If I was given the money, the team, and had to gamble...

[reality_check]

You guys are pin-pointing on two aspects of FF11. Grinding and HNMS.
A decent Auction House system.

FFXI Auction House System:

You can only sell things in stacks of 1, 12 or 99 (........)

The prices of incredibly rare gear NEVER fluctuates because there's a built in history of what the item has sold for in the past.

There is no way to search for an item via text entry

It took days for the auction house to load.

The buyer had to pay to put items up for sale, even if the item didn't sell (I would sell a stack of Fire Crystals for 2100gil and I would be charged a 400 gil tax fee?)

The items went to your delivery box instead of going straight into your inventory (what is the logic behind this?)

Oh, and let's not forget the guessing game of the auction house. You can't actually see what people have listed their item for. How archaic is that?

Someone's wearing nostalgia glasses.

[Orsnoire]

What the OP is driving at is what I label "MMO Stockholm Syndrome." It results from people who spent years convincing themselves that x, y or z game feature was really fun, simply because they had to do it a lot. Stated another way, they came to see flaws in the game as features because they were so codependent on playing the game that they had to find a way to reconcile its flaws in order to remain intellectually stable with playing the game in general.

End result is that OP, and those calling for the same inane crap, are people who haven't moved on because they're emotionally and intellectually incapable of overcoming their former paradigm. For this reason they're completely incapable of seeing reason and reality of just how poorly such a game would be recieved and how unlikely its success would be.

[Keres]

Build TP...build TP...build TP...build TP...build TP...wait...wait...wait...WEAPONSKILL! YEAH! I DID SOMETHING!

Build TP...

[Vanidin]

Stuff.

Just go play xi if that's what you want.

[Zantetsuken]

Build METER...build METER..build METER..build METER...build METER..wait...wait...wait...LIMIT BREAK! YEAH! I (or someone else) DID SOMETHING!

Build METER...

Fixed.

Ok, I'm joking... a little.

The point is, FFXI had a baseline of auto-attack+other skills which build to unleash very damaging WS which then combo into Skillchains and finally Magic Bursts. Party coordination was rewarded well in FFXI.

FFXIV has a baseline of weapon skill combos which are more active and intricate, but are effectively FFXI's auto-attack in the amount of damage they do. These build the LIMIT BREAK meter... which only one person can use, and typically only during boss fights.

FFXIV has more combat options for sure, but once you get optimal rotations down, it's really just flashy auto-attack that requires player input.


I'm not saying one is better than the other, but both systems actually have similar levels of engagement.

[randomrope]

It would fail because people these days wont play a game with that kind of slow leveling, not to mention that boring combat.

I enjoyed FFXI back in the day, but its 2013 dude.

Leveling is completely different in XI now. You can easily level up to 60ish+ in just a few days. 75 within a week or even higher. With book page exp and Abysea alliance grinds its a totally different leveling game. Leveling in XI is now faster than leveling in XIV

[deathsite]

As a monk in ff11 all you had was auto attacks and your ws boost before a ws to get more dmg and use focus vs my monk in ff14 were I have to use Internal Release/blood for blood/Dragon Kick then Bootshine into Twin Snakes into Demolish with Touch of Death then if I have the spell speed I could use Bootshine into True Strike into Snap Punch then do that over and over again keeping dots on the target at all times and while moving to get max dmg

are you going to tell me that my monk in 11 did the same work as my monk in 14 does?

[Sixmp]

I liked XI in many ways. The difficulty was fun. The endless grind was not. The constant waiting just to get a party of 6 was not fun. Getting enough people to do anything that took more than 6 people become so serious due to it being difficult that is spoiled the fun. I enjoyed leveling BST solo in the end. Only to find out that BST in end game was mainly crowd control and usually ended up with me having to constantly go back to leveling to regain lost XP.

FFXI did have it's fun points. It was however mainly a pain in the rear.

FFXIV ARR could use some more difficulty but imo that is about all it needs. That and more content but that will come with patches and expansions

[Zantetsuken]

As a monk in ff11 all you had was auto attacks and your ws boost before a ws to get more dmg and use focus vs my monk in ff14 were I have to use Internal Release/blood for blood/Dragon Kick then Bootshine into Twin Snakes into Demolish with Touch of Death then if I have the spell speed I could use Bootshine into True Strike into Snap Punch then do that over and over again keeping dots on the target at all times and while moving to get max dmg

are you going to tell me that my monk in 11 did the same work as my monk in 14 does?

We always joked about 'AFK MNK' in FFXI, so I'll cut an exception for that one.

