FFXIV is becoming a grind fest with little enjoyment.

[Zojha]

Low Level:
No reason to get better gear. Dungeons restrict your abilities/gear score anyways.

High Level:
There is almost no reason to get better gear. Just wait 3 months for better/easier gear to come out.

And in the end, we're all gonna die anyway ._.'

[Terribad]

Snip

I don't understand why they do that, especially with how fast they kill of content. It's like you're never progressing. I didn't work "hard"(it's not hard here) to level and or get better gear just to go do a dungeon and then have all of that removed. Which is one of the reasons I don't even bother any more.

[Nalien]

if possible, do you want to elaborate on what the good systems in FFXI had? Many (like myself) have never played FFXI.

Ho boy, you've opened a can of worms now, I could write you several essays... I'll try to keep this short though;

Firstly, the major difference between XI and XIV was horizontal progression. Gear in XI was not replaced very often, there were far more stats (some of which have rightly been streamline downed here, we only have Accuracy, not Accuracy and Magic Accuracy, for example), most importantly enhancement stats, which would enhance specific abilities. I'm actually not a fan of this, because it resulted in combat in XI being based around switching gear mid combat to maximize specific abilities/spells, which I just find absurd. I'm much more a fan of how Final Fantasy IX handled such stats. There were also other stats, such as Enmity +/- (increase/decrease your hate gain), Regen (+HP/time), Refresh (+MP/time), which I do think could work quite nicely here. There were also negative stats, gear didn't always just make you stronger, which I think is an interesting idea which could separate Jobs somewhat by making them play and gear differently (something like Ninja being fast/critical but low Det, while Dragoon has high Det/critical), but I digress. The main point here is that horizontal progression was a thing in XI, gear, and more importantly the event the gear came from, had a much longer shelf life as a result. I think that is definitely something XIV should work on.

Next, lets talk about Mythics, since Anima weapons are the current popular topic. Mythic weapons were the second set of Relic weapons added to XI, and I think they're a pretty good example of how to do a Relic quest. It's worth noting that Mythics weren't even particularly good, certainly not if you were a mage (XI had a series of crafted elemental staffs at Lv51 IIRC, and they were basically the best mage weapons for a loooooooooooong time, the game was far from perfect...), but that doesn't really matter, what matters is the quest. Lets start with Treasure of Aht Urghan first, the expansion that added them, it introduced;
Assaults, which were somewhat similar to Guildhests, except endgame level content. IIRC there were 5 zones, each with 10 different Assaults to challenge You could do a certain amount per day, they rewarded a currency you could exchange for certain pieces of gear, and they were required for capping your Mercenary Rank (effectively the expansions Grand Company, but the quests to rank up were fairly amusing, rather than a mere formality like they are here).
Nyzul Isle, this was a special version of Assault, in which the aim was to reach Floor 100 of its namesake. You were limited on time, and you'd never go from 1 to 100 in one go, you needed to save progress and pick up where you left off. Floors were generally randomized, with different objectives and enemies. Floors 20/40/60/80/100 had the bosses, which would drop the gear from the event. Also had its own special currency (most things did in XI, but unlike here they dont clog up my inventory!).
Salvage, this was an odd event, in which you entered and were stripped of basically everything; Gear, stats, magic, skills. As you went through, you obtained items that could unlock them, but you had to prioritize who got what to a degree. Gear from here was a bit odd too, each set dropped 3 versions of fairly weak gear, you'd take those, along with some crafting materials, and an NPC would upgrade them to the proper set (fun tidbit, the Wootz Mail Dragoon has here is a HD copy of the Ares set from Salvage).
Einherjar, you know how we have an Odin FATE? XI had an Odin "Raid". Several rooms. Waves of mobs. Beat the boss, get a Valkyrie feather, all the feathers = fight Odin. Rewarded its own currency and crafting materials.
Zeni NMs, this I 50% loved, 50% hated. 50% of that hate is aimed directly at the stupid camera "minigame", which I wont dwell on, basically you turned pictures in for currency to buy pop items. Those pop items would spawn NMs. Simply put, you'd defeat one and get a seal indicating you had, which allowed you to buy a higher tier pop item (some required multiple seals, there is a nice tree diagram floating around somewhere), and so on till you got to Pandemonium Warden, but the less said about him the better.
Beast Tribes/Besieged, a bit differently than what we have here. In Treasures there where three, and they had armies. These armies would attack the city periodically, and we'd have a massive lag-fest of a world event to defend it. NPCs could get kidnapped, we could sneak into the enemy stronghold to save them. All open world, unless we failed to defend the city. Then they took the magic do-dad and there was a special instance to fight them and take it back, no real reward other than getting it back (which was well worth doing). Their leaders were open world NMs as well, that I guess would be somewhat similar to an S Rank here, except XI had a claiming system which mean only the party that claimed it gets credit. They had no real rewards though. Besieged was great though, if you could get past the lag, you got issued temporary items to boost stats and help you out, there was a rough objective (protect generals, etc.), it was good fun.

