Why are you looking forward to FF14?

[Kaylia]

I'm absolutely certain they will change that. It was poor planning from their part when they built client-server communication, and it's not something that can easily be changed. It was probably more efficient back then for them, but with today standard, I can't imagine how a company could do it again


Not to mention there is no "zone" left. Actually, the fact that there is no zone pretty much imply they need a "chat system" independant from your area.

[miokomioko]

I just hope they give us the ability to zoom in on our chatlog so we can actually defeat XIV's strongest boss.

[Guitarman]

torn between HATING the .0001% drop rate on things FFXI has, and the lack of the feeling of accomplishment i get in WoW because everything is so disposable and easy to obtain by comparison. Hope there's a happy medium.

Though, going on month 6 of trying to get my ffxi acct restored is making me more and more leary of this one.

[Alderaan]

The saying, "you can never go home again" rings true here. The one thing that i've learned is that you can never recapture that feeling again. Some of us are 7 years older than when we first started XI. Things change, get more complicated. That feeling of accomplishment that i got from XI, i'm not expecting from XIV.

I am worried that SE still doesn't understand that customer service is as important as the game. If you take a look at the official TOR(which is over a year away from release) forums, they have close to 2mil posts already. That's nuts! Unless i'm blind, i still don't see any sort of official forum for XIV and we're in beta sign-up.

[TheBlazed]

Blazed,

The reason i am looking forward to FFXIV is because FFXI was simply an outstanding revolutionary game. It went down its own path and wasn't a "clone" of other games on the market. (Aion, WoW, Warhammer, Conan) I.E Button mashers.
The Subscriber base is still surviving today.

IMO, you felt a difference between FFXI and other MMO's, it wasn't a casual game, it didn't appeal to people who's schedule didn't have a huge amount of time to invest in it. To me, it felt like WoW was the game for children while the real hardcore players came to FFXI (not to spike any WoW vs FFXI argument).

i am not defining the real hardcore players as the people with "no life" but what i mean is the people who enjoyed a challenge are the ones who came over while those who didn't whether it being because of schedule/RL/or the challenge stayed away.

Reason i say this is because(correct me if I'm wrong) WoW focuses on what makes them money, catering to what players wanted and made the game easy and fun, a fine way to make a MMO and their numbers show it. On the contrary, FFXI wasn't casual no matter what anyone tries to say.

Forced grouping,forced teamwork, real effort to try to low man/solo is what drove me to love this game. You really had to know your job in order to perform while these others games you just button mash to kill. IMO, once again the Casual players are the ones who bitched/moaned about FFXI being too hard. (I.E Level sync) (although sitting in lfg for hours was annoying i am glad they did bitch a nice system)

To wrap it up, FFXI was SE's first Shot at a MMO, people seem to forget this and say "Man screw SE and their customer service (although it was bad), im not playing FFXIV"
i foresee FFXIV to be the best MMO of 2011, not to jump the gun but it definitely has a chance.

People always deserve a 2nd chance to learn and not repeat from their mistakes, alot of things was bad in FFXI but i suspect they will learn from 7 years of bitching about pop times/0000000.1 drop rates/and of course the 20 hour boss fights.

I will give FFXIV a try Solely for this reason, for some odd reason if its just ends up being a copy of FFXI i wouldn't like it but ill still end up playing that shit, truthfully.
SE is a HQ company i believe they will come through on this next FF online title.
Only time can tell.

Forgive any grammatical errors

[Cool4Cats]

I'm looking forward to playing XIV with some (from the screenshots) lovely graphics and finding things out the hard way!

No more wiki or blogs or guides... Not for a week at least!

[McGoonagle]

I'm absolutely certain they will change that. It was poor planning from their part when they built client-server communication, and it's not something that can easily be changed. It was probably more efficient back then for them, but with today standard, I can't imagine how a company could do it again.

I'll go along with that.

FFXI development must have started at least 10 years, or 5 generations in computing, ago. Fundamental design decisions that made sense then may have unforeseen effects on restricting options even just a couple of years later. Not just the surface of this game, but the nuts and bolts will be very different.

[Kaylia]

I just hope they give us the ability to zoom in on our chatlog so we can actually defeat XIV's strongest boss.

You need to skip forward in time as well.

