What made you stop playing ffxiv?

[Zezlar]

I stopped playing b/c Rift is more fun. You remember all the changes listed in the Letters from the Producer? Well, Rift already has those things! It has an auction house, mounts, PvP, raids and even jumping. 6 months in and FF14 still feels like it's in beta compared to how polished Rift was when it was released.

I think we all can do without jumping. The animations in other games are so fake looking it's pathetic.

[Ava]

I stopped playing b/c Rift is more fun. You remember all the changes listed in the Letters from the Producer? Well, Rift already has those things! It has an auction house, mounts, PvP, raids and even jumping. 6 months in and FF14 still feels like it's in beta compared to how polished Rift was when it was released.

You're entitled to your opinion, but personally I find rift terribly imbalanced and boring - they put zero thought into the soul/class system and in return delivered the most imbalanced class system ever released and classes in that game lack uniqueness just as much as XIV does. In addition, their auction house is worse than the current state of the market wards, imo. Mounts are nice, pvp is not (see class imbalance), and their raids are pointless when leveling 1-49 is a chore for anyone use to their generic quest system that was clearly ripped straight out of WoW. Rift is a generic piece of crap and I highly doubt people will abandon their leveled/geared characters elsewhere for it.

They did; however, do an amazing job launching the game.

[Stuntmanmike]

The reason I stopped playing is because I feel like I had nothing to work towards. When you can put on any gear in the game as soon as you find / buy it, what's the point?

My favorite thing about FFXI is that it had an enormous amount of challenging low-level content.
A multitude of NM's within even the first 20 levels, some with great rewards.
Interesting and challenging missions, shoot, even only as high as level 25 I think, mission 2-3 was epic as hell.
A VARIETY of quests, which, while most had worthless rewards, almost all had interesting stories.
Working towards that next piece, or set of gear.
Vastly different areas to explore.
Collecting maps, I was personally a map whore in XI, I had almost every one when I quit.

That said, I quit because the game felt pointless. Grind to cap, then do what exactly? FFXI had the best "journey" experience of any game I've ever played and that's what I wanted with XIV.

[Grit]

Developers can learn from Rift's success... as well as FFXIV's lackluster launch.

Players CAN wait another year or two for you to make the game great.. And you will recuperate your spendings in the long-run.

Releasing unfinished products no longer flies with MMO gamers.

[Zezlar]

It's a long list, it wasn't just one specific thing that made me quit.

Battle System
Market Wards
Over-sized repetitive Zones, there is no variety
Guildleves get boring as hell after awhile
Too much emphasis on crafting
No class diversity
No content
Low amount of story missions
Lack of story related quests similar to FFXI
Poor animations
NPCs are (a little less now) utterly useless
Party search function isn't as good as it could be
I don't like stat building myself, but I could live with this.

[Soda]

I just want to say that I think this type of thread is the most beneficial and efficient way to gather information about how to improve the game. When players cancel their WoW accounts, they ask you to pick (from a large list) of options why you quit the game, and also to talk about your least favorite aspects of the game. And if you look, they've taken that information and used it to improve what the most people consider faults of the game. Even if we list our least favorite aspects of the game right now, that is something to use.

Here are my least favorite aspects:
- The amount of delimiters to logging on. As some have described before, it feels like the game is making me try to log off all the time. Run out of leves? Wait 36 hours. Ran out of anima? Wait a day or two. Playing our game too much? Exp punishment. I just don't understand why you'd ever want to have these kind of penalties in an online game. You WANT people to log in, not off.

- Equipping any gear. It really kills any motivation to level up to max when you can so easily acquire the end-game gear, and where it at any level. A huge aspect of playing MMOs is the ability to want to progress your character. One of the best ways to do that is to give people incentives to leveling up, such as saying "Hey when you get to 45, you'll have these amazing new legplates you can wear." But right now, the way gear is working, it really almost makes ranking up feel pointless after you've obtained some nice gear sets and core skills from different classes. It's like they made it incredible easy to reach endgame at an early stage in the game.

- Guild Leve limiting. I know I kind of touched on this earlier... but the fact that leves are limited to just 8 over a 36 hour period... It makes the game feel so uncertain after I've used up my leves at each camp. I'm not really having a large incentive to log on because I'm thinking "well, I used my levels, I might just be online for 35 minutes looking for a party to no avail." With that mindset, it really kills interest to log on. Personally, I think leves should be given FROM the crystal that they're for, at an unlimited amount even. Right now, the playerbase could use unlimited reasons to be online, if you ask me.

- Interface. It's awful. It just feels clunky, laggy, years behind. Why does it take so many "actions" to do something? What I'm saying is, it takes so many steps to do anything with the UI. Want to craft? That's going to be a few hundred mouse clicks. Want to look at half the menus in the game (linkshell, friendlist, party search) then open the main menu, then drag your mouse, then click the item, then wait for the periodic UI delay, THEN the menu comes up. WHY can't it just be hotkeyed?

