Surprisingly, The outdated MMO is WOW, not FFXI/XIV1.2

[Maeka]

People praise FFXI for a reason, because interaction was a thing there, leveling up in the open world made people communicate more often which was leading to more social aspect of the game, which FFXI was really good at as well.

I don't know what FFXI you played, but in the FFXI I played... once you found a group, you got together, plunked your butt down at a camp, hope nobody trained mobs onto you, and you pulled the same 3-5 enemies overa nd over and over again, and the only chat messages you saw come up on your screen were...

(Tank Name): {Provoke} (mob)!
(DPS): Using {Blah Blah WS}!

etc etc. Macros.

You saw chat interaction about as often as you do in Duty Finder today in FFXIV. Oh, and if you were, say a DRK, DRG, etc.... you didn't even get that. You got to AFK with your flag up for 2, 3, 4+ hours waiting for a group back in the day.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

And when was this?

after WotG? I had the base game and first 2 expansion in the vanadiel collection or w/e. It was in 2006 i believe.

I like challenge as much as the next guy, but the challenge should not be getting out of the starting area and unlocking basic functions of a game. I slogged through 4 years of Lineage 2, and that was just as grindy if not more so.

You also don't need lots of downtime in fights to make friends and communicate. I made many long term friends during coil, and even though I don't still raid with them, I've met them at conventions and stuff, and its been 4 years since that group happened. XI doesn't have a monopoly on making friends. You just have to try harder in XIV since you don't have extended periods of boredom in fights :P

[IllyriaKnotfred]

after WotG? I had the base game and first 2 expansion in the vanadiel collection or w/e. It was in 2006 i believe.

I like challenge as much as the next guy, but the challenge should not be getting out of the starting area and unlocking basic functions of a game. I slogged through 4 years of Lineage 2, and that was just as grindy if not more so.

You also don't need lots of downtime in fights to make friends and communicate. I made many long term friends during coil, and even though I don't still raid with them, I've met them at conventions and stuff, and its been 4 years since that group happened. XI doesn't have a monopoly on making friends. You just have to try harder in XIV since you don't have extended periods of boredom in fights :P

Exactly. Sitting on my butt forever waiting for my mana to fill was thrilling

[loreleidiangelo]

Like EQ's legacy servers. I think it'll end up the same, too. You'll have the diehards that trickle onto it, but ultimately they will be abandoned. Because people really *don't* want that experience back again. They want some of the new shinies and they want one or two of the old things, but that's not what you get on a legacy server.

In the interest of fairness, part of the reason something like EQ Legacy and World of Warcraft Classic might fail is simply because it's content people have already done, completed, and thoroughly immersed themselves in. It's not exactly a critique on "that particular style of game" if those sorts of servers don't see success, because it can just as easily be attributed to lack of new things to entice players. This is why I keep mentioning Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, since as a completely new game it'll be something of a barometer on whether or not an "old-school game" can still see success in today's MMO market with today's style of gamer.

You know what my story of the valkrum dunes is? 3 hours waiting for a party, 20 mins of killing mobs, party disbanding. after 3 weeks of this i quit. Didn't even unlock subjobs. You can keep your XI in XI, I like being able to progress solo when I need to.

This is probably my biggest concern when it comes to games that are styled around this sort of arbitrary "forced socialization" business. While partying up with randoms and hopefully adding them and becoming life-long besties with them has a lot of appeal, at the same time it makes the game very difficult to break into for new players, and can create areas of isolation for people who maybe aren't the best with communicating with others, or perhaps not as skilled at the game. Heaven forfend you also happen to play an odd class or skill combination, or a race that people deem as having "subpar" racial stats or perks in areas where that's relevant. In games like these where partying is mandatory, it's easy to see the bright spots of open-door socialization while failing to acknowledge that there's just as much room for your character progress being stunted beyond repair due to circumstances relatively outside of your control (JP ONRY).

[Maeka]

Exactly. Sitting on my butt forever waiting for my mana to fill was thrilling

DURING BATTLE, no less.

WHM was basically "Stand up, cast cure, regen, etc and get on your knees for as many ticks as you could until you had to stand up and cast some more cures, then steal a tick or two of resting, cast, get back on your knees"

Oh, and no RDM or BRD = No Group because you got <3k XP per hour without any form of Refresh.

