If Horizon Had A $1 Monthly Fee

Everyone knows that true era is 1:1 2003 fall version brady games guide.

If had a dollar every time someone posted about Horizon..

Joking aside, it would be interesting to play the game as it was at JP release. Interesting in the sense I'd probably do it for a few hours and stop after a week, but that was an experience I expect most of the NA community missed out on.

Agreed -- that's about the only experience I think I'd genuinely be interested in myself. People I know playing other private servers have tried to make them sound appealing until they start describing the laundry list of problems I "fondly" remember from before an attempt was made to modernize FFXI.

I am always amused when my friends explain "we just miss the classic experience, the way the game was on launch and how it used to play", then tell me about all these balance changes, or extra QoL improvements... It seems even the people who "just want to play the game how it was" have things that they felt needed changing.

Guy said "minor changes" when King Behemoth is running around Sauromugue Champaign and Rolanberry Fields


re: the orignal JP experience
From the things I read, I dont think I'd want to partake in that. It sounded VERY rough lol
https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/The_History_of_Final_Fantasy_XI/2002
Everything from June onwards is lulz.

Broad strokes - Horizon is 75 cap ffxi. The same jobs are available. 98% of the same gear is available. 98% of the same spells and abilities are available. Progression follows the same events. The client is pretty much the same. If someone played 500 hours of 75 cap FFXI, and 500 hours of Horizon, they would see them as 'basically the same thing'.

If you start comparing from the viewpoint of someone with 10,000 hours of 75 cap ffxi, those small changes feel larger because you recognize the details that have changed and you attach significance to them because you understand their impact on balance. And yes, some of them do drastically alter the balance. But, most people aren't playing 75 cap FFXI to play an extremely hard MMO, they're playing 75 cap FFXI because of a combination of social factors, nostalgia, and (in some cases) poverty.

You can certainly recognize that many of their changes are heavy-handed and reduce the difficulty of endgame or alter job preference, but if you think back.. SE did the same thing constantly. Job patches constantly shuffled out meta jobs. Retail 75 FFXI wasn't a single patch. RNG without distance check was insanely broken. If you go back further, full TP return from WS made MNK and DRG insane. Late game, overwhelm and hasso did wonders for SAM. I don't think you can or should define a game solely by it's meta. FFXI is FFXI.

That said, I am not saying they made good balance changes. I feel their 'custom' and 'era+' is one of, if not the single worst implementations any private server has done. I still wouldn't be surprised if behind the scenes Ninja was guiding what custom stuff comes out because of his funding, or some other questionable motivation is causing their insane choices for custom modifications. But, I still maintain that this does not make it any less 'FFXI'. It just makes it a worse server than it could have been without them.

Ya, I know, but that's part of the fun of it. I doubt they'll ever be able to really re-capture what it was like then because the community is so small, we understand more of the mechanics, and basically no one would stick around for this beyond being a curiosity, but I would still find it kindof interesting. By the time I got in game, the cap was 75, RoZ was in place, and a bunch of changes had been made. I put plenty of time in the game at that point onward, but lvl50 cap with all the weird balancing issues and oddities sounds fun to explore (admittedly not for long).

The early days of MMOs are always kindof wild. I played EQ2 on release and the first few months were super chaotic, something about it made it really memorable even if it was rough. The game didn't really have a lot of staying power after a while, but it was really fun having everyone run around with no clue what is going on. There's no way to recapture this with 11 at this point, but seeing the mechanics as they were then would be an interesting curiosity.

As an aside, reading the history again, one thing I think gets missed about SE is how good they've been over the years at pushing updates. When EQ2 was in its first years, there were several patches/updates where SoE fubared it and a planned several hour update took over a week before servers were online. This happened multiple times. I can't recall this ever happening for 11, did it?

Not a problem, was bored and writing a wall of text felt like a good waste of time. :D

My post wasn't really trying to 'sway' people away from their opinion for/against private servers either, just adding actual facts and case law to the conversation that has backing proof that some of the claims made in this thread are just straight up wrong. People are still going to hate things regardless, so I wasn't expecting a sudden love towards private servers.



