Internet Wayback Machine

[Flunklesnarkin]

I have found the internet wayback machine extremely helpful when researching how games worked in the past because game faq sites get bogged down in revisions after numerous expansions and patches.

It basically is a non-profit project started in 1998 that takes snap shot of the internet every few months and basically crawls and archives all the webpages out there.


So if you wanted to see what ffxiclopedia looked like in 2008 you could browse the site without having to sift out all the abyssea expansion stuff

Here would be a link to a version of ffxiclopedia in 2008

http://web.archive.org/web/200802220837 ... /Main_Page


or you could plug in any other website like ffxialla or whatever other sites out there


here is a link to their main page.

http://archive.org/web/web.php

[Kyousousha]

Or you can just look at the revision history that is available for every page.

[Flunklesnarkin]

you could do that also, but not every website has a revision history page to reference.

Also, its more intuitive to just surf the internet rather than having to search revision histories on every new webpage.

So much easier to just input a target date like October 2007 and start surfing.

[xipies]

So much easier to just input a target date like October 2007 and start surfing.

One thing to keep in mind is not every page matches the same timestamp.

Ex: http://web.archive.org/web/20080222083736/http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
goes to http://web.archive.org/web/20080220150900/http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Virtue (URL changes after clicking link).

Note the 20080222083736 and 20080220150900 difference. It's usually not bad, in this example it's a couple days, but sometime on poorly archived sites you can get differences of a year or more.

[Flunklesnarkin]

definitely a good idea to keep track of the date.

It's not normally so bad on high traffic websites because those get archived a lot.


A few days or even a few months isn't a huge difference as long as it doesn't change from one expansion to another.

So if you are aiming for a specific expansion of ffxi, and only want to view how the game worked during that time. Just make sure you set a date far enough away from an expansion release that it doesn't cross back and forth across that line.

usually a month or two after or before an expansion works best from what i've found.

Here are the expansion release dates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fant ... Expansions


Zilart was released in April 2003 for Japan and March 2004 for US

CoP was released in September 2004

ToAH was released in April 2006

WoTG was released in November 2007

Add On's started in 2009

and of course Abyssea started in 2010


So If I wanted to research WoTG style FFXI i'd probably use a 2008 date

If i wanted to use ToAH I'd probably set the date to april or may 2007 a few months prior to WoTG release.

For CoP I'd probably set the date to some time in 2005

you get the point I'm sure.


Another thing to note though, a lot of websites change their homepage URL over time. For example, if you want to research stuff on ffxiclopedia prior to 2007, you can't use their current URL as a start point, you have to use their old URL. I'll dig that up tomorrow sometime.

[Flunklesnarkin]

Well here is the ffxiclopedia webpage prior to 2007

http://web.archive.org/web/200610291155 ... /Main_Page


It also appears that they had forums back then too where people discussed game mechanics

http://web.archive.org/web/200610291024 ... pedia.org/




Here is a list of some websites that might prove useful when plugged into the wayback machine. (the links aren't wayback machined yet)

From the BG Forums

http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/41409- ... ompilation



http://wiki.bluegartr.com/Main_Page BlueGartr Wiki - Everything FFXI related.

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/ FFXI Forums and Information site

http://mysterytour.web.infoseek.co.jp/f ... index.html FFXI Information site NA/JP

http://www.killingifrit.com/ FFXI Forums and Information site

http://www.ausystem.org/~aushacho/gbox/ff/skill-e.html Skill ratings and caps by level for non-ToAU jobs



There are a lot more links listed on the BG forums, but I copied a few links over to here.

[Zedingo]

One thing to keep in mind is that some mechanics may not have been fully understood back then, so you might find yourself filling in the gaps with more recent knowledge.