Final Fantasy XI: Anyone else out there boxing it?

[Bigfish]

I'm just mildly curious. Feels a bit lonely without anyone to talk to, as most of the community is playing WoW.

[genocyde]

I just finally closed my 5 accounts on WoW. Having played off and on since 1.0 (I just found my old UIbackup folder on a jump drive I was cleaning out. Had a folder for every patch 1.0 - 1.12 cause they always broke on patch day :P) I finally gave up. Blizz's direction with WoW does not match my wants.

My new project is to multi-box a first person shooter game. I'm actually starting on console ones first because their controls are 10X easier than PC FPS games. A game like Halo 3 has auto aiming assist, auto look centering, etc. etc. As soon as I come to terms with the fact FPS games are too complicated to box, I'll go back to MMORPG's.

I gave some thought about boxing FFXI, is it pretty boxing friendly? I ran a holy trinity style 5 box in WoW, would a mixed team in FF be harder or easier do you think? Got any tips for someone looking into that game??

[Bigfish]

I gave some thought about boxing FFXI, is it pretty boxing friendly? I ran a holy trinity style 5 box in WoW, would a mixed team in FF be harder or easier do you think? Got any tips for someone looking into that game??

I would say the game is VERY boxing friendly, especially for melee classes. /follow functions in FFXI such that when you tell your extras to /assist, they switch targets to the mob, run up to it, and follow it until it is dead, at which point, they will run back to their previous follow target. Only down side is you have to have your main actually engaged to the target before you can use /assist.

Of course, that's for melee. You could just as easily go with a tank, a healer, and 4 mages and blow things to kingdom come.

Outside of that, there is the mildly steep learning curve and the fact that the low level economy is more or less dead. If you can get past that though, its like instancing 100% of the time. (the killing elites for xp and loot, not the no-one-else-is-there bit)

UI is kind of klunky, but a bit of bind and macro working with windower should fix most of that.

[Talonluck]

What is SOE's stance on multiboxing? Do they allow it like WoW or is it use at your own risk?

[Bigfish]

Sony Online Entertainment's policy is very multiboxer friendly from what I understand.

Sqaure-Enix's, who run FFXI, is more or less pretty murky. I don't think anyone has got an official answer out of them. I'm not remotely worried about that though.

[Talonluck]

Interesting, thanks for the info Bigfish! I've got a few cousins who are interested in future multiboxing of FFXI.

[glo]

My new project is to multi-box a first person shooter game. I'm actually starting on console ones first because their controls are 10X easier than PC FPS games. A game like Halo 3 has auto aiming assist, auto look centering, etc. etc. As soon as I come to terms with the fact FPS games are too complicated to box, I'll go back to MMORPG's.
You looked at Darkfall Online at all? Sounds like it might be what you are looking for. You have the challenge of trying to box a FPS while enjoying the other elements of a MMO.

[thinus]

My new project is to multi-box a first person shooter game. I'm actually starting on console ones first because their controls are 10X easier than PC FPS games. A game like Halo 3 has auto aiming assist, auto look centering, etc. etc. As soon as I come to terms with the fact FPS games are too complicated to box, I'll go back to MMORPG's.
You looked at Darkfall Online at all? Sounds like it might be what you are looking for. You have the challenge of trying to box a FPS while enjoying the other elements of a MMO.

I'll take my hat off to anyone that boxes Darkfall Online. No follow commands, no macroing, no assist commands or even targeting for that matter. In Darkfall you just swing in a direction or cast a spell in a direction and it damages what it hits. You will be able to melee things at point blank range but shooting arrows or casting spells at moving targets will be a really difficult challenge. It also does collision detection on players so you can't stack players on top of each other like in WoW which makes mouse tracking across multiple sessions tricky seeing that your point of views will be different.

You will probably die more from friendly fire than anything else.

[algol]

SOE = Everquest etc = perfectly happy with boxers.

SE = no official statement, and rather draconian service. If an admin decides to ban you for "botting"...you're not getting your accounts back.

[maxel]

I'd be interested in it, and have been tossing the coin around. The main hold up I have as it stands is key passing. As I explored it, it didn't look like keyclone worked with the game, and I'm not going to drop a few grand to get 3 more computers up and running. Not sure how I feel about InnerSpace either. That whole subscribe to me model just doesn't fly well with me considering I'm also paying to play the game online as well. Are there any other alternatives?

