it's a shame all the "FFXIV then and now" discussions are always about 1.x and "now" as in, at the oldest, maybe Stormblood. because um. having played since beta 3. the game was fucking ROUGH up to at least Stormblood lmao

off memory (i might not remember some things correctly):

• until 3.1 or 3.2, there weren't any EU servers. the EU datacenter was in the US with supposedly priority routing to Europe and ideally you wanted to be using a "gaming VPN" (yes!) such as Mudfish because some ISPs had garbage routing to the US regardless
• similarly, the US datacenters had similarly terrible routing and if you were on the East coast you had the same issues as EU players
• WHM had spells called protect and stoneskin; which they would cast at the beginning of every content (and after every wipe). stoneskin was a single target spell which had to be cast. one. by. one. before every. fight. they were cross-class spells which iirc PLD and SCH could select; PLD in particular sometimes would cast stoneskin when a tankbuster was being cast.
• ACCURACY. every enemy had accuracy thresholds for the front, flank and rear and if your accuracy value was below that, you would sometimes miss your attacks.
• WAR was shit. i mean genuinely shit. in 2.x it wasn't uncommon to see ppl downgrade to MRD to get access to more cross-class abilities to at least hold somewhat decent dps
• 2.0 SMN was fucking busted because you could cross-class thunder from THM which gave it a fourth? fifth? DoT which could be extended by Garuda-egi
• 2.x gathering and crafting had no streamlining whatsoever. there weren't scrips, or clearly indicated vendors. you exchanged HQ mats or crafts for books and gear.
• unlocking a job worked by having its main class at lvl 30 and a secondary class at lvl 15 (for example DRG was LNC 30 and MRD 15)
• depending on the job you wanted to main, you had to level other classes (some as high as level 42 for PGL/MNK for Mantra)
• aggro management abilities were a thing, and even had to be used on cooldown for some jobs because of how much enmity they generated with some abilities. BLM and SMN in particular were infamous for how spiky their DPS was and how easily they could rip aggro from the tank
• STANCE DANCING. tanks and healers had stances that had pros and cons, and as such to play optimally would be "dancing" in and out of them. tank stances imposed a severe damage penalty in exchange for enmity, while healers in cleric stance did more damage at the cost of severely reduced healing.
  this got even funkier in 3.0 with DRK for which, iirc, the optimal opener was
  unmend => darkside (a 20%(?) dmg buff OGCD) => dark arts (an OGCD augmenting some abilities) => souleater
  which was the most enmity any job could output in two GCDs.
• when hunt marks were introduced, B rank marks worked similarly to A ranks and would only respawn after a few hours. also, the weekly B rank was the same for every player on the server (datacenter?). The new FFXIV Hunt systems takes a toll on player sanity
• mods were not a thing. at all. you had Reshade, ACT and a few standalone overlays (like i remember one for mini cactpot where you opened a web page and put your game in windowed and it did what the current mini cactpot plugin does) and that was it.
• until they were. in 2015 naughtyWVR released the first nude mod for the game and, iirc at the time, refused to explain how he got it working. (it was also paywalled) Textools only came around in 2016 and iirc was pretty damn primitive and buggy at first. SSTools came around 2018 or 2019 and iirc at first didn't support custom posing. custom poses only really became a thing around 2020, and back then the only visualization tool you had within good ol' CMTool was The Cube™️, no fancily arranged bone selection panel like in Anamnesis

i'll maybe do another post if i remember more? gods the first years of this game sucked. they were amazing. i miss them

It goes like this: there is a woman, called “hero” by many, and she dies threefold. Once by hanging, once by burning, once by wounding. That is not the whole of it, of course. But it is a place to begin.

(I liked the full images too)

We got some more classic Final Fantasy villains on the docket as we continue making our way through the Omega raids in our, uh... [checks notes] 69th FFXIV stream!?

Nice.

Hope to see you there!