FFXIV: ARR becoming TORtanic

[Chrysania]

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

Guild Wars 2 and Secret World would like to say hello. Incidentally, they're both Buy to play with no sub requirement and kick the unholy snot out of ARR here in pretty much every way possible on all fronts.

You want something to work for? Ability points in both games; the grind that never ends! INFINITE LEVELS...except you just get points. In GW2, to buy very rare things with; in TSW, it can take quite a lot of effort to get every skill out of the skill wheels, and then there're all the aux weapon skills...

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Do you like to craft? Guild Wars 2 doesn't have crafting classes; you can level your main class by crafting. You can LITERALLY (if you can supply yourself) make a non-combat character and level it to 80 just by crafting in GW2. And its not in a combat-worthless class; you can then go totally suck in the big, wide world as a combat class and learn how to play it at 80, if that's your fancy, rather than quest grind it.

But maybe that sounds boring and crappy. You can level quite nicely in PVP as well. In fact, you pretty much never have to PvE much if you don't want to either. If PvP is your bag, GW2 utterly minimizes the amount of PvE you'll ever have to look at.

But what if you like story and PvE and dungeons and raiding? Their main storyline's present. You get some options and choices, but its no SWTOR in that respect. Its a lot like what ARR seems to be trying to be, in fact; something you do incrementally as you level, except in GW2, you're never stuck at any particular level and have to event grind to be able to continue the story.

You're never stuck. There's so much you can do to get XP in GW2 that you literally have to do nothing to avoid getting XP and eventually leveling, because if you so much as walk, you'll get exploration XP. You'll eventually find a vista or jumping puzzles, do them, get some XP.

GW2 cannot make a dungeon to save its soul, in my opinion, and it doesn't quite know how to make a pet class that doesn't suck, but other than that, its a great game.

Secret World isn't a crafter's paradise by any stretch of the imagination; crafting is minimal. You stick stuff in a window in a particular pattern and click a button. There is no skill required, and even the arcane little shapes for specific things are an unnecessary superfluity, as its not a skill-driven thing at all. You cannot be a non-combatant in Secret World. PVP is three faction objective oriented, and the maps are good. They need more variety and better viability of certain weapon/ability styles out there, but its solid and doesn't suck near so much as SWTOR's pvp tends to.

Doesn't hold a candle to GW2's testament to godliness where at least WvWvW is concerned, but TSW makes up for that lack in embarrassing every other MMO out there in its mature survival-horror storytelling. That game...that game is not for children.

That game is not for mental children either. That game will hurt your brain if you try to play it like every other MMO. Abandon all hope, idiots that play TSW. Or, at the very least, google everything when you can't figure anything out. Pretty obvious that a lot of the people at endgame there had google walkthroughs get them there, but if you DON'T do those...

Ye gods. That game has content well worth taking your time on. Just be prepared for some rather (I think) hilariously cheesy and occasionally over the top black/bleak humor.

TSW was basically made for people that like to learn and are of above-average intelligence. It will reward you for being genuinely intelligent, or taking the time to learn something. Otherwise, you can easily google walkthrough your way to its gear treadmill endgame and we'll all laugh our asses off at you when you're running around in full 10.5 gear and you don't know how to recognize, let alone attempt to solve, a basic Caesar cipher.

Good times. Good times. ARR has no such good times. It could use a few.

[Raxion]

Guild Wars 2 and Secret World would like to say hello.

What endgame did GW2 have? All you did was grind Citadel of Flame until your eyes bled. After you got the gear from that, all you had left to do was run around low-level maps and do the SAME EXACT THING you were doing at level 1. GW2 gameplay was mind-numbingly repetitive.

[Chrysania]

What endgame did GW2 have? All you did was grind Citadel of Flame until your eyes bled. After you got the gear from that, all you had left to do was run around low-level maps and do the SAME EXACT THING you were doing at level 1. GW2 gameplay was mind-numbingly repetitive.

'Things to do' does not mean 'endgame'.

