Elle Chase

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.

FE is a great PvE game, with lots of atmosphere and beautiful blend of combat and crafting.

Because of this, the game really has very few PvPers. Every day I'm in there I hear whines from people who can't find enough for blood sports, or people who'll offer almost anything to lure you until a PvP area.

Personally, I'm very, very glad that a non-fantasy PvE game is around. My only gripe is how difficult it is to get "honest" teams for instance "dungeons." Most teams seem to include at least one high-level "ringer" who makes the whole thing a cake walk. What's the point of sleep-walking through a dungeon while some high level players magically makes all the enemies disappear?

While all the points in the article are valid, especially the overly complicated buffs and debuffs, those factors also make PvE more difficult as well. I believe the real reason why even s1 PvPers cry in the wilderness for opponents is that the game's main audience has little interest in PvP.

This is impossible to prove without a massive Daedulus-project scale study of FE gamers vs MMORPGers in general, but I hold the opinion that not every MMO player enjoys PvP. The newbie experience and level-up experience in FE stresses the PvE side. I also suspect that crafters are less likely to be PvPers than non-crafters. I'm sure devotees of PvP will disagree, since they're convinced everyone "must" love what they love about MMOs. It just isn't so. There is an entire group of MMO players who enjoy cooperative or solo gameplay, as opposed to competitive play.

I would suggest that FE is very wise to continue paying attention to their core audience first, since abandoning that will cause a disaster on the scale of SWG's NGE. I'm sure they'll refine and improve PvP, but never at the expense of what seems to float the boat of their "bread and butter" customer base.

Hey, don't worry about it... these quests will become unplayable on any server with a half decent population ... because they are in PvP-enabled zones where higher level enemies can and do regularly beat up on lower level enemies.

What the author leaves unsaid is what happens if you aren't lucky enough to have a legion, or group of friends, who can put together a balanced 6-person group who will dedicate sufficient time for the quest. Or even if you do find a group, but run into well-organized Asmodeans (or Elyos) who have level 50 alts camped at appropriate spots to farm Xeno-questers. After all, expert Aion players typically have multiple level-50 characters by now.

The article also highlights one of the well-known exploits in Aion - the "force log" that allows a player to instantly exit the game (standard log-out has a 10-second timer). Are you a ganker who bit off more than he can chew? Log out instantly and deny victory to your opponent(s). The tactic has been around for months and months, but NCsoft won't (can't?) do a thing about it.

Finally, the article demonstrates that late-game players really MUST have a good legion (or an equivalent circle of friends). Even if you can get to 50 solo, you can't do the key quests for equipment that makes the difference between marginal functionality and true success.

I'd like one please.

Hmm... you must have had those battles before the servers went down... again.

I've been unable to play because bugs in the tutorial mission prevented me from advancing, and because the tutorial's weird difficulties (some enemies you must RUN past rather than fighting) discouraged my partner, a long time Trek fan.

I have to say, this game is clearly NOT for everyone.

I sincerely hope you are able to get regular, detailed and clear communication going with the community. The failure of NCsoft to post on their own forums was one of two major factors in me dropping Aion.

The other was the fact that it continually had lag problems as it passed through the AT&T routers here in the SF Bay Area. I've played a half dozen MMOs with the same hardware, software and ISP, and regretfully had to drop Aion in favor of Champions simply because Aion never worked right!!! I may given Aion a try again, but only when I see community or dev postings that indicate that an update includes fixes to the game's comm infrastructure. Needless to say, the complete lack of postings about technical details gave me the impression you were concentrating on bigger issues that affected more people, which discouraged me. I go into this to give you ammunition in your arguments for detailed, comprehensive patch notes in a clearly marked section of the game's forums.

Preventing alts just means that players seeking an advantage, be it espionage or whatever, will be obliged to purchase multiple accounts. In other words, really sneaky activities become a pay-to-play feature, much as they are in EVE.

If the Bulgarians SERIOUSLY believe than no alts is the way to prevent opposing-side espionage, they are such babes-in-the-woods about MMOs that my expectations for this game just dropped a couple notches.

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but I'm not hearing anything about NCsoft fixing the periodic lag spikes that made the game completely unplayable for 5-10% of the audience (including me). Until I hear they've addressed the problem, or that they are actually responding to customer problems (for a while they wouldn't even post on their own forums!), I see no point in wasting my time on a game I that refused to work for me during open beta and preorder.

And yes, before you mention it, the lag spikes aren't problems with my PCs or a specific server. I worked with various drivers, configurations, even machines, as well as various servers and characters. My ISP has done just fine with a half dozen other MMOs in the last couple months, so it's not their fault.

My point is that in addition to the long lines on some servers, there is a minority of the population who wanted to play, discovered the game wasn't working for them and went elsewhere. For those people this was definitely NOT a smooth launch.