FFXIV: ARR becoming TORtanic

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Originally Posted by seekerofpower

This is the only part I want to reply to. This tells me you have never played a FF game.

<irrelevant words saying nothing that ever mattered>.

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First town in FFIV is Baron. You had to grind to survive in the mist cave?

Wat?

I can't take you seriously. You might have spent hours running laps around Baron, but you really wouldn't have had to. Your estimation of survival chances is ...I don't even know how you factored that.

I can only conclude that you're just very bad at battle management and...leave you to it? Yeah. Definitely going to leave you to it.

Edit: Buy potions. Use them. They make the mist dragon fight super easy.

Edit 2: I still have my original SNES cartridge of FF2, from waaaay back when, before I knew it was actually 4! Lovely game. I was rather impressed with the PSP remake, though the After Years pseudo-sequel...eh. It missed something. Wouldn't you agree, mon peche?

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Originally Posted by Juubi

- Little Post-Game Stuff to do (AK,CP Runs, Long Duty Finder Queue, Tomes Farming)
Very boring and repetitive stuff.

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So you already completed coil? wow.

Never going to be a pvp apologist in mmorpgs. There are games specifically made for pvp, like call of duty.

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Originally Posted by Chrysania

*snip*

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Help me understand your complaint. An MMO requires subs, so you need people to be logging in to do stuff every few days. You hate gear treadmills, and don't want to have to "grind to beat the boss". So, if you had YoshiP's ear, what would you tell him to do? Have the main story quest give you fully materia'd i90 items and put you up against Bahamut? Then, after no reward for beating him, you can do what you do in every FF game and watch a cutscene before turning it off? If you had to pitch that to SE shareholders as a reliable option for a sub-based game (or any game that requires servers), how do you think that would go?

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your complaint, though.

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Originally Posted by Juubi

- Crafting is very boring and inconsequential and a majority of players have no interest
In wasting their time crafting wherein they could be doing other more fun stuff
- Worthless monster drops that give nothing but stupid crafting materials
- Very hard to accumulate Gil in this game because monster loot sucks.
- Terrible Instance Dungeon queues in Duty Finder

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http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aER5bxSjOi...qik6o1_500.gif

Hello community.

I agree with the original poster 'Juubi' for the most part with game deficiencies, however most of you are way off topic. My character is a level 50 whitemage and dabbled in crafting. All gear is obtainable through quests or dungeon drops, I never crafted or bought gear for my character. All the more power to those that enjoy crafting.

Comparing this game to the Juggernaut that is WoW. It is absolutely a fair comparison to compare any other MMO on the market, its called competition and we can learn about other types of game mechanics. WoW may of been out for 10 years, however how long was FF 14 in production to Live to FF 14 Reborn production to what we have now. This game seems to be lacking on content versus time versus other games.

Pvp is not for everyone, however understand some players do want player versus player interaction. Those not wanting PvP can always focus on Pve, I do not understand why you would be against opening other play styles to attract more players. Then again PvP mechanics tend to disrupt Pve mechanics as classes are adjusted to maintain homeostasis.

Personally I took my time leveling, avoided fate farming, and completed every quest in each zone. End game is BORING, having to run the same dungeons over and over and over is not content. Crafting may be a fun minigame for some, though the craftables for the most part are useless. Mob drops are 'Meh' uninspired loot. The hard mode primals are fun the first few times ... Tell me why credits roll when you complete the main scenario storyline? Single player game methinks.

Personally, think the pvp will be a laughing stock considering the current server side issues that they seem to not care about.

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Originally Posted by Juubi

It's amusing that the problems of FFXIV:ARR are being treated by White Knights as a non-issue, it's either mind-blindness or blatant denial of the obvious.

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Can it read? Why. Won't. It. Read?? (south park reference that is very relevant here.)

I think the biggest issue with the game is that levelling through the story isn't that fun, challenging, or memorable. The simple act of levelling from 1-50 should be filled with challenging and immersing content with secret mobs and bosses that drop ultra rare items/gears etc.. And secret areas which scream "explore me and find the hidden chest at the end of this hidden boss" type stuff. In other words, each person who levels 1-50 should have wonderous memories and things to chat with their friends about, items they found which noone else did. Creatures they fought and special monsters they defeated that not many people knew about.

