Final Fantasy 14 is going to be an MMO :)

[TheBigBB]

I have no hope for FFXIV. Maybe I'm just contrary to the whole process, but I don't see SE learning THAT much from XI. My take on the market is thus:

At this point WoW is the undisputed king, and through cunning trivialization of their early game content, they more or less ensure every new player can hit cap with a fair degree of ease. It is actually moderately intriguing the amount of obsolete content they have in the game. But that is beside the point from the fact that they keep their end game content relatively fresh. With a small investment of time, you can be hob-nobbing it around with all the other level 80s.

Other MMOs are able to more or less maintain their subscription base through sheer force of addiction, but you just don't see anyone really starting anything but WoW because every other MMO more or less retains the notion that you have to spend as much time getting to cap and gearing up as the people who started half a decade ago, which is a real turn off.

FFXIV will almost certainly get a good start, but I imagine its going to go down the same path of all the things that turned people off XI: Limited UI, PS2(3) limitations, a lack of empathy with the fan base, and an inability to implement forward looking design to make the game that people want to play instead of copying the big dog MMO of the time.

That's just my 2 cents though.

Good point. I can't see myself enjoying a MMO which doesn't have a plan to help new players years down the line catch up. I can't always be playing the same game, so I want a reasonable chance to catch up. The fun should be the experience, not the satisfaction of others being unable to catch up to you in gear and level.

[Lyonheart]

I have no hope for FFXIV. Maybe I'm just contrary to the whole process, but I don't see SE learning THAT much from XI. My take on the market is thus:

At this point WoW is the undisputed king, and through cunning trivialization of their early game content, they more or less ensure every new player can hit cap with a fair degree of ease. It is actually moderately intriguing the amount of obsolete content they have in the game. But that is beside the point from the fact that they keep their end game content relatively fresh. With a small investment of time, you can be hob-nobbing it around with all the other level 80s.

Other MMOs are able to more or less maintain their subscription base through sheer force of addiction, but you just don't see anyone really starting anything but WoW because every other MMO more or less retains the notion that you have to spend as much time getting to cap and gearing up as the people who started half a decade ago, which is a real turn off.

FFXIV will almost certainly get a good start, but I imagine its going to go down the same path of all the things that turned people off XI: Limited UI, PS2(3) limitations, a lack of empathy with the fan base, and an inability to implement forward looking design to make the game that people want to play instead of copying the big dog MMO of the time.

That's just my 2 cents though.

Good point. I can't see myself enjoying a MMO which doesn't have a plan to help new players years down the line catch up. I can't always be playing the same game, so I want a reasonable chance to catch up. The fun should be the experience, not the satisfaction of others being unable to catch up to you in gear and level.

EQ2 has RaF and even without RaF leveling from 1-70 has been made easy. 70-80 is slow, but it should be, and is still not too slow.

[Duese]

The fun should be the experience, not the satisfaction of others being unable to catch up to you in gear and level.

And by skipping a majority of the content you are making the "experience" better?

Fitting that this is an FFXI thread and all since they came up with a nifty way to deal with it rather than just "here, have lvl 75." Rather than boost the level of the new players, they gave the ability to lower the experienced player down to the same level as the new player and allowed the experienced player get the same rewards. The Level Sync feature really was a neat feature for that game, especially with the amount of level capped content. It really made grouping a lot more fun and accessible, not to mention it got rid of a lot of crowding issues on overcamped xp zones.

Also, through the use of experience rings, you benefited from shorter xp sessions on multiple different days, rather than just straight out grind fests. It's kind of like rested xp except you don't spend your entire lvl'ing life under the effects. (Seriously, I lvl'd 70-80 in less then 2 weeks and never ran out of rested xp in WoW.)

WTB more anniversary rings though. =)

[TheBigBB]

The fun should be the experience, not the satisfaction of others being unable to catch up to you in gear and level.

And by skipping a majority of the content you are making the "experience" better?

I didn't say anything about skipping content. You're talking to a guy who did collection quests across two separate 5-man groups to 80. I'm just saying that if I took a 5 month break to play some other games (I did) I shouldn't have to come back and be unable to catch up. WoW does a great job of stopping that from happening. I've heard that other MMOs don't. I had a bad experience with FFXI. I hope that they consider the new guys who might start 1,2,3 years after release.

