Random Complaint Thread. No white knighting allowed.

[Hyan]

I wonder if the exclamation marks are going to be green or yellow...

Didn't they do that from the start?

Not since September, nope.

[Lucavi]

You think the failure to use resources began only at September?

Dot dot dot.

[Hyan]

No, it ended for a while and seems to have started again.

[Sephiroth]

Jumping isn't bad as long as they make it impossible in cities (except in Dynamis style events).

[Lucavi]

No, it ended for a while and seems to have started again.

Right, there's just a shit-quality button that they flip every now and then to keep the public on their toes and hemorrhage funds and stock value. Troll on, brother.

[Lordender]

Everything about 14 was misshandled.

1. Requirements to run this game were way too high, games of similar quality of graphics run a hell of a lot better than 14. Shitty code is shitty.

2. Let RMT dictate every single design choice on things like no AH, ridiculous amounts of server checks for the most simple tasks such as scrolling thru inventory/crafting menu's which ultimately led to insane menu lag thats never going to be fixed until they change it.

3. Contradicted themselves with keeping the same races to keep familiarity with FFXI but had the most uninteresting jobs in the game. All of the classes blow. In FFXI the jobs were 100x better at the start of the game.

4. Went through a marathon of bad game design to mask the lack of content which is why you have no transportation other than Anima which was a fail idea from the start. Fatigue is also a joke.

5. Everything about this game is lazy, Leve's are all copy and pasted along with the terrain. I can't believe i'm going to say this: WoW Dailies are more fun than leve's and I hate WoW dailies.

6. The game world is boring, it is filled with too many critters in which you will level on for 20-30 levels. The intro showed a lot of chaos going in the world but here we are fighting marmot's, dodo's for 30+ levels. The intro was nothing but a gigantic troll.

7. There is no purpose for to even be there in this world. I never felt like my char had a purpose to exist here. Leve quests could have been a lot more epic with in-depth storylines and story telling to instill chaos in the land.

8. SE made the most fail durability system I have ever witnessed.

9. Forces you to craft, bad design.

10. Skill point system = fail. Should have just kept exp chains from XI.

11. Battle regime = fail. Skillchain/Magic burst = better system if they made it to have huge debuff's on the target so that they would always be worthwhile.


Lets not even get into the fail interface because that has been rehashed since day 1 of the alpha.

The only good thing about this game was the intro even though it just trolled the fuck out of the entire fanbase 14 ever had.

[Lucavi]

Sephiroth had an excellent post a few pages back about most of the flaws of the game. I hope someone at SE read it.

[Sephiroth]

I like to think SE are reading this thread if they're so concerned about making the game be what players want to play.

Hopefully the official forums that are coming will allow for more direct contact with developers, but that should have happened in the beta.

[Kaylia]

All the content in the world won't help if the game mechanics prevent said content from being fun and strategic. You'd be surprised how much a little feature such as jumping can improve even trivial gameplay. Eliminate the animation locks on instant cast abilities and those 2 things can add up to a world of difference.

The issue here is that jumping, without swimming or properly designed environment is probably going to be awkward and useless. It might be nice if they allow you to jump down more cliff by removing invisible wall, but in the current state, it won't fix half of the stupid map design

I'm glad he is considering it but it's a bit too late now. That's the kind of thing you have to include very early in the project.

2. Let RMT dictate every single design choice on things like no AH, ridiculous amounts of server checks for the most simple tasks such as scrolling thru inventory/crafting menu's which ultimately led to insane menu lag thats never going to be fixed until they change it.

I doubt it's the reasoning behind the market ward. FFXI's strength was its community, and they probably wanted to strengthen this aspect by adding an environment where crafter would be forced to leave a personal touch to be succesful (talk to other, have a reliable bazaar...etc).

However, there is no way in hell such clumsy system would turn into a working medieval bazaar. The lag, the sheer amount of items and retainers and people tolerance for pointless step that slow them down doomed it from the start.

[Cureslime]

S-E never even looked at the NA beta forums so I find it hard to believe they read anything on English language fansites. All they did was occasionally remove posts linking to NDA breaks and that was only when someone reported a post.

[Hyan]

Oh no, baseless accusations! My kryptonite!

[Sephiroth]

The issue here is that jumping, without swimming or properly designed environment is probably going to be awkward and useless. It might be nice if they allow you to jump down more cliff by removing invisible wall, but in the current state, it won't fix half of the stupid map design

I'm glad he is considering it but it's a bit too late now. That's the kind of thing you have to include very early in the project.

Well the world is still small, it allows them to make the future areas more workable with a jump feature. I don't think they could make any changes to the zones without making you download the entire regions again. But that wasn't a big problem for beta.

[Kaylia]

On topic, here is my biggest gripes with the game.


#1 The world. Am I the only one who get terribly depressed the moment I step outside city gates? Everything is so empty and flat. No matter what direction you face, it look the same everywhere. You have generic rock formation plastered everywhere across the whole map, and that's it. Where are the landmarks? Where are the unique design that let you know you're "here", and not anywhere else? In most mmo I played, I would have no issue knowing exactly where I am from any scenic pictures, but in FFXIV...I really don't know.

