Game content is full of mistakes...much worse than FFXIV 1.23

[Duelle]

People are very quick to admonish 1.0 because it failed, but people rarely address the actual reasons behind WHY it failed. A lot of the features in the old version were frankly superior to what we ended up with in ARR but were removed to simplify the gameplay experience. The OP isn't wrong when he says that a lot of the complexity from the original has been lost. Classic case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

1.0 suffered from an unrefined battle system. I'll still posit that if you ever want to see what 1.0's battle system could have been, all you have to do is look at The Secret World.

As far as 1.23, it wasn't a massive improvement. Nevermind the fact that anything after 1.18 was basically hold-over content. Stuff that we were repeatedly told was to keep people busy and grinding away while they remade the game. Some made the mistake of developing attachment to hold-over content, which is no different from deciding the redshirt of the day is your favorite character - a waste of emotion if nothing else.

Mobs weren't just annoying distractions, they were genuine threats on the field. I can't even remember the last time I died to an enemy outside of a dungeon or Fate in ARR, but it used to happen a whole lot more back then.

You mean when there were lv90 mobs in places meant to keep people from exploring too far out and thus prevent their discovering how incomplete FFXIV was at the time? That's not a positive to the game's design, unless you enjoy watching your character get killed for some reason.

Remember elements? Fire, ice and so forth? They used to mean something too! Now it's just "spam fire, cast blizzard to regen, spam fire...". And what about the other skills in our arsenal?

Sure, let's make black mages useless in anything that is attuned to fire. You know, their combat model's prime element for dealing damage. And I'm sure letting Thundercloud procs go to waste because using them on Ramuh deal 0 damage/heal him would go over very well.

Hit mob for X potency damage is all fine and dandy, but at the end of the day, there's very little to distinguish one DPS from another, just a handful of throwaway unique skills which aren't even that special in most instances.

And thus "let's be different for the sake of being different" makes its appearance. The idea is that DPS classes be comparable to one another to try to prevent groups and raids stacking a specific class. Excluding people and specific classes from content is a major no-no in modern design. We saw people exclude all sorts of jobs in FFXI. We saw WARs get excluded from tanking stuff past HM Garuda when the game launched. Why would we want to implement conditions that would allow similar examples of stupidity to happen?

[Orca]

Any "difficulty" 1.0 had was tied to the input lag and animation lock. Remove those and the fights would all be incredibly easy.

I'm sorry, this absolutely isn't true. :/ Whilst I'm not going to sit here and say anything was better or worse, the difficulty of many 1.0 versions was vastly higher than what we have in ARR, the largest difference being that ARR has faaaar more endgame scenarios whilst 1.0 had none until Ifrit and darkhold. I'd like to point out on 1.0's release week, people ran out in to the fields first day and were absolutely slaughtered left and right by dodos of all things, so much trial and error and you didn't know something was too strong for you until you were lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. I was a tank and always got the best gear for my level, id take a whole party of my LS with me and venture in to the open dungeons. Generic levelling mobs would hit me for 60% of my health every 2-3 seconds (god help me if something aggroed or broke sleep) and we needed so much support magic to get through that crap, we'd level for hours, tons of death and sometimes I didnt even get a single sword or shield level. This was with about 7 people too i believe.

The NM's were outrageously strong until they were patched later, I once had a battle against Phaia that took my party of three 27 minutes of frantic healing and defending, adapting to his behaviors, knowing our cooldowns and we were only 5-6 levels below him and very well geared, he would hit me for about 80% of my health per attack. It was quite a while before people could tackle higher NMs solo because levelling was slow for a long time. Some parts of the map were nearly inaccessible due to lv 99 enemies protecting them that couldn't be roflchoco'd past. Most generic roaming enemies had behaviors or quirks. Body parts needed to be broken off them to prevent special moves, they'd AoE if you stepped on them, follow you around, run if you took your weapon out or readied a special attack, enter a nearly impenetrable defensive mode until you cracked their shell. They hit like a train, took little damage and aggro'd like hell and you were damn lucky if you escaped a botched fight. if you looked away from the screen during a levequest or encounter, chances were you'd die, second wind was basically mandatory for every class. I would frequent across so many dead bodies asking for help on my travels but in ARR its usually because someone went afk in the wrong place. You couldn't sit there tapping 1,2,3 for 10 seconds whilst you watch tv until quite a few patches later when everyone caught on to how OP thaumaturge, stoneskin 2 and marauder were, and things got much easier in open world once Yoshida came in.