Each person should be able to have a unique experience just getting through the story. Since this is not the case, and for example every arcanist (which is what i am) who levels 1-50 will always have the same exact experience and everyone else levels to 50 in such speed that the word exploration becomes null and void...you get this situation where everyone expects the game to pick up after they hit level 50...and instead of picking up it just gets repetitive.

crafting isn't to bad, there is just nothing worthwhile to craft .. low level gear is worthless, you either have it from quests or discard it shortly after anyway, high level gear is eactly 3 viable sets, from dungeon only - let's not talk about how the 1 crafted set falls short on usefulness, even so, its just nothing a serverload of crafters could find enjoyment in

tbh most of your points lean on some real problems but don't actually hit the mark <.<

Me and my friends already quit and will not sub. The story was nice and and so was the dungeons and them being somewhat challenging already from the start. But we are just not looking forward to the end-game people are talking about as all we see is dungeon grinding and nothing else at all. Crafting doesn't appeal to us and I don't see how PvP will be any good at all with how combat works in this game. There is no exploring at all and no factions that could atleast hide a grind. The situation with the overcrowded instance servers and thus lag is gamebreaking.

I would have liked to see how the story panned out and run the end-dungeons just once but we just can't bother as we are not looking to continue playing.

The game did surprise me as being alot better then I thought it would be but was not a game I was following or looking forward too (for me that is TES). I hope those that stay have a great time and that the game continues to get new content.

A troll post managed to get to page 18?

Impressive...

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Originally Posted by Rainsford

Help me understand your complaint. An MMO requires subs, so you need people to be logging in to do stuff every few days. You hate gear treadmills, and don't want to have to "grind to beat the boss". So, if you had YoshiP's ear, what would you tell him to do? Have the main story quest give you fully materia'd i90 items and put you up against Bahamut? Then, after no reward for beating him, you can do what you do in every FF game and watch a cutscene before turning it off? If you had to pitch that to SE shareholders as a reliable option for a sub-based game (or any game that requires servers), how do you think that would go?

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your complaint, though.

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I'd tell him to put a focus on cooperative story-driven activities, not filler. Every game has grind in it, but the best games will leave you feeling like they had no grind at all. How do they do it?

They make their grind fun, with 'fun' being a notion strongly tailored to the milieu or genre of the game at hand.

Gear treadmills put the emphasis on ever-better gear. The whole point of the game funnels into the gear treadmills. The story; the only thing that could possibly set ARR apart from every other gear treadmill game out there; is presently a disjointed, ricepaper-thin thing that YoshiP should be tailoring his game to richly and warmly invite everyone into, and never stop.

Right now, it stops at level 15, 16 and 17. Three back to back dungeons you are forced into if you want to not only continue on the main storyline, but even be able to do regional quests. You are grounded until you do those chores...er, I mean...stuck until you do those dungeons. Yeah, I was just as apt the first time.

Anyway, that's the first, but not the last, example of what needs to go. The main story should be pure Final Fantasy; a gripping tale in which you're the big gorram hero, and you sally forth and do stuff. The main story should walk you by your pretty little nose from questing zone to questing zone, and each questing zone should have numerous local quests in it for you to do. Why should it do that? Because nobody has fun not having a clue what they're 'supposed to be doing now'. While 'supposed to be doing' is a very flexible notion in the context, it should not be in the core leveling game. You're supposed to be where the main story has taken you, and you're supposed to be doing this cunningly crafted, unraveling skein of regional storylines while you're there.

Fates don't suck; they just need more context and relevance. They frequently just...happen on random timers, most of them. Some of them have to be touched off by specific activities, even if that's no more than clicking on a person.

That should be the other way around, and the idea should be expanded upon immensely. A fate should not be a boring-arse not-actually-random event that happens in the same place every 10 minutes in exactly the same way no matter what. A fate should be a reactive event.

