Is there any way to play this without dealing with the horrendous

if you play on retail then no you must deal with playonline

if you play on private servers, you don't need playonline.

>>379171331
I mean you only have to deal with Playonline's shit ONE time during installation.

Then you just use Windower and your only use of Playonline is literally to log in and launch the game.

>>379172852
>is literally to log in and launch the game.

Can't even do that much. It keeps giving me errors and telling me my password/ID is wrong and that I need to register even though I registered both PlayOnline and S-E accounts.

Is there a way to play this without paying?

Private Servers but there's no way to avoid the horrendous grinding, hours of literally nothing while you wait for spawns / travel through empty areas and the complete lack of balance that makes Jobs have entire level ranges where they are completely useless compared to basically every other job.

Also it's ded

>>379173054
Yeah, you have to put in your Square Enix account password, not your PlayOnline password, because that would be too easy.

It's fucken madness, but ya do what ya gotta do or your money was wasted.

>>379173568
Private servers like Nasomi are good if you want something approaching the oldschool 'socialise or fail' experience. If you just want to do the story content at your own pace, Retail now has a 2 week free trial too. The free trial lets you play all the vanilla content (no expansions). Of course the story starts getting good just after you run out of vanilla content, so if you're in it for the story then you'll have to end up paying (but absolutley get as much done as you can in your free trial time first so you get more bang for your buck.)

>>379176501
I used the same password for both. Ultimately I'm just doing the free trial, so if everything is acting retarded, no skin off my back.

daily reminder that private servers ALL OF THEM have a glitch when you die that home points you automatically sometimes.

>>379176986
In the free trial I'm pretty sure you don't get to choose your PlayOnline password? They gave me a random plastering of letters and numbers, glad I don't have to type that shit in every time. Well, whatever. The password you need to type every time is the one you get to choose. Maybe it's your saved PlayOnline pass that's wrong in this case? Because as I understand the signup process it couldn't be the same as your S-E account that you would have created first.

>>379177343
>In the free trial I'm pretty sure you don't get to choose your PlayOnline password? They gave me a random plastering of letters and numbers

I didn't even see anything like that. Just options to set up an id/player name/password. Never dealt with PlayOnline before today. Shit's retarded. At least setting up XIV was easy. If my computer weren't such a toaster I'd be playing that right now.

>>379177665

if you're too dumb to figure out how to use POL then you're too dumb to play ffxi

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106KB, 706x521px

>>379177830
You're probably right.