I genuinely don’t think Blizz is trying to make a fun game, they are trying to make a game that forces addicted players to jump through hoops so they stay subscribed and never stop to think about whether or not they are enjoying themselves. That approach of keeping players hooked rather than make them want to play your game only works if you don’t have legitimate competition - well now they do, and people are leaving in droves. Even in 9.2 they put player power behind annoying grinds and timegate everything. Hoops upon hoops. It will stay like this until they actually start trying to make a fun game
In one day, I did jumping puzzles, Slice Is Right, raced chocobos, went to a player-created nightclub, did a 24-man alliance raid, jammed out at a bard concert, and went ocean fishing. This game dunks on every other MMO, and they're about to add ISLAND SANCTUARIES to the mix.🤤
2 days ago I downloaded Star Wars The Old Republic. Idk man, so far I'm reallllly enjoying playing it like a single player game. I only pay attention to the story and quests. It feels good compared to WoW which I'm coming from.
I kind of feel the same about Star Trek Online. It's not AAA game by any means, but they did a decent decent job making entertaining story and missions over the last 12 years. (IMO, better story than the last two Trek series and movies) And it's free to play, so hard to complain about that. 😆
You should check out eureka and bozja is fun as hell. I'm gonna do heaven on high soon I nearly killed p1s as a dancer around 25% health left. This game is awesome I can get sidetrack with everything
Not being forced to do anything at level cap makes me play the game so much more than if I had a daily/weekly preset tasks I needed to do to stay current. A themepark isn't any fun if someone is telling you which rides you're allowed to do in what order.
I would say that you don't even need to do Min ILevel/No Echo. The former I believe does increase drop rates for certain things like mounts, but otherwise, you don't need it. Standard Level Sync is more than perfect enough to experience the content essentially as it used to be. Fights may have been patched to be less BS over time, so it's not 100% as it was, but it's more *fun* now. Min+Echo is just an extra step to restore the original difficulty, and even though I don't use it, I appreciate it for the people who want the challenge. It really is such a simplistic system too. Level Syncing is such a genius idea, it's no wonder even Guild Wars 2 copied it but for even open-world content! So even that stuff is fun to experience stuff that's been out for a decade but you don't instantly mop the floor with everything being 50 levels over it. I simply cannot fucking believe that for WoW's nearly 2 decade history, they refuse to use Level Syncing for AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANYTHING except maybe Timewalking...which is only SEASONAL? Like why? That system is what keeps literally every dungeon, every trial, every EVERYTHING in FF14 populated with people to Duty Finder queue up with!
Level syncing is a genius idea. It keep old content still relevant. FF11 online had a similar system long ago when it was still new. But i remember gear did not sync with you. So you had to keep old gear just in case if you need to do old content.
Did Twintania (synced, no echo, but not min-ilevel) last night and it was a fantastic intro to FFXIV raiding. We had a few veterans, a few first timers (including me), and we went through the fight, learning one set of mechanics at a time, until we could do each one. The veterans talked newb's through the next set of mechanics after we wiped to it the first time. It was a really fun thing, and that high when we beat her was just the best. Maybe I'll be up for min-ilevel eventually, but for learning the fight and for a first raid this setting seemed to be about the right level of difficulty for our group. Hard enough we needed to respect all the mechanics and learn the fight, but not quite so unforgiving as min-ilevel. Plus I got to do some of Coils, content that I've really wanted to try.
Regular Synced is like running content on the last day of the expansion it released in. Min Ilvlv+No Echo just brings back the timeline a little more to try and recreate the Launch day experience of the content. it isn't perfect due to job tuning and general power creep but it's fairly close on most fights from like Stormblood onwards
I think you have it wrong or at least misunderstand. XIV's primary objective is to get player from point A to point B. In doing so the Main story quest (MSQ) system revolves around the writing team weaving a story that places the player as the central role of the RPG. Every player from veteran to new will go through the MSQ. The story serves as the truck of the game and everything else that surrounds this trunk is to nourish the game and the player. Once the player reaches the 'drop off' point they are given access to other things within the game. These drop off points are every X.0 and X.3 patch with X.4-X.5 serving as the set up for the next expansion. A Realm Reborn is more of a tutorial that has a story. It serves more of that point now in its history than when the initial part of the game was current. When it was current 1-30 served as the tutorial aspect, introducing MMO systems to players whom never played a MMO in their lives (as the Devs trying to keep their word of XIV being released on PS3, also made a assumption that most console players never played an MMO). Going forward the systems that are in place today, have their experimental phases in ARR. Every refined system from Raiding to glamour was experimented between the last few patches of ARR and mid-patches of Heavenward. The Daily roulette system was a way to populate dungeons with rewards. Since Yoshida understood that most players would 'opt out' of running low level dungeon content for higher level dungeon content the roulette system would give roughly 20-50% on a sliding scale of your level (lets say you're level 40 and you get stuck doing Satasha, you'd get the maximum bonus allowed for going through that content scaled down as you reached a dungeon that was level appropriate for you). This system was further refined with the armory bonus and xp bonus gear (Hall of the Novice ring, expansion pre-order bonus earring). Min ilvl system...never cared for it because of how wonky it'd do the stats (typically 5% below nominal stats for gear....even doing the Ultimate's due to ilvl sync I actually have ilvl appropriate gear just so I'm not gimping myself on every stat point).