Reactive to what? Some player somewhere doing something, even if its no more than clicking on an NPC. Or it could be a lot more. Certain fates could go off all around the entrance of a cave dungeon every 5th time the final boss in it croaks, and a nearby town might pop up with a fate in which they need fishermen to help thin the local waterways of HORRIBLE STILL-LIVING PIECES OF <boss that died> that, incidentally, the dodos seem to love eating.

More thought needs to be put into these things, in short. They need to be crafted into something that flows with a coherence that supports the main story. It is all about that story.

The whole game is about that story. Final Fantasy's keystone is its story. Without that, you have nothing worth writing home about. Look at every Final Fantasy ever. Subtract the story and just look at the games themselves. Some were pretty awful, ya? Clunky, unnecessarily complicated sometimes; changing things just so it'd be different from the last game sometimes; great sometimes?

For most Final Fantasy fans, and RPG fans on the whole, those elements are secondary to the story. Its all a vehicle for the story.

So, how do you make story something viable to the needs of an MMO? MMO's need their hamsterwheels between content releases, right? Yes! Yes they do!

STORY THOSE EFFING THINGS. Don't just put a thin, sad scent of story excuse on a dungeon we'll be herded into and forced to run hundreds of times just so we can run the next dungeon hundreds of times.

You want to make us run a single dungeon a whole lot? Put some effing effort into it. Make that dungeon FUN, first off. Don't make it tedious. Throw some wildcard elements into that sucker; throw some fate-like events into that dang thing. Come up with 15 different bosses, only 3 of which will ever appear on a given run, each with their own mechanics and storied reasons for being there.

Random Dungeon Generators. Look into this technology for content you want to make hamsterwheels out of. How much more fun would people be having with these placeholder group-focused affairs if they truly didn't know quite what to expect every time they set foot into Magical Dungeon'o'Doom?

This last run, it looked like a sewer and was poorly lit and was full of undead. Now its purple-illuminated, slightly foggy castle halls and we've got weird mutant beasties all over.

Splatter random events throughout. A random event could be a door that makes the party answer a riddle before letting them pass (and spawning monsters each time they get it wrong), spontaneous quests (One of the hostages you just rescued is a fellow adventurer that wants to tag along and help you defeat the boss that imprisoned her! Bonus rewards at the end if he survives to the end!) to do with the thing and general encouragement to do more exploring and less racing to nowhere.

You set up gear treadmills and all you encourage people to do is get on them as fast as they can reach them, then race on them until they're exhausted. Why not? The only thing that matters in a gear treadmill game, according to the game itself, is its conclusion; the gear treadmill. Its a very poetic nicety to observe that 'the journey is the point', but lets face it; that's not true in a gear treadmill MMO.

It might be sage advice to preserve one's own sanity with despite the point gear-treadmill games establish, but its always despite them, in defiance of their inexorable downward spiral into treadmill hell.

Don't go there. There's no need. Not when nobody in the entire industry is even trying to engage its playerbase at 'endgame' intervals with anything exploration-oriented. Gear can be part of it. Vanity can be a huge chunk of it.

YoshiP, take a note from one of the smartest things Guild Wars 2 did; don't make top-stat gear all that hard to get. Make awesome appearances and customization options the chief carrot on most of your sticks.

Then, take a note from one of the best things WoW's ever done; make the crafting of a relic akin to the crafting of a legendary in WoW - practically a community ordeal requiring the concerted efforts of many. Don't make legendaries do obscenely greater damage per hit than anything else; make them bloody AWESOME to behold, and give them a gimmicky special power that's either flashy or, indeed, just plain useful. Most importantly, Final Fantasy the hell out of this process. Make the quests for it appropriately epic for all involved, give crafters their own contributory quests (Let several player crafters of different sorts have their Cid-crafting-Excalibur style moments).

Then, take a note from FINAL FANTASY and don't make it a giant PITA to level; make leveling combat classes a Final-Fantasy-Fun experience.

It'll be more work, avoiding the treadmills. Treadmills are so easy every idiot game out there's been doing them forever.

It'll be work that's worth it when you craft a method of 'endgame' that keeps people busy without putting the entire emphasis of your game on gear when it should be on the story.

