Awesome changes made that weren't there when you started playing?

When I started playing....
...Glamours were locked until level 50
...Glamour prisms weren't consolidated into a single type; there was one each for Woodworking, Blacksmith, Carpentry, etc. (I believe before that they were divided into several different grades too!)
...Glamour plates weren't a thing.
...World Visit wasn't a thing.
...You couldn't have a minion and your chocobo summoned at the same time.
...You couldn't increase your chocobo's summon time to 60 minutes by eating more than one Gysahl Greens.
...The chocobo saddlebag wasn't a thing.
...Stacks of items were limited to 99 instead of 999.
...Swimming in Costa Del Sol or the residential areas wasn't possible.
...You couldn't use aesthetician hairstyles on retainers.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

I haven't been playing nearly as long as many of the people on here, but i have a few-

Making crafting/gathers more accessible is a big plus, i know people like the game to be hardcore, but with how boring they used to be (and kinda still are) quicker leveling made them much, much more bearable.

I also liked the removal of flash for tanks, maybe it was just me but going from SB pld to ShB pld it felt sooooooo much less clunky. Old pld had some good things about it, but the new system feels way better imo, even if the removal of some skills is a little saddening still

Lastly the ability to visit other severs was a VERY needed inclusion that im so glad is in the game now.

Rogue/ Ninja
Treasure Maps
Golden Saucer

Housing items are no longer destroyed when you remove them! Yeah, that used to be a thing.

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Originally Posted by Jennah

Whatever they did in late Heavensward to stop gil sellers from spamming everyone with tells. It used to be that you got at least one every 5 seconds.

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I never did get that.

Back in FFXI at least there was a reason gil sellers were the dirty little secret, it was impossible to make money in that game outside of some seriously boring grinding on gray mobs for like 10 gil per drop. And the high level things in the market that were seriously required for high level character effectiveness in a game that played more like old Everquest than it did FFXIV, used to cost millions.

Not so in FFXIV, at least after ARR. I have never had need of gil in this game for anything that wasn't frivolous or just eye candy. Everything else in this game that you need is buyable and at reasonable price... and they throw gil at you left and right from the MSQs and side quests.

I remember wandering through the Marketplaces in ARR going.... dudes what's the point of selling gil here? Its pointless, everyone has enough to buy whatever they need and the high level effective stuff is all no drop no trade anyway.

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Originally Posted by Silverquick

I remember wandering through the Marketplaces in ARR going.... dudes what's the point of selling gil here? Its pointless, everyone has enough to buy whatever they need and the high level effective stuff is all no drop no trade anyway.

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Houses. Though you have to be lucky to find one of the larger spots unoccupied.

The gil sellers also sell loot runs of high-level content in addition to gil.

Well you kinda made my point there.

Houses are completely unnecessary for high level effectiveness. And when you take a look at the market and the things that cost the most money are all things mostly worthless to high level players. While the old gear out of Coils of Bahamut does look cool... there's no way in hell it compares to what you actually get at like 60th, 70th, 80th... and as an example the weapons from things like EX 8-Mans generally are far worse than BIS... they LOOK cool and make for great Glamors... but they're not really that necessary. They cost a ton, and they look cool... but they're not exactly top of the line... in fact they're far worse.

That's the real reason they're so pricy. Its not because people actually use them as gear... they use them for glamors.

This was the complete opposite in FFXI, all the high level gear either took days on end to farm or cost millions of gil on the market.

Its just not the case anymore post ARR.

Well, glamour IS the real endgame here......

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Originally Posted by Silverquick

Houses are completely unnecessary for high level effectiveness. And when you take a look at the market and the things that cost the most money are all things mostly worthless to high level players. While the old gear out of Coils of Bahamut does look cool... there's no way in hell it compares to what you actually get at like 60th, 70th, 80th... and as an example the weapons from things like EX 8-Mans generally are far worse than BIS... they LOOK cool and make for great Glamors... but they're not really that necessary. They cost a ton, and they look cool... but they're not exactly top of the line... in fact they're far worse.

That's the real reason they're so pricy. Its not because people actually use them as gear... they use them for glamors.

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The sellers don't care if you want it for gear or glamour. If someone wants it, they'll sell it.

And at least one of the popular sellers actually does sell the very best gear. Their catalogue includes Eden savage and Alexander ultimate clears.