Well FFXIV force you to do raids while leveling up. For me its a big no too not have a choice. Im not interested in doing raids so forcing me to do this made me quit FFXIV.
How does it force you to do raids? If you want to level up I can name several different method besides the raids. Main Scenario = If you're still leveling your main job, just go through the story. It'll provide more than enough experience to get you to max level. Leveling roulette = Just goes through dungeons within your level. MSQ Roulette = Basically just the final dungeons of ARR and it gives a boat load of exp Just running regular dungeons = Not as much as roulette but still enough to level up fairly quickly. Palace of the Dead/Heaven on High = Deep dungeons that give you exp after every 10 floors. Was the best way to level for a while PvP = Gives you job exp and pvp exp after every match, win or lose. Fate grinding = Random fates around the world give you decent exp. Especially if you're near the appropriate level for them. Leve Quests = Helpful for leveling in ARR and really good for leveling crafters all the way up to 90. As a matter of fact, besides the Alliance Raid and Normal Raid roulettes. The raids themselves give crap exp. Because they were considered end game content upon their release, they inherently don't give much experience since it was expected that players would be max level at the time they were released. They never really went in and changed that. If you dont like alliance or normal raids. Just dont do them. Easy as that. You dont need to lie and make up a reason you decided to quit playing. Just say you didn't like the game and that you quit.
@@linkblade0 To continue your msq you have to do crystal tower which is an alliance raid. Even if its super easy it's forcing me to do content i dont like
@@soorpa Ah, I admit I had forgotten that they had made Crystal Tower mandatory. However, it's hardly the first time a game makes you do annoying content. Were you enjoying the game otherwise? Cause it seems silly to me to quit a game solely because it made you do something you didn't like. Heavens know the game population would be much smaller if people quit because it made you poke something you didn't like once.
i believe FFXIV should cut down ARR to mostly cut scenes and speed it up by 1/3rd .. it was a DRAG.. even if i enjoyed it.. ill never want to do it again.. GW2 did it
Wow has a really nice story but its not all in the game , they value more money by putting most of their stories in books . I wish the game had more of the story in-game
I think Bellular said it best about WoW's story years ago. Blizzard knows how to do bullet points for a story, but they've forgotten, or maybe never knew how to do minor nuisances to story. They drop plot points in front of you, and the plot point maybe in it of itself be compelling, but much of the lead up seems stiff or rushed. It's very much "Are we done with bullet point 1? yes? Start #2!"
@@BlitzAce987 right, but you haven't been lecturing people about how this game is "the best MMO on the market" for the best part of a year, literally making rants about how much he loves features he doesn't really understand
@@natebroadus8474 He can take as long as he likes, but it comes off as disingenuous when your praise expansions you haven't played and rant how the game is better for having features you haven't tried
I tried ff14 now. I am literally at the beginning. And i Must say the early game experience is one of the worse i had in any mmo so far. When will this game start to make fun.
If you simply rush and you don't pay attention to the story, never. If you do, it gets fun around lvl 20 to 30, there is a reason it takes so long but you'll need to watch the noclip documentary to learn why.
For many people the story in FFXIV is a hurdle which they might not overcome as they wish to play a game and do not desire to read a book. Also for a story in an MMO I would say SWTOR offers a more interesting approach to it by having dialogue options where the player character has an actual say in it. If you care for combat gameplay and quickly want to get into action, go with SWTOR or WoW for roleplay FFXIV is the clear winner.
Fair point, but for me at least, FFXIV doesn't visually appeal to me at all. For instance, if i had to look at those potato looking lalafels or whatever they are called again i would gouge my eyes out. So for me, gameplay can be the best out there, but if the visuals are not appealing to me i won't touch it with a ten foot pole. And i tried the game, i really did, but just not for me. I just don't see myself staying in that world for long
Then you haven't gone far enough in FF14 story if potatoes still bothers you. The story in FF14 gets so good, you wouldn't care or forget about what they are.
