How to make FFXIV GREAT!!!

[SilverSalochin]

I have been playing MMO's of one sort or another for about 10 years now. Like many of the other players I fell in love with FFXI and was really disappointed to find out that FFXIV is so broken. The Dev team seems to be making the right steps forward but here are a few things I personally would like to see fixed in order to make this game a GREAT game instead of a poor game. I know a lot of these are already in the works and a lot of people have already posted similar things. This is just my personal two cents.

*Menu System
-Remove the side opening bar and create a smaller less intrusive UI. The menus are horrible. You have to move icons around but can not drag and drop actions? Just simplify it. Remove the crazy gear screens and all the additional data. Simplify each menu to control one thing. It doesn't have to be the same system as FFXI, but it should be as fluid, crisp, and fast.

-Make joining a party easy through the menus. It makes no sense now. Just make two buttons. Seek invite, and look for seekers. Its that easy. Dont need to go crazy with the specific jobs etc... people will weed through to pick out the classes they want anyway.

-The gear menu is particularly frustrating. You should be able to navigate through this with JUST the keyboard. A lot of players don't like to use the mouse. Make it an option. Oh and make it fast, really fast. In this game you should be able to switch weapons in a matter of seconds, changing classes on the fly. This is what people originally thought when they heard about this game.

-Items menu. What is going on here? This makes no sense. If you do a few leves and rank up your inventory will be full of garbage. Lots of garbage. Does there really need to be a +1, +2, and +3 for everything??? Limit the slots to 50 for starters, get rid of the extra + items that take up space. Oh and make selling these items to an npc FASTER, there is no reason why it takes more than 5 minutes to sell your entire inventory.

-Configuration menu. Just need to add a few things here. Most of all the ability to remap your keyboard however you choose.For example I have played FFXI for years with "aswd" as movement and the arrow keys for rotating my camera view. I personally hate being forced to use "jkil" to rotate my camera. It makes your elbows all sticking out to the side and is not as comfortable on a full size keyboard.The new targeting options in 1.18 are good but the icon for floating target selection is too over the top. Just make it a small little arrow. Add a way to change the sound made when selecting actions, its just annoying. I usually just turn the system sound all the down.

-Actions Menu. A couple of options here. Just make this either a drag and drop with the mouse or get rid of the icons all together.

-Actions Bar. Make it resizeable, all the other menus are!!! Also, have an option to get rid of the helper window that pops up above the actions, after you have the actions for a while, you'll know what they do. Also, you should be able to move it to the VERY bottom or top of the screen to save on space.

*Guildleves
-You should be able to get new guildleves at or near the Aetheryte crystals. This removes the need to teleport back to town to trade in your old ones.

-Get rid of the cap. Let people do as many guildleves as they want to receive exp. Remove gil and item rewards after the first run to prevent leve spamming for gil.

-Create more interesting leves. They are exactly like WOW for the most part. Kill 6 Dodos, or 2 Fire imps...

-Start the game out right with the early level leves. Right off the start you are killing moles and other vermin. Give people a good first impression. Add some more interesting creatures in the starting areas, Quadavs from FFXI were fun to slay

*Combat
-Animations. Most people remember FFVII. For its time, the animations are what made that game. There was nothing like Summoning Knights of the Round to lay the smack down. Weapon skills, magic, and other abilities are lack luster. The graphics are nice in the game but the actions don't seem to take advantage of this. People should be in awe when a conjurer reigns down with a nasty spell.

-Make the switch between active and passive modes FASTER. Players should be able to pull out weapons instantly to slay something, put the weapon away, and move on in a timely manner.

-Most of the weapon skills look EXACTLY the same. Change up what the characters do. It looks cheap to the person playing, like there was no time at all put into it. This would actually make it rewarding to unlock new abilities, as of now it just bleh.

-Make the actions occur instantly. There is too much of a delay between the time the action is input and the time it takes to perform. It should occur instantly upon input.

