Might come back. Few questions.

[Puremallace]

I was in that crew who was ready to jump ship from Aion in 2010 and saw promise. I logged into a turd and have a collectors edition box that sits in my shed that I still get sad about whenever I see it.

So some simple questions:

. Does this game suffer from issues Aion had of a foreign developer catering more to one audience then the other?
. What are real issue that make people quit? Do not be afraid because I can care less about hard leveling experiences because I feel that is what WoW has removed.
. Catch up mechanics at end game. Is it Vanilla/TBC where you have to run the old content to get current or is it streamlined to catch up once hitting max level?
. Professions? To my dismay WoW has basically killed the profession economy. Is there any economy for high end gear or is it all bind on pick up and unable to be placed on a market?
. Graphics seem nice but is it a lag fest due to server side issues?
. The class game play looks nice. WoW has all but stripped class identity to the bone. Do you see FF14 moving in this direction or are class quest stay relevant as the game gets older?

Anyone who can help would be appreciated. Any gripes about the current state of the game would also be appreciated to help me judge the game.

[Faroth]

I was in that crew who was ready to jump ship from Aion in 2010 and saw promise. I logged into a turd and have a collectors edition box that sits in my shed that I still get sad about whenever I see it.

The original collector's edition was very sad in itself. I have it as well.

So some simple questions:

Does this game suffer from issues Aion had of a foreign developer catering more to one audience then the other?
Can you elaborate on what you mean in regards to this? I'm not sure what Aion does that caters to one audience more than the other.
I can say that the English localization team lead, Michael Christopher Koji-Fox is not just a translator, but has a direct line to the creative team and works in conjunction with them for story elements, so there's definitely a collaborative east and west to the dev team. I'm just not sure what you're specifically honing in on.

What are real issue that make people quit? Do not be afraid because I can care less about hard leveling experiences because I feel that is what WoW has removed.
Long and grinding leveling experience for 1-50 and including the post 50 story quests that made up the 2.0 patch cycle. There's a lot of fetch quests. Also, people who don't care about story have to go through a LOT, and I mean a LOT, of dialogue. This is a Final Fantasy core entry at its heart, so it's a story driven game by and large. Of course, there are skip potions now, so you could skip portions or all of the story so far if you felt like shelling out the cash.

Catch up mechanics at end game. Is it Vanilla/TBC where you have to run the old content to get current or is it streamlined to catch up once hitting max level?
Basically think Wrath of the Lich King era. You have a dungeon roulette that you can run that will give you gear about 10 ilvls lower than the hardest raid content. If you're good at catching up on money, or join an FC that has money to spare, you can buy crafted gear at that level as well.
You can run 4 man dungeon roulette for tomestones (think Wrath badges) for gear. This is ilvl 390 and can be upgraded to 400 with items from the 24 man raid.
You can get gear from 24 man raid that's just a smidge below that
You can get gear from crafters
You can get gear a bit lower but decent for catching up from the newest dungeons as well

Professions? To my dismay WoW has basically killed the profession economy. Is there any economy for high end gear or is it all bind on pick up and unable to be placed on a market?
See above, definitely a market for high end gear, especially crafter gear and the high difficulty pieces that are just for looks.

Graphics seem nice but is it a lag fest due to server side issues?
I don't have major lag issues, but of course mileage may vary. I have everything set to max and keep graphics on. You can tune things down so you don't see all spell effects or only see your own, etc.

The class game play looks nice. WoW has all but stripped class identity to the bone. Do you see FF14 moving in this direction or are class quest stay relevant as the game gets older?
Have to get technical here:
Classes are gone from FFXIV - you start with a class such as Maruader and at 30 you upgrade that to a job called Warrior. They've done away with the two class combo to unlock the job and new jobs are just their job from the start.

That said, while there's some blending of identity in the name of balance, I think the jobs in FFXIV will always keep their flavors and unique aspects. It's more inherently tied to their weapon system and their rotations than WoW was. I don't see major changes. Some don't like that XIV is slow to make major shake ups, some of us like that it remains steadfast in being what it is.

Anyone who can help would be appreciated. Any gripes about the current state of the game would also be appreciated to help me judge the game.

The free trial lets you play indefinitely, so you can get every job up to 30 for free. That said, it's not until 50 that most start to open up and you'll be playing with a slower combat flow. A lot of past WoW players find it very slow due to the 2.5 global cool down, but once you're max level you've got enough off GCD skills and movement requirements that it is less noticeable. Some jobs also benefit by stacking materia for skill speed to lower their cool downs.

