Can any WoW refugees explain the exodus to XIV to me?

[Kaerna]

Except that sounds exactly like FFXIV as well, Stormblood more specifically. Most of our content this whole expansion has been piece mealed to hell and back to further extend its longevity cause as it stands most of it will be done by the majority of the playerbase in the first week of release. Are we going to just forget how Eureka, one of the big features of this expansion, was spaced out so hard that they were entirely irrelevant in terms of gear the second they came out?

In my defense I joined in December 2018 so all of these experience seems fresh to me. I haven't reach the point where I start waiting for patch and grind end game content. I did hear that Eureka gating was equivalent to the entire BFA expansion so I'm hoping SE took your guys feedback and stop going down that path because WoW at the moment is just...slow... Their gating is so bad that the main story of the expansion is even time gated and as at the moment has yet to be concluded.

Probably ask me later in a few months to see if im frustrated with FF14 but for now I'm going to enjoy as I can.

[Raelsar]

Except that sounds exactly like FFXIV as well, Stormblood more specifically. Most of our content this whole expansion has been piece mealed to hell and back to further extend its longevity cause as it stands most of it will be done by the majority of the playerbase in the first week of release.

There's a different approach between the two game when it comes to "time-gated" content.

FFXIV will almost always allow you to do ALL content as soon as it is patched in.
WoW will simply make content inaccessible, possibly for several months, despite it already being patched in.

There's definitely two different design philosophies at play here. WoW has been plagued by an "Endgame or Die" mindset for the past several years (also called "Raid or Die"). In WoW, it can feel like you're being pushed to play and push your progress daily (the RNG and luck factors not helping) in order to keep up with the hyper-competitive crowd; if you don't, you'll be ostracized and kept out of content by the community itself. The whole "rushing through everything" mindset pervades ALL aspects of the game, including levelling.

Conversely, FFXIV simply adds in the content with the patch and allows players to consume it at their leisure; you can choose to rush, but there's often little point to it because you'll just run out of stuff to do more quickly. Some content does get held back between patch cycles to spread it out, but it's also important to note that patches come much more frequently in FFXIV; about twice as fast. Major patches in WoW are usually at least 6 months apart, and the stretches between the last patch of an expansion and the next one is usually over a year.

Hell I wouldnt be surprised if 6.0 came with a Number Squish give how fast our iLvls are climbing.

FFXIV doesn't have WoW's insane stat-inflation issues, so I doubt this will happen. Health and damage numbers in FFXIV seem relative safe up to 999,999 (just shy of a million, and I'm not sure if it's actually a "hard cap"), so until we're approaching that arbitrary limit I doubt they'll be considering a numbers squish. Conversely, WoW has had two number squishes (WoD and now BfA) with the second one including a squish to the item levels; both cases make FFXIV scaling seem tiny in comparison.

Even now, I think WoW will have another numbers squish before FFXIV has any. It doesn't help that item levels for the two games actually similar... while health values in WoW are already triple that of FFXIV, despite WoW being relatively early on in an expansion which included a numbers squish. Then again, the last expansion in WoW had a start-to-finish item level jump of 250; FFXIV during Stormblood was around 150 item levels (including leveling), and I think WoW has more stat gains per item level as well.

[RitsukoSonoda]

WoW having an exodus? Well I haven't touched it since lich king. I burnt all the content too fast back then to justify continuing to spend money on it because I was bored entirely in a short period of time where as I had FFXI which I'd played since initial launch in japan and still had content not done yet. WoW wasn't a bad game. However it wasn't the standard of RPG's or as amazing as so many others claimed it to be. I feel the game's life and success is more of proof of the effectiveness of Blizzard's marketing team and strategy rather than the game's actual quality. And maybe other people are starting to realize this too.

[Grimr]

Another wow exile here. I left during WOD. It was rather easy to do so. Blizz went off their rocker and continues to do so. It wasn't just one thing but a combination of things. Flying nearly being taking out so blizz could continue to cut corners. I did get tired of raiding. Felt there was not any point to it what so ever. It was just shit exapnsion but it started circling the drain way back in cataclysm.

ff14 is a nice change of pace. It really helps i don't raid anymore either just the normals, extremes and occasional savages for mounts.

[Eloriel]

I left first during Cataclysm, then during WoD and lastly, during Legion. It was actually Legion that ruined my last bit of love for that game. People raved about it, but I? I loathed what the expansion had done to the classes. Also, when I saw the artifact weapons that everyone got (them having a lot of lore behind them in WoW), I knew that they would be gone in a year or two, and hated it from the start because of that. Hence, I looked for a new MMO I could love, and found that FFXIV was about to be reborn. I had given 1.0 a try, hated it, but saw what Yoshi-P wanted to FFXIV 2.0 and was willing to give it another try. Been here more or less since then.

Why people are leaving WoW now? Well, Blizzard has always promised more than they give - a lot more - and by WoD people had gotten really tired of it. Legion should also have been an expansion of the caliber of Wrath of The Lich King, at least, considering the plot of it. It really wasn't, no matter how much some people seem to have loved it. So by now, and with the new expansion being very off in so many ways, and also with all the other things going on at Blizzard at the moment... It's no wonder that people are fleeing their games and searching for others. Of course some will come here.

[Nedkel]

There are few reasons
1. They forced RNG into the gear grind, making it a hell on earth to grind for
2. Lore, instead fraction war they have lore about fighting old gods, the same thing all over again
3. Balance is a mess, especially between high and lower levels, or at least it was when i played a 2 months ago
4. Activision-blizzard is a sinking ship and its just a matter of time before they do something really stupid to their game
5. Player number is decreasing at really bad rate

So people are leaving the game and catch up to FFXIV because it is similar, but more polished game.

