Final Fantasy XIV Official Release Thread

ahhh I can't decide if I should pick up the game now or cancel my preorder.
The battle system looks painfully slow and boring, but I'm kind of getting my hopes up that it will be different for end game
 
vengence said:
Do you remember the launch of WoW? Or were you actually around for it? It was horrid. WoW is only polished because it's old. Most MMOs are well polished after 6 months just fine.
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It wasn't that bad. Occasional loot lag, and queues for high pop servers people flocked to because they wanted to follow the high end EQ / WoW beta guilds (ie Fires of Heaven). If you joined a medium pop server about the only thing that was bad was the loot lag.
 
WBurchnall said:
I cancelled my pre-order and my friend gave me his recruit a buddy-system code so I'll be playing for the next 30 days. I've been promised the full version is better and just installed it this morning but in all honesty, I don't think I'll be willing to pay $50.00 for my next month(buying the game). I find myself hard-pressed to be willing to spend even $15.00 a month.
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According to SE, using the buddy pass exempts you from having to buy the game, meaning you only have to pay the monthly fee to continue playing.
 
Game - Awesome

Crafting - Awesome

Combat is friggin sweet

Battle Regiments are sweet

FFXIV is not WoW EZ-Mode - Awesome

Respec Stats/Class on the fly - Awesome

Fundamentals that got my WoW Spoiled GF to stop whining:
1. Stop using the Mouse - FFXI and FFXIV are console games on a PC. A controller is how its played. (Stop whining about Tab not working - a controller or Right Arrow Keystroke will solve your inability to nagivate simple menus issue)
2. Read your damn journal. No one has a question mark over thier head in FF.
3. Can't find an NPC? - See note 2 + Talk to ALL the NPC's - Explore your environment!

Thank you SE for bringing rewarding challenges to FFXIV.
 
Snowknight26 said:
According to SE, using the buddy pass exempts you from having to buy the game, meaning you only have to pay the monthly fee to continue playing.
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Shoot, I'm even willing to try it at that rate.

What's in it for the person that shares that buddy pass?
 
the question is.. how or where to obtain these buddy pass? Anyone have any spare to share? :D
 
So how many folks are running this in Nvidia surround or Eyefinity? I am getting crappy performance and would like to know other peoples experience.
 
This is the game I didn't know I wanted.

I am actually enjoying playing an MMO again, menu system doesn't bother me, especially since I found out how to create macros to change main and sub hand items.
 
Snowknight26 said:
WBurchnall, the NPCs can repair your armor to 75%. They changed it during/after the open beta.

You can also reallocate your points so your argument of having multiple characters is basically invalid.
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No? I don't think so. I tired the undo option which lets you re-allocate the last five points you've spent. It DOES NOT let you re-allocate points beyond your last level.

So .... not really at all.

It would be akin to in the old Diablo games reaching lvl 65 and having 300 poiints in strength and 300 in vitality and utting 5 more str and going 'Oh, actually, I wanted that in vit! doh!' and then going from 305 str/300 vit to 300 str/305 vitality'.

Changing the last/most-recent level isn't really re-allocating points in a way that nerfs the argument I made. Unless they've added a npc that allows a complete re-allocatoin from the beginning (allll your points back, not just the last/most recent level's points).
 
TRex said:
So how many folks are running this in Nvidia surround or Eyefinity? I am getting crappy performance and would like to know other peoples experience.
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From your signature:

"3 x EVGA GTX 480 Super Clocked 3-Way SLI"

SLI + FFXIV = Broken/Not working at the moment. So ....your multi-monitor setup for nVidia surround is being powered by '1' GTX480. Or in other words your attempting to run I dunnoo....1920x1200x3 off a single card which probably explains your poor performance.

Once your running 1920x1200x3 off three GTX 480s whenever SLI is made to work with the game/fixed, I'm sure your performance should be MUCH better.
 
WBurchnall said:
No? I don't think so. I tired the undo option which lets you re-allocate the last five points you've spent. It DOES NOT let you re-allocate points beyond your last level.
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Not undo, but reassign. You can keep reassigning points but there's a limit to how many you can do in a certain period of time.
 
PornoSatan said:
It wasn't that bad. Occasional loot lag, and queues for high pop servers people flocked to because they wanted to follow the high end EQ / WoW beta guilds (ie Fires of Heaven). If you joined a medium pop server about the only thing that was bad was the loot lag.
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....Huh? I didn't even experience the first month of WoW release (My account date is Dec. 29, 2004) and even then and at least a month later, there were massive rollbacks, servers being taken offline, and Blizzard giving everyone free gametime because of all the problems. WoW's loot bug problem extended even past the first expansion (maybe WoTLK too, but I didn't play much of it)! Not to mention warlocks and hunters were a laughable class to play for years. I'm sure there's more I'm missing, like not even having any +dmg spellcaster gear until years after release (All it was, was stacking int).