[Rogalicus]

What are real issue that make people quit? Do not be afraid because I can care less about hard leveling experiences because I feel that is what WoW has removed.

1. First and foremost is lack of open world content. Almost everything they release after expansion is instanced (minus Eureka, but I don't really want to mention that shithole). The zones are mostly decorations for MSQ.
2. Gear is absolutely atrocious, every item is just stat stick with no interesting effects. Stats are boring too, for DPS you get haste, crit, weaker crit that procs with higher rate and versatility. Gearing doesn't feel rewarding at all, they raise item level cap every even patch, but the only change is numbers get slightly higher, nothing changes in your gameplay.
3. Endgame is really stale and might feel lacking after WoW. You get new 4 boss raid every half a year, there is no trash and no environment, just round boss arena. There is also another LFR only raid wing in odd patches, it feels like a real raid, but lacks incentives to repeat it, unless you want to gear your alt class or something. Then there are trials, which are 1 boss raids. There are also dungeons, which are essentially corridors full of trash with no mechanics and bosses that have the same mechanics over and over again.
4. Side content is bunch of worthless mini games or uninspired mob grinds. You can decide if it's good or bad.

Catch up mechanics at end game.

Unless you have millions of gil to drop on latest crafted gear, you'll have to go through most of the content since launch of the expansion, just at a faster rate.

Professions? To my dismay WoW has basically killed the profession economy.

There are not much reasons to earn gil (unless you want to buy your own house), so profession are as relevant as you want them to be.

. Graphics seem nice but is it a lag fest due to server side issues?

I didn't experience any real lag, but server tick is around 0.3s, which, for example, allows you to start running before you finish your cast. This also causes huge movement unsynch with other players, but it's not really a major issue.

WoW has all but stripped class identity to the bone.

FFXIV hardly has it outside of quests. You won't see something like shaman or DK walking on water or warlock gateways. Most of the available buttons just do damage and that's it, even CC is very limited and mostly irrelevant.

[Puremallace]

The original collector's edition was very sad in itself. I have it as well.

So some simple questions:

Does this game suffer from issues Aion had of a foreign developer catering more to one audience then the other?
Can you elaborate on what you mean in regards to this? I'm not sure what Aion does that caters to one audience more than the other.
I can say that the English localization team lead, Michael Christopher Koji-Fox is not just a translator, but has a direct line to the creative team and works in conjunction with them for story elements, so there's definitely a collaborative east and west to the dev team. I'm just not sure what you're specifically honing in on.

Thanks for the responses. In Aion specifically it because clear NCSoft West was basically a bunch of translators and had to wait FOREVER on NCSoft East where Korea was the primary market for Aion. US and EU especially were considered side things left to whither on the vine.

Think I will be checking it out. Lead dev on WoW has lost his mind from the best I can tell. Came back after 9 years to a very different game. Thanks for the input.

[Faroth]

Thanks for the responses. In Aion specifically it because clear NCSoft West was basically a bunch of translators and had to wait FOREVER on NCSoft East where Korea was the primary market for Aion. US and EU especially were considered side things left to whither on the vine.

Think I will be checking it out. Lead dev on WoW has lost his mind from the best I can tell. Came back after 9 years to a very different game. Thanks for the input.

I'll say all the different regions get the same release on the same day and the Localization lead here in the English side of things is very tied in with the main content team. He's contributed a lot of lore.

In fact, the Japanese players complained at one point because there was a lot of flavor text in English that wasn't there in Japanese and they had to kind of reverse-localize what he had added so the Japanese players got it as well.

[Puremallace]

I'll say all the different regions get the same release on the same day and the Localization lead here in the English side of things is very tied in with the main content team. He's contributed a lot of lore.

In fact, the Japanese players complained at one point because there was a lot of flavor text in English that wasn't there in Japanese and they had to kind of reverse-localize what he had added so the Japanese players got it as well.

ahh ok. Yeah Aion the Korea version was over a year ahead and NA players got so desperate for content they bought Korean social security numbers to be able to play.

[Well]

I've played FF, did all of its questline, got to max lvl in the previous xpack and also did some leveling on other classes. There are two big yikes for me:

First, the main questline. Oh.My.God. If you haven't gone through it at least once, you cannot fathom how excruciatingly long, boring and repetitive it is. When people say there are a lot of fetch quests in a particular part, they do not mean what you think they mean. It's 10 times worse than what you imagine, and I am not using this figuratively. If I wasn't trained in the korean ways of grinding from my Lineage 2 days, I would have abandonned the game in the first tenth of that chain. That part especially where you go back and forth constantly is unbelievably annoying. Gotta have patience there.

