For the 129392831203123801 time. STOP IT with the genderlocked gear.

[Welsper59]

I try not to get involved into this debate, but in light of your post, I feel like asking what you think about the city-state and Grand Company choices and if you think they succeeded in adding substance.

Given how little they do for us (outside of Frontlines), and the fact that storywise they do very little, I don't think much about them at all. If anything, the specific locations, personal pride, and glamour to be found for the GC choice would be the real differential factor between them. The first two being much more subjective than the last. Again, that's being said outside of Frontlines.

I'm assuming you're moreso referring to the decision of choosing your starting city-state, than anything else, to which it really doesn't matter because there are no true lasting or lengthy consequences. I sometimes tire of using XI as an example for points, but it really is a good source for MMORPG related pros and cons, so bear with me on this. In XI, they offered you the choice to select your starting zone for good reason. It became your national affiliation, which significantly affected storyline, some quests, items you could buy from vendors, and ease of progress into gated content. Depending on your race, it would also offer an additional bonus if you chose a fitting start location for said race (Elvaan to San d'oria would get a melee catered lv1 ring, I think). To some degree, your choices affected you, even when it came to high level content, with race specific usable gear... gear that affected your actual performance. Hell, your race even determined your stats, sometimes very noticeably, like Galka were lower MP and casting stats than Tarutaru, and vice versa with melee situations.

There's no way in hell that the people here would appreciate such a dividing system of choices, not when so many players care about "best" rather than "acceptable". So the XIV team needs to cater to more people without having such significant consequences for player choices. The desire to leave some degree of pros/cons to our choices can still be a thing though. If I were a developer, I would absolutely want players to think about their choices in a fantasy game instead of not caring at all for them. A warped situation, sure, but I digress.

I don't think they succeeded as far as choices go. They merely added diverse environments, but it does not affect us in many ways as to what our choices when we start mean for us when starting in X city, as opposed to Y city. Perhaps that's not something they cared about though with city states, as evidence would suggest. The same applies to GCs, as I stated earlier. Other than colors/pictures and the players you happen to see, they mean little to nothing. They could just call the GC's "Team A", "Team B", and "Team C" with little impact at all to why we would choose one over another. So if that one was supposed to have an impact, it really didn't... other than frustrations with the gameplay feature itself (GC restrictions) to group activity. That problem is vastly superior to complain about over glamour, IMO.