WvWvW was always there. Eight flavors of crafting ACTUALLY USEFUL things was there. Dungeons, if you could stomach their imbalances, were there. Legendary crafting was always there, if you wanted an epic grind to make all those CoF runs and world completion, etcetera, actually worth something.

Now, if you classify endgame as 'there wasn't a gear treadmill for me to get on', then no. It had no endgame. It has more game. There are treadmills to craft legendaries if you want a treadmill. Crafting rare exotics is less of a treadmill, but still there if the legendary grind is too much to swallow.

Oh, you didn't actually mean anything but 'it didn't have raids' when you said 'it had no endgame'. Hahahahaha. No, no it didn't. Its not a raidy gear treadmill game. I can understand your confusion and malaise though; almost every MMO is a series of treadmills, whereas GW2 is, quite literally, not.

But no worries, its turning into one. More and more treadmills are creeping in, just for you, with all the ascended stuff.

Treadmills: the cheap, easy way to keep morons busy. Not very much fun, but hey...were you stupid enough to grind CoF until your eyes bled?

If so...wealp. They apparently have you figured out then, don't they.

[Raxion]

'Things to do' does not mean 'endgame'.

WvWvW was always there. Eight flavors of crafting ACTUALLY USEFUL things was there. Dungeons, if you could stomach their imbalances, were there. Legendary crafting was always there, if you wanted an epic grind to make all those CoF runs and world completion, etcetera, actually worth something.

Now, if you classify endgame as 'there wasn't a gear treadmill for me to get on', then no. It had no endgame. It has more game. There are treadmills to craft legendaries if you want a treadmill. Crafting rare exotics is less of a treadmill, but still there if the legendary grind is too much to swallow.

Oh, you didn't actually mean anything but 'it didn't have raids' when you said 'it had no endgame'. Hahahahaha. No, no it didn't. Its not a raidy gear treadmill game. I can understand your confusion and malaise though; almost every MMO is a series of treadmills, whereas GW2 is, quite literally, not.

But no worries, its turning into one. More and more treadmills are creeping in, just for you, with all the ascended stuff.

Treadmills: the cheap, easy way to keep morons busy. Not very much fun, but hey...were you stupid enough to grind CoF until your eyes bled?

If so...wealp. They apparently have you figured out then, don't they.

I love your tone. You speak as though I care even a small bit about that forgotten disaster.

I also love how you claim that a lack of content is, within itself, a plethora of content. (And you say I'm the stupid one.)

GW2 was a game designed around the hope that people would enjoy doing nothing but running around in the world doing absolutely nothing. That's why it was a flop.

WvWvW was nothing more than a one-sided collection of poor souls trying to find fun in that boring-as-hell game.

I also couldn't give a damn less what they plan on implementing into that disaster. It's trash now, and it'll be trash afterwards.

[sasakusaku]

GW2 was a game designed around the hope that people would enjoy doing nothing but running around in the world doing absolutely nothing. That's why it was a flop.

Lol GW2 is not a flop. It's doing really really well. Lots of people playing it, from recent blog they posted average logins per day and I believe it is close to or even exceeding FF 14 atm.

Like said, problem with GW2 is it has no trinity; I love playing healers but sadly healing in GW2 is pretty worthless and ineffectual so here I am playing FF 14 for now.

I am in GW2 during this down time on my ele and it has tons of players every where.

[Reslin]

Lol GW2 is not a flop. It's doing really really well. Lots of people playing it, from recent blog they posted average logins per day and I believe it is close to or even exceeding FF 14 atm.

Like said, problem with GW2 is it has no trinity; I love playing healers but sadly healing in GW2 is pretty worthless and ineffectual so here I am playing FF 14 for now.

I am in GW2 during this down time on my ele and it has tons of players every where.

Not even close but to be fair FFXIV is still new which means it might experience a drop off as most new mmo's do at some point. Guild Wars is another mmo I play. According to their recent data there's around 2.5 million unique logins each week. FFXIV gets 617,000 unique logins each day. That puts FFXIV at over 4,300,000 each week. Nearly double that number.

