If Horizon Had A $1 Monthly Fee

But what would change in regard to 3rd party, bots, gearswap and multi boxing? It would be worse, because in those eras it was incredibly easy to multibox or bot things where the battles are so slow and easy. You think if SE doesn't police their game now, they will on a 75 era server?

If none of those things were as prevelant as they are now, and looking solely at the content and what we are capable of, you really prefer 75 era? Taking ages to swing your weapon, whiffing constantly, having very little wiggle room in what your job can do in various content. Every single FF game we've had an end game where we have cool spells like Meteor or really powerful equipment and hitting damage cap. I don't see what people find special specifically about level 75.. it was extremely unbalanced, terrible pace of combat and towards the end it just got weird with melee burns everywhere and no tanks. It was not a utopia like most of you guys think it is.

I already spoke on the daily time gates, but I really don't see a difference in a daily key item and an event where you can literally spam it 24/7. During Abyssea where we found out we could stay in there forever by farming time, people lived there 24/7.. sometimes a daily lockout can be a good thing because it doesn't make people feel forced to have to participate in content for endless hours or they will miss out.

I literally lived and breathed that era as a kid. Countless hours no-lifing this game during that time. I don't get the appeal in all honesty.

So you want HNM claim systems back is basically what you're saying. We last had that in Abyssea and literally everyone hated it. The vast majority of potential XI players do not like that system and have hated it since its inception. It completely blocks people from participating in so many ways and is very antiquated. Most don't even have time for that anymore. I have to keep reminding myself that you guys are in the minority, so I am discussing with the vocal minority. Not to say anything bad, if you prefer that then sure go for it. I just personally don't see the appeal I guess.

draylo, how many people have you had this same discussion with? hundreds? thousands?

it's cringe and sad that you can't accept that people like what they like and it's not what you like.

it's just really sad

I was never 12 when I played this game, played since 2003, I enjoy all expansions for various things, wish I could go play them again in the way they were designed. I still replay many old games that are not online, like FF4-10, mario 64, KH1-2. XI suffers the fate of many live service games, I wish more care was taken to preserve the game builds/patches, but that wasn't the industry standard in the early 2000s. Thankfully the fans of the game have developed private servers to allow people like me to enjoy a game I can no longer experience. I know it's not a perfectly accurate replication, but it's closest we're going to get since SE gave up on the game.

I can sympathize with your zero-sum thought on an official classic server. It likely would be a concession of manpower that could be spent on an expansion for retail. However the likelyhood of either option is nil, so the point is moot. I'll just dream of progression servers, I can guarantee you my dreams aren't effecting retails abikity to get a new expansion.

Yes.. that's what people have been trying to explain to you. There's a bunch of games that have fully supported classic servers or a thriving 'classic' private server community. Some people like the old way of gaming, just like some people like classic, manual, shitbox 80s cars vs auto-driving, automatic cars with computer screens in the interior.

I mean I've played on and off since release in 2003. I've ran an endgame LS on private servers since 2019. I've made lots of arguments before against normal pop ground kings, but at the same time, I do realize it is a different experience you don't get anywhere else. I can understand it on both sides. I'm not saying retail needs world spawn HNMs again. I'm just saying that many of us do enjoy that lv.75 era and camping those things. It's a small minority, but everyone has their preferences.

That aside, I obviously have my issues with Horizon because it has some people on staff who went out of their way to come up with some BS about me "harassing and brigading staff" to ban me. (I criticized some enlight and HNM changes and got on Aerec's shitlist.) Playing on private servers does mean you will potentially deal with some bs from staff members, and there isn't anything that can be done about it. I can't recommend Horizon to anyone, but I will say private servers are fun for what they are.

Instead of everyone just making baseless assumptions on what is or isn't legal, why not just take the minimal effort to pull literal case numbers and other law related material? Everyone is able to look up past court trials and see their records for free along with the overall ruling and other various legal material. Rather than saying nonsense like 'I heard from a friend of a friend that another game had a private server that got sued into oblivion!' just look it up.

1. 'Reverse engineering is illegal!' - Sorry but no, it's not. This has been tried numerous times in court and is ultimately almost always ruled as fair use. Are there some cases that have ruled otherwise? Sure, like anything in life, there are always edge cases but as with anything, the overall facts of the case matter.

