Congrats on Pagos SE!

[Souljacker]

The folks comparing XI and Eureka don't seem to have actually played XI. They heard about things, they may have dabbled a bit, but they didn't actually play the game. I played it for well over a decade of my life and will always remember it fondly.

It had flaws, sure, but nothing as egregious as this one and let's remember that it was one of the first mmos to become successful and had some growing pains. The big problem with Eureka is that there is absolutely no excuse for it to have launched with the same growing pains. Fifteen + years of developing XI taught the team a lot and by the time there were no dev kits left and no more expansions forthcoming, we had systems that really rocked and made the game super fun. All of those systems could have been added to Eureka at the start - like level sync, like our companion Trusts, like proper xp chaining, or maybe the books that sent us to kill xyz, or any number of improvements that has made XI pretty freaking amazing. It's sad that they don't have much of a choice but to contract out an entire rewrite, but I'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, I'm starting to digress. The point is that XI grew up over the years and everyone bashing it either didn't stick with it or didn't play it at all, or didn't understand the time period. It wasn't the same as it is now with instant gratification and everything f2p ad driven. It was a different era where getting 1-2 levels was a really big accomplishment because it meant you could equip a new piece of gear... and gear was relevant for much longer. Hell, people wore Leaping boots well into end game. Don't get me started on Okotes. Just getting these pieces was a task in itself that left you with a sense of pride and accomplishment and they were almost always still useful expansions later in gear swapping scenarios to improve stats (minmax). It wasn't like it is here where if you don't hit max level immediately you had nothing worthwhile to work on. The game was designed to grow alongside your character. It was really rare for something to truly be no longer useful. Gear wasn't as throwaway as it is here where the ilvl increases, and boom your old stuff gets put on the retainer at best, but mostly just turned into the grand company seals vendor.

Eureka uses an FFXIV formula with enough references to XI to make it insulting. There's no rewards. You aren't looking forward to anything. The first handful of quests don't even give you anything that improves your character and from what I hear, NONE of them actually do and you don't even get to mount up until max level. Relic won't be relevant for long enough to make it worth the grind. Casuals will be limited to basically waiting for the weekly challenge log to reset and then likely soloing mobs back in Anemos to complete that, unless SE nerfs the ability to even get xp back in there (which I'm sure they will).

This is nothing like what XI players wanted. None of us asked for this. The elemental wheel wasn't a literal elemental wheel, it was a complex system of strengths versus weaknesses we could employ in numerous ways with skillchains and magic bursts to give ourselves an advantage in combat. Everything in Eureka references something in XI, but it's so watered down and in many cases completely misinterpreted that they really should just delete it from the game entirely. That's how I feel as someone who gave over a decade of her life to Final Fantasy XI. I'm only even here because there's nothing left in XI for me to do anymore, not really. And that's not their fault. It's just over.

And it's looking like it might be over for this game as well, at least for me. I canceled my subscription two nights ago. I haven't logged in since. I'm still checking the forums to see if they are going to address this travesty, but there doesn't seem to be any hope of that.

It makes me sad.