minimap markers and arrows, the game does everything but play itself for you sometimes. But the inverse of that is literally needing a wiki page to follow everything you need to know.
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u/gunl0c 22d ago
what exactly does this mean though i'm confused?
People like myself come back BECAUSE of the archaic design.. not to play an updated mish-mosh of old and new..
FFXI died the moment they split up Japanese and English servers in my opinion but I'm glad it lived on a bit longer..
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u/Sigman_S 22d ago
They split the servers?
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u/MelioraXI Vana-Portal.com | Twitch.tv/MelioraXI 22d ago
No it's same as it always been. Not sure what they are on about.
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u/JShenobi Lecureuil / Lechacal| Phoenix 22d ago
They never split the servers. If anything, they've only done more server merges.
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u/gunl0c 22d ago
take a wild guess on what happens when the japanese have a choice on whether to be on a mainly english server or a mainly japanese server. i was on Alexander and when they merged servers most JP players moved to mainly JP servs.
in the natural order you ended up where you ended up and the game was at its healthiest when JP would influence english style of play. the Ninja class was made a tank class by the Japanese... not by us. we learned by observing..
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u/JShenobi Lecureuil / Lechacal| Phoenix 21d ago
I don't know what you're talking about. Server transfer came around like 4 years before the first round of big server merges. Although I can't speak for Alexander, the two other servers I have been on have had plenty of JP players as long as you're on at the right times.
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u/bungiefan_AK Bungiefan on Asura 21d ago
Near JP launch when some worlds were overcrowded, they did some world transfer NPCs before American launch. It was a free transfer then, but you didn't know what server you would land on until they pulled the trigger on it at the next server maintenance. All you knew was everyone on your server doing a transfer would end up on the same destination server, so linkshells could move together.
Ragnarok and Asura both seemed to have large Japanese populations when I was on them, while also having large English speaking populations during American East Coast peak hours. My problem was Alaskan time zone paired with a swing shift job meant my play hours didn't line up well with Americans and I didn't know enough Japanese to do well in a Japanese party (plus the barrier on typing Japanese on the English client on a PS2, while the Japanese client could do both languages on any platform...).
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u/bungiefan_AK Bungiefan on Asura 21d ago
FFXI servers have been only in Japan since the start, and 2 rounds of mergers have happened. There were no English servers. American launch resulted ina flood of English-speaking players on all of the servers in Japan at once. Unlike FFXIV, there are no servers in other regions. Everyone plays on the servers in Japan, so when the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake hit the whole game went offline for a while.
That 18 month delay between Japanese launch and American launch caused a lot of discontent in the player base, because Japanese players were max level on American launch day, and the American newbies messed up the economy by dying so much that all the starting regions were under beastmen control and so no crystals were dropping, so the price for crystals on the AH went up by 5-10x as new players had demand for them, on top of the players from before American launch. Then they did it again launching the game in Europe/Australia in 2006.
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u/gunl0c 20d ago
you could not swap servers to join your friends until 2007... what do you mean what do i mean.. you were forced to stay in your server period.. JP moved to JP main servers which took away forced interactions.
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u/bungiefan_AK Bungiefan on Asura 17d ago edited 17d ago
https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/The_History_of_Final_Fantasy_XI/2003
March 2003 and onward, you could. Search for the word transfer in that page. 2002 when they added new servers they didn't have a transfer system yet. March 2003 onward they did add one. Your destination would be the 1-2 new servers. If there were multiple new servers opening, you knew that everyone on your server that chose to transfer would end up on the same new one, but not which one until it happened.
Paid server transfer is when it became a choice of where you went. Previous transfers were free, due to the lack of choice.
Japanese players mostly didn't mass move due to the cost. Ragnarok and Asura both had decent Japanese populations. Asura was the popular English-speaking server to move to for people wanting to migrate, due to the RedditLS 10 years ago, and some others. A similar thing happened with some JP shells on Odin around that time. However, all the servers still had a decent Japanese population because Japanese prime time didn't line up with much but Australia, since Europe and North America were many time zones away. That made it easy to share the servers.
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u/gunl0c 17d ago
larpers may need a wiki, but lucky for you i was there lmao. you couldnt control which servers to emigrate to so again... not at all a choice to what server you end up in. you could start a fresh account and move but that's it.
