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In reference to the topic "10 reasons not to play FFXI"
Pringo
Member Posts: 9
I posted this in the FFXI forums, but since there is more traffic on this side of the forum I will repost it here.
This is my first post in this forum so please bear with me. I will also being using WoW as a comparison to FFXI since the majority of people flaming FFXI tend to play WoW. (Another reason would be because I have played both extensivley, so it would be easier for me to comment). I also apologize that this may or will seem as a wall of text.
MMORPG, probably the most addicting type of game out there on the market at the moment. WoW in all essence has captured what gamers need and what they have sought after a long period of time, 'the casual gamer-ness.'
This meaning that you don't need to devote endless amounts of time in leveling and getting gear since the average instance run near end game takes a few hours (excluding high-end raids eg. Onixya, BWL). WoW is very much geared towards the average casual gamer in which they do not have to use a lot of time to accomplish very little. This is however, where the downfall begins. Due to this lack of commitment or time, it attracts many "Childish" or "Immature" people to this game for the lack of better words. Hence why the majority (Emphasize on the word majority, I didn't say all) of the population on WoW servers are usually Kids, teenagers or seriously immature adults. The reason, which I undoubtedly agree with, that makes WoW so great is that in all, you can get really good gear, level up your toon to cap without much time needed in comparison to other games on the market. But what Blizzard excels with in the casual gamer department, they lack in the "extensively end game" material. This meaning that once a person has reached level 60, gotten their epic mount, and twinked out their toon till kingdomcome, there isn't anything else to do. Yes, people will argue that to counter this boredom a new expansion is being put inplace with the addition of new areas, armors, races etcetc. But will this be enough to attract or keep the current players satisfied? Time will tell, but the way Blizzard is going in concerns with the end game content they will undoubtedly, sooner or later, crash and burn.
Before you go on and say that "OMFG YOU NOOB, I BET YOU NEVER EVEN GOTTEN TO END GAME!!1
1 LOLOLOL." I'm actually playing WoW at the moment. Previously I had quit FFXI to come play WoW after the release of the game last year during xmas period. But after 3 months of play, getting to 60, twinking out my mage, running endless amounts of MCs, attained my epic mount, gotten my second character to 60, I found myself, bored and back in FFXI. The fact that getting jobs to 60 takes so little time is great, but in the end, it gets boring. I know many of you have flamed or have read flames about FFXI on this forum, but comming from a person who has played both extensively, reached end-game in both games, please listen me out before making comments.
FFXI in all essence, is an EXTREMELY time consuming game. I will not argue with anyone when people say that FFXI will take absolutely the most time to accomplish anything in the game in comparison to any other game out there in the market. But that being said, this weeds out all those "immature" and "Childish" players that WoW seems to be infested with. WoW of course has its mature player base, but is dominated by 10-19 year olds who find it fun to grief, and repeatedly kill players 20+ lvls below them (Yes, I rolled a PvP server unfortunately). The fact that WoW is so centered on solo leveling, makes people socially retarded to be honest. They have no idea how to play with other people, and WoW is a MMORPG. Yes, these people who I claim to be "socially retarded" are abundant, but there are a lot of nice people too in WoW. FFXI however, these "socially retarded" people are quickly identified and taught a lesson and won't be touched with a 10 foot poll. Since FFXI is based on team-work and partying (Term used in FFXI for grouping up for those who don't know), and with this in mind, people are taught to be co-operative and friendly, or else they will hardly ever get any party. It's amazing how lonely it can feel in a server with a population of 3000+ if they know you have stolen/mpk/bern a jackass overall. Unfortunately, these "socially retarded" people who do NOT get weeded out tend to be hard to avoid like a Dick Cheney joke on David Lettermen, but they are a lot LESS abundant on FFXI than on WoW.
The main thread I will be refering to will be the thread entitled "10 Reasons not to play FFXI" on the FFXI thread posted by Corbo.
