Quote Originally Posted by odericko View Post
As someone who plays both XI and XIV (with a legacy account), I can't help but read this post as someone trying to convince themselves XI is over for whatever reason.

Ever since XIV became the gear treadmill it is now I can't help but lose interest in playing. That's why I came back to XI and gave it another shot. Already let my XIV sub lapse and plan on sticking around here to complete all the content I missed out on from when XIV launched.
Hi, nice to see another person with Legacy that still has love for ffxi (I thought I was the only one. lol) I never let me ffxi subscription end (except the one month where the ffxi payment system rejected my payment and instead of letting me pay with another card, it blocked me out for a month...of which the gear the was offered that month on the repeat login was never offered again...still pissed about this MONTHS later...) and I played without stop on ffxiv 1.0-1.23b. I've seen both games change, ffxi changing since launch til now and ffxiv 1.0-3.1 or whatever we are on now.

Just like you I find myself with a TON to do in ffxiv, yet I am getting sick and tired of it. The main scenario DRAGS like crazy, hundreds of pointless main quests, such as talk to 2 people, quest done, bring me this one item from one person to another, quest done. I know that doesn't sound too bad, but when it takes HUNDREDS of these just to give your mule access to the new jobs is a joke. I've spent the last 2 weeks getting mules from starting to the last 2.0 quest (which is still FAR away from 3.0 where the jobs are, not to mention that I'm skipping every cutscene and dailog and it's STILL dragging.) Nothing but busy work. And to make things worse is SE lied about the personal housing, it will cost 800K they said, they said you can play the main scenario and be able to afford it by the time you finish 2.0. Nice lie, but personal housing costs 5 Million at the very least (and if nobody buys it in months, then you get a discount.)

Anyway, last night wife and I got our tax refund and we decided we would spend a little real life money buying some of the things they have for sale on there for in-game items. I couldn't freakin believe it. They sell the outfits for main-NPC characters and they charge $8 an outfit ($15 for one that comes with a hairstyle) and all are sex-specific and most outfits are a 1-2 pieces so you can't even break up the outfits and they only go to 1 character on your account (even though most people can have up to 8 characters per account.) Then they sell event items, for $3-$5 a piece per character, so if the event you missed had 5 items, expect to pay ~$20 for just 1 of your characters to have the items missed. Are they for real? $12-$25 for mounts... Then we decided to check out the plush and soundtracks/blurays they sell with bonus items. $40 and above for a RL thing with an ingame code...

So I decided last night to just cut the crap. FFXIV's needless grind to get to 3.0 content (yes I know it makes sense to wait that long cause the game's story has to lead to the new town Ishgard but it's still not right, SE writes the story so they could have made the new town/jobs accessible from the start, which is what they promised before the expansion was released, yet they changed it and they chose to force you to grind hundreds of busy-work quests to access something as basic as a new job) and overcharging RL money for ingame items was the last straw. I do not have the love for SE like I did years ago (man do i regret getting Final Fantasy tattooed in Japanese on my arm) and this abuse of fans is just the reminder I needed of how SE treats it's fans/customers.

The only reason I'm not quitting FFXIV is because my wife would hate me if I did that, she loves it cause it's all pretty and the outfits are all pretty, etc... But I have to be honest, I much rather play Pong than FFXIV at this point. However, FFXI doesn't seem to piss me off like FFXIV does. FFXI has done nothing but improved as time passes. Trusts were the best thing to happen to FFXI since it launched and SE had enough sense to pass the lvl75 nonsense they were stuck on for years. FFXI is just fun now and everything (most everything) is accessible solo, no need to spent most of the day gathering people to do 10 minutes of content. No needing to stop what you are doing to help LS members do content, nope, everyone can do what they want, pretty much when they want. Gil now flows like water in FFXI, so no more being too poor to afford the nice things. Nobody farms NMs anymore so no competition there. Even the pointlessly level-capped CoP areas were no longer capped. Yes I know most of these changes are years old by now, but it still has made giant (and significant) positive changes. Hell, even the moghouse had a second floor added with more room to design the house as you see fit. (My only complaint is that you can't have the second floor of the moghouse be the main floor. Seeing as how you have to tell the door that you want to go to the second floor makes the second floor a extremely rare visit.)

I just realized there is no point to my post lol Thanks for reading. It might not help you, but it helped me to post my thoughts. Almost therapeutic. Well time to log into ffxiv, as much as it angers me, my to do list is just too big to not log in... kill me...