Fix your game

[Gnova]

My apologies, I don't wish to cone across as complaining about stuff all the time unjustifiably. I'll try to be more positive about stuff I like in my remaining 3 weeks.

Some real things you could be positive about instead of snidely complimenting the weather mechanics.
The crafting system is fantastic.
The main storyline is great.
The atmosphere in dungeons has been handled very well.
The clothing/armor designs are nice without being ridiculous.
The ability to play every class/job on one character is a nice change.
The roulette system which significantly lowers wait times for people doing lower level content has been done very well. When queueing as a tank or healer I don't think I have ever waited for more than five minutes for a dungeon pop.
The class balance seems to be pretty well done. I like that I don't cringe when one tank class joins a group over another.
There are multiple ways to earn XP (quests, dungeons, fates, leviquests).

[Ecosmith]

Some real things you could be positive about instead of snidely complimenting the weather mechanics.
The crafting system is fantastic.
The main storyline is great.
The atmosphere in dungeons has been handled very well.
The clothing/armor designs are nice without being ridiculous.
The ability to play every class/job on one character is a nice change.
The roulette system which significantly lowers wait times for people doing lower level content has been done very well. When queueing as a tank or healer I don't think I have ever waited for more than five minutes for a dungeon pop.
The class balance seems to be pretty well done. I like that I don't cringe when one tank class joins a group over another.
There are multiple ways to earn XP (quests, dungeons, fates, leviquests).

I haven't yet tried crafting, I like a bit of crafting so I'm looking forward to that.
The look of the one dungeon I've seen some of was indeed very nice, there was a great bit with a water-filled cave where wecwere running about on floating lily pads. You could see down through the water, it was v cool. The opening cinematic dolly shot through the instance was also a great scene-setter (not being sarky here, the dungeon looked really nice).
The clothing and armour does look good at times, but FF14 is sadly following the WoW trend by locking look to gear. As I progressed my MarUder through the Limpopo quests, I upgraded hos gear when better gear dropped, and found myself at various times garbed in:
A pink dress.
A huge yellow woollen sou'ester.
A yellow diaper. This last one seriously boosted my defense, and dropped at lvl 13 or 14. I looked ridiculous.

I appreciate that this is the standard way MMOs (and single player rpGs) do this, but for me, its another way that control over my character is removed from me, leaving me less invested in him and by extension the game. I'm not wearing these pieces hecause I thibk they look good, I'm wearing them purely for the numbers they represent. It means that every player is basically saying 'i dont care what I look like'.

The multi-class/single character thing is fine imo. I actually like class specialisation and the 'old' way of doing it, as I'm an alt-freak, but I see the trend. The Secret World has it too, I played that for a while. I think FF14 does it much beter than TSW btw.

The duty finder is ok for fast xp, but I'd personally rather there were more and better things in the world to do, quests and instances that you could find somewherre, rather than just popping open a window. Whats the point of a world? Still, you dont have to use them, I see. But as they're there, the devs have less need to give us other stuff.

I'm afraid the main storyline has left me totally cold, partly because of the terrible cheesy accent Balderal and the other NPCs use, and partly becsuse of the truly execrable cutscenes. They're interminable, trite, and my character nodding and gurning mutely in slow reaction shots doesn't help at all. It's ironic that the tl;dr crowd has caused text delivery to be reduced to almost nothing, replaced by cutscenes shich invariably take far longer to watch than a few paragraphs of well-written prose.

And my comment about the weather was genuine. The weather and the night sky especially are very cool. I havent seen any weather of note before in an MmO. FF14 generally looks very pretty indeed in terms of its world, architecturr, terrain and atmosphere. There's a bit too much map loading for my liking, I hate the invisible walls, and the cities are woefully laid out (no urban planning done at all obviously) to force longer running about, but its a gorgeous spectacle. Can't fault the look.