Why do you keep playing FFXIV ?

[loreleidiangelo]

Not wanting to lose my spot in raid is what keeps me SUBBED to 14, but most of what I do if I'm not raiding is PVP. It's not even that this game's PVP is particularly spectacular or balanced, it's just that it's loads more interesting than the PVE content ATM (what content, lol?).

I enjoy PVP in other MMOs, but this is the only one where I know people who actually play, so that's what keeps me coming back. Chatting and raging and laughing with everyone on VOIP while we wreck or get rekt is always a riot.

[Gimorian401]

I play because I can set goals for the day, patch even an expansion. I do things at my pace and I like working with people when I play. Solo games tend to bore me pretty quick.

[Averax]

Right now there isn't a whole lot to do endgame, so pretty much I log in just to cap esoterics until 3.1. (and let me tell you, doing the same couple of dungeons every day gets old real fast). There's also Alexander, but i've pretty much gotten all i need from there. (for now)

I've also been working on alts

[OfTheWhitewind]

Because there's always something to do! Also because this has been my first MMORPG experience ever so I'm pretty much like the obnoxious kid at Disney World for the first time that wants to do EVERYTHING.

[Obysuca]

Because there's always something to do! Also because this has been my first MMORPG experience ever so I'm pretty much like the obnoxious kid at Disney World for the first time that wants to do EVERYTHING.

>_> XIV's your first mmo experience? I'm sorry lol

I mean, theres far worse mmos out there, but theres also far far better ones. Sure, theres a lot of WoW clones out there, but XIV's a watered down WoW clone aimed at people with low attention span (able to cap by doing 1 expert a day) / people who don't want to have to think (no special stats, no procs, no elemental weakness, no resistances, no multiple gearing choices, only a single path in dungeons, your gearing choice picked out for you etc) or people who have never played a mmo so they don't know that there's better and XIV has a lot of bad game designs :/ Only reason its stayed up for so long is because it's got FF in the title, which won't carry it forever.

[OfTheWhitewind]

snip

Well, considering I'm a casual player with a low attention span, not interested in learning a million different game mechanics and have never touched an MMO before now I would say FF14 is just fine and probably the only one I'll ever touch. :P And to be honest the other MMOs out there really do not interest me in the slightest.

Sure I "don't know there's better" ones out there but eh. I don't really wanna know, being the filthy casual that I am. Ignorance is bliss.

[Colorful]

>_> XIV's your first mmo experience? I'm sorry lol

I mean, theres far worse mmos out there, but theres also far far better ones. Sure, theres a lot of WoW clones out there, but XIV's a watered down WoW clone aimed at people with low attention span (able to cap by doing 1 expert a day) / people who don't want to have to think (no special stats, no procs, no elemental weakness, no resistances, no multiple gearing choices, only a single path in dungeons, your gearing choice picked out for you etc) or people who have never played a mmo so they don't know that there's better and XIV has a lot of bad game designs :/ Only reason its stayed up for so long is because it's got FF in the title, which won't carry it forever.

I've played dozens of MMOs (maybe more than 100 at this point) and FFXIV is 2nd to only WoW pre-WoD (a lot disagree, but I loved Mists), and probably less popular opinion, Runescape back before they added the P2W crap. I think you're greatly exaggerating the things other games have over it. It is missing a lot of things sure, but as of now it's the only MMO worth my time and money. I haven't played FFXI so I can't compare it to that myself, but it sounds downright awful. Some classes have one job which is to stun a monster at a certain point? Gear taking months and months to obtain? I don't find things like that very fun.

I think the only major flaw comes from the raid and dungeon environments being very lacking, and I suppose that could be blamed on the lack of money they're making, or the lack of money SE is willing to invest back into the game from the profits. For example, all of WoD and Alexander are well, aesthetically similar (each boss room) and overall look downright "boring". I guess it comes down to opinion in the end, but if you compare Alexander to the likes of Throne of Thunder, you can easy tell which one had far for time and money put into it. Not just in boss count, but visually. The trash was somewhat interesting, or rather the paths to the boss, the bosses felt more interesting and looked a lot more interesting, a few examples are Durumu the Forgotten, Horridon, Dark Animus, Megaera and Lei Shen. The boss rooms usually weren't just rectangular or squares (or maybe they were but they just spiced them up significantly rather than the bland samey looking ones in FFXIV). But that's an unrelated issue.

I think all the issues boil down the lack of money, and with a fairly small sub number compared to the mammoth that is WoW (aprx. 600k) they don't have much of it in comparison. They also tend to spread their development efforts too thin, across multiple things without focusing on perfecting one thing. This is a fairly large issue to me, and results in most things never being used by players because they're not developed well enough.

[Obysuca]

I haven't played FFXI so I can't compare it to that myself, but it sounds downright awful. Some classes have one job which is to stun a monster at a certain point? Gear taking months and months to obtain? I don't find things like that very fun.
.

Sure, it might sound awful, but its a whole different experience when you actually play it. The gear actually felt like an achievement and practically every piece you obtained had a story behind it. Leveling took a while and people actually had conversations and made bonds that lasted for 5-13+ years. There was no DF so the jerks were less common because everyone knew everyone on their server, so if you were a jerk, no one did crap with you, which is a plus to XIV's "me me me, screw everyone else" attitude. Sure, there were a few bad apples here and there, but the community was much better than XIV's "community", which is almost nonexistent because of DF. Knowing people (which you would because people actually talked in XI), got you through the game much easier than the rare few who never talked and had to wait hours for a pt, because they didn't know anyone or attempt to make their own pt.

