What game did you play before FFXIV and do you miss it?

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Originally Posted by Joe_Schmoe

World of Warcraft. That game didn't have level sync, so no, I don't miss it (Picture nearly all instances, except maybe current-tier raids, being like the Castrum and Praetorium duties or the level 50/60 dungeons. No thank you.)

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lol? Keeping old content relevant is nice and all, well, except it is ruined by losing 90% of your abilities and classes playing nothing like they do at 70... unfortunately it kinda evens out to a big fat meh regarding the sync feature.

City of Heroes. I'm not bitter towards NC or anything.

http://i.imgur.com/yCrxkVU.png

FFXI

....buuuut being as bored as I am with the constantly rehashed content in XIV I resubbed to XI a few days ago and the games are like night and day with XI still being the superior of the two. It may be a lil clunky, but the content is still good, still being updated and still interesting, the people are friendly, the 16 servers are more populated now than they were 5 years ago, the stories are great and my gear doesn't outdate at hyperspeed. Oh I also got ESO updated but haven't restarted it. We shall see how the content and people are there soon!

So maybe XIV will actually take XI's spot in my "game I used to play" idk yet, we shall see. But I have been here since 2010 and with no new content, just reskins of the same thing, this may not hold me much longer. :( :( :(

Final Fantasy XI, and I do miss it. Time spent in that game (as demanding as it was) was rewarding, unlike here, where your progress is reset every few weeks for no reason other than "bigger numbers" (oooooh, ahhhhh).

Also, I mean the "real" FF XI. Not this grotesque mutation they have flailing around these days merely wearing the name.

So ya, I've missed it for more than a few years now.

I mostly played offline RPGs, fighting games and action games. I come from a console gaming background, and the only reason I even tried an online RPG was because it was "Final Fantasy" and I had enjoyed many offline Final Fantasy games.

I played FFXI a while back (2004-2006), that was my first MMO and I miss some aspects of it. Mainly, the community, how players knew each other and had reputations. Also, the combat required less movement and button mashing, so there was more time to type and socialize. I do like FFXIV's combat better, but I wish I had more time to type sometimes.

What I don't miss about FFXI was the rampant job discrimination. Since all the parties were formed manually by players, if you were not leveling up a popular job, you would struggle to find a party. I remember my Dynamis LS (raid group) had a ban on Dragoons, lol. Duty Finder in FFXIV protects you from that kind of stuff to some degree.

Swtor

Miss lightsabers, Star Wars lore... and lightsabers.
But this game is better in majority of aspects except one .... no lightsabers.

:p

I dabbled a lot in free mmorpgs in the past, and the one right before FFXIV was MapleStory. I was actually really into that game with its flashy skills and admittedly easy game play. However as with most free mmorpgs the grind for common quests soon became a nightmare (every kill quest was asking for hundred or more mobs and that was just too much). But the game also had sooooooo much side content that there was always something easy for you to do that still rewarded you (lore, levels, equips, etc.). The stories in that game were also surprisingly well done. The regular events had content that was relevant to progression as well (the most useful were the powerful pots that mattered a lot since healing was non existent), while being very fleshed out so they didn't seem like total throwaway content.

I don't particularly miss any part of it. I have nice fond memories of that game that I think are enough for me now. I found FFXIV after getting a bit bored of the grind in MS, and the first kill quest right outside the city asked for like 3 mobs or 6 mobs and that felt so nice that I instantly fell in love with the game (before the nostalgia did).

Marvel Heroes. I miss my guild there more than anything. The game itself got pretty old pretty fast with them having to release a bunch of new heroes every year, which, alongside the eternal bug fixes, ate up any time they had to release new content. I haven't played in forever but I'm fairly certain that my main is still pretty viable for endgame content.
After what happened with the teleportation, however, when they made the game outright unplayable due to new camera movements, and released it despite there being a lot of feedback saying as much, I kind of gave up on Gazillion. They released it, ignoring their player-testers' feedback, and then acted all shocked when a lot of people who didn't bother with the test build said exactly the same thing. Meh.

