New player *not* disappointed

Hello everyone.

Sorry for the incoming wall of text, but I want to say thank you to Square-Enix, and give a little insight to other players, into how some people might approach an online role playing game. (Me for example. As there are so many different walks of life out there, and XI is nearly perfect in its current form, for someone such as myself.)

I joined this game back in 2012, but didnt play for more than 1-3 months.

Back then i was very confused, and struggled to find a bit of direction to enjoy this game.

(Mostly due to the lack of travel capabilities like a chocobo, or the current teleportation system, and finding people, which the trust system now corrects.)

I mostly only played this game when Final Fantasy XIV was between 1.0 and 2.0 start up. (currently have all 60's classes including crafting/gathering and was item level 238 on my main job, over 36 million gil, personal Free company, house, and airship etc. etc. I'm saying that, only to give you an idea of how much I played that game.)

Since then I have taken multiple breaks from XIV.

I believe this time around i have quit XIV entirely (or at least until the level 99 cap is released in a few years) to come back to XI because i heard about trusts.


Simply put, as someone who works at night in america, i think i fit more at home in a game that is essentially what i like to call a "MSORPG" or Massive Single-player Online Role Playing Game.

So far i'm still a bit lost when it comes to things like starting up skirmish, delves, Abyssea (this is by far the most confusing thing i've known about for the longest, because I still dont know a lick about it!) unity, accolades, so on so forth.

What i have completed so far is, farming dynamis (currently doing that for gil and drops) gotten THF and DRG to 99, about to finish Rise of the Zilart expansion, and about to finally hit rank 8 in bastok lol. A lot of peppered content here and there. I also am doing sparks (Records of Eminence) silt (escha Zi'tah) and merit farming. I will start Capacity points once i finish Rhapsodies.




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I just wanted to say I am very happy here as of right now, because I enjoy the game for the game itself, and the content it can offer.

I dont need people in linkshells, or have to have the top tier gear, and have the best of the best or anything along those lines. I prefer a solid game, with plenty of content, at a cost thats effective for myself.

I calculated the hours i put into XIV so far, and if i were to play a single player game, at around 300 hours per game or so, running me 60$ a game, i saved myself well over 3,000$ over the span of the 3 years playing XIV.

I feel I will save more money, and stress playing this game, as I dont need to interact with people, who normally play when i'm at work, as I had to in XIV.


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Anyway, I want to thank Square-Enix for keeping the game alive, and making the changes to allow for a more solid gameplay experience with the new teleport system, and trust system. This allows for people like me, who enjoy a more solo experience, but in a game that is cost effective, and provides thousands of hours to enjoy.



Lastly,

I know XIV has the interest of the current group playing that game, and i'm excited to see where that development team takes that game. I am glad the people there can enjoy it, to support it until the time I feel its going to eventually become a game more fitting for someone such as myself to one day enjoy.

In the mean time, I am glad XI is where it is, because as i mentioned, its quite ideal for my play style.


-Content:

This is a given. (Because obviously XI has had more time to polish content, and add content.)

This game has an absurd amount of content its ridiculous.
I like to enjoy story lines, and i plan to complete every expansion/add-ons story content moving forward.

There are also plenty of jobs in this game, many of which i still need to unlock, and countless others i need to level to 99! I plan to level every job to 99! It will be very exciting!

-Interaction

Not sure how to categorize this, but simply put, when you walk up to a gate, that opens automatically, in this game the gate opens before you reach it. In XIV your character ends up running through the gate, because the location with which either your character activates the gate is too close to it, or simply it opens far too slow.

-Depth

This is probably the strongest point XI has in my opinion over XIV. I"m not talking about "quantity" but rather "quality." This game has jobs that are all unique, and feel different to play. They each have special traits that are unique to the job.

To me every enemy in XIV acts exactly the same. (They do 1 of two things, place an indicator for you to dodge, or "blow up" if you dont "dps" them fast enough.) They also feel like they are there just waiting to die. Instead, in this game, each enemy acts different, you have to watch the enemy for what its doing and act accordingly. The enemies also feel stronger, and seem to have a will to live in the way they act. Its not simply "kill them before they kill you." At least thats how i feel upon writing this.