A more general definition of what it is can be found on Wikipedia here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

I am also not a lawyer so I can't give any definite answer saying that something is or isn't legal. However, being able to look at and cite past cases that show examples of the exact things in question happening and being ruled fair use helps show what has been tried and proven in the past.

In regards to disassembling, multiple cases I cited in my first past included that happening, not just observing chips or voltages.

- Sony vs. Connectix - Connectix ultimately ended up dumping and disassembling the BIOS object code.
- SEGA vs. Accolade - Accolade dumped and disassembled the ROMs of officially licensed SEGA games in order to create their own loader coded to run unlicensed carts.

There was a legal write up on the legality of disassembly after the older cases which you can find here:
https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1368&context=jitpl

Reading through this gives more direct wordage and responses from the judges at the time of ruling on several cases, including the SEGA vs. Accolade case. On pages 5 and 6, you can read through the response the judge gave on this case in regards to 'clean room' work and disassembling. They stated that:



In total it ruled that:



Now take these kinds of factors and points made by the court in regards to disassembly and apply it to private servers.

1. In the aspect of 'clean room'; we do not have or use ANY leaked or stolen material from Square Enix or FFXI in order to recreate the server software. Disassembly is ultimately a requirement in order to establish access to understand how different aspects of functionality work.

2. In the aspects of the 'amount copied', the main requirement needed and used from the client is the information needed to reconstruct the proper packet structures. This has been done both with and without diassembly of the client. Where a lot of the early work was done through just dumping the packet flow and guessing what each field is also by trial and error editing to see what reaction would happen by altering different bits of data in the packet. In order to properly reconstruct all data in packets, additional disassembly is required to properly understand the information.

Since it was mentioned in this topic as well, the network protocols used by FFXI are also not subject to copyright. Copyright law does not cover these kinds of things, however they can be patented. But, in terms of the setup and services of FFXI, their systems are not, as far as I am aware, patented by/to SE as they are recreations of already existing things.

For example, the main authentication server for PlayOnline is running a modified IRC daemon. SE does not own the copyright or patent for IRC, its code, or any of its networking protocols. Instead, its protocol is open source and available under the RFC-1459. Similar, the game servers are also all recreations of pre-existing services with modifications to fit the needs of FFXI. The usage of additional technology on top is also not owned by SE, such as the encryption used (blowfish) or the compression used (huffman).



Going along with the above, it will ultimately boil down to "it depends". Does the work being done infringe on copyrighted work or patents? Then no, it is likely something a court would find is being done in bad faith and is illegal. But in the context of a private server and what cases were cited in the links I gave, the ruling is more likely to be in favor of the private server as everything is cleanly obtained, fresh code, and not for profit. It also does not come close to being a full recreation of the original work, as in being in competition with retail servers.


They did. You can read the full filing here:
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/48/1212/2414907/


It is established but left open-ened on purpose by the courts and the rulings of the various judges. Under certain circumstances, the need for disassembling and reverse engineering is protected under fair use, but was left opened to be retried on a case by case basis. Like anything, it ultimately "depends". If the private server was set out to be for-profit, directly and fully emulating the entire retail experience and so on, then yes that would absolutely be infringement. However, in our case the private server code is entirely open source, fully homebrewed and is entirely non-profit itself.

I would say, look at it this way, there are companies that are MUCH more legally active in the protection of their IPs. For example, Blizzard. They have gone after several private servers in the past, but have they ever gone after the actual code bases or projects that create the private server software? No. Because they legally can't in their current state. (WoW's private servers are in the same nature as FFXI's where its all fully homebrewed code using no actual material, sources, or other works from the official servers.)

The only private server projects that have been legally taken down or otherwise successfully removed/attacked have been ones that directly use official copyright material, sources, or literal leaked copies of official binaries.

This isn't to say that private servers are and will always be legal and "untouchable". The courts could rule tomorrow that they are illegal and everything can change. The point here is that at this current time, the current case law suggests and lends itself to showing the creation of private server software is legal.


There are cases where reverse engineering has been deemed illegal, but again it is a case by case matter and depends on a lot more factors than just the fact that reverse engineering is being used/involved in a project.