I'm continuing to have a blast with FFXIV. Fishing takes up most of my time still (almost rank 20 fisher) but it's fun and I've been adding my results to a harvesting database. When I'm not fishing, I'm doing guildleves or the main quests with a bunch of real life friends from back home. The only complaint I still have is the market ward system, but SE already posted something about upcoming changes to the system, which should make it a lot better.

Also, until those changes happen, I suggest checking out yg.com's Bazaar. It's basically shows what people are selling, and it's a great first-look at what you might want to sell things for. Aside from the bazaar, the rest of a site is an excellent resource to all things FFXIV and I definitely recommend checking it out.
 
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PornoSatan said:
It wasn't that bad. Occasional loot lag, and queues for high pop servers people flocked to because they wanted to follow the high end EQ / WoW beta guilds (ie Fires of Heaven). If you joined a medium pop server about the only thing that was bad was the loot lag.
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You obviously didn't play WoW at launch. There was massive lag problems, rollbacks were all too common, log in queues were ridiculously long. Blizzard gave gametime back many times due to the amount of problems due to stability and other problems.
 
Just noting here - is there anyone that would be willing to sell/give me a Garlond Goggles code? I'd like them for my characters, to complete my set of pre-order/special items (I have Onion Helm and Asuran Armguards). If anyone has one they are willing to part with, please PM me!


Gabriel - yes, it is cheaper to buy a 3 or 6 month service account payment if I recall, but this does NOT effect the $3 per character charge.
 
WBurchnall said:
From your signature:

"3 x EVGA GTX 480 Super Clocked 3-Way SLI"

SLI + FFXIV = Broken/Not working at the moment. So ....your multi-monitor setup for nVidia surround is being powered by '1' GTX480. Or in other words your attempting to run I dunnoo....1920x1200x3 off a single card which probably explains your poor performance.

Once your running 1920x1200x3 off three GTX 480s whenever SLI is made to work with the game/fixed, I'm sure your performance should be MUCH better.
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This fixed my problem.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1036092855

SLI is now working and the game is running fairly smooth at 6040x1080.
 
WBurchnall said:
No? I don't think so. I tired the undo option which lets you re-allocate the last five points you've spent. It DOES NOT let you re-allocate points beyond your last level.

So .... not really at all.

It would be akin to in the old Diablo games reaching lvl 65 and having 300 poiints in strength and 300 in vitality and utting 5 more str and going 'Oh, actually, I wanted that in vit! doh!' and then going from 305 str/300 vit to 300 str/305 vitality'.

Changing the last/most-recent level isn't really re-allocating points in a way that nerfs the argument I made. Unless they've added a npc that allows a complete re-allocatoin from the beginning (allll your points back, not just the last/most recent level's points).
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yes, you can reassign all your points. i dont know exactly how long, but around every hour you should be able to hit the reassign button. As long as you don't apply any points you reassign, you can undo all your points. (but it will take hours to get ALL of your points if your at a high rank)
 
KaOTiK said:
You obviously didn't play WoW at launch. There was massive lag problems, rollbacks were all too common, log in queues were ridiculously long. Blizzard gave gametime back many times due to the amount of problems due to stability and other problems.
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I know it's fun to hate on WoW and everything, but I not only bought and played it the first day it came out, but during the beta as well. Here's my account history for the first ~11 months, directly after release:

oidm6u.jpg



As you can see, the account was created on day 1, we were given a 5 day credit a month later, a 7 day credit roughly a month after that, and then a 3 day credit 2 months later. There was a few rollbacks, but they weren't serious, about the only serious one was shortly after the original honor system was released months later that resulted in 3 days worth of honor being rolled back. RIGHT at release the only things that happened were loot lag, which was independant of the server you were on, so I experienced alot of that, and queue time, which obviously only impacted those who selected a high pop instead of medium pop server. And the reasons these issues existed in the first place is because Blizzard didn't expect it to become so popular from day 1, it wasn't due to say developer ignorance.

It was for the most part fully functional, and even came with the raid content MC and Onyxia at release. There was some artistic aspects that weren't complete, for example the only epic ground mount that had extra artwork was the undead horse, and that's only because of Blizzard's development of Stratholme pre-release, where they simply used Baron Rivendare's mount. Every other race had to deal with a temporary mount until the "new graphics" was released.