But jobs like THF, RDM, NIN, WHM, BLM, SAM, RNG, etc had nearly the same (endgame) engagement factor that this game has. It just feels different because FFXI had a different baseline with auto-attack and single-enemy focus. If you screwed up in FFXI, your party wiped -- even on trash mobs.


The fact is that even the slew of abilities that MNK has in FFXIV can be reduced to a few optimal rotation macros.. which, in turn, makes it effectively equivalent to FFXI's auto-attack.


It's really the illusion of choice -- You can do the most damage possible by triggering the preset abilities in order, or you can just ignore it -- but most people feel like they are more engaged and active, so I guess it works - for now.


**DISCLAIMER: I'm talking about FFXI pre-abyssea. It was a different game then. **

[BlaiseArath]

It would fail because people these days wont play a game with that kind of slow leveling, not to mention that boring combat.

I enjoyed FFXI back in the day, but its 2013 dude.

Agreed. What we need now is another Copy > Paste Next Gen MMO WoWclone with as little uniqueness as possible, and lets make sure items are as boring and uninteresting as humanly possible, and the Open world has 0 reason to be explored at all so its just a large, empty, useless filler space you run through on Auto-pilot from Exclamation point to Check point.

Cause we all know from experience trying to clone a game to win that games playerbase works perfectly every time.

Oh, those countless Call of Duty/iOS/etc clones that tried to profit off their respective Popular games Fanbases that failed miserably leading to dozens of gaming companies either failing or being bought out due to loss of revenue? Nah, ignore those, Lets keep trying to Clone a game and get that crowd of players on ours. No way this will backfire.

........ Seriously though, I wonder if people listen to themselves, companies included. Can take a page from Capcom and enjoy their large failures over and over. If people wanted a WoWclone, frankly they'd play WoW. Time has shown us that games that offer a new experience generally sell the best unless its an already established IP. Saints Row learned this when it moved on to 3/4. it was essentially a GTA clone in SR1/2 (and while i personally preferred Saints Row over the mess of GTA4, It was still a clone more or less).

When Saint's Row 3 came about, they took a different approach. Walked away from the more serious deeper town and moved into a full blown satirical comedy fest. Personally I liked the Mix of Serious/Comedy of 2 better but It broke from the GTAclone Mold into something unique, and it sells well. but even that game can't compete with the original, and GTA5 proves this.

On the flip side you can look at Resident Evil, a series that sold well up until about RE5 when Capcom decided it was going to try to make it a Third Person shooter and less Survival Horror. Then came Resident Evil 6, which almost every can agree just become a frigging Action-Shooter and it failed miserably. Capcom also brought us epic failures like DMC. Two games that started as one thing and sold well, then strayed form the path to encompass a broader range of playrs aaaannnddd...? FAILED. So the message comes off pretty nicely here, when you break from what makes the series good and try to copy others just so you can appeal to that crowd, You almost always lose. Also Dead Space 3...

What I'm getting at is, This MMO needs to be more unique, There's already an established MMO that has this model, its Wow, and no matter how hard SE Tries, it will never take WoWs fanbase... So While I absolutely would not bring back sh*t like ground kings... FFXIV is in painful need of something that seperates if from games like GW2, which offer more content and are FREE. Square Enix/Final Fantasy White Knights are only going to make up so much of a popuation, so if FFXIV wants to last at all, It needs to become worth the 15$ a month or so its costing us... and Copy>Pasting every popular MMO idea in the last 5 years (and leaving out some of the great ones from FFXI mind you...) Is only going to be appealing for a small time, even to people who enjoy those things... Because at the end of the day its all be done before, sometimes better.

We don't need a FFXI port, especially not one from a Nostalgia Goggle of 75 cap era bullsh*t. But say what you will about FFXI but it had a lot of good ideas but just couldn't implement them cause of the technology of the game or poor foresight. FFXIV should not have this problem.

My dream of FFXIV is really giving us more "Diablo II" feeling in gear, and less "Diablo 3"... While theres a lot of other things i think they should have borrowed from XI when they were shopping for stuff to Copy>Paste from MMOs... Gear is the biggest thing for me, and I feel like I.lv just doesn't do it for me. Even Materia feels pointlessly boring.

Edit: And with it all said it done. I don't dislike FFXIV... I just felt like I've played it before. in Guild Wars 2.. Except GW2 was free. I want FFXIV to be an amazing game, I just don't see it standing up to any test of time when all its best features are just borrowed ideas almost directly copy and pasted except a bit more poorly implemented... I know the games new so i'm not bashing it too hard. But I just hope it picks up and develops its own style in the upcoming year.