Quote Originally Posted by DAOWAce View Post
I've wanted to love FFXIV from the start, but after the massive letdown release was for people it seems they did the only thing they knew how to: Create a game nearly identical to the only one they've done before; FFXI. I don't see the original FFXIV as a 'risk', I see it as something that needed to be heavily refined and polished, not completely abolished; but it looks like they saw it as one, and here we are today.
I completely disagree. The release version was fundamentally broken. No matter how much you polish a turd, it's going to remain a turd. Just about every "original" design decision was absolutely horrible with seemingly no thought put into what they actually mean for the people playing the game. The cumbersome market wards, the random exp that incentivized dragging out fights, the stamina system that let you frontload all your power to the beginning of combat, the excessive amount of different items and quality levels, etc. The list goes on and on. Everything was just fundamentally broken on a design level, so even if the technical aspects didn't suck ass (lag, bad UI, lag, lacking server features, lag, and did I already mention lag?), the game was just poorly designed.

As far as the launch combat system goes, it was nothing like a true action MMORPG, it was a traditional one with manual auto-attack. Auto-attack is now automatic for the same reason your character's breathing is: You're supposed to do it all the time so you might as well not have to do it manually. I mean, was there ever a time to NOT attack? That's right, there never was. You just kept pressing that 1 pretty much from start to finish except when you had just blown all your stamina on a bunch of WS and cooldowns.