So Why Did You Quit? (and Still Read FFXIAH?)

It's as the title says: Why did you quit FFXI? (or take a break?). How long was it? Why did you come back?

And of course, if you're not subbed to FFXI anymore, why do you read FFXIAH in the meantime? :)

Just curious.

Initially I quit FFXI in 2013 for what felt like for real because my ex and I had broken up, and I'd kinda rearranged my whole XI experience to cater to playing with her. Sorta soured the game by association.

But you make friends here on this site, so I kept coming around to see/read people I like.

Came back to XI in 2016 for a short stint on Sylph to try and play with Shadowlina, but it didn't last. Came back in 2017 though, to finish Seekers of Adoulin and Start/Finish Rhapsodies. Didn't stick around though, because all my friends were gone. My brother was on a different server, and I couldn't wrap my head around modern progression/events/XI in general because I'd been playing FFXIV's cookie cutter combat too much for too long. The idea of gearsets was literally giving me headaches.

Then I actually let my sub lapse in 2019 for XI, for the first time, mainly because I didn't think it was getting anything added to it that I'd be interested in. Stuck around here because, again, people I like are here and nowhere else really. And I guess I got mod status around then? I can't remember when I became a moderator.

FFXIV had what felt like a long wait for its most recent expansion in 2021. This prompted me to want to play XI, but I wanted extra incentive to play, so I decided to start a Let's Play for XI in 2021 while waiting on XIV's Endwalker. Endwalker has largely been a disappoint in all areas, but XI has recaptured my heart. Even reviewing its entire story while trying to think of commentary and read aloud almost all of its story dialogue has only strengthened my love for it.

I quit in 2013 the first time after the birth of my daughter, I also moved and all my friends went to FFXIV. I ended up joining them in FFXIV a few months after and played that game through the Alexander raids. There was a long hiatus of new endgame in 14 and at the same time an old friend got back into 11.

I joined him around 2016?? and we played together until we had a falling out in 2019. I solo multi-boxed for another 18 months until I found myself just playing to play. I made tons of R15 REMA and some I still haven't used lol. One day I DCed and didn't feel like logging in all my accounts. I went back to 14, caught up on 2 expansions slow walking the story. Once that was done I quite and didn't play anything for 5-6 months.

I came back again in 2022 out of boredum one night and ran into an old friend a couple weeks later. I've been playing with him ever since and its been fun. I also only played 1 account for a change which was a breath of fresh air. I'm currently back to 2 accounts since 1 account has some limitations with stuff like trove. (3 is probably perfect but I'm resisting hard)

Because I played it for long enough and feel like playing something else for a change.

I quit then resub a couple of times in the past, it's pretty much almost always the same reason.


I kinda enjoyed the small-ish community of FFXIAH. Also I am curious about the game's current condition even without an active sub.

Sortie.

Beholding the grind of it as a casual player was very off putting. I can only join PUGs and Statics do not work for my schedule, so it felt very out of reach as 6-man content (that no one PUGs). Seeing Prime weapons are wholly tied to it makes me want to come back even less.


I played 2014-2023 (canceled sub in Feb).


I keep hoping to see alliance content, or non-sortie based new stuff.

Edit: Because people care for some reason, I have 3 characters that I routinely would cycle through. Of course now that 8 mog wardrobes are a thing this is kinda redundant. But #BackInMyDay I didn't have enough inventory space to BiS 6 jobs on one guy. And I don’t feel like trying to get the REMA all over again on a fresh Brd when I already have it on a different char.

I quit in 2011 or 2012 as someone that was playing 7 days a week 8+ hours a day previously, I had a ton of fun with Abyssea with a friend but it was fast burn content and ultimately after I was done with it my HNMLS was dead, all my other endgame shells were gone and all the things I wanted to do were near impossible with a few people. I was stuck in a game where I could do nothing with 1-2 people now, and was bored of Abyssea.

I tried 14, quit in disgust pretty quickly, most of the people I knew didn't like it at all either.

I played Tera for a few years but at the point I had 13 characters and every day was doing dailies x10 x13 and they literally never added anything after a couple of years. I also hated the constant gear resets.

I was playing other multi player games for a while. Paladins, Warframe, ESO, WoW, Rift...pretty much everything else and didn't like any of them much.