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Originally Posted by Pheryx

Golden Saucer

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Gosh. I couldn't imagine FFXIV without the Gold Saucer. For some people they probably have not been there in years but for me I have been playing for a year and it's still my favourite place in the game.

One thing I miss that DID exist when I started, that was removed in the 1.0 -> ARR jump was the ability to repair OTHER people's gear.

I'm also looking crazy forward to the QoL being added in 5.2:
Converting gear into Materia no longer destroys the item, just resets bond to 0%
I can company craft without a party

I thank SB everyday for SAM

Glamour dresser

Naoki Yoshida (I'm not a legacy player, but bringing him in was huge!)

A stupid one, but 1st thing I can think of is Aestethycan. They added it quite fast so I can't say it was very far from beginning point, but still I was in need to use fantasia twice just to change haircut before they added the NPC for this.

Glamour dresser is a huge help indeed. Would be nice if we could use plates anywhere, but what we have now is nice as well.

Aside glamour things, I do like crafters revamp a lot. Most of things they did with battle jobs are good for me as well.

Not a thing anymore, but I remember time when using Run on Tank or physical DPS was a punishment because it spent the whole amount of TP you had at the moment and as result you couldn't use any skills because you haven't stamina for it.

Multisit mounts. It's not exactly QoL thing, but it is convenient (especially in Eureka).

Other servers visiting! I don't really need it now, but back when I was on Odin till last year I really missed an opportunity to visit my friends on Phoenix. You know, entering a dungeon or making an alt just to do screenshots together wasn't really convenient. I do hope that at some point cross-DC interactions will be possible as well.

And so on. To be honest, I think that most of changes they did with time made the game only better. There can be some questionable decisions, but it is noticeable FF14 Team does their best or at least tries to.

When you had to do Duty Roulette solo and they didn't have nearly as many types of roulettes.

If we can point only one QoL change... There was no Party Finder when I started. I was doing my bard relic quest and had to go to Eastern Thanalan and shout/wait to find parties to do Hydra, because it and Chimera weren't added in Duty Finder yet. Then they added PF, but you could do content only with people from your server. Then they upgraded it to Cross World Party Finder, massively increasing players pool and participation.
Can't wait for Cross Datacenter Party Finder next.

World visit. A little sad about servers moving under Crystal (my one and only IRL friend into XIV played on Coeurl), but being able to visit other servers opened up the community a ton. I'm hoping bridges between data centers comes soon.

I would say adding cross datacenter PF was a humungous change considering many servers with lower pop struggled to get content done regularly.

When they added the glamour dresser, that freed up hundreds of inventory slots from myself and retainers.

Novice Network

When I began playing this game, I didn’t know the basics of what an MMO was. Never played one. When I made my character, the role I chose was based on the weapon I liked most, which was the Axe. I started as a Marauder not knowing what a tank was or how roles played a factor. Needless to say I was terrible playing in dungeons as I didn’t know how to tank, because the game didn’t explain it. Had the Novice Network been there from the beginning, it would have relieved me and my unfortunate party members from a massive headache it was to play ignorantly. It was added a little too late as I was about to quit the game, but decided to change roles as DPS (Dragoon) to give this game one more chance and have been happy ever since. I still don’t tank to this day as I have PTSD from my dungeon runs, but I’m fine with DPS.

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Originally Posted by Esmoire

Gosh. I couldn't imagine FFXIV without the Gold Saucer. For some people they probably have not been there in years but for me I have been playing for a year and it's still my favourite place in the game.

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Yeah that place became my home for a while lol

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Originally Posted by tdb

I wish they'd also sort the emotes alphabetically. It always takes me a long time to find random emotes for quests when I'm playing on a controller (on the keyboard I can just type the name).

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You can now sort by alphabetically

There was no glamour system when I first started, so that was a great addition...but the streamlining of glamour prisms was probably what I'm thankful for the most. Having different grades and types was annoying as heck. It didn't make the glamour system more engaging by having them. It was just complicated for the sake of being complicated for no good reason.

The old lodestone, lol
http://lodestone.fragmenterworks.com...mber_ym=201009

Crossworld Party finder was a great change they added in Heavensward.

Also Dragoons getting magic defense was really nice considering back then they usually died to primal fights due to animation lock and with no magic defense an aoe under them either almost or did killed them.

Changing haircut without the usage of Fantasia.

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Originally Posted by radhaz

The old lodestone, lol
http://lodestone.fragmenterworks.com...mber_ym=201009

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Just let me open up Netscape Navigator to view this properly.

