FFXI is hard

[Sever]

At first, when you start playing it all is good. Then, you reach level 5. That's when you enter the real meat and potatoes of this game. Which is to say, that's when death hurts.

Like EQ, the game penalizes you for dieing by taking away your earned experience points. It is even possible to de-level yourself by getting killed a lot. At this point in the game, you begin to learn the importance of checking the monster's strength. This is somewhat hard to do on the Japanese version because...well...it's all in Japanese.

Once you learn that, however, you begin to learn which monsters to stay away from. But, that won't prevent some monsters from attacking you on sight. It also spawns the habit of being very wary of your surroundings.

Great game so far, I've met a lot of helpful english-speaking people.