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

This is why when I came back I opted to pay to play on one of the official servers instead of private. The way I look at it is I don't buy consoles or games as much as I used to, so I try to support the things I like with those savings.

This game could have died a long time ago. The publisher long since stopped giving a hoot about it. It survives because the development team and the fans still love it. Square-Enix themselves probably only give Final Fantasy XI enough funding to keep the servers going, and as soon as that net profit dips into the red they'll pull the plug altogether.

Frankly, I'm amazed that they haven't lost their pride altogether and tried selling us even more stuff. I think it would be pretty easy to monetize this game. Level-skipping tickets (take a job to Lv.99 for only $9.99 or all jobs for $200! What a deal!), story-skipping tickets, Mog Kupons, emotes, mounts, whole items...

We need to remember that we could be playing that game I just described. But we aren't. We're playing a game that allows you to experience the entire game with a single character, whose slot already costs less monthly than most subscription-based MMO's. A game with decades of content that's honestly pretty well spread out from levels 1 thru 99 so you don't even need to rush to the level cap if you don't want to. A game with over a dozen breathtaking storylines with a cost barrier of entry less than two Starbucks coffees.

i chuckle every time a returning player comes here die hard white knighting SE/ffxi for a few months and then disappears for a few years

edit: it's like dude, you haven't played ffxi in 3 years yet you come here to argue with people who have been subbed that whole time about how good of a job the "Development team" is doing.

there's a new one every thread like this too

edit2: actually damn this one hadn't played in 7 years

Are...you trying to get the entire community to hate you or something Tsm?

Cause you aren't trying hard enough, apparently. Get gud, son.

The paid Mog Wardrobe thing really shouldn't be an issue, or even something compared to other MMO "cash-grabs." What I think people forget sometimes is that FF11 was a game developed for the Playstation 2. I know "PS2 limitations" is a bit of a meme but you have to understand that, especially two decades ago, software architectural structures are not infinitely scalable. You can't expect to just keep adding inventory slots without noticeable backend (or frontend!) costs and tradeoffs.

You know why your inventory takes so long to load when you zone? It's because you have so much ***in all of your storage containers. If you make a brand-new character you'll notice that your measly 30-slot inventory loads almost INSTANTLY.

I'm not gonna pretend to know all of the details of how much item management affects server loads, but I'm almost certain that the cost of the additional Mog Wardrobes exists partially to offset its own cost. "Additional item storage" isn't free. The game wasn't meant to live this long, nor was it built with the expectation that the client program would ever need to track more than 200 items at a time.

There was a very obvious player need for more storage slots, especially in the Oseem age, but giving every player an additional 160 slots would add a decent chunk of networking+database management cost. I think having the players optionally offset that cost is a reasonable compromise with this in mind.

Don't forget the ultimate storage capacity that every player has access to: mules.

Sure, it's a pain to move stuff from one character to another, but you can store jobs you aren't touching anymore to your mule and be done with it. Only have equipment for jobs you play most of the time.

To be fair, they design it like that. If my WS set could also double as my regen set, that'd be great. Create overlap of distinct gearing niches and it'll cut down on quantity. As it is though, I need a regen piece which I will never use in combat.

I agree in some sense that it's a self-afflicted design problem--- they could just design items differently so you don't need as many. But SE knows that one of the main lasting appeals of this game is the requirement for making distinct gearsets, since it enables a huge amount of horizontal progression options for your character. If each job only needed 2 distinct bodypieces, that dramatically limits player agency in making gearsets, but ALSO hurts SE when it comes to designing new content rewards: they'd need to make items that replace other items (i.e. player incentive), but if you only have 1-2 usable items for each slot per character, then each new item reward has to just be numerically stronger than the existing item. Which gives you a vertical progression system exactly like FF14's. This actively works against FF11's appeal as a whole, since it would basically invalidate existing content at an alarming rate... plus it would require SE to pump out new content more frequently, which costs more money...

They could have just not made 22 different capes that you put the same stats on.

accurate

Chatoyant Cape when?

I played FF14 for around a year and beat the last tier of Savage Edens, got bored and quit recently. This post is a really good way of framing it, imo.

During raids I'd always make the comparison to memorizing a ballet: every attempt is roughly the same, since all you need to do to win is memorize the dance and not make mistakes. In that sense, the fights are all pretty "tight", but on the other hand, you almost completely lose the notion of "ownership" over not just your character's build, but their ACTIONS, too.