[Ruinfeild]

It is funny reading this topic and seeing quite a few people saying that 'FFXIV is slowly becoming like WoW' and they give no actual proof as to this reasoning.

Time-gating: This is the weakest issue I have seen by far. It is almost like the people want stuff either handed to them or to take almost no time at all to do. If those players had their way I bet they would be the same people who would complain that it was to easy and now they don't have anything to do. There are no rep grinds or any lock-outs that is preventing you from doing the MSQ or many of the side quests. This goes for things like the reconstruction of doma, beast tribes, or even the custom turn's in with the NPC's. Unlike in WoW back in Legion when I had a month playtime, I was rep-blocked in the story by the void whatever elves and I had to hit certain reputation (before the buff) just to even get further in the story. If FFXIV started having things like that than I would side with the people complaining.

We are constantly getting some sort of added content every 2-3 months (unless it is the rare instance we have to wait longer) and yes it may not be something big or something people want (people can whine and complain about Eureka all they want but they are still heavily played with how often I see them full of people before and even after nerfs) but it is still content. Compare that to WoW where it was almost every 6 months to hell I think someone said a year. If that starts happening than you can start complaining but I much have what we got now and if you really are not content with it than take a break. Yoshi P even told us that he wanted people to take a break from the game if needed.

Gear: Depending on the kind of content you do, the gear is more relevant than you think. If all you do is roulettes/dungeons and trials and spending the high end tomes, of course they won't be as relevant as the top end game in the gear in savage content. Look at Omega right now with the last tier between Sigma and Alpha, Sigma came out in January of 2018 while Alphascape came out in September. That is around 7 months of that top end game gear sticking around until they added new gear from tomes which released with Alphascape. So no the gear is not becoming irrelevant as quickly as people may think. As for ilevel squish, I doubt that they will change the way they been doing it from ARR-HW and HW-SB (where most of my gear from high end tomes wasn't replaced till mid story and dungeons). As someone pointed out, the ilevel difference between expansions, if the highest HW tome gear lasted me halfway through stormblood, I think you can survive with it being the same way in shadowbringers.

Job identity: Another one I find pretty weak. You get a new trait or action every 2-3 levels so you always got something new added to the job. Sure some don't stick out like STR boost or INT boost or any of those but it is still something. All the jobs play differently and each of them feel more unique than the other regardless of either while leveling or being at max level. Ability bloat is a problem and Yoshi P did say that they wanted to restrict adding more spells unless needed (which is why their merging spells and abilities or I believe in an interview they said they are getting rid of skills that may not be often used). This is not dumbing down or making jobs easier, more skills and abilities to keep track of doesn't equal fun. Every job will continue to be unique in their own way rather than having some sort of talent system or something else to make them cookie cutter (you can try to argue about the same gear but that is grasping for straws)

[Penthea]

It is funny reading this topic and seeing quite a few people saying that 'FFXIV is slowly becoming like WoW' and they give no actual proof as to this reasoning.

I honestly eyeroll every time I see something like this being said. For sure WoW and XIV have things in common given that they're the same genre, and they both have their own problems...but for the most part they don't share the same big issues. Especially that for a long time WoW's main issue is that the game is being catered to the whims of shareholders instead of creating content that would keep the interest of the players.

Of course both SE and Activision-Blizzard must satisfy their shareholders, but the difference is SE still clearly care about the quality of experience they're giving to their players. Activision-Blizzard don't. They have repeatedly ignored player feedback for several expansions because they got too comfortable on the throne Blizzard had built. The position they're in now is well deserved.

[Shurrikhan]

There's a different approach between the two game when it comes to "time-gated" content.

FFXIV will almost always allow you to do ALL content as soon as it is patched in.
WoW will simply make content inaccessible, possibly for several months, despite it already being patched in.

There's definitely two different design philosophies at play here. WoW has been plagued by an "Endgame or Die" mindset for the past several years (also called "Raid or Die"). In WoW, it can feel like you're being pushed to play and push your progress daily (the RNG and luck factors not helping) in order to keep up with the hyper-competitive crowd; if you don't, you'll be ostracized and kept out of content by the community itself. The whole "rushing through everything" mindset pervades ALL aspects of the game, including levelling.

Conversely, FFXIV simply adds in the content with the patch and allows players to consume it at their leisure; you can choose to rush, but there's often little point to it because you'll just run out of stuff to do more quickly. Some content does get held back between patch cycles to spread it out, but it's also important to note that patches come much more frequently in FFXIV; about twice as fast. Major patches in WoW are usually at least 6 months apart, and the stretches between the last patch of an expansion and the next one is usually over a year.

I've found the rush to be more true in XIV than WoW if only due to the presence of midcore content due to the added difficulty settings. Months into a tier you can still join a fresh group for normal (similar to old FCoB difficulty) raids or even start fresh into Heroics or (for fun) Mythics. By week two into a patch in XIV, you are generally expected to know each detail of the first new raid fight and any content beneath it.

I won't deny that the AP rush felt horrible as Artifact Power and still does as Azerite Power, at least until your ilvl redemption point (where finally again allowed to use the customization features you could already use on lower ilvl gear...), but in most other ways catch-up and later accessibility of content almost always feels superior to me in WoW compared to XIV. There's a lively community of players in WoW who have no interest in Mythic or maybe even Heroic, yet are still able to later go in and progress through the still-significant-enough difficulty or difficulties beneath that, and who can find plenty to do outside of raiding. In XIV, there just often doesn't feel like there's enough there for that to be the case.

[lulunami]

MMOs are dying.