[Bigfish]

Update on my status:

I've managed to get my group to 24, stuffed those damn sheep in Selbina with 100 stacks of million corn per character to max out Sandy and Bastok fame, expanded my inventory to 60, got all my keys for the Kazham airship pass, and just killed the 2-3 dragon last night. I've spent around a million gil outfitting and upgrading characters. Kind of pricey, but a lot of that was on one time upgrades.

I was actually surprised how easy the 2-3 dragon was. I remember the thing being quite the pain back in the day. Was actually a nice confidence boost to walk in, go chop-chop, and watch the thing die. Makes me think I'll have a good deal of hope to box all the missions in the game.

Now I just have to trade in 630 pieces of zinc ore for Tenshodo Fame, 1200 Cornettes for windurst, and I should be done with rep building and can get back to focusing on getting to 30, unlocking some advanced jobs, and building my group.

Its going to be quit the adventure, in so much that my leveling from 18-24 has consisted of random xp from farming quest and mission items for subjobs, airship passes, etc. I'll likely get even further as I climb Delkfutt's for rank 4, but after that, I think I'm relegated to finding some good grinding spots for 20-37.

[Bigfish]

Odd situation. Didn't level for 3 days since my last post, and I still got 4 levels on Sunday. That was nice. Should hit 30 tonight, ideally. Got most of my rep grinding done. Only thing left is more Tenshodo fame for characters 4,5, and 6, but they can wait since they're not going to be subbing ninja any time soon. Found out my ideal target range is to grind things 5-7 levels above my group, so that should help subsequent leveling go faster.

[d0z3rr]

Bigfish, what group did you wind up going with? All melee?

I would love to try boxing this game but I only have two computers :(

[Bigfish]

Right now its at 3 WAR, a MNK, RDM, and BLM. Still leveling subs though. Eventually its going to be PLD, RDM, BLU, SAM, WHM, BLM, to try and capitalize on Skill Chains.

[Zerocool2024]

How is the leveling in that game? I played it back when it first came out, got to 15, and wanted to shoot myself because I needed a group for everything and anything.
And 3/4's of the people spoke Japanese, lol.

So, we had to communicate by Emotes, lol.

I understand that you will be boxing, there for, the group problem is gone, and I guess you keep the constant XP going.

[Bigfish]

Leveling is pretty easy at this point. I'm not earning super-fast xp, but I am leveling at a decent pace. Right now though, with fresh characters the issue isn't so much one of leveling, its a matter of unlocking different aspects of the game, which I have to admit, kind of sucks the big one. Bag space, reputation, and unlocking jobs is all getting expenisve in both time and gil. Nothing quite like staring at a Chocobo for 6 freaking hours waiting for the next hour to pass so you can do the 30 seconds cut scene in a chain of scenes before you go back to waiting another hour so you can do the next one, just so you can ride a mount in some areas.

Granted, that's a bit extreme of an example, but it illustrates the point.

I wouldn't suggest FFXI for anyone trying to get uber cool uber fast. Its going to be a long, painful process for me, and I don't know if I'll ever get to the point I want to. That said, the story in this game rocks, and assuming I ever hit the level cap, I'm going to have several weeks of awesome cutscenes and story lines waiting to be plowed through.

[Ridere]

I used to play FFXI back in the day. Was a relatively successful WHM in one of the first linkshells to down a lot of content on Ifrit.



I have tried to go back to the game in the years past, but the economy and lack of lower level support really has been a hinderence. The idea of boxing it would be real neat, but as far as I'm aware, it's one that would require a dedicated machine per account. Am I wrong in that assumption? FFXI, as far as I remember, was a majorly CPU-intensive application to run, as the port over from the PS2 was horrible.



That being said, I'm still a bit intrigued by the idea. I think I've invested too much time into WoW to quit it for another game now, but a team of 6 tarutarus would be completely awesome.



The money issue would be a bit of a worry for me, though. Could farm seals and then do BCNMs for AH selling. Once you could farm the Prime avatar fights, though... 360k a day. And since you'd level up fast enough, if you were to make a few alts on each account and leveled them up in the simplest way for the purpose of farming those Prime Avatar fights, you could make another 360k for each other set of alts you were to bring through the Prime Avatar fights.



Even if you skipped the more annoying ones to get to, you could still rake in a hefty chunk of change just doing Shiva, Titan and Ramuh each day on a few sets of chars.



I really just want them to come out with their new MMO, already. Swap Tarutarus for moogles, and you still have the awesomeness of a party of little guys running around. I think FFXI may be too far gone for me to ever really get back into the swing of things. I hate their fishing system, too, since it requires so much work.