- And that brings me to my final point. HOT KEYS. Why are my buttons auto assigned to 1~9? Why can't I make them anything I want? Why are you telling me how to play? I don't like having my buttons assigned for me. I have to use AutoHotKey just to remap my keys in the game because the UI is so limiting when it comes to customizing our hotkeys. Awful. Fix this FIRST if you ask me.

[Skidkidd]

hmm well lets see, why did i stop playing? Probably because Im 5000 miles away from my super PC. Literally. Havent seen or played ffxiv since jan 4th and cant f'ing wait to go home on the 20th and f'ing play. Here fishy fishy

[Tebhi]

I'm glad this thread was started. I think SE can learn a lot from seeing exactly why people have stopped playing XIV.

My reasons:

Drastic changes - I understand that MMOs evolve, but the changes that are being undertaken are too extreme. I haven't played for a month or two and the game is completely different now (mob size, sp gain, party sp boost, etc.)
Linkshell Exclusion - I always felt like I was cheating on a LS when I'd run into guildies and had a different LS on.
Crafting - I was watching a movie, crafting one day and I realized that I wasn't enjoying the movie or crafting while doing this.
Lack of Incentives - It just felt like there was not a reason to keep sping after a certain point. The best I could do is hit r50 and fight those NMs for shiny stuff, but it just wasn't a good enough carrot to chase.
Repetitiveness - MMOs are repetitive, but it was just too much in XIV. I was doing the same leves over and over, grinding the same mobs repeatedly.
Dwindling Community - The bustling community that I saw at launch was slowly getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, I was in a city with mostly afk people, very quiet crafters and the usuals that hung out in town all day.
SE's Issues - I was really disheartened when Tanaka stepped down.

I'm currently playing RIFT. Honestly, I prefer Final Fantasy's art, music, armoury system and the fact that it's a Final Fantasy game. I'm willing to try this game again at PS3 release, I think. It's tough to say--who knows what will become of RIFT, GW2, etc.

I'll continue to visit this forum to check for updates and discuss issues; I really do enjoy the community (minus the trolls).

[Benjaman]

I'm glad this thread was started. I think SE can learn a lot from seeing exactly why people have stopped playing XIV.

My reasons:

Drastic changes - I understand that MMOs evolve, but the changes that are being undertaken are too extreme. I haven't played for a month or two and the game is completely different now (mob size, sp gain, party sp boost, etc.)
Linkshell Exclusion - I always felt like I was cheating on a LS when I'd run into guildies and had a different LS on.
Crafting - I was watching a movie, crafting one day and I realized that I wasn't enjoying the movie or crafting while doing this.
Lack of Incentives - It just felt like there was not a reason to keep sping after a certain point. The best I could do is hit r50 and fight those NMs for shiny stuff, but it just wasn't a good enough carrot to chase.
Repetitiveness - MMOs are repetitive, but it was just too much in XIV. I was doing the same leves over and over, grinding the same mobs repeatedly.
Dwindling Community - The bustling community that I saw at launch was slowly getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, I was in a city with mostly afk people, very quiet crafters and the usuals that hung out in town all day.
SE's Issues - I was really disheartened when Tanaka stepped down.

I'm currently playing RIFT. Honestly, I prefer Final Fantasy's art, music, armoury system and the fact that it's a Final Fantasy game. I'm willing to try this game again at PS3 release, I think. It's tough to say--who knows what will become of RIFT, GW2, etc.

I'll continue to visit this forum to check for updates and discuss issues; I really do enjoy the community (minus the trolls).

Your definition of "drastic" is flawed. This game needs real, intense, overhauling, and actually DRASTIC changes before it gets any good. However, by your definition of "drastic", there is no word in the English language that can actually define the level of change that this game needs. Mobs getting bigger and changes in SP gain are not "drastic" changes. I can assure you that this game is very much the same as it was at release.

[OJtheLIONKing]

Your definition of "drastic" is flawed. This game needs real, intense, overhauling, and actually DRASTIC changes before it gets any good. However, by your definition of "drastic", there is no word in the English language that can actually define the level of change that this game needs. Mobs getting bigger and changes in SP gain are not "drastic" changes. I can assure you that this game is very much the same as it was at release.

Agreed, this game needs ridiculously huge changes. Cataclysm was considered a big overhaul but it doesn't even touch the amount of change this game needs. This is a great thread though. SE needs to be much less concerned with what the people who have managed to stay all this time think, and more about what the people who wanted to play, but left (or who were thinking of playing but never did) think.