10. Waiting: As I have explained before, I note that FFXI is an extremely time consuming game, no doubt about it. But it is that, that gives a sense of accomplishment in the game. It may of taken you a year (yes a year) to get that relic weapon, but you know and everyone else will know, how much dedication it took to get it. It is a status symbol due to the extreme rarity of getting one, but you will be respected. In comparison to WoW epics can be bought on the AH and used. I know the best epics are usually BoP but there are exceptions where the best armor or weapons can still be bought on the AH.
9. Pvp: FFXI, in all respect was never MEANT to be a PvP game. The PvP aspect, called Ballista, in FFXI was added as an extra touch for the FFXI player base. It was meant to give it some excitment after the majority of the FFXI community requested for a PvP area. I believe the person posting hasn't done any extensive playing of ballista, since if (s)he did, (s)he would find out that Ballista is a team PvP, not a stand-alone pvp. Hence, taking the term MMORPG to a hilt.
8. Exp and death penalty: Yep, dying in FFXI sucks balls. But would it matter if you died and nothing happened? The exp penalty when dying is a DISINCENTIVE to not die. Unlike WoW where you just have to recover your coprse and pay for repairs, nothing major ever happens when you die. So people don't really care if they die or not. While in FFXI, dying is a huge thing but you can easily recover nearly all your exp (200 exp will be loss on a raise III) with a raise III.
7. Genkai: Genaki, or limit break, is a quest that every adventurer and player must complete to advance in the game. This is again, to weed out the weekend warrior since these Genkais (and the time to level up) will take a long time. I use the term "weed out" very loosley. FFXI sole purpose was not to weed out these casual gamers, but does filter through the more dedicated and friendly bunch.
6. Crafting: Major difference between WoW and FFXI in crafting is that, in WoW it takes quite of bit of gold, but you can actually powerlevel all the way from 1-300 (excluding gathering crafts) in one day. While in FFXI it will take you MONTHS or even a year to get to level cap (100), and will cost you millions and millions of gil. But in the end you can make a LOT of gil. Crafting isn't for the faint of heart in FFXI since you CAN break your item, but in the end you can end up HQing (higher quality, better stats then the normal item) your item, increasing the value of it usually by ten-fold in most cases. In WoW you are garunteed to make it, no such thing as a failure, but no such thing as a HQ either. FFXI crafting system is also insanely complicated. One must take into account the element of the day (lightning, earth etcetc) and the phase the mooon is in for the best result. While in WoW you just click "Create all" and walk away.
5. Magic scrolls: Not much to say about this, since in WoW you buy skills. In FFXI you automatically learn some abilities but you need to learn magic. As in WoW, the price of your skill will increase as level increases. FFXI as well, the higher you get, usually the more the magic will cost.
4. AF: AF was developed by the FFXI team to give you the feel, and look of your class. Not to mention some valuable +skill and attributes to boost your abilities as the class you play. Some peices of AF will give you some weird +attributes, but this is done as to not to overpower the AF, since there are such things as AFv2 where you get a stronger version of your AF during end-game. The poster of this list commented that you needed 18+ people beating a mob to get your AF. This is unture, however may have been true at the start of the game since everyone was new and had no idea what to do.
3. Crabs: Yes you do level on monters which undoubtedly look the same. But the same goes for WoW. So no argument there.
2. Shitty point less jobs that can be replaced by other jobs and race specific stats.: Absolutely untrue. A blakmage or redmage cannot heal as well as a Whitemage. A Whitemage or redmage cannot nuke as well as a blackmage. And a whitemage and a blackmage can't nuke and heal equally as well as a redmage. Same goes with the damage dealing classes, each classes has a specific role to fill. As does the classes in WoW
1. Auction house system omg worst idea.: I'm sorry, but to be absolutely honest. If anyone has played both WoW and FFXI (except the moron who posted the thread I'm commenting) would agree that FFXI AH is the best idea ever. You are never actually BUYING gear, you're renting it. After you're done with the gear you are using, you can resell it usually at a profit. Whereas in WoW, it gets "soulbound" (majority of the time). The FFXI AH lists the amount an item was sold for, for the last 10 transactions. So buyers know what is overpriced etc. Whereas in WoW you need to download or create addons such as Auctioneer to be able to do that.