Skizzy said:
....Huh? I didn't even experience the first month of WoW release (My account date is Dec. 29, 2004) and even then and at least a month later, there were massive rollbacks, servers being taken offline, and Blizzard giving everyone free gametime because of all the problems. WoW's loot bug problem extended even past the first expansion (maybe WoTLK too, but I didn't play much of it)! Not to mention warlocks and hunters were a laughable class to play for years. I'm sure there's more I'm missing, like not even having any +dmg spellcaster gear until years after release (All it was, was stacking int)..
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Yeah Hunter's got the short stick for a while, that's because they were technically the last class to be designed. Warlocks on the other hand varied. They went from shit -> way overpowered -> shit -> way overpowered in classic. But that's the way Blizzard does things, nothing new.
 
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Let me try one last time:

If you buy this game or the CE version...and you share off those buddy passes...what's in it for YOU if you do that?

It seems like being the recipient of a buddy pass is the super cheap and easy way for people to get in. Arguably THE ideal way to get in to this game.
 
Q-BZ said:
Let me try one last time:

If you buy this game or the CE version...and you share off those buddy passes...what's in it for YOU if you do that?

It seems like being the recipient of a buddy pass is the super cheap and easy way for people to get in. Arguably THE ideal way to get in to this game.
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Well presumably you can use that buddy pass to get one of your friends to play and enjoy the game with you.
 
Q-BZ said:
Let me try one last time:

If you buy this game or the CE version...and you share off those buddy passes...what's in it for YOU if you do that?

It seems like being the recipient of a buddy pass is the super cheap and easy way for people to get in. Arguably THE ideal way to get in to this game.
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Well, you get the physical goodies in the CE edition, you get the online authenticator, you get a crappy ingame item and that's about it.

It's CHEAP way to get one of your friends into the game who might not otherwise play.

If you and a friend want to both play, I'd suggest splitting the cost of the CE.
 
drstk said:
yes, you can reassign all your points. i dont know exactly how long, but around every hour you should be able to hit the reassign button. As long as you don't apply any points you reassign, you can undo all your points. (but it will take hours to get ALL of your points if your at a high rank)
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Hahaha, wow! Great. I can change from a tank to a mage by just equipping my new weapon....and hitting reassign, waiting an hour, hitting reassign, waiting an hour, hitting reassign? and 3 days later I'm a mage? That system doesn't sound awful at all. It sounds like great fun.

The cool part is I can't probably do much while waiting for the 3 day transfer period because I'd be the equivilent of 'physical level x - x times you've used reassign'. So if I was a rank 50 conj for example, and had resassigned 4 physical levels, I'd now be physical '46' basically and might have soem issues doing the end-game content but certinately 1 day into reassigning when im rank 40 I would... or rank 30 or 20 or 10...
 
WBurchnall said:
Hahaha, wow! Great. I can change from a tank to a mage by just equipping my new weapon....and hitting reassign, waiting an hour, hitting reassign, waiting an hour, hitting reassign? and 3 days later I'm a mage? That system doesn't sound awful at all. It sounds like great fun.

The cool part is I can't probably do much while waiting for the 3 day transfer period because I'd be the equivilent of 'physical level x - x times you've used reassign'. So if I was a rank 50 conj for example, and had resassigned 4 physical levels, I'd now be physical '46' basically and might have soem issues doing the end-game content but certinately 1 day into reassigning when im rank 40 I would... or rank 30 or 20 or 10...
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IIRC, I remember being able to reassign all my points in a matter of a day or two from open beta. Furthermore, with the way it worked, you could still assign the points to the mage categories to the while still taking out of the tank categories.
 
My friend has to go out of town, and I'm stuck having to figure the game out on my own. Where do you'll go to read basic guides on things like how to equip gear and stuff like that. I mean basic stuff that I took for granted all these years playing other MMOs, but seems to be hidden in a menu here.

I almost clicked discard on my Onion Helm today trying to figure out how to equip it. I finally found a aethryete (sp) crystal in Gridania, but of course it didn't activate the levequests; told me that I didn't have any levequests for Gridania although I picked the ^&*(*** levequests in the town. So I need to know if there's a point to doing them since I can't even figure out where to do them. Thus I really need a guide.

Thanks!
 
cageymaru said:
My friend has to go out of town, and I'm stuck having to figure the game out on my own. Where do you'll go to read basic guides on things like how to equip gear and stuff like that. I mean basic stuff that I took for granted all these years playing other MMOs, but seems to be hidden in a menu here.

I almost clicked discard on my Onion Helm today trying to figure out how to equip it. I finally found a aethryete (sp) crystal in Gridania, but of course it didn't activate the levequests; told me that I didn't have any levequests for Gridania although I picked the ^&*(*** levequests in the town. So I need to know if there's a point to doing them since I can't even figure out where to do them. Thus I really need a guide.

