If You Are Tired Of This Game Or Just Want A Break

Where do you get this "bad reputation" of the FFXIV community?
People on MMO-Champion and ResetEra generally say the opposite thing.
Of course there's people who report their own personal and bad experience, but the majority of posts are about people "surprised" about how friendly and good the community is for noobs.
ResetEra and MMO-Champion are two pretty big communities eh, not small niche forums.

What do you have in mind Mattelot when you say the FFXIV is garbage?
Is it about the good ol' dilemma of Tanks/Healers being forced to DPS and getting kicked from Content Finder if they don't?
Because while I'm perfectly aware things like those sadly do happen, I feel this problem specifically gets a bit overboosted and it's, in reality, nowhere as bad or spread as some hurt people want to make it look.
I'm talking in general, not about anyone specfically in this thread on FFXIAH.

It's less about how bad they are to you when you're playing the game because the GM teams are far stricter on taking action on people that are rude and more about how they treat people who critique their game outside. Which scares off anyone from other titles from playing it.

Nothing gets a discussion going like a classic Vize thread

Billnes thinks XIV is toxic and for noobs I heard.

Thanks for the replies to my question.

In XI though, when anybody asks me to DPS (which has been never) as WHM:

Party: "Yay! A good WHM has arrived!"

WHM: "Alright, whatcha want me to do first?"

Party: "Do a silly clown dance (DPS) for us."

WHM: "Degrade myself, huh?"

I'm gonna chime in and add to that crowd that thinks FFXIV is a pretty decent game. It's different than FFXI, but that's not a bad thing. Each has their pros and cons. The biggest draw for me in FFXIV is the story. I'm really impressed with the way they play out their cutscenes and main plot events. Once you get past the filler portions the story is pretty epic and the world is really nice to look at. I also like that the crafting and gathering professions are more hands on than FFXI.

The gear progression is bland though, and for that reason I never focused on current top tier raiding events. I don't see a point in investing undue effort in the gear treadmill to keep everything BiS since it'll all be outdated in a few patches anyway. But the majority of the game is pretty laid back, and they intentionally designed it so that you can log in and spend a couple hours playing and get stuff done, even if that stuff is just a bit of crafting or a few dungeon runs. Also, for what it's worth, most of the community I've run into has pretty darn amicable. It's no FFXI, but again, it's not supposed to be.

just play Maplestory, it's FREE

I kinda agree, but thats more of how fights and events in this game are, not mechanic itself. Most events/mobs use exactly the same mechanic, so skill is only needed to clear it for the first time. Like for example clear Dynamis D for the first time and do it fast, not by brute forcing all mechanics with 100 attempts.

If for example they would come up with event, that throw at you random unskipable mobs, with random resist, doing random spells and having random mechanics, then that would actually require skill. You would need to adapt and react on fly. Obviously Im assuming not using React or similar lua.

Eh, BigBang ruined Maple. Then they nerfed group EXP and Kanna skills in Reboot. Feels like a single player game when leveling now. :(

Personally I just play Tera when I'm bored of ffxi, it's f2p so no sub or purchase cost and you can have fun with a pretty game with nice action combat. It is however, very skill based.

You have to actually press right mouse to block big attacks on tanks, right mouse puts your shield up. This is the only game I've enjoyed tanking on personally.
You have to target and press left button to heal party members.
You have to dodge using iframes on damage jobs similar to dark souls rolls.
You have to use iframe warps, dodges and stoneskin moves on black mage or you die.

In terms of dungeon graphics, it's near identical to ffxiv. If you squint your eyes you can't tell the difference. Very much like FF14 it has terribly boring leveling but one of the most intricate and beautiful worlds in any mmorpg I've ever played though.

Honestly Sorceror on Tera is the most fun I've had playing a BLM type class.

It's all good, I don't get enough time these days for FFXI, nevermind anything else. Family life. Work. Other games. SE's had enough money from me over the years. It's why I still haven't got FF7 Remake or Wardrobes 3&4. The first is because I'm not paying full price for 1/4 of a game every time they introduce a new quarter.

Wardrobes should be quality of life and not extra charge on an 18+ year game that already makes them a ton of profit. And for what? So it can go towards updating FFXIV while FFXI get nothing but barebone updates? I'm surprised they even bothered adding new story. I know I'm sounding pessimistic here, but that's just how SE is to me. They make great games, but boy do they love to rip us. They would've shut down FFXI years ago if it wasn't a numbered title in the series.

I don't get this complaint honestly, they didn't swindle you out of money. You paid for a service same as you pay for anything else, not like you're doing them a favor giving them your $3 a week.

