Theres alot of chatter on here comparing FFXIV to FFXI and people wanting alot of things from XI to be put into XIV.
People saying things like XI was/is so popular so why aren't these things in this and XI is thriving while XIV is struggling so put all this stuff in.
I played XI for over 4 years and thoroughly enjoyed it and I'm sure if XI had a graphics overhaul and new plot added i'd be happy to play it but it would be XI or XI-2.
The thing is XIV wasn't ment to be XI-2 and compared to certain other mmo's XI wasn't popular and is currently in decline not thriving hence there are less servers now.
The way I see it they were trying to get a more engaging battle system in this, one that you couldn't semi-afk fight and would have to be more tactical.
Thats why you get more crits when behind a mob and the whole mechanic of disabling certain parts of a monster by hitting certains sides of the monsters with specific attacks. There was talk of magitek armour that has since not been mentioned.
There are some interesting concepts in this game there just has been poor implimentation of them and a lack of content to play through. Leves are fine but they should be more on the side thing like fields of valor in XI. If they were intended to be the main leveling content then there was a big underestimation of the variety that was needed. There is a definite need for a substantial amount of plot line to be added along with dungeon crawls and other events of some kind as well as more voiced cutscenes. The UI could do with some teaks and I do personaly agree that the fammiliar things from XI like /sea all party flags etc should have found there way into this. But also a more customisable UI would have been appreciated along with support for voice chat which I think is even more important once it comes out on the PS3.
What would have been good is if the development team posted up the orginal brief/concept for us to draw ideas from rather than leaving people drawing on XI for the type of content they want and not forming orginal concepts. If this becomes XI-2 all that will happen is people will slowly move from XI to XIV to find a barely different game and the people who didn't like XI won't like this so what would have been the point in making this in the first place if it doesn't pull in new people?.
I really do think that after the next update the community should look to other sources beside XI when thinking about what would make this game great.