And that's the summary of what I'd tell Yoshi; he has to make the 'endgame' of his game support the game itself. Nobody looks forward to being max level so they won't have anything to do anymore, after all. They often want to be max level 'because that's when the real game starts'.

The real game should start at level 1. 'Endgame' should not be a gear treadmill, but an activity and community-building endeavor.

Here's an idea: lead up to major content releases with community activities. Don't just drop a new expansion; have our gatherers and crafters do grand company quests making things and contributing materials to build ...lets say airships...so we can oh...fly the army to <place> and kick the next expansion off.

Mundane stuff? Sure. But its the sort of concept a server's entire community can rally behind. Incentive to do it? Make it a bit of a competition between servers, with the top 3 getting a month-long <Yay BuffNameGoesHere> buff of some sort for the whole server to enjoy while bamfing around the new content.

And then have some epic bossfights or invasion events or whatever-might-contextually-fit-a-theoretical-expansion's-theme so people can go charging around blowing crap up in the days leading up to said expansion.

See, while I'm sure none of these ideas are perfect, and all of them would take more work than the same tired old crap, can anyone here see how the work might damn well be worth it?

Who here would like their 'endgame dungeons' to be well-crafted randomly generated affairs with spontaneous events that'd sometimes go off inside, different bosses you might never see twice and fun/weird things with nothing to do with combat sometimes spontaneously being generated therein (like a door asking riddles, or an optional, randomly-generated puzzle; solve it for a treasure box and tokens or something!)

Wouldn't it be a lot more interesting if, via intelligent preparation, 'endgame' never really happened? What if incremental content releases built the story up between major releases, and each major release was presaged by in-game events that gradually scaled up to release day, wherewith...BAM! THE EPIC CONCLUSION of <Stuff that was built up over the last 4 months> and...a new season begins!

YoshiP, look at it more like producing an ongoing television series and less like an MMO, in that respect. Tell an amazing story. Let us feel like we're part of it while you hide the grind in Final Fantasy story up to our ears.

Give that a whack. Nobody's doing THAT these days, much as they probably should.

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Originally Posted by Chrysania

TLDR

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Can we have a shorter one?

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Originally Posted by Chrysania

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

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This made me laugh so hard LOL.

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Originally Posted by Keneblerz

Can we have a shorter one?

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I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

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Originally Posted by Chrysania

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

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Made me laugh :D

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Originally Posted by Chrysania

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

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Post of the year.
http://img.pandawhale.com/27476-Al-B...g-gif-Io98.gif

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Originally Posted by Chrysania

Lots of great ideas I'd tell Yoshi if I could whisper in his ears while he dreamed

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Also get rid of the map system, don't show glowing dots on the map pointing to your destination. The way the system is now you focus more on your map than your actual screen. Make finding destinations something you actually have to...find. Make Fates appear at random locations, the same fate should not appear in the same place twice and it should NOT show on your map that a fate is even happening. It should be something you accidently found, make fates possibly drop ultra rare items for that level of fate so that fate hunters will have reason to explore every nook and cranny of your lands hoping to run into a fate. Make fates scale, if you are by yourself and run into a level 50 fate, it should be challenging for 1 person level 50, the moment more people come in that fate should scale ever so much for each person joining.

They should hire you Chrysania, effing good ideas. I want to play the MMO you envision and wonder why they can not do these simple things to make it FUN.

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Originally Posted by Miinister

I want to play the MMO you envision and wonder why they can not do these simple things to make it FUN.

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Time and money. It's one thing to sit here as fans thinking about the things we want, it's quite another when you're SE and have to pay for it, especially in such a short time frame.

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

Time and money.

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Pathfinder Online, google it. Should launch in 2016, a game that was designed and funded by actual fans who know the genre and what an RPG should be. They actually proposed the idea of a real mmo-rpg which goes back to the rpg roots and asked for donations and said if they reached a mill they would begin the project...they reached more than a mill really fast lol.

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Originally Posted by Alish

Please name me an MMO that had a huge abundance of things to do at launch.

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Star wars galaxies but that was entirely different era all together...

