FF XIV Reviews

is that where in kill cam u dont even see them aim at u u just see the scope go up to the eye and they have a headshot? <.<

this is why I like the "limited" tournaments held around here. The judges have a list of "noob weapons" and "noob tactics" for each game. Noob weapons are usually flat out banned and cannot be used. Noob tactics are easily over looked, but if you are caught using excessive noob tactics (camping with a non-scoped/short ranged weapon) you will be warned and later banned from the tourney. I had so much fun with the Halo tourneys here because spawn killing and vehicles were considered noob tactics while the rockets and vehicle weapons were considered noob weapons. Grenades were also limited..oh it was fun

I was considering it. If I ever get bored with Black Ops, I'll definitely pick it up, but Black Ops is definitely looking better atm.

As much as I hate MW2, it's just so much fun. And I look forward to starting over with a new setting and new weapons in Black Ops.

yeah, it's actually easier than normal sniping, people act like its an accomplishment. I hate mw2 because sniping in that game is bs, none of the maps are big enough. Bad company had good sniping and from what i've seen in medal of honor it does as well

quick scoping seems like total *** to me...

i find it *** that u can get hit by a .50 caliber bullet and still walk in MWF2 ; ;

moh comes out tomorrow, black ops is in a month. also i think MoH looks better actually lol. but i'm also more inclined to like it since i <3 Dice and their shooters.

You should try Bad Company 2. Sniping in it is realistic not up close. and the bullet is affected by gravity so you have to learn to aim above the target at long distances and how to determine what distance means how far over you have to aim. Bad Company 2 was made by Dice which is why I'm so stoked for MoH since its also by dice.

Users who like being rewarded with near-constant content, simple fun without work, and over-powered items pay $15/month.

Users who like being ***-reamed with intense effort and time investment for scraps of content and hard-earned but under-powered rewards also pay $15/month.

To an MMO company, they're worth the same. Arguably, the first types are more valuable because they're easier to please.

There's just 12M of the first out there, and maybe a couple hundred thousand of the second. I don't play WoW -- it's not my thing -- but I know which game I'd rather work on.

Yeah I agree but I guess just having grown up expecting a game to be hard and have it's challenges draws me to XI and XIV. And simpler games such as wow push me away, hell I've even been pushed away from XI since the recent updates.

Which is totally fair. I'm the same way -- it's why I played XI over WoW.

But the sheer arrogance with which XI type players demean WoW type players is incredibly juvenile. MMO companies don't give a rat's *** that we think we're somehow "better" because we want our items to take 1000 hours to get instead of 10.

It might make our sense of accomplishment higher X years from now, but that means nothing to an MMO company. You're paying $15/month regardless and handing out epic weapons like candy costs them nothing. If it's more fun to more people, (and clearly it is, by a huge margin), who are we to demean that? A user is a user.

There have been something like seven AAA level MMO's launched since WoW, with big companies with a ton of money behind them. Every one has either been cancelled, died immediately, went free to play, or is limping along barely breaking even at 100k-200k users. (Some, like this one, lasted six weeks after launch.)

This is a big deal guys. It's serious. We can sit and debate the finer points of effort vs. reward in game design, but at the end of the day, if XIV doesn't get enough people paying for it pronto, it will not survive long enough to be improved. SE has a ton of money and they're not gunna pull the plug that fast, but I seriously worry if we're talking about this game not being competitive for a year or more.

I agree :/

LotRO went F2P
WoW seems to be eating away at the market. It just sucks because 14 actually has the potential to be amazing for casual gamers. But it kinda seems the norm with games these days. EA owns sporting games, WoW dominates MMO, it just sucks to know that the people at the top care so little about the gamers and only the profits. It must be soul crushing to be a game dev and just have your ideas constantly shot to ***by those guys.

I don't know what kind of upkeep (operating costs) a game like FFXIV entails, but I'd imagine they're going to keep stabbing at it until the ps3 version has had a proper run through.

The Final Fantasy brand itself lures a loyal base, this game by any other name would be on the brink of shutting down already I'd think. Then again, I think they pushed it out early knowing they'll still pull in at least the lower bound of initial estimates.

i bought MOH and black ops from amazon already. black ops looks bad *** i cant wait. fast scope and 360 shooting is so BS.