SWTOR

I miss having a voiced character,companions,story choices and your character ACTUALLY doing stuff/interacting in cutscenes not drawing your weapon and scowling. I loved tanking in SWTOR i loved charging in,slamming down my lightsaber force pushing a boss off a ledge then charging to another enemy and throwing out taunts but instead being stuck with doing the same thing over and over again in FFXIV run in small room>turn boss around>rinse and repeat for EVERY single dungeon/trial/raid in the game with tanking being a chore rather then a fun experience. But why am I here playing FFXIV if I loved SWTOR so much...simple New Content, SWTOR went and turned its back on its playerbase forsaking its hardcore playerbase and going 3 long years without making a new raid/group content and 2 SINGLE PLAYER EXPANSIONS instead, I dont have to worry about that with FFXIV now do I.

But its not without its cons I can't stand how many restrictions and limitations that ffxiv has compared to F2P MMOs where everytime I'm asked what it can do better there are just sooo many damn things that other MMOs/F2Ps just does better then this Sub-Based MMO. SWTOR compared to FFXIV, swtor had a disastrous glamour system but they took the time and turned it into a simple drag in drop system whereas a glamour overhaul with ffxiv will never see the light of day cause of server limitations, instances were a MINOR feature in swtor but ffxiv had the worst type of instance system I have ever seen.

I don't even remember.... Xenoblade Chronicles, I think it was. And that was the closest thing I ever played to an MMO.

But, like I said, no, I don't miss it. It was a good game, but I am having way too much fun to miss it.

Runescape, if you can truly call that an 'RP' game..

.. Need I say more?

The game I played before coming to XIV was FFXI, and I do miss it greatly, so many fond memories, I loved every second I spent on that game, and I loved wings of the Goddess. Would love to see a "past" expansion for FFXIV *nudge nudge SE*

I've seen a few people say they loved FFXI "before the changes" or "pre-abyss" (I'm assuming these are the same thing).

What update happened to FFXI that made it worse or 'ruined' it? Is it similar to what happened with Star Wars Galaxies (the sort of pin-up example of a major revamp killing an MMO).

The game I miss the most would be Star Wars Galaxies, miss my elder jedi :( My other favorite games through the years were Dark Age of Camelot, miss the old frontiers and spamming many pets with my Theurigist, and old school EQ2 (loved raiding in this game). Other then that I have been in both FFXI beta and FFXIV 1.0 and 2.0 betas and still love this game.

Dabbled in quite a few MMOs,

WoW
Tera
Vindictus
Rift
Wakfu <- underappreciated game

Normally I kept on popping back to WoW between those other games that, although they did something new and interesting, didn't have the polish that WoW had. But FFXIV has firmly dislodged WoW from its perch.

Lets see, my previous mmos were

FF11
Phantasy star universe
Dream of mirror online
Mabinogi
Air rivals


In that order. 11 I dont miss too much as I got over it. PSU and Air rivals I miss a lot as many good times were had.

Dont miss mabi or DOMO much since Mabi is still alive and I can log in anytime and DOMO got a reboot and is alive again.

I liked the old stuff.

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Originally Posted by zipzo

I've seen a few people say they loved FFXI "before the changes" or "pre-abyss" (I'm assuming these are the same thing).

What update happened to FFXI that made it worse or 'ruined' it? Is it similar to what happened with Star Wars Galaxies (the sort of pin-up example of a major revamp killing an MMO).

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Mostly it's the 'old school'/hardcore players lamenting how the Abyssea mini expansions made levelling much more easier and accessible (and although I long suffered under the terrible level grind of FFXI, I can see where they're coming from - getting to level cap no longer was an achievement to work towards it was just a number). FFXI until then was party-focused, in fact you needed to be in a party to do pretty much anything in the game, enemies were just too difficult. Abyssea and it's 'Dominion Operations' content changed all that.

Although the writing was on the wall long before Aby'd addition for the end of party-centric levelling (Wings of the Goddess and it's 'wallbashes', training regimes at outposts, exp scrolls), but Aby and Dom Ops truly was the watershed for FFXI moving away from old school 'party based' content to more solo-orientated gameplay, a transition that has more or less completed with the most recent changes made to the game (level cap raised to 99, most content can be soloed now using the 'Trust' npc fighters, exp given by enemies has been greatly buffed and exp needed to level has been greatly reduced).