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Originally Posted by Yoko_Kurama

Pathfinder Online

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Yea, I've seen that. When it comes to indie projects with that kind of scope, I tend to take a "Eh, good luck... but I'm not gonna hold my breath" approach.

All too often they just never pan out.

Was this a kickstarter? You really have to be skeptical of these already seen one where people put a lot of money in it and basically went nowhere.

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

Yea, I've seen that. When it comes to indie projects with that kind of scope, I tend to take a "Eh, good luck... but I'm not gonna hold my breath" approach.

All too often they just never pan out.

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Originally Posted by Cenewulf

Star wars galaxies but that was entirely different era all together...

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Before every game tried to be like WoW.. Those were the days.

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Originally Posted by MrSativa

i got 50 whm in a week via story
i got 50 gsm in 3 days
i got 40 pld in 4 days.

i have relic and full dl

and i still find stuff to do...

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Noone's arguing there's nothing to do, just the stuff to do is absurd.

How many CM/Prae's/Aks did you do to get all that darklight? Yeah, that's the problem.

Do you have full DL on your paladin too now?

See I'm the reverse, I'm almost full DL on PLD 50 and sooooo bored, and was leveling whm 40 but realizing he'd "need" full DL too, and that's depressing.

Star Citizen is over 21 million via paypal/kickstarter donations. They have the money and the time :)

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Originally Posted by Roaminggnome

Was this a kickstarter? You really have to be skeptical of these already seen one where people put a lot of money in it and basically went nowhere.

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I guess I have some faith it will pan out because the guys running the project are people who were big names at CCP games (company that makes Eve online) before leaving that company to start this project.

I know that this is a new, probably one-of-a-kind occurrence in AAA gaming, but XIV shouldn't entirely get the free pass of being new.

Many of these dungeons, though changed/nerfed are from 1.0 and sorry CM and Prae are less fun to me than AK and WP. Those two are just like free trophies because there's no complex/dangerous mechanic. Seriously, the final boss of Qarn, Cutter's Cry, Titan SM, Ifrit HM (with stuns) were all harder than all/most of the content in there.

Pay no attention SE, you're nowhere near the problems TOR had. Seriously, Final Fantasy has never even been a PvP MMO. Look at how popular it was in XI (read: not at all).

If you want PvP so badly, Mortal Online is the game for you.

The thing I liked about XI's stance on PVP is that it never once affected PVE. If you PVP'd in XI, you knew that some classes dominated other classes. Some classes, properly played, dominated all.

Moreso, when PVP did require a spell changed, they changed it separately from PVE. For instance, in PVE, Utsusemi was 100% reliable (save for certain abilities meant to ignore it). In PVP, it behaved like blink. It might absorb the next attack, it might not.

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Originally Posted by Chrysania

YoshiP, look at it more like producing an ongoing television series and less like an MMO, in that respect. Tell an amazing story. Let us feel like we're part of it while you hide the grind in Final Fantasy story up to our ears.

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Yoshi had the perfect opportunity to do this were he to start ARR soon after the conclusion of version 1. We could have seen destroyed versions of various zones and cities leading to patch long community rebuilding efforts accompanied with related stories. (sadly he copped out on destroying/redesigning the cities anywho...). This would have enabled the zones as well as the stories to evolve over time and would be the perfect hook to keep subscribing as the areas would be different each patch. We should have got to experience losing part of Bloodshore to the Garleans, but then next patch SE got our hopes up by saying "Hey lets build Costa Del Sol lolz"


A problem with version 1 was that it started in a cold war of sorts. It was boring and the battles referenced in the CS prologue were much more enjoyable. ARR has more or less done the same thing. When your in character theres no risk involved. The Garleans are just there. Theres no concern or reason to protect any settlements or towns.

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Originally Posted by Juubi

Little incentive to do a max level alt class, leveling them is entirely dependent
Upon mindless Fates grinding and minuscule leve quests, seriously why shouldn't
former low lvl quests reset for a low level alt?

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The good thing about SWTOR is that you could level just using your Class quests and a run of each dungeon and forget about the World quests once you have levelled your first class (especially during bonus xp weekends or using xp boosts or rested xp). The problem with ARR is the sparse amount of Class or Job quests. I would not want generic quests reset. I would want more Class quests.