In all, yes my post may seem to be biased towards FFXI. But all I'm trying to do is defend this game, since I love the game so much ( not actual love you freak). I play both WoW and FFXI at the moment and like both. Each game has the pros and cons which make them great and which make them stink at times. But in all, they are great games.
I again apologize that this seems like a wall of text, but please take the time to read it.
Comments
Final Fantasy XI was the first game that forced me to quit. I couldn't play it anymore. I installed the whole thing, registered and patched up the client (6 hours!). I logged in and started hunting mobs and such. all well, graphics looked a little out dated but I could live with it. then I got around the level where you need a group to do anything at all. and thats the beginning of the end, it was impossible to get a group, and I mean that.I'f been looking for someone around my lvl for 3 days and so far only found 2 other people, both miles away. Cancelled my account because this game obviously wasn't for europeans.
I disagree with slower leveling brings a better community. I currently play Lineage 2 and the Beta of RF Online. tough its not as bad as WoW/GW and there are plenty of nice people, there are hundreds of childish retards. ruin the whole gameplay experience. "ADENA PLX!1"
*sigh*
I see where your coming from and have every right to defend the game you love but come on... FFXI does S-U-C-K for us EASTERN gamers. In it's own right, i bet it's a great game but ss treated us like second rate customers and not only stick us in with the already established Japanese players, they also don't even tweak the game to be more accepting in the Eastern gaming community.
You also criticise the WoW community and eventhough i agree that the majority of the outspoken players have less IQ than a glass of water, at least you can understand them. A good majority of FFXI community are Japanese and the language barrier is just plain stupid. The reason for this? It's because Squaresoft were too cheap to give us a proper release with ENGLISH only servers.
Also you criticise WoW for being a solo friendly and how it turns people into social retards, well i disagree, can you imagine being forced to group with those 13 year old smacktalkers? It would drive me crazy.
I agree that endgame in WoW is crap but how many people reach endgame in FFXI? I know i never could because I was completely and utterly bored by it within the first 10 hours of playing.
To be totally honest, FFXI does not suck for eastern gamers. My LS is almost full comprised of eastern gamers. We are part of the HNM scene (one of the end-game contents) and do basically everything that has to be related to eng-game. It is true, as you said it does suck for eastern gamers, BUT! times have changed and it is now the reverse. I'm not too sure about all the servers, but with the past few months the americans, europeans, majorily the english speaking community have begun to dominate the eng-game scene. Whereas the japanese have taken a back-seat position. The population on any given FFXI server between japanese and english speakers are now dominated by english speaking people. It is true that in the beginning, it really sucked for american players, or people in a different timezone than the japanese, since it was back then, a dominant japanese game. The reason why SE said they did not want to release an "english only" server, was because of the downfall of WoW's reasoning. WoW created a buttload of servers, but they should of kept the same amount of servers (other than the new oceanic servers which was a good idea), and invested in better maintanece of the servers. If they would of done that, they would have probably have a lot less lag spikes, and crashes than they do now.
Yes, the language barrier does suck. But hence why FFXI has an auto-translator function. Given that you can create more complicated sentences and are restricted to much more simpler words, the function is enough to communicate between japanese and english players to begin a party and work in the party. And to answer your question about How many people reach endgame in FFXI? I'll have to say that usually on a server, half the population is 70+. This basically means they are, or will be participating in end-game content. All your points may be true during the very beginning of FFXI, say 2-3 years ago. But the game has developed a LOT during the time that passed, making it one of the best games out there.
And to make clear, I am not critisizing the WoW community. The guild I am currently in are all awesome people, I have met a lot of awesome people on my server. But these awesome people are serverely outweighted by the amount of ignorant, arrogant, egotisical and childish players on the servers. And it is true as you say, that the amount of dedication may not neccessarily weed out the bad players, but it does drastically reduce the amount of morons that are left in the game. There are quite a bit of morons and idiots on FFXI, but there are relatively less in comparison to WoW. The dedication and time taken to level up are just one of the factors that limit this.
