For a myriad of reasons, FF14 has seen a huge influx of new players recently. As of the 5.3 patch, 5/8 of the servers on my DC of Primal were listed as congested, only recently being released via 5.35 a couple of days ago. I've seen so many sprouts on my server, it's great. We haven't had so much new blood come into the game at once in a long time.
So I figured, why not take a trip down memory lane? It's good to know your roots as it were, and for all the flaws and foibles that FF14 still has, it's important to know exactly how far things have come from those halcyon days of ARR's release in 2013.
That's all I've got for now, but I know there's more, a lot more. To all you vets out there, what you do remember from those bygone days when we were all just innocent Warriors of Light, fighting to keep Eorzea free?
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So I figured, why not take a trip down memory lane? It's good to know your roots as it were, and for all the flaws and foibles that FF14 still has, it's important to know exactly how far things have come from those halcyon days of ARR's release in 2013.
The data centers, roulette system and party finder interface were not in-game on release. This meant that each server was restricted to it's own population when it came to game-related activities. This also meant that certain servers got a reputation for being the go-to servers for one thing or another. It's a large part of why Gilgamesh became "the raiding server" and Balmung became "the RP server." We had no world visit or cross-world PF or DF. It also made running duties as a DPS job incredibly difficult when solo. Tanks were in such short supply that I, as a WAR main, never waited for a queue, ever, for the entirety of three full versions of the game. It was only with the advent of Shadowbringers that tank queues started to be longer than instant. Meanwhile, I had several friends leveling DPS jobs who waited multiple days before finally getting into a story dungeon, and the only reason they finally got in was because I specifically asked where they were in the MSQ and they told me that they were still waiting for this one story dungeon to pop in queue, so I brought them along with my Tank Privilege.TM
While jobs were mostly the way to go, there existed some niches situations where staying on a class was actually beneficial. You saw this a bit more often in PVP than PVE, but even in PVE there were some people that made it work. Jobs had more limits to the cross-class skills that they could use, being restricted to two other classes' skills at most. Each class had a few skills that could be cross-classed to other classes and jobs, and these included such things as Raise from CNJ, Skull Sunder/Savage Blade from MRD and GLD, and Blood for Blood (Lance Charge as we call it now) from LNC. This meant you could take something like Skull Sunder and use it on your LNC and become a "tank" for your party, as Skull Sunder had a large extra enmity modifier to it. This also meant you could do something like put Raging Strikes, Straight Shot, Internal Release and Blood for Blood on your MRD, turning a naturally tanky class into something of a DPS monster via two extra sources of +dmg and a pair of +crit chance skills. Given that WAR's at the time took a huge damage penalty for being in their tank stance, it wasn't uncommon to see parties run a MRD this way in content that required a 2nd tank job but had no real use for a pure tank, as even without the WAR-unique skills, a properly kitted-and-buffed MRD could throw out some very big damage. If you're interested in seeing what it looks like when a GLD uses Blizzard 2, or a CNJ holds aggro by cracking stuff over the head with their staff, check this compilation video out.
MRD's and WAR's used to have the strongest DPS cooldown in game via the ability Berserk. It was a flat 50% increase to attack power, which functionally raised damage by 50%. It also afflicted the MRD/WAR with a debuff after it ended called "pacification," which locked out all physical GCD attacks for it's duration. But worry not! For as a WAR, it was possible to cross-class the Flash skill in order to generate aggro in an aoe around you. Since Flash was a spell and not a physical attack, it let you sidestep the pacification penalty and continue to function as a tank despite being afflicted with "melee silence." It also served as a dump for WAR's MP. Alternatively, maybe with a macro or if your healer was attentive, they could Esuna the debuff off of you once it appeared, removing the downside to Berserk entirely. BRD's and WAR's were briefly the best of friends during Heavensward, as BRD's could prep a WAR with Warden's Paeon, thus instantly negating the pacification debuff and allowing the WAR to continue as if nothing had happened.
