Anyone else having problem with big changes (job system/main story)

[Virtualwarp]

Over the years square enix started to introduce one change after the other to balance the game. Since I have a job for earning my one money and other things to do than gamming, I can only spent limited time on the game. So it happens to me several times that I returned to the game after a break find a lot of things in the character and job system changed and need to relearn.

When I started four years ago and FFXIV was new for me I really liked it the way it was and the number of jobs to choose from was overseeable.

Here are just some things which I observed in the game over the years:

* assignment of attribute point while leveling up
* using ice,fire, etc. ward potions to increase resistence during normal game play
* cross class skills, a motivation to level on multiple crafting classes
* druid protess command
* command from archer were removed to make bard stronger

While I have some understanding that the game needs to be kept modern and easy for being interesting for new players and keep existing ones, I am not so happy how it is done. Most of the changes are not that critical for me but may be for other veterans. For me the most anoying thing are command and job system changes.

Now according to producer live letter part lviii they want to shorten the main story. What I dislike here is that the players once again have just to accept whatever they do.

Am I belonging to an old fraction of players used to offline-games where I had the choice when to apply a patch and when not.

Anyone else dislikes these changes? Is it the same with other online games as well?

[Raltar]

This is par for the course in MMO games. Things change over the years, expansions add more levels and abilities that need to be balanced, new classes, and so on. The shortening of the main quest has been asked for for a long time because of how much of a slog and how many pointless filler quests there are in the 2.X story. Considering you have to do the main story of every expansion, it makes it more difficult for new players to get into the game to play with their friends, for example, because they have to slog through some seriously boring stuff in that section of the main story.

[MariaArvana]

It's just how online games are. As the game ages, certain systems become obsolete or new systems are designed to streamline them, or some systems were obsolete from day 1 and basically serve no purpose, so the devs take time to remove them, tune them better, or replace them with more engaging systems. As an example:

* assignment of attribute point while leveling up
* using ice,fire, etc. ward potions to increase resistence during normal game play
* cross class skills, a motivation to level on multiple crafting classes
* druid protess command
* command from archer were removed to make bard stronger

-Assignment points was an illusionary choice and served little purpose. DPS & healers put them into their main stat that's used for damage without looking back, it made SMN/SCH harder to play optimally if you liked to play both since you'd have to constantly shift the points back and forth. Tanks were the only arguable case that it could benefit, since their VIT didn't boost their attack (At least until Midas/Creator)

-Outside of boss-specific mechanics where the game gives you buffs to survive anyway (Scylla), the ward potions were effectively useless. The damage reduction they gave was so miniscule due to how elemental resistance are programmed that popping a damage potion to kill the enemy faster gave you more damage mitigation.

-While interesting in theory, it was again an illusionary choice and a forced system. No tank worth their salt is not going to level GLD to 22 for provoke. No healer worth their salt was not going to level CNJ to get protect. The worst of all was Blood for Blood behind 34 LNC, or quelling strikes behind 34 (38?) ARC. Extremely powerful tools that literally made you weaker for not getting them, or worse, literally incapable of doing certain fights (Any fight with a tank swap in provoke's case.) Now every job has all the tools it needs to function correctly without playing 2-3 other jobs that the person may not have even the slightest desire to play.

-CNJ protect was bad game design. Only WHM's protect gave magic defense till they changed it, meaning in high-end fights your whole party was taking way more magic damage for literally no reason other than 'well, you didn't bring a WHM'! It's the same logic that made WAR unstoppable throughout HW due to it being the only tank giving slash resist, along with a permanent 10% damage down on Storm's Path. besides that, protect was a kinda useless skill. There's literally no reason you'd ever not use it, the buff lasted 30mins so its not like you had to do any timing, fights were designed with it in mind, so it was more of a punishment for not having it then a benefit for having it.

-Not sure which command you were talking about on ARC, so I won't comment.

The point is, a lot of the things they trim or change are useless, obsolete, or worse, actively harmed the game's balance. It'll be the same case with the main story. There are a TON of useless quests in the ARR MSQ that could be trimmed and literally nothing would be lost from the story, they're simply quests for the sake of padding out the story, without contributing anything. Like, 90% of the Titan questline can be cut out and nothing would change to impact the overall story due to how pointless it was. (A whole bunch of fetchquests without meaningful character development that could have been summarized with, 'let's have a party!' then next quest the party starts, put all exposition about the band of heroes here, done. 10-15 quests + a dungeon summarized in 1/100th of the time.)

The MSQ is especially egregious and needing a trim-down because a lot of players just get stuck through the horrible, long drawn out slog that is ARR and quit the game before they ever see the actual good story.

[Yencat]

While some changes have been controversial I can't imagine there's many players, new or old, that will be sad to see them shorten the ARR MSQ. It's easily the most complained about thing in this game, and SE probably has the numbers of around which level people drop out of the game to back it up.

[Insertusernamehere]

I never played WOW or ESO but my friends who joined to FFXIV try it for free left before reaching 30 level. I don't know the difference between WOW / ESO / FFXIV but something with FFXIV wrong apparently
I am guessing slow progressing story and unappealing early jobs with limited skill set with 1 button spam.
But I can't make true comparison because I don't know anything about WOW or ESO. I will try their game when I have spare time and money.

