GamerEscape

After playing the game for a while and reaching level 30, I thought a good way to level would be to form a static party.  And so I hit some community forums and started to recruit.  It was not long before I filled out a 5 man group with only 1 slot open for a pick up player.  And from there, I started www.teamavengers.org where we could organize events.  Our little static party turned in to a linkshell which grew and hosted hundreds of members throughout it’s time.  Some core members would chat on IRC every day, and that led me to install MediaWiki on our web site so we could share our findings about quests or write guides for each other.  It was very slow to get started, but it was originally intended just for our linkshell.  Other community sites were run by only a few administrators and getting any incorrect information fixed on those sites could take a long time if it even ever got done.  A wiki was something anyone could edit.  Anyone could update it.  And the community could patrol itself and keep things in good shape.

 

I believe the wiki software was installed on our web site for 3 months or so with only some basic articles, and then it really started to blossom.  Guides were contributed to the wiki, and I found myself with a few motivated contributors who weren’t quite confident in their wiki skills.  And so I just told everyone “something is better than nothing – someone else can always come along and make your contributed content look better”.  The site began to grow and become something more than just our linkshell.  I decided to move it off of our linkshell web site in to it’s own domain.  It was becoming something much more than the Avengers linkshell.  It was around this time that we started to post in other community forums about our wiki and that we were welcoming anyone to come and help contribute.  The other sites, like Allakhazam, were not happy that we were stealing a piece of the community away from them on their own forums,  but by that point there was little any other community sites could do to stop what had been started.

 

It was not long before FFXIclopedia was the largest and most popular Final Fantasy XI website on the Internet.  Even though we were top ranked in Google searches and doing monthly upgrades to our hosting plan to handle the steady increase in traffic, Square Enix still would not recognize us as a “Premier Site”.  After months of e-mail Square Enix without getting a response, it finally came.  After working with Matt Hilton on an approval process, it happened – we got recognition, and so the legacy began.  At the peek of FFXIclopedia, it was among the top 5 largest and most active wikis on the Internet and served over 500,000 unique visitors every month and had been translated (not in it’s entirety) in to Spanish, French, German and Japanese.  Square Enix had even admitted to using it internally as a reference to their own game.

 

FFXIclopedia was an amazing community project.  It had it’s ups and downs.  To this day, I still have adventurers tell me what an amazing resource the site was and how it helped to make Final Fantasy XI a memorable experience.

 

 

Most people know the history of FFXI BG, or what theyve heard via the grape vine or from a friend of a friend of a friend.  What really stood out for a lot of people was some of the more interesting stories from way back in the day from people who were in BG or who simply claimed to be.

One of my favorite ones was Nikkeis, back when she worked at GameStop.  She was a pretty hardcore gamer, played most JRPGs, and had taught herself Japanese just so she could play some of them sooner rather than later.  One day while she was working there was a crowd of people around the FFXI section.  This was back when FFXI was the golden game, lots of people bought it, most didnt last due to a convoluted setup process and a very high learning curve.  But anyone who played endgame or knew of the hardcore tiers in different games knew about the difficulty of it.  There was a guy there who was telling stories, smug and happy, he was pretty confident and going on and on about how he was a badass.  Someone said “Hey you should join BG” and he, with a confident smirk, said he was in BG.  Nikkei knew everyone in BG, because everyone who was in BG were all close friends.  She stated “Oh hey Im Nikkei in BG, what is your name.”  This quickly led to a quiet moment and an apology.  Nikkei gave him a “thats right, dont do it again.” quick speech, and that was that.

Another time was my own experience in a GameStop.  I was picking up an extra copy of Wings of the Goddess and there were some guys talking about FFXI, one random and one guy who worked there.  They were talking about their relics.  This was around the time BG had finally saved up to start massing our relics (we wanted to pop out multiples at once and had been doing the math on the best ones).  So we were focusing on our Shield and Horn at that time.  One guy was a red mage and had Excalibur, one was a bard and had the horn.  I listened in on their conversation and joined in once they noticed my Wings box.  They asked me about my experience with the game, stuff I had done.  I said my LS was working on some relics and things were going good and we had been focusing on a lot of endgame and it was my day off (wednesday) blah blah blah.  They asked me what LS I was in and I said BG.  I was still newer in BG at the time and really didnt want it to affect the conversation but oh did it.  These two guys with their relics were more excited that I was in BG than their multi relic linkshells.  That conversation really set the tone for me in future events of how important BG had been to the growing FFXI community.

