Make FFXIV more like FFXI and less like WoW

[Doo]

Still though, at both of their peaks, FFXIV has had 5 times more subscriptions than FFXI (300,000 vs 1.5M) despite being on one-less platform (PC, Xbox 360, PS2 vs PC, PS3) and one of them having 10 years and multiple expansions to gain a sub base. How can anyone possibly argue the changes are bad?

Are you sure those numbers are accurate and most mmos these days start with over a mil sub, it's when they go f2p that's the issue. You make a game where everything is easily achieved and simple, players will end up leaving for the next hyped mmo.

[Gideon]

Are you sure those numbers are accurate and most mmos these days start with over a mil sub, it's when they go f2p that's the issue.

These are the numbers I got from Square press-releases. Eh, I dunno if most MMOs start with a mil, but maybe. Regardless WoW is the same age as FFXI and has sustained 7-12M throughout its lifetime.

[LordSaviour]

These are the numbers I got from Square press-releases. Eh, I dunno if most MMOs start with a mil, but maybe. Regardless WoW is the same age as FFXI and has sustained 7-12M throughout its lifetime.

WoW had a crazy ad campaign which helped stimulate its subs.

SE's advertisement budget must be slim to none. Rarely see any commercials for any of its games.

[Doo]

These are the numbers I got from Square press-releases. Eh, I dunno if most MMOs start with a mil, but maybe. Regardless WoW is the same age as FFXI and has sustained 7-12M throughout its lifetime.

I thought someone said 1.5mil was the amount that purchased the game, not subs but I don't know for sure. You have to look at Blizzard like it's a different animal. They do what they do extremely well where most have failed.

[Gideon]

You have to look at Blizzard like it's a different animal. They do what they do extremely well where most have failed.

I'm not comparing Blizz to Square, sorry. I only brought up the subs for WoW to illustrate there was a market for a good game, it's fair to say WoW has expanded whatever market did exist. But even Everquest (which predates WoW/FFXI by 7 years and much of both was "copy/pasted" from), had 500k subscriptions.

When you look at the numbers, those that want another FFXI game are in a vast minority and seem to feel entitled to it (since its from the same company and has FF in the title). Ignoring the fact that almost every FF game has been completely different (and just borrowed from previous iterations of FF and other RPGs [dragonquest]). It's a piss poor argument that falls short whenever you quantify the differences in the games and how they have contributed to the success or failure of either.

[LiadansWhisper]

doesnt look like you were watching live letters and Producer letters before ARR were released, on the Gamescom in German 2 years ago ?! he said he went to the Blizzard section there to talk with their DEV Team, he also got a limited D3 Edition from them with signs from some Producers. He also mentioned in a letter that he want follow the footsteps of WoW.

I was responding specifically to the suggestion that somehow the Devs were sitting around talking about how they had to avoid the "shame" of using elements from other games. It was an incredibly insulting and demeaning statement for someone with no damn idea what is actually going on behind the scenes to say.

I played XI and WoW when XIV 1.23 went down. And your arguments about 6 dailys and stuff just made me laugh hard. Yoshi mentioned that we will get even more dailys with every update.

He's said we'll get more daily quests. BUt he has not said we'll get more daily allowances. Right now, I have twice as many dailies I can take as I have allowances. There's no reason to believe that they'll ever overwhelm us with dailies, considering that Yoshi also said that that's the last thing they want to do. It was a huge mistake WoW made that cost them a lot of players.

- Duty Finder / Raid Finder - first time when i saw this it was on WoW

Yup, WoW was innovative with this. Does that mean that SWTOR And Rift and Neverwinter and ESO and, well, basically every other MMO since are WoW clones for using this?

- Philosophy Points (uncapped/week) and Mythology Points (Capped/Week) - WoW?