[Yencat]

I never played WOW or ESO but my friends who joined to FFXIV try it for free left before reaching 30 level. I don't know the difference between WOW / ESO / FFXIV but something with FFXIV wrong apparently
I am guessing slow progressing story and unappealing early jobs with limited skill set with 1 button spam.
But I can't make true comparison because I don't know anything about WOW or ESO. I will try their game when I have spare time and money.

I can't speak for ESO, but WoW doesn't have a MSQ. As long as you have the level for it you're free to go and do whatever you want. The downside to this is the storytelling can become a bit incoherent as you're zooming through multiple expansions and timelines before resolving the previous.

[SturmChurro]

I never played WOW or ESO but my friends who joined to FFXIV try it for free left before reaching 30 level. I don't know the difference between WOW / ESO / FFXIV but something with FFXIV wrong apparently
I am guessing slow progressing story and unappealing early jobs with limited skill set with 1 button spam.
But I can't make true comparison because I don't know anything about WOW or ESO. I will try their game when I have spare time and money.

The ARR new player experience sucks for the most part. I've had a lot of people I know try the game and hate it.

ESO, you only get like 4 skills and an ult, and you have to switch weapons to have access to other skills. It's annoying. The animations are pretty clunky, the cash shop is horrendous, among other things.. I play it from time to time to do the story since I like Elder Scrolls, and it has some decent armor designs I use to make outfits with, but that's about it. I received an account warning last time I played, so I'm probably never gonna touch that game again.. just my personal opinion. Can't really talk on WoW. I have played that game on and off, primarily and pretty much only for PvP. I like it's PvP.

[MichiPichi]

I never played WOW or ESO but my friends who joined to FFXIV try it for free left before reaching 30 level. I don't know the difference between WOW / ESO / FFXIV but something with FFXIV wrong apparently
I am guessing slow progressing story and unappealing early jobs with limited skill set with 1 button spam.
But I can't make true comparison because I don't know anything about WOW or ESO. I will try their game when I have spare time and money.

I played both and brought several friends here (well tried to) from various other mmos. They said the combat, the forced MSQs, and the simplicity of it all. So far I'm not really enjoying it neither, I'm just waiting on the AA fresh start server and I'll head back over there.

[Shougun]

I'm usually pretty excited to be honest, new gears and paints to play with. It has potential to go wrong but usually I don't feel that way. My favorite job improves, imo, each expansion in a way I enjoy so I'm often quite happy with that (Paladin, minor gripe with repeat casting as I don't really want Warrior axe spam but maybe something they can fiddle with next expansion- Confiteor is amazement though.. feels good to use/looks very pretty). When a strong intention of improvement and care, without a sever lack of financial support, I feel changes forward is most welcome. Easier said than done of course.. but yeah I'm generally okay with changes.

Not that it has to change old content, I love seeing new systems too. I hope either in this or their next mmo they bring airships and chocobos to a more center stage. Like I would love to see some sort personal airship content as you might imagine having in a single player FF rpg (but with more customization because it's an MMORPG).

I hope Blue Mage gets new paint and gears >.>;; lol.

I never played WOW or ESO but my friends who joined to FFXIV try it for free left before reaching 30 level. I don't know the difference between WOW / ESO / FFXIV but something with FFXIV wrong apparently
I am guessing slow progressing story and unappealing early jobs with limited skill set with 1 button spam.
But I can't make true comparison because I don't know anything about WOW or ESO. I will try their game when I have spare time and money.

Only played Vanilla all the way through (stopped at TBC), and then I've played most of the race intros after cata for fun. IMO, at least if you liked WoW's intro, FFXIV beginning is not as engaging / fast. In WoW vanilla I FONDLY remember starting in a small hamlet and building up into the big city, that act of simple exploration as the world became so much bigger after the first few hours... It makes me a bit sad nothing like that is in FFXIV. I would easily say I've enjoyed every intro of WoW's race more than or at minimum equal to FFXIV's, but that's probably a mix of really liking the world peeled back experience and maybe because the newer race intros are a bit accelerated in that beyond getting into combat quickly they're also remixed and specially designed quests and areas to have some vague sense of newness (like wrangling raptors or whatever). Also there is this element of being able to sweep yourself off your feet and out the door as you wander around, in short order, since the MSQ is pretty loose, yet in FFXIV it's quite guided and text dense. The later you join the longer that corridor might feel too, like a 100 hour corridor lol.