As far as why I played, quit for a bit, tried to come back recently, but find myself unable to do it regularly? These reasons:

Market Wards - This was the dealbreaker for me. When I had not just one, but several episodes of spending upwards of 2-3 hours looking for a single item in all wards of all cities and not even finding it, it drove me to quit. They're better now, but they're still unnecessarily clunky and inefficient compared to a proper auction house. Buying a full new set of armor, as I like to do when I reach the proper rank to keep myself motivated (more on that in a moment) is still a very time consuming task when i have to manually hunt down each retainer selling it. I'm not even going to go into the other issues with price histories and the format right now. Bottom line, they're still not ideal but they're at least remotely usable.
Lack of Motivation to Level - As it is there's no Dynamis/Nyzul/Heroic/Raid content for me to work to, and I could buy lvl50 plate gear and wear it right now if I wanted to, so I don't have much to aim for.
Repetitiveness - I am trying to stay interested in leveling, but that I get the same few guildleves every time, and that they involve largely the same kind of activities. Something about its implementation in WoW as dailies makes it much more tolerable. I think it's the fact that I can pick up all the quests that need doing at once at the hub, I don't need to go back to the hub after every single quest even if there is a teleport, I can work on multiple quests simultaneously, and they are not timed. Failing a leve because of a server hiccup or game crash is not fun, either. Non-leve grinding is even worse. I had the patience to do this in FFXI 4 years ago, but I have since played other MMOs that spoil me by making me expect to have actual content and context to the grind.
It takes too long to do anything - Related to the repetitiveness is how tedious everything is. After Rank 20 it takes too long to actually rank up, and that gets very boring very quickly. I think a rate one rank a day would be a good incentive all the way to rank 50, but obviously the content needs to be there to support it--nothing is more tedious than FFXI style grinding. Almost everything about the game has a gigantic time sink built into it as well, so I can't use my limited time well. I know this is something they're working on with the GUI to reduce the amount of time there, but this slash and burn approach needs to be applied to anything that makes it take longer to kill/craft/gather. When compared to this, I can log into WoW, or if I started it up again City of Heroes, do my dailies and a heroic/dungeon, and get my fix in an hour. I could do, what, 3 guildleves in that time?
Combat system - I like the armory system in and of itself, although it could use some tweaks to boost class uniqueness. However, it's very annoying having to spam what should be an auto-attack to actually use any of the actually interesting abilities. Auto-attack alone would make this a lot more fun for me since I could focus on abilities that matter as a melee. Also, MP regen was desperately needed and I'm glad that's in, that was part of the reason I started looking to play again, so thank you for that.
Disincentives to Playing - This has been mentioned multiple times before, but it bears repeating: the game should be encouraging me to be on more often, not discouraging me. I'm an adult, I can manage my own time, and I should be able to play the game as much as I want to without it constantly giving me reasons to stop playing. To this end, I don't understand why leves have a 36 hour timer--it should be at most 24 hours and possibly less. GL are basically dailies by another name, so we should be able to do them daily. Strictly speaking, they're also like Fields of Valor in FFXI, which didn't restrict you to one every day and a half and were very successful as a result. I often found myself kind of itching to play ingame, but uh oh the leve timer isn't up for another 12 hours, so I didn't bother logging in that day, which turned into days-weeks-months. This is to say nothing of the Surplus system, which deals with the problem in exactly the wrong way.
My Linkshell left - This is a big one. I had some incentive to play before because I had at least some of my old FFXI linkshell in here to talk to while I did the repetitive guildleves. However, during my hiatus they all quit, and I now don't have a single friend from outside FFXIV to talk to. Considering how clunky the social system is, it's not easy to make new ones in this game either. As an indication, when I logged into FFXI and asked the ls if any of the members still played FF14, they laughed at me.
Too much crafting interdependence- I can understand a little, but I consider myself a plate wearing, sword wielding paladin in any MMO I play, and I like to make my own gear. It's quite annoying when to level my armorcraft I have to also spend reams of time and valuable guildleve slots/inventory space on working with (at best) tangentially related crafts.
The lack of MMO baseline functionality - Everything from the lack of a manually sortable inventory (I know that's coming) to the inability to fly/swim/jump/ANYTHING but walk to the aforementioned clunky ls/friends system all just makes me think "why am I bothering wading through all this when literally any other MMO has these features." The next point only exacerbates this.
The community has gotten bad - One thing I always used to point at to WoW players was the undeniable strength of FFXI's community. Even though there were language barriers, in general people were willing to help and not mock someone too bad for asking, and they welcomed newcomers. In the FFXIV community, however, I've seen a lot of very grumpy people who are averse to any change and don't want anything any other game, especially WoW, has as well. They also seem opposed to anything to make the game more accessible, which is exactly what this game needs. I've gotten tired of dealing with these people and it makes me sad that many of these guys used to be part of the same awesome FFXI community.

There were one or two other points I forgot about while I was writing it, but this post is long enough, and the basic gist of it is that FFXIV needs to get up to baseline MMO standards before it can hold a crowd. This includes basically everything the more curmudgeonly of the community deems as "not needed" like a jump and AH, since most MMO players want and expect little touches like this to make the game world feel richer.

After it gets that down, it can work on its potential strengths (path companions, large scale PVE ala campaign, a beautiful world that just needs more variety, and an interesting class system) to draw in more people.