I'm not saying this is better but god damn it was harder and the lag was really only a huge problem once things like Ifrit came in to existence, believe it or not, stuff can be (and was) difficult outside of level cap. Everyone whined and whined that it was simply TOO hard, the forums were littered with constant complaints about this, the word 'easy' was never used until Yoshida took over. For the most part SE was like well, just deal with it cuz its not changing. I dont need to recount anything that happened after that as we all know, but it is what it is. 1.0, 1.23 and ARR were all incredibly different from eachother, but Tanaka's era was brutal compared to Yoshida's. A flawed tragedy for many reasons, but brutal none the less.

[Felis]

i like it how people mention only the good things about 1.23 and ignore all the bad things it had. The bad things that were unrepairable.

I'd like to point out on 1.0's release week, people ran out in to the fields first day and were absolutely slaughtered left and right by dodos of all things, so much trial and error and you didn't know something was too strong for you until you were lying in a crumpled heap on the floor.

That was because people couldn't see the level of the enemy. Only a color-code that was not even accurade.
Remove the enemy level display in the UI, put some lv 20 enemies into a level 10 area and you would have the same difficulty without changing anything else.

[Lynneth]

Yeah, I remember when there was a goobbue outside limsa that had the symbol for moderately difficult, or w/e it was, and we had a party of 15 and tried to kill it, and it 1 shot everyone...

[Fendred]

Duelle, the black mage wouldn't be designed around rotations if the developers were going for elemental resistances. The black mage would have several different kinds of elemental spells to use in place of fire when fighting something that is resistant or immune to it.

[DragonFlyy]

for MMOs, it's about meeting new friends,new adventures,help each others, good memories,
ARR has none of them


ARR is something like Mcdonalds, Beats headphones, but what's inside them are garbage/low quality stuff

The first part is your fault, not the games. I have made plenty of friends, even in instanced dungeons. It's called communication. I have added people to my friends list that were on my server and others we have "friended" on other media. Have even gotten some to transfer to my server. Outside of dungeons, I have made plenty of friends in my FC and LSes. It's not SEs fault that you don't try.

The second one, and most of what everyone in this thread is stating as fact, are just opinions. Some people like the game, some don't. What baffles me is the people who don't like the game, keep playing. Same thing on hundreds of other games. Go read the Diablo 3 forums. Almost every post is hate, and yet all of them still grind hours away playing. Somewhere in the last 10 or so years it seems fun isn't the reason to play a game and more people play because it's "popular".

[Naryoril]

Guildhest:
idk why they are there,what for?because no one wants to play them.

They are tutorials for party play and various mechanics you'll see in other places of the game, mostly boss fights. I know a lot of people where this is the first MMO they ever played, more than in any other MMO i have played since WoW. And for people new to the genre the guildhests are a real boon.

[Tupsi]

i like it how people mention only the good things about 1.23 and ignore all the bad things it had. The bad things that were unrepairable.

Kind of like how the people (most that likely never even played beyond 1.0) only mention the bad but none of the good, some of which were thrown out for no reason other than to mimic WoW (Yoshida's own words.)

[Hyrist]

Some people really do behave along very steriotypical lines. It makes it hard to view them as individuals so much as the opinions they may have, due to their over emphasis on their particular (and often narrow) viewpoint.

[Maero]

Just don't play this game if you find so many things wrong with it