Contrary to how we do things nowadays, wall-to-wall pulls were not nearly as commonplace. Oh, they still occurred, but the closer you got to the item level cap, the more careful you had to be. A not-insignificant part of this was the restrictions placed on most jobs for using AoE, specifically TP. The only jobs who had "unlimited" AoE of any kind were casters and healers, because MP was far less limiting on their ability to put out damage than TP was. Most AoE skills for physical jobs cost upwards of 120 TP, and with a cap of 1000 TP, it was maybe 15-20 GCD's before you bottomed out and were limited by the paltry 60-per-tick in-combat regen rate. This is the time that BLM's rightfully earned their reputation as the kings of AoE. Not only was their damage top tier (SMN came close with their DoT's, but that had it's own limitations) but they were the only job with no limit to their main resource. The physical jobs would all have to switch over from AoEing to single target about 3/4 of the way through their TP bars. It was common practice as a tank to use your single target tank combo, tabbing between each mob to hit a different enemy with each step of the attack. Heavy Swing > tab > Skull Sunder > tab > Butcher's Block > tab > repeat until it's all finally dead. Blessed be the BRD's, who brought to us their TP and MP regeneration songs, even if it did kill their own damage to use them.
Speaking of BRD, they didn't have the ranged DPS limit break that we have now. Instead, they used the healer limit break. This made for some occasional clutch end-game moments where the last man standing was the BRD who popped the healer LB3 and saved the raid.
ROG and NIN weren't in ARR upon release, and instead were added as a part of one of the major post-2.0 patches. This marked the first and currently only time a non-limited job was added to the game outside of an xpac. Personally, I think SE learned from this and has purposefully restricted adding jobs to the game outside of xpac releases, as NIN's release really threw the end-game into disarray.
DRG acquired their reputation as "floor tank" during this time, with SE even going so far as to make fun of it via an in-house animation they created and played during one of their broadcasts. In their defense, the problem wasn't really DRG per se, but rather, er, their defense. Specifically their magic defense stat. It was the lowest out of all the jobs, and occasionally meant that even a full HP DRG would just get insta-gibbed by unavoidable raid damage, to say nothing of when they were under the damage-taken penalty of Blood for Blood. It was so bad that it became a meme to wear crafting gear in the body and legs slot, simply because even the stuff that an ALC or ARM would wear had more magic defense than the armor DRG's wore. This was further complicated by the at-the-time very wonky net code, combined with the terrible animation lock that Jump had. For any new DRG's out there, think of the animation lock on Stardiver, only it doesn't gap close and is worse in every way. It wasn't a question of whether or not you could avoid clipping your GCD, it was more a matter of how much of it would be clipped. This was especially egregious given that both Spineshatter and Dragonfire Dive had rather quick, snappy animations comparatively speaking. Both of those skills have remained almost entirely unchanged since their inception, minus a few potency changes and the loss of the stun on Spineshatter.
Ah, and who could forget the original glamour system? Unlike what we have today, the OG system was stupidly complex in comparison. First of all, instead of a single "glamour prism" like we use now, you had different types of prism, broken down by the crafting class that was responsible for creating the piece of gear in question. So if your chosen job was BLM, then chances are you needed to have a minimum of four different glamour prisms available; one for GSM, one for LTW, one for WVR and probably one for ALC. Now that probably causes you to look askance at your inventory, especially if you happen to be a multi-job type such as myself. If you ran a tank, a healer, a melee and a caster, then you needed glamour prisms from each of the crafts (except CUL naturally) in order to cover all the bases. Pretty terrible yeah? But wait! There's *MORE!* You see, not only were the prisms broken down by craft, they were also broken down by level. There were five "tiers" on release, each corresponding to a certain ilvl range, with each prism being used to take the look of the target item based on that item's ilvl. So if you wanted to use, say, the Battlemage Robe as the glamour for your level 50 caster, then you needed to get the appropriate level-and-class prism in order to apply it. This led to some people literally carrying dozens of separate glamour prisms, either on their retainers or somethings on their person, so as to cover any glamour needs that might arise. When SE finally consolidated all the prisms down into single ones based on craft, it was a glorious day. When SE finally consolidated all of those down to the system we have now, it ushered in an age of Glamour Peace and Prosperity that continues to this day.
On the topic of glamour, dyes also used to be more heavily restricted, with most dyes coming exclusively via ALC crafts. This made dye-making a major money-maker for those who could manage it.