All I see on XIV are people who expect to get carried / people who ragequit from 1 wipe / people who demand you know the fight before doing the fight within an hour of release / demand you watch a 20 min video instead of them taking 30 seconds to type the mechanics out. On XI, in 11 years of playing it, I've never once had someone ragequit after 1 wipe or demand people watch a video. If you didn't know the fight and were new, that was fine, someone took 30 seconds or so to explain it and guess what, people listened. Unlike XIV where people "play how they want to play" and cause a ton of unneeded wipes.

There was a whole variety of content (not counting it being out for X amount of time, just in general, there was so much you could do rather than 2 dungeons for 3 months ish then throw those out). Old content was still relevant, so if you joined late, you could still get to experience said old content and get gear that was still relevant too. There were so many side-grade gear so you could mix and max for certain encounters and the gear wasn't trashed 3 months after it coming out. Relic (and mythic) were actually rare and good and not just "oh here's something to get, but now its worthless and only glamour", like XIV does).

People also didn't up and unsub a month after an update until the next one, because there was plenty to do to where you wouldn't get bored (the point of a mmo, to never run out of things to do). 75% of the game wasn't obsolete like XIV's is and there was actual open world content so (up until aby or so), you'd actually see people quite often out and about doing things. Also, expansions felt like expansions, not just a patch you paid $50 for like HW. Each expansion in XI added some new sort of content, rather than rehashing and rehashing like XIV does. Practically every update built upon the content they added in XI, rather than throwing it out the next update like XIV. The content released in each update in XI(which used to be spread out further than XIV's for a good while), was enough to keep people busy right up until the next update and beyond. You didn't see people going "I can't wait for 3.1 to come, there's nothing to do" or "I leveled a new character to prevent boredom". SE didn't try catering to the super casual and then try to throw everyone else in for an update, resulting in a lackluster update with no content like XIV does. In XI, they knew who their playerbase was.

It felt more like an actual world, rather than a game. The music is the best I've heard in pretty much any mmo (lots agree, but its an opinion), best storyline for a mmo too (it trashes XIV's hard). The quests and missions were meaningful and actually had plots instead of "go kill 3 sheep, done". After 11 years of playing XI, I still remember practically all of the missions, most of the job quests and a lot of the side quests. XIV? Who here remembers exactly what happened 2.0 - 2.4? It was pretty much "Go run this errand. Oh no, a primal, go kill it."

Also, inventory expansions were added in game from a quest >_> Rather than XIV's excuse of "crashing the server if we gave you more, so go buy some with real money!" The events were more involved and were more than "talk to npc, do a fate, done, never touch it again". You could do the event multiple times in XI for different rewards (sometimes better rewards when wearing the first reward you got) and there was always more than just 1 thing going on. Like the last event, there was the dancing / emote game, some mini games, goldfish scooping and more.

The lockouts were only 2-3 days, rather than a week, so you could actually go in and attempt to get things again and the gear was worth it and lasted a while, so you didn't have to worry about it becoming obsolete right when you got it (XIV, finish full eso, it's now worthless, here's more tomes). There were plenty of special stats / procs like, refresh+ pdt- mdt- regen+, in X weather: Y effect and so on. Elemental weakness', weapon resistances. You could also gear up multiple jobs at once, rather than being forced to stick with a single main job and everything else getting subpar gear. The jobs actually felt different from each other, rather than in XIV, theres very small, if any, difference between jobs, besides having to be on flank or rear, most jobs play exactly the same in XIV (same reason we can't have a real pet job, SE said it'd be "too hard for new players")

Like I said, XI felt more like a world, rather than a game (or a lobby game, looking at XIV)
Sure, there was some bad stuff, nothing is perfect, but the majority of the people who bash XI and say how "bad" it was, usually have either never played it or never got passed lvl 10-15 because they didn't want to have to participate in one of the M's in mmo, multiplayer.

[Eidolon]

You know I'm actually hitting this issue of late.

Why do I keep logging in?

Because SE has me trained to think that not logging in = missing a lockout = falling behind. I'm starting to question if I log in for fun anymore, since running the /same/ expert every week is boring, getting the /same/ red scrips every week is boring, running the /same/ alexander (normal) is boring to gear alt jobs. The caps just make this feel like such a tedious grind that I'm really feeling like this game is getting worst and worst.

If it wasnt' for my freinds I'd probably have unsubbed by now.

[Reinha]

I stay subbed because I'm satisfied with how the game is now and the way it's going forward. Heavy emphasis on quests, a leveling experience where you can actually die if not careful and professions that actually take time and thought. Those are the main things I like about this game.

As for what I do in-game. Oh boy that's a long list. Leveling all classes, completing logs, finishing all quests, getting a few relic weapons for glamour, getting a glamour for my most played jobs, leveling desynth, leveling chocobo, getting MGP, doing achievements with a cosmetic reward of some kind, doing beastman dailies for mounts, collecting gil to buy a mansion some day and gearing up my main with tomes. Maybe I'll have time to farm mounts and minions at the end of this expac. ._.