Surprisingly, The outdated MMO is WOW, not FFXI/XIV1.2

[Maeka]

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

Ahh, but yeah, WoW is about the same as XIV really at least in that aspect. But then XIV was kinda-sorta modeled after WoW, or at least heavily borrowed a lot of concepts from it.

[ShanXiv]

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is probably the closest thing to what OP is looking for that miiiiight come out in 2018. Personally, I question the longevity of such a game, where the bulk of what the devs have showcased is just a leveling grind, but it could be that they're holding out on the most interesting dungeons/open world content until a later date to generate more hype.

I'm eyeballing the game to see how the "social experiment" as it were pans out, but I'm not sold that people won't just join exp trains like what they did in the old days and rather than socialize with their party members through chat just rip some music on their PC and only make imperative statements about the pulls they're doing rather than small talk. I feel like technology has come so far these days that there's less incentive to talk to others for camaraderie/entertainment when you can literally just suit up some anime on your second monitor and watch that while you're afk sitting trying to regen mana.

I read the replies, and am happy to see that most opinions are more "softer" than before.
Not many people are saying:"XIV 1.x failed because SOMEONE said that it's a 100% crap", or "I've played 1.0 (NOT 1.1x-1.2x),it's crap" or "(Some people told me) XI is only a grind fest" etc.
or at least, are willing to try something new.(XI and XIV1.1x were eye-opening MMO to me, I've played UO,EQ1,EQ2,WOW before.)

Some people seem are getting tired of the "2 dungeons,1 primal,1-2 new glamour,emotes,hairstyles" in each patch,
some people like me, are asking for more, something that is sustainable.

The difficulty and game pace were something that XIV 1.2x had done right IMO.
When 1.0 release, players complained the speed of harvest animation is too slow, SE increased it later.
The gathering in 1.x were some mini-games,(you can still play these min-games in Gold saucer now)
it takes longer to harvest an item, but the items have more value too.

Now, you just select an icon and click it,then you got the item, simple,easy & fast, it saves your time? not really,
because you have to harvet more items to earn the same amount of gil, thats boring.
Gathering in 1.2x is definitely better than 2.0-4.0, there are many such examples.
Someone mentioned "The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak" dungeon in 2.0 alpha, yes it's a better design than what we have now.(what are you thinking SE?)

You mentioned "watch anime while playing the game",
Togashi Yoshihiro wrote some fun MMO stories in Hunter x Hunter comic, because he played XI. Many MMO animes took the ideas from XI,
Why do you need to watch a MMO anime when playing the game? you are experiencing your own，epic advanture story in a beautiful virtual world.

The graphics,ui,movent control of XIV 2.0-4.0 + the difficulty,game pace of XIV 1.2x(not 1.0) + the content design,game depth,community of XI = dream MMO?

[Krotoan]

The graphics,ui,movent control of XIV 2.0-4.0 + the difficulty,game pace of XIV 1.2x(not 1.0) + the content design,game depth,community of XI = dream MMO?

For you. Which is great! but some of us like the way the game is and really don't see smushing another games 'innovations" into this one as an improvement. I found the XI community selfish and elitist and the game pace of 1.2 to be monotonous. I'd be gone sooner rather than later if this happened.

[Maeka]

For you. Which is great! but some of us like the way the game is and really don't see smushing another games 'innovations" into this one as an improvement. I found the XI community selfish and elitist and the game pace of 1.2 to be monotonous. I'd be gone sooner rather than later if this happened.

^^
This.

Everybody dumps heaps of praise on FFXI for it's AWESOME COMMUNITY, but I found it to be full of cliques and very, so very elitist. The harder you make something, the more elitist the community surrounding it will be. I found a lot of people to be very snooty and snobbish, especially those who were into endgame. They looked down their nose at you like you were some kind of peasant and they were royalty that should be worshipped.

Especially BG and the people who frequented their forums. Oi. I remember when ZAM actually existed, and the people in BG and similar linkshells... they had this god-complex like they thought everybody should bow down to them or something.

Especially when you THEN add Job Discrimination to the extreme on top of that. "We only want X Y Z jobs!" and if you're not one of those? You're out of luck, period. Heck, you had some people in XI who would get angry at you just for looking at their equipment, who would use equipment change macros if you examined them, I mean, really? I'd just love to dope-slap them and tell them to get off their high horse.

[Shurrikhan]

I still think that's a bit of a LOL or "Told you So" on Blizz's part. I think they are ONLY doing that to shut the vocal minority up, and it probably won't last all that long.