Here are some cases that have ruled in favor of reverse engineering being fair use, as well as one that had a mix of both fair use and infringement.

Vault Corp vs. Quaid - 847 F.2d 255 (5th Cir. 1988)

During this case, Vault sued Quaid citing copyright infringement regarding their floppy disk protection software PROLOK. Quaid created a piece of software called RAMKEY which would allow copies of the original software protected with PROLOK to function without the original disks. This worked by emulating the required fingerprint in memory (RAM) to cause PROLOK to think it was properly being used. The lawsuit would seek injunctions to prevent Quaid from advertising and selling their RAMKEY software and attempted to claim $100 million in damages.

The court ultimately ruled that Quaid's RAMKEY software was considered fair use and that copying the software into RAM was permissible under 17 U.S.C s117(1).

Atari vs. Nintendo - 975 F.2d 832 (Fed. Cir. 1992)

During this case, Atari and Nintendo sued each other for different reasons. The main point of interest from this case was Nintendo sueing Atari for reverse engineering the original NES's lockout chip that would prevent the console from playing any non-officially licensed Nintendo carts. This had a mixed ruling due to additional factors. Atari had lied and illegally obtained a copy of the source code used for the '10NES' program to advance their already working reversed efforts. The court ruled that Atari's original works that were created through reverse engineering was legal under fair use, but their additional works and creation made using the stolen code were not.

Sega vs. Accolade - 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1992)

During this case, Sega sued Accolade for something similar to what Atari did above, by reversing engineering the code required to make non-licensed carts work on the SEGA Genesis. Accolade did this by dumping and reversing the needed bits of compiled code from a licensed cart, then recoded the needed parts themselves to get their own non-licensed carts working. The court ruled that even though the material came from a copyright work, the reverse engineering and recreation of the needed code was fair use. (Originally, SEGA won the initial ruling however Accolade appealed and ultimately won their appeal with the ruling being fair use.)

Sony vs. Connectix - 203 F.3d 596 (9th Cir. 2000)

During this case, Sony sued Connectix for copyright infringement as well as addiitonal intellectual property violations. The case eventually boiled down to a matter of copyright infringement related to Connectix copying the BIOS used and required to use the PlayStation. This case landed up using the 'SEGA vs. Accolade' case as reference material and ultimately ruled in favor of Connectix 3-0 in that their work was considered fair use.

This case ended with Sony failing to appeal and the two companies settling out of court. About a year after the case, Sony would ultimately land up buying Connectix.

Further Reading..

You can also read more on the copyright law around reverse engineering, which includes a specific clause about software interoperability and preservation. In this section, they directly cite the 'SEGA vs. Accolade' case as well:

https://www.copyright.gov/policy/1201/section-1201-full-report.pdf - Section 1201 of Title 17. Page 14 under 'Permanent Exemptions'.
https://www.copyright.gov/policy/1201/section-1201-full-report.pdf - Section 1201 of Title 17. Page 15 under 'Permanent Exemptions' section 'c'.

Going along with this as well, in a more recent case of 'Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S' Oracle sued Google arguing that their API and services were copyrightable and that the recreation / emulation of these services by Google was infringement on their works. You can read about this case here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.

The court originally ruled in favor of Oracle but was later appealed and overtuned in Google's favor 6-2 that Google's recreation and usage of the API and services was fair use.

There are so many other cases like these that can be pulled and reviewed to see that, when done properly in a 'clean room' manner, reverse engineering has [almost] always been ruled fair use.

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In the case of Final Fantasy XI servers, everything is 100% clean room. There is no leaked source code or material from retail. Everything is done through reverse engineering the client and by countless hours of manual work to recreate the various calculations and other math involved to make the game work.

The claim that 'X game had a private server shutdown' or 'X game had a private server owner put in jail' and coorolating that to reverse engineering being illegal is just people being entirely clueless about the facts of those cases. If you take a minute of time to go research any case where a private server has been officially targeted and shutdown, you'll see that it ultimately always falls into one of a few reasons/cases as to why that happens. Some of those reasons are as follows:

1. The server accepted money in some manner. This is generally in direct relation to providing goods for said money. Law states that it is the sole responsibility of the intellectual property owner that they must defend their IP. When it comes to money, they can attempt to prove damages and losses if a server is accepting money in exchange for goods, such as in-game items, premium content access, or other incentives to get people to pay. It is far less likely the copyright holder would be successful in proving damages against any kind of server solely asking for donations to 'keep the lights on' so to speak.