FFXI development must have started at least 10 years, or 5 generations in computing, ago. Fundamental design decisions that made sense then may have unforeseen effects on restricting options even just a couple of years later. Not just the surface of this game, but the nuts and bolts will be very different

Beside, it was SquareEnix first attempt at an online game as far as I know, so they definitively didn't have the same experience as let's say, Blizzard's staff (not that they didnt have problems, but you can tell their game can be upgraded more easily than FFXI). I'm sure they hired smart and experienced people, but still, it probably did hurt them to some extent.

I remember an old interview where they were saying "how hard it was to move from single players game to mmo", and you can tell. I'm not blamming them in any way for this, because the result was still pretty good (compared to many company who should have experience and still screw up)

(Aion, WoW, Warhammer, Conan) I.E Button mashers.

I don't want to start an argument about the skill involved, but your comment implies it requires less skill to play game like WoW, and it's not entirely accurate. It's true you will always be press button when you play WoW to execute your basic rotation, but there is more to it when you reach the endgame. Someone who just mash button to produce dmg will be -terrible- in every aspects, just like a DPS in FFXI who is mindless engaging HNM and never take anything into consideration.

Leveling in WoW is mindless, but FF isn't much better. You need to be semi careful with aggro/link since you can dies (but it's in no way "hard" since you can level hours without any incident)

[Alcarin]

Well several stuff comes in mind why play FFXIV.

I love fresh starts...

When FFXI came out it was like OMG love it, huge maps and areas is what i love, lots of quest... when i hit the levels and time for end game, was very fun!!! but once the drama starts was very boring.

The level up with a group is always fun, but it takes ages an a lot of time and some times impossible because you need ppl to level up in a faster way...

Of course at the begining 1 - 3 years was insane fun, and thats what im looking forward to play FFXIV so start all over again, with new stuff, new worlds, new mobs, new everything, and im sure SE will deliver that... honestly im not looking forward to play and get addicted to it, or the need to spend a lot of time to get something like a reward...

Get 99 ks to try a nm for speed belt drop and chances are like .01% = no fun...

Or your linkshell to disband and not able to do Odin again = no fun...

[McGoonagle]

Beside, it was SquareEnix first attempt at an online game as far as I know, so they definitively didn't have the same experience as let's say, Blizzard's staff (not that they didnt have problems, but you can tell their game can be upgraded more easily than FFXI). I'm sure they hired smart and experienced people, but still, it probably did hurt them to some extent.

I remember an old interview where they were saying "how hard it was to move from single players game to mmo", and you can tell. I'm not blamming them in any way for this, because the result was still pretty good (compared to many company who should have experience and still screw up)

Given this, I think a lot of the competition is not looking forward to FFXIV. SE might not be warm, fuzzy, and huggable, but they are not stupid (You don't get to be that big without a pretty decent set of clues.), and they have learned a lot from FFXI that will be going into FFXIV.

It's not going to kill WoW, or any other game worth the monthly fee, but it may end up with a major player base, and could attract the strong players from other games looking for new challenges. Success breeds success, and that could lead to more resources going into expanding the game.

[Lucavi]

The saying, "you can never go home again" rings true here. The one thing that i've learned is that you can never recapture that feeling again. Some of us are 7 years older than when we first started XI. Things change, get more complicated. That feeling of accomplishment that i got from XI, i'm not expecting from XIV.

I am worried that SE still doesn't understand that customer service is as important as the game. If you take a look at the official TOR(which is over a year away from release) forums, they have close to 2mil posts already. That's nuts! Unless i'm blind, i still don't see any sort of official forum for XIV and we're in beta sign-up.

I share your worries. I have this sinking feeling that they're going to address many problems within the game, and as such, your experience as players is going to be amazing, but our experiences as -customers- will be the same as it is now.

Lots of shady dodging of logical questions.
Lots of head-in-the-sand mentalities when it comes to just about every aspect of the game.
A refusal to acknowledge the fact that customers care about a product just as much (maybe more) than a developer.
A refusal to acknowledge that some customer ideas are actually good, logical, and well-thought ideas.
A failure to perform honest dialogue with the customer, be it through an official forum, or though other prominent websites.

I know that SE as a whole has made tremendous strides to globalize their products and their approach to making and releasing games. FFXIII seems to be the best game yet in terms of SE actually trying to make it an even and equal experience for everyone.

However, I'll freely admit that I've been spoiled by Blizzard's constant communication and feedback with their paying customers. Even if they don't make a change that people want, they at least explain why. Many times I'll just read what they say and nod, whether I agree with it or not. Its just nice to know that I'm not a drop in the bucket, even though everyone rags on em' for swimming in pools of gold.