In your example with a past job you worked at, there are a lot of other factors that come into play when reversing the work of a potentially competing product. There's way too many bits of information and context missing from that to really be able to talk out a potential reason as to why the company had all of those kinds of restrictions put onto it after the fact. But also, was that something that played out in court and was legally tried on? Or was it simply an agreement between the two companies made 'under the table' per-say to avoid the other company from actually filing a suit against yours?

As for your project with reverse engineering, modding and involving Bitbucket, the issue with that kind of situation is that you are basically beholden to Bitbucket and their personal policies. Regardless if your project was legal or not, they are not legally required to host it for you. If they received a DMCA notice, even if it was bogus, it could be in their policy to just immediately terminate the repo and not deal with it to avoid any legal trouble for themselves.

A great example of this very thing happening recently was on GitHub with YouTube-DL. Their project implemented the needed protocol information and other data used to download material from various other networks. The main one being YouTube. Now, the project itself does not contain any copyright material, it simply enables the ability to others to obtain copyright material. That itself is not illegal. YouTube DMCA'd the repo and it was pulled down. However, after public outcry and seeing that YouTube's DMCA actually held no weight, GitHub re-instated the repo and even created a DMCA defense fund to help protect users from bogus copyright claims.



Like I mentioned above, companies that do go after private servers [almost] never go after the actual private server project itself. They go after the hosts that make use of that software for profit or other damaging reasons. (ie. copyright infringment by using artwork/assets from the game on their own websites etc.)

We can use several mainstream well known code bases for example:

- World of Warcraft - Has several well known code bases for creating private servers at different expansions of the game. (ie. AzerothCore, MaNGOS, TrinityCore, etc.) These projects are never the target or subject of any of Blizzards legal filings. Instead, they go after the servers that make use of the code bases where damage has been done. (ie. taking donations/for-profit, copyright infringment using artwork/assets from the game for their site, recreating the original Blizzard sites, etc.)

- Ultima Online - Has several code bases. (RunUO, ServUO, POL, UOX3, etc.) A game ran by a very well known anti-consumer company, EA. Again, these codebases have never been targeted, but some servers running on these code bases have been.

- Ragnarok Online - The main private server code base, rAthena has been around for decades, and is also the same codebase used when the FFXI private server ProjectXI was rewritten into the original starting new codebase 'oneskyxi' which later became DarkStar. Again, the company behind this game, Gravity Games, recently went after 7 private servers in the last year, but the actual rAthena project remains untouched.

And so on. There are countless private servers for countless games, all of which have never been touched or gone after with any real legal recourse outside of ones that made use of actually leaked/stolen code or material.

Steam Cleaner was broken for like a year. It would spawn once after a maintenance, then never spawn again. SE never acknowledged it.

Does that count?

It is basically the same game though. I think a lot of people who disagree are overstating the difficulty of 75-era XI to exaggerate the differences while also misremembering how poorly balanced 75-era XI was.

Some people are acting like 75-era EXPing was some sort of exercise in complex mental calculus to manage MP and pulling rate and that WHM being able to restore ~100 MP for a party member every 10 minutes somehow destroyed that.

75-era was rife with jobs getting left behind because they simply couldn't compete and I feel like Horizon has largely resolved that issue. Like, everyone knows Assassin exists as a trait because THF initially because nigh-useless after 60, right? The only job that has changed enough to be played differently from the 75-era is SMN and I don't think anyone can argue in good faith that it was better to have SMN be a second-rate healer.


I'm not pretending that Horizon is some sort of groundbreaking product that will usher in an everlasting golden era of 75 players. I think I even stated at one point that the early death signs are kind of already there and that peak retail, even in the iLVL-era, is better than Horizon. I even stated quite early on that I don't think I'll be playing Horizon for much longer. I just don't think it's really accurate to argue that Horizon isn't almost the same thing as 75-era XI. I'm not trolling Draylo(I suspect he's actually trolling me), he's just the one having the biggest shitfit about private servers so he gets responded to the most. It's also ironic that Draylo accuses me of hating retail, when the reality is that I'm only on this forum because I like to read about what's going on in retail to see if I'd be interested in coming back.


