Greetings fellow adventurers and staff alike! It’s time for the first official HorizonXI Letter from the Director. With launch right around the corner it’s time for me to have my first open talk with the community - so here we go!
First and foremost, I guess I should introduce myself for those of you unfamiliar with who I am. I’m Aerec obviously! Well that’s the short of it, the long story starts around 20 years ago when I first picked up Final Fantasy 11. My sister was originally gifted the game which she tried playing on my father’s ancient laptop. However, she ended up not really playing much, so I took over trying the game - and here we are! I originally played on the Lakshmi server, but I also played on Bahamut at one point. In recent years, I played modern retail on Asura.
After spending some time in the military, I stumbled across my first FFXI private server: Supernova. The friends and staff I met there stuck with me, but I quickly desired to play something that felt more like the original 75 cap experience - that’s when I found another private server called Nasomi. You have to give the guy credit, what Nasomi did for the community was far reaching. He shed more light on the FFXI private server scene than had ever existed before, and many players learned of private servers for the first time. But alas, while many of us found friends and new adventures on Nasomi, those times did not last. So I took my leave and went to the one place I never saw myself going: current day retail.
Well boy was it fun! It was a completely different game than the one I grew up playing, but still fun in its own right. After another slew of successful endgame achievements and more friends and linkshells, I took my first break from the FFXI scene. Yet, I still missed the feelings FFXI always sparked in me, so I went through dozens of other games trying to scratch that itch - but it never really went away. On a whim, a group of friends I had met over the years during my time playing FFXI said, “Hey dude, want to go another round at 11?” There was no question in my mind when I said, “I’m there guys.” And that’s how I started playing on Wings. Man, what a roller-coaster ride that was. I never thought I would ever become as involved as I ended up being in the scene when I first created my character there. Eventually I found myself developing code for my favorite expansion: Chains of Promathia. I’ll always remember duoing Ix’Drk with my best friend on Lakshmi, so I wanted to be able to experience that with him on Wings. Accordingly, I set completing Chains of Promathia content as my first major development milestone.
Things quickly evolved from there, and I found myself running the beta server to get things tested - which meant I also joined the GM team. Shortly after that, due to unforeseen circumstances regarding staff availability, I found myself amongst the admin team helping perform updates and ensuring the server stayed afloat. I won’t go into details, but after a year of working as an administrator on Wings and meeting some amazing people along the way, a thought began creeping into my mind. “Aerec, haven't we all done this before? Haven’t some people played these servers three or four times now, and it’s always the same experience?” And so my crazy idea of Era+ started to solidify. First, I brainstormed with some friends in the background, and thankfully some of them reigned in my more crazy ideas... But I also felt as if they began to see the potential of what I was proposing. And so Lilisette was born - but it was more of a fleeting thought at the time, and a side project to Wings. Shortly after I began working on basic concepts for what I thought the server should be.
A few months later, I found myself no longer working on the Wings project due to “creative differences”. As such, I finally had time to start working hard on this whole Lilisette thing. Some of my friends who left the Wings staff and development team around this time also found themselves without a home, but wanted something to work on. That’s when we started the AirSkyBoat emulation project - a plan to bring a LandSandBoat derivative into the 75 era that we had started on Wings but never finished. Through working on “ASB”, my friends started to hear of the work my little Lilisette team was doing, and they started to become interested in the project. Through discussion with them and myself outlining what I wanted to do with the project, we realized we weren’t completely aligned at the time. They wanted a more accurate 75 cap era server, and I wanted something more custom. But we all wanted to make something great together, so we compromised. At the end of the day - I wanted a home where I could play and develop FFXI with my friends - and so HorizonXI was born.
This was a new horizon for our team, and what we hoped would be a fun new horizon for the FFXI private server community. The same feel of the 75 era with small changes to make the game feel new and fresh and give that same sense of exploration the original game made us all fall in love with. So here we are almost a year later. Some of you have been here since we made our public Discord, and some of you reading this now just joined today! We are excited to see each and every one of you adventuring in Vana’diel once again. Let’s get into the real stuff now!
Topic 1: Let’s Talk Launch
We’re almost there! It’s going to be an exciting day for all of us. I’m sure it will be a stressful day for Staff, but we hope that it’s exciting and fun for our adventurers. As of now, I can confirm that we have done two things: (1) we have heavily increased the density of the level one mobs directly outside the gates in each of the starting cities; and (2) we have lowered the respawn times of all mobs in the starting zones. Due to the increased density of level one mobs, there may be some minor lag as each of these monsters was built using the “Dynamic Monster” system that I’m sure you will see quite a bit more throughout your time on HorizonXI. If there is any lag at all, it is primarily caused by the overloading of packets sent by these types of dynamic mobs. For those of you who were online during the Beta stress test, you would have experienced this when we spawned a few hundred mobs at a time in Southern San d'Oria. Any lag should stop when the client successfully processes the mobs (if there is any lag at all). As previously stated, we have also greatly reduced the respawn time of all mobs in the starting zones (with Notorious Monster Placeholders being excepted from this). Due to the increased volume of mobs and the greatly reduced respawn cooldowns we have also temporarily reduced certain item drop rates on these mobs (so they can’t be exploited early).
