Quote Originally Posted by Raymeo View Post
False, unless you mean that they looked at WoW in order to figure out what NOT to do.

Scaling

First of all you've got WoW, a vertically scaling game, and FFXIV, a horizontally scaling game. Huge difference right there. The scaling of a game is the very foundation that nearly everything else is built upon, so this key difference alone already means that you're comparing apples to oranges.

In a vertically scaling game like WoW, once you reach max level, you are only able to enhance your character by directly upgrading your player's power. In this case it's done via gear upgrading.

In FFXIV this is not the case because players scale horizontally instead of vertically. In other words, as soon as you reach level 50, you're just about as powerful as you're ever going to be. Rather than directly upgrading your character's power after reaching max level, you begin to upgrade your character through adding on new options of equal power. For instance, you can continue earning new equally-powerful abilities to carry over from other classes. Acquiring new gear is also a horizontal improvement, because the majority of new gear that you earn will offer you different equally-powerful options to suit different tastes or situations, rather than giving your character a dramatic increase in direct power.

Classes

WoW locks you into one class. If you get tired of spamming Fireball on your Mage, then tough. You're a Mage. You just have to deal with spamming Fireball forever.

FFXIV allows and encourages you to play as multiple classes on one character. If you're a Black Mage and get tired of spamming thunder spells, then you can switch classes with the White Mage and heal for a bit, or switch classes with a Warrior and tank for a while. This is another glaring difference that separates the fundamentals of the two games entirely.

Crafting

Crafting is an afterthought in WoW. Characters are limited in how many crafts they can level, a craft can be leveled to max in a few hours, and you can tell your character to craft a bunch of queued up items while you go AFK. Crafting is almost exclusively leveled by min-maxers who are only in it for the passive bonuses that come with it. Repairs are all done by NPCs. Nobody wants crafted gear because it gets replaced in no time flat. Gear is almost exclusively gained through questing or dungeon crawling during the leveling process, and at max-level nearly everybody bypasses crafted gear because it becomes obsolete after running dungeons or battlegrounds for just a short couple of hours. If you PVP, you even get all of your gems and a good chunk of your enchantments purely through running battlegrounds.

Compare this to FFXIV, where crafting plays a very integral role in the game, and you are free to level as many crafts as you want. Crafting provides players with a majority of their gear through the entirety of their playtime. It provides players with the only means for receiving 100% repairs, which causes there to be actual interaction among players. It provides players with the only means of attaching materia to gear, which causes even more interaction to exist among players. It can't be leveled to max in just a few hours, so choosing to invest time into your crafting can actually reward you by placing you ahead of competition. Each craft benefits from leveling other crafts for more abilities, giving you even more ways to invest time into put yourself ahead of competition. Also, let's not forget that crafting actually involves the player in the crafting process, instead of encouraging them go make a sandwich while their character crafts a hundred battle elixirs.

Group Size

Current WoW end-game PvE content requires ten to 25 players to keep a coordinated schedule, making it extremely difficult to organize and operate a reliable end-game team.

FFXIV requires no more than eight players for the vast majority, if not all, of its end-game content, making it much more manageable for linkshell leaders to organize and lead a successful team.

Rewards for time subscribed VS Rewards for time played

WoW places a heavy emphasis on repeating the latest 25 daily quests every day, and the latest tier of heroic dungeons seven times a week, and the latest raid (or at least going as far into the instance as the time's achievable gear score allows) once each week in order to progress. Earning rewards is strictly controlled through a system based not only lockouts, but also on tokens, which you are limited to a very specific amount of each week, forcing players to play the same daily content for months at a time and in the end basing rewards on time subscribed rather than time actually played.

FFXIV requires repetition as well if you feel the urge to be 7/7 on all primal weapons, but there's no arbitrary minimum to the number of days or months that you are required to log in for in order to earn them. Rewards are based on how much time you invest into playing, rather than how much money you invest in subscribing. All that matters is how many times you kill a Primal. How many days you spread your victories over is irrelevant. There is nothing forcing your character to fall behind if you take a week off from the game.

Dividing players VS Letting players help each other

If you do miss a run with your guild in WoW and fall behind, then good luck getting caught up with your friends. At the time of FFXIV's launch, WoW barred players from re-entering heroic dungeons after each run until a daily reset, and barred players from re-entering raids after each run until a weekly reset, so you could not help your friends catch up to you if you had already run something without them.

In FFXIV on the other hand, progressing your own character through content doesn't lock you out of helping other people afterward for any longer than a trivial 15 minutes, and then when you do take the time to help other people, you're still eligible for loot again.