As someone who initially played from NA launch until they raised the cap to 80, I'm not sure if I agree. I feel like the balance is only altered in the sense that it's better on Horizon than it was on retail. The difference between DDs is no longer so stark that people would rather hold out for better options than invite one of the less optimal DDs. WHMs no longer eventually play second fiddle to RDMs. Likewise with PLDs and NINs. As you pointed out, 75-era XI went through many different periods of "winners and losers" for jobs. Horizon doesn't seem to have this issue as far as I can tell. Most of my LFG experiences have been quite short and I never hear anyone talk about how long it takes them to find parties, nor have my own experiences LFG on Horizon matched those of my time in the 75-era taking MNK or WAR or THF to 75.

I haven't played it so I don't have any first-hand experience, can't really comment on it. Since I'm not at all invested in Horizon, I don't particularly care either way if it's close to retail 75 or not.

But if it doesn't take you a year to get your first 75, are you even era-ing bro?

The rest was solid, but this is a big "it depends" and like you said a grey area. It really boils down to SE's licensing terms for their FFXI client, especially with the DMCA being what it is. Just because the client is publicly downloadable doesn't make it free to use however we want. Does SE authorize people the right the use their FFXI client without a subscription? If not, then SE could in theory do a DMCA action against the users of the Horizon server the same way media companies could DMCA users for torrenting movies. The only effect on private servers would be if they provided material assistance or enabled people to break or circumvent SE's licensing terms on the client.

It's the reason emulation communities forbid the posting of links to ROMs and only provide assistance in how to create fair use copies from material you've already purchased and therefor have a valid license to. I don't think SE cares enough about that right now, but it's the only real legal weakness private servers have cause like you said the LSB is 100% original work.

Lots of commercial software is made available to download publicly, attempting to actually use it without paying for a license is bad news bears. It's why I prefer to stick with FOSS whenever I can.

Rock on with Luda

Official MV LMFAO

this is all symptomatic of a common issue with horizon andys: conflating the entire game with exp pts, and as long as they feel like they're making steady progress and not getting completely dumpstered by other job options they think balance is perfect

meanwhile most people who've experienced endgame on original retail + multiple pservers already knew there would be problems, what problems they would be and why. those thoughts were communicated and summarily shot down by obnoxiously smug devs who were clearly out of their depth

not even gonna bother getting into the laughable attempts at pushing a blood tanking meta or how badly they screwed up nin (and were forced to go back on that + buff it, all without ever admitting to messing up still), the ridiculous nerfs to rdm and truly idiotic attempt at 'balancing' nin sub. that's all stuff that doesn't matter in the eyes of someone who only sees the game thru the lens of a zitah level sync pt

Yeah the nin + pld changes really sucked :)

Uh... what? You've obviously not played on the server. There is no endless zitah level sync pt. Their level sync system literally does not allow for something like that. RDM is still mandatory at endgame. /nin is still the preferred method for most tanking. The leveling experience is GREATLY improved, in my opinion, from my memories of 75-era and any other private server to exist so far. They never claimed that they were going to completely rebalance the game, just nudging a few jobs in either direction.

Well yeah they had to do all those things, they interfered with THF's ability to be the best DPS and the best tank in the game. I'm surprised they didn't nerf WHM and give the healing to THF instead to encourage it's use as a main healer buy I guess THF love only goes so far. The entire server is just the devs fantasy of what they think they game should of been like.

Does the anti-Horizon crowd actually think THF is the best DPS on Horizon?

THF is strong because it can use Ridill and Kraken club but DRG cannot.

I haven't hit 75 yet but I can see why DDs like to sub THF just for SA + WS. It does more damage and sometimes skip magic bursts.

Not a lawyer myself(so there is a chance that I can be wrong about the law) but I think the bolded statement is very questionable. In the field of business, traffic IS an asset. If a company made a software, offered them for free on their website, that means what they are gaining from the download are traffic/exposure. It is still their asset.