Actually...this system has undergone a number of changes. In its original incarnation it was badges (just one type) that didn't really have a weekly cap - it was just that you could only earn them in certain dungeons and those dungeons were locked on a per-day schedule, and some dungeons were so hard you just were never going to do them anyway unless you were a super he-man raider in full BT gear. In Wrath of the Lich King, it was still just badges. I'm trying to remember if there were Valor badges. I think there were, but they came in at the tail end of the expansion. Rift dropped right around the time Cataclysm dropped, and it came fully made with two lines of badge rewards, as did SWTOR. So I guess FFXIV, SWTOR, and Rift are all WoW clones! Cuz of badge gear.

- Weekly Raid ID's

So does every other large MMO that has raiding. Are they all WoW-clones, too?

- Skill Smashing Battlesystem

I have no idea what this is, tbh.

- Dailys (more are coming soon, please looking forword to it)

Well, FFXIV came with Levequests in 1.0, which are basically just dailies renamed - you could only get up to 6 a day, after all, which isn't any different from having limited (yet repeatable) quests in any other game. Rift and SWTOR also have dailies. ESO shows every indication of putting dailies in at some point.

- Encounters with Red Circles/Lines of Death

Actaully, no. The vast majority of encounters in WoW do not feature the type of "telegraphed ground damage" that you see in this game. A good example of this is Sha of Fear. During the encounter, randomly-selected groups of people are teleported to various platforms and have to dodge attacks from the mob they're trying to kill in the middle (they are AoE attacks in a cone formation). There is no visual telegraph of where those attacks will land - you have to memorize the pattern that occurs on each platform. If you have issues with being able to visualize the pattern, you're kind of screwed (and as a result, someone actually made an addon to give players visual cues as to where the attacks will probably happen next - but it's still nowhere near the ease of attacks in FFXIV).

Another example is the Malkorok encounter in Siege of Orgrimmar. He periodically smashes the ground in a cone in random spots around the room. He does telegraph the initial smash. However, after he has done three smashes, he then goes back and does a "Breath of Y'saarj" attack in the spots he had previously smashed. There is no telegraph for this attack. You have to a) know when he will do the attack and b) remember where the previous smashes were. All this while dodging randomly-spawning orbs that can kill you and adds that slow you (and prevent you from getting out of the breath/smash).

Telegraphed attacks are actually rare in WoW, and when they do appear, it's very difficult to see them (the Devs really like to make the visual cues match the floor and wall colors). If WoW telegraphed attacks the way FFXIV does, I'd probably never die on any encounter.

- Rage Timers on certain Encounters
- Item Level System
- Basic Stats nothing Complex - max. ACC for Coil and Push your Main Stat

These are also hallmarks of Rift and SWTOR. I guess those games are also "WoW Clones." Or maybe FFXIV is a Rift/SWTOR Clone. No idea!

- Materia System = Jewelery System [well not 100% carbon Copy since you cant put Materia into Boss Drops at the momentbut i am sure it will follow with the next Level cap]

Well, no. They don't work the same at all. And, I mean, Materia has been a part of FF for as long as I can remember. Sure, gems in WoW give you stats similar to Materia. But they are created by Jewelcrafters from raw ore. You can swap your gems out as much as you want - you don't have to go to an NPC and lose all of the materia in your item like you do in this game. You don't have to destroy gear to get gems. And even how the gems interact with your gear is different. You also cannot "overmeld" in WoW.

- Gear Progression Useless since you will replace the whole Gear with a new Content update (every half year)

I'm fairly certain the "gear grind" has been a "thing" since Everquest.

- Quest [!] and markers where u have to go.
- Hairdresser

Because no other MMOs have this, right? Like, Rift, SWTOR, even Everquest has flipping quest markers. They may look different, but they're there. And it's been a long time since a top-MMO was willing to release without a barber shop - players love that sort of thing.

- Vanity Slots @ 2.2 [please looking forword to it]

Vanity Slots actually came from Rift, not WoW. WoW didn't even introduce Transmogrification (which is completely different from Vanity Slots, btw, in how it works) until the middle/tail end of Cataclysm. Rift had it at launch.

- TonZ of Mounts and Minions (more will follow)
- Achievment System/Rewards

Are you saying you don't want these? Although there aren't "tons" of mounts in this game. Pfft. Maybe there will be eventually.