Fun fun :D

[Marious]

They where good when I played it a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away! But yeah some of the stuff sucked. I played a galka BST it was great but only got to like lv 68 I think at the time or was it 62... It was along time ago for me. I was playing it from launch and then when WoW came out dropped it like a hot stone.

[Bigfish]

I have tried to go back to the game in the years past, but the economy and lack of lower level support really has been a hinderence. The idea of boxing it would be real neat, but as far as I'm aware, it's one that would require a dedicated machine per account. Am I wrong in that assumption? FFXI, as far as I remember, was a majorly CPU-intensive application to run, as the port over from the PS2 was horrible.

I had 2 instances running on mid-level machines a few years back, though I never got them very far due to a lack of a good keybroadcaster i was aware of at the time. I would imagine being ok to run a couple, if settings are set low.


The money issue would be a bit of a worry for me, though. Could farm seals and then do BCNMs for AH selling. Once you could farm the Prime avatar fights, though... 360k a day. And since you'd level up fast enough, if you were to make a few alts on each account and leveled them up in the simplest way for the purpose of farming those Prime Avatar fights, you could make another 360k for each other set of alts you were to bring through the Prime Avatar fights.

Money actually isn't TOO bad with a full group. You get all the crystal drops, and with fire, water, and earth crystals going at 1.2k+, you get a nice chunk of change after a while. At the least, its enough to keep you geared at your current level. Avatar fights will defenitely be a nice source of income. The single biggest issue I see with it the monotony of killing the things day after day, not to mention travel times to pick up, get to, and turn in. But that's all contingent on me needing money at that point. Heck, even one Avatar at 60k/day might be worth the trouble, especially if its a quicky like Titan.

I plan to focus more on getting Rare/EX equipment anyway, and honestly have no qualms about using AF to 75. Probably the single greatest liberator is not having to pick up anyone elses slack, which seemed to happen a lot more often than it should have in a game so filled with elitists. Of course, what I actually DO end up doing is not quite set in stone, as I have no idea whether my "Gimp" group is going to tackle things well or not.

[Ridere]

AF to 75 won't be a big issues for most jobs, I think. I imagine you won't be plowing throusth stuff as fast as individual parties do, but the fact you never have to spend a minute LFG would make it way better.



I'd happily grind out exp at like 3k/hour in the privacy of the boyahda tree by myself than have to deal with pugging busy areas trying to find imps. haha.



Hopefully you keep posting your progress, as I want to live vicariously through you, since I don't see myself going back to FFXI :D

[Bigfish]

Well, managed to finish the SAM unlocking quest last night, except for the final turn in. The tree is a bitch for a party of 30. Hits hard, and has the tp build of a Samurai. Wiped 4/6 of my characters. Got him down though, reraised, and got my branch. The bomb was a bit tricky as well. Hits hard, but doesn't asplode in your face, so its really just surviving until it berserks, and then it drops like a sack of potatoes.

Got the NIN Quest started, but haven't had the time to kill the leeches yet. 3 day weekend though, so hopefully I can get a lot of work out of the way and get back to leveling.

Bleeding out my eyeballs with zinc ore and rusty subligars. 3 times a day I run the AH circuit searching for the stuff. Only need 164 more Zinc Ore, and 44 more Rusty Subligars. That only 170-200k more gil, at which point I think I'll be done dumping gil from my previous 75 in to my group.

Can't wait for 40, when I'll finally have most of the teleports, escape, and Warp II. Will make travel SO much faster.

[Ridere]

Yah, it'd be pretty darn handy to have your own WHM and BLM for the teleports and warps. I think if I were to box, even if WHM isn't the most ideal job to have in a party anymore, I'd still take them along just for the teleports. You'd be the master of transportation. haha

[Kopitar]

My new project is to multi-box a first person shooter game. I'm actually starting on console ones first because their controls are 10X easier than PC FPS games. A game like Halo 3 has auto aiming assist, auto look centering, etc. etc. As soon as I come to terms with the fact FPS games are too complicated to box, I'll go back to MMORPG's.
You looked at Darkfall Online at all? Sounds like it might be what you are looking for. You have the challenge of trying to box a FPS while enjoying the other elements of a MMO.

I'll take my hat off to anyone that boxes Darkfall Online. No follow commands, no macroing, no assist commands or even targeting for that matter. In Darkfall you just swing in a direction or cast a spell in a direction and it damages what it hits. You will be able to melee things at point blank range but shooting arrows or casting spells at moving targets will be a really difficult challenge. It also does collision detection on players so you can't stack players on top of each other like in WoW which makes mouse tracking across multiple sessions tricky seeing that your point of views will be different.