My FF14 raid group (IRL friends) were really surprised to hear my gripes with FF14 combat and content. They'd be like, "aren't most MMOs are like that?" And they're not -wrong- per se. But FF11 gives you WAY more control over the way you play your character. Not just between jobs, but WITHIN them.

As opposed to FF14's "ballet" fights, FF11 has "improv" fights. FF14's design places almost zero weight on skills like reaction, flexibility, and fluidity... skills that are highly emphasized in FF11's core battle design principles. In FF11, you are forced to adapt and respond to mob behaviors, as well as to different kinds of bosses. Sure, a bunch of fights have "optimal strategies", but not because SE hard-coded them that way... it's because the PLAYERS figured it out that way.

I've "maxed out" FF11 Dancer by most metrics, but I still play the job a lot and experiment with it, because it gives me an opportunity to absolutely push my limits. "Huh, I wonder if I can solo Sovereign Behemoth"? "I did it, cool! Now, let's try AAEV on Difficult!" This sort of thing really makes me feel like I'm in control of how I play the game.

Final Fantasy XI came out and copied the formula from another game (I think it was Everquest?), and then World of Warcrap came along with a fancy new formula that suddenly everyone was copying. The problem is, when you have a bunch of copies of something popular, usually only one can survive. After all, why would you play "that" one when you could be playing "the good" one?

FFXI and WoW ended up veering in totally different directions and appealing to two totally different audiences. But because WoW was the popular one and every MMORPG since (including Final Fantasy XIV) has followed that formula, it only makes sense that people would just associate all MMORPG's with that one formula.

That's also why I've always appreciated Final Fantasy XI. The things that make WoW so appealing to most are exactly what I hated about it: the hand-holding, the solo grind, the quick race to late-game content. I love that Final Fantasy XI just drops you completely unaware in the middle of a city with no direction. In any other game it wouldn't work, but Final Fantasy XI's openness lets you start wherever you want. You want to start out by just randomly talking to NPC's? You want to start out running outside and beating up enemies? You want to start your nations missions? Join a linkshell? Start crafting? Just go for it-- whatever you do ends up advancing your character in one way or another anyway.

Games like XIV with a clear vertical progression may have issues (mainly with gear becoming obsolete very quickly), but it provides a necessity on the behalf of game designers to keep churning out new content to push the ceiling higher. Otherwise, a huge chunk of the player base will get bored and leave once they've cleared the latest content.

For those complaining that SE isn't giving us the updates we want, those of us who extol the freedoms of horizontal progression and its endless possibilities are basically describing why it's okay from a business perspective to ignore us. They can maintain a loyal, core player base by only throwing us crumbs because there's already so much to do. Must of us have been around forever and probably won't leave anytime soon and they know it.

What we really need is a NPC system where you can store gears and save them as a set, so when you return and ask for it, the NPC hands it all back in one go. However, this would likely go against the storage slip system... which to be honest, is outdated and takes a long time to mess about with.

You need several different slips (which also take up slots), know the ones you need, then go through the process of trading every single one... finding what you need, and by the time you've done all that your party has fallen asleep.

It would be way cooler if say, you could save up to 75 gears in a set with the NPC (keep it in Mog Garden so it only interacts with your character). Make it one set to begin with, to see how it goes. If it works out well? Then tweak the NPC to allow multiple sets which can be named. The only issue I can see are augmented items, but at least some (not all) are sendable to mules.

There are so many items you can't send over though... some are acceptable, others you scratch your head wondering why. Must be a way of doing this without increasing inventory, so the load times aren't any longer.

People act like it's impossible or unreasonable to like both games. I've played both to the end and they're both enjoyable for their own reasons.

It is okay to independently like or dislike one game or another game. You should, however, try to form your own opinion about it with an open mind instead of just going off of what everyone else thinks.

They gonna release this with the new expansion!

I don't think that's an inherent problem with horizontal progression. A lack of content is a lack of content no matter its orientation.

Just for example, they could come out with some really difficult content that rewards players with equipment with more combined stats than what we have now. If it's difficult, then you need to have acquired the best equipment in the first place already. The overall reward for completing these challenges would therefore be more inventory space because you wouldn't have to swap as much. That would be horizontal progression from a vertical leap in difficulty that could stay people from boredom.

I remember the long period of time where Lv.75 was the cap. Things didn't get boring because they did keep coming out with more and more challenging stuff. The problem isn't that the progress is horizontal, it's that there's no new content.