I think that's it... Onto the weapons;

Firstly, you needed to max out your Mercenary Rank. Clear every single Assault, the limit on entry the only real problem here. Then you needed a Key Item dropped from the 100th Floor of Nyzul, not so hard, as well as a specific weapon dropped from Nyzul (if you wanted to upgrade the Lance, you needed the Lance, this part is fairly stupid but I guess correlates nicely with our Atma farm in it's dumb RNGness...).
Next you needed to defeat the three NM Beast Tribe bosses. Then you needed to beat the four Salvage bosses. Then you needed to defeat Odin. For all these, all you needed was the Title from defeating them, if you already had it you could skip on by IIRC.
Then came the grind. 30,000 Alexandrite, which dropped in Salvage (at a horrible rate IIRC). 100,000 of Einherjars currency for a special item. 150,000 Nyzul Tokens for a special item. There were also special items obtained from clearing the final tier of each Assault. This was pretty ridiculous... I know those numbers probably mean nothing, since you have no context for how much you could farm those tokens, but... It was a nice variety of content to do, and given the lock outs it was fairly impossible to burn yourself out on them, like many might now be doing with Alexander/Beast Tribes/etc. I'm sure someone will point to this grind and say Mythics sucked because of it, but the thing to remember is grinds can be scaled, the main point I'm making here is the variety of content involved.
Finally, you had the "fun" bit. Before Pandemonium Warden, you needed to beat 3 Zeni NMs, well you needed a trophy dropped by all 3 of them for this stage. Basically, each of these stages was "Do the content we added a hell of a lot", but it was new content. It was varied content. Quite the contrast to what we have here... But that's not even the best bit...
The final part of the Mythic quest was a duel. You, alone and with your new weapon, against Balrahn (story significant NPC). Think of it like this, you know the Zodiak quest here? Remember when they got to the point and said "The Zodiak Braves weapons came to life after they slew a demon!"? That's what this was. Except, unlike this game, we got to slay the demon. Rather than going "Lets just craft the blood, you go grind old content for the materials!", XI let you go 1v1 in an awesome fight to finish your weapon. Something like that is what this game is really missing. Zodiak weapons ended on a whimper, I really hope they don't make the same mistake with Anima weapons...

Long post is long... I might edit more in later...

GAH, I forgot about _NMs. They were pretty great, BCNMs, KSNM, ISNM, ANNM (OK, ANNMs sucked). Basic unifying idea was, you had a currency (beastmen seals, kindred seals, imperial standing, allied notes), you traded that in for an item, that item let you enter a special instance. These were usually fairly well made and interesting, I'd liken them to Guildhests probably (but for endgame), though the rewards usually skewed which you'd go for. Can I dream of GCNMs? Am I allowed to do that Yoshida? Please? I have so much Coke... Let me spend Grand Company Seals on something fun... I would actually rather see the crafting materials dropped from Grand Companies entirely, and put in such content... It's just more entertaining... Certainly a more enjoyable method for obtaining Bombard Cores.

[Velox]

But XIV is a WoW clone.

And WoW is an Everquest clone...and Everquest is an Ultima clone...and Ultima is a Meridian clone...
Every MMO borrows elements form previous MMOs.

MMOs are like themeparks. They are all themed differently, they all have different roller coasters, carousels, bumper cars, arcades, Ferris wheels. Sure all these rides look and feel different, but at the end of the day every themepark has the exact same elements as other themeparks. Why do people visit more than one park then? Because the looks, feel, and theme alone make it worthwhile, even if all the individual elements boil down to exactly the same formula used.

MMOs are no different. They all share the exact same base elements, just with different coatings on the surface.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

And WoW is an Everquest clone...and Everquest is an Ultima clone...and Ultima is a Meridian clone...
Every MMO borrows elements form previous MMOs.

MMOs are like themeparks. They are all themed differently, they all have different roller coasters, carousels, bumper cars, arcades, Ferris wheels. Sure all these rides look and feel different, but at the end of the day every themepark has the exact same elements as other themeparks. Why do people visit more than one park then? Because the looks, feel, and theme alone make it worthwhile, even if all the individual elements boil down to exactly the same formula used.

MMOs are no different. They all share the exact same base elements, just with different coatings on the surface.

Not really. You will see things being taken away the deeper and deeper you get.

FFXIV has no exploration or hard open world content. Everquest when it began literally had no instances. It was just a dangerous open world with open world dungeons.