Second, the level grind early. The classes are so basic for the first tens of levels that I found my forehead on my keyboard very frequently when I would begin leveling a subclass. They are inexusably basic. This never happened in WoW for me, even as an Arcane mage and that should tell you a lot. You literally got 1 healing ability as a healer for instance for a longwhile. It's an absolute slog.

With these said, FF has the best class ever made for me, gameplay wise and in all MMOs ever in the RDM. Literally the best. Nothing comes close.

[Irian]

Does this game suffer from issues Aion had of a foreign developer catering more to one audience then the other?

I wouldn't personally say so. The developers have said that they pay close attention to their US audience but there's always that language barrier that might make some stuff fall on deaf ears. Frankly, maybe that's for the better because the game is a JP game and has a lot of JP influence and I don't think they have interest in changing that.

. What are real issue that make people quit? Do not be afraid because I can care less about hard leveling experiences because I feel that is what WoW has removed.

Staleness. While less of a problem for me personally, at least lately, the game has a tendency to be a little too predictable. You can often know what's in the next patch right after the launch of a previous one.

It's hard for me to say that lately though with the blue mage curveball, but it's still likely an issue the game has overall. They occasionally do do surprising stuff but it's an exception, not a rule. It's hard to say this is a huge problem though because many people love the game for it, it's just a big reason I see friends quit.

. Catch up mechanics at end game. Is it Vanilla/TBC where you have to run the old content to get current or is it streamlined to catch up once hitting max level?

There are essentailly JP/VP systems in the game that allow you to get up to decent gear level fairly quickly, but the game won't push you all the way. As it stands I think the starting Mendacity (justice points) gear is about 40 levels below the best gear, although you can shorten that grind by a significant bit by crafting.

. Professions? To my dismay WoW has basically killed the profession economy. Is there any economy for high end gear or is it all bind on pick up and unable to be placed on a market?

There is a huge economy for crafting and being a high level crafter is practically a game of its own in FFXIV, for better or worse. I personally really enjoy it because even though I'm a super casual crafter it always feels like there's that other side of the game that I can tap into when I'm bored, and it's a very involved aspect that requires investment to properly pay off. In return many BiS (marginally) come from crafting such as accessories that you can place additional matera (aka gems) in by being a crafter, and only crafters can do that to a piece of gear at all. So crafting has a lot of meaning in both combat and otherwise.

. Graphics seem nice but is it a lag fest due to server side issues?

I wouldn't call it a lag fest but I do often feel as if the game isn't quite as responsive as WoW due to servers being overall worse (In FL, even on a solid connection I can't get below 100ish ping for some reason) and due to animation delay. It's not the worst thing in the world, the game's combat is still I'd say much more enjoyable than WoW's "hit button, refresh dot, hit other button when it lights up" style of gameplay that is BfA.

. The class game play looks nice. WoW has all but stripped class identity to the bone. Do you see FF14 moving in this direction or are class quest stay relevant as the game gets older?

FFXIV does not at all look like it's going in the direction of WoW. In general classes are pretty solidly different from each other and honestly Stormblood made them even more different in my experiences.

There are of course misses with class design (MCH) but you can't really say they came from a boring or unoriginal idea, more that they bit off more than they could chew design-wise.


Since I've come back I've had nothing but appreciation for the game and little to no interest in returning to WoW. With a new expansion coming up that shows tons of promise, WoW looks by comparison to be an old relic hanging onto its glory days compared to an up-and-comer that, while definitely flawed, also has a lot of effort and heart put into it compared to the boring and cynical current WoW design.

[Rivellana]

I've only played for three weeks and a lot of your questions have already been answered so I'll just insert responses to a few things from my own experience.

The slow combat at the start and the longer global CD than most games have can be offputting until you either get used to it or get more off global abilities. The ARR storyline is also excruciatingly long and uninteresting until you get up to the last few quests of the patch before Heavensward. I found the story in Heavensward and Stormblood both very enjoyable.

I'm an east coast NA player. I played Aion quite a bit over the years and my latency to their servers (in Texas) was always HORRIBLE. The lag in that game was unreal. Rubber banding around corners and knowing that any little lag spike likely heralded a player of the other faction nearby come to mind. I've played WoW longer than anything. My current graphics card is obviously the best one I've had...not top of the line...but I could never run WoW at more than about a 7 on graphics if I wanted more than 15 fps. For FFXIV, I can run graphics at max and have never had so much as even a tiny lag spike or FPS issues.