Famitsu interview with Yoshida after NA's FanFest

[Duelle]

If you remember back to the 2.0 launch many legacy players were handed every job at level 50 that played nothing like how they did in 1.0. We learned how to play the game by reading tool tips on the skills. People figured out how to play fairly easily after playing awhile. I don't think there would be that much trouble for people starting at 60 if SE decides to have a level boost for Stormblood.

I don't think you're giving the intuitiveness of FFXIV's systems enough credit. Tooltips are part of the process but a lot of the gameplay has things built in to show you a sort of progression of skills. That's a feather in FFXIV's cap that WoW simply doesn't have, even now with the simplified specs and rotations.

Of course, considering that I've had to teach newbie tanks how to hold aggro because they don't bother to read tooltips and follow the bouncing ball, I see no harm in having tutorials. Especially for people who get boosted to 60.

I'd rather devs pander to fans of a Final Fantasy game than the WoW refugees who jump over to this game and complain.

Ignoring the "us vs them" thing, FFXIV was designed to appeal to modern MMO fans. That largely included WoW and those who played SWTOR and LOTRO. Not to mention that people who ask for FFXI things don't understand that a) FFXI is built around very different design principles, b) built around very different systems, c) that game's progression and gear design only work for that game, and d) the game is still alive and well. I don't even need to get into stupid design oversights like gear swaps mid-combat and the resulting inventory bloat from a trillion items built for very specific purposes.

As an example, each expansion storyline was independent in FFXI, and everybody was happy with that, and SE didn't have to sell XP potions. By saying that, I m not asking for the storylines of FFXIV to be the same as FFXI's.

The thing is that expansion storylines were mostly high-level content. Zilart was 50-75. CoP tried the disastrous level capped content. ToAU was all high level (the zones themselves had mobs that reinforced that). WotG story content is also relatively high level.

Of course, you didn't need to add level potions in FFXI because most of the expansion story content had only the game's lv75 cap to take into account. FFXIV doesn't have a static level cap that spans several expansions, so you're sort of comparing apples and oranges.