[xCry0x]

FFXIV in the late beta up until launch was such a horrible experience they would have gone beyond free to play and actually paid me to install it and give it a go on launch.

The perspective that FFXIV had anything 'good' about it is amazing.. you are entitled to your own opinion but when a game was such a catastrophic flop that the company comes out and publicly apologizes it speaks to the extent of you being in the minority. (given I never played it in launch)

Maybe the mechanics of the game were misunderstood but when I played the crafting system seemed to have a giant degree of randomness to when your combines would go critical and explode. The crafting system was huge in FFXI and intricate to the point of the moon cycle etc... I spent a good amount of time doing wood working in FFXIV, spinning in circles, timing the hour of the day, talking to the more advanced japanese crafters.. all the feedback was that it was random and you just had to sit and suffer.

Then you get into the class system... some people like it but I hate games with no real defined holy trinity system. I enjoy playing the healer for one game, the tank for the next, dps for the next etc. I rolled some sort of mage in the FFXIV beta and it felt underwhelming getting into the 20s (iirc) and basically just nuke heal nuke heal etc etc etc. I liked the EQ-ism of FFXI forcing you to group at level 3 and I liked the whole class system where you could mix and match jobs to be a healer/mage if you leveled up black mage/white mage or whatever but then you were subject to the short comings of making yourself a 'hybrid'.