While I totally understand your point (I absolutely hated Lalafells as well) these are really just surface level issues that generally disappear very early on. I remember it being the same for WoW back in the day - people turned up their nose at its stylized, goofy artstyle until eventually it grew on people and the actual game underneath shined through. I went from loathing Lalafells as the stereotypical cutesy, dollesque race to actually sort of liking them once I saw their characterization inside the game. The contrast between how they look and how they act is surprisingly well done and not just played for laughs, which makes them feel much more grounded than you'd think. That's not to say it will be the same for you, but you know. There's a reason why they say "Don't judge a book by its cover"
And that is completely fine, people have different preferences and I have realized some people are more sensitive to visuals than others. However, I will say this that when I first heard about FFXIV, I had exactly the same fear that I will hate the art style. This is why I have never tried any FF game before (one other reason being I don't like turn based battle systems). However, after being encouraged by a friend I decided to give the free trial a try until level 60 and by level 60 I had bought it and played for the last several months all the expansions. Here is my conlusion, the art style is not as anime as other JRPGs or KRPGS infact it is much closer to western rpgs. I had pre-conceived notions of what I will see based on other FF and similar games. It is really not the art style that bothers people (on a photo by photo comparision no one would say WOW gnomes are any less cartoonish than lalafels) but how the characters will behave, their way of moving and actions that is actually bothersome to me and many others in JRPGS. FFXIV thankfully keeps that to a very minimum (almost nil in most of the game and only exists in certain comedy scenes).
In FF14 you play the game, in WOW you play the expasion.
First thing first, Blizzard needs to stop thinking engagements is equal to fun. Forcing people to do things isn't what video game makes fun.
I genuinely don’t think Blizz is trying to make a fun game, they are trying to make a game that forces addicted players to jump through hoops so they stay subscribed and never stop to think about whether or not they are enjoying themselves. That approach of keeping players hooked rather than make them want to play your game only works if you don’t have legitimate competition - well now they do, and people are leaving in droves. Even in 9.2 they put player power behind annoying grinds and timegate everything. Hoops upon hoops. It will stay like this until they actually start trying to make a fun game
In one day, I did jumping puzzles, Slice Is Right, raced chocobos, went to a player-created nightclub, did a 24-man alliance raid, jammed out at a bard concert, and went ocean fishing. This game dunks on every other MMO, and they're about to add ISLAND SANCTUARIES to the mix.🤤
I tried lost ark but i don’t know how people still fall for the gearing progression hampster wheel and idk how u can go back to it after trying ff
2 days ago I downloaded Star Wars The Old Republic. Idk man, so far I'm reallllly enjoying playing it like a single player game. I only pay attention to the story and quests. It feels good compared to WoW which I'm coming from.
I kind of feel the same about Star Trek Online. It's not AAA game by any means, but they did a decent decent job making entertaining story and missions over the last 12 years. (IMO, better story than the last two Trek series and movies) And it's free to play, so hard to complain about that. 😆
You should check out eureka and bozja is fun as hell. I'm gonna do heaven on high soon I nearly killed p1s as a dancer around 25% health left. This game is awesome I can get sidetrack with everything
Happy you're enjoying all the stuff to do and good luck in savage!
@@rface0 thank you :D
Gl on the clear!
Not being forced to do anything at level cap makes me play the game so much more than if I had a daily/weekly preset tasks I needed to do to stay current. A themepark isn't any fun if someone is telling you which rides you're allowed to do in what order.
I would say that you don't even need to do Min ILevel/No Echo. The former I believe does increase drop rates for certain things like mounts, but otherwise, you don't need it.
Standard Level Sync is more than perfect enough to experience the content essentially as it used to be. Fights may have been patched to be less BS over time, so it's not 100% as it was, but it's more *fun* now. Min+Echo is just an extra step to restore the original difficulty, and even though I don't use it, I appreciate it for the people who want the challenge.
It really is such a simplistic system too. Level Syncing is such a genius idea, it's no wonder even Guild Wars 2 copied it but for even open-world content! So even that stuff is fun to experience stuff that's been out for a decade but you don't instantly mop the floor with everything being 50 levels over it.
I simply cannot fucking believe that for WoW's nearly 2 decade history, they refuse to use Level Syncing for AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANYTHING except maybe Timewalking...which is only SEASONAL? Like why? That system is what keeps literally every dungeon, every trial, every EVERYTHING in FF14 populated with people to Duty Finder queue up with!
