Improvements from FFXI?

[Del Murder]

Running faster and more low-man content (meaningful stuff you can do with 1-3 people) would be ace. The sprint shoes pace should have been the normal pace in FFXI.

[Jibril]

Less focus on camping timed spawns and low drop rates to get the best gear in the game. Assault had the right idea: gradually but surely work toward something rather than waiting on a 5% drop/24hr spawn. ZNM and Campaign were good systems, too.

Just get out of here with that Salvage/Dynamis/Kings nonsense.

[Miriel]

I hope they'll have a better way to organize your stuff. It was always such a pain in the ass switching jobs cause my gear would just be all over the place.

[Rostum]

I want rewards for exploration. I love exploring, but hardly any MMO to date has ever given anything remotely worthwhile for completing and exploring maps.

[Lionx]

Even WoW? o.o

[Rostum]

Even WoW? o.o

I haven't played it in quite some time, but doesn't it just give you a little bit of EXP? Not really worth it, imo.

[Mirage]

Isn't it about the same exp as you get from killing an enemy in said region?

[Rostum]

No idea.

It'd be cool if you finish exploring a map a treasure chest appears that holds a small pool of treasure, or randomly selects one thing for you (i.e. an item, a weapon, piece of armor, exp, etc.).

[Madame Adequate]

I'll step in with a minor thread rez and chip in on the WoW thing before I seque into how I'd improve FFXI.

In WoW, when you explore, currently you get a little experience (Usually more than killing an even-level mob, but not by a huge amount) and once you've explored an area entirely you get an achievement. When you explore everything on a continent you get another, and when you explore all four completely you get another, the title "The Explorer", and a tabard. AFAIK nothing else.

Travel and exploration are somewhat tied in together and I'm not sure how best to balance the two realistically. Ideally I would say make an absolutely gargantuan world and have fast, though not instant, travel. Look to EVE Online for the best example here. It should be big enough to have tens of thousands of people on at once with plenty of room to spare.

I'm sure that a more realistic, less resource-intensive compromise can be found though. After all, a huge amount of EVE is very cookie-cutter. The brilliance comes in character interactions and guilds messing around and so forth, not the game setting per se. What we need is a world which is big enough to be difficult to explore, has tangible rewards for exploration, but which doesn't in turn make it really trying to get from A to B. The first time I travelled from Bastok to Windurst it took forever and it was totally awesome, I absolutely loved trekking through dangerous lands, riding on the boat, and so forth. But I imagine that after doing it a couple of times it gets pretty freaking tedious. I think different options are the best. Pay more gil, get there faster.

But hidden away in caves and caverns and all sorts of dark, distant places should be danger and treasure. I'm not talking about taking two minutes off the beaten track to explore a cave and kill an elite mob for a slightly better drop. I'm talking about somewhere that is in no information you can get in-game aside from visiting, which takes half an hour to reach even if you know where it is, and which can be considered a full dungeon. Deep caves, complex ruins, mountain peaks - the world should be a vast and dangerous place full of wonder.

But ultimately that's somewhat I want to see in any MMO. What I want to see from XI specifically is twofold. First, make the game easier to play. Jess liked FFXI more than WoW, but she played the latter about five times as much at least, simply because one of these games has a pleasant and easy interface and the other seems specifically designed to break gaijin souls. Related to this is soloing. Whilst I appreciate Yearg's point about getting people to play together so they learn how, I really dislike doing it. I much prefer to solo, and once I reach endgame I tend to just reroll rather than play with other people. I like being part of an interactive world but that doesn't necessarily mean I like having to interact, or at least not to the degree that FFXI demanded. I certainly don't like having to set aside hours to play when I'm still before level 20, just because looking for a group takes so long.

[Yeargdribble]

I'm hoping for a happy medium. I want to be able to solo, but I want partying to still be the preferred method. I want to be able to be self-reliant against small numbers of weak mobs for a little XP here and there when I don't have time, but I also want to be able to buckle down with a party for an hour or so and get some serious XP when that's what I want to do.

Problem with FFXI right now is that to do anything with a group you'd better set aside at least 3 hours of your life. It's just unreasonable.

I much prefer to solo, and once I reach endgame I tend to just reroll rather than play with other people.

With all due respect, there are other games out there for you if that's all you want from an MMO. To be honest, at the moment I'm playing like you. My wife and I are literally just grinding different jobs in FFXI for no apparent reason. We want a little FFXI flavor, but we don't want to be hardcore like we once were. Now FFXI has taken large steps to allow us to do this. Once upon a time it wouldn't have been an option. Soloing or duoing was a laughable idea. But with the Fields of Valor thing and lots of other small changes, it's more than reasonable.

The game has a good balance right now of allowing that casual play while still having a very hardcore end game. I don't want FFXIV to have that WoW feel where people can easily level a character to 80 in a month taking their time or a week if they aren't. I want levels to mean something the way they do in FFXI. I want there to be content all along the way. I don't want the WoW things where because it's so easy to get to 80, the only content that matters is at 80. I want my gear to matter while I'm leveling up and not replaced in a few hours of solo grinding.

But hidden away in caves and caverns and all sorts of dark, distant places should be danger and treasure. I'm not talking about taking two minutes off the beaten track to explore a cave and kill an elite mob for a slightly better drop. I'm talking about somewhere that is in no information you can get in-game aside from visiting, which takes half an hour to reach even if you know where it is, and which can be considered a full dungeon. Deep caves, complex ruins, mountain peaks - the world should be a vast and dangerous place full of wonder.

I feel like FFXI has this in abundance. There are so many places that are utterly unique and just explorable. There are crazy things out there that you can't find out about from within the game with exploring. You can only find out more by discussing it with the community.

