Other MMOs that you think ARE ACTUALLY BETTER?

Nothing is better in my opinion, some have their respective strengths and obvious weaknesses (aside from ESO which is a laughing stock in everything it does yuck. The progression there is non existent + might as well have been a single player game).

If you like most of FFXIV or even if you don't, there's always something it does well enough to leave a positive impression. Its at worst a jack of all and at best, the perfect fit. Obviously subtract my bias - but all in all I've tried every MMO going. Few do justice to 'all playstyles' (aside from perhaps pvp only players) and do it consistently, like this game does. Perk of a sub paying playerbase perhaps.

That and it retains some actual depth to its core gameplay. Most of the new spammy/casual friendly AAA's don't.

Oh and if you ever think the mogstation is bad, do pay a visit to the ESO crownstore. You'll soon change your mind at exclusive items locked in 1% chance RNG crates where people waste thousands of real life money for nothing in pursuit of a single mount. Literally.

None.

I might like a few certain features from other MMORPGs more (for example, the world exploring system from GW2, which feels more alive), but overall I don't consider any of them better games because FFXIV does everything else better. If there were a game I liked more than FFXIV, I'd be playing that one instead.

If there was a MMO I felt was a better overall game, I'd be playing it.

There are games I have extremely fond memories of and sometimes miss, though I understand that the things I miss about those games are more coated in nostalgia and not actually finding it, legitimately, a better designed system/game.

Of course, there are things that other MMO's do extremely well XIV could likely look at to adopt. (ie: WildStar had incredible housing freedom and features; World of Warcraft has more imaginative design of raid fights over the years and many remain memorable experiences; Mythic+ is also a really solid idea IMO)

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Originally Posted by Embercrisp

DAoC was/still is my most favorite MMO of all time. I wish it could get released again in better graphics lol I would play. The PvP in that game was also ahead of its time.

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I still believe that their RvR system is currently the best way what PvP has to offer.

full package, atm i find none overall better. That said individual things, some do it better, GW2 for example has better overall map design (namely cuz of PoF) and i like their take on "level sync". GW2 mount system is also markedly better. Tera world design when they go "absurd" is just really well done (tough call though, idk if id want ff 14 that "far out") BnS has the bewbs and butts ;) Personally I prefer FF 14s combat, but can see why some like the combat in those games: Tera imo is "make belief" actiony (you actual relevant stuff is still your hotbar buttons) but BnS for example feels very action oriented. Haven't tried ESO and someday i want to :P Legion i disliked quite a bit so not going the WoW route, will say that at least WOD to Legion was a step in the right direction...I just didn't like the direction. FF 11, I like as many things in it as i dislike lol, a big part is nostalgia and the community it had, alot of it is remembering crap that was just bleh! like /nin for everything and classes being situational as fack based on content. Will give it this, at the time I was playing WoW too and wow never felt like a world like ff 11 did.

So far nothing that I have played is better than FFXIV.

I can't say about XI since I never played it. I quite like playing with a controller so that may have something to do with it. I have played XIV a lot longer than any other MMO I have played. Most I give up before reaching lv30 because they take a long time to level. I don't really like having to level by grinding mobs. So that is something 14 does better. The leveling grind is much easier and I love the races and mounts.

Best overall MMO experience, it is FFXIV for me.
Previous MMOs ive played is mainly WOW from 2005-2011

Others I have tried for 2+months:
SWTOR
Rift
Defiance
TERA Online
Black Desert Online
Aion

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Originally Posted by Final-Fantasy

Final Fantasy XI Online, still playing it after 16+ years and I enjoy it a lot more than this game :P


Better Story than 14's
Better design of gameplay
Better endgame
Better Auction House
Better music

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Wat

FFXI vet here and the auction house you having to play a guessing game of what a item actually costs was bullshit. FFXIV's is way better.

For convenience, I say Guild Wars 2 has a better system due to being able to deposit craft materials instantly into you bank anywhere you want, Easy access to Glamour and is 100% account bound on all Glamour, and access to the Market anywhere you want if you wish to sell something or buy something (still have to go to the Market NPC to pick up the item and currency obtained).

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Originally Posted by KokonoeAiyoko

Wat

FFXI vet here and the auction house you having to play a guessing game of what a item actually costs was bullshit. FFXIV's is way better.