2. The server directly uses copyrightten material from the games intellectual property. This is the leading cause as to why most private servers for other games get shut down. They will often use copyright material from the game in their website, launcher, or other means of branding / advertisements. This is absolutely against the law and the game owner has every right to go after servers that do this. Even more so when those servers are also seeking money.

3. The server is using leaked or stolen material, source code or other assets/work related to said game which again is absolutely illegal. This is not as common in the western market or with the larger scale MMORPGs or other live services games, but is extremely common in the eastern market and smaller scale MMORPGs. It is very common for eastern games to have part or all of their games materials leaked at some point. This happens because these smaller games are provided through a third-party publisher instead of the game being self-published and self-hosted. On the black market, some games' materials and source code are very desired and companies or even small teams (or rich kids) will pay top dollar to get access to a games source code. When that does eventually happen, a common thing that will happen later down the road is drama between team members which will result in the assets / code being resold for much cheaper and/or eventually just leaked publicly.

When this happens, it is pretty common that random people on the internet will take said leaked materials (be it code or precompiled binaries) and spin up their own private server using the official assets/files. Again, this is illegal.

There is a reason that many private servers for very well established companies remain online and untouched, because there is pretty much nothing the company can do to take the server down when everything is done above board, clean room and within the bounds of the law.

Here's some example cases of private servers being targeted:

Atlus vs. Rekuiemu Games / Comp_Hack - Atlus is the creator of a defunct MMORPG 'Shin Megami Tensei'. The creators of the private server brought the gmae back to life, however in doing so they recreated the original games website exactly, using copyright assets/materials.
https://casetext.com/case/atlus-co-v-sum

Blizzard Entertainment vs. Alyson Reeves (Scapegaming) - Due to the way this case played out, no actual ruling happened on Blizzards claims. Aylson failed to appear in court and lost. However, the main factor of this case is the fact that Alyson enabled donations to the server with incentives and raised over 3 million dollars which Blizzard used as proof of damages.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/cacdce/2:2009cv07621/456953/34/

Gravity Games (Ragnarok Online) vs. [Seven Private Servers] - In April of 2022, Gravity Co. (developers of Ragnarok Online) announced they were targeting and filing lawsuits against 7 private servers. They did not announce which servers those were but owners of several servers did acknowledge being one of the ones being hit. This included: 'Nova', 'Talon', and 'Solace'. Several other servers also shutdown in fear of being targeted next due to all doing the same thing, copyright infringement by using game assets/artwork on their websites.

The only case that seemed to actually end up being publicly filed was Gravity vs. Nova:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220421193329/http://renewal.playragnarok.com/news/newslist.aspx#n2224
https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/california/cacdce/2:2022cv02763/850478/26/0.pdf

The codebase used for RO servers is called rAthena and has operated for decades at this point and has never been targeted by the company. It is solely private servers that make use of the games actual copyright material and other assets that got targeted.

Fun Fact: The original first major rewrite of Final Fantasy XI's private server core from ProjectXI to DarkStar made use of rAthena's codebase as a framework to start from. You can still find various chunks of rAthena code within the latest fork for FFXI, LSB!

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2. 'Distributing The Game Client Is Illegal!' - This would actually fall under a legal grey area for FFXI. It would be difficult for SE to prove damages or stolen content is being distributed because they themselves offer the game to be downloaded, fully free, without any kind of limitation/gateways preventing you from obtaining it. You can grab the full game install directly from their website here:
http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/download/media/install_win.html

You do not have to login to see this page or access the links. Meaning even if you never played the game, or ever had an active subscription you can still download the full game client. Next, PlayOnline does not require you to enter valid information in order to access the 'Check Files' page in order to update your client. You do not have to login first either. You can keep Final Fantasy XI fully up to date without ever logging into retail or owning an actual account/subscription.

Now is it in a private servers best interest to bundle their own install? No. We actively discourage it as well and suggest servers stay up to date with LSB and require players to use the latest retail client. This in turn allows the private server to never need to distribute any kind of copy of the installer to avoid any kind of legal nonsense/trouble that could stem from this situation. It is ultimately up to the owners of the given servers if they wish to take that advice or not.

