Repeated introduction: hello and welcome back to my FFXI Horizon talk show. I’ve decided to call it Final Festivus XI, a play on the festivus channels which was used by other private FFXI servers to contain drama. The show is for news and drama around HorizonXI private server.  

All I ask is that you follow the HorizonXI and FFXI rules as it relates to these news items. Don’t use this as a reason to go out and bother anyone. I’ve attempted to keep all names redacted as much as possible.

Biggest news this week was the Mog House Meeting last Sunday, February 19th. The devs shared the census information, which can be found here (https://horizonxi.com/news/two-month-post-launch-census-2-19-23). For more updated, public information, you can use Hugin’s website here (https://horizonxi.info/census). 

They also answered burning questions. I’ll be drafting the questions and the dev responses in the future and linking them here. Nothing currently.

They also shared the 1.1 Patch is planned for March 31st, 2023. Their big push is getting items fixed and ready for release at this date. The big one they shared was pathing and movement rework, which should fix the issues with Gravity and mobs turbo-running and catching up to players who use Flee. 

Biggest player news was the discovery of Enlight. A player with the name “Kepsecretkepsaf” is selling it in game. He’s also selling the information to farming the scroll. He’s gotten more than one scroll. It’s generated lots of talk and speculation of who it is and how they obtained Enlight. 

If you have an interest in purchasing the spell or they information, feel free to reach out to them! 

Last week, there was a patch to increase the drop rate of crystals. People were pretty upset due to the price crashes. Additionally, the devs ended up reversing the change just a little to decrease the drop rate. Hopefully, players are happy about this with it being a little more balanced.

The bullet point about “backend work on the server” should hopefully improve black screens. That’s an assumption by me. However, I did notice the “daily backup” time in game was crashing it for everyone. After that bullet point, the daily backup stopped crashing (at least for me). Hopefully we continue to see more progress on some of the server issues. 

If you’re still having issues with black screens, stop using Lower Jeuno. It’s been a known issue for weeks and every other zone has AH, MH, and teleport Goblins. 

I allude to HNM drama and /say trash talk. 

I go into HorizonXI discord drama. The devs got mad at people telling “yo momma” jokes and unironically shut down the general chat. Then, they got mad at people talking in other channels. Then, they turned off reactions from people clown reacting when devs would tell them to follow the rules. I’ve attached the Discord rules below. 

Anyway, there’s nothing against telling a FFXI themed yo momma joke. Or against reacting to messages. Or really, anything the devs were getting mad at. On the stream, I go into how detrimental to a community it is to overmoderate for mundane things. Changing the rules, inconsistency, etc. will just discourage people from participating and move them to other places. 

I also discuss the potential tools to use for moderating a larger discord. HorizonXI discord has 30k people. But there are endless free tools that help keep a community safe and welcoming without needing 24/7 human intervention. For example, The FFXIV community discord has 300k users and 0 manual moderation. The mods even admitted they don’t read the public channels because the automatic moderation is done so well. 

I highly encourage HorizonXI staff to use the tools available to them to lessen the workload for mods. They should also let mods make decisions for what is and isn’t okay, to avoid mods facing backlash for decisions outside of their control like we saw with the yo momma jokes. 

That’s all for this week! Let me know your thoughts on the name and the news I cover. Curious if there’s anything I’m missing. Check out my discord here: https://discord.gg/ZSfrfzA9bV 

o7