One day I saw there was a return home campaign and wanted to login and just mess around in tree or see if anyone I knew was around cause I was feeling a bit down from rl stuff, it felt nice to be back in the game even if I couldn't really do much still. I checked the XI reddit sub cause I knew nothing that they had added over the years, and saw people talking about sparks gear. I was still wandering around in my HNMLS stuff. I checked it after finding how to get it on wiki, saw the insane stats on it and had a blast killing stuff on my own cause of how strong sparks gear was. I then got my trusts which completely blew my mind again, figured out all the other stuff again.

Been playing ever since, it's pretty barren out there if you're used to XI.

I tried FFXIV fairly recently as an alternative to FFXI. The combat is to 1-2-3… 1-2-3… 1-2-3… for me. Albeit I did like the RP on Crystal Datacenter.

I didn't mind rotations too much on Tera because action combat made it fun, but on XIV it was just pointless busy work.

The rotations in Heavensward were spot on and really pushed players to maximize DPS. Stance dancing as a tank was incredibly engaging to me.

They really messed up after that trying to balance all the jobs.

I don't remember my timeline but i've quit a bunch of times over the years. I only come back because I knew (whenever I was coming back) that I was coming into a group of friends to do things with so it always kept it interesting. Had I stayed in Siren I would've, unfortunately, not had that.

...unless I learned japanese, who knows. Anyway.

The reasons why I quit were almost always because the people I played with weren't as active or quit as well, and so I didn't have a lot of motivation to do things on my own. I just like playing with folks. Always sucked watching a linkshell go from 20+ people to like 5 afk folks. At least we have discord and that kinda thing now.

In between being gone I've played a lot of stuff. I played TERA for a short bit when it first came out (I still have the CE for it somewhere in my house) but quickly got bored of soloing BAMs and—just like xiv—only the highest level gear mattered, so there was nothing in the way of sidegrades and variety. Don't get me started on the unnecessarily brutal reforging methods that had consumable materials and gear that could break. I got into the japanese PSO2 servers again after not playing since the beta and that kept me occupied a couple years, then it came out in the west and it wasn't the same, yadda yadda.

I still play XIV and PSO2 occasionally to clear dailies, but XI's experience is fairly specific and hasn't been replicated anywhere I don't think. Especially since I'm not there to like, roleplay with strangers or something. I just wanna play videogame.

This 100% for me too. After 19.5 years, the spark has gone out. I found myself slowly not caring and I honestly just lost interest, I just wasn't having fun anymore. I loved the Linkshell I was a part of though, great group of people to play with, especially knowing some of them through my social LS.

I started a social/endgame shell with a couple in-game friends back in 2005, who some people said that we would never be able to complete any said content, but we did. We were pretty high calibre players, and it was fun as *** lowmanning content in unorthodox setups. It wasn't until 2016 or 2017 that our shell started dwindling away due to RL. I still enjoyed the game and pressed on, but the daily grinds and 6-man content really started to irk me.

I'm done with MMOs now, I just don't have the time anymore. I've been revisiting older games I haven't completed, and it's actually been great.

I'll keep on lurking around here to see what's up, kinda hard to let go of something you've been a part of for almost 20 years.

Cause i've quit and come back like 4x. My friends still play. My 20 year old LS still plays. My 6 man endgame group just kept losing players, and finaly enough is enough.

Still like to see how the weapons turn out etc. But 6 months to make one, no thanks. I got 20 ML jobs, not gonna spend 6 months of daily grind to make weapons for them each.

Team mates quit cause the rng required to beat oddy ***. Get bad aura and you lose, so stupid. Have all the skill and gear, but if the rng says m.attk down etc ur *** and can't win. Should have made it 18 man content, so you don't need 6 man full teams.

This time looks to be final quit, but who knows right?

My biggest break was shortly after beating the Voidwatch content. I kinda took a step back and really didn't like how the leveling grind (which I found fun) was replaced by standing around opening chests. And I was sad looking at all of the old gear for which I overcame huge hurdles to acquire that was made obsolete by stuff like the Aurore and Teal sets. This was also after I'd lost the names of all of my main characters to a crappy server merge as well. Just a lot of little things, and ultimately I felt like I was starting to log in solely out of an obligation to my subscription.