If SE developed even a small group tasked with translating questions and comments that people send in, and responded to... say... 10 of them a month, on a regular basis, I would love it.

I would have loved to hear why 2-handed adjustments took so long, or what they thought about dual-wielding in RotZ. I can imagine Ghostcrawler now: "We think dual-wielding damage is too high right now, across the board. We're pushing some numbers around and will be making some changes in the future. Expect more news before the next expansion."

Something like that: its simple, but it lets me as a customer know that this big ass company sees what I see: that we're all playing and experiencing the same game.

All that aside, I'm still stoked as shit for FFXIV. I can't wait for the beta -- absolutely cannot wait.

[Vacht]

FFXI was good largely because SE didn't respond to every one of the base's silly demands.

People wanted to stop "monopolies" (aka. not wanting to work as hard as those who do sit around for hours), "fix HNMs" (aka. make Nidhogg pop-able by trading a Fire Crystal to a ???), and "stop RMT" (amazingly, they provided an increase in supply of the most demanded goods for the cheapest possible prices in return for selling gil, which was promptly bought by gil buyers who quickly stimulated the game economy through quick and massive spending).



FFXI's best features (not dumbing the game down) came from SE betraying its base. The only thing that could have made the game better would have been abolishing the R/EX system.

I agree with this, sooooo much.

The R/EX change is similar to when they removed no stealing from other players in ultima online. These players that complain are all naive and bubbly.

But you know honestly, i quit the game the first time because i claimed VE like 35 times and never got a hairpin. A few weeks later though, i got the pin first kill, so it worked out.




The fully traversable environment should be nice.. its so necessary haha. i really hope we can charm mobs, and bring them wherever we want! There were questions regarding BST being a possible class i think. But it would be nice if the game was more interactive, like evvents that would change the landscape, weather and other stuff. Like in Asheron's call when the biggest badass you only read about in the story came into the game at the beginning of a new patch, he was played by a developer and was super tall and was able to fly. The seas were all turned red and the weather varied because of all this. The boss would raid random towns and kill unsuspecting people... it was awesome!

Later they blew up a town... no one ever complained. Its still played, because its a very unique game and didnt listen to whiners.

[Eyedea-Seraph]

I have to agree, this is my #1 reason. I'm assuming many BG forum users are like me, where, for better or for worse, FFXI was a significant chunk of your life. I've played FFXI for I dunno, 6-7 years now, which is practically 25% of my life. Granted, there are some large segments in there where I wish I went outside a bit more, but hey, live and learn.

To echo some above posters, FFXI was a unique situation in video games for me where meaningful connections with friends whom I've never seen irl were formed. As FFXI has been winding down, I've started to lose touch with many of them as there's not really a easy way to keep it up without logging into FFXI.

Now that FFXIV is starting up, it gives me a new medium to maintain those friendships and hopefully forge new ones.

It also helps that the graphics and game world look amazing, and that SE seems to be taking a more open and feedback oriented design approach this time around. And, as shitty as some of the stuff was in AV, you still did it, and however much you may say you hated it, you wouldn't have done it if there wasn't some enjoyment factor somewhere in there. For a game and community to hold my interest that long, I'm excited to see what FFXIV can do.

THIS 1000000000000x

[TheBlazed]

I don't want to start an argument about the skill involved, but your comment implies it requires less skill to play game like WoW, and it's not entirely accurate. It's true you will always be press button when you play WoW to execute your basic rotation, but there is more to it when you reach the endgame. Someone who just mash button to produce dmg will be -terrible- in every aspects, just like a DPS in FFXI who is mindless engaging HNM and never take anything into consideration.

Leveling in WoW is mindless, but FF isn't much better. You need to be semi careful with aggro/link since you can dies (but it's in no way "hard" since you can level hours without any incident)

HA, i think i noticed i may have shot at that direction after posting. Well I didn't mean less skill but the difficulty of going through the game. Like if my friends were to ask me, which MMO out their is fun to play and has not too much emphasis on time, i would definitely reference WoW(not saying FFXI isnt fun to play)

but my main point was FFXI felt different from playing those games, in general, i believe wow was a bit easier to play.(from start to end-game)

but don't get me wrong i would never directly imply WOW takes less skill and FFXI takes more. would spike so many arguments wowheadsvsffxifanboi's

[Lucavi]

HA, i think i noticed i may have shot at that direction after posting. Well I didn't mean less skill but the difficulty of going through the game. Like if my friends were to ask me, which MMO out their is fun to play and has not too much emphasis on time, i would definitely reference WoW(not saying FFXI isnt fun to play)

but my main point was FFXI felt different from playing those games, in general, i believe wow was a bit easier to play.(from start to end-game)

but don't get me wrong i would never directly imply WOW takes less skill and FFXI takes more. would spike so many arguments wowheadsvsffxifanboi's

Well it just wouldn't be true. I played a survival hunter at end-game, and many of the jeers were that hunters were an easy class to play because beastmaster really only needed to spam steady shot back in the day.