The purpose of a game is to make profits above the cost of the wages of the people working on it, if it's not making enough they will shut it down. It's not there as a public service, it's there to make money. Wardrobe 1 and 2 are free, 3 and 4 are paid. I see nothing wrong with that.

Because they made it so you can't gear up as many jobs as you would like. For the longest time you could not send augmented equipment over to mules, so if you wanted multiple JSE capes, Reisenjima gear (etc), on top of your Reforged and many accessories, you are very limited on inventory. With the extra space we would have the freedom to level more jobs and gear them accordingly, but as the game is, almost everybody is playing inventory management even with wardrobe 3&4. The only players who don't have 1-4 jobs max.

One thread directed at the devs had many players super keen to get at least two new free wardrobes, and keep 3&4 as a paid service. The game is so old and doesn't cost that much to look after, so it's not like they ever needed this service to keep the game running. They make a killing on it, and that's before we add server transfers. Which again, they make bank on transfers because of the sheer imbalance in the economies across servers. You get players often buying up materials, HQ abjurations and weapons and selling them on way higher on smaller servers. So again, SE is making money from purposely not balancing things.

I get they want to make money, but clearly it's more about that than user satisfaction. I understand how business works, any company would be dumb to not want to make profit. But when SE initially introduced this Wardrobe 3&4, it had more backlash than anything. A minority were like... "whatever, I'll pay it", while many others said no... "it should be a free, quality of life update", many of whom pointed out that it was SE's fault we were struggling with inventory to begin with. Let's bloat them up first... then sell 'em this conveniently awesome "service". Yeah, right.

It's not something I lose any sleep over because I still play the game with six mastered jobs (this includes RDM, which is a real pain), but I'm at my limit and it restricts expanding any further. I'm not paying more money just so I can gear up two more jobs, I'd rather focus on those I have. In a game with 22 jobs, you can only really gear 6 or 7 (8 if you're major crossing over and stay light with duplicates) without this "service", which isn't right to me. Well yeah, you could do more... but it's a ton of storage slips and muling to switch. I'd love to be more versatile than that. It would make managing smaller groups easier.

Ironically, FFXIV is the only game I enjoy taking on, and for similar reasons. Warrior is easily my most played job and the tanking kit revolves around managing ability cooldowns to mitigate big pulls and tank busters. Sure there's some community resentment to how they changed enmity and tank role implementations in shadowbringers, and while I loved the stance dancing aspect in heavenward what I honestly miss most from older patches is Brutal Swing and Butcher's Block. Those two abilities just felt and sounded right, like they were thematically what a warrior should be doing. Brutal swing was leagues ahead of low blow in how satisfying the animation and sound effects were, and butcher's block equally so. But even with all the changes over the years warrior still feels complete and coherent in what it does, and it'll probably always be my favorite class.

Black mage and Samurai are my other two preferred combat classes for what it's worth, and much like warrior they feel like their kits are complete and coherent. The slight increases they got to ability damage a ways back really put them in a good spot. And while there may be a lot of whining on the official forms about this or that a lot of it feels like personal nitpicking and I hardly notice any of it when I'm actually playing the game. Overall I think is worth giving it a shot. I don't take it too serious and most of the game is intentionally designed to be pretty casual.

I just don't get the big deal, especially since you seem super salty over it. Seems like you're cutting your nose off to spite your face. If you need more space pay the extra piffling amount. Principle I guess?

If I go into the store to buy ketchup I'm not gonna pay less to get the glass bottle cause it's cheaper out of principle, I'll pay more to get the squeezy one cause it's easier to get it out of. Life is too short to be salty over a couple of bucks imo.

Honestly they have been surprisingly refrained from adding more stuff to spend money on, the company has shown they have no issues doing it with FF14 so it's amazing they have not added more.

If you're this put out over a couple of bucks for extra inventory space on ff11, do not go near FF14 ever. FF14 has the most extreme monetization of any mmorpg I've ever seen. The odd thing though is that you probably would not have a problem with it on FF14 if you did cause you have no history with that game, which proves it's just some odd principle issue.

Guess it depends on how you look at it. The only thing that XIV offers that impact gameplay are additional retainers, which potentially offer a fair bit for the money. There's plenty of cosmetic stuff, but that's not uncommon. Neither are things like paid boosts, race changes, or what have you. WoW has offered them for a long time.
Games like Guild Wars 2 or SWTOR sell currencies in their cash shops to get upgrades or items as well.

