Please Open If Horizon Had A $1 Monthly Fee Again

Absolute trash, and unreal. Taking credit for other peoples hard efforts and labor. People have no respect these days for great works of art! It's such a shame people literally want to convince themselves that this is the real game lol. Trying to persuade people away from retail to join this cult instead. Can't be a true fan if you consider this the "Real experience".

the legend has entered the chat

So... your saying Horizon is Scientology... makes a weird kind of sense...

It's truly over for horizon, how could they have done this... Not one but TWO logos were edited.

Square Enix will never financially recover, how will Nobuo Uematsu and Koji Kondo get their ¥0 payments of residuals...

I'd just like to point out that the same person said both of these quotes.

Cute conspiracy and all but there are no ads on forum pages

Poor argument because there’s ads on the main page and many people likely navigate from the main page through a bookmark or history. More reason to load that main page = more views. It’s not complicated. Unlike these supposed “Horizon ads” which no one has been able to ever produce evidence of, you can go see them right now on this website.

Yeah man, it's called taking someone else's point and actually considering the information they have presented. That's me conceding that you may be right about a little bit of bleedover. Just because I didn't believe your argument was in good faith doesn't mean that it may not have had some validity to it. Keep in mind that I don't really have a dog in this fight, though.

I'm not sure how much you think 2 ads run on the homepage would make per click but it isn't enough to put up with morons like you fulltime, I can assure you.

Back as far as this forum has existed the admins have had trouble going neutral or positive via ad revenue. When there were 10x the posters, better ad rates from google, and ads were run on every page. The traffic coming in from your toadies and goons ain't ***so don't flatter yourself.

Aw man, I go to take my kid to get his hair cut and the party starts without me. Rude!

Two of those went on for a while and got closed when they had wandered WAY off topic and into "harassing individuals" which is always a thread's death sentence. The third was explicitly about buying accounts. None of those closures had anything to do with private servers, the same would have happened if they'd been about retail.

My brother in Promathia, that is exactly who asked for it

Okay this is stupid for a bunch of reasons, but the big one being - as I pointed out to you when you came mewling to me in PMs - we don't serve ads on forum pages. Also, the idea of anything surviving on standard banner ads in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty three is some hilarious ***. It pays pennies. If you want anything from ads, it's the big modal ***, which we won't do. (Even those pay for ***, honestly.)

Also, "drive traffic". To what *** end, man? We don't make money on ads, at least no appreciable amount (and again, not on forum pages), and I don't get paid at all. What possible motivation is there for me to make the moderators do extra work around here? That's not rhetorical, by the way. I am genuinely curious what *** masterstroke you think I'm cooking up over here

As I've said, more than once - a private server player asked Scragg for it, and he said sure. That's why it's here. It's not a conspiracy. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head to say they have to post here. No one's getting paid for it. (I mean, Homsar might, and good for him. Secure the bag, big fella)

TARGET ACQUIRED

BRUH

I don't really care if this exists or not, but if people asked for it then where are they? There has been one legitimate thread and the others have all been trolling. If the existence of these subforums is causing moderators to step into nearly every thread due to the shitstorm they cause, and there is little to no good-faith discussion, is their existence still justified?

If they dont do it here, they'll just have to lock others when it goes off-topic elsewhere instead, since the topic just cant seem to die

I for one have greatly enjoyed the bounty of entertainment being given by these Horizon threads. Almost more fun than playing the game itself. Watching room temperature IQ takes being thrown back and forth is truly a marvel of modern communications technology and I'm here for it.

And it beats the 5th iteration of whatever stupid *** Sortie thread we'd have instead.

They're probably people here specifically to shitpost about horizon and not actually discuss anything. Eden and catseye subforums are both empty at the moment. I don't think anyone reasonably would want to have a private server subforum for a website whose sole function only works on the retail game.

That's actually a fantastic question and I have a very funny story about it that I unfortunately cannot share :(

Three things, here:

First, as I am sure people are sick of hearing me say, I think the AH forums should reflect the reality of FFXI in 2023 - which does include private servers. I wouldn't have added this subsection of my own accord but now that they're here, it's fine with me. Not talking about them doesn't make them go away.