Strangely I must say ARR seems to be a carbon copy of SWTOR, even though it has tried to copy WOW. A lot of players cling to SWTOR because of the hope of the vague "Super Secret Space Project". I'm not really sure what we will expect to cling our hopes on, "Super Secret Airship Project" perhaps?

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Originally Posted by Juubi

The reality of the current MMO landscape is that an MMO can exist without crafting, but it can not exist without PVP, you said it yourself, crafting wasn't fun, the degree of its simplicity or complexity is irrelevant, the point is that crafting isn't fun and downright boring, Many would rather clash swords with another player than carry a pickaxe

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Really? Cannot exist without PvP? Well, uh, I've been playing MMOs for about 15 years now AND NEVER PLAYED PVP EVEN ONCE BECAUSE I DONT CARE!!! MMOs can exist without it easily. I don't give a crap about fighting other players, and I don't understand why you think it's so vital to every single MMO in the world, period, the end Mr. "I'm internetjesus you must all agree with me because you are clearly retarded if you don't." And, uh, I kinda enjoy the crafting system of this game. True I haven't done much with it, but it's still fun. Maybe you should give it a try before bashing the hell out of it as if you're internetjesus and everything you say is scripture regardless of your personal inexperience.

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

Chrysania, did someone piss in your cereal this morning, or do you always have this winning personality?

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You should see my bad side if 'charming' isn't to your liking.

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

This makes it all the more ironic when you proceed to go on ranting about what makes games good and bad.

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Not really. You just don't seem to understand what objective/subjective actually mean. Or 'Ironic' for that matter.

Mooooving right along.

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

Considering that the social component is an integral part of the MMO experience, you’re dead wrong. Take the social aspect out of Eve, and you remove the corporations, alliances, the political intrigues and the great wars that involve tens of thousands of players at once, and affect hundreds of thousands. Game mechanic is only part of the equation, how that can be utilized by the players in a MMO and the resulting impacts are not something you can simply cast out the window as irrelevant.

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Take the social aspect out of EVE and you're left with a very intelligent box of digital Lincoln logs that was initially designed, and has since been endlessly optimized, to facilitate those things you named. Pure sandbox games are like that. Its kind've their thing.

But this is not a sandbox of any sort. Its not even a little sandboxy. There are no particular tools here in ARR for people to basically build their own game out of. That is not, in fact, a component of MMO's with any commonality at all. So, while you're being dead wrong by dint of confusing 'sandbox' for MMO...

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

/thumbsup.jpg on being an obnoxious DB :rolleyes: Oh, and since when did you became the authority on deciding what is good or bad, or how and why people enjoy doing anything? Here, let me make it as simple as possible for you:

Making tons of money trading in a single player game like X3: guaranteed results, zero competition, ultimately pointless


Making tons of money trading in a MMO like Eve: success is not guaranteed, you’re competing against thousands of other humans, the money you make can actually be used in meaningful ways – pvp, reinvestment, subscription etc.

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I'm the authority on what I think. You disagree? That's nice. Do you expect me to respect your opinion because you had the temerity to have one, but couldn't quiiiiite evidence genuine thought backing it? Nope.

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

Yes yes, you can’t actually address the point, so you resort to mass ad hominem, how smart of you! Here’s a cookie for effort!

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Incorrect, my malapropic fellow forumer. See, there was no oppositional target there. You're one of those lads that discovered logical fallacies on a forum somewhere and thought they sounded very witty, I surmise? 'Mass ad hominem'. Keep your cookie, you need it more. The term you're looking for is 'hyperbole'.

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

Didn’t you just say that, and I quote “There is no such thing as an objective metric on what makes a good game anyway.” ? Hello foot, meet mouth :D

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There isn't. I am absolutely, 100% correct. There is no such thing as an objective metric to determine such, and WoW proves itself to be a good game to play along many objective metrics. Do the objective metrics make it good, or do they simply serve as systems of measurement by which its 'goodness' can, in fact, be identified?

