What's the wrong way? Besides a the points Yeargdribble mentioned as well as asking annoying questions that the game has easy access to the answers for. I know that begging for things like equipment and gil are a no-no. Are there any others?
It is best to do some research or ask some advice on a how a job works before actually using it in a party situation. As the game grows older, the tolerance for ignorance is lower. That's one of the worst elitism issues. Always be ready to listen to advice from those in a party.

There are certain things that may or may not occur to you about party dynamics that you can often only get from experience. Understanding how not to pull hate is a big deal. Knowing not to us AoE (area of effect; multi-target) spells pretty much ever is important. Knowing how to handle links or adds. If you decide to play and have a job you plan to play, feel free to ask for advice and I'm sure people here would be glad to give you a primer.


I'm not the type to do anything half hearted, and I'm pretty patient,
You sound a lot like me. Just remember this is a blessing and a curse. You'll garner respect for doing your best, but the game can take a lot of time and eat away at your life if you're this type of person.


I've seen quite abit of WoW and can tell it's not really my type of game. I generally hate traditional high fantasy. I also promised myself that if I ever did play an MMO, it would be FFXI. Happy to hear that the endgame parts is where the game begins to really shine.
Just keep in mind that if you get into endgame, you'll be dealing with a lot of scheduled events. Before I had to break it off I was having scheduled events every night. This includes about 4 hours of Dynamis twice a week as well as sky/sea farming for anywhere from 2-8 hours at least once a week. You really have to police yourself.

Also, endgame is a mean MEAN place. Especially now. Everyone has to start somewhere, but most endgamers have been at it for a long time. Finding a good linkshell (guild type thing) can be hard. However, if you take the right approach you'll find yourself well liked and making solid progress and friends.


Sounds good, I do like the fact you switch out job classes. I can't say the races really impress me too much I'm afraid (still angry that my moogles are not options ) The job classes should be quite nice to play as. Do you get access to all of them from the start or do you need to unlock them through quests? I thought I heard something about this, I'm curious to know.
The races aren't bad. I was also disappointed at first, but you learn to like it. There is a bit of racism though. In general I would say pick the race and job that you want to play. However, if you have no strong leaning one way or the other it would be good to pick a race based on your playstyle. Also, some races are more flexible than others.

People are more likely to accept a Taru playing melee than a Galka playing mage. It's just easier for them to make up for the shortcomings. Hume is good all around, but some would say it's a boring choice. If you wanted to ever play Black Mage, Taru is so unfairly overbalanced over the other races it's just unfair.... and they are very cocky and elitist about it.

I'd tend to say that Mithra > Hume > Taru for flexibility. Elvaan is shortly after and Galkaa is a distant 5th.

As for jobs, you start with 6 jobs available (same jobs as FF I). You'll need to get to level 30 to start doing advanced job quests to unlock the other 12. Some of them are pitifully easy and some are very very difficult and will require much help.

Is joining a group easy?
Joining groups is fairly easy. You put up your 'flag' and start looking for a group. You can add a comment for those who read them when forming a party. Parties need a tank, a healer and some DDs (damage dealers) in general. Things bottle-neck if there aren't enough tanks and/or healers seeking to join. I find WoW's LFG system to be far better and I wish SE would listen to the players. The biggest problem with LFG is that you can't seek on multiple jobs and you can't seek on one job while doing something on another.

The biggest problems with joining parties is that certain jobs just aren't as popular, or even worse, have a bad reputation and get no invites. Puppetmaster is probably the worst. Dragoon and Thief and pretty low on the invites as well.


How about Guilds?
FFXI has WoW beat here. They are called linkshells. You get a linkpearl from either the leader (shell holder) or a sackholder. You can be in as many as you like at a time... which is why it is so superior to WoW in my opinion.

Generally as you are just chilling out in a party, if they notice you don't have a pearl next to your name, you're likely to get an invite to a lowish social linkshell. Starting a linkshell in FFXI is also very easy as you just have to purchase the shell for a pretty low price from a vendor and pick the color and name.

Will I need to really know some people going in or is it set up that may at times be meeting new people all the time?
It's very helpful to know people going in, but not absolutely necessary. Having people that can answer your questions on the fly is great. Also having a little start up gil is helpful, but it's also good to learn how to manage on your own. You'll be fine if you start alone and you'll make friends as you go.

Sounds normal but I'm certain I would have to see it first hand to understand how bad it truly is. How is the second character/account work? I've heard only some pieces of it and must say it sounds kinda like a rip off. I would love some more elaboration please.
Well in the end my wife and I had around 14 mules (14 extra bucks on our monthly bill) just trying to keep things straight. I had several jobs at 30 and 40 and some at 50 as well as a 75 Bard, which was decked out beyond belief both at 75 and at all caps. She had 3 level 75 jobs decked out.