WOW is too weak anyone can play it as you can see. FF MMO's take time and you have to be skilled or just lucky to get anywhere in the game. why most cant handle FF MMo's to hard for them since they cant use their mind.

As Jaerik said, we can argue the fine points of the game and sense of accomplishment all we want. To us typically viewed as "hardcore gamers" wow seems easy, but nowadays the gaming market isn't after us hardcore gamer. Nowadays everyone has a home pc and a console or 3.. so you target the common gamer and average market. It sucks but it's business.

yea i have ps3 xbox360 laptop desktop and psp. i totally agreed if your new to FF mmo's at first be hard. but people in ff are active and will help. i just shout what im trying to find out something i always get a reply back. also when someone asking if i also try to help if i can

I think it's a crying shame, don't get me wrong. I don't want to play WoW -- I want to play games like XI. I like the sense of accomplishment that comes from investing a bunch of months and years into my character, while everyone else drops out.

But I'm amazed at the attitude that a lot of us have. It's like we think our X years of investment somehow gives us so much value, we can wave our hand and dismiss the opinions of 12 million other people as of secondary importance. As though our year of farming for a relic weapon is somehow just as valuable as 2.16 billion dollars a year in user subscriptions.

We can be adamant in our opinions without losing our sense of perspective. Shifting to ad hominem attacks and saying WoW players are somehow less intelligent or lazy isn't helpful -- it just makes us look like *** with a hilariously overblown sense of self-importance. And it doesn't really help convince MMO companies that we're a valuable demographic to cater to.

ffxiah.com uses a MySQL or Oracle database, right? How hard would it have been for FFXIV to slap their items into a database like that for an auction house? A couple months to set that up? I mean.. they don't even have that many weapons, right?

I agree and I feel as though it's just an exhaustion of anger. Because I know that if it keeps going like this I'd rather strat playing Runescape than pick up WoW.
IDK I guess I just feel that it honestly sucks to watch something you were passionate about die out. It's like watching Brett Farve retire. You know football will still be around, but it wont be the same.

very true i agreed. we can all be big headed in times. but im pretty sure everyone helps others when they need it. i've already helped a couple of people who needed help on leves becuase werent strong enough. yes i was being bi headed but when it comes down to it ill always help others even if i dont know them.

It's not hard to make an auction house. I'm pretty sure we don't have an auction house because of a design decision, not how much work it is. It's not that it didn't make the cut -- it's that it was never worked on. People talk about that "AH icon" in LL but that's grasping at straws. NPC's in the area refer to it as the Tribunal, a quest plot location, and the icon is a judge's gavel, not an auctioneer's mallet.

If you think about it, the AH in XI was a pretty weird system. It wasn't even an "auction house." There were no auctions. Lowest price sold first but you didn't know what it was. Highest bid price meant nothing. Etc. It was hard to explain to first time users because it was such a uniquely quirky system.

Duplicating all of that functionality in another game strikes me as a weird decision. I don't blame the devs for thinking "Okay, that was kinda wonky, let's try something else." Especially because once you roll out a system like that, your economy is now "locked in" to all the same strengths and weaknesses as XI. You can't really go beyond that.

This is a new dev team with new designers. I really doubt they're wild about the thought of copying a game that's 8 years old. They likely think they can do better.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they can? I'm just amazed they didn't think delivering on those ideas was important enough for launch.

The retainer idea is ridiculous. It's like they looked at Upper Jeuno/Rolanberry Fields/etc. bazaarfests and said: "Hey, this is great! Players can set up their own bazaars, they love it in FFXI, so let's move it to FFXIV!" Nobody liked it in FFXI, but it had to be done due to AH taxes or items that couldn't be put on the AH.

I think the Search feature on FFXI was very basic. But if they took that feature and really beefed it up, they could do something nice with it. Like some sort of search function to find people who are selling a specific item. Or having a much more interactive /seacom like doing a search for people who want a specific mission, quest, item or interest. And instead of clicking on every player to see what they put in their /seacom, it should narrow down players based on what they want. In my opinion, this is how I'd want to find my items. Do a search for the item I want, find a few players that own that item(and are willing to sell it), then send them a tell asking how much. If they linked the bazaar to this feature, it would save so much hassle and there wouldn't be some localized "AH", it'd just be a commune of people who are looking to buy/sell items.

I'm really just drawing at straws of how they could have at least made this game seem less empty upon release. It's sad to see them release a game with such little content. When I look at the previous games, I see the full product so I suppose I'm a bit biased in my thinking.