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Well, it was aptly named "auction house".

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Originally Posted by KokonoeAiyoko

Wat

FFXI vet here and the auction house you having to play a guessing game of what a item actually costs was bullshit. FFXIV's is way better.

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The upside to this is that there wasn't an epidemic of undercutting and prices stayed far more stable. Considering stability is a fundamental hallmark of good markets, I'd say FFXI's system was hands-down better than FFXIV's currently is.

Also, there's really the same amount of work involved for FFXIV. It's kind of stupid to just look at the prices of currently-listed items. I've lost count of how many times I've seen a few copies of something up for 15k, only to check the history and see that the item hasn't sold for above 5k in the past few months. That sales history is the real guide to pricing, and FFXI had an equivalent mechanism.

At the moment I give the edge to ESO. That is followed by FF XIV with Wildstar and WoW about equal. I like the UI for ESO better than FF XIV although I would like to see more abilities on the action bar and not having to swap. I also like their housing system better. It is no Wildstar and the house/apartment interiors tend to be smaller than FF XIV however you can get as many properties as you want any time you want and the are all different. To me they alos feel more alive as many are in or near places of high activity.

I still play FFXI, Aion was pretty good, Guild Wars 2, Rift, Elder Scrolls Online, yet always come back to FFXIV. The story line is what keeps me a loyal fan.

Guild Wars 1.

Guild Wars 2 was a complete failure to me but GW1 is really the 'best MMO' for me.

Hmm... This is really hard to answer. I don't think I've played an MMO that's better than FFXIV in all - or even in most - ways. There are things that other MMOs do well, though. I haven't played many MMOs so I don't have many to compare to.

I loved the social element and the bright and cheerful graphics of Maplestory - for lack of a more sophisticated way to describe it - even though the game was in 2-D.

Aion didn't stand out to me too much, except for the ability to fly in that MMO.

I loved the story in Guild Wars and the way the story quests were conducted. The heroes and henchmen system was also really fun. I enjoyed the PvP in Guild Wars as well. But it's an old game so it certainly can't compete with FFXIV in the graphics department.

As for Guild Wars 2, I love their vast, expansive worlds; their environments just feel more immersive than FFXIV's. It feels like we're really in that world and that the world is alive, with the ambient sounds, npc dialogues, etc. Their maps are larger than FFXIV's as well, with connected levels. I adore some of their main cities - The Grove, Rata Sum and Divinity's Reach (in no particular order). GW2's environments feel more realistic than FFXIV's, though the difference is only felt when I compare the two games; I don't have much trouble immersing myself in FFXIV either. However, GW2's combat feels shallow and unsatisfying due to their lack of a trinity system; everyone is just a dps, and battles have been reduced to running full berserker set, pulling the boss to a corner and then burning it down while dodging attacks. I know they've added somewhat of a trinity to their raids, though. I have yet to try that out.

I've quit all of these other MMOs except GW2, which I still visit maybe once or twice a year, sometimes staying for longer spells. In the end, I suppose I value what FFXIV has to offer more than what GW2 has to offer, hence I'm mostly playing this game.

runescape back in 2001.

Guild Wars 2 still remains a far better MMO to me. It's the best one I've ever played. The only thing FFXIV does better is end-game content with raids. Also FFXIV has dungeons and a role system, which GW2 doesn't have.

Bottom-line is, if FFXIV didn't have Extreme Trials or Savage, I'd have quit a long time ago.

But all that aside, GW2 has a much better combat system, open-world content, PvP, and story delivery. The story started off weak (painfully dull and boring), but leading up to their first expansion they did one of the most amazing plot twists I have ever experienced (Caithe's secret). And from there, the story just got better. The story instances have so much detail, and the way NPCs interact with you in the middle of battles sometimes is just incredible.

The maps are fun to explore, filled with life, talking NPCs and monsters, and they all have their own story and series of events. The best part is you can keep going back to them, regardless of your level, and play through them. Same with the story instances.

Not to mention there's no monthly subscription. Oh, and you can color individual parts of your gear pieces. No need to bother with retainers, you can send crafting items directly to your storage, and don't even have to take them out when you want to craft.

I honestly found Wildstar to be absolutely fantastic but the dev team for the game seemed to be dead-set on making it fail in every way possible.

