YMMV / Final Fantasy XI

• Adorkable: Aphmau might be an empress, but hell if she isn't this when she falls flat to her face when she tries to greet you.
• Alt-itis: An interesting case, since you can change class and start over from level 1 without creating a new character.
• Broken Base:
  • For many players, "Red Mage" and "sensible update" cannot possibly exist in the same sentence. For completely opposing reasons, however. Also, opinions are rabidly split over meleeburns.
  • No one can seem to agree on whether astral burn is cheating or not.
  • There's also the gradual raising of the level cap from 75 to 99, after years of the best gear at 75 being the best in the game. For some, it means the game becomes more soloable or less people are required to get things done, for others it means their hard-earned gear now amount to nothing compared to the new stuff. Either way, there will be a grind.
• Complete Monster: Eald'narche, from the Rise of the Zilart Expansion Pack, is revealed as a prince of the Zilart from 10,000 years ago. After he made contact with the Mothercrystal, Eald'narche became obsessed with opening the Gate of the Gods and becoming a god. After the Zilart's plans to open the Gate using the Crystal Line were thwarted, Eald'narche and his brother Kam'lanaut were sealed in stasis until they were freed and began plotting to try again. After coldly dismissing his brother and letting him die, Eald'narche ascends to Tu'Lia to attempt to reactivate the Crystal Line. When Eald'narche is defeated, he attempts to reactivate the Crystal Line prematurely, intending to cause a meltdown that will destroy Vana'diel and kill everyone living on it.
• Demonic Spiders: Rarab enemies at high levels; Rarabs start as The Goomba, the weakest enemies in the game ... however they attack fast and even have a self-healing move called Wild Carrot. At levels 119+ Rarabs can become absolutely brutal, they attack lightning fast, spam weapon skills, and Wild Carrot can now heal in the ballpark of thousands of health ... which if a player is unlucky, they can use over and over.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Shantotto. Square seems to have taken notice of this and included her as the de facto representative for this game in crossovers.
  • Cornelia Karst is a supporting character who is only really important to the Bastok missions, but her colorful design and upbeat personality endeared her to players. Years after her last in-game appearance, she won a popularity poll and became a temporary Trust. When her powerful and popular GEO Trust was retired, Japanese fans thanked her on Twitter.
  • Among the villains, Lady Lilith is easily the most popular villain despite not getting nearly as much attention from Square as The Shadow Lord, The Zilart Princes and Promathia. Fans love her for her tragic back story, understandable motives and Fanservice design. She was the runner up in the above popularity poll to become a temporary trust.
  • The "Waifu" heroes; Lion, Prishe, Aphmau, Lilisette, Arciela, and Iroha all have enjoyed popularity due to being the face of their individual expansions, as well as their spotlight received in the spin-offs of Dissidia (Prishe in the 012 incarnation, the rest in the DFFOO mobile game).
• Fan Nickname:
  • So many Mithras are played by males that everyone calls them "Manthras".
  • Due to the numerous similarities between the playable races in both games, fans going to FFXI from FFXIV and vice versa tend to nickname one game's race after their equivalent from the other (ex: calling Tarutarus, "Lalafells", or calling Mithras, "Miqo'tes".)
• Fanon Discontinuity: A substantial number of Final Fantasy fans tend to skip this game when talking about the numbered series, due to it being an MMO. It doesn’t help that, in comparison to FFXIV (its online sister entry), it has a much higher entry barrier for newbies because of its aged gameplay mechanics and overall design philosophy.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Take your pick, and be aware that opinions are somewhat mixed: The Ninja's Blink ability, Red Mages in general, Meleeburn parties, Astralburn parties...
  • There's the job combo of Red Mage/Ninja. There are videos on YouTube of players with this combination soloing enemies that were intended to be fought by full alliances. Do note that while these are possible, they require maximum skill and several hours of not leaving the game for any reason whatsoever, as well as expensive healing items.
  • For most of the game's run, Ninja had a special place in the Stop Having Fun Guys arsenal — Ninjas at 37 get a Game-Breaker ability (Blink, thanks to the Utsusemi spell) that allows them to ignore any and all incoming damage. It was considered mandatory for the longest time to take Ninja as your subjob if you were melee, simply because of how broken the Blink spell was - instead of healing better, faster, or using other tactics, everyone simply had to blink away the damage. In addition, you had to get the Blink spell (which cost a lot of money) and spend money on the Blink spell component (which you used up every single time you cast it). As a result, playing a Ninja was extremely expensive in the long run.
  • In the Level 99 era of the game, the Ninja's Utsusemi ability has seriously dropped off in terms of usefulness, since most endgame content involves monsters that will quickly dispel stacks of Blinks or attacks that ignore it completely. Puppetmasters and Summoners seem to have risen as the current Meta, since pets can be used with minimal risk to the actual player. Automatons can be built to be on par with Damage Dealing classes, or can be built to be awesome tanks with damage reduction that require no MP to heal (just Repair Oils, which even for a +3 version only cost 1000 gil each), while Avatars can do crazy amounts of damage and with current equips can be called and used with minimal if any MP cost. It also helps PUP and SMN have two of the best 1-Hour Abilities in the game, either unlocking double stats for the Automatons for a few minutes, or allowing for massive and constant damage spam from Avatars.