It did bring new players into the game though, so it was ultimately not a bad thing, complaints about it therefore comes across as more just this trope at play I guess.

Ironically it pretty much became a predecessor to how Palace of the Dead is here in FFXIV for that matter in opening up ease of levelling to players. Give a means to level quickly and players will ultimately prefer to use iit no matter what it is. But I digress...

DCUO.

I do sometimes miss it for a few reasons.

• Love the DC comics characters that were in the game's story mode.
• I really enjoyed how you could play as a hero or a villain.
• There were various travel modes that were quite fun (flying, acrobatics, super speed).
• There were many types of battles from 1v1, 2v2, 4v4, 8v8 and larger raids, and the raids were actual raids and not just a boss in a circular room.
• The healing jobs (sorcery, nature, celestial, lightning) in the game were very fun and quite different from each other, and while not perfect, they seemed to be pretty balanced.
• And the one thing I miss most of all was the way they did glamour. You had an actual glamour log so you didn't have to physically hold on to every piece of gear in the game.

Wow, and just came here recently.

I'm not looking back atm, because every aspect that drew me away from wow, this game has. Plus it's Final Fantasy IP, which I'm a huge fan.

MegaTen Imagine
I miss it a bit. It never ended over here. The story just stopped. People left. The game switched localizers. New localizer dropped the game soon after. Never got to see the end. There was fun end game stuff like the Beelzebub fight and lots of world building, just sad I never saw it amount to anything.

FF11 and WoW. FF11 is bitter/sweet miss my friends the gameplay builds deep bonds because you need a party to do anything in the game. If you were an terrible person in that game it will reflect and lower your odds of doing things with ppl. Compared to this game many mean ppl can be black listed and end up in your duty finder still. WoWs story sucked compared to 14, but imo jobs kick butt compared to this game. They were very fun to play, in 14 it feels like they try so hard to reinvent each class (except for healers) they forgot to make it all fun. Most are just ok, some a pretty good now. But its my opinion, im sure many love the classes as they are now

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Originally Posted by Maku

FFXI. Played for 8 years. I miss the community it had do to things actually requiring that you get to know people and actually coordinate your abilities. The battle system, though many say is slower than FFXIV, felt fast and engaging. You couldn't just spam your highest damaging spells as a BLM because you would actually pull hate even off a tank that was fully geared and doing their job properly.

You actually had to heal and DPSing on a WHM was totally foreign for most.

You couldn't just focus on your own DPS you had to actually monitor and coordinate with team mates for max DPS numbers.

Pre-Abyssea FFXI was the perfect game.

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Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

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Originally Posted by Derceto

Also, I mean the "real" FF XI. Not this grotesque mutation they have flailing around these days merely wearing the name.

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What makes it "grotesque mutation"?

FFXI, still play it while FFXIV is doing maintenance or if monthly updates are worth playing... Got to love the classics been playing it since day one.

Before 1.0 i played Aion and i miss flying with my own Wings.
Before 2.x i played Tera and missing the Action Combat System.
Before 4.0 i played B&S/Black Desert and missing the Action Combat System.^^

Before FFXI i played DAoC and miss the RvR Fights 5h every Day.

I played dcuo for 5 years (from beta) I loved the game but it got stagnant when they started monthly updates (basically repackaging old maps repeatedly) and the community was so toxic by the time I left, It was about 2 years ago I last played, I saw a new healer being called horrible names in a raid and had a real existential moment where i asked myself 'why am I even playing this?' So I immediately quit and deleted the game. Miss the style system though. My friends had at that point migrated to ESO, but i never clicked with it, loved how every quest had voice acting though.

I've played a number before XIV, some things I miss more than others, so I'll list out all the ones I've played and my impressions of them, in somewhat chronological order of when I played them (some will be before and some will coincide with XIV)...

RFO (Rising Faction Online): My first actual MMO experience. Was pretty fun until you hit the lvl 30 zones (which were also the first of the open world PvP zones in the game) and would get repeatedly ganked by max level players whenever you were out of the hub zone and couldn't level anymore.

PSO: Not technically an MMO, but the first real game I put a LOT of time into, even on crappy dial-up on my Dreamcast. I do still miss it and the way the combat handled and am waiting to see if PSO2 ever gets a US release (I know I can play it with a VPN and the English patch, but I don't want to go through that hassle).