BG had its shares of ups and downs, it wasnt always roses.  As player quality varied some people said we might have made some questionable choices in recruitment or even took people who were friends over skilled players.  I cant truly deny that we did focus more on closer friends we could trust rather than taking a player who was arguably better but untrustworthy.  BG had become a selling point for RMT characters.  Many of us had to deal with seeing former BG members characters that had been sold to rich UAE players for hilarious amounts of money.  While some people had decided to quit out of a necessity and didnt want to come back or had to leave due to financial reasons and needed the money, it still stung to see people we had put time into on the other side with a different pearl.  We stayed strong though, with good people we could trust and honest players we knew wouldnt break out codes of conduct.  Most people assumed BG botted, and to that I simply counter with how could we have botted if we didnt claim kings 90% of the time.  Our best claiming times were after patches that changed the memory locations for those bots.  So for that two weekish period before people had updated bots we reigned supreme.  This was simply because of a few strong PS2 players and some very strong PCs, it certainly wasnt because of claim bots (that I am aware of, and I was ultra strict about reminding people constantly that botting was not something we tolerated).

We didnt even lose anyone for salvage bans, which was the thing that basically destroyed most linkshells out there.  We focused on non camped content and it made the game better until Abysea destroyed it.  Many old BG people have migrated on to families or some FFXIV experiences, and I keep in touch with a small portion of them.  BG survives as a strong forum and good and bad memories.  I choose to stick with the good and let go of the bad.  If we dwell too much on the past it will affect our future, so always be progressing, any progress is forward, and forward is where you want to go.

-Sonomaa 

My name is ElmerThePointy, and I played a TaruTaru BLM/DRG/PUP on the Gilgamesh server. My experience in Final Fantasy XI transformed my life. I remember one day, trekking through the snowy hills of Uleguerand Range, wyvern at my side, I came upon Jormungand and charged in, solo. I fell in two hits. It was good for a chuckle, and I readied myself to warp home… when I noticed the chatlog: Jormungand is intimidated by Elmerthepointy. Me, a tiny little gnome with a toothpick, managed to intimidate a greater wyrm. That single event gave me the confidence I needed to charge head first into life, and now, I’m the President of Outer Space.

All kidding aside, I was never big into HNMs, Dynamis, Limbus, Eugenics or whatever new endgame they’ve released since then. I liked jobs that made it easy to explore solo and take in the vast world of Vana’diel at my own pace. My favorite part of the game was, strangely enough, outside the game. Along with the Mithra Corinth, I ran a site called JPbutton.com, that translated articles and interviews from Japanese maganizes for FFXI fans. We also attended special events held in Japan to bring the latest news back to the fans. See, this was back before you kids got spoiled with your live producer YouTubes and up-to-the-minute convention access (Petasos off to the amazing efforts of the FFXI Community Team.)

FFXI helped me hone skills that I still use today. Easy access to a Japanese community provided great study opportunities and friendships while keeping a website updated with translated materials was also a huge boon for my language ability. For this, I must also thank the aforementioned Corinth, a FFXI friend, my translation partner on JPbutton, who helped me improve as a translator myself. It feels like a lifetime ago, but friends I met in Vana’diel still litter my social network feeds and memories of sitting with a linkshell buddy in Hall of the Gods, listening to the background music drone as we chatted for hours, feel just as real as lazy summer nights from childhood. Congratulations to everyone, dev team, community team, adventurers new and old, on 15 years of adventure.

