Having played two years of WoW after playing 3 years of FFXI I have a slightly different perspective and things that used to annoy the crap out of me in FFXI make more sense now.

Leveling should be more accessible, but not ridiculously fast. In WoW who cares if you're 20, or 42 or 72 or even 79. You're either 80 and covered in epics or GTFO... you don't matter an 95% of the content isn't available to you until you get that little bit of XP to hit 80.... even then you'll be shat upon by people who don't like the fact that you aren't completely geared out from Maly, Naxx and Ulduar.

Making leveling too easy and making all of the content a throw away after every 3 months when a new raid is released makes it so that there is nothing else in the game.

There is content while leveling in FFXI, though it's painfully slow. Being 60 might actually mean something while obviously 75 means more. I used to believe that it shouldn't be so hard to get the rewards in FFXI, but if it was painfully easy it would also grow far more stale and rewards really do mean more if they take more effort.


The ability to walk over pixel high ledges that get us stuck or give us a jump button, either will fix it.
Absolutely. Jumping needs to be added. Nothing de-emerges you like not being able to step walk over a bump that someone could easily traverse in a wheelchair.


Another improvement would be for it to actually feel like an FF game. FFXI just didn't feel like an FF game.
Pure opinion and from the sounds of your whole few hours of experience I don't know that you're one to make that call. You can't play even one of the offline games from only a few hours and say it doesn't live up to the name. Beside that, what does make an FF game feel like an FF game. The series has made some major diversions in its history.

There are plenty of people who didn't think FFVII felt like an FF game because suddenly it was so much more mechanized. To the really old school fans VIII and XII didn't feel much like FFs because they weren't based in a more traditional RPG environment with nothing but swords and castles.

What makes a FF is broader than all of that and I'm sure XIV will be as much FF as XI was.


More room for character customization, especially at the beginning so every newbie doesn't look like a clone. I want my character to be a little piece of me
This is a huge problem in FFXI. We need more than to pick faces from a (short as hell) list. Also, gear throughout needs to be more varied, especially early on so you can feel the customization. In FFXI everyone starts with the same gear to their race. By the 10-20 stretch you are either wearing a harness, a doublet, or scale mail. That's just too limited and everyone looks the same. More variety of gear with similar stats so you can at least pick gear partially on aesthetics.

Either that or add a system like LOTRO has where you can pick a show set that everyone sees while you're really wearing other gear with better stats that may look like crap.


If the graphics in FFXI look like crap to you then you need to go tweak your registry. With the graphics truly maxed out FFXI probably has the best character and mob models of any MMO out there (LOTRO included). The environments are still not too great and the biggest problem is the draw distance of large environments. They need to adjust it so that things don't pop in so badly.





Biggest thing they need to improve is SE themselves. Their customer service is terrible. Many GMs are straight up racist. Problems are ignored for years and SE largely ignores and takes for granted their playerbase. Setting up your account and logging in each time should be very very simple the way it is with WoW. Blizzard is a fantastic company. They have a lot of 1 to 1 interaction with their players and take feedback very seriously. SE needs to learn this above all.