Final Fantasy XIV explains the ins and outs of party play

Is this game worth buying? I've heard good and bad things.

Having all party members within 5 levels isn't as easy as you think, since every character is trying to be almost EVERY class, with the result that it's common for a huge class range to exist.

Healers and other support classes rarely get XP in a party. FFXIV's badly designed XP system gave rewards for the actions you performed, resulting in healers abusing the system. Rather than fix the system and reward XP for kills and level accomplishments, Square Enix's fix resulted in some sort of mish-mash of code that effectively resulted in healers getting almost no XP (regardless of level ranges), and tanks getting less than DPSers. While the PR folks can talk all they want about how the system is supposed to work, the reality in the game is vastly different.

Final Fantasy XIV desires its amazingly low metacritic score. Never has a game with such high art production values failed so miserably on so many levels. The latest Korean and Chinese imports are vastly superior products in every respect but one: Square Enix did a fabulous job with the art. If you play games simply to enjoy visual beauty, FFXIV is definitely the game for you.

The graphics and the sound in the game are good, well worth seeing, but… ya, the game was made poorly in a thousand other ways.

Does the dev team explain that group ‘quests’ are really what in WoW and other games are dailies? As in… the game is so short on content, it has dailies called ‘leve’ s on a 36 hour timer as the main bulk of content. Dailies aren’t adequate content. Do the devs explain how they came to mess that up?

Do the devs explain why they want to torture healers with targeting? As a healer, you have to either mouse click on each player’s avatar, or cycle through friendly targets. Unlike almost every other game out there, you can NOT assign specific numbers to point to specific party members on keyboard, and you can NOT click on player’s name/healthbars. Tanks sometimes yell, “Get away from me so the healer can click on me” , to other group members in a fray. Do devs explain that?

Do devs explain why they felt like making it so awkward to invite to groups? You actually have to bring avatars close to one another so the leader can click on the avatar of the invitee. Same with guilds, you can’t just invite a friend, you have to SEE his avatar and click on his avatar to invite him, which is a pain if you’re on opposite sides of the world.

Do devs explain why anima, the energy used to teleport around the world, regens so slowly that half the time you’d like to group with some friends, but you don’t because it’s just such a pain to move around right now without mounts and without flight points?

Do the devs explain why it is you can play the game and never hear about ‘dungeons’? I dunno about you, but group play in most games I know involve dungeons, and you can currently play FFXIV without knowing what a dungeon is.

“Final Fantasy XI's development team was notorious for being silent on every aspect of the game, no matter how much players begged for an explanation of systems. It's a tradition that has most certainly not been carried over to Final Fantasy XIV,”??? I hear sentences like this so often in FFXIV from FF veterans. People are always saying something to the effect, “Oh yeah, this is awful, but it’s something good compared to how bad SE did it in FFXI.” As if that makes something awful better when you know things were even worse before then??? That’s not good.

What's frustrating is the way they're attempting to open this dialogue with players. "Hey, please read our wiki or decipher a translated interview or trawl through our blog for an explanation of how the game works!"

They're struggling to maintain their unstated-but-obvious 'Grand Vision' of an utterly opaque gaming experience requiring a notepad and community to learn, one which fosters the kind of team-work and camaraderie that exists only when humans are forced onto the razor edge of survival and the alternative to cooperation is a bitter and lonely demise.

...Unfortunately for this 'grand vision', to keep from hemorrhaging subscribers (and their symbiotic partners: stockholders) who don't want that part of the pre-penicillin experience, they're offering a sneak peak behind the curtain, a 'cheat sheet' if you will. Every step forward is made grudgingly and by halves; the devs are being dragged forward, kicking and screaming, by Market Forces into implementing measures they didn't want to, because it will compromise their artistic integrity. (See: categorized market wards as a 'solution', or the web-based crafting information.)

It's just like a pop idol promising to be chaste and save herself for marriage, even after the racy bukkake/enema video goes viral; her excuse being that since her hymen is still intact, she's still a virgin. She's not fooling anybody and will soon end up in court for beating a photographer with his own camera the next time she gets snapped giving head in a nightclub.

Dear Square-Enix: Bite the god damned bullet and pop FFXIV's cherry already. Just GIVE UP your quixotic quest to be 'different' and realize that your efforts are being nullified by The Internets. Accept that the recipe book exists and add it. Give us meaningful tooltips. Include the actual numbers for everything. If players are alt-tabbing for something (and we ARE)... you've simultaneously failed in your goal of denying them that information, and you've frustrated them in the process.

Personaly i am wondering why no one said anything about the intentional crotch shots in the pic...........