When WotLK came about and they revamped survival, all of a sudden you had a very deep and branching rotation that depended on not only what cooldown was up, but what trinket you had available, what racial was ready (I played an orc), how much life the boss had, what kinds of stings you needed to have up, and how much you had to move around in the fight.

You had to have a sting up to proc lock and load to have a shot at firing 3 back-to-back-to-back or threaded explosive shots in conjunction with black arrow to keep your damage high. This changed if you popped a haste trinket or blood fury, as now you wanted to focus strictly on pure damaging moves.

Things got even more complicated when the boss was at 20% health or lower, as now you had to make sure your rotation included kill shot. This isn't including laying traps, kiting, popping misdirection to keep hate off of you, feigning death when hate was FIRMLY on you, or popping out disengage for spacing, or deflection for small bouts of hate.

It's not really important to note, but as a drg in FFXI (pre-seigan/hasso update) my job consisted of jumping when they were up and I needed TP, throwing out a zerk when it was up or my WS was ready, throwing out a warcry once every blue moon, super jumping if hate was my way, and dumping as many pentas as I could. Things got harder if I needed to off-heal with /whm, but that was rare.

The most complicated gameplay I ever actually experienced in FFXI was ballista, as you actually tended to use every ability (offensive and defensive), and often times had to have better reactions (to run out of range or evade a slugwinder). Additionally, it was one of the only real areas in the game where movement played an effect in the game.

This isn't even touching healing jobs, which are harder in both games than DD jobs.

I'd like to see a bit more movement involved in the game. I don't think FF needs one of those systems where moving to the side raises evasion and lowers attack or anything, but honestly, if you didn't have a thf or something with /thf, there was never any reason to move in the grand majority of fights.

[ringthree]

I share your worries. I have this sinking feeling that they're going to address many problems within the game, and as such, your experience as players is going to be amazing, but our experiences as -customers- will be the same as it is now.

Lots of shady dodging of logical questions.
Lots of head-in-the-sand mentalities when it comes to just about every aspect of the game.
A refusal to acknowledge the fact that customers care about a product just as much (maybe more) than a developer.
A refusal to acknowledge that some customer ideas are actually good, logical, and well-thought ideas.
A failure to perform honest dialogue with the customer, be it through an official forum, or though other prominent websites.

I know that SE as a whole has made tremendous strides to globalize their products and their approach to making and releasing games. FFXIII seems to be the best game yet in terms of SE actually trying to make it an even and equal experience for everyone.

However, I'll freely admit that I've been spoiled by Blizzard's constant communication and feedback with their paying customers. Even if they don't make a change that people want, they at least explain why. Many times I'll just read what they say and nod, whether I agree with it or not. Its just nice to know that I'm not a drop in the bucket, even though everyone rags on em' for swimming in pools of gold.

If SE developed even a small group tasked with translating questions and comments that people send in, and responded to... say... 10 of them a month, on a regular basis, I would love it.

I would have loved to hear why 2-handed adjustments took so long, or what they thought about dual-wielding in RotZ. I can imagine Ghostcrawler now: "We think dual-wielding damage is too high right now, across the board. We're pushing some numbers around and will be making some changes in the future. Expect more news before the next expansion."

Something like that: its simple, but it lets me as a customer know that this big ass company sees what I see: that we're all playing and experiencing the same game.

All that aside, I'm still stoked as shit for FFXIV. I can't wait for the beta -- absolutely cannot wait.

There are two sides to that coin. Look at the Prot Warrior changes made in this update. They further nerfed the already lowest tank DPS role just because people were whining about Prot being OP in arenas. Almost all of the changes in WoW are rubberband effects. Too much here, too little there. And DPS, tank and healing roles ping pong about mindlessly without much rhyme or reason. If you complain loud enough and get enough whiners on your side you can pretty much get anything done in WoW by just posting on the forums.