I'm a returning player, haven't played FFXIV in years but started back up this weekend. I've played a good amount of MMORPGs: WOW, FFXI, Aion, Tera, Blade and Soul, Black Desert Online, and many more. I can't say FFXIV is the best but I will say that right now, with all of the choices I have, I chose to return to FFXIV and I am really enjoying it.

Some changes have been made since I last played and I'm happy with the majority of them (wasn't happy about how cleric stance works now...). I have a lot of good things to say about the game but I only get 1000 characters.

I find the character models to be somewhat stiff. I'm happy we have '/cpose' but the models could really use a bit more life. That being said, the game is still very immersive, I just think if we could add a little more life to them, it would be even more so. I think some of this may simply have to do with the game being old. I forget the game came out in 2010 cause it still looks great.

More voice acting please.

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Originally Posted by KokonoeAiyoko

Wat

FFXI vet here and the auction house you having to play a guessing game of what a item actually costs was bullshit. FFXIV's is way better.

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At the very least, there should be a tax to list the item like it was in XI.

Overwatch xD.

To elaborate from my comment on the first page (which I trimmed down.)

FFXIV has not been exceeded by any older or newer MMO in the graphics department. V1.0 was better at a few graphics things, but it's fairer to look at XIV V1.00 as the game that XI players wanted, where as XIV 2.00 players wanted something that was more casual oriented and more fun than WoW. So it's disingenuous to say XI was better, when we had "a prettier XI" as XIV V1.00. V1.00 had a lot of other failings, but had it really been "better" than XI, then XI players would have stuck with it, and they didn't.

A lot of games that we think were "better" than XIV at something, are largely looking at some mechanic that wasn't as casual friendly, but felt more intuitive or logical than what we got. Take for instance crafting. UO was the king of this, and then Minecraft came along and went "hey, you know what would be more fun? actually finding the materials, rather than fixed mining nodes". To that end, "Landmark (EQ Next)" was going to be that, and then Sony killed it.

Housing was another thing that UO did well and only Archeage actually followed up on. Place your home anywhere, take up multiple homes slots by rotating it 15 degrees. I'd honestly prefer Landmark's take on this as well, where you could harvest materials from the world, and build a home on an area of land you "claimed" and can make it look like anything you want. For obvious reasons (eg wanting a world to look consistent) you'd never want this in a game like FFXIV, but you would want it in a game that was 100% Role-Play. Otherwise you'd get people making castles that take up as much space as possible with phallic-shaped cupolas. Really what I want for "home construction" is a MMORPG to rip-off "The Sims" way of doing this. Just create a floor plan, and the game figures out where the walls and props go. Visually consistent.

FFXIV has some semblance of UO's scheduled NPC's, but not really. In XIV V1.0 you'd actually see the NPC's walk into and out of the camps when the battle wardens were to start a behest. In XIV V2.0 you see this in the form of FATES. But neither of these are how UO's NPC's worked. UO's NPC's and monsters (at least when I tried it, dial-up era) actually had needs, so they'd eat and sleep, and so forth. Really the only version of this I've seen in anything hasn't been in a MMORPG but rather in a manga/anime based that takes place in a MMORPG's called Log Horizon. It's insanely difficult to do this kind of thing and keep game balance because players gear creep will eventually make it so that they can kill everything. That is, actually how it didn't work in UO. UO literately invented the notorious monster through this mechanic, where the monsters themselves leveled up from defeating players and prey npcs, so you'd need a lot of players to take down the high-level monster, and because you lost exp for dying, the only way to make the monster weaker was to kill it as frequently as possible. I'm not sure if that mechanic was kept past the early UO days, but that was certainly how emergent game play should work.

UO also invented "culinary" stuff in a MMORPG, though over time "food" in MMORPG's moved from being a healing item to a buff. No game IMO actually does culinary stuff better, though other games have more variety (eg Mabinogi had baking, boiling, stir-fry, etc) in the actual way food was prepared, no other game that I'm aware of had "fatness/buffness" as an effect from eating. The pre-MMO Ultima games would actually cause damage or death if you ran out of food, so we have come quite away from "no food = instant death" of Ultima I.