This exists already. See Armor Depository

What drives me nuts is when people have an opinion about a game that they haven't even played. 15 years ago I tried WoW and didn't like it, but I had people who'd never played FFXI argue that "WoW is better than FFXI". Nowadays I feel like it's the same thing with XIV: people who've never played XI are telling me "FFXIV is better than FFXI".

While I was playing XIV with a few friends I casually suggested that they should try XI at some point as well.
One of them said "Isn't that the game that forces you to wear iron panties? No thanks!"
Another said "I don't think I could play a game that looks like it was made for the PS2"
And another said "I have no interest in trying an inferior game"
It's infuriating.

I like this idea on paper, but I don't think will happen, since it could also impose difficult data storage load on the server-side databases.


This only works for certain complete sets of 4-5 pieces.

The current Storage Slips system sucks but it's like that for a reason. If I had to guess, the reason why you can only submit certain sets and can't mix-and-match equip pieces is because server-side, the "flag" that records that you have a certain set stored is just a single integer ID. "Duelist's tabard set" might just have a value of 120, etc. This is efficient storage, because the server doesn't need to "remember" that you've stored five unique pieces (each with their own unique integer IDs): it only needs to remember a single number from an enumeration of set IDs. This also explains why the Storage Slip system works as a way to bypass the inherent storage/inventory limitations that the rest of the game suffers from.

This only works with Artifact, Relic, etc. sets because the programmers hard-coded each of those sets manually, because they're "special." (That is, the programmers enumerated over each of these "special" sets and gave them a unique integer ID.) This same strategy can't work for arbitrary mix-and-match gearsets because, if you were to "count" the set of all possible combinations of gear in the game, you'd run out of integers, due to combinatoric explosion. So you can't feasibly assign each combination of gearsets with a single ID.

"Then why not just store gear as a list of individual gear IDs instead?" Well, that means that for every set the player submits, the database has to remember up to 16 gear IDs, potentially with unique augments. If every player could submit one gear set for storage, each player record in the database would need a brand-new, 16-integer-long field for that gearset. It's one thing if you have to make a new field for a single value, another thing if you have to make a field for 16 values. This is specifically the reason why the Storage Slips system is the way it is.

Sorry to be a spoil-sport :(

EDIT: Now that I think about it, if I were designing this system, I would probably have the Storage Slip KI as the ONLY data saved, period. When you trade the 5 pieces of gear to the moogle, it probably just deletes them from your inventory and gives you the KI. When you ask for the gear back, it deletes the KI and places the 5 pieces of your gear right back in there. So the Key Item has an actual code-related reason for existing and isn't just symbolic. That's pretty cute

It also performs the task of replacing 5 client-side gear slots with a single client-side Key Item, and I'd wager that it is way easier for SE to toggle Key Item slots than inventory slots, due to the fact that Key Items have way fewer options than inventory slots.

Yeah, just like how we've had people in this thread hate on XIV based on second-hand opinions from randos that they took as gospel truth. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing.

Yeah... In reality people can just like what they want. I try to get introspective and really piece together exactly what it is I do or don't like about something. I went into XIV really hoping to like it because I have a lot of friends who play it and it's always great to have stuff like that to talk about and play together.

It really didn't take long before my enthusiasm drained away. In fact, I rejoined FFXI simply because I wanted to see for myself how much worse it was and thought that I could break my rose-tinted goggles. Maybe when I saw how bad this game was, I'd be able to better appreciate XIV. Instead what happened was I completely rediscovered this game and was able to quantify what it was I liked about it. All the stuff I was attached to wasn't just "good because I played it in my salad days", it was "good because the choices they made adhere to a specific style". And that style is my style.

That's why I can't say Final Fantasy XIV is a bad game. It's obviously not if so many people play it. It's just a totally different style that triggers a positive response from a totally different group of people.

I think it is important for many players to recognize this as a whole. XI and XIV are built to appease two polar opposites of the MMO coin and generally people who appreciate one have difficulty stomaching the play style of the other. It's more the exception than the rule for people to enjoy both.

I do appreciate those who try both and can give an honest answer about their likes and dislikes of both games - I'm personally more biased towards enjoying XIV more than XI just because it's less of a time commitment overall.

I don't think it's that hard for people to fall in love with both XI and XIV for different reasons. Different people have different likes, but it's normal to enjoy a variety of things. I've been able to engross myself in everything from old school super nes JRPGs, to strategy games like both the original x-com as well as the modernized re-release, D&D style Baldurs gate 1 + 2 and Icewind Dale games, sim games like the sim city series or harvest moon and stardew valley, strategy games like age of empires II, stellaris or endless legends, and rogue like games like spelunkey and darkest dungeon. Amidst that I've found time to enjoy both FFXI and FFXIV.

