Originally Posted by
Akumasama
Been playing since September 2004 and still play to day, altough I've taken quite a few breaks over the last few years.
Game changed a lot, it's hard to say how I feel about it atm.
I'm torn between the happyness for seeing some things change (finally!) and the sadness for a game that it's not what it used to be anymore.
"Abyssea", a set of content that came out some years ago and that accompanied players for almost 2 years througout the groundbreaking new aspect of level cap increase, was very fun at start, but it grow old quick.
Abyssea was going in the right direction, but they overdid things. Maybe they weren't expecting FFXIV to fail that bad, and maybe they weren't expecting people to keep such a high interest in the game up to this day, so Abyssea was planned to "burn" the game out very fast.
That has consequences, but while it lasts is fun for people.
If game had ended say 1+ year ago, it would have done it with a bang.
But now Abyssea drained all of the game's "lifeforce", all of its "balance" carefully achieved after years of insignificantly small changes from patch to patch, and in the end the game survived... and people found themselves with something completely broken, which wasn't "meat nor fish", as we say in my country, it kinda lost part of its identity.
The team (which is very small, thanks to the fact most of the developers are working on FFXIV atm) is working hard to fix things and I think they're going in the right direction, but many things are broken beyond repair and, as usual, they react too slow, waaaay too slow.
So, what state is the game now? A bad state, it works only for hardcore gamers or people like me who live within the memory of what FFXI used to be and of all the hours spent within the game.
I would never suggest a new player to come back to FFXI, honestly, as much as I'm having fun on it right now.