- Some Minion and Mounts can be obtained via. rewards by subbing the game instead of a WoW-Cash Shop Model

Actually, in WoW the vast majority of pets and even mounts are obtained via in-game methods - you either capture them, earn them through achievements, purchase them outright, or get them as dungeon drops. There's only a very few that you can buy from the Blizz store.

Well all in All like i posted on Page 37, this game has 90% of WoW, the DEV Team just enhanced some things or changed it or added something that it doesnt look like WoW with better Graphics.

It really isn't, but like I said, you and people like you have an agenda. You want to be able to say, "omg, FFXIV is a WoW-clone when it SHOULD be an FFXI-Clone, because smashing my face against a wall of NOPE is so much better!" So I mean, I have ot take whatever you are saying with a grain of salt.

PS.: I am not offense to anyone of the People they say its not, you can go into every Little Detail and will find something what is different to WoW no doubt, but u cant deny that the Basic Model is from WoW and nothing more and SE just added too much from the WoW Basics instead of adding their own Ideas or experience they made with XI.

See above.

Materia works exactly like jewelry in WoW. Armor has a slot, you put stats on it... except there you would have certain colors and filling those colors, you'd get even more bonuses.

It doesn't. Primarily because it is produced in a completely different manner. Materia in this game works, in my opinion, a bit closer to the SWTOR model. However, SWTOR added a bit of depth there because you actually have to combine a few things to create the mod you're placing into the item (and mods sometimes take the place of actual base stats).

While I have no dog in this ongoing mess. A minor quibble, WoW added the LFG tool to the game in "Burning Crusade" and it went fully cross server in "Wrath of the Lich King" in 2009... RIFT would not be released for another 2 years in. 2011

The LFG that was in WoW in Burning Crusade was much more akin to Party Finder than Duty Finder. You didn't queue or anything - you had to manually search. Random Dungeon Finder didn't happen until mid-to-late Wrath of the Lich King, and it was pretty much identicle to Duty Finder now in that you would be placed into dungeons with people cross-server and that there was basically nothing in the way of player controls on bad behavior beyond party kick (though I can't remember if you were even able to do that at the start). I do remember the the ability to blacklist rude people in your group, and report them if they were cross server, only came much later.

[LiadansWhisper]

Are you sure those numbers are accurate and most mmos these days start with over a mil sub, it's when they go f2p that's the issue. You make a game where everything is easily achieved and simple, players will end up leaving for the next hyped mmo.

Considering the amount of complaining and carrying-on that I see on this forum on a daily basis about Coil not being in the Party Finder, or, "It's too hard to make my own group, SE stop letting people use a different comp that doesn't favor me!," I have this feeling that it's not quite as easy as you seem to believe it is.

[MageBlack]

EDITED**

Well... since I seem to be out of my daily posts... I will answer a few directed at me here then call it.

To Gideon and Magelback: You two were trying to justify the WoW-like design of Final Fantasy 14 by saying they did it because they did not want to compete with themselves for subscriptions. The problem with this theory is that it is and already has damaged Final Fantasy 11. It's not a red herring.... or a strawman. Though it was one you both were trying to make to defend the logic of making Final Fantasy 14 more like WoW.

It's basically like Lord Savior said. To think that they wouldn't compete with another, seeing as they are both Final Fantasy games is just absurd. They are, will, and have.

Ok, please then keep things fair and look at both sides of your argument. Since you are saying that its is way more of a WoW clone, Can you tell me how many subs WoW "hemorrhaged" when FFXIV was released?