Though to WoW's negative, and FFXIV benefit, while they do have an MSQ you're not as cool of a hero as you are in FFXIV and the MSQ isn't as fleshed out. Super epic hero too, not a sort of cool hero lol. Yet it takes a hot second to get to that place for FFXIV, as at least imo there is some fleshing out that was entirely unnecessary, some of which they're trying to remove now, so FFXIV has a slow burn which is good when you play alongside the game or wanted slow burn from the start but IMO seems like a growing negative for anyone not ready to invest hundred + hours to catch up. Since I started in 1.0 my exact knowledge of FFXIV intro is a bit faded but I remember hardly leaving town for a long while lol (I have to compulsively talk to everyone and explore the maps of areas I'm in xD), thankfully my computer could render the 2 million polly pots just fine and so it was a visual treat. Though I want to add as I do occasionally check WoW's updates, but have never resubscribed, and they do update their graphics and some areas look quite pixel-less and 'new' something FFXIV sometimes suffers. I also did the ARR intro, when it was new, mostly through beta, so that memory is a bit faded too (I know it was combat harder way back when and they've made it a lot easier now), but again it was not as fond of a beginning experience of most of my WoW starts. Absolutely far from the worst intro I've played in some MMOs, but I do have personal concerns that the beginning of the game could be improved and improved beyond just cutting some quests.

There are many good things I could make a sales pitch for FFXIV on in direct competition to any other MMO out right now (including WoW), yet I don't think I'd ever list the beginning experience in that. I personally like the idea of alternative starts (1-3 hour handcrafted intros to the game) so players can use new game plus to go back to the original story if they want (rather than it being destroyed forever). I mentioned this before WoW announced it (lol me first!) but nearing akin to what they said recently where you can pick an expansion to start playing from and then once you finish that expansion you can play the most recent one. This allows you to get some connection to things before the latest experience, but doesn't require you to go through literally hundred plus hours of story to get what sold you (as I would wager most hear about an on MMO by friends in late content and or new expansion hype trains, and only some of those are willing to invest significantly before they reached the desire they had entered the game sphere for, letting you pick the season/book of the TV show/book world space you want to start, with informational and mechanical support to make that transition smooth, while not just giving players a skip/boost potion and calling it good as I feel while a hook is very important I'm not sure you really need a 50-100 hour 'hook' lol.

Like I loved the environments in ARR but in terms of gameplay and story I feel everything starts to get cooking and in flow at the end of ARR (as a whole, not just the MSQ), especially as expansions reshuffle around old spells and sometimes make older content accidentally even less 'cooking'. Which isn't to say I think their slightly shortening of ARR is a waste, as I know there are people out there that when told you'll have ~150-200 hours to get to 'current' game most of it spent reading that their eyes begin to glisten lol- just that I think even their ~15-20% cut of story is going to miss a whole style/section of players that would otherwise enjoy their game. As 20% less of 60-100 hours is still substantial- longer than many complete single player experiences, and on top of that the style of designed content has improved as they learned how to make it which goes to say the oldest content would be an example of their least polished both in flow and mechanics. Or in other words if we kept the same story but let them rebuild it anew (without a rush, a rush they did have for ARR 2.0), with all their experience now, that I'm sure they would have designed everything slightly differently (perhaps whole sections differently). So that which has their least experience, their most rush, is also one of the longest pieces of contents you have to go through.. hmm.. I enjoyed quite a few moments in ARR but there were also a few moments that I pushed through because I was invested and not because I had to see what was next. Something I think they greatly improve upon in their subsequent content (expansions, and like I said to be fair they were rebuilding from 1.0 at lightning speed.. so in that lens it's all pretty damn impressive).

If not obvious I play FFXIV for a reason with its wonderful music, environments, including fantastic dungeons with usually unique and interesting gimmicks, a story that actually exists and is quite good (particularly I think ShB was an example of them running on all cylinders, pacing and characters had me interested the entire time), job system (I don't want to ever play an MMO without it lol), nostolgia of content I love (well minus one limited job, dreams dashed on the rocks there), a team that I do think actually listens even though they have to read us through second language/translations (I've many examples to where I think either someone can read English or bits of what is said is translated, either way pretty impressive and painful process they submit themselves too), an underdog story that is a bit emotional (didn't abandon 1.0, even let people play for free for a while), in general a nice combination of casual and hardcore content so both communities have something to look forward to (I'm sure each community would like to cannibalize the other communities budget but yeah lol), some of the most interesting versions of crafting and gathering I've seen in a themepark / AAA mmo (maybe some indie mmo focused on crafting might be great, but in comparison to other major mmos I feel FFXIV hits some pinnacle notes in gameplay of DoH/DoL), very reliable content releases such that you feel like your sub isn't being waffled into the air for fun.. It's pretty great. Of course I make criticism (I hope it's constructive), but that's because I think they care and are capable of it, not because I think it needs saving from the brink of a void (it doesn't).

Anyway, as usual I've some love of overtyping or something and ultimately all I was trying to share with you is some of my perspective from someone who has played both (WoW/FFXIV) but doesn't have a deep hatred of WoW either (I've many enjoyable memories). As you'll find here some people think WoW is the worst so sometimes that can skew the conversations, though I think most of that is just pride in the investment of choice (FFXIV) and a sincere dislike of one or two core features (MSQ doesn't focus on you/graphic style/intentional or accidental ignorance/job system perhaps) while honestly they'd like most other parts of that game since FFXIV has many and shares many components to that and other theme park mmos.

[Fynlar]

* druid protess command

What


/10char