Guild Wars: Liked the game for the most part, my Necro was a force to be reckoned with, though the game did suffer from some issues. When you get to the end of the game and even overworld mobs are 2 or more levels higher than you can level to I kind of lost interest... The expacs didn't really bring much too the table either, just more of the same.

LotRO: I loved LotRO for everything it was pre-Helms Deep and the Hobbit segway stuff they crammed in there when the movie came out. The combat was fun and impactful, though skill bloat was a problem by the end, but their skill tree solution just gutted the whole experience. The social systems were great. The music system was fabulous especially since I was on (well... am on... Lifetime sub and all) Landroval which is the server that hosts Weatherstock, the in-game music festival. I miss some of the festivals as they always had interesting things. I miss the landscapes since visiting places from the books was always a thrill. PvP was actually rather fun and had a real impact on the rest of the game in exp bonuses that you could earn for the whole server by fulfilling certain conditions. There was a lot to love and a lot to miss, but it just isn't the game I remember from when I started so I don't think I could go back.

CoH/CoV: great fun playing the villains here, there was a lot of neat things you could do with it and building your home base was immersive for the most part. Being the first game that let you play with super powers made it unique, but that wore of quickly as the core gameplay really became stale in the long term.

Aion: Flying was an interesting concept, but the way it was implemented just didn't make it very worthwhile.

Rift: I really liked the combat in Rift, the way you could play one role in different modes depending on what you were doing made for some really interesting gameplay. The world was interesting and the public events were FAR better than FATEs in XIV. I left, though, when they reset my lvl 50's skill tree and I just couldn't invest the time to rebuilding and reoptimizing my skills for my playstyle... This also started my hatred of Skill trees.

Tera: Love the combat in Tera, the active system and the combos are well designed and thought out. Fighting BAMs (the acronym means what you think out does) was always fun and challenging, though that's been a bit muted lately and just Gunner can run group content solo on-level now which is kind of disappointing... but also nice in a way.

SWtOR: The first thing I can really say about this game is... Man it was fun playing my Sith Inquisitor. Not for the gameplay, mind you, but for the conversation pieces. There's something refreshing about playing a character that can be a legitimate snark and mouthy to the main story characters and actually says what you intend for the most part. And there were some genuinely funny opportunities to employ a little Force Lightning during some of the conversations that just had me rolling... But yeah, not for the combat...

GW2: Never really got far in GW2, it seemed overly complicated and didn't really have a good flow I my opinion. It's public events are also better than FATEs and the guest transfers (switch servers for a day!) were pretty cool. Would love to see something like that in XIV some day.

DCUO: I liked getting to play in the DC universe and engaging with the heros and villans. The power system was fun and interesting and I made some real unique character builds with it. Where it fell short for me were some of the core systems such as gearing and the monetary system (seriously, I can understand a currency cap on an F2P game, but escrow can go somewhere and do something with itself... needlessly complicated) and the zoning was terribly difficult to follow, especially when transitioning from one "core" zone to another, i.e.: Metropolis to Gotham City.

ESO: All I can really say about this is launch woes... The Elder scrolls combat system is fun, playing an MMO in that fashion is different and refreshing, but the implementation of it also with the instance zones, spawn issues and so many other things at launch made the game not fun. It's gotten better with age and some things have improved, but I still feel like it's a game that doesn't really have a solid indentity as an MMO or an Elder Scrolls game so it makes playing it feel really weird.

Devilian: Decent Diablo-esqe dungeon crawler with since interesting concepts but some of its systems are muddled and unclear. I had fun with it for the most part, but I feel like it takes too long to really get a handle on the systems to play effectively.

Blade and Soul: Good action combat and decent story, the aesthetic was fun too considering I do like the Japanese themes. Didn't care much for the faction system and it really turned into a grind fest at the end. Gathering and crafting was really kind of pointless in my opinion, especially since you didn't do any of it yourself.