FFXI and FFXIV cater to different playstyles, and that's perfectly fine. If someone likes one title or dislikes another that's also perfectly fine. There are countless genres that appeal to different groups of people. But variety is the spice of life, and sticking to just one thing and only that thing for too long is a good way to eventually wind up burning out on it and losing interest. I swap between several things that fancy my interest at the time. And I'm pretty sure a lot of people fall into that same boat. In that respect FFXI and FFXIV being so different is a good thing, because if you can find something that interests you in each title it can offer a refreshing change of pace when you switch gears between the two.

I'm glad FFXI and FFXIV are so different. It'd be awful if they were competing for the same playerbase because then one would just objectively win out. This game would have died twice over if that were the case-- once with the WoW crowd and again with XIV's popularity.

Oh I agree fully. Just anecdotally, it seems like there are a lot of players who have played both and absolutely love one and abhor the other with great prejudice. It's kinda wild, but again, that's just anecdotal on my end and it might just because it's the people who whine the loudest get noticed the most too.

I personally fall in the camp that likes both with a preferential to one but to each their own too. Different strokes for different folks and all that.

Low quality bait. People voluntarily choose to stay on smaller servers because the benefits outweigh the hassle for them.

Obviously it would be better if SE had a global auction house, and I wouldn't begrudge them a free one-time transfer to Asura for people who aren't happy with where they are. But, it's not really comparable to wardrobes, as people can see the problems and benefits and make their own choice. Wardrobes aren't being weighed against anything, they're near-necessary space that you can't easily stop buying once you've purchased them once, by design.

If you are a capable multiboxer, or have a group of friends with a good meeting schedule, you're still going to progress faster on any other server than you would on Asura.

I find XIV extremely shallow and boring. It's XI in basically skin only. I've never played a game that actually makes me hate the other people I play with more than XIV.

If you enjoy doing a scripted fight 300 times until Janet finally *** memorizes how to run in a circle correctly, XIV is for you.

If you hate gear stats that actually have meaning, XIV is for you.

Do you like reskins of recycled weapons where the only reward is the reskin, as again, stats are for show and mean nothing in XIV? Than this *** treasure of a reskinned game is for you.

FF14 is worth playing until the story runs out. Its a pretty fun game until you get to endgame content and worth paying for a couple months if you want to casually play through that. Speaking as someone who has done 6+ omen runs per week, 2 dynamis D per week, and vagary once a week with a group for the majority of the last 4 or 5 years.. I got bored of doing the ff14 scripted fights after a few weeks and lost all interest in playing.

Its a good looking game but sitting on my near empty ff11 server with 200 people and 700 mule/bots still feels like theres a more connected community than on their ff14 severs with thousands of people and seemingly limitless access to quick parties thanks to cross world matching.

If you mean dungeons then yes a fair few have been reskinned but no one cares about them. So that moves us on to the only endgame weapons that have been reskinned and thats the Ultimate mode weapons which apart from looking like the base model they are quite unique. DNC and GNB have had a hard time of getting unique weapons outside of Extremes and Savage but the ones that have been added look really nice.

I find XI to have far more reskins then XIV does and there are a lot of weapons out for XIV. What have we had lately? Ambuscade weapons? reskins, Dynamis weapons? reskinned twice, UNM weapons? reskins, "New" nomad mog bonanza weapons? you guessed it ALL reskins. The only actual unique weapons to be added to XI lately is the level 1 beastmen weapons from ambuscade points.


I have a hard time believing this unless you are going out of your way to not talk to people. Every time i warp back to Limsa my chat log soon fills up with people in /say. Though we are in an age where it is very easy to talk out of games on things like Discord which my Linkshells in both games and my Free Company use more than actual in game chat.

The biggest mistake ff14 made in trying to attract ff11 players was copying the races and monsters over, when I move to a new mmorpg I don't want to be reminded how much I love a game I've played for so long. All this does it make me want to go play ff11.

The reason I can never get into ff14 is because it's constantly reminding me how much more I prefer ff11. I can't just enjoy it as a new game. It's like dating someone that looks a little too much like your previous partner.

When I played ESO I enjoyed it and rarely thought about ff11, when I played ff14 I was constantly thinking about ff11. In the end it just didn't match up and I happily uninstalled it.

ARR was about dropping the idea of trying to continue to pander to the ff11 audience and just fully accepting what made it successful, pandering to ex World of Warcraft players that wanted a FF art style.