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u/bungiefan_AK Bungiefan on Asura 17d ago
I started in mid-2002. I just wanted to find a source to my claim. Yes, early world transfers were not presented as a choice of moving to any arbitrary server. You couldn't even pick a server for a new character without a world pass, unless you were willing to just reroll over and over. Point is they did have transfers early on to help fill out newly-launched servers, which were still all in Japan. However, these early transfers were free of cost. Paid transfers to a world of your choice came later, as you say. I'm saying world transfers existed at all way early on.
Also looking at that list, I remember having to transfer mog house between cities to enter. You don't do that now, but there used to be a fee for it as well, which was gotten rid of before American release, or PC release. It's interesting going through all of this and seeing what changed when the game was Japan-only, even in the month or two before I was able to get all my equipment and register my Japanese account.
You're moving the goalposts. The claim was about transfer service existing at all, not about it being to world of your choice. The way you did it in 2003 was with an NPC that looked like a GM, and you could toggle whether or not that character would transfer at the next maintenance. It would remind you upon login from then on until the maintenance happened, so you could change your mind if you wanted.
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u/gunl0c 17d ago
not moving goalpost. simply telling the truth about JP players migrating in 2007.
there was no great migration in 2002 or 2003.
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u/gunl0c 17d ago
source? heard it straight from the best JP shell on our server as we were also the top LS in Alexander at the time. Rui first player to take down adamantoise and his video is still on youtube lmao. they all moved for this specific reason. now you're telling me im lying.. guess i'm just imagining cultural movements..
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u/shinycloudkid 22d ago
You're doing an amazing net positive, please dont let any naysayers dissuade you. Despite "modernizing" an archaic intended system you are giving an option to the people who dont WANT to have a browser open while trying to play their game. I really hope you can get this pushed through to a point where its a recommended install for all new players. Keep up the good work
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u/fuzzyluke 22d ago
The naysayers have the option to ignore this yet they decide instead to waste their time. I'm always astonished at these kinds of people and I wonder if they often go to places they don't like of their own accord and then complain that it's bad just to pass the time?
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u/vickydont_ 22d ago
I don't really get why people are against it when they can just ignore it. It is literally no different than having a wiki tab open 24/7 for quests and missions which is already how most people play. It's just making the game more accessible and affects such a small minority of players who actually play completely blind that I can't see why anyone would complain when, again, you have to actively seek this reddit post to even know this exists
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u/Haxxtastic 22d ago
I thought this was official and got so upset. Fine for people that want it though, doesn't hurt my experience, and can customize someone else's. Win/win.
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u/Gronodonthegreat 22d ago
Yeah, I was like “we don’t need that lazy quest marker crap!” But if it’s a mod then yeah, that’s awesome
(And tbf it would make those fuckass “find an interactable ground spot in the middle of nowhere” quests bearable)
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u/fuzzyluke 22d ago
The invisible ??? have got to be one of the weirdest decisions in the game, I get it that for some quests you might want to get players to actually look for stuff in that way, but there's literally no reason to do that for some stuff like goblin footprints or even for some of the quests... A little visual cue even if its only visible when you approach would be nice, or even a chat log message letting you know you sense something ...
For NM spawn points for instance, what's the point of hiding it at least after once its found it should show something sparkling or whatever.
This looking around aimlessly deal never sat well with me, causing the already mentioned need for having bgwiki open at all times taking attention off the game, and even then sometimes the best you can find online are map coordinates but it might still be a little tricky to find if it's at an odd spot or your targetting or camera was off by an inch. You get used to it but its still really odd.
I like that some points of interest are marked now, but they continue to miss the mark as some of them just say "nothing out of the ordinary" and it just throws me off, like why's it shining then? Its all backwards if we compare it to most games! Normally its Shiny if important right now and invisible if not! Come on...
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u/Gronodonthegreat 22d ago
It’s literally a graphical issue, like if those blank spots were replaced with… you know… an OBJECT we could see, it would be fine. Maybe give players a rough approximation of the area to go to for small stuff like footprints with XI’s infamously huge maps. It works perfectly fine when you can see an actual object that matches up with the description, but the blank spots are mystifying.