Level syncing is a genius idea. It keep old content still relevant. FF11 online had a similar system long ago when it was still new. But i remember gear did not sync with you. So you had to keep old gear just in case if you need to do old content.
Did Twintania (synced, no echo, but not min-ilevel) last night and it was a fantastic intro to FFXIV raiding. We had a few veterans, a few first timers (including me), and we went through the fight, learning one set of mechanics at a time, until we could do each one. The veterans talked newb's through the next set of mechanics after we wiped to it the first time. It was a really fun thing, and that high when we beat her was just the best. Maybe I'll be up for min-ilevel eventually, but for learning the fight and for a first raid this setting seemed to be about the right level of difficulty for our group. Hard enough we needed to respect all the mechanics and learn the fight, but not quite so unforgiving as min-ilevel. Plus I got to do some of Coils, content that I've really wanted to try.
@@hkoizumi3134 i don’t think it’s even so much genius as it is astounding that every game doesn’t have this
Regular Synced is like running content on the last day of the expansion it released in. Min Ilvlv+No Echo just brings back the timeline a little more to try and recreate the Launch day experience of the content. it isn't perfect due to job tuning and general power creep but it's fairly close on most fights from like Stormblood onwards
To me the big thing is in FF14 every expansion EXPANS upon the game.
In WoW every expansion makes the game feel smaller
I think you have it wrong or at least misunderstand.
XIV's primary objective is to get player from point A to point B. In doing so the Main story quest (MSQ) system revolves around the writing team weaving a story that places the player as the central role of the RPG. Every player from veteran to new will go through the MSQ. The story serves as the truck of the game and everything else that surrounds this trunk is to nourish the game and the player.
Once the player reaches the 'drop off' point they are given access to other things within the game. These drop off points are every X.0 and X.3 patch with X.4-X.5 serving as the set up for the next expansion.
A Realm Reborn is more of a tutorial that has a story. It serves more of that point now in its history than when the initial part of the game was current. When it was current 1-30 served as the tutorial aspect, introducing MMO systems to players whom never played a MMO in their lives (as the Devs trying to keep their word of XIV being released on PS3, also made a assumption that most console players never played an MMO).
Going forward the systems that are in place today, have their experimental phases in ARR. Every refined system from Raiding to glamour was experimented between the last few patches of ARR and mid-patches of Heavenward.
The Daily roulette system was a way to populate dungeons with rewards. Since Yoshida understood that most players would 'opt out' of running low level dungeon content for higher level dungeon content the roulette system would give roughly 20-50% on a sliding scale of your level (lets say you're level 40 and you get stuck doing Satasha, you'd get the maximum bonus allowed for going through that content scaled down as you reached a dungeon that was level appropriate for you). This system was further refined with the armory bonus and xp bonus gear (Hall of the Novice ring, expansion pre-order bonus earring).
Min ilvl system...never cared for it because of how wonky it'd do the stats (typically 5% below nominal stats for gear....even doing the Ultimate's due to ilvl sync I actually have ilvl appropriate gear just so I'm not gimping myself on every stat point).
What exactly do I have wrong in this?
Well FFXIV force you to do raids while leveling up. For me its a big no too not have a choice. Im not interested in doing raids so forcing me to do this made me quit FFXIV.
How does it force you to do raids? If you want to level up I can name several different method besides the raids.
Main Scenario = If you're still leveling your main job, just go through the story. It'll provide more than enough experience to get you to max level.
Leveling roulette = Just goes through dungeons within your level.
MSQ Roulette = Basically just the final dungeons of ARR and it gives a boat load of exp
Just running regular dungeons = Not as much as roulette but still enough to level up fairly quickly.
Palace of the Dead/Heaven on High = Deep dungeons that give you exp after every 10 floors. Was the best way to level for a while
PvP = Gives you job exp and pvp exp after every match, win or lose.
Fate grinding = Random fates around the world give you decent exp. Especially if you're near the appropriate level for them.
Leve Quests = Helpful for leveling in ARR and really good for leveling crafters all the way up to 90.
As a matter of fact, besides the Alliance Raid and Normal Raid roulettes. The raids themselves give crap exp. Because they were considered end game content upon their release, they inherently don't give much experience since it was expected that players would be max level at the time they were released. They never really went in and changed that. If you dont like alliance or normal raids. Just dont do them. Easy as that.
You dont need to lie and make up a reason you decided to quit playing. Just say you didn't like the game and that you quit.
@@linkblade0 To continue your msq you have to do crystal tower which is an alliance raid. Even if its super easy it's forcing me to do content i dont like
@@soorpa Ah, I admit I had forgotten that they had made Crystal Tower mandatory. However, it's hardly the first time a game makes you do annoying content.