[sasakusaku]

Not even close but to be fair FFXIV is still new which means it might experience a drop off as most new mmo's do at some point. Guild Wars is another mmo I play. According to their recent data there's around 2.5 million unique logins each week. FFXIV gets 617,000 unique logins each day. That puts FFXIV at over 4,300,000 each week. Nearly double that number.

Then I stand correct, however you fail to mention that FF 14 is cross platform thus a massive console base to draw upon while GW2 is PC exclusive atm; that is a pretty solid number of people still playing it. By no means is GW2 flop, no matter what you say it's busy as ever a year later; a proper comparison should be 3 months launch of both games and I am sure GW2 might be close.

[Chrysania]

I love your tone. You speak as though I care even a small bit about that forgotten disaster.

I also love how you claim that a lack of content is, within itself, a plethora of content. (And you say I'm the stupid one.)

GW2 was a game designed around the hope that people would enjoy doing nothing but running around in the world doing absolutely nothing. That's why it was a flop.

WvWvW was nothing more than a one-sided collection of poor souls trying to find fun in that boring-as-hell game.

I also couldn't give a damn less what they plan on implementing into that disaster. It's trash now, and it'll be trash afterwards.

So you never found our started a successful wvwvw guild, eh. It was pretty awful alone, no question there.

But still, boring is an opinion. GW2 any sort of failure or disaster though?

You...clearly haven't researched how well Anet/NCSoft have been doing with that, have you. Do it. And then call WoW forgotten.

[Raxion]

So you never found our started a successful wvwvw guild, eh. It was pretty awful alone, no question there.

But still, boring is an opinion. GW2 any sort of failure or disaster though?

You...clearly haven't researched how well Anet/NCSoft have been doing with that, have you. Do it. And then call WoW forgotten.

I suppose I can't get off stating my personal opinion of the game as fact. I'd be no better than the OP at that point. To put it like this, GW2 had nothing for me.

WvWvW was fun in (maybe) 30-minute bursts. Maybe a bit more if your server was the dominant server for the week. To me it was nothing more than one big PvP tug-of-war match, but completely one-sided.

Running around getting map-completion felt more like a chore than fun. There was nothing to look forward to upon reaching any later points of the game. You could literally do the same thing at level 1, that the max-level people were doing. At no point in that game did I ever feel like the time I spent leveling had any form of payoff. If I walked into a level 20 zone at max-level, I was instantly level 20 again, and could get my ass handed to me by level 20 mobs...again. That feeling of perpetual vulnerability might have been thrilling to some, but it killed any form of accomplishment one would expect to get.

As for what to do in the game, I simply couldn't find it. After getting my gear, WvWvWing until I was sick of it, and clearing maps for a few days, I was just done with the game. It had nothing left for me, other than leveling another character (which I wasn't going to even bother with).

[Chrysania]

I suppose I can't get off stating my personal opinion of the game as fact. I'd be no better than the OP at that point. To put it like this, GW2 had nothing for me.

WvWvW was fun in (maybe) 30-minute bursts. Maybe a bit more if your server was the dominant server for the week. To me it was nothing more than one big PvP tug-of-war match, but completely one-sided.

Running around getting map-completion felt more like a chore than fun.

I had the good fortune of finding some great people to wvwvw with, and it absolutely made it fun, which is absolutely my own mileage. The main point was that there's quite a lot to do, and was from the start. It just want the usual treadmill stuff we've all long elected an endgame to...have to be? I dunno on that.

The bolded part there though...I agree. But there's a while lot of that sort of thing rampant in mmo's. I do not think we should just accept it, cause laundry lists of chores /= a good game. ARR here, well...crafting and gathering are fine, I think, at least in their mechanics. My thing? Not really so much.

I'm going to hope that 2.1 shows some reel effort to make this a better game, not just for me, but for anyone that doesn't think its cool to run out of things to do and have to farm xp in boring ways to level a battle class. Or endure an endgame that's just damn boring on to of being tedious.

That's my chief gripe; mediocrity does not have to be a staple of every mmo. It shouldn't be tolerated, and I, for one, won't support it. Will you?