[Popotolord]

I mostly stayed because of the msq and side quests. In theory I would have kept playing up until HW. But the MSQ in between the ending of ARR and start of HW was so bland and boring that I couldn't even bother anymore. Plus, an RPG staple feature (character customization in terms of abilities/equipment/attributes) is completely bare bones in this game. I feel like there's nothing to look forward to. Nothing to plan for. And at the rate we're having updates I doubt I'll be subscribed again this year and possibly the next

[Nektulos-Tuor]

I mostly stayed because of the msq and side quests. In theory I would have kept playing up until HW. But the MSQ in between the ending of ARR and start of HW was so bland and boring that I couldn't even bother anymore. Plus, an RPG staple feature (character customization in terms of abilities/equipment/attributes) is completely bare bones in this game. I feel like there's nothing to look forward to. Nothing to plan for. And at the rate we're having updates I doubt I'll be subscribed again this year and possibly the next

Because there really isn't, it was an illusion and trick. :P

[Kosmos992k]

And WoW is an Everquest clone...and Everquest is an Ultima clone...and Ultima is a Meridian clone...
Every MMO borrows elements form previous MMOs.

MMOs are like themeparks. They are all themed differently, **snip**
MMOs are no different. They all share the exact same base elements, just with different coatings on the surface.

TY for this. I wish more people would think a moment a realize that yes all dungeons are the same, they have linear progression from one section to the next, sometimes with back-tracking to cover alternate routes, and trash packs roaming and mini-bosses & final boss. Every dungeon fits that framework no matter how unique or not people claim it to be.

Bosses are the same. Big monsters with lots of HP and more lethal attacks, typically involving one or more mechanics and one or more phases with changes in mechanic and/or attack rotation with each phase and increasing damage done as the Boss loses HP. One such mechanic being enrages, soft and hard.

Gear acquisition can be done one of three ways, dungeon, Boss, open world monster and or treasure map drops; Craftied gear and 3 gear acquired through long term play and grind.

I'm not sure why people get so offended when the underlying framework for content is inevitably going to be the same in every game. The same is true of combat systems, either you have real time action, turn based skill selection, or a combination of elements allowing skill selection based on a global cooldown (aka turns) with free movement in real time on the field of battle. People can say such and such is a clone of Game X, but the truth is that there are only so many ways to handle combat in an MMORPG, expecially if you are not going down the road of real time action combat.

[Velox]

Everquest when it began literally had no instances. It was just a dangerous open world with open world dungeons.

Everquest's total population peaked at 500k as well. You can't compare older games to newer games unless you account for both supply and demand, my friend.

Modern-day MMO populations are massive to those of the late 90's. In fact, demand to play MMOs has increased faster than the hardware technology that runs them. FFXIV can be 100% openworld...if you're prepared to cut the game's polygon count by 40% and limit server pop to 1000 players max.

Technology is all about tradeoffs, my friend. In the gaming world you can't have your cake AND eat it too. You want more of X, you gotta give up Y. It's a careful balancing act that all developers have to overcome.

[Callback]

And WoW is an Everquest clone...and Everquest is an Ultima clone...and Ultima is a Meridian clone...
Every MMO borrows elements form previous MMOs.

MMOs are like themeparks. They are all themed differently, they all have different roller coasters, carousels, bumper cars, arcades, Ferris wheels. Sure all these rides look and feel different, but at the end of the day every themepark has the exact same elements as other themeparks. Why do people visit more than one park then? Because the looks, feel, and theme alone make it worthwhile, even if all the individual elements boil down to exactly the same formula used.

MMOs are no different. They all share the exact same base elements, just with different coatings on the surface.

There are a huge number of different core combat systems an MMO could use. The "WoW clones" are the ones that reject them all and use the oldest most boring and worn out one available (the style that peaked back with WoW, and has been dated ever since. Hence the name). You wouldn't accuse Warframe of being one because it chooses unique 3rd-person shooter gameplay with parkour and stealth elements. On the other hand, you could easily call Trickster an RO clone and be correct. "Clone" is not inherently bad, it just signifies that a game is reminiscent of a more popular game of the style which acts as the namesake. The bad comes when even the namesake is disliked or outdated, and others choose to continue cloning it rather than innovating.

Many fewer MMOs than you seem to think choose to just repaint a dead style, and the ones that do deserve to be berated for it. Looking back to some of the earliest MMOs I played, even PSO used an interesting style of action combat that you can't compare to your list of point-and-clicks.

Even your theme park analogy falls flat. Are you going to say Disney World uses the same concepts as something cheap like Six Flags? Of course not. Disney puts effort into their design to craft a unique exerience.