"Raiding" is something that EQ more or less invented for 3D MMORPG's. There were text-based MUD's before that had this concept, but EQ was the first to actually do it intentionally (as opposed to Ultima Online's emergent gameplay of killing the high level monster that just became high level by how the game worked.) WoW popularized the actual raiding, and that's the kind of raiding that is in FFXIV 2.x. This is also why a lot of the "game spoiling" tools are tools designed to optimize a raider's time and suck the fun out of playing the content. There are studies showing that "raiding" is a health hazard since people are glued to their computers for hours, hence where FFXIV has actually improved over other games in that the raids themselves are not 20-hour long efforts but at most 2 hours, and even then, an optimal strategy brings it down to 10 minutes. To that end, I played EQ but not WoW, and didn't play EQ very long as the PvP aspect of it was not fun when I tried it and it put me off games that allowed PK until Wizardry.

PvP, sad to say, has been awful in every game. Period. This can be blamed squarely on bots. If a game allows PvP, then bots can PvP and PK anyone instantly. In games that have no checks on PK (eg Wizardry, Archeage) the PvP system could be used against criminals and bots with impunity, but it requires players to intentionally role-play being a villain. To that end, this is mentally disturbing when some players get a thrill out of being a murderer. Hence PvP should be restricted in MMORPG's to "arena/battle royale" and "tower defense/capture the flag" style setups that players can be adequately prepared for, or opt-out entirely. Sure we can't murder the bots with impunity, but neither can the bots murder players. I think FFXIV at least took the right route to PvP, so people who don't want to play it, are not forced to ever participate in it. However games like WoW, Archeage, EQ, Aion, and so forth all had "clan/race/alliance" type of open-world PvP and as a result, the fun in those games can be sucked out by being forced to enter PvP areas that players may intentionally impede progress. Which is to say, UO didn't even do this well. UO allowed (initially) PK and theft, but only Wizardry actually put no restriction on it. Archage let you steal crops from players who didn't pay a subscription.

Party finding, FFXIV is fairly decent at this, especially with roulette's to fill in empty player slots. Mabinogi was gawdawful at this. Archeage actually had an auto-party mechanic for NM's on the field, which worked pretty well, but for instanced dungeons had no equivalent of the duty finder, and realistically, all you had to do was out-level the dungeon and then just bulldoze your way through it. Hence the entire level-sync mechanic in FFXIV actually works much better than anything else I've encountered in any other game.

Races, let's be honest. You're playing this game for the catgirls/potatosacks/dragongirls. Archeage's cat people (Firran) are actually very hideous, and their initial concepts for them actually looked more along FFXIV's design rather than what we got. Archeage also did a dragon-race (or demon race?) as well. Other games I played had their own version of "human, giant, elven, dwarf" and XI/XIV did that as well as any other game did. If you did not like the art style of XIV, you wouldn't be playing it. More to the point, games like Tera and B&S, are basically "everyone is a different sized human, and a dwarf race with animal ears", even though the art style might be at least comparable to XIV. In Western CRPG's, well ESO is butt-ugly as always, which their models are basically "different heads glued on the same body".

Star Wars: The Old Republic probably has the closest cinematic quality to cutscenes that FFXIV has, and probably exceeds it in a few ways in regards to decision trees and voice acting, but that's about all I can say about SWTOR in a positive context. As the rest of SWTOR felt like the same mechanics I found in every other turn-based-combat game that I tried. One thing it did better was how dynamic zoning was. So if an area was only available to a specific race/role/msq progress, it would simply not be unlocked (and yell you why) or if a dungeon needed to be played to progress the MSQ, you'd seamlessly get the MSQ version with no other players in it but the ones who haven't cleared the MSQ part (or nobody if it was companion only) and once cleared, you could re-enter it to fight things again if you wanted to, but now everyone else can to. There wasn't any queuing at all. So if anything can be taken from SWTOR, it's how seamless that was. If FFXIV ever gets to a point where the companion AI is smart enough like the SWTOR companion AI, it might be worth creating "seamless" duties where you get players that are queued for it, or companions if there aren't any, but I digress.