WoW did learn that their lock-out system was a bad idea and they eventually patched it so that you no longer get completely locked out of entry, but Blizzard did not announce this change until a year AFTER FFXIV was launched, and a whopping seven years after WoW was launched. Even after the change though, WoW still locks players out of eligibility for loot if they take the time to help their friends with something after having already completed it for themselves, which removes any in-game rewards or incentives for players to help each other.

Linear/gated/tiered content progression VS Doing what you enjoy

Not only do you fall behind your friends if you take a few nights off from WoW, but you don't ever get to play with them again. Your guild leader is forced back into the painful process of recruiting because they suddenly need to replace you with a new player who not only fits the schedule of the team's other 24 members, but is equally progressed with them, unlike you who's now fallen behind. That's the consequence of a game that's based on vertical scaling. Since you are allowed to continue to directly increase your power after you reach max level, content has to exist for all of the multiple tiers of player power. Thus increasing your power will grant you access to new content, but you also grow to overpower old content. This locks you into a path of linear progression, where each player only has a small portion of the game's content relevant to their character at any given time. The worst part about this is that it ends up dividing the game's community into pieces. When characters have different gear scores it means that the characters are locked into different areas of relevant content, so the game effectively separates players from playing with each other if one player ever falls behind another.

Content in WoW isn't just gated between different instances, either. It's gated all the way down to the point where it takes weeks of grinding the early bosses of a raid instance before you can stand a chance at killing the later bosses of the SAME raid instance. That's how much Blizzard micro-manages the content that each player is allowed to access. Take Heroic Spine of Deathwing as an example. Blizzard calculated the DPS requirements for beating that fight so that it was mathematically impossible* to defeat at launch. Yes, the community's most hardcore theorycrafters and DPS simulators proved the fight to be literally mathematically impossible to defeat until a required minimum gear score was achieved across entire raid, which could only be achieved by farming the earlier bosses of the instance multiple times over a period of multiple weeks. (And that's after the Spine's initial nerf, which occurred a week after it's launch because pre-nerf it was actually calculated to be impossible to defeat no matter what. Yes, even if players were to farm the instance long enough for the entire team to earn all of the game's best-in-slot gear. Oops!) The game's most hardcore guilds demonstrated the validity of this math, proving it through the course of several hundred attempts each. All of the world's top 50 guilds hit a road block upon reaching Heroic Spine, all within three days of each other, yet it still took a full month of farming the instance's earlier bosses before a single one of those guilds earned a gear score high enough to get the first Heroic Spine kill. Then and only then did the game allow them to start attempting the next boss of the instance, Heroic Madness.

FFXIV, on the other hand, does not arbitrarily gate its content so that players can't experience it when they want to. Nor does FFXIV divide its community based on tiers of gear scores. This is a consequence of FFXIV being a horizontally scaled game. Since your character only grows in options rather than in direct power, all of the game's level 50 content is relevant content to you when you hit level 50, and all of it remains so forever because you can never outgrow it by increasing your power beyond its tuning. If Aurum Vale sounds like fun but your linkshell boycotted Darkhold because it was boring, you can still succeed at clearing it just as easily as any Darkhold veterans of equal skill. If you didn't get your first class to level 50 until after all of your friends finished farming Moogles and Ifrit, you can still jump into slaying Garuda with them just as easily as anybody who's 14/14. Anybody who is level 50 can participate, and achieve victory, in any of FFXIV's end-game content, and do so with anybody that they want to play with, as the only absolute requirements for success in the game are job levels for entry and player skill.

*See discussion starting at 3:55

In conclusion

You may want to offer some reasoning for your comparison, because I'm failing to see any logic to it on my own.

WTF is this shit. Some kinda essay/thesis dissertation? Nobody has time for this crap. Just be succinct next time. You could have eliminated half of your points on the basis of irrelevance anyway. Many of your points are irrelevant because you're merely describing what FFXIV has been since its inception. I was talking about the recent changes in design philosophy since Yoshi took over.

You do realise I said Yoshi "looked to WoW" for inspiration, I never said FFXIV is exactly like WoW in every single way. In other words, it has become apparent that the design philosophy for FFXIV's future is increasingly based on the themepark WoW model. And quite frankly, if it was up to Yoshi, I bet crafting would be an afterthought in FFXIV as much as it was in WoW too. I mean, crafters have already been heavily marginalised after the whole instance raid era of FFXIV's lifetime. There's definitely been a paradigm shift in FFXIV's basic concepts and theyve all been shifted toward the typical WoW type of game. THe reduction in crafter's utility is one of these changes, and it's funny how you use that as evidence that it's not like WoW. When in reality, the change to crafting is evidence that it is like WoW.

Besides, there definitely is a linear gating and vertical scaling type situation happening with FFXIV at the moment anyway with the Primal fights getting increasingly difficult (well, or so S.E. wishes).