To those who loved FF11...

[Maeka]

As a long, LONG time player of XI, these are some of the things people will say about XI that I just find entirely bonkers:

1). "Better combat!" ..... uh, really, now? Most jobs had nothing but Auto-Attack and Weaponskill with a few LONG cooldown abilities. Our cooldowns in FFXIV are 2-5 minutes. In FFXI, your NORMAL CD for abilities was 2-5 minutes and they were usually for 30 second buffs, or something basic like Shield Bash. Now they did eventually shorten some of these cooldowns, but it took YEARS. There was a point in time when Paladins had nothing but Sentinel and Shield Bash... and one of these abilities was on a TEN minute recast. Berserk for Warriors used to be FIFTEEN minute recast. What were Warriors doing in-between casts of Berserk? Standing there doing absolutely nothing waiting on 1000 TP. Then they'd do a weaponskill. Then they'd wait. Oh yes, such awesome combat indeed.

2). Better community! This one makes me laugh even more. Unless you had awesome connections and played the right job, you were a nobody and you were treated like dirt. The only way to get ANYTHING done in that game was to sit in Jueno and /shout for stuff, and you'd be waiting a very long time. Or you could get a linkshell, but most "social" linkshells didn't really do much with each other either! And then you got the endgame LS's, if you got into one of THOSE, they expected to have control over your very life, dictating when you must show up to events regardless of anything in your RL, like your IRL job. Now, I bet Savage Raid linkshells in XIV are somewhat like this too, but hey. Unlike XI, there's actual content that doesn't involve hardcore endgame.

3). "Dangerous world!" ..... sigh. Yeah, a world full of mobs that nobody fights, that everybody circumvents with Sneak and Invisible. Awesome. Let's put a bunch of mobs in a game that nobody wants to fight for any reason, that everybody will just S/I through everywhere. Such awesome design, right? I'm glad we don't have that crap over here in XIV. Sure, the mobs can be solo'd now but you know, there's plenty of danger in dungeons and boss fights to be honest.

4). "The world is better!" Sprawling landscapes of mobs you never fight, with a few decorations here and there, and.... grass..... and rock..... and grass.......and rock as far as the eye can see. Right. Sure the world might feel bigger (the game is in a later stage in life than XIV is), but what's IN the world? Endless terrain that you have to navigate in the slowest ways possible. Walking was your only method of movement for a huge part of that game's life, and only recently they added mounts. And even WITH mounts, it takes forever to get from one area to another. And a lot of time, it's featureless terrain that you're traversing.

Now a few things of mine I'll say:

5). UI. The UI for FFXI was terrible because it was designed for console first and then a PC port came later. It sure showed too. Wanna move 5 items from your inventory into your mogsafe? It takes forever. And there's this annoying pause between each item too.

6). Time Wasting. Heck there's pauses with EVERYTHING in that game. The phrase "you must wait longer" is very common and it happens with EVERYTHING. Moving items around, even opening certain windows, or the fact you can't have two windows open at once, or the fact you can't even enter a text command while you have a window open which is just ridiculous. And that's not to say anything about terrain features that FORCE you to take the long way around, JUST for the sole purpose of wasting as much of your time as they can possibly waste. If you have a 10 foot distance between you and your goal, you can expect to walk three miles to get around some stupid tiny obstacle preventing you from just going straight there. And every. single. zone. had these types of things in it, things forcing you to sometimes go through MULTIPLE ZONES to get to your destination because it was just that ridiculously convoluted just to do something simple.

FFXI is not a better game than XIV. I'm sorry, it just isn't. XIV has made so many improvements, leaps and bounds over XI that it's crazy.

EDIT: And you know what's hilarious? The one thing in FFXIV that they implemented to specifically be like FFXI, Eureka, is one of THE most complained about things in XIV currently. They thought that they would add a slice of FFXI into FFXIV and guess what? Most people I've talked to, can rattle off several things about it that they hate. They want to like it, but the FFXI-like stuff (death penalties, insta-kill mobs, etc) are usually the things they complain about.

EDIT2: I started playing a bit before Promathia, and continued to play clear up until Abyssea. Took a one year hiatus, came back, played a little while longer, got bored of it again and quit for another couple years, and then came back not too long after Rhapsodies came out and played for.... awhile, but quit early this year because it was just the same boring stuff over and over and over and over again and swapping mobs in Ambuscade is not what I'd call adding content to the game.

EDIT3: I'll also add something else where, in that I don't really *hate* FFXI, or anything nor am I saying it's a bad game, I'm more addressing the ludicrous notion that it is somehow better than XIV.