FFXI is a wonderful game, but it has some major flaws that make people hate it.

Compared to other MMOs it's damn near impossible to get into. You wanna play WoW? They'll give you enough free trial time to damn near get a character to 60. You want you friends to play? That's easy too.

Now look at FFXI. 30 day trial? You've gotta be joking. Barely anyone can get out of the dunes by then. So you just spent 30 days walking back and forth between a town and the dunes. Your impression of this game is that you spend 30 minutes traveling everywhere and if you make one small mistake you are punished by leveling down. You can't even get a chocobo to help your travel until level 20, and even then, you can't use it below level 15 to help you get to the dunes and you can't use crag birds until 20. You are punished with foot travel and it blows.

You want your friends to play FFXI with you? They don't exactly make that easy either. Money isn't that easy to make in the game if you have no experience and it might take you a week of playing to have enough gil to buy a WP for your friend if you don't know how to make money.

You MUST look for a PT. For many jobs this sucks. From leveling THF I know all about sitting and LFP for 6-9 hours. Sure I could farm I guess... this is supposed to be fun? Not to mention that many of the PTs you get will suck. They will either be with elitists or morons. Either way, dealing with low level PTs makes you want to claw your eyes out.



The vast majority of people want to play and have fun and make progress. There are very few casual gamers that like a game like FFXI mostly because you can't make any progress if you only play a short amount of time.

Sure... maybe if you just played a job like WHM that got fast invites or didn't care about leveling up and seeing the deeper parts of the storyline it would be okay.

That's the other thing. FF series fans want story. Well, FFXI has an amazing story that (having played every other game in the series) I would say rivals that of the rest of the series. But so what? You've gotta be level 75 to make it to the end of those story lines. Sure there is lower level content, but you won't make it past ZM14 or CoP Chapter 7 without a level 75 character. You might have a chance at making it to Rank 10 in each nation if others held your hand through all of it. But very few people do upper rank missions any more. Beyond that, if you want the story from multiple nations you have to pay a fee and forfeit your OP warps to change and get it.





I love the game, but I think I got lucky in that I had a decent amount of time to play when I started. It was slow to 40ish and then I got a big chance to play a lot and got to 75 quickly as well as got some other things done (good LS). However, this game isn't user friendly. It's hard to get started in this game and get even a fraction of what it has to offer.

I don't think people who haven't played it in its entirety have any room bashing it. I constantly hear people say the story sucks or this sucks or that sucks when they haven't actually played past level 20. I don't agree with that, but I can definitely understand their frustration with trying to get into the game.