FFXIV/WOW cross over event?

[Eli85]

This Khajiit wishes you played more MMOs, even if this one largely agrees with the rest of your points. This one notes agreement with everything you said except this one notes that Elder Scrolls Online is doing very well right now, and has been for a few years now - and is a radical departure from any other MMO this one has yet to encounter.

So, ESO really isn't that much different from WoW. The real big distinguishing part was its leveling process and the do any expansion in any order you want (which is one thing I love about ESO). But it's still the theme park blue print that WoW normalized. The bulk of the game — end game — is still do the same repetitive content over and over to get more gear and / or alternate advancement points to become stronger. Which is what XIV is. Which is what SWTOR is. Which is what every successful MMO is. Even before that, to look at ESO, you enter a zone, do the main quest (and side quest if you like), complete it, move on to the next zone. It's the same thing, with slightly different points of emphasis.

People like and dislike different things. It's not ridiculous at all. I do think that it IS ridiculous to hate something that one has never played though, and I have ran into a lot of people in FF XIV who fit into that category. If FF XIV was just another WoW clone I wouldn't be here. It is not, thankfully. Not by a long shot. But there is some influences here, of course. How could there not be?

But it is. See the above. There are things that are emphasized here that are not in WoW, but leveling and end game, it is mechanically and philosophically the exact same thing. The only real, tangible and practical differences between WoW and XIV (that are not aesthetically based) are the complexity of the crafting systems, how alts are handled, the GCD, and the amount and focus of the end game content. Maybe those different flavours are enough for you, but you're fooling yourself if you think this game did not lift the WoW blue print.

Ok lets walk down that road. I hate to break it to you friend. Vanilla WoW is a polished version of the mmos before it.

Not at all, no. The MMOs that came before WoW played so, so differently, that you probably should classify them in different genres. Blizzard looked at the MMO landscape and said, "Here is everything that should go away," and then created WoW. It wasn't just a polished MMO; it was a complete re-definition of the genre that no successful game has strayed from since.