Square Enix blew it for some of us, but I'm still here...

[Madsamurai]

After unlocking flying, you will never visit the zone again. NEVER. Not for leve quests, not for gathering, not for treasure maps, hunts, fate grinding, future beast tribe content, future 3.X quests, and certainly not for the dozen classes you haven't been initially leveling as. In fact, the moment you unlock flying, the data for the zone itself is DELETED from your hard drive, because it serves no further use.

Oh God. I lol'ed hard at this. Thank you.

[Greeky84]

Complain because you have to put some effort in? FFxiv is not the game for you. Effort = reward.

[Higashikata]

God forbid people need to do content to access other content!

What was SE thinking!?

[Kiyyto]

Wow, I hear you.... Could not disagree more though.
I absolutely love what they've done.

I mean, it is far beyond my wildest expectations. I probably would have quit FFXIV because I was just kinda sick of it, but I am completely reinvested now.

Heavensward is INCREDIBLE!

[Shurrikhan]

Find the moogles.

How many of these quests were there... Five or so? o.o

To OP:
3) I didn't have an issue with the entry to Ishgard at all, and kind of liked the bits with the two (or, three) sons, though I can see why you might have found other points in the MSQs a bit underwhelming, especially their (as in (4)) fetch-quest aspects.

1) The only good alternative I could really think of would of would take a lot of programming, sadly, and may not even be possible, but, just to throw my two cents out there for now:
Keep the aether currents, but make them a bit more like actual currents; e.g. you can ride them and only them at first. The nodes themselves would be (though I'm loathe to use this reference) the jumping ledges from Assassin's Creed), typically signalling the end of and allowing a quick exit from some particular area - allowing a limited form of flight until you land, or between a combination of your first landing, flight time, and/or distance traveled. Flight speed along currents improves as you unlock more, and flight speed is still a bit faster along currents than generally once you have access to unlimited flight. In this way, you fully experience the zone, but still get some of the questing-facilitation of flight before you've nearly run out of quests.

Complain because you have to put some effort in? FFxiv is not the game for you. Effort = reward.

Also not sure why this is such a common reaction after reading something that is clearly pointing not at the issue of effort, but of contradiction (getting flight mostly only after you can use it) and tedium (I doubt the OP would complain about tougher but more interesting quests)...

[Gallus]

I completely disagree TC. Heavensward maps are gorgeous, they are genuinely beautiful. If you could fly from the beginning, trust me you wouldn't value as much the ability to fly in those maps, it's very reasonable that they expect you to at least explore them before you can get to fly around them...and no, once you can fly around them it's not useless because there's no possible living way you can gather/hunt in those maps relatively easy just by walking from one place to another. I'm in complete love with HW so far. My only "concern" is the lack of accuracy in healing gear xD, but meh.

[Eclair_Xysha]

What... MMO... Would not have you run around back and forth? Grind your time away? Make you do errands? Make a fool out your protagonist?

If you seriously don't like it, just find other games to play.

FPS games? Call of Duty is nice. You can go straight to multiplayer and not have to worry about unlocking anything and everything. So no errands since you don't have to necessarily go straight to story. No grinding unless you want to show off your name tag or prestige. Oh but if you die a lot, you do have to run back and forth between spawns and you will definitely make a fool out of yourself with your KDR.

[slml320]

one note we seem to be missing is this was a decent launch no 3102 error no constant maintenance to fix shit over and over ..

yes i know and feel sorry for the huge pop data centres that couldn't get into due to shear massive amounts of ppl trying to log in.. i do hope they secure a fix for that and quickly!!

but all in all the EA was good and relatively trouble free… I'm usually not one for praise for SE nor do i white knight i usually complain
but
GOOD JOB SE!!

[Onikimaru]

Someone else, actually. I can't say who, but I'll say this: his name starts with "H".

And as for the FATEs, I can say to some degree that most FATEs in that region have gone ignored (as far as I saw), because people were still doing their MSQs. And speaking of MSQs.... the guy I was talking about plays a part in that.



I think he believes there's ought else to "get used to". We're apparently these big, bad, primp ass champions, so everything should deal with epic level tiers of kickass. Or so his attitude screams to me.

Oh yeah i met him

[h0tNstilettos]

Actually, they put flying back in. It's going to be tied to a few factions and achievements, but flying is back in.

Sorry.

Okay and? I already know that as FFXIV forced their hand on it due to many WoW players complaining and jumping ship to FFXIV due to flying. That doesn't change the reason they removed flying in the first place. I said nothing about what they want to do now. I mentioned what they did then. So your comment, followed by the odd "Sorry." at the end made no sense. My comment still stands. That is why they removed flying. When I heard them mention putting it back in they said they'd be handling it differently this time, which I assume would be to avoid why they removed it in the first place.