Thanks!
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I played in OB, I absolutely despised many aspects of the game but I'm not sure how you're in the situation you're in. The NPCs would tell me where and what I should do with the exception of grinding.

http://www.ffxivorigin.com/content/ffxiv-guides-43/
http://www.ffxivblog.com/content.php/153-new-player-guide

http://www.ffxivcore.com/forum
http://www.eorzeapedia.com/forums/
 
vengence said:
IIRC, I remember being able to reassign all my points in a matter of a day or two from open beta. Furthermore, with the way it worked, you could still assign the points to the mage categories to the while still taking out of the tank categories.
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When I played in OB I observed stats could be reset every 30 to 60minutes. The stats you get back are relative to your physical level. I believe the value is either 20 or 25 percent of your overal stats, meaning it should only take 2 to 4 hours to re-assign all of your stats.

I also think thats have diminishing returns based on your physical level and Rank. That is to say if you have a Rank 50 Pugilist and a Physical Level of 50, you can't put 400 stats in to INT and result in 10k nukes at level one.

It may only benefit fully from the first 20 points, next 10 are half value and the other 350 are wasted, this is pure speculation - but I'm fairly sure I'm accurate.
 
todlerix said:
I played in OB, I absolutely despised many aspects of the game but I'm not sure how you're in the situation you're in. The NPCs would tell me where and what I should do with the exception of grinding.

http://www.ffxivorigin.com/content/ffxiv-guides-43/
http://www.ffxivblog.com/content.php/153-new-player-guide

http://www.ffxivcore.com/forum
http://www.eorzeapedia.com/forums/
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Thank you!! I couldn't figure out what the stats meant in the game, what was going on or anything. At least I have some literature to read to understand what I'm supposed to be doing.

I picked the levequests real fast while my buddy was online, and I missed the whole where do you go to do it part trying to keep up with him. And there's 0 things as far as I can tell in my journal. I just completed the opening quest in Gridania; thus the reason why I'm lost. I stood around for 3 hours studying my inventory trying to figure out what keypress would equip my helm. I was too embarrassed to stop a stranger to ask something that simplistic.

Thank you again!
 
My take on FFXIV as a FFXI release day player that switched to WoW when it released.

Opinion of FFXI:
It was nearly 10 years ago, I don't remember it perfectly but I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was one of my first online game after Diablo 2 and Warcraft 2/3. I played it for many many hours and was not put off enough but the interface to stop playing. The only other FF game I had played was FF10, I enjoyed 10 (offline console).

Launch: Servers were great, though getting someone on the same server was annoying, took a bit of effort to get what you wanted, to elaborate the game auto assigned you to specific servers unless you had a friend with some in-game currency to buy a pass to the server. This device was used to prevent high-pop servers.

As I continued to play I found the windower program (against EULA but not something SE pursued) As well as some other addons, Chad/Chaz/Cliff made, they just gave a better output of information.

Overall: Loved it.



Opinion of WoW:
A group of people I was with were going to Mal'Ganis, a leaked server. We ended up moving because of the MASSIVE population, queues, people everywhere, server stability. We moved to another server that wasn't leaked. A lot of the issues went away, after that there were no big deterrents.

List of issues I had with wow release. Rollbacks were annoying but never to the extent I was furious. My particular class, a warrior was very weak in comparison to a paladin or rogue, blizzards justification was the class's dependency on gear (which was noted in the character screen) There was truth to this, but I didn't find it acceptable. It wasn't that I couldn't complete quests or single mobs, but it took more effort and longer to kill and recover than others.

I was a miner/blacksmith combo. This meant I was confronted with the gathering bugs. The means of tracking and gathering were a bit wonky at times. The nodes would occasionally be ungatherable and would occasionally be below ground where no cave existed.

Mobs would evade bug and cause issues with this and that.

I was one of the first max level people on the server, we got to do dungeons and raids that were difficult and massive (for the time of course). As promised the warrior class was much better as equipment came along. We then proceeded to molten core and onyxia.

Overall: Thoroughly enjoyed. (Note, the customizable UI in WoW in my opinion is what made this game, without it, i'd be dead to me)


Opinion of FFXIV:
Character creation, awesome. A lot of people right from the start will be confused by the lack of massive indicators telling you exactly what to do at all times, this is a personal preference. In my opinion if the story and characters are shit, its best to have a 'look for shiny thing, go there' approach. I find the FFXIV story interesting so i remember the NPCs, there locations and roles so I don't mind this potential fault. After gorgeous cinematic and a introduction fight (most people will agree an in game tutorial is needed since people dont like to read manuals). I'm a bit cleverer than the average lemming so I didnt have issues. So far game is good, visuals and music are over 9000, combat as with all MMOs are pretty boring from the start (a change is needed here but not specific to FFXIV)

Then NPCs guide me to a place to get Guildleves and I went from there. I did regional-leves and guild leves until I ran out. I did the story quest at 10 and then again at 15.