I quit for a while, started trying a lot of other games with varying degrees of interest. Roughly a decade passed. A friend invited me to try XIV. Try as I might, I couldn't get into it. My brain kept comparing it to XI. I resubbed to XI to prove to myself that it was just an antiquated XIV and that it was all rose-colored glasses. But I quickly realized it wasn't. So I came back. But now I only log in on my own terms and never out of obligation.

FFXIAH is just a great place to be. I was here a long time ago, so when I rejoined the game I quickly made myself present here as well. Forums are such a more personal and less toxic form of social media, at least compared to the likes of Facebook and Twitter. So I like it here~

Similar story to everyone else here, at a point where I take a long break and come back when there’s new things to mess around with. Been gone almost 3 years this time around but the FFXIAH community is nice to chat with from time to time.

I haven’t tried Odyssey yet but it seems Grindy from an outsider’s perspective though I won’t know til I actually do it. But Empy +3 is available now and soloable, and we have the ML50 grind? That’s sounds (and currently feels like) the old school FFXI grind I used to know and love.

I probably won’t get any sort of R30 Bumba set or anything of the sort but I should be able to manage some +3 sets and the extra power that comes with ML50 on my favorite jobs.

Sign me back up, at least for a short while lol

Here’s the thing about playing this game as adults. As it stands, this game isn’t going anywhere far or fast from here on out. What’s the rush to obliterating content as fast as possible just to run in circles in Port Jeuno and “quit”? To each his own but I’ve definitely embraced just doing stuff with my friends when we are able.

We coordinate through discord as best we can and when we get on, we get some stuff done, help each other with personal solo goals, talk ***, and have a good time. I like my small community and our pace. I’d love to get more to join! Either way, we will beat the game one day, just not in any rush to do so!

Quit multiple times due to similar reasons - too much time spent in game, addiction, burnout, leading to quitting cold turkey.

First few times was 75 era, game was too time consuming. Like weekly events now days, much more reasonable playing time.

Solid group of friends that enjoy playing together keeps me playing.

Diablo IV came out.

Who said I quit? I'm still playing. You sound like a FOOL right now.

I have been playing for the last 2 years or so with no breaks, but I had quit previously. I started playing around 2002/2003, and quit around 2009/2010. I was growing a little bored of the game, new ones were coming out, and being bogged down with events in-game was taking its tole.

The other reason was really just that Abyssea had JUST came out and the level cap was raised to 80. I leveled up half of my jobs, think about 10 of them, from 75-80 and then got upset that everyone getting level 1-80 in like 24 hours or less per job. I was about 2-3 jobs away from Maat's cap at the time and felt like it invalidated all of my work and very casual players were about to have it for no effort at all.

To compound this, the new level 80 gearsets were OP and completely outclassed things like Ebody, which I had just finally earned that year. It looked like the direction the game was taking was one that didn't align with everything that the game was originally based on, so I thought to was time to leave. In hindsight, Abyssea actually ended up looking like fun, but I don't regret the new friends and new games I would have missed out on if I stayed. I had a lot of fun in Wrath of the Lich King for a year and then moved onto multiplayer co-op games with friends. League, Minecraft, D3, Warframe and even FFXIV: ARR around 2014.

I didn't actually miss FFXI for years. I tried to come back around 2015 or 2016 to see how the game was, but my account password got lost and SE support is probably some of the worst in the business, on top of a terrible UI. For years and years I tried getting my password recovered/reset but they refused to do it. Every one of them wanted my old CC that was on file, but I hadn't had that in YEARS at that point. Despite giving them ALL of my CD keys, character info, DoB, Name etc. they still refused. I kept trying annually just for the hell of it, and finally one of the support staff was like "okay, done." and I came back around 2021 and haven't left yet.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

I did quit 3-4 months ago, mainly 'cause i don't like the progression and endgame loop or Retail.
Daily Odyssey and Daily Sortie are too much for me to bear, on top of Dynamis and OMEN, as weekly activities.
I appreciate the story line of TVR but other then that i am kinda bored with the game in general as i do not like Sortie and other then that i did everything.