Dragon's Dogma Online: Disclaimer: I LOVE Dragon's Dogma and Dark Arisen, so this is biased. So this was the first game I broke down and did a VPN and patch to play... The game carries so much over from the original version that it's an utter delight to play. It's not like playing some adaption of the game (there are some differences, of course, but core gameplay stays mostly the same) but rather playing an online evolution of the original. The graphics are fantastic for the engine it uses, the combat against giant creatures is challenging but manageable, even if you're way under-leveled for it and it all just comes together nicely. My only problem it's that the patch just doesn't translate enough for me to get really invested, but I can't wait for this to come to the US... I really, really hope it does.

That's about all I can think of at the moment, I may add more later as I recall them.

Played a little from others, but not clicked with no MMORPG. The problem was always the same: healer was too weak that leveling solo was severely sped down or just impossible. What was not true to other classes.

The game I played the most was Ragnarok Online. Played it for some years. But it is mostly pay2win right now and is filled with bots that basically ruin the fun. Ragnarok Online 2 was boring. They ruined what monk was in Ragnarok Online and priest was basically useless solo. Tree of Life? Not clicked with. The build system is too complex and is very easy to mess the build.

World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2. WoW I played a bit until the WoD expansion made me mad. Then on and off during Legion, not really putting my heart into it like I used to. Ultimately I stopped in March and haven't really looked back. Guild Wars 2 I check now and then but it's gotten irritating. Only thing about GW 2 that I enjoy is the racial diversity and combat. FF XIV is my home now. I am glad.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

White Knight Chronicles on PS3 until D3 Publishing, Level 5 and SCEA conspired to kill it. I loved that game, the online aspect was great and player community ruled. Most of my group came to Eorzea after our previous world was summarily destroyed.

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YES! I moved to 14 after playing this exact game, after the servers cut off, I met my friends, who we all migrated to 14 from there after a couple had been legacy players just waiting for 14 to come out. So sad that the game was continuing in Japan but they dropped support in the west.

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Originally Posted by ADVSS

YES! I moved to 14 after playing this exact game, after the servers cut off, I met my friends, who we all migrated to 14 from there after a couple had been legacy players just waiting for 14 to come out. So sad that the game was continuing in Japan but they dropped support in the west.

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Indeed. I need to put some serious time into learning to read and speak Japanese for just such an occurrence, it reminds me of the PS1/PS2 days when often times the only way to play a game was to learn Japanese. Besides if I can do it, the Idolm@ster games will be within reach too.

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I've seen a few people say they loved FFXI "before the changes" or "pre-abyss" (I'm assuming these are the same thing).

What update happened to FFXI that made it worse or 'ruined' it? Is it similar to what happened with Star Wars Galaxies (the sort of pin-up example of a major revamp killing an MMO).

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What happened for me is that Abyssea was cool, but it ended the relevancy of other content, before... the endgame content was all capped at level 75 and after Abyssea you could overpower older content with level 99 and merits. Basically something like this game once you can over level it and better gear replaces it, you no longer have a carrot or have to maximize builds to do the content.

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Mostly it's the 'old school'/hardcore players lamenting how the Abyssea mini expansions made levelling much more easier and accessible (and although I long suffered under the terrible level grind of FFXI, I can see where they're coming from - getting to level cap no longer was an achievement to work towards it was just a number). FFXI until then was party-focused, in fact you needed to be in a party to do pretty much anything in the game, enemies were just too difficult. Abyssea and it's 'Dominion Operations' content changed all that.

Although the writing was on the wall long before Aby'd addition for the end of party-centric levelling (Wings of the Goddess and it's 'wallbashes', training regimes at outposts, exp scrolls), but Aby and Dom Ops truly was the watershed for FFXI moving away from old school 'party based' content to more solo-orientated gameplay, a transition that has more or less completed with the most recent changes made to the game (level cap raised to 99, most content can be soloed now using the 'Trust' npc fighters, exp given by enemies has been greatly buffed and exp needed to level has been greatly reduced).

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I enjoyed leveling in Abyssea and I was as hardcore as they come. You could still party and hunt NM at the same time. Leveling was still an achievement to me due to all the rites of passage, Maat, Genkai, Artifact, unlocking of new skills, and pondering what new ways I could play by mixing and matching newly acquired jobs and sub jobs.

I left when the endgame did not kick up in scale to level 99, to add to that.

