FFXIV Bitter Sweet

[MistressAthena]

-gives CPR to the thread- live!

[sasakusaku]

Wait, what end game?

Grind CM/Prae and have full DL in a week or so? Meh. These are so easy, I did a few runs wearing a summer bikini set.

Run AK to get a few drops/philo tokens and enough times to cap mythos? Wait until next reset and repeat? Excuse me whilst I fall asleep....zzzzz....snort.

Do 3x primals which take less than 10 mins per? All you need is either the relic item and or enough times to get a weapon, in some cases that takes like only a run or two.

Run coil? Requires a well balance team of well geared/skilled players, usually a FC and out of reach of most players. Crystal Keep is the stepping stone to get people up to par to run coil and won't be coming for months. By that time it might be very well not worth running for most elite FCs because they will already be decked in the best gear from Coil. Good planning there, already nulling content before it's released. /2thumbszup

Level alts? I severely doubt most people enjoy fate grinding, I certainly don't. Yet that is the only real way to level past the first job when quests dry up like water in the desert.

Do levels/guildhests etc? What's the point? To make chump change? Better just to run AK, looting 1-3 chests for the allgan coins gives more reward than 16x leves!

Level crafting? No thank you, there is only one game I have played where crafting was awesome and that was pre-cu swg. This crafting incarnation is nothing like that so that is a pass. Besides, competing with botters and rmt abusers is a pointless battle not worth doing + it often results in getting banned for 'doing to well'.

If this game's focus is entirely 'end game' based then you could have fooled me.

[Arcturius]

Don't take me as a hater for this. I understand your points. Especially with economy materia and that whole section. That I 100% agree with. Its the battle system I don't. Its the balancing I feel you missed your mark. During leveling I never felt a class was more op than me or weaker. The only thing that makes the difference if they did more dps or less than me was the gear they had. The whole level syncing shows that there is great balance and also how the potency works. All classes were able to what they were made to do at the same level as other classes. I feel the balancing is great. Sure the skill usage is kind of meh because 123 123 123 and so on. But in coil you are not able to just do that. There is too much going on. Some say the difficulty spikes at 50. It really doesn't. Dungeons are getting harder every one you get into that leads to 50.Only ones that say it spikes are those who neglect to learn and fate grind. And those players can only blame themselves not squenix. They give dungeons that are fun and challenging and show off a lot of good mechanics. The only spike is coil and that is because we were supposed to go through crystal tower first. That on the other hand is squenix's fault. Also they said this game will be accessible by all and coil is obviously showing that it is not.(for now) so when he says its supposed to be a tutorial leveling up take it with a grain of salt. Which leads me to my last point where I am not sure where you would stand on it. The whole focusing on endgame. Lets be honest it is waaay easier to balance classes when they are all on the same level. Its been showed by nearly all MMOs. But that's not the point. The point is they SAY they are focusing on endgame but I'm not sure how that's going for them. They have 2 dungeons for 50 and a ton for all levels before that. They have 1 raid at the end. There just isn't much endgame. Yet there are a billion classes to level(8 cough) and crafting classes(no idea how many lol) so they currently do in fact have more content for early levels. And honestly it wasn't a bum rush for me the first time. It was fun and super awesome for me to enjoy. And now that I have a max level I don't want it to take as long with secondary classes since I already experienced the main game.(why do tutorial twice?) people that don't know how to play their characters is because of squenix assuming we had an intelligence to learn fast like we say we do. We get mad at them for sending us ff mystic quest(loved it by the way) because it insulted or intelligence to learn a game. Then they give us a easy to learn MMO and give us a properly lengthed tutorial and then slowly gets harder and people get mad cause they can't learn. That confuses me. The grind at the end is ok. Took me a week to do. Now I am having the time of my life in coil. This is all I gethered in my experience. Came in this game with minimal knowledge on how to tank. Paid attention and was ready by level 15 for sastasha and learned my way up. Never fell behind. This is all for your points for difficulty battle system and balance between levels. Rest of your points I agree with. I am not attacking you so please don't feel that way.

Sooo honestly this game has a severe lack of content overall but I love it so I will support it and see how it grows.

Seeing a lot of hate on loot grinds yet we all seem to like level grinding. Guess this is where the whole personal preference come in. I guess I would rather constantly change how I look than every once in a while have one more number added to my level.

OP, you said all gear does is open a new dungeon to grind. But all leveling does will open a new map to grind. Whether you like to level on mobs and bosses in a cool looking dungeon or just endless mobs on a map this is just another case of personal preference. No matter how the game chooses to level us someone will not like it.