My opinions are based on >110 days of playtime on FFXI. I quit the game about a month ago due to a lack of further meaningful advancement options that were actually fun. It's a great game, but also has its downsides.
10. As for waiting, there is a difference between being a challenge and taking a lot of time versus taking a lot of time simply due to waiting. I don't get any sense of accomplishment from sitting around doing nothing for an hour.
9. FFXI is very PvE oriented. They'd added a little bit of PvP stuff in special zones as an afterthought which I haven't tried.
8. I actually think they got a good balance on the death penalty. Death is avoided by players due to the penalty but people still take risks. I think they actually give back a bit too much xp on the higher raise spells and the restriction of these spells to white mage only makes for some poor interactions.
7. The Genkais are kind of pointless at this point but are reasonably easy to get through. Only the first 2 really require any help. These are mostly left overs from various times that the dev team raised the level cap.
6. FFXI's crafting system is interesting and takes a long time to max out. However, the crafting system gives a huge advantage to the earlier crafters. The low chance of producing high quality items (chance improves with higher level of crafting) and the demand for them ensures a flood of normal quality items that really have no way to disappear from the system. Also, many of the crafted items are useless. The end crafted items are extremely good gear though. The net result is that there are large stretches of crafting where you can't make anything useful to raise skill and instead must make useless crap and then dump it to NPCs or at way below cost on the AH. The crafting system is largely passive, just click the ingredients and start the synth. There is a large amount of debate about the influence of various days, directions faced, weather, elemental resistences/bonuses on gear and how they affect the chance of getting different results. The effect of these influences is at the very least not clear to the player.
5. magic scrolls really aren't too expensive. A few are expensive, but most are quite affordable. There aren't really any out of reach spells. Some players won't be able to afford all of the spells immediately though.
4. For each class, at least one of the AF fights would require a full alliance (18 people) to complete with characters of the level that can use the AF. Even with level capped players, many of the fights require more than a party (6 people). Most people complete AFs by enlisting the help of their linkshell and whatever friends they have. There is absolutely no direct reward for people helping out someone with their AFs. With the player base as it is, most players have higher level friends. If you don't, you will have a hard time getting your AF done. The AF quests (5 total) are closely packed together in levels although some of them only require the help of 1-2 other players to complete. The quests become a frequent source of activity since the quests all take a while to complete and with everyone needing 5 done and some requiring alliances, it is a continual draw on the time of linkshells with members passing through the level 52-60 range. I would have vastly preferred smaller fights for the AF. Getting 18 players together to benefit just one is too much of an organization headache.
3. The monsters you fight are pretty repetitive and mostly look very nonthreatening. The monsters are very unbalanced for the same level of monster and so naturally everyone fights the easiest ones which happen to be crabs and caterpillers with some others mixed in.
2. The mage jobs are reasonably well done, but the melee damage dealing jobs are far too similiar. The main important distinction between them is whether they open light skill chains or close them as you need to have one of each. They all have some other relatively minor differences which come up in certain circumstances but really aren't important most of the time. The difference between a ranger, dragoon, monk, warrior, and beastmaster in a party are very minimal. Dark knight and samurai are only slightly different. Dark knight is only different because they can stun. Samurai are only different because they can participate in 2 skillchains.
1. The auction house in FFXI is functional. The rules it follows are rather bizarre, but once you understand them it gets the job done. The auction house is really nothing like an auction. The way it works is buyer offers an amount, the game makes you wait a bit, if it is higher than the lowest reserve price of any seller, the item is sold. The seller who had the lowest reserve price sells their item to the buyer and receives whatever the buyer offered. Any item that isn't sold within a set period of time is returned to the seller. It costs 1-2% of the reserve price to list an item (in the most active city). Each item has a price history which lists the last ten trades and the amounts the buyer paid. Most buyers are lazy and just pay whatever the price history says. It ends up being a giant game of chicken with sellers trying to underbid each other but not get burned by the rare buyer that tries bidding something low. Notice that if you list an item too high, sellers will continually list under you and your item will never sell even if buyers are paying way more than what you listed it at.