I think I'm finished; a new player's final thoughts

[Kincard]

I just want to point out this is incorrect Kincard, you have to complete nearly all of the CoP missions in order to get Sea access and you have to have Sea access for Sagheera to talk to you, and you have to have her talk to you in order for you to talk to Monisette who upgrades your AF into RF. So through the chain you do have to complete almost all of CoP which is far from not needing to do a single mission. This was one of the complaints he made in another thread, and one I very much agree with him about not being something that should be required.

Actually didn't know that/forgot about her. That's probably something they should change, then.

[Lithera]

I picked up this game because of the story, to see if this newfangled Final Fantasy would still feel like one even though it was online, because a friend I knew was going to be playing it and because I had played up to that point almost every numbered FF title there was out there at the time.

Again there shouldn't be a rush to get to the end. If you do and then complain about how boring and easy old expansions are that is still on you the player. Only you, not the game, can choose if the four other expansions and add-ons are challenging or not. Trust me when CoP came out and us old timers walked into that part of jeuno most were wtfbbq is going on. Most of us even back then knew random CS normally meant a bad thing. Also with adoulin it has it's own site this is how we learned what all of this was same with abyssea. I'm not sure if the abyssea site is still up or not.

I also have a hard time believing that all new players have the diminished understanding that say a six year old would have and that they don't know how to pop out their inner Sherlock Holmes from time to time. Most expansion CS show or tell you the area to go to. Quests not so much most of the time. If you did do all of this research about smn as you say you did I'm surprised that no where did you run into anything saying they were no longer wanted by the majority of the player base for wildskeeper and delve. Though with the up coming promise of being able to do delve low man maybe it will have a chance to shine. I believe in the if the mob isn't trying to kill the mages then it can't be 100% a bad thing. Anyway you are either going to quit or not so most of this thread will be moot one way or another.

[Demonjustin]

Incase you missed it in all of the other posts Crevox, just wanted to say again, if you come to Phoenix you are welcome to join my social LS & there are a lot of people in it both friendly and helpful, we are a bunch of weirdos but were not the bad kind! So if you need a home in this game, and don't mind coming to Phoenix, we can offer you a place. Also I have a money making shell who could use SMNs and does events Sun~Wed @9/10 to 11/12 PM EST if interested in that as well, it would give you a chance to put your SMN to use in a group event while at the same time helping you fund anything you still need gear wise or need moving forward, joining that shell isn't up to me, but I doubt the leader would mind so long as you can follow directions for what we gotta do during the event. Either way, just wanted to throw it up here again incase you missed it and it sounds like something you might want to do. ^_^;

[Siviard]

To the OP

I don't post very often on here, but after reading your initial post, I can tell you what your first and most critical mistake was. You chose to play on Asura server

Asura is known to be the server with the most hardcore players and is not friendly towards newer or casual players. I truly believe that if you had started on a server that had a more laid back attitude and is friendly towards new/returning/casual players, your FFXI experience would have been much more enjoyable.

[bungiefanNA]

To the OP

I don't post very often on here, but after reading your initial post, I can tell you what your first and most critical mistake was. You chose to play on Asura server

Asura is known to be the server with the most hardcore players and is not friendly towards newer or casual players. I truly believe that if you had started on a server that had a more laid back attitude and is friendly towards new/returning/casual players, your FFXI experience would have been much more enjoyable.

http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxi/comment...l_new_players/

Actually, Asura has a good new players linkshell or two. It's the official Reddit FFXI server. He just had to look for people to join a shell with. Feedback on that shell seems to be very good lately.

[Vivivivi]

To the OP-

Very insightful perspective in todays FFXI. And I can't disagree with many of your sentiments. Unfortunately it seems that the game isn't focused on attracting new players, but rather is focused on keeping current players and potentially drawing back old players.

I'd like to share a few tips from when I started out (3 years ago), which even then people found it strange to see a legitimately new player lol.

I like you, started out with a couple friends, which I highly recommend. What was nice about that is we really didn't know about end game and took at least a month to get to rank 6. We took our time doing missions, leveling jobs and trying to figure out ways to make gil (yagudo beads and crystals XD ). Eventually we stumbled on what we'd later learn are some end-game activities like voidwalker NMs, Abyssea, etc. After getting to Jeuno and interacting with other players, we got invites to a couple social linkshells and went from there.

I didn't have sea access for limbus events, didn't know the first thing about Dynamis, and was afraid to venture into Abyssea. Why'd I stick around? 2 reasons– I really loved the story in FFXI, I'm not really into other MMOs, but I am a die hard Final Fantasy fan. I also really enjoyed interacting with all of the players I met. While I would encourage any new player to stick with the game, I totally understand the frustration with how long it can take to get access to, and get geared well enough to participate in the current end game content, and in the games current state, even with trust npcs, records of eminence gear, etc. It can still take a long time.

[Xantavia]

For someone like me, I do not enjoy doing nonstop fetch quests; especially when they hold absolutely no difficulty, and they take an extraordinary amount of time, often for no real reason. It is a large time dump. Chains of Promathia was a major offender here. The majority of the quests involve absolutely no combat, and when they do involve combat, it lasts for about 10 seconds and then it's back to running somewhere again. Yes, that's because it's easy now, but either way, it's still boring, especially alone. At some point, I would've loved to go and do it just to see the story, yeah, sure. The problem is that I don't have a choice. I have to do all of this stuff (Zilart, Promathia, Aht Urhgan) for various reasons just to be able to do the content everyone else is doing. And NONE of those 3 things involve me playing with friends or anyone else. Going through Promathia with a friend is not an interesting experience; it's just you both doing it at the same time, no different than you both playing the same single player game across the room from each other.

Did you wait until you were at level cap before doing these missions? CoP battles were designed for characters 30-75. If you did it at 99, of course the fights were over in 10 seconds. It strikes me similar to complaints in other games about people grinding to the highest levels, then saying the game is too easy. And if you have friends, do the older content together. You want to do what everyone else is doing, but seem to overlook that if you did stuff with friends, it wouldn't really matter what everyone else is doing.

[Lithera]

Exactly, Xantavia. At 99 most of the old fights is stupid easy but go do say the CoP Diablos fight at 75 he will still whoop your butt if you don't stun nightmare. The diremites below him if you get knocked off or fall down will still do the same. Even the fight against Tenzen is still a slight challenge at 75 or even 80. Doing these at 99 would be like going to a beginning area in any other FF title at max level and expect to have a five minute fight vs a level ten mob. It is just not going to happen.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

1. Crap like this was clearly done to sell guide books
2. BradyGames hasn't seen fit to sell an English-language guide since 2005
3. Yet crap like this persists 9 years later
4. Ergo, the game is flawed

[Camiie]

1. Crap like this was clearly done to sell guide books
2. BradyGames hasn't seen fit to sell an English-language guide since 2005
3. Yet crap like this persists 9 years later
4. Ergo, the game is flawed

And there you also have the real reason there wasn't an official windowed mode for so long.