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3. 'It's against the ToS/EULA therefore it's against the law!' - Nope. Terms of Service (ToS) and End-User License Agreements (EULA) are contracts you make between yourself and the company, they are not law. By breaking an agreement within these contracts, it does not automatically mean you just broke the law. These are designed to protect the copyright holder of legal recourse from the user in most cases. Generally, these boil down to 'if you break these rules, we reserve the right to terminate your account'.

Everyone is generally breaking some EULA they have inadvertently agreed to for any number of products or services in their every day life. Does that mean everyone walking around on earth is suddenly a felon? No.

Let's look at FFXI's EULA for example, there are several clauses in it that are broken daily by nearly every player:

Using Ashita and/or Windower is a direct violation of these clauses in the EULA. Every single addon/plugin you have loaded is also an additional violation of them.

This website, BG-Wiki, etc. are all in violation of this clause.

Something countless people do every day.

I mean.. it's the FFXI community, need I say more lol?

And so on. The point being, pretty much everyone on this forum has broken one of the clauses in FFXI's EULA over the lifespan of the game. Does that mean you're going to jail? No.

Biggest and perhaps first example of this being one of if not the most played MMO in the world: Runescape. Jagex only brought back OSRS because people demanded it.

That said I personally think classic XI sucked and probably wouldn't play an era server but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.

lol imagine trying to invoke the popularity argument when discussing FFXI of all things. Nevermind the fact that once you trim out the RMT and multiboxes, the retail population isn't exactly dwarfing the private server population.

FFXI literally owes its life to the fact that people developed Windower to cover up SEs mind-bogglingly stupid decision to put in mandatory fullscreen.

You want to ignore all the facts already explained to you in the other thread just to think its in shamble. Pretty sad lol

***like this really hammers home the fact that you're the troll here. Or at least I hope so, because if you can't see the clear difference between all of the things you've presented as the same, there's no helping you.

Horizon is like the sun rising over a beautiful golf course in Florida.

In shambles? Nah.

But you can't pretend that retail has some sort of robust population while private servers are ghost towns.

Well, I mean, you can pretend, but you'd just be pretending.

but after a year less than half the holes are finished and the ones that ARE finished have weird non-regulation customizations that seem like they were designed by someone who's never played golf before

Did Horizon ever say they planned on having the entirety of 75-cap FFXI available within a year? I'm asking this genuinely since I didn't follow anything leading up to the launch of Horizon.

And why are retail players so prone to overexaggerating the differences between Horizon and 75-era XI?

nah but they have been pushing back the promised toau content for literal months now, and all that content is already done (and done better) on other pservers. nice strawman tho

most of the people who don't think the custom changes are bad or 'that different' almost definitely had very loose, very fallible memories of how 75 era retail was in the first place. just seeing the insanely dumb ***people say daily in the discord underscores this notion. it's a great server for first-time nostalgia tourists who just want to relive that old experience of getting to level 30-something on a couple jobs, getting bored with the grind and quitting, just like they did in 04. they wouldn't know a custom change if it blasted them in the nuts so of course they won't see why that custom change is actually dogsh*t

most pserver vets have already given up on horizon, and the ones who do still play will only do so for as long as it retains the biggest pop. you don't think it's a coincidence that the vast majority of people going to every ff11 stream and/or forum obnoxiously screeching about "PLAY HORIZON" are the dudes still in their pserver honeymoon phase, do you?

does breaking the law always mean going to jail? jw

It's utterly absurd to claim that the changes on Horizon have made the game unrecognizable. The game is still played very closesly to the way it was in the 75-era. The prime difference is that the playerbase is now significantly more experienced at gaming than they were in the 75-era. Most people became better at video games and cooperation. The mechanics of the game are now well-understood rather than being the esoteric mess they once were. I don't think the changes are bad because most of the complaints surrounding them are "they make the game easier!" when really the game is easier largely because of the reasons I just mentioned.

damn true good thing i didn't make that claim or i'd be in trouble


and yet they talk and play as if they just woke up from a 20 year coma and reread the brady games guide for a refresher


i mean if anything the most egregiously bad changes were the ones that unnecessarily tried to make already well-balanced things worse/less-balanced (ie: the way the genius 'balance team' handled pld, nin, rdm etc)

i won't even mention the laughably OP BST pets because no serious player brings BST to serious endgame anyway

Do they? Does anyone actually claim that Horizon is the exact same as 75-era XI?