The death of Cleric Stance.

No longer having to manually input new stats when you level up.

No longer having to buy an item to change those stats around if you wanted to properly play both Summoner and Scholar.

The glamour dresser. Before that was implemented I rarely changed my look because it was inconvenient.

Not having to dismiss my chocobo in order to sign up for solo or group duties.

I love my GC squadron, they're both fun to use glamours on and to level.

I started in March 2016, on another character- I moved to France 2 years ago and I couldn’t transfer my SE user on my new french psn account so I rolled my current character a few months back, in order to get rid of my old swiss account - so just to explain why there’s not that much to see on my lode :p

I remember:
The cleric stance (ooops I don’t heal very much, what the ? .... ah ok, still on cleric stance -_-)
All quests marks (except for MSQ) looked the same.... what a mess ? The news icons are nice
THAT WAR cooldown:p glad it was removed
Opening and closing windows for calling each retainer ; I like the new single one
The différents glamour prisms !!! Glad they merged those in one kind of prism + the glamour plates
The fact that now we can dye/synthetise/materialise stuff without leaving the hostel room
The options to call random mount
No stats to put by hand anymore

I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of things.... ^^

Gosh. FFXIV has one of the worst systems I have ever seen when it comes to conferring the appearances of gear from one item to another. With how many people are mentioning the improvements glamours have seen, it must have been really bad before.

Raid finder. Used to take an hour just to get into WoD sometimes.

Removing Chocobos from the party list.

It used to be that Chocobos occupied a party slot. So 4 plays with 4 Chocobos created a full party. Sucked for hunts and FC events.

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Originally Posted by Esmoire

Gosh. FFXIV has one of the worst systems I have ever seen when it comes to conferring the appearances of gear from one item to another. With how many people are mentioning the improvements glamours have seen, it must have been really bad before.

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The overall system hasn't changed, but previously the only way to apply glamours was using prisms to apply one glamour to one gear piece at a time. Plates make the process quicker and you don't have to carry the glamour items in your inventory. The actual prisms were needlessly complicated as well.

@Esmoire

It was stupid thinking on it.

Required level 50 to unlock glamours.
Have grade 1-5 glamour prisms.
Have grade 1-5 clear prisms to remove glamours.
Crafting your own prisms required level 50 crafter to get the book needed.
Couldn't glamour a multi-part piece except with another (stuff like odin armour etc it's why the trial drops items separately) .
No extra storage besides retainers.
Wasn't out with base ARR came with a patch.


Still waiting for them to do away with the cannot glamour an item that is a higher level than you are currently.

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

Still waiting for them to do away with the cannot glamour an item that is a higher level than you are currently.

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That's the only part of it all that made/makes some real sense. WoW only does this within expansion levels once a player gets there through the appearance tab. The only outlier is the base game, which permits lvl 60 appearances or under to be used by players. We don't have that as much as I wish we did. WoW might be circling the drain but man, their transmog feature is great. Wasn't always great though, it took a few years to get there.

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Originally Posted by Esmoire

On that note, five more glamour plates. I can see why we can't have one plate for every job and class, but at least we can cover all the stat types, crafter, gatherer, and have a few plates to spare for your favourites or stuff like BLU.

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I think 20 or 25 plates would be sufficient to cover everything. It would be enough for all the adventurer jobs, enough to cover all three land classes, leaving enough to have some for the hand classes. Or vice versa if you're on a crafting/gathering alt.

At the minimum it should always be enough plates to cover all the adventurer jobs plus two.

On topic -- As someone else pointed out, auto-gathering. I did some gathering before this was added so I got a small taste of the tedium.
Also, Glam Plates are an amazing addition.

But my favorite addition.... Being able to have my Midgy and Paprika out at the same time!!! Minion and Choco, at my side while I vanquish my foes!

Not having to get to level 15, 26(?), 34, on a class you don't want to play because the abilities were necessary for playing another class effectively or even just unlocking your job. It was a cool concept, but it practice it really sucked.

Role abilities in general, and not having to chose between 3/4.

Glamour no longer needing a specific prism for a specific crafting/armor type. (No more Wood Glamour prisms or w/e they were called.)

Glamour being available at 15.

Apartments.

Chocobos no longer taking up party space if you're grinding fates in the word.

No longer having to grind fates if you don't want because of PotD.