Were you enjoying the game otherwise? Cause it seems silly to me to quit a game solely because it made you do something you didn't like. Heavens know the game population would be much smaller if people quit because it made you poke something you didn't like once.
i believe FFXIV should cut down ARR to mostly cut scenes and speed it up by 1/3rd .. it was a DRAG.. even if i enjoyed it.. ill never want to do it again.. GW2 did it
What happened to your hand mate? Hope all is well!
People like story in games waaaaaay more than those that don't
Wow has a really nice story but its not all in the game , they value more money by putting most of their stories in books . I wish the game had more of the story in-game
I think Bellular said it best about WoW's story years ago. Blizzard knows how to do bullet points for a story, but they've forgotten, or maybe never knew how to do minor nuisances to story. They drop plot points in front of you, and the plot point maybe in it of itself be compelling, but much of the lead up seems stiff or rushed. It's very much "Are we done with bullet point 1? yes? Start #2!"
I swear this guy spends more time talking about FF as apposed to actually playing it lol has he even reached Stormblood
I like that he's taking his time. You only get to experience the MSQ blind once.
I reached stormblood 2 days ago after over 75 days of /playtime. You can take your time if you want to.
only get to play the story blind one time, it's a marathon, not a sprint
@@BlitzAce987 right, but you haven't been lecturing people about how this game is "the best MMO on the market" for the best part of a year, literally making rants about how much he loves features he doesn't really understand
@@natebroadus8474 He can take as long as he likes, but it comes off as disingenuous when your praise expansions you haven't played and rant how the game is better for having features you haven't tried
I tried ff14 now. I am literally at the beginning. And i Must say the early game experience is one of the worse i had in any mmo so far. When will this game start to make fun.
If you simply rush and you don't pay attention to the story, never. If you do, it gets fun around lvl 20 to 30, there is a reason it takes so long but you'll need to watch the noclip documentary to learn why.
@@AccolonnTV im level 20...
For many people the story in FFXIV is a hurdle which they might not overcome as they wish to play a game and do not desire to read a book. Also for a story in an MMO I would say SWTOR offers a more interesting approach to it by having dialogue options where the player character has an actual say in it. If you care for combat gameplay and quickly want to get into action, go with SWTOR or WoW for roleplay FFXIV is the clear winner.
Fair point, but for me at least, FFXIV doesn't visually appeal to me at all. For instance, if i had to look at those potato looking lalafels or whatever they are called again i would gouge my eyes out. So for me, gameplay can be the best out there, but if the visuals are not appealing to me i won't touch it with a ten foot pole. And i tried the game, i really did, but just not for me. I just don't see myself staying in that world for long
you say this, pretending that gnomes, hobbits, and other smaller humanoids have never existed....
Then you haven't gone far enough in FF14 story if potatoes still bothers you. The story in FF14 gets so good, you wouldn't care or forget about what they are.
While I totally understand your point (I absolutely hated Lalafells as well) these are really just surface level issues that generally disappear very early on. I remember it being the same for WoW back in the day - people turned up their nose at its stylized, goofy artstyle until eventually it grew on people and the actual game underneath shined through.
I went from loathing Lalafells as the stereotypical cutesy, dollesque race to actually sort of liking them once I saw their characterization inside the game. The contrast between how they look and how they act is surprisingly well done and not just played for laughs, which makes them feel much more grounded than you'd think.
That's not to say it will be the same for you, but you know. There's a reason why they say "Don't judge a book by its cover"
Lalafells are evil. Boil the potatoes!
And that is completely fine, people have different preferences and I have realized some people are more sensitive to visuals than others. However, I will say this that when I first heard about FFXIV, I had exactly the same fear that I will hate the art style. This is why I have never tried any FF game before (one other reason being I don't like turn based battle systems). However, after being encouraged by a friend I decided to give the free trial a try until level 60 and by level 60 I had bought it and played for the last several months all the expansions. Here is my conlusion, the art style is not as anime as other JRPGs or KRPGS infact it is much closer to western rpgs. I had pre-conceived notions of what I will see based on other FF and similar games. It is really not the art style that bothers people (on a photo by photo comparision no one would say WOW gnomes are any less cartoonish than lalafels) but how the characters will behave, their way of moving and actions that is actually bothersome to me and many others in JRPGS. FFXIV thankfully keeps that to a very minimum (almost nil in most of the game and only exists in certain comedy scenes).
No its not, PvP is dead, why play game with other people when u cant PvP? pointless. yea i know it have PvP system but its abandoned - dev words.