Also from small things like shops being different based on areas. Some shops are in boats in Windurst, while there are tents or wandering map sellers in other locations like Raobao, or cottage type shops in bastok. In XIV they are all lined up exactly in a row with a desk in every single location available in XIV so far. From Limsa's Hawkers alley, to Idyllshire, to even the beastman outposts in Dravanian Forelands in the Gnath camp.



Sure XIV runs smoother, has better graphics, a customized User Interface, among other things, but I personally prefer a game with depth, a focus on story, as well as a smooth questing and leveling system.


I could go on for quite some time explaining more and more reasons why i'm having so much more fun in this game right now, especially knowing i can play on my own time, without the need to wait for a party sitting in party finder, or shouting, or looking for a static on the forums or a linkshell or any of those things. I can sign in and get to enjoying the game how i choose, when i choose, with little to no restriction!


Thank you.

Some of the events you named, being confused about, like Delve, require a party of at least 3 real people to enter. There are some things you simply can't do solo if you don't find a linkshell and group up with real people. Once you reach max level, a lot of ways to get level 119 equipment essentially require you to do group events with real people, because Trusts fall behind players in stats above level 99.

For the comparison to FFXIV, FFXI started life as an EverQuest clone in 2002. FFXIV is a World of Warcraft clone, and the design philosophy is a lot different. Before 2013, it was difficult to do anything solo in FFXI and the world was very dangerous to travel through without a party or ways to conceal yourself. Before 2011 with Abyssea or so, you lost a lot of EXP if you died, to where it was common to see people go down a level from being KOed. You did not just run places lightly. Outside of dungeons in FFXIV, I don't think I've ever been concerned with catching aggro as long as I keep running. In the early years of FFXI, monsters would relentlessly follow you to the zone line, and walk all the way back to their spawn point, causing huge death trains to the zone lines of popular zones, and rendering them unable to be used for parties for hours at a time. FFXI's world has been made less dangerous, but nowhere near so as FFXIV is.

I would have to echo some of the confusion spoken about by the OP.

I am a player who started a very long time ago, before Chains of Promathia even. I stuck with the game clear up until mid-Wings of the Goddess and I just burned out... I played with a family member, and this person and I just felt we were getting absolutely nowhere.

They added Level Sync, just before we were about to quit, but we found that even with using mules and Level Sync, that XP was still too slow. The game started to feel like a giant grind, a chore, which led to me losing interest and her quitting.

We went to World of Warcraft (which I was also playing at the time), and I got her into playing that. I think Wrath of the Lich King was out when she joined, and we continued playing WoW clear up until near the end of Mists of Pandaria, when she quit because of religious reasons (too much evil symbolism in the game, pr0nshire, etc). Right after the third Abyssea was released, I randomly checked ZAM's FFXI forums and noticed that the level cap was released, FoV/GoV and all sorts of neat stuff, and I convinced her to re-sub our FFXI accounts, and come back.

We did great for a time, but again, things started slowing down again. This time, we were about Lv78 trying to level in Valley of Sorrows (the best XP we could find) off of FoV regimes, but because we could never get groups, we still felt as though we were spinning our wheels.

So we quit again.

Then, after awhile, we stumbled upon a random webpage that spoke about a whole new expansion! We were both surprised... Seekers of Adoulin? They released a whole expansion? The 3 addons and Abyssea made it seem like the game was on a downhill but here comes Adoulin! We were curious. I re-subbed first, and discovered the awesomeness that was Trust NPCs, and I convinced her to resub shortly after.

But again, things started getting slow. Yeah, we got some Lv99 jobs but there really wasn't much to *do*. 117 Sparks gear was cool and all, but eventually just burnt out. So we quit -again-.

