The Final Fantasy XI Fan Festival, which RPGamer discussed yesterday, continued today with more opportunities for fans of the game to ask Square Enix's development staff questions regarding their plans for Final Fantasy XI.

Some key pieces of information revealed by the developers were:

• The development team is working as hard as possible to ensure that Treasures of Aht Urghan makes it out on time.
• The Xbox 360 beta version of Final Fantasy XI has reached 100,000 characters.
Characters that are part of the Xbox 360 beta test will be transferable to new accounts.
• Final Fantasy XI is currently undergoing full translations to both French and German.
• Players of the North American version of Final Fantasy XI will be able to download the new language patches at no additional cost.

Below is the question and answer portion of the conference. As stated yesterday, the development team could not make any assurances regarding the plans they discussed, nor could any sort of timetable for implementation be put forth.

Q: What is Square Enix doing about the Real Money Traders still actively camping Notorious Monsters constantly?
A: We are aware of these groups of people, and are working on new ideas to combat them, which might be ready for the April patch.

Q: Do items equipped or eaten affect Treasure Hunters in any way?
A: If you believe, your dreams will come true.

Q: Are there any plans for Final Fantasy XI development for the PlayStation 3?
A: Right now, we still don't know what type of machine the PS3 is, so we are waiting on Sony to finalize the hardware before we can make that decision.

Q: Are there any plans for the green teleport paths in Ru'Aun Gardens?
A: We put in different paths without specific plans to use them, so stay tuned.

Q: I would like to know if the dev team actually defeated Absolute Virture with the current jobs and equipment available.
A (after writing on paper and a long pause): We're going to go back and try again.

Q: Are Mithras furry or tanned?
A: We're going to leave that up to you guys.

Q: Will Besieged have different levels, because the demo wouldn't be very fun for characters under level 70?
A: The strength of the beastmen that attack all depend on the players attacking the strongholds. If the players have beaten the beastmen back, their raids on the town will be weaker. The stronger the beastmen in the region, the harder their attacks will be.

Q: Will there be any new instruments for the bards, or maybe new tunes?
A: We will take the suggestion back to the sound team and see what they can do.

Q: What is Square Enix able to do about sites that still promote gil selling?
A: These sites that do promote these actions, we ask you not to visit them; we can't find lots of them.

Q: It's impossible to find the Chains of Promathia for PlayStation 2. Can it be released as a Greatest Hit?
A: Currently we don't have a plan of releasing a combined version of the expansions.

Q: Currently it's almost impossible to get a fully upgraded relic weapon. Are there plans to change this?
A: Unfortunately, there are currently no plans to change this. We know they are hard to obtain, but we don't want everyone to have a relic weapon.

Q: Currently, there is a rumor that the direction you face makes a difference in what your results are. Any comment?
A: Just face where your heart tells you to face.

Q: Are there any plans to have rental equipment for different level caps?
A: We are thinking of ideas, especially for ballistae, that will help handle the problem of storage.

Q: Samurai was supposed to be a tank job such as Paladin or Ninja, but Ninja has taken this role away. Are there plans to give the Samurai job more abilities to be able to tank?
A: Actually, when first developing the Samurai, we never planned on it being a tank, but an attacker. We plan to make the Paladin a better tank, and the Samurai a better attacker.

The development team closed with the message to fans that the team will continue to support the game as long as it retains the support of its fans. The team also thanked fans for their continued support up to this point.