New Years message

[Vold]

I think SE has always fallen back on the excuse that XIV was their upgrade for XI. I just think it's sad that some guy is or was providing graphical upgrades for us in the most basic sense - HD textures for zones. I haven't looked into it for awhile but maybe characters or mobs by now? In any case, if they are too cheap to throw a guy or three at such things then it's hopeless to ever think about such upgrades by the team. It's a shame because I imagine many people from the old days would return as older people and go, damn, I like this. I think I'll hang around modern day XI. But, without that official graphical upgrade by whatever means necessary, those people have a hard time reconsidering their decision to leave. And maybe they are right. XI still feels like XI at the end of the day. No doubt about it. But I would wager people would very much enjoy XI in modern day, but I also have seen old school people come back and just leave again upon getting that mythic they've always wanted, or they did so much grinding that they went back on break. Maybe I'm a lost cause. I have many games dating back to the PS2 that I've never got around to playing because of this game. I'm clearly biased.

I'm just annoyed that XI has had to rely on other players developing stuff for this game while SE opts to make XIV and put a skeleton crew here. If not for certain apps, if not for the efforts of so many 3rd party players to make this game fun, I doubt it would still be running today if people were forced to play the basic XI experience. Those apps have given us so many reasons to keep our brains busy maxing ourselves. I just wish the two would officially come together to make the entire experience as amazing as possible. But SE is too proud for that and maybe youknowwhat app's team are too proud to sell out. IDK. Whatever. Maybe it'd be a pointless endeavor anyways bc ps2 code. Just like it's pointless for me to censor the name of a 3rd party app because a team member might spend about 3 minutes a year on these forums and they've never tried laying the law down on them anyways because they know what the project means for maintaining a playerbase here...

[Haldarn]

I think SE has always fallen back on the excuse that XIV was their upgrade for XI.

Really thinking about it, I wouldn't mind if this was even viable. I'm all but up-to-date on XIV, but it's so dull to play, I can't bring myself to grind out more fkin tomestones. All of the content in that game falls into two categories: a) boring repeats or b) must spend four weeks learning a dance.

So I'm sat here playing XI because for some reason challenging myself (slowly) to get more and more upgrades to my RDM so I can solo more and more content is actually fun. And the variety of content is massively in excess of XIV. It's so frustrating that S-E don't see that with a UI and graphics (and yeah probably networking) update, XI would be a feasible investment.

I'm just hoping that as a promo for the XI raid in the next expansion, sometime soon they combine the subscription fees.