[TheBigBB]

(Seriously, I lvl'd 70-80 in less then 2 weeks and never ran out of rested xp in WoW.)

Also, I call BS. It takes 10 days to get 1.5 levels worth of rested experience, as far as I know. You got 10 levels on rested in under 14 days? Unless you got 8 levels worth of quest turn-in experience, that's not even possible. Do you really need to be so insecure about your argument that you resort to lying about a mechanic just to make your point stronger? It's okay to like the FFXI rings system. No one's going to attack you just for that.

[Bigfish]

Fitting that this is an FFXI thread and all since they came up with a nifty way to deal with it rather than just "here, have lvl 75." Rather than boost the level of the new players, they gave the ability to lower the experienced player down to the same level as the new player and allowed the experienced player get the same rewards. The Level Sync feature really was a neat feature for that game, especially with the amount of level capped content. It really made grouping a lot more fun and accessible, not to mention it got rid of a lot of crowding issues on overcamped xp zones.

I'm going to have to cite this as a prime example of SE's "too little too late" policy. I've been espousing that position for years. (How the hell do I know that word?) Basically, SE does some pretty awesome stuff. Problem is, it happens about 2-4 years after it should have been implemented.

Level sync is an awesome feature, doubly so in the effect that it lets you undertake the miriad level capped content without having to keep a second/third/fourth etc. set of gear on hand. Thing is, they should have done this back with CoP, when level capped stuff was more prominent.

Level sync and Fields of Valor somewhat alleviating party seek times aside, new players still have to do: Missions, Genkai, Zilart, and CoP before their characters can really get fleshed out, and that's just the grind to 75. Meripos add a whole new level of "grind grind grind" in to the mix. Now back when this stuff was cutting edge (or hell, just standard adge), it was fine. Starting fresh and playing catch-up is NOT a pleasant experience though, especially when you're looking at counting the time in months instead of weeks.

[Duese]

Also, I call BS. It takes 10 days to get 1.5 levels worth of rested experience, as far as I know. You got 10 levels on rested in under 14 days? Unless you got 8 levels worth of quest turn-in experience, that's not even possible.

Believe what you want, but group xp puts a huge knock into xp per kill unless you are in instances. Not doing instances and completing 6.5 zones worth of quests does yield quite a bit of quest xp. Oh and you assume that I didn't start with full rested xp.

All that beside the point, my initial argument still stands that "rested" xp is becoming the standard xp where it was initially designed as something to help casual players.

I'm going to have to cite this as a prime example of SE's "too little too late" policy.

I agree 100%. Would have been awesome to have this from the beginning. It did make crafting a little more worthwhile though. Making that lvl 30 shade gear or pally gear was pretty nice. They finally started adding a lot more gear to the game which definitely was a nice boost. I guess they got tired of all the Thief's and Ranger's wearing the same boots from lvl 7 to 75.

[Marious]

Dude those boots where great for thief's... let me guess those where off the rabbit NM. I camped that bastard a long time lol.

[Ridere]

Dude those boots where great for thief's... let me guess those where off the rabbit NM. I camped that bastard a long time lol.

Close!

Jaggedy-Eared Jack dropped a neck piece which improved your chance to steal.

Those boots dropped from Leaping Lizzy in South Gustaberg and were quite the hot item. haha

[Duese]

Close!

Jaggedy-Eared Jack dropped a neck piece which improved your chance to steal.

Those boots dropped from Leaping Lizzy in South Gustaberg and were quite the hot item. haha

Winner!

And their first idea to fix the problem was to change the drop from Leaping Boots to "Bounding Boots" with the same exact stats and make them Ra/Ex instead of actually adding new gear choices. That just jacked the price up on the non-Ra/Ex boots to ridiculous amounts and had everyone and their mother out camping Lizzy.

It was fun camping NM's though, especially if you *cough* modified the registry of the placeholders *cough*. One time I changed the registry for "Hill Lizard" to "Leaping Lizzy" on my friends computer. He kept freaking out saying "OMG! I tagged lizzy!" only to see 3 of them standing next to him. I loved screwing around with the image files and registries in that game. Someone created a megaman outfit for taru's that I wore around for like a month. To bad it only displayed that way on your computer and not everyone else's. It was pretty fitting seeing that my characters name was Superhero.

Edit:

Omg screenshots!