Subscription deadline is coming up and the question is: will you subscribe?

[STARSBarry]

subbing for 6 months, il be playing for at least that long.... after all it will take around 5 months to get a full set of token gear with the tokens capped at 300 per week

[ilikeorangejuice]

I want to love the game because I like the final fantasy universe and I enjoy the story that the writers put out, but the game just doesn't justify a subscription fee. Honestly no current game, not even wow, justifies having a p2p model anymore. Why do you think they all fail or turn f2p in the first place?

For this particular game, It boils down to gameplay, which lets be real here.. Is just clunky and awkward due to some unwise game design choices.

2.5 gcd?? Game was simply catered for console gamers. and honestly isn't very entertaining to watch or back-seat game.
0.5 delay between every single damn action??? Just plain crappy game design.

Its an aesthetically pleasing game, but sadly there isn't anything new or innovative here. So i'll probably just be finishing the story since that's one of the only appealing parts of the game.

I will say the crafting is unique though, they feel like mini-games that actually have progression.

[skillface]

I'm surprised that after 21 pages only a few people have even mentioned the additional internal lag from the abysmal server tick rate in this game. That to me is the largest problem, and as I said earlier I simply won't subscribe as long as that is a thing. It's already bad enough trying to play an MMO from Australia without that additional lag. This is where that 0.3-0.5 second delay on all actions comes from, and the reason why so many people are having issues with avoiding AoE attacks even in the US (surely everyone has felt this, assuming this isn't their first MMO). EVE Online feels a bit better to me, and that game's servers are in London.

And don't tell me to play on a Japanese server either, I was on Tonberry during Beta Phase 4 and it was barely any better than it is now (and I'm sure as hell not paying to transfer back there even if we can transfer across datacenters, and my friends struggled to even get onto Behemoth as it is).

Sure it's 150ms to Tokyo vs 300ms to Montreal, but you have to take the 300ms internal lag into consideration as well. No matter where you live or which ISP you're through, you're suffering from that additional latency. How the hell do people not notice that? I would have thought US players would be a lot more sensitive to it seeing as they usually don't have to put up with anything above 100ms, let alone the 450-600ms effective latency we get here depending on which datacenter you're on. Even if you live in Montreal or Tokyo you still have an effective 300ms latency, think about that for a second. That would be purely unacceptable in any other MMO, why is this one different?

If you're expecting to get anything done in endgame or especially PvP (when that comes out) without them first addressing this, you're sorely mistaken. Frankly this is why most MMOs end up flopping (and by extension one of the largest reasons for why WoW is still so popular); they always fall flat when it comes to network performance or general responsiveness.

This is the single most important reason I haven't bothered leveling past 30 (as instances are a chore at best with this kind of delay and I've heard that they get significantly harder at about level 35, and playing as a Tank exacerbates the issue) and why I won't be resubscribing, at least until it's addressed. Hell I'd rather play TERA at the moment (and anyone that's ever played that game that lives in Australia or or such knows that the action-oriented combat system in that game combined with the fact that your attack speed is tied directly to your latency makes playing said game a joke). People might think I'm exaggerating but when you've played WoW for 6 years from Australia you tend to really pay attention to these things.

TL;DR: Bad netcode/server performance is bad, not resubscribing until it's fixed (assuming it even does get fixed, SE don't exactly have a great track record with that kind of thing).

[ShiftingFate]

End game content isn't challenging.

Have you and your FC beat Turn 5 of Coil?

Didn't think so, please try again...

[IronToe]

My sub is on the fence, I have serious issues with this game and I try to figure out which way im gonna go every time i log in. That said heres my issues and resolutions list for whats wrong and how to fix it. things are bad in this game as it stands currently.

1.) The only thing this does better then any mmo is the crafting, not the system, just the actual act of crafting, its fun. The system sucks, theres no actual point to crafting anything, short of potions that have far to long a cooldown to be useful or food that doesnt last long enough or you lose on death. Everything else you craft is useless because you get fully geared through questing and end game content is better then what you can craft. So the best part of this game is gimped, I like to participate in it, its what I do mainly, but its gimped none the less.
1a.) To fix: Take away the gear rewards after level 10 for quests. Lower the cooldowns of potions dramatically. Increase duration of potions dramatically.

[IronToe]

2.) Story line progression sucks. There I said it. I know everyone likes it and points to it as a great part of the game. Think about it. How many time have you gone to a new area, collected your quest and run off to pick up 3-5 things along some linear pathway with 2 or 3 mobs popping up on the way. Then return to the new city and talk to 3-4 npcs in random locations, fetch something somewhere, a mob pops up again somewhere else and then return to the original npc and now we are off to another new city to start all over again. This is batch questing pure and simple, someone recycled the same stuff repeatedly with a new skin and some new text but ultimately its the same set of 3-5 quest in each area that we are all repeating.
2a.) To fix: You cant, this game was built as a wow clone with much better graphics and as such its a grind fest of fetching things and going to kill mobs thinly disguised.

[IronToe]

3.) Lack of foresight with the RMT's and continued lack of doing anything about it. The game is supposed to be an immersive experience, someone pulling me out of this to offer me in game currency for my real world money just pulls me back out to remind me that yes Im not in Square enix's world, im in my living room playing a game that has every intention of sucking every dollar i own out of my pocket. I'm here to have fun and escape my day to day life, not be reminded of it a dozen times every time i entered a new zone.
3a.) Do something about it and now, not at patch 2.1, not in batches of a thousand, do something now. Hire half a dozen people for every server, have them sit in every major city and start banning immediately and on the spot. This can be done and it should be done.

[IronToe]

4.) Cheating/Hacking/Bots. I follow the rules, that bot over there teleporting from node to node obviously isnt. I report him. Days later, still teleporting from node to node. Not only does this follow the same reasons as above issue (taking us out of the experience of teh game) but also this issue directly impacts the market, destroying the economy which continues to further cause the real issue with problem number 1 which is a gimped crafting class, you simply cant make any gil because the economy is completely destroyed.
4a.) This issue cant be solved as quick as the above issue unfortunately but it needs to be resolved. Some kind of hook needs to be inserted to detect third party programs.

[IronToe]

5.) Combat is awful. 2.5s gcd? ok i can get over this i guess, the monsters are balanced around it so even though its slow as hell I can ignore it. But its dreadfully slow.
5a.) Even if you lowered the gcd im sure the lag would be an issue, Id suggest to insert more instant cooldown skills for each class to make people feel they have more to do then hit a button every 3 seconds.

[Vansair]