Many of our mules were simply gear storage. Capped gear for our mains and for other jobs. I had an entire mule dedicated completely to my Bard's gear as well as one for all of my melee jobs and another for all of my mage jobs. Beside that, it's great to have a mule in each city so you can have access to all of the Auction Houses at a moments notice and sell (or buy) things quickly and easily where the market is good.

One of the primary ways we manage to make money without stopping too often was to simply keep ALL of the random drops we got and sort them to be sold among our mules. A lot of people keep mules for gardening as well since it can make a lot of money. The number of AH slots you can use is 7. So if you went mining or something and wanted to sell a lot of stuff, it could be backed up in your box for well over a week unless you sent it to a mule to be taken care of.

SE keeps adding storage mediums, and this is great, but it's just not enough. Most people I know with multiple jobs just end up playing one gimp by sharing gear that is only marginally useful simply so they don't have to use that much more inventory space.


Who are the RMT?
Real Money Traders. You'll also see CGF (Chinese gil/gold farmers). They play 24/7 and even though they get banned, they keep coming back. If a mob drops a great piece of gear, there will be probably 3 of them sitting where that mob spawns all day long and likely using cheats to claim it so that you have no option but to buy it on the AH at an inflated price.

I'm not sure how things like mining are now, but there used to be one of them at every mining point botting it so that you literally could NOT mine. They have destroyed the crafting economy and pretty much everything else.

How important is money in the game?
The sad answer is extremely. You really need money to make it in Vana'diel. People will generally expect you to eat food that enhances your performance. You'll be expected to have oils and powders (to keep sneaked and invised around aggressive mobs) in some places. You'll have to keep your gear current and it can be very expensive at times. Even passing up the luxury items you'll find yourself hurting for money a lot. Some jobs feel it a lot more than others.

Also, how well does SE actually respond to the community?
When I left the answer was 'almost not at all.' They've gotten better, but there's really no direct line to SE like there is with Blizzard. You don't feel the impact of your feedback much and the GMs, though better, are still crap. They are outsourced groups that don't really know that much about the game most of the time. They answer to the higher up JP GMs. There's a good bit of racism and racial tension in the endgame world and Japanese players will often be favored. I've been witness to some egregious examples of this.

SE is, however, slowly listening more and more (probably because they realize their apathy was failing). You will at least feel their presence in trying to fix problems in the game, but you'll still feel very detached from them in any direct sense.


I unfortunately have a 56k connection. Besides downloading all the patches, how much is this going to be a problem?
Patches will make you want to claw your eyes out, but other than that you should be generally okay as long as nothing else is eating up your bandwidth while you attempt to play. You'll have very little chance of claiming any NMs (notorious monsters) though.


Are the job classes pretty balanced or are some classes extremely overpowered while others have been nerfed to near obsoletion?
Balance is a big problem in FFXI. I find that WoW has fixed a lot of the balance issues by allowing each job to be able to fill multiple roles in a pinch. In FFXI this just isn't the case. You also have a major number problem. There are only a handful of healers and even less tanks while the vast majority of jobs at DDs. That said, people tend to pick one job as the best of each category at different times.

With DDs this becomes a problem. You end up with your flavor of the month DDs. It once was Dragoon, but after a particular nerf people just laughed at DRG. Despite how powerful it can be it wasn't as powerful as it was AND there seems to be a huge influx of retards to DRG (and Dark Knight... go FF IV). Even now a lot of people don't want to invite DRG. Ranger used to be a GOD!! They were the only way in endgame and often a party would kick any other DD at any point to get a RNG. After their nerf they are lower than dirt for the most part even though they are still great.

It has a lot more to do with community perception than the realities of the job. It's funny how years ago people would say "Warrior is only a subjob... it's stupid as a main." People wouldn't even pick up WARs for XP PTs and now they are the flavor-of-the-month DD for over a year.

The balance could be tweaked, but really it's in people's heads so you just have to learn to work around that.

What terms and lingo do I need to know to get around easier (if the forum already has a place for this information just say so and I'll visit it.)
I've used a lot in this response. I don't think I could even begin to go down a list of lingo that would be inclusive, but I'll add a few.

AH = Auction House
LS = Linkshell
PT = Party
XP = duh
LFG/LFP = Looking for Group/Party

Also learning the shorthand of the job names is helpful, though you'll get it in time.

Anything else I should know, remember to consider that this may be my first MMO, so even trivial things might be important.
In general, never buy on the AH, but always sell at the AH. Also keep in mind that in FFXI you have to level your subjob independently of your primary job. Most main jobs will be expected to have several subs by endgame. These are things you'll pick up as you go, but it's good to know ahead of time.




Sorry for the uber long post. If you have any other questions I'd be glad to answer them.