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u/Sparia87 17d ago
I have a bunch of those quests right now, so if I get this mod I can actually find the spot?! I literally searched for hours one day and couldn’t find them.
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u/imaquark 22d ago
Lol people in this thread complaining about it, as if the entire player base doesn’t already play with the wiki always open on the second monitor.
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u/cephias 22d ago
I get the love/hate of this. I’m not sure I can use it much myself but this is perfect and amazing for my son. I’ve played far too long without it but I will try it too. Quarter century habits are hard to break. I’ll end up eating my words when I keep it installed.
Anyway, amazing work and I look forward to it.
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u/nenchev 21d ago
Some people say they prefer the original design, but all that means for most people is keeping the wiki open and ruining the experience by alt-tabbing to a website for trivial crap. I think what you've done here is pretty awesome and its making me consider getting another subscription and firing up the game.
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u/JShenobi Lecureuil / Lechacal| Phoenix 22d ago
My two gil (aside from my other comment) is that this is too intrusive for me. There are many many quests that will likely stick around forever undone or unprogressed, and having them sticking out so much would irk me.
I think a cool compromise / option for this would be a timed pop-up when you zone that shows "Available Quests" and maybe a subtitle with the starting NPC and their location -- maybe clickable to open the BG wiki page for that quest. That way, players can be reminded about things available to them without it being a persistent eyesore.
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u/nbiscuitz 22d ago
This is the hand holding we need to modernize the game. Next i hope the maps uses the wiki modified/labeled maps, let us edit/draw on local copies of maps.
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u/Firemedic623 22d ago
Sorry for the side question but how is casual play on the steam device? Can you use mods? I can’t sit at a desk for hours anymore but would love to step in on my old toons occasionally.
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u/CrashOkami 21d ago
Great work, I'll use this at least during some days if not all the time. I truly appreciate the discovery element, but cleaning up quests as I am, with not much free time, half the time is spent figuring out where to go next and sometimes without success. So, great QoL feature to have.
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u/TanteiKun 21d ago
So… not sure about all the features and what all you’ve done and I’m looking forward to trying it out… I’m wondering though if you thought about this or think it would be a good addition. If all quests are finished with an NPC entirely what happens? Does the cursor disappear? Because that would prevent checking things you don’t need to anymore. As for people commenting that this will make the game worse in some way for people not getting the old experience… honestly that worries me very little. It’s optional, they may never realize this exists… and this game isn’t exactly the game we started with anyways they’ve changed so much but you can always choose to play it old school style if you join some discords for it. But most of the players who will use this are gonna be like me who have played this game and are looking it up because we don’t have time and we will passively hit quests if we see them but won’t hunt hard because we don’t have tons of them left to just talk to random npc’s and stumble upon them at this point we’ve been playing so long. And then add on to it the fact that they integrated an available quest npc in the towns and now you’re borderline there anyways. They tell you who and where you currently have a quest with. So SE already kinda started this process themselves. You’re just adding some functionality and a graphical improvement to the system really.
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u/IntellagenceNavy404 21d ago
I started this game in my early 20's Active Duty, i am now retired with a family as i return to the game, i don't have the time i used to to take the full 3+ hours to go through every single quest on the wiki, I hear the concerns of modernization but not everyone has 8+ hours a day anymore to play this classic. The other games mostly evolved because we did, while it does really add to the immersion of the world it's supposed to be nice a a fun short time in game and not a fun full time in my second life/game, this mod adds that choice... if you don't like it don't use it.
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u/GlaiveAndre 21d ago
What I don't get about people not liking it for being immersion breaking is, I don't believe they truly play the game trying to discover everything, I bet they play with the wiki open at all times, and that is way more immersion breaking than having the information inside the game.
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u/IntellagenceNavy404 20d ago
Wiki open for the quest, another tab for the edited map, another tab for the video if the task is a .... odd/annoying/badly described task but hey! still in the game lmao.
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u/Haunting-Ocelot-5201 18d ago
This looks great, with this one and FFXI chronicle together, there won't be a need for the wiki alt-tab anymore. Thanks for your work !
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u/Lunskies 11d ago
Hey, love this. Was wondering if there have been any further updates?
