Hello everyone,

We are a married couple from Sydney, Australia, looking very much forward to playing FFXIV.

We both played and are still playing FFXI together on the Phoenix server. My husband has somewhat limited experience with MMOs, playing FFXI on and off, mostly depending on when he has enough time for it. He has started playing FFXI a little over one year ago. On the other hand, I have been playing FFXI for 5 years and still going. My husband can usually play mostly during evenings, while I can usually play during the whole day. We can both play during the weekends all day long, especially if planned ahead.

My husband is mostly a casual player, still getting used to the MMO community and style overall, while I would describe myself as a combination of both casual and hardcore player; I usually play casually but I can easily switch into hardcore mode and play for long hours, do hard events/missions/runs, especially if they were planned ahead. We both happily follow leaders as long as they are just and fair and we like to help others with whatever we can. I, personally, very much enjoy planned events as I can actually prepare and show up on time and plan the rest of things around those events so I won't miss them. However, I can also adapt to spontaneous events.

At the moment, we are trying to decide upon a server. We are trying to decide between Tonberry and Behemoth. This might prove a bit tricky for us because my husband will mostly play in the evenings when the English community on Tonberry will also most likely be online but I will also play during the day when there might not be so many people on Tonberry as opposed to Behemoth. We will also attempt to test the lag/ping on both servers during open beta to see what works best for us; however, if we won't be fighting hard mobs such as primals, we might not actually see any difference. I guess we'll see properly in game.

We are also looking for a friendly, tight-knit linkshell to join as soon as we find it. The leader/leaders/officers should be fair, just and friendly, the players should be friendly, polite and helpful to each other. While we are looking forward to end-game too, we would love a linkshell which focuses on several different activities, not just end-game. We might not be able to log in every single day and/or we might not be able to be online for long hours every single day, thus a hardcore linkshell wouldn't be suited for us. We prefer a linkshell which combines happily and successfully both casual and hardcore players, in which the hardcore players would be willing/happy to help the casual ones when they reach those points in time where they will need help.

So that's us. We're happy to have found this website and we will follow it. We look forward to seeing you all in Eorzea very soon. Happy gaming to everyone!

First of all, welcome! You should check out the server-specific forums - they have lists of recruiting Free Companies (the LS of FFXIV), with all their focuses.

Just as a side note, if you want to test your ping, you don't need to wait. Open the command prompt, you should get a black screen with C:\Users\{Your User Name}> showing up. Just type in:

ping 199.91.189.21

for the NA servers, and

ping 124.150.157.36

for the JP servers. Being from Sydney, unless you're with telstra you should see a noticeable difference. (Seems telstra just sucks for anywhere lol).

Hi Carmelita,

Thank you for your welcome and advice!

My ping for Japan is 220 and the ping for North America is 285. Do you think that is a significant difference? I wonder how it would translate in game lag/no lag and in hard fights and such. I really don't want to make a decision that I will later regret because of lag.

I'm not with Telstra, I'm with TPG.

Hmmm, kinda high for JP it seems (from my experience - 140 JP vs 270 NA with iiNet from Melbourne). Your difference probably wouldn't be huge gameplay-wise - you certainly won't have a "no lag" effect even with JP. Of course the JP servers would be better for endgame content where solid reflexes are necessary, but while sometimes you will say "lagged into that one," you don't really know if a lower ping would have saved you.

Those numbers really mean it depends on your preference - slightly better connection vs. a server full of English speakers (well, American English … :P). Being monolingual I would prefer an EN server, but there looks to be a strong ANZ/SEA community on Tonberry, and the ping difference is significant too. Plus more people on in our primetime, for quick & dirty stuff like token-spam dungeon runs etc.

mine is 218 =/ for JP someone shoot me.