In terms of playability

[Lestat]

I very much enjoyed Final Fantasy 11 in the earlier years of the game 2004-2009, and i was wondering on those playing the game, if an old fan would enjoy this game now?
Or do you think i should wait for more changes in the game play to be worthy of time and money?

I could not find a thread that concentrates a persons opinion on the play ability of this game as it evolves through the patches, so i made one.

[TacoTaru]

I'll try to get in before the lock/flames/etc. The random question thread in general XIV chat would have been better since the question gets asked there all the time. Here are what was said a few days ago when someone asked the question. Don't expect much more out of this thread as it's bound to get locked/deleted, and you'll be pointed to the RQT by everyone. Spoilered for length.

Spoiler: show

You will get entirely polarized responses to this from the people who frequent this section because they still actually play, and those who frequent this section looking for opportunities to talk shit about it.

It has come a long way since release. Patch notes are looking promising. It might not be worth your money quite yet. Pay now to get a goobbue mount and a head start on leveling/gil... or wait until the big 2.0.

Check back in a month when 1.21 hits. If it promises to be a satisfying enough time sink, maybe I'd say it's worth p(l)aying. Maybe not even then.

1.21 patch at the end of Feb will definitely bring alot of people back into the game due to new jobs. Everyone with maxed out 50 classes atm will return to lv them so that will be a good time to jump into the pay subscription.

I might be able to give you a balanced opinion on this. I was like you left FFXI and was looking forward to FFXIV14. I was in the Beta etc and got up to speed quickly. When the game launched it was no different from the beta so it was a disappointment. I played very little until around Dec 2010. Literally didnt touch the game again until last week. I had all the time in the world to play for free and didnt bother. I got an itch to play again and paid the fees. The game has improved 10 fold. What everyone is saying is totally correct but the majority of those have probably been playing since the game was released. Iv come back to a game that feels more like FFXI. I never wanted 14 to be that but some of the little things remind of when i first played 11. There are alot of improvements still to be made but right now im fully imersed again rushing to get some levels, get quests and missions done before the impending release of 1.21. When that drops ill have more to do again. The LS im in right now literally everyone is already all lvl 50 or enough for them not to bother EXPing. That is the only downside to the game right now is that there is no playerbase of lower level people / new players. So there is literally no EXP parties from 1-40 from what i can see. I dont think you will be dissapointed with the game if you picked it up now and paid the $10 if you havnt played in a long time. I had many patches to catch up reading on. The job / action system is so much easier as well.

If you're really itching to play, you probably should wait until 1.21 with jobs and a slew of other changes. I'm in the camp of being done until 2.0 but to be fair, it is about where it should have been at launch. If you do play now or sometime before 2.0 then you can get a goobbue mount.

I guess it all depends on whether or not you can find people to do stuff with, which server you want to play on. I'm sure you can ask around to find a high pop server.

A lot of annoying bullshit has been removed, still a lot of shit needs to be streamlined. Much better game than Launch imo, not a bad game to fuck off in if you're just sick of XI and don't want to try Tortanic or WoW, Rift, etc. Leveling might be a PITA due to everyone leveling up with P.lvls and capping jobs out from months ago with very little new subs coming in.

I, like several other people, was in alpha/beta played up to release and then quit around Jan 2011. Came back around October 2011, rerolled my character so I could go through all the quests/tutorials over again since I hadn't done anything other than level and I'm enjoying the hell out of it. If you came back at 1.21 you'd probably get the most bang for your buck since that's when all the BIG content is coming, but there would certainly be enough in the game now to hold you over for a month until it came out if you joined up now.

There is still a lot of stuff that's ridiculous that it doesn't have (no delivery system, AH-type system is poor-to-mediocre, groups can't exceed 8 players, so on), but the game is really starting to come into it's own. The worst thing is the thin player base and the abundance of 50s; coupled with a delayed server merge, if you gambled wrong when starting/gamble wrong on rerolling you'll end up not having anyone to level with.

Depending on how 1.21 changes things (it may or may not), you're going to come to a point where all that's left to do is level classes and try to gamble money on double triple melds. I'm close to that point now and when you hit that point, it does start to become a slog waiting for the next patch.

[Lordender]

It is going to be a pain in the ass for you to level at this point, most people are either at or near level cap. I think its a very playable game if you roll on a high pop server but the biggest challenge is going to be finding parties, it seems to vary per server. I think its going to be a very different experience for you being an old XI player, the patches since the new team came in have streamlined a lot of things. You might want to look at Kuro's video's, he goes through the changes from patch to patch showing the improvements.

[SilverBreeze]

There's a stickied random question thread... look next time.