If someone else copied the software and offered them for free on a different website, that person is the one gaining traffic(asset) instead of the company.

I don't know if this actually breaks the law in your country. But just a friendly reminder, if you think the reason why this is legal only because SE offered client for free(aka you personally believe it has no money involved), not because this is actually legal, then it is a fairly dangerous assumption imo.

Edit: also found this as I search.

https://lawsoup.org/legal-guides/copyright-protecting-creative-artistic-business-


If fan art can be copyright infringement, even without charging money directly, then I fail to see why FF11 private server doesn't follow the same logic. It IS FFXI IP that is being used after all, and IP IS an asset of a company.

I don't think it is like you believe, the biggest problem here is that you see FFXI as a piece of code, and cash is all that matters when it comes to profit of the entire company. when in fact FFXI is a creative IP with business value that is more than just code and cash. So whatever that applies to creative artistic business probably applies to ffxi as well.

What the hell kind of game tweaks did they implement on this server? I remember thief very well at level 75. It was a very good DD at merit party. A well geared and played thief could outparse many DD's at the greater colibri camp even without accounting for the piercing bonus. Blau dolch/sirocco kukri was a fantastic combo back then, and Mandau/blau even moreso.

But let's be real here. You weren't taking thief to HNM's and doing a ton of damage. The 2 handed jobs reigned supreme at Fafnir, Cerberus, Hydra, .. you name it. Daggers in the level 75 era had a base damage around 25-29, and that just meant that thieves were not allowed to melee most mobs with dangerous tp moves because they fed too much TP and the damage they contributed wasn't worth it. They also couldn't hit the haste cap at level 75. The most haste you could get from turban/homam/rapparee harness was 22% with swift belt or 24% if you actually owned a speed belt.

The level 75 era was very unfriendly toward dual wield jobs in general at the end game scene because dual wield DPS scaled very poorly as the mobs level climbed higher relative to the player. That limitation was far less noticable for 2 handers, which is why you saw darks and sams all over the place in HNM linkshells but just that one thief in an alliance to swap in and hit the mob once to apply treasure hunter before they got kicked back out again.

Thief is a little stronger in a standard EXP party than it was back in the 75-era, but it's still not the top DPS or really even close to it. It receives a couple traits earlier and daggers are slightly stronger. That's really it, though incidentally Acid Bolts got indirectly nerfed, as did Bloodies.

Haha, bolt spam was definately a thing back then yeah. I remember the days of carrying around a crossbow. The biggest thing I think the abyssea era and onward opened up to the dual wield jobs that increased their damage potential was higher base damage weapons. The level 75 end game was a blight upon dual wielders because mobs with high defense and cRatio reduced their white damage to next to nothing, and their weaponskills were on par with the 2 handers. We entered adoulin with base damage 45-55 daggers which was double the previous era, and that mattered. The advent of Ilvl just broke the old limitations completely. I have fond memories of the level 75 era, but I don't miss it and I certainly wouldn't want to go back. The game in its current state is the most balanced it's ever been between the dd jobs, and all of them are on relatively similar levels now.

Country? I think California's legal system is broken.

Exactly, the devs didn't like that so they boosted Thief Into atmospheric levels of power. Offensive power of the two handed jobs with the defensive power of Ninja, then they nerfed Ninja just to be sure it wasn't going to compete with Thief. Dagger WS's got boosted and Sneak Attack is so stupid OP that everyone subs it for damage. The "end game" meta is all piercing with Thief reigning at the top. For awhile it was BST's tanking and DDing everything with jug pets, but that got so out of control they had to nerf it back down. After the developer's HNMLS was done with it of course.

Oh yeah the dev / admins have their own HNMLS, just remember how competitive it was back then, now imagine one of the LS leaders having godlike ultimate authority across the server.

What a silly way to troll.

But DRG can use Kraken club..

Oh, I am aware. Same as you steal stuff from authors, computer programmers, playwrights, musicians, inventors, movie producers and more but what is SE going to do anything? How long has Nasomi been around? 10 years?

I doubt we are concerned about that except server admins. I don't plan on playing HorizonXI too much. Maybe only want one job to 75 and that's it.