I want to say thank you to Yoshida and the developers. After 4 years gone, im home.
Man how time has flown. The first time I got involved with ffxiv I saw gameplay of 1.0 whilst playing WoW back in the day (October 2011), I had kind of been following the drama surrounding the game on and off and watched the reviews, poor as they were. But, when I saw whom they had put in charge, and what they had planned on doing (i learned of these things while listening to the Crystal Core podcast from back on the ffxivcore forums.) I decided that because the art style and general atmosphere of the game intrigued me so much, I had to give it a try.
January 2012 came and i was busy as hell working at a gas station, reading WoW and Twilight fanfiction, and generally enjoying my life as an MMO nerd. I had finally put together a PC that was capable of running the game decently (AMD A6-3650, 8GB ram and a radeon 6790, damn that is weak compared to my rig today) and I purchased the game for 20$ and began to enjoy the intricacies and quirks of the game.
I remember each day exploring farther and farther south of Gridania as my fledgling Archer, very much enjoying the game even with all that was wrong with it. By the time the first artwork of "2.0" was released I was very invested in the game, and thought "how amazing will this world be with contemporary mmo design?" (answer: very amazing) I signed up for alpha and beta, participating in both ( i still have my invitation emails for them.. hehe) and I realised that this was going to be somethign special when it was released.
2013 came and ARR was released to the world, I rushed to level 50 with a friend of mine, and fondly remember the primal EX fights, Binding Coil (lol the turn 2 exploit was pretty hilarious, seen as someone with a lot of past raiding experience) and of course the Crystal Tower..
February 2014 came and one of my favorite pvp games of all time (Shadowbane) was released as an emulated server by a group of volunteer devs, and thus I said goodbye to FFXIV for almost 5 years...
As of 2 days ago, I am back in the land of Eorzea and absolutely loving it. I want to thank both Naoki Yoshida and the developers for their undying dedication to this game, and for catering a product to us PVE mmo players (and pvp to an extent) that is unlike any other experience available on the market, even today half a decade later. The class/job/crafting/gathering class system design is more enjoyable than probably any other mmo product out ther on the market today.
Thank you for bringing so much joy to my life once again, and for helping me through a time of more grief than I know how to cope with, being able to escape into this game is beyond amazing
I love you guys ^^ I'll be in-game
