What Final Fantasy XIV could Learn from Final Fantasy XI
FFXIV will launch on Aug 27th in 2013. I was a FFXI fan before and now I hope the FFXIV ARR will not disappoint me because I have already saved a lot of money to buy ffxiv gil.
Final Fantasy XIV was designed to fix some problems from Final Fantasy XI that it never was going to have, but that's not what I'm talking about. Instead of talking about preventing players from leveling consistently or hunting the possibility of RMT with McCarthy-level vigilance, let's look at some simple lessons to internalize in the future.
FFXI currently has 22 classes available. You can make arguments about Dancers technically working in the role, but you can also make arguments that Rune Fencers fail to actually tank effectively, so it's belaboring the point. Even in a game with more than three roles, the distribution is horribly skewed.
For some people, fun is running around with a huge group of other people, and that's fine. I am not one of those people, and that's also fine. FFXI had a broad enough endgame that you could go to Dynamis or not without lacking for things to do. It lacked much to do if you weren't interested in group content, but that's a different discussion altogether.
Veteran players aren't actively discouraged from helping newer players at an appropriate level. But as I've mentioned before, even once that feature hit FFXI, the low-level areas were not awash with activity. Nobody wanted to go back to the Dunes if it could possibly be avoided because why would you subject your high-level character to countless wipes when you weren't even getting anything out of it?
I hope FFXIV ARR will be much more better than FFXI. But Those Chinese powerleveling will be very happy since they will be able to make money again by doing ffxiv power leveling after this new version has come out. Good luck to players and all people who love this game.