At its core, XI's monetization is similar to retainers, just a lot less convenient. Pay extra for more AH slots and inventory...and more login points, special dials, deeds, trove, sparks, bonanza entries, and so on. Most people have at least one mule, because it just started to make sense, right? Same as wardrobes.
To be fair, SE did improve base storage as well over the years, and by a good amount, but they've also implemented a lot of gear seemingly designed to take up a lot of space (random augments, job-specific items, etc) to offset it.

Intentional or not, SE has created a situation where many XI players are voluntarily paying a few bucks over the base subscription, every month, possibly over multiple accounts to boot. To me, that's not quite the same as charging for a cosmetics or a mount.

Every game does the same. The mechanics of extra purchases are to create an extra avenue for revenue and then create more demand for it. Either by increasing need or refusing to update in a way that would impact sales.

For FF11 they obviously are trying to pad our inventory more, the most blatant version of this being Ambuscade capes. They are obviously also trying to sell more alts in the way you mentioned. If the engine allowed it we would have far more things to buy, I have no doubts on that.

For FF14 they force you to clear more boring story content to be able to do latest dungeons, knowing full well most find them tedious and so will buy story skips. Especially on alts. For cosmetic and mount sales they will intentionally start making "free" ones far less impressive to look at to push cosmetic sales more. Also there is the case that your subscription is paying the wages of the people making the cosmetics you then pay more money for, and that they are making less content to make the sellable stuff. You can say "oh no they don't" but of course they do, they want to sell them. Lets not be naive cause we like the game, they are there to make as much cash as possible.

I played a subscription based mmo that went free to play, this is why I know the mechanics of FF14s optional items. I saw them remove the dye NPC to change colors of armors to sell them instead, I saw them start putting the prettier mounts and armors on the cash shop and new dungeons giving recolors, I saw them adding items to pad our inventories to sell bank expanders, I saw them lowering stack sizes, I saw them adding pretty new hairstyles and emotes so you had to buy them. Things they used to just add in monthly updates as fluff content suddenly started showing up on the cash shop.

At the end of the day we know that anything they sell as extras have an impact on the core game, it just comes down to if you really care that much or not. If I want more space I'll buy more space for a small fee, if I want an alt for gobbie box I'll pay the extra. Similarly if I want to skip the boring story I'll buy a story skip instead of doing it and being mad about it, if I want a pretty mount to show off I'll buy it.

Bonk's Revenge in 1991 on ye olde TurboGrafx never charged extra

Wanna know why Naoki Yoshida is so beloved at Square Enix and why they lavish him with promotions? it's not because he turned FF14 around, it's because of the extra revenue he managed to get out of it to make it so profitable. It's business. If I had to guess, I would say he even had some say or suggestions on how to promote more income for FF11 too. He is afterall in charge of all online games.

Not only is FF14 one of the most heavily monetized games of its kind, the majority of the playerbase also is fully accepting of it being that way too. Do you have any idea how difficult that is to achieve?

This is something even World of Warcraft struggles with and they have a pretty loyal fanabse, every time they add some new mount to the cash shop it causes an outcry.

I can't stand micro transactions. Especially if it's for things you should be getting because the developers encouraged the need for it with how they updated the game. Fair enough about cosmetic stuff. You can't really do that with FFXI because the graphics aren't pretty enough to sell them or mounts. Some of it is acceptable though, but depends on what it is.

For the longest time, FFXI developers referred to inventory expansion as a "Quality of Life update". It's how they always referred to it in their update notes, which is what bugs me. For years they expanded our inventory for free, and then it became a paid service which they painted as something amazing. Since then, we have seen no further expansions.

With the amount of money I have spent on FFXI since 2004, I could have bought at least 40 brand new titles and kept them for life. Therefore, it's insulting to offer a "service" on top of that fee. Like Isiolia said, imagine doing that across multiple accounts. Some people have the disposable income and don't care, while others have no choice but to save.

I'd be more inclined to pay extra if say 1) they gave us proper updates each month, 2) they advertised the game outside of Japan, especially in Europe, 3) made events with official forum community reps across all servers and not just the big ones, 4) threw us a bone by giving us some free inventory, even if it's small, 5) they followed up on some of the things they promised but never delivered, like a new UI.

They could be updating FFXI to make certain Windower QoL features obsolete. It would be a start, but I get it. Means spending money they put towards FFXIV, FFXV and Dissidia NT (the charges on those extra characters is a complete rip off! And don't you dare say otherwise), and more recently toward FFVII Remake and FFXVI. Instead, all we get are dead on arrival Mentor systems and Windurst T-Shirts sold at such a high price they better come with crystal shards encrusted in to the material.