I think the latter. You can't make a game good with a magic metric, but you can use metrics of various sorts to identify good games from bad, to some extent or another.

So...yeah. I have nothing to retract. Methinks you were trying so hard to find a mis-step that you made one of your own instead.

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

And since when has popularity ever been a metric to judge the quality of, well, anything?* Oh yea, that’s right, only when it suits your arguments :rolleyes:

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Quality? Never. But here's a coup de grace on the matter for you; the quality isn't here in ARR in several key places that it absolutely needs to be if any hope for a bright future could reasonably be held by anybody regarding the matter perspicaciously. Popularity is quite important to the possibility for success. Quality that remains obscure, or too indelibly associated with mediocrity, is often quality that adds nothing to the actual value of the product in question.

ARR has lots of quality in it. The music's high quality, the art style and world design; all quality. But those aren't enough and will not be substantive factors to sub retention. They will offset pretty much nothing of the dissatisfaction existent due to server lag, dearth of quests, tedium of the gear-treadmill endgame, etcetera, so on, so forth.

My argument is rather simple, all things considered: ARR doesn't have the quality where it counts to hook and retain the people it will require to succeed financially.

My position: People should damn well make noise, ceaselessly and tirelessly, to make sure SE knows what they want. SE will have to be trusted to sort something out of the noise, but damn well make that noise, or by your silence acquiesce to whatever they feel like giving you, whether you wanted it, like it or don't.

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

I didn’t guess, I made an observation. I have no way of knowing what you actually like or not, nor do I care.

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I like Mass Effect, T.S Eliot and earl grey, with or without bergamot. Also, theme park MMO's that actually entertain, like a good theme park should.

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Originally Posted by Aenarion

Too bad for you then. While I actually do agree with many of the ideas you brought up in the other wall-o-text, I do not agree with your claim that ARR "sucks".

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While it is, to some extent, a poor thing for me in regard of my general hopes for ARR, I'd dare think it worse for you, as you seem to be a valiant defender of something here. I'm not sure what, but you're valiantly defending it, whatever it is.

And it won't help. I'm not consulting tea leaves, my pineal gland or astrology charts by which to formulate my opinions and speculative observations. 1.0 was a financial catastrophe for SE; a genuine financial catastrophe. The general reputation it secured for itself was probably worse than the monetary cost though, for that fiasco's actual cost in sum.

If you think ARR will magically be weighed by the world neutrally, you're wrong. It would be wise for SE to reach out to Final Fantasy fans and give them a Final Fantasy game. Not an Everquest/WoW hybrid with 'Final Fantasy' somewhat awkwardly glued to its forehead, such as they have here done.

Its depressing, to me. Bioware's abysmal showing with SWTOR was as well, for not incomparable reasons.

They could have done amazing things. They had the technology. All the pieces were there.

Cuiusvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.

If they put in vanity gear I will truly be upset.

How can anyone truly look forward to seeing 1.05 million people running around in immersion breaking swimsuits while fighting dragons?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Juubi

The reality of the current MMO landscape is that an MMO can exist without crafting, but it can not exist without PVP, you said it yourself, crafting wasn't fun, the degree of its simplicity or complexity is irrelevant, the point is that crafting isn't fun and downright boring, Many would rather clash swords with another player than carry a pickaxe

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I hate pvp. I won't play any game, let alone an MMO, that is dependent on it. If FFXIV required pvp I wouldn't play it. I would not rather clash swords with another player. I'd rather craft something.

Don't assume you speak for all of us.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SolviteSekai

If they put in vanity gear I will truly be upset.

How can anyone truly look forward to seeing 1.05 million people running around in immersion breaking swimsuits while fighting dragons?

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Prepare to be upset.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Juubi

The reality of the current MMO landscape is that an MMO can exist without crafting, but it can not exist without PVP, you said it yourself, crafting wasn't fun, the degree of its simplicity or complexity is irrelevant, the point is that crafting isn't fun and downright boring, Many would rather clash swords with another player than carry a pickaxe

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Nope. And when has a Final Fantasy title ever been about PVP?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by coffeepotz

Prepare to be upset.

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I'll be fine with it in 6 months when they put it in.