-Bret “Elmer the Pointy” Mayer

 

After Mega Elixir ended, it was suggested that I create a new podcast to keep the spirit of the Final Fantasy XI podcast alive. We thought it was good for the community to have a show that could relate to them. Someone to listen to while waiting for a dunes party. Someone who could relate to your level down experience. Since I knew him from regular posting on the Mega Elixir forums, I dragged Fusionx into the project, and we got started. The show was originally designed to be news and community based, where listeners could send emails and have them read on the show. The format changed a bit over time, to include a discussion topic, and having listeners on the show as guests. We also had a segment called Treasure Coffer, where listeners got a chance to answer a trivia question for a chance to win a real life prize. The show was supposed to be between 45 minutes to an hour long, but many shows were much longer than that due to our in-depth and off topic discussions. In addition to myself and Fusionx, we brought on Samigrace, Chinchilla, Duelly, Teila, Squigglicious, Kieran, and had Miroku and Iphigenia intermittently.

Though it was hard work to get together every week to do it, we all had an amazing time doing the show. We loved interacting with, and working with the community to put the show together. We the chance in 2007 and 2008 to attend the Fan Festivals, where we got to meet a lot of our fans in person. It was an unforgettable experience to get to interact with both fans and developers of the game we loved so much. The show started in 2006, and ran for 7 years. We want to thank everyone from the bottom of our hearts for the opportunity to just be a part of your lives.

To play the game with you, to joke around with you on the show, and just for letting us “bring you the biscuit” all of those years.

-Steak

Making Limit Break Radio for Final Fantasy XI was probably one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on. We were really able to flex our creative muscle and that was largely due to the incredibly immersive world of Vana’diel. It was a world that you wanted to take with you after you logged off, and that idea ran throughout the entirety of the show. The concept of Limit Break Radio was a “morning show that took place in Vana’diel” so it would allow our audience to be able to take a little slice of Vana’diel with them wherever they went.

-Aniero

 

I remember sitting at my desk at work with a timezone advantage of booking FanFest 2008 tickets. Living in The Netherlands, I had anticipated the website going live for hours, F5-ing it on our crappy work internet.  I’m pretty sure Fanfest 2008 cost me more than most people attending. Mainly because I was one of the few people who flew all the way over from Europe to attend it.

Why am I emphasizing my location so much? At one point, there was some sort of a contest to give away a prize to the person who traveled the farthest. I was convinced I had it in the pocket. My friends from LBR even told me “OH SNAP, TAMTU’S GOT THIS.” Only to be foiled by some guy from…. I don’t remember. Eastern Europe? Either way, that was a very exciting and memorable moment for me, where I thought my odds were completely in my favorite for once. Alas, that prize eluded me, just like the W. Legs I’ve never gotten after all these years of Sky. All in all, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it for the world. Especially since the people I met there were part of a beautiful world, some of them still friends to this day. And enemies, but hey, drama happens everywhere ;)

 

As one of the later podcasts in the FFXI community, I noticed something missing; roleplaying. During my time with the guys from Limit Break Radio, I found a community who loved to stay in character in their interactions with the hosts. Hell, even the LBR hosts were in semi-character.  Me and my co-host Sooraya both had a background in online amateur voice acting as a hobby, and having produced many radioplays myself I decided to start up He Says, She Says; an in-character radio show with two hosts giving their opinion on various matters from a guy AND a girl’s perspective, skipping the part that required us to be super good at the game (we were around level 50-66 at the time). No, we were dealing with social matters in a fictional world. Later on, we did create a story around it as our actual characters progressed through various missions.  It gave the show a unique dynamic, and by setting up each episode with a skit, I got to put my good ol’ radioplay writing skills to good use. Working on HS/SS was one of the greatest projects I’ve had, one of the most fulfilling ones, too. The community we built from it was super supportive. 

The show lasted 15 episodes,  due to personal reasons.  I tried to pick it up again with a second season with Viki from LBR, but I just wasn’t able to combine it with real life anymore. However, I only have fond memories of the project.  It was a fantastic creative outlet and even made it on Square Enix’ podcast tour. Shoutout to everyone who made it possible; the voice acting friends who helped out with the skits (some of them now actual professional voice overs in animé and games!), my co-hosts Sooraya and Viki (now Nika), Luso for the remixes of our favorite FFXI themes and of course, everyone who penned a letter for our characters to analyze and go Dr. Phil & Oprah on. Thanks for the memories!

 

 

 

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These comments were gathered ~October/November 2015.