  • Beastmasters have always had a bit of a troubled history in finding their niche in general gameplay, but that means some of the very unique tools they have at their disposal tend to get overlooked. One of these is courtesy of their Slug Jug Pets known as Generous Arthur, who has an attack called Purulent Ooze that can inflict a Max HP Down debuff on an enemy, reducing their max HP by a very impressive 10%. Now obviously, this will only be useful as an opening attack since it only reduces Max HP, however once the debuff wears off, the enemy does not get that health back, plus due to the general rarity of the debuff very few enemies are immune to it ... including endgame bosses! Many endgame alliances will end up bringing a Beastmaster with them if only because being able to shave 10% health off a Damage-Sponge Boss is just too good to pass up!
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Many areas of the game just toss your normally-used detection-prevention spells out the window, as the monsters there are able to spot you despite these spells. Most notable example are imps, monsters who possess true sight (ie. they will spot you, even if you are invisible).
  • Literal, to low level players trying to cross the Valkurm Dunes map to reach their exp party, the Sand Bats in that tunnel. Impossible to avoid and aggressive to any player low level enough that they HAVE to take that route (as opposed to higher levels and travel spells).
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Wings of the Goddess story is ultimately about two diverging realities struggling for their existence at a critical point in time that decides which of them prevails as the primary reality and which is relegated to oblivion. Nowadays Final Fantasy XI coexists with Final Fantasy XIV, whose revamping it helped to finance during the transition from 1.0 to 2.0, and Square Enix appears to have decided Final Fantasy XI will get no more major expansions - also, Final Fantasy XIV's director Naoki Yoshida is in charge of Square Enix's Business Division 5, which handles the company's online games.
• LGBT Fanbase:
  • The muscled-out Stripperiffic Galka are a One-Gender Race, all male. With the implications readily apparent, there is a lot of gay-appealing fanart of these guys.
  • Not to mention the large number of yuri dojinshi and fanfics involving Mithra...
• Loot Drama:
  • The trope was originally called "The Ridill" over the infamous drama Ridill would cause when it dropped. The Ridill was a sword that was usable by multiple classes and had an extremely useful effect, but was a 5% drop off a boss that only appeared once every day.
  • Other items that have similar effects on the player-base but at a reduced rate due to being more specialized, even rarer, include Defending Ring, Hauteclaire, and anything from Absolute Virtue.
• Never Live It Down: Pandemonium Warden made headlines when a group stubbornly sat for eighteen hours while fighting it (Which the game STRONGLY suggests against. Hell, you gotta click past the warning every time you enter the game, not even World of Warcraft does that). The boss has been killed relatively quickly (that is to say, with a bit of time left on the two-hour timer) multiple times since it was nerfed, but journalists (and this very wiki) continue to report on the evil online game that makes you sit at the computer until you're physically sick. (See Marathon Boss above.) A general rule of thumb nowadays is that no boss sticks around for more than two hours. After that, the critter despawns, but if it takes you that long to kill the guy, you are not doing it right (Underleveled, bad strategy, half the alliance being made up of bots).
• Nightmare Fuel: The Gusgen Mine has the ghosts of faceless children going through repeated motions, and their faint crying and moans in the background — it freaks out pretty much everyone the first time they go down there. Something horrible happened there, but it has never been explained.
• Once Original, Now Common: Many elements that the game introduced were seen as a complete revolution, pushing the barrier for innovation. From modern perspective, those features are borderline standard of the genre.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The "Level Down" mechanic, wherein when a player dies, they lose EXP; if they lose too much, they will actually level down. The reason this is so hated is because in most endgame missions a player is almost expected to die, sometimes multiple times, in order to complete it. Worst, the mechanic only makes sense from an MMO Fake Difficulty stand-point, in that it makes sure a player can never be truly "done" with leveling up a character, thus forcing players to play more just to make up the level(s) they've lost.
  • Player Versus Player, for several reasons:
    • Many matches of PvP turn into 1v1 matches, even though the game is based almost entirely on party play, turning most team matches into insane free-for-alls.
    • Many job combinations are horribly ill-suited for solo play in the first place. A Bard/anything will likely be turned into paste in one-on-one.
    • Swapping equipment has harsh penalties, and while it's to prevent players being untargetable, the game is almost bursting with players that swap equipment all the damn time in order to perform perfectly.
    • Very few players even have a large interest in PvP, and most of those people are on one server.
    • And due to the lack of interest in PvP, the classes are largely unbalanced. Paladins have a large inherent advantage against melees (especially PLD/RDM) and a skilled Red Mage can beat pretty much any class.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys:
  • Due to the way job/subjob combinations work, there are only a few that are considered "correct," and anyone who does not conform to the "right way" to play is just asking for a "Stop Having Fun Guy" to go off on them. Meleeburns, for example, are heavily slanted towards piercing damage such as Dragoons, the "correct" way to melee in the endgame is either a Dragoon or Samurai, subbing the other class — or Warrior. Having underleveled subjobs or gear is also considered unacceptable, even though it can take months to farm the money required for at-level gear. The game is basically designed for the SHFG mentality. While the norms aren't too ridiculous, Lord have mercy if you don't follow them, much to the resentment of many players. One popular endgame-oriented forum, has 15 fifty-page threads devoted to nothing but "gimped" players (to varying degrees).
  • Part of it is the sheer amount of Level Grinding — both for EXP and for Money / Items. When it takes literally months to do certain things in game, having any slowdowns can become very frustrating.
  • The game, especially before it was made easier to progress, was Nintendo Hard so when people suggested you go to a certain area to farm certain enemies it's pretty much accepted that doing so is the easiest and least risky way of gaining experience.
• Win Back the Crowd: To say that Abyssea has re-energized an aging game is quite the understatement.