This is where shit hit the fan, corn an' all. Because there is only class quests and a main story, there aren't really side stories unless you count the (often repeated) guildleves which are on a timer (36 hours at the time of this post) which takes us to grinding(note1). In FFXI this was done via party play, quite fun IMO. Fast paced, needed to be well executed in order to achieve success. In FFXIV party play is not so much an option, if a healer is needed to complete the fights. A person playing the healer role does not gain Rank/Skill points when they cast a heal(note2** - this note is important if you dont know anything about FFXIV) Discouraging having someone dedicated to healing. There may end up being an efficient way to level yet to be discovered but the people who are at this point in the game are not enjoying because the mobs hit way too hard, or give very few rank points.

The game also lacks any end game content - which is fine if endgame is 6 months away due to the time to level, but leveling is not fun. problem.


(note1*)Everything can be loosely translated into grinding. Going to school, grinding. Working, grinding. In wow you grind 'shitty quests' to level up, in FFXIV you party grind, in lots of games you solo grind. The trick to grinding is making it fun. Not all forms of grinding are appealing to everyone.

(note2**)In FFXIV you have a Rank and a Physical Level. All classes contribute to the Physical level, killing a monster rewards EXP (physical level). For a fighting (Disciple of War/Magic) class when you use offensive (no heals or buffs) you gain Skill Points (rank). So if someone is just buffing and healing, their Rank/skill points are not reflected in their input effort. Personally I feel there should be different party modes, 1 Rank points should be evenly distributed among the party, 2 the way it is now.

Other issues with FFXIV: No means of sorting your inventory, manually or automatically. No auction house or reasonable way of finding things to buy. Imagine a grocery store where nothing is labeled, nothing is categorized or grouped. Everything is just colorless boxes, hundreds of them. If you want to know whats for sale, you have to go to every box and open it, investigate, close it and move to the next one. I wish I was joking its this bad. The only thing different is you can /shout in FFXIV to try to find someone, it doesn't work well. Also a lot of players find it rude.
More issues, when the client or server crashes or anything that causes you to crash/disconnect (which isn't that often, but often enough to be very annoying). When this happens during a Guildleve, you automatically fail and cannot restart. Considering you only get 8 per 36 hours its quite a kick in the face.

I'm not sure how true this is currently, but if you are in fullscreen and you tab out, the game crashes. If UAC pops up, the game crashes. Fraps? crashes.

Comparing to wow launch, wow had quirks but none of them were equivalent to pulling off a toe nail. FFXIV issues left me dumbfounded, every issue I run into (that I find annoying) is just mind blowing. Who in there right mind would not have an organizational method for trading when the entire loot system is based around player crafting, in addition to this the servers are cross-region, so not everyone speaks the same language. Good luck trying to get someone to understand the in game auto-translate when you need something beyond repairing an item.

If all my points are nullified by the fact its cross platform, maybe they shouldn't do cross platform? Or don't join the servers together or something. I will not play this crippled game.

Conclusion/TLDR:

FFXIV is off to a bad start, if the game interests you but you don't like dealing with beta/unfinished/unpolished game, do not play now.

Also, I intend to play this game after my issues are addressed. I can't imagine SE letting this game go under because they have so much potential. But with the success of WoW's custom interface I can't understand how they are discouraging third party apps and not introducing the ability to do a custom UI.
 
todlerix said:
FFXIV is off to a bad start, if the game interests you but you don't like dealing with beta/unfinished/unpolished game, do not play now.

Also, I intend to play this game after my issues are addressed. I can't imagine SE letting this game go under because they have so much potential. But with the success of WoW's custom interface I can't understand how they are discouraging third party apps and not introducing the ability to do a custom UI.
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While I agree with most of what you said, I hate the custom UI stuff in WoW. UI customization and AddOns have gotten so profilic that Blizzard designs the game and encounters around the expectation that people are running UI mods. Once this happens, things have gone too far. Aside from ranked LAN play at major tournaments, many Arena fights can be decided on who can manage their UI better as well.
 
Oh, for those that are interested in Roleplay... "http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/forum/" is a good start. Beseid is the primary unofficial RP server, and Lindblum is the overflow.

Still looking for a pair of goggles!
 
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