Secondly, there are people who come here looking to get back into FFXI who really don't want to play the modern game. I don't quite get it, but those people _are_ real, and private servers do scratch an itch for them, and if they can get some guidance here, even if it's just about the available options, then that's still serving our community, even if it's a bit of roundabout way.

And third, there actually WAS some good faith discussion. It got drowned out eventually, but early on in those threads there was actual debate. If the signal:noise stays like crap forever then yeah maybe I go tell Scragg that the experiment didn't work and we gotta close this section down. It's still an option; I just want to see what this looks like after the initial gold rush of *** wears off. Like, Windower/Ashita discussion used to get pretty heated here, but it was so long ago that no one remembers. But eventually the new normal became normal and now it's just part of the culture like anything else.

Might want to talk to this guy about what he knows:

Personally, I don't think those people are part of the "community." If retail goes down, this site just would not exist. It would not bring enough traffic (even now it probably doesn't) to justify its existence, most would leave. I see these people as a complete detriment to retail in all aspects, there is literally 0 gain in having them around. You can see for yourself what they think of most retail players. This Kipling insinuating we are all boomers who are mouth breathers clicking ads like some old grandma. There are no available options, only retail. Anything else is not Final Fantasy XI, but of course that is my opinion.

It was entertaining but ultimately they are just not a benefit so hopefully it doesn't cause too many problems for people who have to deal with it. I already see the future and eventually most will be topic banned from this section but surely it will just fade away by that point.

As far as the no advertisements, you would have to be the most gullible person in the world to believe that.

Literal millionare who is known for his weird obsessions with 75 era FFXI (even tho he probably barely played it, although I'll give him props for mentioning XI in interviews etc) confirming he supported said server. Literally have the most random people who look like they wouldn't touch XI a day in their lives, streaming that server and pretending to be having so much fun (most of them don't play anymore, what a coincidence. I wish I saved the links to their streams, its like AI generated "streamer" to promote something). Just the simple fact alone that this private server managed to gain that following/numbers when literally every single one before it had barely broke 1k consistently, for over a decade. Just use ya noodles.

It was fone wasnt it? who requested the section be added, trolling us from the grave...

You don't even have to specifically ask me, go to any YouTube comment section, there's literally posts all over the place from earlier this year and late last year where you can tell it's just people trying to ramp up Horizon. People were even commenting that stuff on MY videos about XI, which is hysterical if you know even a little bit about my relationship to that server, lol.

It was so bad for a while I was fairly confident it was just bots, and there's no way I'm the only one who noticed it.

From what I'm to understand, the forum is and always has been (Scragg has mentioned it, years and years ago) a small portion of the site's traffic. Majority of people just use the database and AH features and don't even engage w/ the forum (and I have nothing to prove this but I'd guess most people "using" the forum aren't here to post or even come into threads like this, they go to information megathreads and job guides).

So you're probably right about when retail shuts down, XIAH has no real reason to exist. But rn it still serves its primary function.

The exact ratio varies, but 80/20 site only/forum users is about right. It was 90/10 or even more skewed for a long time, but as the player base has whittled down, the frequent poster crowd turned out to be less likely to leave. Again, though: still a pretty small piece of the pie.

IT'S NOT MY STORY TO SHARE, I AM SORRY

I'm sure there are funnier answers to the question but I can't think of one

You guys need to see the light. Horizons warmth will fill you with joy. Cast down the shackles of retail, the grip of sortie... the pain of v25 oddy. Come to the fields were the sun hits everyone. Our savior aerec is Supreme. A god amongst men. The legend of legends. His tale on how he created a this game from scratch that looks and feels like ffxi out of thin air is omnipotent. A musician who took the stale ffxi sounds and gave them... life


You peasents annoying me. I hit 31 rdm now. I feel so powerful... god bless horizon

I saw it everywhere, it was most def like paid ad bots.

Also, for the record: all the nonsense around this section has definitely had one effect retail players can be happy about. All of the discussion really hit my nostalgia button (I've logged in to retail a bit, still haven't decided how much I'm gonna play) and more importantly, got me motivated to start fixing things around here again*.

Sales rates are fixed for me locally and I hope to get them deployed this weekend, so if anyone has something in particular you want me to address, strike while the iron's hot, friendos.

Big thank you from the community Rooks!

Figure out a fix for the shoutbox!