At that time there was an announcement stating no more expansions would be coming out after rhapsodies, and PS2 and XBox support was getting dropped, amd XIV was peaking... it basically made me feel they were giving up. By the time I realized it wasn't as dire as it seemed. I had already moved on to try other mmos like GW2, ESO, WoW, Swtor and while each was fun in some way, all those alternatives lacked a certain quality that FF give me.

WoW is my first mmorg play, started 2007. But, ago May I quit WoW and back play ffxiv. Since WoW now shit.

Test play GW2, I don't like it. Other WildStar and Tera both is fine...

I think FFXIV are best mmorpg game for me,

GW2. With the new expac looming ahead I'm gonna head back there. The PvP there is light years ahead of this one and I miss that a lot. I prefer the aesthetic/visual effects of FFXIV more though (esp. DRK).

I played a bunch before FF14, but my favourites were:

Diablo 3 - Kill all the things! Get good loot! Play with friends!
But then they ruined the "get good loot" part. So I stopped playing.


Borderlands - Kill all the things! Get good loot! Play with friends!
Borderlands 1 was, is and always shall be a fantastic game.
Then they slightly missed the ball with Borderlands 2.
And then they screwed the pooch with the Prequel and all others based on 2's loot system.

Why can't they understand that people want to play loot-getting games, to get the good loot and kill all the things!! Nobody wants to grind one boss over and over to have a chance at specific loot. Allow a chance for all loot, even the great stuff, from everything, everywhere. It's simple! Kill all the things! Get good loot! Play with friends!

Wait, wait, wait...

D3 - Play it again.
They fixed it! :D
They fired the dude who ruined the loot system, revamped the entire game and made it loot-centric again. Loot is 'rare' but not 'stupid silly to get.'
Kill all the things! Get good loot! Play with friends!
It's a simple concept.
Blizzard woke up, got it, and fixed D3.
If you stopped playing, I suggest trying it again, it's a great game again.

Maybe one day Borderlands will smarten up and do things right...

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Indeed. I need to put some serious time into learning to read and speak Japanese for just such an occurrence, it reminds me of the PS1/PS2 days when often times the only way to play a game was to learn Japanese. Besides if I can do it, the Idolm@ster games will be within reach too.

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a couple of friends broke down and got the jp version that we used to play with, but they didnt really play it much after, I remember the log in message boards giving guides to switching to the jp version.

I kinda have the opposite story of everyone here... XIV was my first real serious MMO (played TERA for a while before that but couldn't beat ACHM (lol) and got discouraged and quit), but now that I've played other games since then I kinda realize what a shallow game it actually is. Very noob-friendly, which is a nice option to have on the market, but not enough meat for someone who really wants to sink time into a game. I like spending time in Eorzea with my friends, so I don't quit, but I wish they'd try some other MMOs with me sometime. Oh well though.

Played a lot of MMO's, but before FFXIV it was mostly Eve: Online and before that Guild Wars 2.

I liked GW2, some fond memories of it, but I don't miss and never really feel any desire to reinstall it.

Eve: Online is different to all the others, feels more like a world, has a sense of place all the others lack. I do miss it sometimes and will probably reinstall at some point, if only to mess about with the limited free trial mode.

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Originally Posted by Jandor

Eve: Online is different to all the others, feels more like a world, has a sense of place all the others lack. I do miss it sometimes and will probably reinstall at some point, if only to mess about with the limited free trial mode.

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EVE was the first and only mmorpg I invested any money or time playing, this was wayyy back though. I got to about the year mark and stopped when it was gonna take over 3 months to learn something lol

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Originally Posted by ADVSS

a couple of friends broke down and got the jp version that we used to play with, but they didnt really play it much after, I remember the log in message boards giving guides to switching to the jp version.

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Had I been able to at least read Japanese, then I would have done that, if for nothing else, because they got the Avatar's storyline.

Ragnarok Online, WoW, Maplestory, 1.0, 2.0 and BnS is my history... and honestly, I'd go back to any of them save WoW and Maple in a heartbeat if the reasons I left weren't still an issue. I miss them very much.

RO is a dead game, 1.0 was so much prettier than 2.0 even if it didn't run well, and BnS... I live in Alaska, so my ping is too high to be competitive lol. The p2w is real nasty there too.