Quote Originally Posted by Fadigre View Post
This doesn't really relate back to your point of the playerbase and how they should be grateful

From what I can see from your post, you hold a lot of value to gameplay. There's nothing wrong with that, we're all different. I know when I was younger I would have said the same thing.

I'm now at a stage where if aesthetics and gameplay are not balanced then I quickly lose interest in single player games (multiplayer games are different, I'm engaged through competition easily, this is why I'm not incredible bummed out by the hairstyle thing and why I allowed myself to rush my character to begin with).

The aesthetic's job is to immerse the player into the world. This is the reason why educational games normally fail to engage a player as they have terrible aesthetics. If we are not engaged with FFXIV then we will see it for all it really is; a bunch of menus and buttons. If we were to take away all the aesthetics from any game then it can easily be compared to navigating Microsoft Excel.

Gameplay is always composed of several smaller games such as in a shooter you have to pull your trigger when you get your crosshair over a target whilst also scavanging for pick-ups and managing the terrain. With aesthetics to glue all of this together, games are seen for what they really are; several unimportant goals a player must achieve to progress.

If you'd like to learn about how important aesthetics are to a person like me I'd take a look at this link

And on a final note; you can take any concept and dumb it down so it sounds stupid, such as the Barbie dress-up game comment. How a person looks and dresses are important parts of the world. So important in fact that people make careers out of it.
I can easily say that all any MMO is about is running around and killing things.
All I am saying is, in a 2 year span sometimes balance with certain things are sometimes out of reach, you can always add more stuff the to CC, but if you don't have a game to show for it, it will amount to nothing. I love making characters, and my gf makes her characters for twice the time it takes me :P. At launch, need to have the very good first impression on the game. FFXI didn't have all the good CC, it was simple and to the point, yet the game was soo good that I forget to look at my character XD.

Everyone is different and love different things, but if we are comparing apples and oranges and if you had to choose one or the other within a two year span frame to make it. Which would you choose? Awesome CC or Awesome Game?

Sometimes in life you can't have both. At least with CC they can build upon it after launch ( if it's not up to players expectations and still retain subs) but if the game sucks at launch, they probably won;t get there players back and the game will burn down to the ground.

I want both too, don't get me wrong I really want to make this awesome looking character that I can show off in-game. I just know that the game needs to be awesome in order for the CC to really count in it.

PS: the comment about Barbie dress up game, it was just rage from a combination of things so forget I said that XD.