APB!!! LMAO!

It seems like their new idea for an economy is an attempt to be more realistic in a sense. Rather than have all the items that can be bought and sold in a list with only 4 different stock pools, it seems more like a cluster of individual stores if you will.

Rather than checking the previous prices of sold items to determine prices and having only 4 pools of stock to get what you are looking for, this economy seems more buyer oriented. Do you buy what are you are looking for in the first bazaar you see at their price, or do you keep looking to see if anyone has it cheaper? If you have the time to shop around it's more beneficial to the buyer, in theory anyway.

If SE doesn't know about this site already I'd be disappointed in them. To be honestly it almost seems like in the back of their heads they know people would post what they are selling on this site and/or sites like it. So in a sense they figure let you guys on here take care of all the dirty work on what the average price of items are and who has what. And they don't even have to pay you, lol!

See, that would make so much more sense and would actually be quite efficient. If they set up some kind of centralized "merchant registry" outside of the Wards, with a Head of Markets person or something that could "look up" which retainers have which items for you, add some search features, etc., that would immediately eliminate the hassle and headache of spending hours clicking through each person individually. It would also make price comparison easier and make the economy more stable and systematized.

That said, I suspect SE wants to keep the 'more natural' feel of a community of merchants, rather than just a big AH; it fits with the themes in the rest of the game, and I actually got a really strong sense of the sort of grassroots economy building up out of nothing in the first few days after release. That was very cool. And this type of system wouldn't get rid of that. But it would address our needs, which are very real.

I was kind of hoping that some SE official would contact Scragg/Jaerik and ask for some help on developing some type of marketting system for them for FFXIV. I think it's stupid that they ignored this resource used by so many players of FFXI. Hell, I can't even think of a player who hasn't at least looked up items using this website. Sure, it's a website and not a UI-Game Client, but they could at least take some tips on design of that.

An organic player-to-player economy, that approximates real life better, has been the holy grail of MMO design for 20 years now. Practical designers realize that centralized systems like an AH are easier to use, and more stable. But that's not how RL works, and it seems every couple years, some big wig designer is out there saying they're going to design something that's more realistic, new, and wonderful.

It never happens.

The most intricate, powerful, amazing virtual economy in the MMO world right now is EVE Online. Their economy is so rich and so stable, you can pay for your monthly subscription with in-game currency. But it's so stable because it's a centralized, brokered, transparent system, similar to global stock exchanges. It sure as hell isn't market wards.

I think separating the wards by type and implementing a search mechanic is a fantastic idea. I'm absolutely baffled why, if it's only a couple weeks of work like they're implying, we didn't have it at launch. But beyond a certain point, if your wards are categorized, searchable, etc anyway... isn't it basically an AH system anyway? Just with a cludgier interface?

I've heard great things about EVE online just never got around to trying it :/

It's incredibly complicated. It's basically MMO-via-spreadsheet. The below graphic is a good approximation.

But its economy is so incredible that it's spawned a number of PhD studies and books on design. Their presentations are often standing-room-only at conventions like GDC.

I can't really fathom a highly-paid design team, tasked with developing new and interesting systems, going to some 3rd party yahoo site for ideas. They would have to actually put us on the payroll or risk legal problems re: work product or unsolicited ideas.

We'd be happy to advise from a volunteer role. Hell, we've been open to a closer relationship with SE for years. We'd even be open to changing our ad model if they needed it.

Trouble is, I like to think we're ruthlessly fair: I praise SE when warranted but also don't hold back punches when they screw up. That's not a good thing for an "officially" connected site, which are usually expected to always spin things in SE's favor as though they were under the same PR umbrella. It wouldn't be fair to our users for us to suddenly switch gears like that, and I doubt SE wants to touch us with a 10' pole unless we do.

Oh well, our door is always open nonetheless: jaerik@ffxiah.com =p

Jesus *** christ that picture made my day with the people hanging and the bulldozer. I'm almost tempted to try it out for a challenge.

They're relying on you guys, for now, it seems. Considering that if you're playing on PC you definitely have access to web sites.

I mean with the whole server-confirmed UI to prevent bots, hacks, etc. it wouldn't be too far fetched to think that their new idea to replace an AH is to just have a slew of user's bazaars in game and let independent websites take care of searches, prices, etc.