This video tells you why some people thought FFXIV 1.2. is a better MMO than 2.0

[Brill_]

I don't want XIV to become XI. I like they are different games. When I get tired with one, I can jump over to the other. I do want XIV to stop following the same boring repetitive formula they've been using for 5 years now.

[Nestama]

Ok its my opinion, I can express it any way I want and I still play this game every day. I understand 1.0 isnt coming back since that type of game style is basically dead in this new era of gaming. If you are "tired" of hearing about 1.0 topics then why read and post? Move on from the thread.

I think by 'tiered of 1.0 topics' they mean they're tired of OP constantly making 1.0 topics. As I mentioned in the previous page, OP tends to make topics nitpicking ARR-SB and then saying 1.0 could do it better/was better in every way (and if they don't mention 1.0 in their opening post, they'll find a way to include it in some way later on in the thread they make... or in other threads they post in). They're a broken record at this point.

[Powercow]

oh, and FATIGUE. Who remembers that being fun and interesting?

Lets make it so you cant level at all after a couple of hours of grinding, and since grinding is all there is, we'd like you to stop playing our game now.

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here and assume that Surplus SP was implemented for the good of the game... just uh, they screwed it up super bad. I don't have any dev interviews or anything but these are my thoughts on Surplus...

Surplus SP was added as a way to encourage players to play different classes. Any single class in FFXIV 1.0 was incomplete by design -- you were meant to get skills and traits and spells from different classes to make your own, with a core of a single class. There were numerous skills and traits that would help a tank spread between gladiator, marauder pugilist, lancer, conjurer, and thaumaturge, with some other niche ones being in the other classes. This meant that the game design was to make players level everything at least partially, if for nothing else than a combat class doesn't feel complete if you don't. The question was how do you encourage players to level other classes than the main one they want? Well SE's way was to add in a system that slowed SP gain based off how much you played the one class.

The problem is that this wasn't the only solution (for example: letting players see the stuff they can get from other classes, then trusting them to spread out their levels on their own) and wasn't even really important since 1.0 had no endgame content at all they needed to worry about. If a gladiator hit 50 and didn't have Pain Spikes, nobody at all cared. But even worse is that this system was also grossly overtuned. You could hit Surplus 1 in a few *minutes* of playing a class, and if you get a decent grinding group you could hit tier 8 in a single day. Surplus 8 meant you were getting 80% reduced SP, btw. It also lasted a week, which meant that you could level, say, Archer for about 1-2 days, then you were pretty much wasting time after that since you got almost nothing out of it. This wasn't encouraging players to level other classes, this was outright punishing you for playing just 1, 2 or even 3. Hell, I remember playing 1.0 pretty hard and I had surplus on every battle class in the first couple of days. It sucked.

The other potential reason for Surplus was to act as a speedbump to hardcore players and allow newer or more casual players to catch up more easily. If you only played about 3 hours a week, Surplus was probably a minor inconvenience at most. The big issue here is the packaging of a catchup mechanic. Most MMOs, including WoW, SWTOR, and even ARR all used the same easy one -- log off, accumulate rested EXP, level more quickly for a while when you do play. That feels like a reward, and it feels nice going to work or school, coming home to a big rested EXP bar and leveling super fast for a bit. 1.0, on the other hand, just plain felt bad. That's a big distinction for keeping people engaged -- people like feeling rewarded, but people hate feeling punished for simply playing the game, and Surplus only ever felt punishing.

[Jin-]

Agree on that warrior of light part, it's super lame

[Penthea]

If we gave it another year or two, we may have a real MMO, a real adventure

SE couldn't afford to give it another year or two because the game flopped so hard it nearly killed the company. You really need to take a good long read at the history of 1.0 and how it affected SE as a whole. It was a disaster on so many fronts.

I didn't play 1.0 myself but I know people irl who did and I remember when they got it. They had little good to say other than it looked pretty. Everything else they said was all about bugs, lag, dcs, random performance drops, bad ui and a distinct lack of content. And these are hardcore long time FF fans who played XI, two of them even went to a fan fest. They tried their hardest to love 1.0 but they could not. News of 2.0 is what kept them hanging on to FFXIV. Not their experiences in 1.0. They hold on to their epic adventures relating to Dalamud very dear, but not to the point of saying 1.0 was better...because they really don't miss dealing with a poorly made game that had severe performance issues both server and client side.

OP if you don't like XIV, that's fine. No game is for everyone. But to harp on about how 1.0 was some misunderstood "real mmo" that didn't get a fair chance just shows how woefully misinformed you are about it.