Please note that we will be disabling this increased spawn system as soon as the player base spreads out enough to handle things properly. We are also prepared to reduce spawns in other zones depending on player density and how it spreads over the first few hours and days. But we didn’t want to go overboard without knowing how many of you will be playing at launch. We just wanted to be as open as possible on this subject - we hope this will allow players to adventure without much of a hiccup. Also, we suggest you group up with some friends and explore elsewhere as soon as possible! (You might find a secret or two~)
Topic 2: Community Feedback
Let’s talk about community feedback. You have no idea how much we care about this. We first need the community to understand one thing: This is a vision that dozens of us have been working on for almost a year. We want to deliver to you two things: (1) an “Era” FFXI experience that recreates that same feeling that you all felt years ago when you first played; and (2) provide you with something new that is a bit different than the things that have come before. In order to maintain this vision, we promise to look at community feedback and adjust as needed, but we have also promised ourselves that any adjustments we make will stay true to our vision so we don’t lose the spirit of what we worked so hard to create.
With this in mind, please note that we already have a few things on our minds post launch:
- Regular evaluation of job balance.
- Level sync system adjustments as needed.
- Certain game systems balancing.
We have some ideas in our back pockets for other game systems that we have not yet implemented due to wanting to see how our playerbase reacts to the launch state of the game. For example, our “Recruit a Friend” system is actually already complete, but we felt it would be abused if it was available at the launch of the server. I also wanted to personally let you know that we are always listening to your feedback, and that in the future there will be more official avenues of contacting the team about your thoughts on the game design of HorizonXI.
Topic 3: Character Name Reservation
Time for the big announcement! Please watch Developer Blog #7 on December 11th, as we will be opening Character Name Reservation during this blog and walking everyone through character creation. Please remember that during Name Reservation you will only be allowed to reserve one character name. So choose wisely~
Finally the sappy stuff:
First to you, our adventurers. Almost every day I am stunned to look at what has been done here. From the deepest depths of my heart I thank you: thanks for the support, thanks for reaching out and bringing your friends, family and acquaintances to Horizon. Thanks for being so passionate, thanks for interacting with the team, and thanks for being so supportive all this time. You have no idea how many times it was you and your involvement and support that kept us going through many many sleepless nights. We made this for you, so that you could enjoy adventuring one more time again in a world we all know and love - Vana’diel.
To my staff… It has been a wild ride right guys? How many crazy ideas were shut down? How many secretly implemented… (Oops..) But here we are, a year later with a server full of support and a community none of us expected. First, to my wonderful fiance Beira, without your support I don’t think I would have ever gotten as far as I have. Thanks for letting me be so passionate about something that a lot of people would have found crazy. To the other admins: Ophie, Frank, and Crit (We finally got you!) - thanks for being passionate with me and bringing this vision to life. The many hours of us sitting in discord coding, laughing, and messing around will stay with me forever! To our community managers, Kip and Annona. Thanks, you have no idea how much you do and provide for the team. You alone provide so much support allowing the dev team to sit back and do what we love. To our amazing art and design team… Shuu, Beira, Jas, Bees, Alaris, Zeppo, Mando. Holy munchies everyday I get to wake up and see the amazing art that you have made for the community and Horizon and it blows me away. To our music team: Emi, Tweex, Uzzy, Chary, Roso. I never thought that my crazy idea of custom music and recomposed music for the game would come to fruition.. But here we are and I think you all hit a home run. The community is going to love every second of your tracks. To our developers, especially Flam, Judaine, Damarus, Jmcmorris, Kore, Abdiah, and Public. It has been a great joy to work and code with you along the way. Without each of your efforts we would never be where we are today. To our balancers and testers, our community volunteers. It has brought me a great deal of pleasure working with each and every one of you. Seeing people so passionate about this game that they would devote their time to help in such ways is a testament to our community.
Finally, a special thanks to members of the community who have helped lead the way and helped us along the road:
- LandSandBoat
- Atom0s
- Zach2good
- Velyn
- Latte
- Ashenbubs
- Claywar
- Winter
- Teo
- Xaver
- Jimmayus
- Heals
- Thorny
- KnowOne, Ino, and the rest of the EdenXI Team
- And many many others
Without the above list of folks, the Final Fantasy 11 private server community wouldn’t be where it is today and neither would we. I am glad to be a member of a community with such dedicated and outstanding people.
With all the above stated, that concludes the first Letter from the Director! Stay tuned for the second one, I hear I'll be doing a video.
All the best and Happy Adventuring,
