Quote Originally Posted by vasdeferens View Post
With such a great resource like FFXI to draw ideas from I hate seeing so many more similarities to Warcraft
I sternly disagree that FFXI was a great resource of anything but a good example of what not to do.

It was a congregation of ideas that, while seeming good on paper, were poorly implemented and usually impossible to implement correctly. Those that stuck were actually improved upon by later games anyways and actually gets accused of being more 'wow like' when seen in other games.

I can disseminate critical game crippling flaws from every age and expansion of FFXI, without even citing it's overarching problems that, instead of addressing, they decided to compound upon.

In short, the game was cripplingly slow, unrelentingly punishing in all the wrong ways and continually compounded upon problems that it chose to ignore until it was way too late to fix the stigmas they imposed. There's a reason why the game did not break a million subscriptions while even games nowadays that are considered failures hold onto double or more.

We are already triple FFXI's once stable subscription numbers with all indications that we will continue to climb. Let's not alienate the base we've already established by making changes back to an Era in which MMOs were heavily niche minority. We have what was good out of FFXI - a gripping story, a world worth enthralling in, and a set of diverse races near identical to the game before. There are many other Final fantasy titles we can take inspiration from, and many other successful mechanics from other, non Final Fantasy MMOs that we can have our own spin and improvements upon. Harking back to FFXI continually will severely limit the scope and draw of this game.