-TP. You gain TP so fast and have all the actions available in a few hits. Basically you spam actions. This takes away from the meaning of TP. It doesn't have to be managed and the weapon skills are un-rewarding because you use them every two seconds. I feel like there should be an EXTRA TP2 meter that builds as you land actions or take hits, that eventually leads up to something good.

-Skillchains. Its simple. This may be what made FFXI a unique and great game. Definitely 100% add these into this game. The beautiful thing is you can have skillchains AND the battle regimen system, though the Regimens seem kind of lame. Again make the animations amazing and add some extra effects for Magic Bursts etc..

-Oh and GET RID OF THE WHOLE SCREEN DARKENING EFFECT. Its just dumb and it doesn't add anything to the game, except a mild sense of epilepsy.

*Gear
-Get rid of repairs. Its just annoying to repair your equipment. Its a game it should be fun, you shouldn't have to do chores if you don't want to.

-Add some cool gear. The gear up to the level cap looks bland and the augmentations they grant or boring. Gotta add some wow factor to the gear. People will play for days on end if you make a cool enough sword to earn, (How about an oversized Cloud sword?) or a BA suite of armor.

-Gear level. You shouldn't be able to wear gear until you are the right level to wear it. People shouldn't have to do advanced calculus to figure out if the level 19 axe will hit harder than the level 30 axe at rank 25. Also it rewards players for earning higher levels, you earn a hi level, you get to wear the cool stuff.

*Class System
-SE's heart was in the right place when they originally made the current class system. Allowing each player to use abilities from all their classes. The problem with this is, it takes away from the individual classes. Also the classes in the game aren't true to final fantasy at all. Stay true to your roots!!! Mages not conjurers or thaumaturges.

-Jobs. Expand on what FFXI did. Use a Job/SubJob system or expand it to include a third job. This still allows for a lot of flexibility and customization. Besides it would be cool to be a War/Sam/Thf or a Blm/Rdm/Whm or a Brd/Cor/Blu? who knows!!! Just do it!!

*Misc
-NPC's. Get rid of the floating window that tells you what they're saying. Its already in the chat log. Also, its the 21st century, the important NPC's should TALK with sound. Hire voice actors, SE can afford it I promise.

-I played the beta to this game and I thought it was a fluke when there was no Auction house. This is necessary. The retainer system is just silly, too time consuming, and hard for most people to understand. Just make a central hub where people can buy and sell things. You shouldn't have to zone into 8 different levels to find the axe you just searched for. Quite trying to make it work, its beyond repair, its a dumb idea, add the auction house or something similar.

-Teleporting. Either make it unlimited or just get rid of it. Part of an MMO is running around a huge virtual world and earning new ways to navigate it. I like the ability to teleport but it almost seems kind of corny.

-Behests are great. Keep these. Expand upon them and add item/gear rewards for them.

Thats all I got. If you actually read this whole thing I would be surprised, but if you do its because you also spent $75 for the collectors edition and you want this game to rock. Feel free to comment/bash/criticize or belittle this post.

[Tirem778]

Let's just wait until patch 1.2 though to see how things turned out before wanting more complete overhauls. After that if it still kinda sucks, I'll agree with everything you just said. (Even so, I still agree with most of what you said. XD)

[Sephr]

Honestly, I don't want to be one of 'those guys', but there's a lot of 'here's what FFXI did, go do it' in there.

I'm all for good ideas, but a subjob system.. and a sub sub job system? Sounds pretty bad to me.

Lots of things I do agree on however, mainly concerning the UI. VAs would be nice, but fairly unrealistic at this point although I do feel at least the main storyline cutscenes should be fully voice-acted.

[Jennestia]

Aside the fact the game is already being overhauled, I'm waiting to see what they're going to do, though for your suggestions, above all this is one I definitely disagree with:

-Behests are great. Keep these. Expand upon them and add item/gear rewards for them.