You will probably die more from friendly fire than anything else.

Not possible to dual box combat in Darkfall, but it's very good for resource gathering, we have a number of people in our clan doing it. If i bring my 2nd account to a battle it's just to spam mm in the general direction of the enemy and to portray more numbers for us.

[Gearboxx]

I just canceled my wow subscription about a month ago and have been bouncing between FFXI and Lotro. so far FFXI takes the cookie, and i am really interested in dual/tri boxing once i learn the game a little more.
what server are you playing on?

[Bigfish]

I'm on Fairy.

[Bigfish]

Just an update, I've managed to get my subs to 37, and I've got my mains up to 25. It has been quite interesting because having to search for spells for my blue mage has got me around 90% of my exp, and it has really been quite the world tour having to travel to obscure corners of the world for the right family of monster. Now that everyone is on their main job, we are doing so much better than we were previously, to the point I have to make sure we don't kill mobs too quickly before they can use their skills or the group can skill up their combat skills on it.

[Ridere]

Very nice!

I still really want to box FFXI. It was my first MMO. I just can't get myself to start over, and I don't think I have the hardware for it. I'm hoping squenix releases more information abou their next MMO this summer!

Keep up the awesome work.

[Halaa]

Nice work with the full party, Ive been triboxing for nearly a year now. Been using the g15 binder plug-in for the azaril windower as it allows me to play all characters without tabbing or having to do anything but run the game thru windower and write macro scripts. As far as SE's take on it, they arent concerned as long as you dont RMT but I wouldnt being overly obnoxious in case you get a GM on you thats had a bad day. As for me I blatently look like im using some form of scripting engine. I borrowed some characters and leveled 5 BLM as my first project completly syncing casts and one shotting everything in my path with timed Ancient Magic. Toned it down after that and leveled MNK RDM RDM using both RDM synced casting heals and just going all out on the MNK. now Im leveling DRG on both the secondary characters but only doing 1 at a time and using the other guy to PL while I level whatever jobs I need for maats cap on my main. Once I get all 3 characters DRG to 60 I plan on doing triple DRG/mage for synced healing breaths.

[Ridere]

So a question for you boxing FFXI.

How successful are you guys in running more than one copy of FFXI at a time? I feel pretty confident I could get HotKeyNet working with FFXI, but my main concern is that I recall FFXI being very CPU-intensive. So how are you all handling your accounts? 6 computers, 2 computers?

I have two computers right now that I use for WoW. My Desktop PC as my main, and a laptop which is actually powerful enough to run the other 4 copies of WoW, though I do have the settings toned down to the lowest. I'm reallly just curious as to your setup, Fish, since with the announcement of FFXIV, I have to admit that I have a bit of a desire to fire up FFXI again.

[mactabilis]

"I'm reallly just curious as to your setup, Fish, since with the announcement of FFXIV, I have to admit that I have a bit of a desire to fire up FFXI again."

Word. I've been missing ffxi since i quit 2 years ago. Hate to admit i was a greedy elitist, back in my day. But, reading this post and fish's adventures spark a whole new sense of adventure and an aspect of playing ffxi, i've never thought of until searching dual boxing forums. I dabbled in 2 boxing PC+Ps2 ffxi, but thats as far as my multiboxing hobby ever went. With word of FFXIV, i'm thinking of going all out on the multiboxing. But for now, I wouldn't mind practicing with FFXI. I'm currently brainstoming rigs that would be ideal for me. I need It to be mobile because i'll be doing alot of gaming at work, on a 3gpp2 network. Do you guys think 1 rig would be able to handle 3 toons in FFXI and later in FFXIV? Also, what "game-isolation" software do you use fish?

[Duese]

Because it needs to be in every single thread about FFXI ever...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARghlVjBab0

Watch it. Remember it. Live it.

[Zzc2]

Hey Bigfish,
what's your setup like? I was thinking of trying to box FFXI but there is not much info on setting it up. Only thing I have found is that I need windower + g15 keyborad + g15binder. How do you get all this to work with multiple computers for the game? Do you use software broadcasting or hardware? how do you setup macros for each window?

[Zzc2]

Since it looks like other people are looking for info on how to box this, I'll post what my experience has been so far.
This is my experience using 5 computers boxing 5 characters. There are other setups I have heard of other setups (1 computer multiple ffxi) but Im not sure on the details on how to get it going.