The common trend in the games I liked to play is that they are all heavily story driven, and when the story doesn't feel like anything but set dressing, I lose interest in it. Like Mabinogi I really enjoyed the story for, up until G12, and then the game kinda just waffled around till G15 when I quit it at G17 (even though they picked the story back up from G12, it was going nowhere.) That's the only MMORPG since Nexus TK that I actually invested time into playing for the storyline. EQ, Tera, Aion, Archeage, Wizardry had stories but they felt like set dressing and little effort was placed on their significance. It made those games feel like you're just logging in to kill mobs until you outlevel the area and move on. SWTOR had a pretty good story going into it, but it felt exactly like playing EQ aside from that.

Like if you've played Diablo/Diablo II at all, you'd recognize quite a few MMO tropes in it, because it created the UI shorthand for those tropes that all other games copied. Inventory Tetris? Diablo. Red HP, Blue magic? actually that was Ultima Underworld. Toolbelt/bar? Diablo. (Prefix) item of (suffix)? Diablo. Colors for rare items? Diablo. And that last one was because you could play it multiplayer and trade stuff with other players.

Somewhere between UWI and Diablo I many western CRPG's started to syncronize on CRPG user interfaces and you started seeing a lot of the same things. When all the cheaply produced MMORPG's started using Unreal Engine, you started seeing everything look the same. Even Star Trek Online has the same look and feel of Perfect World (which acquired Cryptic who produced Star Trek Online) and Tera. Like I don't know about anyone else, but when I see screen shots from a Korean MMORPG's, they all look the same. Final Fantasy XIV has it's own identity. WoW has it's own identity. But put 10 screen shots from "up and coming MMORPG"'s side by side, and chances are people would think they're all from the same game because there is so little identity to high fantasy 99% human "humanoid" characters.

I wish we could get a game that allowed you to make your own guards/monsters, set your own traps, etc and reward adventurers who make it to "you" the final boss. But hey, that's probably another game type entirely.

edit: Blade and Soul was something I watched the anime for AFTER being told about there being a game in development. When the game finally came out, I actually got a lot of deja vu from having seen the anime. However story-wise I felt it at least was trying to follow the story it was based on. The race/class I picked actually interacted with a character who dies in the game, but I recognized from the anime, so I felt compelled to at least play it longer than I'd have otherwise given it, given the "samey-same" feel that other Unreal engine games have.

bless online is releasing on may 30th for packs early access i'll tell you then.

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Originally Posted by Final-Fantasy

Final Fantasy XI Online, still playing it after 16+ years and I enjoy it a lot more than this game :P


Better Story than 14's
Better design of gameplay
Better endgame
Better Auction House
Better music

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While I don't mind that people like and enjoy XI, there's nothing wrong with liking another game instead of what's popular and mainstream. But, to say that XI has better music than XIV is kind of mean and unfair to poor Soken (and Uematsu) in my opinion. >_>;

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Originally Posted by Zeonx

bless online is releasing on may 30th for packs early access i'll tell you then.

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I'm waiting for that too.

For me.. PShome. too bad it's dead :c

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Originally Posted by RareItems

Overwatch xD.

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lmao!!!...

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Originally Posted by ko_

For me.. PShome. too bad it's dead :c

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Isn't that the game where all you did was just run around and buy cosmetic items with real life currency? You can do that here.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

FFXIV has not been exceeded by any older or newer MMO in the graphics department. V1.0 was better at a few graphics things, but it's fairer to look at XIV V1.00 as the game that XI players wanted, where as XIV 2.00 players wanted something that was more casual oriented and more fun than WoW. So it's disingenuous to say XI was better, when we had "a prettier XI" as XIV V1.00. V1.00 had a lot of other failings, but had it really been "better" than XI, then XI players would have stuck with it, and they didn't.

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FFXIV 1.0 wasn't anything like FFXI, end of. Now, FFXIV can't be better than a niche game like FFXI is, but it gets to a larger playerbase due to the nature of the game. This is, a niche game you either utterly love or hate, whereas a theme park game such as this you can like it or not, but there's something for everyone and it's gonna cater to a wider audience, which is what games nowadays work. FFXI's depth alone, when compared to FFXIV, already makes it a better RPG in every aspect, and I'm just talking about the stat depth, not to mention the world, lore, community, and battle aspects. FFXIV can't get any more shallow, and if it did, it'd blow all over the place. Feels like an action RPG, which may or may not be good depending on the player, but again, this isn't a niche game so it's more likely to get to everyone.

I actually like Aion's musics better than FFXIV's musics.

