MMO addiction

[RyoXander]

I was definitely addicted to FFXI, but not XIV; it's too casual (which I love now). I remember when I played XI I had a ton of friends and the game was very social. I never got that same feeling with 14 and instead have had just a very small circle of friends. Now its just me and one other close friend who joined an FC that has very nice people in it. Idk why I find it so much harder to make friends in this game. Is it cuz im older? who knows lol.

[Ryaze]

I was definitely addicted to FFXI, but not XIV; it's too casual (which I love now). I remember when I played XI I had a ton of friends and the game was very social. I never got that same feeling with 14 and instead have had just a very small circle of friends. Now its just me and one other close friend who joined an FC that has very nice people in it. Idk why I find it so much harder to make friends in this game. Is it cuz im older? who knows lol.

This game is oddly very anti-social. In that they have designed quite a few systems that seemingly discourage player interaction. In every other MMO I've played, the moment you login you get hit with system messages notifying you of important events as well as telling you every single public chat channel you've entered based on your location. This game doesn't have city wide chat, all cities chat, regional chat, or a global chat channel. FFXIV has "zone wide" chats, but the game doesn't explain this system to you at any point in time. FFXIV has decent little "tutorials" on their website, but at no point in time playing the game does it direct you to these resources. Use /shout chat? O, it doesn't reach the other half of whatever main city you're in because that's a separate instance. Your dungeon just popped and at the same time you see someone request a service/ask a question in a local chat channel. Nope, you can't send private messages in a dungeon/instance either.

This game has some of the worst, if not the absolute worst, UI bloat in any game I've played and the onboarding process for a new player has got to be nuts at this point, let alone if they've never played an MMO, and even worse if they've played very few games in general. Imagine constantly getting hit with tip boxes every time you do something new, on top of trying to just learn the general flow of the game, and you don't even know how to ask for help because the game obfuscates how to actually talk to other players instead of defaulting you into /1 General zone chat, unlike every other MMO I've ever played.