The absence of civilization beyond the gate make it even worse. How am I supposed to believe this world is real? FFXIV's design is closer to a dungeon crawler with a single hub and randomly generated dungeon than anything. I feel absolutely no drive to explore every corner of the map because I know it will be the same boring stuff everywhere.

After playing LoTRO for 2 months, this feeling was amplified tenfold. Nearly every days I played the game, I was in a new and unique location unlike everything I've seen before. That game has its faults, but the world design was definitively not one. I'm particularly impressed that they managed to create such an interesting world without resorting to extreme fantasy setting (like WoW or Aion). That's the kind of realism I was looking for in FFXIV, but Square failled miserably


#2 Combat system: People constantly make fun of WoW because its "too easy"...but really, what part of FFXIV is "hard"? WoW might have trivialised leveling, but it still offer genuinely hard contents. In Lotro case, I can't say it's "hard", but I'm using every ressouce I've at my disposal to survive and complete quests solo (from stealth, to crowd control, to kiting, to meleeing or nuking with aoe). In FFXIV so far...all do is 1,1,1,2,1,1,1,2 and pop an occasional cooldown..and the occasional retreat when I get overwhelmed. I still havent experienced difficult team fight yet, but with my current arsenal, I really don't see where the game will challenge me.


[edit]

#3 Everything takes fucking forever. No matter how trivial the task you want to accomplish is, its going to take you 10 times longer than it would in any other mmo.

[Alderaan]

I'm surprisingly rather enjoying LOTRO now myself. The world is amazing and i know exactly where i am at any time without having to look at the map due to landmarks and areas that stand out.

[Hyan]

The world was the best part of LOTRO for sure. Of all the wow clones I've played (including wow itself), I had the most fun in that game. But I still felt like I was always alone. It gets boring as fuck.

The intros were also particularly impressive.

[Yoli]

However, there is no way in hell such clumsy system would turn into a working medieval bazaar. The lag, the sheer amount of items and retainers and people tolerance for pointless step that slow them down doomed it from the start.

Definitely agree with this. The market wards were a really neat idea imo, but the majority of people would certainly rather have a less neat idea that's more convenient. I wonder if people would have liked the market wards more if they'd come with a search function at the start though. The bad experience of months w/o one leaves a pretty bad taste in the moth, but it's honestly not /that/ hard to find what I want now that a search is in. And I genuinely like how it maintains some diversity of pricing - I hated how powercrafters/rmt/etc would just drive regular AH prices in xi. Or how undercutters could semi-permanently alter the prices on things because they were lazy and wanted a quick sale. So I think the market wards had the potential for some very real upsides, which just got lost in a completely shoddy implementation.

I feel absolutely no drive to explore every corner of the map because I know it will be the same boring stuff everywhere.

On one hand I totally know what you're talking about and agree. On the other hand - and what puzzles me - is that there actually are some (very few) neat spaces in the world, tucked away in the middle of nowhere. Gridania's zone is awful tunnel, awful tunnel, awful tunnel, really nice lake in the middle of nowhere serving no purpose and out of everyone's way, and then more awful tunnels. But yeah, I agree. The world is overall very lifeless and flat. And I don't think there's much they can do to fix that in the short term at this point - will have to wait for an expansion should they salvage the game (which I'm feeling optimistic about - I like what seems to be going on).

The potential for cool zones is there in the future, if they do pick up on this as a problem. It'd be awesome to have an HD riverne, or HD sky, etc. But the starter zones I guess we're stuck with.

[Lucavi]

The world was the best part of LOTRO for sure. Of all the wow clones I've played (including wow itself), I had the most fun in that game. But I still felt like I was always alone. It gets boring as fuck.

The intros were also particularly impressive.

To be fair, there's a lot of alone time in this game as well, and that's without having such an expansive world. The only place I truly feel "crowded" in is Horizon during Behest time, or at the repair-bot in town.

[The Q]

Kaylia I feel exactly the same as you do on #1. When I look back to FF11 I can remember unique landmarks and points of interest in every single zone I ever visited. Even Gustaberg had many little nuances that I remember and nostalgia hard for whenever I hear that music. Take that hill with the graveyard atop it. When I played the game I thought it was a pretty neat little touch but nothing overly spectacular compared to a lot of other things in the game. If that same landmark were in FF14 it would most likely be the single most interesting landmark in the entire game, mainly because it would damn near be the only one in the game lol. Even then it would probably be blocked off and only viewable from a distance with no known story relation to anything as with every landmark I know of that actually exists in this game.

It's sad when we have zones so huge yet one couldn't tell one end from the other because they are so homogeneous in design.

[Lucavi]

When are we going to see something like Gusgen mines again? That shit was creepy. The whole backstory of all the death in there, and then seeing random ghosts, and having some pretty strong monsters in a few places. There's nothing like that in this game; nothing that leave an impact outside of a few screenshots of some far off place in the distance that we can't reach.

[The Q]

Gusgen mines scared the shit out of me. Not going to lie.