And on why i still read FFXIAH mainly 'cause i like to check if there have been any new releases of content or if the endgame loop is moving away from Odyssey/Sortie which.. is not

I did quit 3-4 months ago, mainly 'cause i don't like the progression and endgame loop or Retail.
Daily Odyssey and Daily Sortie are too much for me to bear, on top of Dynamis and OMEN, as weekly activities.
I appreciate the story line of TVR but other then that i am kinda bored with the game in general as i do not like Sortie and other then that i did everything.

And on why i still read FFXIAH mainly 'cause i like to check if there have been any new releases of content or if the endgame loop is moving away from Odyssey/Sortie which.. is not

I did quit 3-4 months ago, mainly 'cause i don't like the progression and endgame loop or Retail.
Daily Odyssey and Daily Sortie are too much for me to bear, on top of Dynamis and OMEN, as weekly activities.
I appreciate the story line of TVR but other then that i am kinda bored with the game in general as i do not like Sortie and other then that i did everything.

And on why i still read FFXIAH mainly 'cause i like to check if there have been any new releases of content or if the endgame loop is moving away from Odyssey/Sortie which.. is not

I took a short break for a couple weeks to deal with some RL things and then I realized I didn't miss this game one bit. Had every intention of resubbing (after my sf6 phase dies off), but I see I haven't missed anything these past few months. And they've triple downed on the Sortie grind and prime weapons alone haven't given me much motivation to resub. I still pop in here to read what's going on but it's summer soon and RL during this time of year is a lot more busy than standing afk for hours or shout watching or missing out on segs/sortie cuz it filled up and now you're stuck with nothing you do.

Unpopular opinion: most people will quit FFXI if they took one week break from the game. The only thing keeping most of us playing at any given time is the fact that we haven't taken a break and FOMA makes you think you will be behind if you do. Once you step away, whether intentionally or otherwise, you'll see FOMA is totally fake and you can rejoin at any time and enjoy the game at a later point. Or not. I think it's cool the game isn't so far out of reach if you take a break here and there, as it does encourage resubbing

See you soon (in my Kang voice)

I love when one person has some experience and thinks everyone is the same.

The game is 22 years old, many have quit and come back. Many take breaks longer than a week often and still come back.

It's not an addiction, it's a hobby. I've played pretty much every online game you can play, many of which are far more technically impressive than XI. I still come back to XI.

This is as stupid as telling someone if they stop gardening for a week they will never want to garden again, or fishing or whatever.

That is generally how it works. Breaking away for just a day or two gives you the clarity to realize you been *** up.

Of course not everyone is self aware.

This! I quite often take a break from XI to do something else like most recently XIVs raids, Diablo IV and again once XVI comes out. Ill probably login do Dyna once the campaign starts then log off.

I quat playing because I hate the new endgame (Ody). But I stay subbed because I love my LS and friends.

I keep posting here because I remember the glory days of Nov '21(?) PACKETS threads, and the memes that abounded, and when even Rooks posted "wtf is going on here?", it was a magical time.

Two weeks ago I had to go to Vegas for a one week conference, didn't play at all during that time as I didn't have time. Got home and picked it right back up.

Having said that, I hate that the "end game" content is just two events with only one being real FFXI. This game really needs a melee / alliance friendly "end game" content. Something akin to Omen where you can do it with six, but are free to bring in up to 18. That way friends aren't left behind and the population gets less segmented into private 6 man statics.

I think this is what everyone was crossing their fingers for with Sortie. Oh well.

I quit a million times over the years and quit a few months ago. Multiboxing killed the fun for me (don't do it) and my PC is falling apart.

You also only live one life everyone. Have different experiences than MMOs.

I started playing way less once odyssey was added, soloed a bunch of points with the intent of getting into boss fights but everything was small groups that alrdy had static’s made. No more alliance content meant I couldn’t show up when I had time and participate in events and have fun, ended up either doing stuff by myself or just logging in and doing nothing.

I started playing again recently but it’s just low lvl lvling and missions with my son who just started playing with me, that’s probably all I’ll do with the game now till we move on to some other game we can play together.

Not true lol. I took 2 longer breaks(2 years) and dozens of smaller breaks from 2 weeks to 6 months in past 10 years whenever I don't feel like playing anymore. I still resub when I feel like playing again and vice versa. Also you don't need to quit to see that FOMA: you'll always be behind whenever a new gear or content is out even if you stay subbed. Why do you need to quit to see that :p.