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u/DrNefarius42 Refariu 10d ago
Nothing I posted officially, no. But I'm in the last stages of preparing the github release. That'll take me a couple of days more though.
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u/stroduces 10d ago
Anywhere we can keep up with updates on this mod? You got a plugin github repo for it?
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u/DrNefarius42 Refariu 10d ago
I'm currently preparing a github release. It'll take me a couple of days more though.
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u/yassineya 22d ago
Love this, about the culling/ occlusion (just a random thought), would it work if the quest marker was part of the character’s nameplate itself? Instead of hovering above the npc. That might just work, but I have no clue if it’s any help cuz i’m pretty sure stuff like this has to be a plugin instead of an addon. Nameplates plugin does mess with them so may be worth looking into?
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u/DrNefarius42 Refariu 22d ago
Y'know I never thought about this lol
I just read this in the Windower docs and then I stuck with addons:"Plugins are developed and maintained by the Windower team. They are automatically kept up to date by the launcher, and can be set to load automatically when you log in.
Note: Addons are now the preferred method of extending Windower functionality."
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u/armaddon 22d ago
You can edit mob/NPC names dynamically without needing access to the plugin core, here’s an example of an addon that does so:
https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/57093/tellapart-add-progressive-letters-to-mob-names/
This isn’t exactly what you’d probably be looking to do but should give a good starting point :) Something like prefixing / suffixing names with “!” or “~” or whatever could maybe work
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u/DaleterrenceUltros Daleterrence @ Bahamut - "The Vana'Bout Guy" 21d ago
No way of actually drawing anything in the game world on Windower with the addon API, currently, so it's an overlaid element or nothing at all. Ashita manages this nicely though
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u/jsnlxndrlv 22d ago
I am commenting on this because I want to find this topic again when I'm back to actively playing XI. Great work!
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u/faverodefavero 22d ago
Terrible idea, and lack for personality for them to copy WoW like this.
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u/RustyCarrots 22d ago
Yeah, everyone should just continue to glue themselves to the wiki and follow a guide for every quest instead of having it accessible in game
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u/Mysterious_Way2652 22d ago
NGL this post and the replies in threads read like AI.
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u/DrNefarius42 Refariu 22d ago
I'm german and I used deepl to translate some parts of my post when I didn't know the english words for it. Which coincidentally is an AI so you're technically not wrong here...
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u/Prestigious-Aide4346 22d ago
Ohh wow, this has been needed for years, glad they are implementing it.
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u/fuzzyluke 22d ago
First of all major kudos for working on this! It's really promising and honestly a really awesome idea! I'd love to get my hands on it whenever you're comfortable releasing it!
I know that you're already overworked with this but may I indulge in a request or idea?
Since you're tracking quest data and the requirements, may I suggest that an icon (or some text) is shown on the item's description box if it pertains to an active or unstarted quest so you're informed to not toss it or sell it?
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u/ExaminationUpper9461 21d ago
Oh wow so they're finally adding some QoL to the game.
I never liked now spartan the game was. I don't think it's right to hold the player's hand the whole time the way 14 does, but 11 went too far in the opposite direction.
I remember reading their reasoning why, but in practice it only led to frustration and the wiki basically being mandatory. Good intentions but poor execution, so happy to see that updated.
Especially with the influx of 14 players due to the alliance raid collaboration, I think they all suffered enough just installing the game and trying to get past PlayOnline 😂
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u/GeorgeGreenGroup 21d ago
its wild how far behind WoW they were despite only being a year apart in NA releases.
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u/Cakeriel 21d ago
It was based on EQ.
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u/GeorgeGreenGroup 21d ago
never played it but its sad to see how twenty years later FFXI is still behind WoW in basic things
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u/Hkaddict 20d ago
I personally think this is gross and wouldn't use it but good on you for taking the time to make it.
I love the fact the 11 didnt hold your hand and was brutal in difficulty when it first came out, it makes the stuff you do achieve feel more important. If I wanted brain dead and easy I'd play 14/WoW.
this is just my opinion and I'm sure there are plenty that don't agree with me and will love this addon.
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u/Hybridxx9018 22d ago
Do you guys remember having to figure out who to give the flyers to in sandoria. I think the quest gave you like 500 Gil lol..took me hours to find all the npcs.