[Ignaetious]

Yeah I gotta say for the most part I feel the same way about the game.

I think that the game lacks flavor and variety, at the moment. I think that they need to add in some way of diversifying classes aside from cross class abilities. Sure most choices in these games are somewhat superficial, but they are needed to make you feel more invested in the game.

There aren't any interesting items, all generic stats, which is your only drive really. I don't know about anyone else, but I miss the days where that I wanted to go find an item by camping, or getting it in a dungeon, quest or whatever. Not because the item increased some extraneous stat by a couple more points really, but because it does something cool. Not necessarily comparing the game to its predecessors, but you saw this in FFXI a little, among other games, even wow. I have very little drive to hunt items simply for the look of them, or to get some useless mini pet.

Also not a huge fan of the token driven endgame, never really liked this stuff, while I have not reached that point in this game, it is nothing I haven't seen a dozen times before. Also one thing that really bothers me is the fact that the game is ridiculously easy, and when I say that I mean the solo content. The dungeons are hard, but I'm not always in dungeons. While I do enjoy them, I don't always feel like dealing with other people either, I would like some entertaining solo content, that actually requires some thought, and not just at level the level cap, maybe treasure hunting will fix this, whatever it is.

I like the game. I know nobody even cares about my opinion. I am only posting this in the off chance that maybe some developer might read it and maybe commit it to thought. I just think it is a shame that the game turned out how it did, it was looking like they were going in the right direction in 1.0. I would like to see it turn into a deep and thought provoking game, because I love final fantasy.

[Ashthra]

Well, look on the bright side: at least the game is considered finished, now.

FFXIV 1.0 may have had neat ideas, but they were never added or never added correctly. Anyone on here defending the virtues of the first iteration either didn't play it for very long, or played it for so long that they evangelized its supposed greatness to justify the time wasted on it. 1.0 was a bad game. It was an alpha product, at best, that had a horrible engine, a terribly designed world (four super massive zones that were all copy-pasted barren garbage with random mobs of random level strewn around), and class system that was so 'limitless' that it wound up homogenizing all of the classes into the same handful of mandatory abilities to do anything, and then spamming your strongest ability/heal with the AoE toggle on in Coerthas. You're welcome to mourn what the game could have been, but let's face it: the only thing truly memorable about FFXIV 1.0 was how completely it failed on every possible front. 2.0 is much better, but still manages to be somewhat forgettable.

Regarding the lion's share of the OP, the whole "It's too easy QQ" thing is symptomatic of the entire gaming genre, now. However, I wish people would stop equating things like "solo friendly" to meaning "easymode", or things like, "I don't have five hours to spending looking for a PT in the Dunes to kill lizards until some idiot wipes us by pulling an IT++ Goblin Mugger" as, "I'm a lazy casual and I want everything NOW NOW NOW". I work 40-50 hours a week. I require meaningful progression in whatever hobby or downtime activity I can fit in, or else it's not worth my limited time. Having said that, I also require that my meaningful progression actually feel meaningful, and not simply spamming 2-3 buttons until something dies, repeated 50 times. As much as it would cause people to rage, seeing something similar to the Weapon Skill > Magic Burst system would make grouping, at least, far more dynamic and in depth than simply, "Move out of the red lines."

In short? I agree and disagree. FFXIV 1.0 was a train wreck, and FFXI was a ball-busting laborious grindfest that deserves to stay in the past for many of its outdated concepts. However, FFXIV 2.0 seems...too safe. To survive into today's MMO market, it needs to do something truly different to make its mark. As of yet, I don't think it's accomplished that.

[LoLo]

I agree with most of your points and all I could do is nod. I see a trend going that old FFXIV players will agree with you while newer people who joined in late 2013 will feel differently. If only the newer people could have tried 1.0 and saw how big the areas where and how completing something in the game felted more accomplished.

[BlackHaloJT]

"Bitter Sweet" I couldn't agree more in how I feel. For me; someone that enjoyed logging on in 1.0 to now struggling just to log on–– these posts sums it up pretty much. I don't have to be completed with main story line to realize the direction this game is going in. It is new and a lot more glamorous? Yes but to me it just feels like a wham bam zerg fest, button smash skill rotations, do the same thing over and over (and I have even got to the last part yet which would be dungeons.) Can they make the game better? I don't know at this point. As bad a 1.0 launch started then finished in 1.23 was tons more attractive. I am not ripping on other games either. Just seemed version 1 community minus a some bad apples had some unity, maybe because we felt survivors of the game itself when everyone else ditched out. Now version 2 is just over populated, over run by mindless, negative, elite, trash talking players.

