Eureka - from a FFXI point of view

[TarynH]

But answer me this: If you're going to take some content from FFXI and put it into FFXIV, why WHY would you take the most boring thing (exp / merit parties)? Why not something engaging? Any of the end game type fights? Instead of just literally pull a mob, kill and repeat until you see a FATE?

Because contrary to nostalgic belief, there really wasn't anything engaging beyond that in FFXI. It all had a base system with a fresh coat of paint.

Dynamis - Pull some mobs and kill them for random drops and currency, until you get to a "NM"
Besieged - Pull a mob off to the side and kill it.
Campaign - Pull a mob off to the side and kill it.
Sky - Pull mobs and farm them until a NM spawns. Kill NM for KI and spawn another NM.
Land Kings - Wait around and hope you don't get beaten by a claim bot. Farm mobs if you get bored.
Overworld NMs - Wait, or sometimes sit around and farm the local mobs until it spawns.
Sea - Farm mobs until you get items. Spawn other mobs to get items.
Limbus - Farm mobs until you get items.
Skirmish - Kill mobs until you reach objectives.
Delve - Kill mobs until you reach the NM.
Salvage - Farm mobs until something happens.
Nyzul - Farm mobs and sometimes light lamps until you reach NM.
Exp. Parties - Pull mobs and kill them for experience.
Abyssea - Farm mobs.
WoE - Farm mobs until you get the NM.
FoV/RoE - Farm mobs (usually).
Promyvions - Sneak around, or kill mobs, until you reach a gate where you kill mobs to go up to another floor where you kill mobs. Repeat until you reach the NM.
Overworld Areas - Sneak around, or kill mobs until you get where you're going.

Yes, it looks simplistic when you reduce it all down to that. Not saying it was bad. Some things had a different nuance to make them fresh at the time. It just wasn't the super awesome dynamic content people are remembering. It was just different from FFXIV. It was built differently, and meant to be played differently. I personally had more time back then, so I didn't mind the slow nature of FFXI as much. I had more patience to sit and wait for a monster to turn around before running past it.

And that's the issue here. FFXI was/is a slow game. That is the fatal flaw with Eureka. FFXIV is not built to be played slow. Grinding out mobs on FFXI was mostly letting your job auto-attack and build up TP; sometimes throwing out a debuff/buff. Grinding on FFXIV, however, will eventually give you carpal tunnel syndrome. Just reaching chain 30 a couple of times made my fingers hurt. You can hardly even chat in a smaller group, or you risk losing your chain. Even on FFXI you could talk between pulls.

The NMs in Eureka are seizure-inducing zerg fests. With absolutely no filters on the massive amount of flashing lights. For whatever reason, none of the filters for other people seem to work in there. You can't even see the NM you are fighting, because it is always covered in white light.

Large party groups are migraine-inducing zerg fests, that sometimes camp right next to you, and jack your kills. In FFXI, nobody could even touch your claimed mob, unless you called for help.

The aggro system is completely random. Sometimes you can run around a mob in circles and it completely ignores you. Yet if you stand still and do nothing they immediately aggro you. Sometimes Ninja's Hide works, and sometimes it doesn't (with the same mob.) It's very hard to determine what typical mob behavior is going to be. Even FFXI had some ground rules for that.

So when people say Eureka is like FFXI, they are both right and wrong at the same time. The base systems are like FFXI; you sneak around dangerous mobs, get to a camp and grind, and the quests give you vague hints. However, the entirety of Eureka feels like FFXIV trying hard to be like FFXI, and failing. It simply doesn't work. After two days, I'm already tired of trying to figure it out, let alone grind it all out.

I also have concerns about what happens when everyone is level 20 and ends up camping in the same spots. That's going to be a whole lot of fun.

[Lambdafish]

I never got to play XI when it was relevant and I always wanted to. You are exactly right about the mentality of the content, I hated the first 30mins of the content, I was on the beach fighting the crabs thinking "is this it?", Then I decided to challenge the content, go out of my way to work it out. I found a party, we went north and found the most challenging enemies we could. It was exciting finding the buff NPC up north and it made me wonder what else the island had in store. XIV doesn't have emergent gameplay, and the way eureka keeps you in the dark about lots of its content makes it compelling to me and makes me want to grind to discover what else is on the island

[niwaar]

Having tried Eureka, I think that the majority of the reason people dislike it is due to a difference in playstyle and expectations.

Yes they do dislike it for those reasons, and more.As a former XI player myself (and I assume a lot of people still playing XIV are as well), they have tried to implement this type of content before. With Diadem they had to close it down and rethink it and tweak it. They failed to do so then, and they spent 18+ months (this time cutting back seriously on content for patches 4.0 through 4.2 in order to implement a prettier and only slightly better version of diadem with arguably a worse reward structure. We played "Merit Party: The Game" we expect more out of a modern MMO. There are many parts of FFXI the community would have loved to see Eureka have been modeled after, the "Merit Party" grind was not one of them.