I'm pretty sure this wasn't the purpose of Behest -- we really don't need EVERY venue to produce gear rewards or it will become yet another gear grind that plagues all MMOs. I don't mind a grind, but I don't want everything I do be for a gear reward.

I do feel at least the main storyline cutscenes should be fully voice-acted.

They already are and they stated that these will be the ones with VAs mainly. We haven't had a real CG cutscene added for story yet since it hasn't been expanded.

[Nero]

How to make FFXIV GREAT!!!

Get rid of the complainers.

[Eekiki]

Hopefully if/when hamlet defences are implemented, there won't be a need for Behest anymore.

Devs have said multiple times that drag and drop functionality was coming to the UI after all the mechanics are overhauled. It makes no sense to make all these UI changes only to have to re-do them again after changing a bunch of other stuff.

TP is fine. Would you rather sit there watching auto-attack for 30 seconds before being able to do something like in XI? I sure wouldn't.

I agree about getting rid of gear repairs eventually, but right now we need more gilsinks, and people paying the NPC to repair stuff out of convenience is one of the few things reducing the ridiculous rate of inflation.

Sub-subjobs? No thanks. The armory system takes care of that already, although I think the AP cap should be increased.

Something does need to be done about that floating window. Not just on what NPCs are saying, but for pop-up text on abilities as well. It's a bit too intrusive. If you run the game at 720p (which is what the PS3 will do), the chat log is way too small to be useful for NPC text.

AH is not necessary, ever. You get everything you got from the FFXI auction house (which was plain awful by the way) and more from the Market Wards and Item Search counter. The fact that you're still complaining about having to "zone into 8 different zones to find what you want" proves that you never used the item search counter, which eliminates that requirement. Since you obviously haven't used the Market Wards since the counter was first introduced, your opinion is invalid. What they need to do is combine the wards, but this will probably not be much of an issue once Ishgard opens, since that will likely become the Aht Urghan Whitegate of FFXIV.

The retainer system would be fine if the UI wasn't so laggy.

Battle Regimens are better than skillchains. They're easier to plan and execute, involve more than just 2-3 people at a time, and they're more effective in battle. All they need to do is add some new effects when a regimen induces an effect.

OP score is 40%. F-- See me after class.

[Spitfire]

"I agree about getting rid of gear repairs eventually, but right now we need more gilsinks, and people paying the NPC to repair stuff out of convenience is one of the few things reducing the ridiculous rate of inflation."

How so; when someone has 100 million gil a few thousand isn't gonna dent it. This just hurts they people that don't play as much and haven't amassed 10's or even 100's of million gil. I've only managed to scrounge up 1 mil gil and paying 30-40k to get repairs everyday or so really adds up and puts a dent in my wallet.

[Eekiki]

"I agree about getting rid of gear repairs eventually, but right now we need more gilsinks, and people paying the NPC to repair stuff out of convenience is one of the few things reducing the ridiculous rate of inflation."

How so; when someone has 100 million gil a few thousand isn't gonna dent it. This just hurts they people that don't play as much and haven't amassed 10's or even 100's of million gil. I've only managed to scrounge up 1 mil gil and paying 30-40k to get repairs everyday or so really adds up and puts a dent in my wallet.

Oh I completely agree, but it's something, and that's more than nothing.

[Archadius]

They already are and they stated that these will be the ones with VAs mainly. We haven't had a real CG cutscene added for story yet since it hasn't been expanded.

I vehemently disagree with this. Of all the storyline quests, we got maybe 2-3 that have "some" voicing in them. Not even FULLY voiced scenes. That might be good enough for you personally, but the rest of us feel we got the shaft, and SE didn't even lube up first.

When they DO expand the story via 1.21 and beyond, or an actual expansion pack, they had best step up the VA. I remember working at EB Games before FFXIV was released and in all their advertising they used "FULLY VOICED CUTSCENES!!!" as a primary selling feature. Talk about false advertising.

[Holy_Dragoon]

I could not help but think the OP was written by someone who had not played the game post patch 1.18