[Wolf Kanno]

Alright, so before I go into my list I'm just going to state that I am still a noob at this. I've owned the game for three years now but have probably only put in about 20 hours only in all that time due to computer problems, lack of time, or my attention being stolen away by console games. So for this reason, there is a very good chance that a few of my complaints are unfounded cause I'm just not aware of my options, so don't rip my head off if I say something ignorant cause I know I am in regards to this. Despite all this, I've finally picked the game up in recent days and have been having a blast.

Small Bag of Holding: I know this is kinda the norm for MMO's but seriously? This gets annoying, nothing grates on my nerves faster than having to stop and do inventory control every ten minutes on the field so I can keep my worthwhile Crystals instead of losing them cause every monster likes to give my WAR spell scrolls he can't use. It just seems what I can carry is a bit low and I've never liked it when games count your equipment you are wearing as items in your bag of holding. I'm not asking for a bag of infinity +1 but just a little more leeway. I would also like the ability to just sell extra items as well, you can sell them on the auction site but god knows at my low levels I have nothing of interest to anyone so it would be great if I could sell to a shop even if I may not get a great price at least I would be making more than I would from dropping the item or lugging it around until someone buys it at the auction. Considering how bad inflation is in this game, I need every little gil I can get and don't want to be bothered having to backtrack to a city just to sell crap I don't need.

Mules: This goes back into my problem with the small storage space. Even at my low levels I'm noticing how much I may need a second character just to store all my stuff... This is especially aggravating as I need to purchase this second character and while we can debate all day about how its a great price in comparison to other MMO's with fees, it doesn't change the fact that I need to pay extra just so I can have a functional character at higher levels. I would either like the ability to sorta establish WoW process of letting an account start with a certain amount of characters (just two or three since the nature of XI makes having eight or ten impractical and silly) or once again, just let me have a decent amount of storage space for equips and Crafting materials.

Better Interface: Probably my big issue with XI, I may need to completely customize my keys just to make this less frustrating and even then I'm going to have issues with the camera being next to my movement keys... Its been getting easier as I get accustomed to it but it doesn't change that the controls have a steep learning curve in the beginning and just get complicated as you go on.

PlayOnline: Needs to burn in hell.

[Yeargdribble]

By the time you have a fully upgraded Gobbiebag and Mog Satchel, your on person carrying capacity is about 160, which is adequate. While the Gobbiebag quests are ridiculously costly when everyone on the server is trying to do them, starting small and increasing the size makes you feel accomplishment. I also appreciated slowly working my way to larger and larger bags in WoW.

Mules.... Man f@#$ mules. This is the biggest flaw in the game and is quite related to the above problem. Sure, you can eventually have tons of storage in many places, but this game lets you level 18 jobs to max level on one character. Much gear is Ra/Ex, so you have to hold onto it and can't send it away if you want to. The game also forces you to min-max gear for every conceivable situation. When I was actually hardcore I normally had my bags nearly maxed out on gear I needed for BRD alone.

There needs to be a system that allows you increasing inventory space relative to the jobs you have at significant levels. There becomes a point where if you have many high level jobs you're either muling constantly, or you're gimping (one staff BLMs and one instrument BRDs, meleeing in STR gear). It's even worse with level capped gear you need to keep. The new system to allow gear at low levels doesn't scale gear at all, so if you need to be at your best in a difficult level capped area you still need level capped gear.



If you're going to allow tons of jobs on one character and the game is going to push for every job to have tons of gear, then inventory needs to be made better. And we shouldn't be forced to pay for mules which, due to poor design, are absolutely necessary to play the game.

[Levian]

I want there to be more stuff I can do alone before I'm level 30. I don't want to rely on others all the time.

[ANGRYWOLF]

I guess I wasn't the only person who wanted to play solo..and got ripped for it by another poster some time back.
So I gave up commenting about the game.

I wonder when we'll see anything more about the beta..when it actually gets going.
If I hear anything from Square I 'll decide then whether to go ahead with it.

I do agree about exploration.There should be a sense of wonder when you do it and you should be able to find valuable items and get credit for it.
There should be an air of danger and an air of mystery and the legends you uncover should be quite complex and enthralling. But it takes along time for a developer to come up with that and incorporate it in a game.

[Yeargdribble]

It's not that I think solo shouldn't be feasible. I was very irritated with FFXI at a time when you couldn't solo past level 10. Having played WoW and FFXI I know the downsides of being able to easily solo.

Low Level Content

People say they want content at low levels and a game that allows them to level quickly and solo. The two are nearly mutually exclusive. In WoW, you can level so easily and quickly solo that the low level content is irrelevant. Any accomplishment you make before 60 is beyond pointless. You will never see half of the content because nobody cares. I you wanted to got get a set of Fang Armor or Blackened Defias Armor, by the time you've run the places enough to get any, you will have leveled beyond the range where that gear is even decent for you. By the 40 absolutely nobody is running mid-level instances any more. You're unlikely to find a group for Mara or Sunken Temple. Now your job is to grind.


Slower Leveling

The benefit of slower leveling with good content along the way is that every level counts and you don't outgrow gear faster than you get it. An MMO isn't an offline RPG you're meant to check off of you list in a month. If you want a game where you can just level quickly to max level all solo, there are plenty of games that don't cost 15 bucks a month that allow you to do that. Go play White Knight Chronicles where you can play completely solo, get gear and play online only if you want to... for free.


Solo
So for the people who want solo, would you be satisfied if solo leveling wasn't as fast as party leveling? That's what I'd like. I want solo to be an option when you don't have time for a group. But I don't want it to be the easy that WoW made it that invalidates all of the content and makes it pointless to be anything but the max level.