Quote Originally Posted by Xatsh View Post
More people playing this game I feel hated XI then loved it. Outside my guild you mention XI people usually start talking about how horrible it was and how much better WoW/GW2/and insert almost any other mmo that is not XI was then XI. So should not be surprising people prefer the mainstream wow style. Most of them are from wow or similar games.
I'm amused to see some people pining for 1.0 when I can bet dollars to donuts they were the same individuals who kept going on and on about how 1.0 did not feel like a final fantasy game.

1.0's original combat was not a bad idea per se. TOR did the "no auto-attack" thing and that actually worked because there was synergy between resource-generating abilities and what other attacks and skills you could use (to my recollection the argument against the no auto attack design was "OMG I CANT TYPE WHILE FIGHTING STUFF WTH QQQQQQQQ"). Stamina as a battle pacing mechanism pushed things too far, and would have forced stamina recovery/haste (I have a feeling Tanaka wanted to use haste as a stat to improve stamina regen) down everyone's throats at some point, IMO.

What the battle system in 1.0 lacked was a LOT of polish. It was slugging between intentionally being slow as well as the horrible latency between the client and the servers in Japan. Random skill gains to increase weapon rank was probably the worst offender of the lot, because it intentionally decreased leveling to something even slower than snail's pace (in before "omg i luv spending 10 hours to get only 5% of exp to next level!1!one"). The fact that you were expected to grind forever and a day for traits didn't help (guild marks for traits were RNG generated, and with leves being RNG generated as well you had RNG on top of RNG...), and the obvious lack of synergy between abilities didn't help.

I'll still argue that The Secret World did what Tanaka & Co. were trying to do with 1.0. It's a polished version of what we saw when the original FFXIV launched.