[Krotoan]

You know what my story of the valkrum dunes is? 3 hours waiting for a party, 20 mins of killing mobs, party disbanding. after 3 weeks of this i quit. Didn't even unlock subjobs. You can keep your XI in XI, I like being able to progress solo when I need to.

Or having a non-optimal race-job combination and getting overlooked for hours while waiting for a party. Only to join, get trained and die then have the blm warp out leaving the rest of the party to beg for raises or lose MORE XP.
I stopped before the current systems for solo-ing were in place. XI had it's fun points sure, but the bad certainly outweighed the good for me in the end. My life no longer allows me 4 hours at a time to possibly accomplish nothing, or worse yet, LOSE progress. Leveling wasn't FUN in XI for me, it was a chore. Sneak in with items or someone casting spells that randomly wore off for no reason, eat food, kill as many things as you could as fast as you could in sequence for the bonus, make sure you had your weapon skills macro'd to heck so people would know when to skillchain, constant terror that someone would train mobs on you or someone in your party would walk just a little too close to something while you were killing things, kill the SAME things over.. and over.. and over.

.. please don't put that in XIV or I'll have to find a new game.

Also the amount of hand holding in wow now is insane. There used to be add-ons to do what the game just DOES now. Point you at the quest objective, DRAW LINES TO IT. The only thing left to do is pushing the actual buttons, there's no thinking there just doing. I really liked secret world because I had to research things to figure out quests. My friends and I learned ancient Sumerian to figure out a particular quest and when we finished it we were SO PROUD. Sure we could have looked up the walkthrough but we weren't forced to or led by the nose. There were maybe 2 quests in FFXIV that did require you to think and I enjoyed the crud out of them, however since we've not seen more of them I'm thinking the playerbase did NOT like them, and never finished them so the devs stopped making them.

[Maeka]

-snip-

WoW Does the exact same thing that FFXIV does in regards to questing areas.

WoW does not draw lines to the quests, it puts an arrow pointing you to the general direction, in fact, FFXIV does MORE hand-holding, because FFXIV will put dots on the minimap for every single enemy the quest wants you to kill. WoW doesn't do that.

And IIRC, you can turn off the quest helpers in WoW if you want.

[Krotoan]

WoW Does the exact same thing that FFXIV does in regards to questing areas.

WoW does not draw lines to the quests, it puts an arrow pointing you to the general direction, in fact, FFXIV does MORE hand-holding, because FFXIV will put dots on the minimap for every single enemy the quest wants you to kill. WoW doesn't do that.

And IIRC, you can turn off the quest helpers in WoW if you want.

Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but I remember there being very little actual objective finding. FFXIV "go kill this thing" quests mark enemies yes, but a lot of quests just give you an area and you have to go find the NPC/spawning area.. which admittedly are usually huge purple circles but it doesn't always point out what you have to do exactly. People actually hated the moogle quests BECAUSE it didn't highlight them on the map.

[Maeka]

Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but I remember there being very little actual objective finding. FFXIV "go kill this thing" quests mark enemies yes, but a lot of quests just give you an area and you have to go find the NPC/spawning area.. which admittedly are usually huge purple circles but it doesn't always point out what you have to do exactly. People actually hated the moogle quests BECAUSE it didn't highlight them on the map.

WoW does almost exactly the same thing. The only difference is that when there's a specific, named mob... the "general area" circle is a lot smaller and when you get almost up on it, a little gold dot will appear on the minimap where the enemy actually is. But that's only for named mobs or major items you're supposed to interact with, and they only appear when you get close.

Now, maybe you had an addon that did more things, like telling you the exact direction, distance, AND drawing an arrow on-screen? I've seen addons like that and I just roll my eyes at that. I don't use those addons. I have at least 2 functioning brain cells that can put out enough computing power that I don't need that.

[Krotoan]

WoW does almost exactly the same thing. The only difference is that when there's a specific, named mob... the "general area" circle is a lot smaller and when you get almost up on it, a little gold dot will appear on the minimap where the enemy actually is. But that's only for named mobs or major items you're supposed to interact with, and they only appear when you get close.

Now, maybe you had an addon that did more things, like telling you the exact direction, distance, AND drawing an arrow on-screen? I've seen addons like that and I just roll my eyes at that. I don't use those addons. I have at least 2 functioning brain cells that can put out enough computing power that I don't need that.

Highly unlikely, I may have mixed it up with another game though. I remember Age of Conan being stupidly uncomplex as well.