[Lucavi]

There are two sides to that coin. Look at the Prot Warrior changes made in this update. They further nerfed the already lowest tank DPS role just because people were whining about Prot being OP in arenas. Almost all of the changes in WoW are rubberband effects. Too much here, too little there. And DPS, tank and healing roles ping pong about mindlessly without much rhyme or reason. If you complain loud enough and get enough whiners on your side you can pretty much get anything done in WoW by just posting on the forums.

Oh I agree with you there, and I tried to cite an example of when the Devs get it right: when they talk to us and hear us, but don't give in to a whining example.

If you aren't going to change something because you feel that it's just right, then just say so, and explain how and why you feel that way. It doesn't take that long to write a post. Don't ignore the hundreds or thousands of people expressing their right as paying customers to question your decisions. That's terrible customer service.

I'm pretty sure they nerfed prot war because it was steamrolling in PVP. There have been times where nerfs and buffs were knee-jerk reactions, but there have also been legitimate times where change must be made. I'll happily cite the huge paladin buff about 2 months before WotLK, when plds could faceroll everyone in 2 buttons and a hail of golden flakes of divine storm.

Just like how I want a middleground between FFXI's "2005 gear is still the best now!" and WoW's "Pshh... late 2009? That was so 3 months ago!" stances on gear upgrades, I want middleground between FFXI's "We have no plans to address anything you have to say or think, but have a nice day" and WoW's "I'm sorry, did we not give you enough gold for that quest? Hold on then" stances.

[ringthree]

Oh I agree with you there, and I tried to cite an example of when the Devs get it right: when they talk to us and hear us, but don't give in to a whining example.

If you aren't going to change something because you feel that it's just right, then just say so, and explain how and why you feel that way. It doesn't take that long to write a post. Don't ignore the hundreds or thousands of people expressing their right as paying customers to question your decisions. That's terrible customer service.

I'm pretty sure they nerfed prot war because it was steamrolling in PVP. There have been times where nerfs and buffs were knee-jerk reactions, but there have also been legitimate times where change must be made. I'll happily cite the huge paladin buff about 2 months before WotLK, when plds could faceroll everyone in 2 buttons and a hail of golden flakes of divine storm.

Just like how I want a middleground between FFXI's "2005 gear is still the best now!" and WoW's "Pshh... late 2009? That was so 3 months ago!" stances on gear upgrades, I want middleground between FFXI's "We have no plans to address anything you have to say or think, but have a nice day" and WoW's "I'm sorry, did we not give you enough gold for that quest? Hold on then" stances.

Prot war was not steamrolling by any sense and there are still tons of jobs that ARE steamrolling and have ALWAYS steamrolled that they will never touch. It's all reaction based buffing and nerfing. Why do you think they want to completely reset everything with Cataclysm?

[Lucavi]

Every game has their biased jobs. Look at any eastern job in FFXI. When's the last time sams actually had to try? Sky gear fitting monks, sams and nins snugly?

Blizz isn't perfect by any stretch. I hope their new MMO isn't based on past lore, so they can start fresh without showing bias towards what their "historically favorite" jobs are.

[SwaggerlikeKillquick]

Honest question.

Most if not all of you played teh trainwreck that was 11, so why are you thinking that SE possibly may get it right this time?

not trolling, not bashing - i'm interested, hell i played FFXI for a few years. what's going to be different?

FFXI IMO has the best UI of any MMO that exists, the basics atleast. It was mostly due to Windower either way num pad and arrow keys for movement is the way for me. I hate WoW/Aion setup with a passion and is the reason I hate those games. If the controls are bad IDGAF how good the rest of the game may be.

I liked FFXI more so then I do now when people were using skill chain/MB for exp. Jobs got ruined for xp parties because of TP burns.

I have also liked FFXI job system 1 char that can change jobs and not have to gear out 10 different chars to play the jobs I want. I approve of support jobs as well.

Storyline. Every other MMOs storyline is god awful. Playing through CoPs story/difficulty was the best and was more enjoyable then most RPGs.

So what I'm looking forward to is the XI UI hopefuly, the job system, hoping for improved ways to get exp, and the story line FF is known for having.

Major differences I'm hoping to see are drop rates, 100% force pop NMs (year right XD), no more utsusemi.

PS. multiple dynamis zones kkthxbye (fuck waiting for other LSs to finish a zone so you can enter)