Ragnarok.Jessikah. Thanks for the recommendation, but I pretty much lost it at this person's face.







Cannot unsee that horrendous face.

Wardrobes would've been more ethical if they were a one-time transaction. You buy additional space and you keep it, period.

Charge 10€ for each of them, but make them permanent and not a monthly fee.

...of course they would've gained less money, but yeah I think it would've been a more ethical, more fair thing to do towards their loyal customers who have been paying monthly fees for over 16 years now.

Wardrobes are absolutely an unethical cash grab. The most obvious part of it is the fact that if you stop paying for them, you're unable to retrieve the equipment in them. So, you can't just decide you no longer want to pay for them, you have to make a coordinated effort to have them empty at the time you deactivate(which is only once a month, so you could easily put things in by mistake after deactivating but before they go inactive, especially if you use plugins).

But, that's what gaming is becoming across the board. If it's not predatory cash shop transactions, it's poor business practices and half-finished products. CDPR was looked at as one of the better developers in this regard, until they launched CP2077 the way they did. The amount of gaming companies that place the user experience over even the most minimal amount of profit is near-nonexistant. Gone are the days when games were all one-time purchases in the same $50-70 range and the only thing the developers cared about was making the best game they could for that price.

LOL! Yeah. They randomly generate NPC's from their selection of faces and outfits, and some of the faces are pretty comical.

Though that is one of the cool things you can do with the game is customize your characters' faces, portraits, outfits, and even colour schemes. And there are certain challenges you can undertake at points in the game which will unlock more outfits for your soldiers.

EDIT: You just can't beat having both goggles and corrective eyeglasses!

I don't think it's quite that dire. We still frequently get games that are complete, solid experiences out of the gate. The existence of some manner of DLC doesn't necessarily change that.

Which isn't to say some complaints aren't warranted, of course.

"We" do think that/know that.

Server transfers are also cashgrabs. (effective ones at that, you pay $30 to scalp goods and easily make $30 worth of gil, it's a nobrainer for anyone motivated enough to do it)

If I run a company with 100 people paying me $10 a month for me to drive them to town, I earn $1000 a month. If another company opens with a far more modern car and takes half my customers I'm now making $500 a month. I'm bringing in half the money I used to bring in even though the people are paying the same amount of money. I am now stuck with a few choices, increase prices, cut costs, find alternate way to make money or a mix.

At this point I need to find a way to increase my revenue while keeping in mind my chances of getting new customers over this new company are low, so maybe I offer an optional coffee or extra comfy seat with the drive for $5 extra a month. If half the people pay me the extra I'm still making less money than I used to but I am at least more profitable. Would you seriously now demand I give you the coffee and comfy seat for free? Knowing I'm already struggling.

The reality is, FF11 has less players than it used to and so needs to be creative in the ways it makes more money. Would you like them to put the subscription fee up to $18 a month across the board for everyone as a consequence of less people playing, or would you prefer them add opt in services that cost more money for the people who play it the most?

FFXI makes a decent profit, is the profit FF11 makes impressive to Square Enix? No, the profit FF11 makes is probably a rounding error to the company itself. As such the team in charge of the game has to try to keep profits up so it continues to be funded, and he is doing it. If you care about the game continuing to run, can afford it, and need the extra space pay some extra. If not, at the very least don't complain about it.

Would you pay $5 extra if they came out and said "we are on the verge of being shut down, we need to make more money" if yes then assume that's what they are saying and do it, because here is the thing. You will never get a warning like this from them, if the game is no longer making what they want they will just tell you it's over with a few months notice and that will be the end of it.

I don't like extra charges and on newer games I'm mostly against them, but FF11 is an old game, with a fairly small playerbase and a small and dedicated team continuing to work on it best they can.

Oh and if you think the profits from FF11 goto FF14 you're crazy, the profits from FF14 optional items don't goto FF14..

There is a major difference between your example and SE's wardrobe/transfer scenarios.

Your example has a cost associated to it to produce the extra service regularly (making coffee still costs money, and vacuuming the seat regularly also costs money), whereas there is a singular item cost regarding the 3rd/4th wardrobes and server transfers (in the case of the transfers, it's automated). It is highly likely that there is no such cost associated with maintaining that service, but they certainly are reaping the profit in full each month.

Your example would be better if you offer to let them play their own music on the radio for the $5/month extra. The sunk cost is getting the CD or download to your phone, and then charge them the $5/month for them to listen to their music. It only costs you once to buy the song, you don't have to continuously pay anyone else to "maintain" the song, but you reap the benefits for the service.