Me and my cousin played FFXI starting in the beta. I got the game for free at official launch and we played for a long time. But the greatest moment of gaming excitement is when we got the peacock charm drop from a super rare NM. I'm pretty sure it was the rarest, most valuable item in the game at the time. The NM was deep in a maze, and had a huge spawn window. I think it was something like an IRL week or something, and even if you managed to tag it from the countless other players camping it, you still had a very low chance of the drop.

I spent the night at my cousins one weekend and we went to bed one night after camping it for hours and left our characters logged in at the spawn point so we could check the combat logs to see if anyone got it while we were asleep. When I woke up, it had not spawned, but my cousin had already got up and left the cave. I was surprisingly alone in that room for the first time ever. No other players. After about 30 minutes, it spawns. I'm alone, and not strong enough to kill it by myself. My cousin somehow managed to make it from Jueno to the maze (like at least a 10 minute run) before anyone else showed up, and we got the kill and the drop.

We were literally screaming and high fiving so hard that his step mom thought we had won the lottery or something.

We both put it on at least once just to say we had, and sold it for more money than we'd ever imagined. We then bought the best gear for our characters and felt like gods.

Never even made it to max level, but holy crap nothing has ever come close to that level of excitement in or out of a game.

[–] shasta@lemm.ee 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I still play ffxi to this day and I fully remember moments like that. Good nostalgia but I'm also glad they don't make games like that anymore. FFXI itself has been modernized to remove this kind of grind and is still getting new content updates. You should check it out again.

[–] dgbbad@lemmy.zip 2 points 11 hours ago

Me and that same cousin got together and played it again 3 or 4 years back and got to 99. The grind at max level is just too strong to keep my interest. He, however, got into the ffxi horizon fan server that's pretty much exactly like original XI, but with some QOL additions and an added hardcore mode. He got summoner to level 75 in hardcore mode and died like 2 days later. You don't lose your character, but there are some cool items you get from hitting certain level milestones that you do lose. One of which was a ring with a teleport spell on it that had unlimited charges and only like a 20 minute cool down that you get st 75. It also does a server wide announcement when a hardcore character that high dies, so everyone was messaging him. He got super bummed and quit.