If not for its awkward in-combat movement speed limitations, I'd have to say many Blade & Soul classes create more appealing combat flow, choices, etc., especially when playing content for which one is undermanned and undergeared than any XIV class, especially prior to the purely optimized levels, where small internal balancing issues leave much to be desired.

Certain of Black Desert Online's classes also feel better than any XIV class (bar maybe highspeed Monk on a no-ping connection, especially the Heavensward variant), provided the content isn't neither braindead easy nor so numerically intensive as to demand permanent kite-striking.

Certain iterations of WoW also beat XIV's combat out, imo, across the majority of their classes. (LFR, similar to our story mode versions, aside) WoW raids across most expansions also beat out XIV's raids (ARR through SB) in variety, mechanical originality, etc. First Coil and Savage Second are about the closest they've gotten for me, while Ulduar or ICC tend to beat out XIV tier since by a very large margin.

But it's on a class by class, intensity level vs. intensity level, raid by raid, fight by fight basis.

There are plenty of examples of design philosophy, responsiveness, system fluidity, and beauty in simple solutions that I'd love to see XIV borrow from other MMOs. But many of the things I take issue with in XIV, such as a shallow undermechanics base (which, being so shallow, then requires that any increase in depth tend to have an exponential increase in complexity, rather than a small investment of complexity offering exponentially more depth), poorly wrought story lines, issues of scaling (why is a single Ala Mhigan settlement, which was as a kingdom no more than twice the size of Ul'duh, allegedly, large enough to fit 400 of the latter citystate within it? How could so many warring tribes, each said to be hundreds strong, possibly fit within such a small valley?), are found across all the others as well.

Edit: Though just a bit more aimed at memorization than difficult but intuitive mechanics than I'd like, I was moderately impressed by the latest 24-man fights. Much like Shinryu normal as a final MSQ, it felt sufficiently threatening without yet being irritating (except when the unlucky candidate for the final boss's Rake-charge turns when already perfectly behind it), and provided an enjoyably over-the-top fireshow in its AoEs. Looked great, and played out pretty enjoyably. About as difficult as Ozma, but a touch more intuitive aside from the the numbers mechanic; a good place to be in.

For a small period for me SWTOR (Star Wars the old republic) was better. A lot of focus on story, great lore, all voice acted, but also focus on endgame/raiding/pvp. But only for a small period. The game had always “bugs” being bioware :p, couldn’t handle a lot of players on open world but there was a “golden period” for me. At the moment Swtor is but a “shell” of what it was and potentially could have been.

Ffxiv is miles away better.

Then you have obviously WoW, but again for me the lore, the world doesn’t reallly interest me that much

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

WoW popularized the actual raiding, and that's the kind of raiding that is in FFXIV 2.x. This is also why a lot of the "game spoiling" tools are tools designed to optimize a raider's time and suck the fun out of playing the content. There are studies showing that "raiding" is a health hazard since people are glued to their computers for hours, hence where FFXIV has actually improved over other games in that the raids themselves are not 20-hour long efforts but at most 2 hours, and even then, an optimal strategy brings it down to 10 minutes.

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You always have some kind of chip on your shoulder about raiding and always paint it in a negative light, usually with grandiose claims and gross exaggerations.

1) In what world is raiding in WoW a 20 hour thing? Please cite your analysis and studies for review.

2) In what world do these tools "suck the fun out of content"?

3) You don't even raid, yet here you are making claims about how raiders feel? Mind citing how you arrived at your conclusion?

Gw2, Swtor and LoTRO have a better outfit system.

Those are features i miss in this game.

The UI in this game also seems to be schizophrenic and takes too many confirmations on PC.

I think for an MMO that's easily comparable to FFXIV, WoW pretty much blows most things XIV does save story/presentation (probably crafting system too) out of the water. Better raids, better experience for casual players, more stable servers, better customization/QoL/functionality, better glamour/transmog, better combat (why are DPS jobs in this game so convoluted and involved but tanks and healers are some of the most faceroll homogenized garbage I've ever seen?), better storage and inventory management, better alt character support, better leveling experience (both aren't great, but WoW at least changed scaling so you can do zones you like and skip ones you don't like), better cash shop.