[Shurrikhan]

1.Fun party contents:
Hamlet defence, DOW DOM DOL DOH all can play together
the Job quest were nice too

The job quests were a decent touch -- I enjoyed many of their final battles well enough -- but I doubt there's a content form more overhyped than Hamlet, to the point I doubt those who praise it most played it more than a few times. It created no meaningful synergy between disciplines. It didn't integrate them worth a damn. To me all but maybe... Aleport... felt like shallow concept-service over meaningful and even slightly finished content.

2. Gears stay relevant

As all gear does when there's only one armor set uniquely available at level cap and is barred behind a massive grind. I'm all for gear choice and relevance, so long as it adds far more to fun and a sense of unique progression than it does to inventory bloat and community restrictions, but 1.x wasn't an example of maintained gear relevance as it was of gear scarcity. Its only real leg up on the current system was the "optimal" rather than "required" restrictions attached to many a gear piece.

3.Stories were real, you were not some superhero, the "Warrior of Light" in 2.0 is lame.

On this I kind of agree. It was refreshing to feel like... a real person, and the way they made you special without making you "super" fit brilliantly with the themes of the game back then, from its connections with other characters, the worldending themes, the (very different) concept of balance, the appreciation of intelligence and caution and responsibility, the mindcluckery in the background of all that... It was good.

4.The world was real, it had the immersion, 2.0 failed to capture this feeling, 2.0 is just a park, a theme park.

Again, agreed, on average. Over 2.0, at least, it was certainly a step up. It wasn't great, but you could get the feeling that you'd packed up and went backpacking in the mountains for a while when visiting Mor Dhona or Coerthas. It felt surprisingly "real" for an MMO. It was refreshing. It suffered more from technical issues, but I think the goal was a better one than we saw with ARR, and quite possibly much of Stormblood as well. In all cases though, XIV open world has been painfully underutilized.

5.Events in open world, well honestly, this Atomos event was not very good...but it's still better than FATEs

They were gimmicks, and even advertised as such. The invasions were explicitly a well-humored way to get people out of solely afking in Ulduh. The Garlean patrols were almost interesting, but still just content that was kind of "tossed out there" as tide-over scraps, more to show attention than to give anything of value in itself.

6.Epic boss fight, not just some dodge circles on the ground, heavily scripted, "rope jumping" fight

Apart from the few fights that encouraged procedural kiting and turned party play into organized chaos, they were quite bland. Castrum Meridianum was a bit exhilarating the first time, but in a jokey, gimmicky way until the actual United We Stand fight, and Nael was a snooze.

7.Yoshi & his team still had passion & heart, & they listened to players

Yoshida 1.x was a strange time. Though we got frequent communication for changes excused by certain frequent player requests, there could hardly be a less politically-charged or vaguely even... dishonest... period of the game. The changes each presented more or less as bait-and-switch. Whatever Tanaka did was explained off as fundamentally flawed to the applause of intentional mediocrity. Why create make a system of complete customization actually work if you can just scrap it completely? Why build your own job, if one can just shunt some extra actions onto each class and call it a day, all options beyond job choice removed? Why push towards FC competition, primal summoning, ship-building, voyages, environmental interactions, multi-person crafting in guilds or camps, or other open-world contents when you can talk instead about the horrors of copy-paste terrain and how the whole world is just going to get nuked anyways, and do... none of that?

Yoshida platformed on pragmatism, but of a lowest denominator sort. I don't know why that came to such applause then, save that he was simply not Tanaka, nor do I see why the vast increase in staff and funding is somehow a Yoshida achievement, when the change was made with the replacement in leadership, not because of it.

The whole period reeked of scapegoating and, as many an MMO friend put it, "poisoning the chalice". Tanaka was awful, true. But no issue we might have with Yoshida now wasn't clear back then as well.

8.Events in town, players were fighting for their home(and for fun, the mobs didn't drop any rewards...)
now people just idle in town & queue for DF, yeah that's fun

Levelers were out and about. Until literally forced out of Ulduh not to be corpse-camped, there were rarely any 50s elsewhere. At most, some helped friends level 45-50 via beasthold grinds before going back to afking or AV/CC spamming.

9.And most importantly, the community, IT'S THE SOUL OF A MMO.
there's almost none in 2.0, 2.0 is a nice but empty body, 2.0 has no soul, yeah that's good, nice, fun....

I didn't find 2.0's community any better or worse on the whole. At most, 1.x's seemed a bit more patient, and 2.0's a bit more enthusiastic. If you're comparing 2.0 content to 1.x's now, that's not a fair comparison. Obsolete content will always chill over and the playerbase stratifies further and further with time since the game's (re)release.