SE, for the longest time, had a thing against AoE. Aside from a few select attacks, mostly restricted to melee jobs like tanks and MNK/DRG/NIN, every AoE in game at the time had some heavy fall-off to it. Some of it was rather complicated, with specific tiers of damage based on the number of targets hit. Stuff like "400 potency for the 1st target, 10% less for the 2nd target, 20% less for the 3rd target, 30% less for the 4th target, 40% less for the 5th target, and 50% less for all subsequent targets." That was literally in the description for the damage of certain attacks. We still see it on a few attacks nowadays, albeit much more simplified, as in the case with DNC's two dance attacks. This was one of those things most people were just confused by; it seemed like it took SE forever to find a spot they were happy with when it came to AoE damage, and ultimately they just ended up doing what had so often been suggested before.
You know that chain bonus you get when you beat at least two overworld mobs that are at or above your level within a short period of time? That's a throwback to FF11, where "chaining" mobs was the best way to to grind xp. Successfully killing mobs before the timer resets grants a stacking boost to experience gained, capping at a certain extra amount. This element was key to an early trick used for leveling up in ARR; a series of FATE's in Northern Thanalan, usually called the "Lambs" series, was the main source of xp in the very early parts of ARR. The trick was to spawn the first of the FATE's in the series, which saw absolute hordes of these "Lambs of Dalamud" cultists spawn in the FATE. Parties would then spam AoE as much as possible, racking up insanely high chain counts (we're talking 200+) for the duration of the FATE, purposefully letting the timer run out and failing the FATE so that the chain would reset and they could start it again ASAP. This was patched out relatively quickly by SE, but man was it fun while it lasted.
Coming off the heels of FF11, SE had a rather....let's call it "poor" reputation when it came to dealing with RMT situations in their games. For quite a long time in FF11, "gil sellers" were the bane of every legitimate players' experience, making it nearly impossible to meet the stringently enforced "gear requirements" that would see you picked up by parties to do any kind of content. Whether it was camping Leaping Lizzy, the Emperor, Stroper Chyme, or even stuff as crazy as Serket and Fafnir/Nidhogg, the RMT in FF11 killed a lot of fun for the game. So you can imagine the frustration of the playerbase when, not even a week into 2.0's official launch, people began receiving spammed /tells advertising RMT in-game. Now, at this point in time, gil was significantly more scarce than it was now. Repair bills were about 10x as high as they are now, relatively speaking, and stuff like potions and food did not persist through death like they do now. The temptation to give into these RMT spammers is a large part of what fed this constant barrage of /tells, and it wasn't long before the community came up with an in-game macro command that would allow you to instantly add someone to your blacklist with the push of a button. This was, at best, a temporary reprieve, as we only had a limited number of blastlist slots. It became a habit for most people, each week, to go through their blacklist and manually remove the dozens of deleted names that had been added in the last week, each of them an RMT spammer, so as to make room for the fresh batch of spammers that were to come. To his credit, Yoshi and his team worked tirelessly to deal with this issue, and many of the QoL changes regarding repair bills, food and potions helped quite a bit. The biggest thing though, was when FF14 was briefly taken off the market for about a month following it's release.
Yes, that's right, FF14 was unavailable for purchase shortly after it was released in 2013. This was intentional, as SE had not anticipated the demand that came with the release of ARR. They had been optimistic, sure, but this was beyond mere optimism. There was a real, pressing, almost ravenous desire by the gaming public to play ARR. Unfortunately, their server infrastructure at the time just could not handle the load, and it was common to have hundreds of people in queue, waiting to log in, only for them to eventually get in and be immediately kicked out because the server load was too much. Yoshi found this situation to be terrible, as in his view, people were unable to play the game they had spent their precious time and money on. So SE took the unprecedented step of stopping all sales of the game until they could get their servers to a point that demand could be met, as well as laying the foundations for further expansion as needed. Functionally, this meant ARR was unable to be purchased for a about a month (give or take), and current players at the time were compensated with a free month of subscription as an apology for the situation. Truly a bro move.
That's all I've got for now, but I know there's more, a lot more. To all you vets out there, what you do remember from those bygone days when we were all just innocent Warriors of Light, fighting to keep Eorzea free?
submitted by /u/Quor18
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