The WoW Factor

[Reynhart]

Reading your post, I think you should change the name of the topic to "Not the FFXI factor".
I played and loved FFXI for years, but I can't be blind to all the boring, time consuming content.

You speak of the beauty of the journey, but levelling was, in my opinion, utterly boring. Pull a mob to camp, kill the mob, pull the mob to camp, kill the mob, rinse and repeat until you hit the level cap. FFXIV took a leveling-through-quest approach that actually makes you visit the world.
As for progressing through quests, FFXI was far too obscure so people HAD to rely on a guide to achieve pretty much anything. In FFXIV, the guide is simply IN the game.

As for the combat system, some people love slow paced combat, others prefer faster one. I don't think one is ultimately really better than the other. As for my personnal opinion, the delay of weapons in FFXI was really too high, especially for 2-handed weapons.

You can't really criticize FFXIV for mimicking WoW when suggesting it should mimick FFXI. FFXIV is neither WoW or FFXI and this is a pretty good thing. As for the challenge, I don't know yet how difficult ARR will be, but I was fairly pleased by the challenges on v1, even for the storylines.

You also mention HNM and drop rate. Please...I'm sorry, but I don't understand how people could appreciate such a system. Random supremacy is an heresy. You could be the best player in every server, with the best armor, weapon, etc...the game will punish you on a simple dice roll. And please don't tell me that "random = difficult", it's totally unrelated.

"The Raven Nevermore" in v1 was the very definition of a fair challenge. An extremely difficult fight that will always reward you if you're good enough to beat it.

As for the skins, when the cap in FFXI was lvl 50, you didn't have that much choice too. The game is still pretty young compared to its predecessor, and I'm sure it will give us a lot more option in stuffing and content.


As a last point, you should think about the people who played FFXI at the beginning. It's eleven years from now, and these people have grown up. Some of them, like me, have children now, and can't really spend hours of grinding, camping, not-dropping anything and waiting for a group. I think it's important that FFXIV don't forget those people in their target.