1st off you are going to need windower, which you can download here ('http://wiki.windower.net/windower/latest')
you will also need spellcastlite here ('http://wiki.windower.net/plugins/spellcastlite') and if you have a g15 or g11 keyboard, you will need the g15binder here ('http://wiki.windower.net/plugins/g15binder') (note, if you have rev2 or 6 keys on your g15, make sure you get the g15r2binder and not the g15binder)


Once you download all those, install windower on all computers(THE DEFAULT DIRECTORY IS WHERE THE INSTALLER IS SO MAKE SURE YOU SET THE DIRECTORY TO WHERE YOU WANT IT TO INSTALL), and add the spellcastlite.dll to all computers and the g15binder.dll to your MAIN COMPUTER ONLY. both files go in the windower/plugins dir.

now you need to modify your windower/scripts/init.txt file
scroll down in the file until you start seeing all the
load XXXXXX
load xxxxxxx
load xxxxxxx
At the bottom of the list, add load spellcastlite and on your g15 computer, load g15binder or load g15r2binder depending on your keyboard
Here is one of the init.txt files on a slave computer ('http://www.shapthetrables.com/hive/files/init.txt')

next, you will need multisend here ('http://forums.windower.net/index.php?showtopic=15086&st=100&p=186276&#entry186276') (there is another one out there but i think multicast is easier). Install that on all computers.

Setup your ffxi config settings and launch the windower gui on all computers. it will launch the game with what ever settings you provide. Once you are in the game on all your characters, go back and launch the multisend program on all computers. If you launch multisend before you log on your characters, multisend wont pick up the character names which will cause the send commands to not work properly.

That's the basic setup. I don't have access to my g15 computer, so I do no have the g15 setup here. I'll post that later.

now, to send commands when your all logged in and setup, you do //send commands

//send @all /follow main
this will send the /follow main command to all your computers. you can all do it by job or specific person.


//send @war /ws fastblade this sends the command /ws fastblade to all warriors that are setup to use the weaponskill fastblade. note that you dont seperate fastblade and you dont add <t> at the end. this is the spellcastlite setup. all weaponskills, spells, etc are like this.


//send slave1 /ja provoke causes slave1 to use the provoke ability


I'll try and post more info on the setup later but this is good for now i think to get people started.

[Solon]

Someone is trying to drag me back fo FF11, and the only way I'd go is boxing. Any more updates?

[Ridere]

There's automated scripts running right now to ban RMT/gold sellers. S-E, naturally, found a way of messing this up, and as a result a lot of legitimate players are currently being banned and unable to get back into their accounts for days, if not over a week, worth of time. Combined with the fact that you are required to continue paying for your account during this time, it has aggrivated many people.

I still miss playing the game, and I still sometimes think about starting to box it, but given that they're banning people with relative reckless abandon, I'd emphasize a bit of caution. Boxing may be something that gets flagged as RMT activities.

S-E's customer support/service system has to be one of the worst I've seen in any MMO. It's really sad, since I did really like FFXI, and I'm excited about FFXIV.

I'd suggest reading up some on http://ffxi.zam.com/ and take a look at the current frustration players are having with these bannings. 6 accounts is a lot to invest in, only to have some automated script run and ban you, simply beacuse you're transferring money from the 5 toons to 1 main.

[Zzc2]

Yeah, I started boxing this game. two weeks in I was banned one night. Contacted customer support and they said I needed to get a court order to find out WHY I was banned. They said there was no one I could talk to, they cant tell me why I was banned, told my I was perma banned, and that once they ban a player, they like to keep them banned, meaning I cannot startup a new account or i will get banned. They banned my 4 characters that looked alike, then later in the day, banned my 2 other accounts. I was pissed at them. I hope ff14 doesnt have this fucked up customer service.

[Ridere]

Yeah, I started boxing this game. two weeks in I was banned one night. Contacted customer support and they said I needed to get a court order to find out WHY I was banned. They said there was no one I could talk to, they cant tell me why I was banned, told my I was perma banned, and that once they ban a player, they like to keep them banned, meaning I cannot startup a new account or i will get banned. They banned my 4 characters that looked alike, then later in the day, banned my 2 other accounts. I was pissed at them. I hope ff14 doesnt have this fucked up customer service.

That is majorly depressing. I really want to box FFXIV. S-E really needs to drop the draconian act. I'm not quite sure what's going on. They need to start getting some bad press, or something.