Well, for some reason or another, she gets the sudden urge to look up FFXI on youtube and found out that there are now Mounts in the game and all kinds of cool stuff. So we re-sub AGAIN. This was in November (of '16).

A few days after resubbing, I stumbled across the Rhapsodies of Vana'diel missions overview on a wiki and I discovered how much awesome the first Rhapsody *alone* is (c'mon, +30% XP!?!?! My jaw about hit the floor!) so we did the Rhapsodies questline as far as we could for now (we need to do some more, lol) and now we're happily going about our business.

But...

This leaves us all lost about what Endgame Activities we can solo and which we can't, what gives good gear, what doesn't, etc.

I really wish someone would write a good guide about what can be solo'd and what can't and an overview for the "dummy" players who know nothing about this stuff. Just in another thread, I had to ask someone about what this business with vorseals and etc are for, because dude.... Escha was released before I came back. I know nothing about it.

That's like Abyssea. I've tried reading overviews of it and it just leaves me scratching my head, because it all sounds so confusing. So many different terms, and rules (you can do this, this, but not this), mechanics (this happens if you do this, that happens if you do that) .... and I'm like "uh how am I supposed to remember half of this?"

I'd like for someone to just write a guide that covers all this stuff.

I'm pretty sure that Delve is the last holdout for things that can't be started solo. That doesn't mean that much Endgame content is exactly easy to solo/lowman if you don't already have the gear to handle it though.. If you have the gear/merits/JPs to basically overgear the content, then it can be done, but there is really nothing that is designed for soloing which makes sense since this is technically a multiplayer game. ^^;;

You'd probably be best served by focusing on completing RoV, (and maybe all mission lines,) before stressing about gear. The game is more than Endgame after all and doing all the groundwork first will help you once you are actually ready to tackle the hard stuff. (Completing missions unlock a LOT of things, like CP bonuses, vorseals, equipment reforging, and even events like Sinister Reign or Omen.) You also should work on capping out all your merits and probably try to get at least 100JP for your first big gift. Anything that you can do to strengthen your character directly (like merits, JPs) should be easily soloable even with sparks gear and really should be done before inflicting yourself on others as a general rule. XD

Try to leave the solo/duo mindset behind for now. You are going to need to have more real bodies in your group in order to get started on most 119+ content, especially if you don't know what you are supposed to be doing yet. Try to find a linkshell that doesn't mind helping people get rolling. Heck, even just 1-2 helpful and experienced friends should be enough to get started. I've run tons of people thru Escha-Zi'tah T1s just to give them an idea about how the content works, some vorseals to start off with, and usually a few decent pieces of gear to help them out. I paid for the pops, I killed the mobs. Their job was to stay in a shady spot and watch how I did things, since usually any participation by them was a liability due to their gear being not up to the task yet. My motivation has always been just to be helpful to others who are struggling with the information overload of returning/starting.

You are also probably going to have a pretty tough time finding PUGs which are going to be willing to take you at this point for any Endgame activities due to a combination of gear/job. You might want to switch to BLM/GEO/WHM/SCH in order to get groups to farm gear for the jobs you actually love playing. Pretty much any/every group will want GEO/WHM and BLM/SCH are both in high demand, and the gear reqs are not super hard to reach viability for any of them in order to start on 119+ content. Just don't expect to be able to jump into the higher tier stuff right away though since JP/gifts are required for that.

For now, you might want to try lower difficulty Ambuscade Vol2 solo/duo to get some starter 119 gear. The NQ sets tend to be equal/better than most "easily accessible" drops and even doing it on Easy shouldn't take forever to get. Yorcia Weald Alluvion Skirmish is also a decent option if you at least have a duo partner and a decent stock of Copper Vouchers to buy obsidian, but you can expect to end up spending quite a bit of gil on getting good augments for the gear that drops here. With a bit of luck with the drop rate, you can also trade 3x of the wings that drop here for 119 weapons if you don't have one yet.

Don't worry about asking questions btw. There are plenty of know-it-alls (like me) here who are more than happy to answer anything to the best of our abilities. XD