10.The atmosphere... There was water in my eyes when I saw this.
Will you cry when you throw away your dated gears? I won't.
2.0 is just a park, The world has no weight, almost no good memories after 5 years playing, yeah fuuuun....

In terms of the open world experience, I'm slightly inclined to agree, but, honestly, that mostly just comes down to mobs being worth a ton more exp to grind in 1.x compared to 2.0 and beyond. I have to dungeon-spam with a tryhard team to level that quickly now. The open-world population, exempting FATE zergs, mostly just comes down to it being a fairer and well included resource to the player. Materials covered a larger span of levels, and mob exp was better.

I'll agree that many a 2.0 zone felt like a park, and despite meeting some interesting people FATE-grinding when the game was new or grinding Extreme primals in the wee hours of night later on, it didn't feel much like the game itself had a soul, but I can't honestly say the experience lost net value for it, so long as you didn't close yourself off and managed to take the new content forms as a world of their own. I loved Amdapor Keep and Pharos Sirius (both pre-nerf) for instance. They felt heavy with impression and sense of lore, and their characteristic gameplay challenges (well, DF challenges) gave a sense of adventure that felt very FF and worldly.

Now, I hugely want more from the open world, but, I think you've shorted yourself a fair bit here if that's your honest assessment.

[Shurrikhan]

oh, and FATIGUE. Who remembers that being fun and interesting?

I do. Honestly.

Every single aspect of leveling made vary clear to you that you did not level classes. Classes leveled you. You gained stats from them. You gained abilities from them. And so you essentially had a lower base exp rate, but rested experience given separately on every class. The table is set: from what will you make your meal today? This was made quite clear, including every time the fatigue debuff appeared as you scrapped at an empty bowl of pudding while ignoring all other possible treats. Fatigue did not apply to character exp or level. It applied to class rank and skill/proficiency growth to a specific class. The higher your rank, the slower you leveled up, the less contribution lower level ranks could make for your leveling. Even if not for the fatigue system, you could have leveled your character far more quickly by multileveling.

Fatigue was the way the game warned you that you are, in FFVIII terms, gaining XP without gaining any AP -- aligning yourself for a death sentence by refusing to play the game the way it's always said it was meant to be played -- by leveling at least a few different classes. I played a mere three, one far more than the others. I never hit fatigue, despite constant grinding. And the classes I leveled on the side supported the "main"'s playstyle. If I needed additional pulling utility, I went and got it. If I needed more durability, I went and got that by playing what was good at that. If I wanted to take advantage of tanking, I played the tanks (which at the time included, in a sense, Lancer and Pugilist) until they'd taught me all I needed. If I wanted to take advantage of duoing, I trained from the class best at duoing and was then free to reap its benefits on any other. It was simple and sensible.

Anyone butting their heads against fatigue without putting in at least 4 hours a day was actively diminishing their own character power and quite likely their user experience in other ways as well.

I'll admit even then, though, that fatigue could have been done better, perhaps by, say, causing exp gained on any non-fatigued job of the same Discipline (Magic/War combined) to replace rested experience already consumed on the others so that you could at least grind your way back to disempowering yourself (though less than previously the case, as at least now you're more obviously enticed to multiclass).

But, chalk one up for famous (purposely) misunderstood systems to be scapegoated for totally irrelevant issues. It's like someone complaining about XIV jobs today because... he never went and got his job-stone, despite multiple warnings and indicators pointing the quest out to him.

[HyoMinPark]

Really? Another complaint thread?
If you don’t want to play this game, there is an Unsubscribe button for you inside your account management.
Make use of it.

[TroySoFab]

Only the butts were better.

[LauraAdalena]

You know, if you are having a hard time finding people to play with, maybe it's because you are constantly bagging on ARR and saying that 1.x was better and talking about how the game is dying, and how we need Tanaka back (when i see no real reason to or any real reason to fire Yoshi-P. He may be... well, i don't know how to put it without being rude, but he's not bad.)

If you really dislike FFXIV beyond A Realm Reborn just unsub. You are doing yourself a favor by not playing something that seems to irritate you or cause you displeasure. And if you really want to make friends, go find local events for hobbies you like. I bet you can find some. Just stop bagging on ARR for not providing you with friends. Stop complaining on the forums about how dead your FC is when nobody I know is having that issue unless they choose to be in smaller quieter FCs. I chose to, got bored, and now I'm in a much more bustling and memey FC and the game is fun again.