When people fire that up and see how bad the Vanilla world really was compared to Live, they'll get tired of it and leave. There'll be a few diehards, but back in Vanilla you needed a stinking group to do dang near anything, even some normal quests that had terrible rewards.

And without a group, you're sunk.

Yep, the moment they said it was going to be a pure copy-over, I couldn't see it as anything more than a community-tailoring project. Vanilla WoW was fun in its time, don't get me wrong, but it was far from perfect and some of the areas of improvements possible (not even broad scope or the like, but simply polish to the maths to make given internal balance benchmarks work as intented) were readily obvious.

Ignoring them for a "pure" rather than "as intended" experience does not bode well for any intent to last.

[Maeka]

Ignoring them for a "pure" rather than "as intended" experience does not bode well for any intent to last.

But then again, if it ain't "pure" then it ain't "vanilla" and there will be purists out there whining about it AND you'll have people on Live servers who (perhaps rightfully?) will point fingers at them and say "see, you didn't really want Vanilla, you just want partial vanilla!" lol.

The vanilla purists can't win no matter what they do. Which is why *being* a vanilla purist is silly.

[Shurrikhan]

But then again, if it ain't "pure" then it ain't "vanilla" and there will be purists out there whining about it AND you'll have people on Live servers who (perhaps rightfully?) will point fingers at them and say "see, you didn't really want Vanilla, you just want partial vanilla!" lol.

The vanilla purists can't win no matter what they do. Which is why *being* a vanilla purist is silly.

Precisely. v.v

I love the feeling of a game that hasn't yet been twisted and spread in various directions, retucks, and face-lifts, but actually sticks cohesively to an original vision (because it hasn't yet been forced to proceed arbitrarily from there, breaking up the balance of the game's focuses that once made it what it was).

That cohesion was left unpolished in Vanilla/Classic WoW, though, which is why I won't be bothering with it save perhaps for a brief time with friends when quite bored. Had they said "if we're doing this, we're doing it right", on the other hand, as a project of earnest effort, I'd probably jump on that long enough to level cap a character or two. ...Which would be quite some time.

[akaneakki]

I don't know what FFXI you played, but in the FFXI I played

I played it from 2004 to 2008 ish with 1 year break or so. I get what you mean, but the fact you have to party with people on the same server made it a lot better as well. If you knew top players or was in a great end game LS like myself, this was great. Most groups I was with luckily to be social between pulls when we cleaned the whole place for mobs. Communication was a big deal and was needed when you also did main story quest, you actually had to go along with 11 or 17 other people, places like frit's Cauldron. Or when you had to pass jormungand in the snow area.

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

WotG? That came out in 2007. I think it was third quarter as well, but anwyays. Unlocking basic functions can be frustrating which I can agree, as much as many in FF14 refuse to read upon guides or read tooltips how their class works. Many people try to avoid as much and I think games these days really needs it, because the era of players trying for effort is getting less and less of. I didn't find fighting king wyrms boring, i didn't find killing WoTG kings aka chimera and cerberus boring. I did all end game before I quit the game, including absolute virtue. Boring is a subjective too, like people on FF14 find grinding same exper roulette for months boring but some find it boring, whats your opinion there? You find it find to grind same dungeons etc for months?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Then it was Cop and Zilart, and treasures was the pack I got. Before WotG. You can't expect me to have great memory for a game I played for a month 11 years ago lol

I did not say I didn't like grinds, in fact I loved all of the relic quests, and like I said, I played lineage 2. I just don't like when a game forces you, early no less, to group up in order to unlock a basic function of the game. In Xi, that was leveling. And subjobs. I never even got to the quest for it.

[Shurrikhan]

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.

Generally, WoW actually provides less indication. Zones are vaguely marked, but only hunters get to see individual units on their map. Hunting quests recommended for multiple players take one step further back, even, often mentioning only the general zone it roams.

It also wasn't really until the post-MSQ (or, post-flight) Moogle quests that people had reason to loathe them. All previous ones were visible straight from the main roads or barely behind the corners of the ruined structures. It was only when they could hide among any of many floors of the ruined ampitheaters', each with hundreds of columns to hide behind that it became newly difficult to find things, and even then it wasn't by any new restriction or removed hand-holding; it was just an increase in the number of places something could be within a marked zone.

The only actual removals of hand-holding I can remember are alike to the quest starting from the corpse by the wall's flood-grate in Yanxia, such as used to be frequent in WoW quest design (though these quests were usually reduced to memes, as one would rather google or ask zone chat for the locations than figure things out themselves).