Quote Originally Posted by Answa View Post
I think you're overreacting.

FFXI didn't really have any difficulty to it. It just took fucking forever to get anything done. Or to wait for an NM to pop so that some other team would claim it. Or to wait 72 hours to be able to go to Dynamis again so that your relic armor doesn't drop. I could go on.
Thiiiiis. FFXI was a game built on more fake difficulty than actual difficulty. Things took forever to do and often times you wiped just to a RNG-launched sequence of events rather than any actual screw-up by your players.

Playing correctly dictates you succeed and are rewarded for your hard work and efforts. I don't really understand the argument that the combo system is built for idiots just because it highlights the skills that will combo next... if it didn't highlight and you missed your ability, you'd have to wait for that "miss" to pop up or dig it out of your battle log with your eyes before executing your next skill. I'm just as tired of FFXI vets railing on so many of the MMO genre's improvements at the hands of WoW's addons as I am of Casual players complaining when fairly easy content or hard content is "too hard."

This game needs balance. It needs casual and hardcore content, it does not need just one or the other, and anyone who thinks that is the case is self-absorbed and selfish. Yoshi has already stated he wants to give content to EVERY type of player in this game, so just because it's not here now doesn't mean it won't be in the future. If that's not good enough then I do encourage you to stop playing and come back if and or when the game becomes a product you feel deserves your money (because that's how it's supposed to work).

But as the quote suggests, FFXI was not actually a HARD game at all, and I feel that people who played mostly or only FFXI without branching out to other MMOs are brainwashed into thinking it was the pinnacle of difficulty when it was pretty much the opposite. As someone who has played XI and WoW for years, I can tell you WoW presented more actual gameplay challenges and rewarded players more appropriately for the amount of time they spent playing rather than SE's system of throw a random number generator and a drop % on it and watch one idiot get it run 1 and a good player go 0/500. Yeah, that's great time spent to reward ratio. Would you work a job where you had a 5% chance at the end of the week to get your paycheck?

This game is currently utilizing boss mechanics that are actually interesting and require some thought. The problem is SE is not quite use to this so we see fights like Chim getting completely cheesed by mages standing in some sweet spot to avoid ALL the boss mechanics meant to make the fight engaging. That kind of BS is the community's fault and is what I have seen out of FFXI players from day 1... nothing but a fight to figure out where they can stand or be to not get hit by anything. As the game is now, I can't blame people because moving and casting, moving and dpsing, all suck at the moment from server lag. If SE fixes that in 2.0 however, I hope to see all this hug a wall cheese abolished too. Do you see people in Lord of the Rings all huddled in a corner casting spells at a boss 20 feet away, or do you see everyone out moving, dodging enemies and fighting? If you showed ANY non FF gamer a video of the way we fight enemies they would laugh at how pathetic it is. And XI was just as boring. WoW? Other mmos? Actually engaging.

Honestly if people think XI is the best game ever, it's still up and you can go back and play it. I'd love to see good ideas taken out of XI and implemented in this game, but a lot about XI needs to remain with XI.

I'd worry I've already said all these things on the forums but it seems common practice for people to say the same stuff over and over so guess I fit in.