To address your strawman, You feel that FFXIV is already stealing subs from FFXI and therefore you wish to totally kill off FFXI by making this game even more like is predecessor? I can tell you why I think so many subs went away from FFXI (also, please tell me exactly how you know ALL those subs went directly because of FFXIV?) Players that went to FFXIV from FFXI went in with an expectation based on a previous experience. They were hoping for a similar experience to what they were already playing. Three things contributed to this way of thinking, 1) Very Similar art style and character models 2) Its a final fantasy title 3) its an MMO

Now if you have experience with previous Final Fantasy titles you will know that, while they have some similarities, numbered installment have been different from the one before it in many ways. FFXIV keep with that tradition, correct? ok, so with the above three points in mind, I can see why MMO players (the vast majority of complainers about FFXIV's design, not as much from the FF players.) who played FFXI and transitioned to FFXIV were surprised and upset at the direction it took.

I'm not denying that many players of FFXI may have transitioned from FFXIV, what I am saying is that it would have been even more damaging to the existing player base of FFXI if FFXIV was more like FFXI. Nobody seems to want to count how many people left FFVII for FFXIII (or the irrelevance of that question) yet here we are talking about FFXI to FFXIV. And we are also not talking about how many people left Guild Wars 2 for FFXIV either. This is what i meant by special pleading.

As for the Strawman part it was in regards to "Defending making FFXIV more like WoW" and "they are already damaging FFXI" is the two are not necessarily connected in the way you are presenting them. Using the excuse that FFXIV is already stealing subs from FFXI therefore we should put more features of FFXI into FFXIV is a strawman when you fail to actually account for where all those subs went, then compare those sub steals for comparable nature from the other game that is specifically mentioned in the OP, WoW. so please, before you continue to wave that around research both sides, come up with a ratio even of transferred subs, then use that as a reason to make FFXIV more like FFXI.

Until then, why not find a better ground to get the features you would like in the game? There are many more, better articulated reasons for getting NM's put in FFXIV for example. There was a great thread devoted to it long ago. Also, be clear on what you would like from FFXI not just the ambiguous "make it more like FFXI" That can mean many things to many different people.

So, ya. make a better argument was all I was trying to say. Like I said, it would take a long time to try and explain myself and I probably wouldnt even get my point across clearly enough for you to understand what I meant by what I said.

[OldGeezer]

- Cross-Class abilitys

This is what really sets FFXIV away from WoW. It got rid of the progression trees that are WoW's hallmark contribution to MMOs, which they borrowed from Diablo II. If you used a progression tree for class abilites like Rift and SWTOR did, you're copying WoW. Dailys and Party Finders are tools, but they aren't core elements to WoW. Does FFXIV borrow tools and elements from WoW? Absolutely, but it doesn't borrow the key elements that make WoW what it is. So while it's similar to WoW, it's not a clone.

The Armory System for DoW and DoM is fail in such a game since the Gear Progression and Lockouts and RNG doesnt allow you to Gear all the JOBS you want to Play with BiS before the next Content update will arrive. Some Boss Encounters in this game doesnt allow every class to join because u will always have the BiS (for a Party) DD's or Tanks or Healers and most People(especially Random ones) want the 90% Win success Party.

The armory system allows you to play every role in the game. That's its function. Raid lockouts are preventing you from maxing out all your roles at the same time. They're two different things. It's working as it was designed to work. You not being able to run Coil 24/7 is a different matter entirely.

[LiadansWhisper]

This is what really sets FFXIV away from WoW. It got rid of the progression trees that are WoW's hallmark contribution to MMOs, which they borrowed from Diablo II. If you used a progression tree for class abilites like Rift and SWTOR did, you're copying WoW. Dailys and Party Finders are tools, but they aren't core elements to WoW. Does FFXIV borrow tools and elements from WoW? Absolutely, but it doesn't borrow the key elements that make WoW what it is. So while it's similar to WoW, it's not a clone.

^^ So much this.

The armory system allows you to play every role in the game. That's its function. Raid lockouts are preventing you from maxing out all your roles at the same time. They're two different things. It's working as it was designed to work. You not being able to run Coil 24/7 is a different matter entirely.

You could also argue that the way lockouts work for Coil and CT are either a) artificial gating to make the content last longer or b) another example of SE's "Parenting" of the playerbase. i.e. Preventing us from burning ourselves out by not allowing us to do it in the first place. The latter rather fits with some of their other design decisions.