We would have taken:
New Dynamis (hell a lot of us would have rather seen original dynamis over what we got) - With its open area design, timed inclusion but goal orientated structure + higher drop rates. (Arguably we got a hyper grinding version of this, but XI's implementation is still better on its face.)

Abyssea - Sure you could do the alliance merit party grind we see in Eureka in Abyssea. But the core of Abyssea was based on repeatable and non repeatable quests. NM spawns, forced spawns, and the typical XI Hierarchical HNM Spawnings with the added "fun" of obtaining atma from various sources.

Assault/Nyzul - A series of time gated missions we could choose and party up to complete giving various rewards/currency and character ranks that both rewarded progress in the world but gave better vendor rewards.

When we were told about Relics being obtained through a zone instead of Materia, Light, Fate and Duty grinding. We all had the worry that it would be more Fate grinding and then were told it would be different. That they didnt want us doing the same thing over and over again in old content to obtain our weapons. What we were just given took away the gil grind. It took away the duty grind (which had a real purpose and WILL effect the game as the expansion continues to get older over the next 14-16 months it has left. What we got was Mob Grinding and more Fate grinding. All wrapped up in a shell that gates players and requires an old school party creating/joining set up that this community never has had to use. The lack of a duty finder option (and correct me if I'm wrong, lack of cross world party finder accessibility) is the last straw to the stupidty of the content itself.

[Zumi]

If you played FFXI this is very much like Abyssea where you had groups of the same family of monster and you had a camp with a bunch of those monsters and you killed them for exp.

[Cidel]

Well, I guess. My 1st party I played with had a brief conversation about FFXI when we were zerging down fish and and frogs with like 20 other people. Somebody mentioned it reminded them of Dynamis to which I replied that it barely did; it was too disorganized otherwise. Then Abyssea was mentioned, which most agreed was a better comparison. I probably only stuck around a few weeks tops after Abyssea launched, so I didn't really experience the whole thing.

Maybe with time, I'll identify better how much this "feels like XI," but out of the handful of parties I've been in after some hours, there were some aspects that reminded me of XI.

-My 1st party had the dynamic of setting up a camp and one puller grabs one particular monster family and brings it back so the tank could take over. Then some rude party would eventually come along and start taking our mobs. That was oh-so-very-XI.
-In looking for a place to camp/That buff NPC, one party literally dragged us across the map past level 12-18 monsters. We were literally hugging walls and dodging line of sight. Totally brought back XI memories. That was the most exciting part about my whole 5-6ish hours there
-I'm hoping the quality of people fighting monsters gets better organized with time, because out of the parties I've been in, none really don't know how to do much other than tank and spank. One party would run into a situation occasionally where another monster of the same family could aggro. Since the mobs were hitting the tank for like 25% of his max HP per hit, this could be dangerous. I discovered that WHM's Repose was actually sticking- 30 sec duration. I let them know that I would sleep any adds. Every. Single. Time this occurred someone would obliviously wake it up. Be it hit it with an AoE or my cohealer put down an Earthy Star. Like, in XI, an add being slept so we could fight one at a time was avoided like the plague. Here, people are still getting used to the fact that enfeebles exist? Maybe mobs need the PvP debuff icons over their head now too.

[NovaLevossida]

If you played FFXI this is very much like Abyssea where you had groups of the same family of monster and you had a camp with a bunch of those monsters and you killed them for exp.

That was the exact point in which I stopped playing XI because it no longer felt like XI. I'm not ecstatic that Eureka is a hybrid between that and a Diadem 3.0.

[Catwho]

I didn't quit FFXI because of the content. I quit because all my friends quit, and the graphics were no longer satisfying. XIV is prettier.

I've been looking forward to Eureka. I like the groove of long grinds, getting as efficient as possible, putting on some music and just killing stuff for hours. I was a bard in FFXI, and the way that class was utilized, I would chain pull for hours in the Mamool Jack camps or in Abyssea or in Dynamis. (I also had THF for Dynamis, but frankly getting back lost exp on bard was always easier....)

[Claviusnex]

As I posted in another thread having not played FF XI it reminds me if WoW's Timeless Isle which I found boring and was one of the reasons I left the game (Warlords was the final straw). Currently my mindset is to maybe finish the story line and never return. I might not finish the story if it drags too much. I'm definitely not going to grind out Protean Crystals so will have to pass on any legendary that is obtained via that path.

[Liam_Harper]

As I posted in another thread having not played FF XI it reminds me if WoW's Timeless Isle which I found boring and was one of the reasons I left the game (Warlords was the final straw). Currently my mindset is to maybe finish the story line and never return.

WoW's Timeless Isle had a lot of faults, but even then it had solid rewards for the grind. Must have been like, 20-30+ minions from various sources, at least 3 mounts, about 20-30+ toys and fun items, a 300% exp potion, decent catch-up gear, an optional free-for-all PvP mechanic and 5 world bosses that dropped raid gear and 2 piece tier. The reputation grind could be done in less than a week in a group. And timeless Isle wasn't great.

This is Timeless Isle stripped of most rewards and the grind multiplied times 10.