Even as bad as you allege these changes to be, they don't really affect the core of the game to the point where Horizon is drastically different than 75-era XI.

It doesn't matter really. FFXI is completely garbage and SE don't want it anymore. Given how many multi boxing players are in FFXIV and they are very fast at everything. SE obviously preferred FFXIV's system better because it's designed to prevent legitimate players from being harassed by bots and it's working so SE don't have to police anything at all. Like I have mentioned many times in the official forum in the past, the only way for FFXI to continue and receive major updates is to remake the entire engine.

Thanks for the post, I appreciate that you took the time to cite references. Despite what Saevel is said, I've not made my mind up on anything, more on that later

What I'm still unclear on is this:


What is the legal barrier between being "clean room" or not? Are you freely able to disassemble client binaries to create a protocol spec so the client can interact with the server or would disassembling the client binaries violate this?

In what I could find about Cyrix's process, they observed the behavior of instructions and the processor, but didn't actually physically disassemble it. This seems somewhat comparable for the examples you posted above, you can observe some behavior without disassembly particularly for some hardware and APIs. The equivalent here would be observing FFXI network activity to replicate it, but not disassembling the client binaries, would it not? What I'm trying to gather is what is considered "clean room" and when is that no longer applicable. If the answer is you can freely RE the client to replicate it, then great, but I'm curious if that's an established case or not.

I guess I'll explain why I'm pressing on this. I've been in proximity to legal problems with reverse engineering twice now. The first time was a job I worked at, one of my peers had published some code he reverse engineered related to hardware and a series of software bugs. The company who owned them absolutely bent us over to the point I wasn't even able to publish disassembly for anything the entire time I worked there without approval, but they had a number of other legal stipulations like we weren't allowed to do work on any of their other products or even own them for a period of time (as a company, not individually). I know of several instances of this same thing happening, some of which are higher profile than others (Michael Lynn / Cisco being one example that's very similar and probably the most high profile). I'm trying not to dox myself here, but I'm sure if you have been involved in the RE community prior to 2008ish, you know at least one of these incidents, probably more because they were widely discussed and the legal implications never really made clear (it didn't matter to me post 2010). This cast a long shadow over everything we did there for years. The second is a little closer to this situation, we were working on reverse engineering an old game client to mod it and make it work on current platforms. The project was taken down from bitbucket, the only non-reverse engineered assets we published were some of the original debugging symbols, which we located because early versions of the game shipped with symbol data, which later versions obfuscated. They also did some "encryption" (I use that term loosely) for their files, which we reverse engineered and published including the "keys", but it was really just some lame obfuscation attempt. Some of the text/dialogue in-game was hardcoded instead of being a separate resource, as well, but I don't recall if we had gotten to that or not (the early repo I have doesn't have it).

I understand there is a difference between going to court and cowing under legal threats, but I never really grasped why this was a problem in both these cases and projects like LSB continue to be permissible legally unless the answer is just that SE isn't willing to make empty threats and the companies above were (or, as I asked before, if this is actually settled or not)

Nothing is contradictory there though. Nobody in these topics has claimed Horizon to be a 1:1 replica of 75-era XI. The point I keep iterating is that the changes on Horizon haven't substantially altered the game. The overall differences are minor and the meta on Horizon is almost exactly the same as it was in 75-era XI.

right into


I'm convinced you're S-tier trolling now.

I've gotta ask though, do you just like arguing with Draylo because it's Draylo, or is there some other reason you've been white knighting Horizon for 8 pages? Seems like such a weird hill to die on.

Anyone can quickly browse through the patch-notes channel in their discord and see all the "Era+" differences between Horizon and retail 75. Your description of them being "minor" is subjective and easily debatable, considering the sheer number of changes.

Your first point is valid, nobody is claiming Horizon is a replica of retail 75 era. How you then pivot to "there's hardly any changes and it's basically the same game" in the very next sentence is straight gaslighting.

this is just advertisement for horizon.
As long as its the most active thread, it will keep getting attention for horizon. that is it. its that simple. that is why the trolls keeping this thread alive.

don't feed the trolls.