I'm sure some people with misinterpret my post as hating on this game or wondering "why doesn't she just go back to WoW then" (I play both currently, FWIW), but it's not like my statements in and of themselves mean XIV is a BAD game - I just think WoW is the BETTER game. Honestly though, since this is the FFXIV discussion forums, it makes sense that the only real "approved" response here would be FFXI.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

Honestly though, since this is the FFXIV discussion forums, it makes sense that the only real "approved" response here would be FFXI.

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This made me genuinely chuckle.

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

The upside to this is that there wasn't an epidemic of undercutting and prices stayed far more stable. Considering stability is a fundamental hallmark of good markets, I'd say FFXI's system was hands-down better than FFXIV's currently is.

Also, there's really the same amount of work involved for FFXIV. It's kind of stupid to just look at the prices of currently-listed items. I've lost count of how many times I've seen a few copies of something up for 15k, only to check the history and see that the item hasn't sold for above 5k in the past few months. That sales history is the real guide to pricing, and FFXI had an equivalent mechanism.

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Wait what? There was plenty of undercutting in FFXI, but I feel you are missing the bigger picture here. There are...

1. More players in FFXIV than there ever was in FFXI and thus there are more items.
2. Items are far easier to obtain in this game and are spammed at you thus there is gonna be a bigger chance of a undercutter.
3. Crafting is far easier to do in this game at a basic level and far less grindy and thus also contributes to much more people having access to said wares to sale combined with everything else I mentioned.

Adding in archaic mechanics isn't going to solve anything.

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1. More players in FFXIV than there ever was in FFXI and thus there are more items.

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That's... not true actually. At its zenith FFXI used to be as popular as FFXIV was.

This is a hard question but I'll put it this way. FFXIV is a traditional old school MMO. it does that formula very well and I love the experience. But I prefer how ESO does combat, builds, and just about every other system becuase its modern and forward thinking, and overall I enjoy those systems more. However I do NOT enjoy ESO's huge balance and exploit issues the devs wont fix.

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Originally Posted by KaldeaSahaline

You always have some kind of chip on your shoulder about raiding and always paint it in a negative light, usually with grandiose claims and gross exaggerations.

1) In what world is raiding in WoW a 20 hour thing? Please cite your analysis and studies for review.

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Use Google. LMGTFY, any time I link to studies, nobody reads them.

http://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/wo...-games-history

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Alterac Valley Lasting All Day
Speaking of hardcore, how about Alterac Valley in its first couple of iterations? Whereas other battleground maps focused on smaller scale 10 v. 10 or 15 v. 15 battles, Alterac Valley was the first, and for a long time, the only 40 v. 40 map. AV was also a bit different in that it contained PvE objectives that needed to be accomplished in order to win the PvP battle. As such, AV was immensely popular with the player base.

What made the battle truly epic in the beginning was that one match could literally go on seemingly forever. If one side started to win the fight, the opposing side could "turtle" at one of several bottlenecks along the map and delay or even push back the aggressors. Add in NPCs that could be summoned into the battle to fight for you, and the overall feel of the match could change at any given moment. It wasn't uncommon for the typical Alterac Valley to last for several hours. The most epic battles would literally take up much of your day. Blizzard eventually implemented a system that gave all battlegrounds a finite amount of time to complete, but classic AV will always be remembered by those who were there.

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That is where the "20 hour raid" comes from.


And here's a study: Video Game Genre as a Predictor of Problem Use
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3304244/

And another:
Impact of Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games upon the Psychosocial Well-Being of Adolescents and Young Adults: Reviewing the Evidence
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3820076/

Here's one on just play time:
http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~swc/pu...ame_hours.html

And of course, China thinks it's a problem: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4183340.stm

There is a psychological feedback loop going on here: Players start playing MMORPG, Player wants to win at all costs because it stimulates their reward center, other players discover the same strategies and tools, those players denigrate anyone who isn't playing like a robot so they can keep the stimulus up. That is the same behavior addicts have, and that NIH PMC3820076 study even mentions that is what is going on due to how the reward systems work, more typically known as "the skinner box".

People want to play the content, not be forced to tools and mandatory guides just push people away from having fun with the content. Besides recent rule changes in the EU GDPR make collecting information about ANY EU people illegal without their consent in 2 days time, or the sites get fined millions. So I entirely expect players on the EU servers to start getting blocked from accessing those sites.