Why not borrow the good parts from FFXI?

[Azurymber]

Massive city battles with invading forces.
Ferry/Raft rides with random events.
Meaningful exploration with difficult mobs, mazes, unique pathways, and things to discover.
Skill-based battles rather than combo-spam.

Eureka is literally just 100s of people running from nm to nm killing things near instantly, and lagging people out. It's basically just hunts in a special zone with pointless mechanics everyone is ignoring.

And rather than make the zone interesting, it's just groups of mobs scattered in giant areas with almost nothing interesting to discover.

I don't understand why devs keep implementing the same 100+ person spam hunt/nm/fate mechanics, that lag people to death, and make the monster your killing disappear from your screen due to the number of people.

[Alash]

Because the game design does not allow for it.

-Massive city battles with invading forces.

Would result in, and I quote yourself, "100s of people running from nm to nm killing things near instantly, and lagging people out."

-Ferry/Raft rides with random events

In XIV would turn into "An instanced 'dungeon' where sometimes a giant crab spawns, and sometimes it doesn't. And the giant crab drops lv.1 glamor gear."

-Meaningful exploration with difficult mobs, mazes, unique pathways, and things to discover

I doubt this game can actually do this. You have to remember that part of the reason XI felt like this is that
A) You sucked at it. You were a ween who'd hardly played an MMO let alone an online game and didn't fully understand the constrictions the medium possesses, and...
B) You were probably still on dial-up or really crappy ADSL and so you weren't inclined to seek online sources of information out, or maybe didn't know of their existence. Not to mention today's datamining culture literally everything in the "maze" would be discovered before the servers even come up.

-Skill-based battles rather than combo-spam

Would require an entire rework of the game systems, something I doubt they are inclined to pursue.

"I don't understand why devs keep implementing the same 100+ person spam hunt/nm/fate mechanics"

Because their subscriber numbers stay afloat, so why bother improving? The game has remained exactly the same since 2.X, and it isn't going to change.

[Vivi_Bushido]

Personally I would rather we quit trying to recycle anything from FFXI at all and make FFXIV unique and special with new fresh innovative stuff.

[Razard]

Why not borrow the good parts from FFXI?

I thought they did for Eureka.

[Sarynth]

Because their subscriber numbers stay afloat, so why bother improving? The game has remained exactly the same since 2.X, and it isn't going to change.

I just want to borrow this bit right here because it highlights one of my biggest complaints about 14, and why I'm currently loving Eureka. SE keeps sticking to the safe path of "hey lets copy wow and other western mmos
instead of trying to either improvise or borrow stuff from ffxi. Would I like to see some things like an actual rework of game systems and endgame that doesn't fall into the dungeon spam for tomes, raids or trial? yes I'd love it but sadly Alash has the right of it that SE won't bother improving because they have the subscriber numbers. It's kinda sad how vertical progression and this devotion to the 2.x formula is really only leading to stagnation. C'mon SE let's get some version of dynamis, sky, nyzul, salvage, sea etc and horizontal progression with it.

[Rinuko]

I'd love for some besieged or salvage but i doubt we ever see that in XIV. heck even Einherjar

[Cabalabob]

Content in 14 doesn’t have the staying power of 11. Due to linear progression once the new patch comes out the old content is all obsolete and there’s no reason to run it anymore other than glamour. Content only lasts about a month in ffxiv. This isn’t the case in ffxi, 12 years later and people are still doing dynamis (the first endgame content added).

Why make complicated and intricate content that is only going to be played for a month? ffxi didn’t have that problem because content lasted years and the equipment stayed relevant until late in the game and when it became irrelevant, they updated the content to make it relevant again.

[MistakeNot]

Content in 14 doesn’t have the staying power of 11. Due to linear progression once the new patch comes out the old content is all obsolete and there’s no reason to run it anymore other than glamour. Content only lasts about a month in ffxiv. This isn’t the case in ffxi, 12 years later and people are still doing dynamis (the first endgame content added).

Yet there are far more people playing FF14 than FF11. FF11 may have staying power - but only for a few people.

[Rinuko]

Yet there are far more people playing FF14 than FF11. FF11 may have staying power - but only for a few people.

Odd, not a lot of player plays a 10+ year old mmo vs their latest mmo. /thinking emoji

[KisaiTenshi]

Massive city battles with invading forces.

V1.0 had this, various other MMO's have this. It generally results in not being very fun for the people who don't want to participate. Like ideally, the mechanism for this is to have a city that is regularly assaulted by various classes of monsters (eg from easy zombies to hard dragons) and you have to participate in some meaningful manner to get any reward. It could even be done in a way that crafting and gathering classes can be used to build defenses.

However as much as I like the idea in concept, in practice, players and bots just zerg the map and no strategy is involved.

Ferry/Raft rides with random events.

V1.0 also had actual "ferry" zones. Well, until they got rid of the Ferry entirely. Another MMORPG I've played had something like this as well. To get to a "fishing ship" required triggering a certain event.

Meaningful exploration with difficult mobs, mazes, unique pathways, and things to discover.

What people want when they ask for "meaningful exploration" is that they want dungeon/tower/castle type locations that actually require "solving" (eg "The Sunken Temple of Qarn"'s type of puzzles but actually open different paths through the dungeons, and they change if you don't solve them correctly.)

Skill-based battles rather than combo-spam.

Combo-spam is what every turn-based system uses because that's what is less cheatable and most fair, it also gives it enough turn around time to verify that the combos and skills are valid. Action MMORPG's (where you have to manually dodge as well) are extremely cheatable and tend to suck if you don't live in the same city that the servers are in. This is why many Japanese and Korean games tend to suck when they are localized to for North America/Europe, because they don't have the sub-16ms (1 frame) latency to allow all players fair play.