As FINAL FANTASY XIV™ (FFXIV) moves in to its next development phase, so does the community and with the reintroduction of billing. Since Nantekotta (formerly of Asura, FFXI) was reestablished earlier this fall we’ve seen a great start and growth of our community. Many skilled players have both joined and developed within our ranks and fond memories as well as lasting friendships have established for many of us.

With that said, along with the commencement of the billed services, we’ve decided to make some changes to the purpose and basic structure of this linkshell to accommodate the needs of our members for the coming months.

As anyone with experience of both endgame FFXI and FFXIV will tell you, they are very different from each other. FFXI was a mix of quests and open world Notorious Monsters (NM’s), all requiring preplanning and hours of collaboration of 18 or more players per linkshell, often without any guaranteed rewards. This resulted in an endgame where most successful linkshell were compiled of 50+ members, to increase the availability of members during spawn periods.

FFXIV is for the time being very different. Almost every quest is focused on the single player experience, and most rewarding NM’s are instanced. Furthermore, none of the content requires more than 8 players and can be challenged at any point in time. This has resulted in three types of linkshells forming;

• smaller limited groups of ~20 members for the “hardcore” almost functioning like statics,
• large communities with less restrictions on recruitment, often scheduling content and/or using point systems to organize the group and finally
• larger communities with close to no restrictions, mainly focused on the social aspects of online gaming.

Many of us have already joined one or more of these types of shells to satisfy our needs. Myself for example I’ve joined one of the more limited groups for events during my personal primetime. However like many others I find myself wanting to do endgame content spontaneously during other hours, and when I do I prefer to do it with people I trust. This can be an issue in a large community with lesser restrictions on recruitment.

This is where the new Nantekotta comes into play. Our new focus will be as a “connector” for experienced endgame players looking to spontaneously challenge content. Think of it as the server-wide chat channel you’ve always wanted, for people you’ve found you can trust in your past travels.
While we won’t be offering scheduled reoccurring events for our members, we will provide such tools as a schedule, voice communication, forums and the rest of what Guildwork.com offers to help our members connect and progress in the game together.

Only those with recommendations and/or votes within our ranks will be accepted, and we encourage all our members to think of Nantekotta as a tool rather than a primary linkshell, unless the spontaneous style is your primary method of progression of course. We know there is a lot of stigma surrounding the term “hardcore”, and would like to point out that Nantekotta will continue to function as a social shell in the same capacity is has before these changes to recruitment.

We are committed to making this the most useful tool at your disposal to enhance your gaming experience, and we feel this is the best method of doing so as we continue to customize our linkshell to fit the game mechanics.

The linkshell policies have been adjusted following these changes and can be reviewed in the Policies & Organization section.

Looking forward to our joint adventures towards 2.0! may the Twelve we with you.

Sincerely,