[BlackHaloJT]

Im not going to compare "other" games I want to compare what we left off with in 1.23. All of the same complaints that were brought up in version 1 beginning to end still exist in version 2. You would think that all these things we wanted in version 1 after 2 years plus wait for the remake of ARR they would of fixed. Not the case in fact if you look at the forums people are still ranting about the same things. RMTs, rushing to 50, spamming the same dungeons, primal drop rates, and my favorite speed runs. Only difference now is the markets are flooded with junk with no real price medians. Crafting? what for unless its to level. 50 lvl dungeons are spammed for tomes versus AV and CC for .01% Darklight drops, and as the main topic stated if you don't have such and such gear for such and such instance then your not good enough.

Yoshi Interview taken from Gamebeat-
http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/17/th...ogo-interview/

Yoshida: Because I wasn’t on the team when that decision was made, I’m going to guess why, from what I’ve heard. What I believe is that, back then, they probably thought that a lot of the Final Fantasy XI users would move to Final Fantasy XIV when it was released. But because what they were making was a new game in Final Fantasy XIV, they didn’t want to make them exactly the same. Then it would just be Final Fantasy XI-2, and they didn’t want to make a Final Fantasy XI-2. But they wanted to make it easier for those people who had been playing Final Fantasy XI for such a long time to take a step into this new world by creating things that were similar, but different and unique to the Final Fantasy XIV world. Again, that’s just my guess.
But then again, that lets us see one of the biggest things that was wrong with the original release of Final Fantasy XIV. If they wanted to make it—they should have taken it and made it into Final Fantasy XI-2. Take Final Fantasy XI and make a sequel with new types of systems and new graphics, but build it off of that foundation. Instead of doing that, they decided they wanted to do something new, but still use some of the things from XI. Again, instead of taking one thing and taking it to the next level, they just kept everything kind of in the middle. Nothing was exceptional. That’s why you get this quagmire that was the original release of Final Fantasy XIV. There were a lot of great things that came out of XI, a lot of revolutionary things, like the level sync system. But the fact is, when they made the original Final Fantasy XIV, they made it with a server system that wouldn’t allow level sync. You have this great system you developed. Why not have your new game also use that?

If I wanted to destroy everything that was in the original XIV, I wouldn’t have taken on the position of rebuilding XIV. I would have gone on to Final Fantasy XVI and made that instead. The fact that I took up XIV is because I realized that, again, even though it had the rocky launch, there were still a lot of people out there who loved the game. You had this new generation of players who didn’t play XI and started their MMO experience with Final Fantasy XIV. For them, they don’t know about Tarutaru. They don’t know about Mithra. For them, they know about the Lalafell and the Mi’qote. To take that and destroy that would be destroying those people’s image of what they got into the game for. There’s tens of thousands of people that, for them, that was the first thing. As a hardcore MMO player myself, I know how important characters are to player. They’re your alter egos. Going in and destroying that and starting over with something absolutely new would crush those people. So keeping that was one of the things I decided we were going to do when we set out to rebuild XIV. Keeping those basic things that people had become used to with Final Fantasy XIV.

So in summary he contradicted everything just said in this interview and totally destroyed this game by pretty much copy and pasting "other" games (we know who those are) He talks about being a hardcore player himself but it sure doesn't show it in V2 everything is dumbed down. No one said we wanted a FFIX-2. Was FFXI it a good game sure, I truly believe most of the player base that played Version 1.0 also played FFXI at some point in time. So yes they tried something different and yes it sucked in the beginning but gradually through a painful process formed into something called 1.23 which was a foundation to build on. Instead they destroyed everything about it and created this crap called V2- A Reck Reborn.

[BlackHaloJT]

I've heard it so many times before "well you have to wait until the next version update to judge" The problem is that instead of sticking to what they had and building upon that in version 1 they catered, copied and pasted from lackluster "other" games.

When I watched that video when meteor hit and the lights went out gave me shivers in my spine. I wanted that Final Fantasy feeling to be forever. Now I'm doing the story line and looking around and thinking okay where is the depth. Do I really have to deliver tea to some guards, or talk to a npc when he is right next to or across from the original quest npc. If it wasn't for the flashbacks of the calamity I wouldn't recognize this is a realm reborn.

[Inosaska]

I wanted a Summoner but instead got a Warlock. I know most of you will say but your post is to small to mean anything! Well I don't really care what others think because its the truth.