The only reason why I switched to FFXIV is because wow doesnt feel respectful towards my time

Argent Dawn
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I really REALLY loved world of warcraft for as long as I played. I think graphically it looks really charming in it’s own way, I love the world the action takes place in, and I enjoy the diversity of classes. It feels like it’s an mmo that aged much better than final fantasy. But I switched to FFXIV for just one reason. I don’t feel like wow respects the time of the player.

FFXIV looks graphically worse than WoW (imo). I feel like realistic graphics age like milk. WoW’s design can stay fresh through colours and artistic direction, however Final Fantasy, as the years go by, looks less and less interesting graphic-wise. The world also feels rather dull.

I dont enjoy the combat as much as I did in wow, nor do I really like the way all the skills are super flashy. The world itself (not just graphically) doesn’t seem as appealing to me. It also feels much less beliavable. Sure in WoW you are battling gods in a fantasy land, but in final fantasy you are attacking tanks and robots with knives. I can see how the Jailer could be wounded by a mace, I find it very stupid how robot could be wounded by some dagger. The mix-up between sci-fi and fantasy is a huge turn off for me.

I also dont like how everything is story locked and i cant just do my farming in peace.

However final fantasy, despite, for me personally being an overall worse game, I choose it because it feels respectful towards my time. It feels like if i want something, I can work towards it and feel myself getting closer to it, as opposed to wow in which absolutely everything feels like a gamble.

If i want a mount in final fantasy, the drop chance is around 5%. I can redo old instances as many times as I want, and even if by some miracle I don’t drop the mount, after every boss fight i get a totem, and once I have enough totems i can trade them in for the mount. In WoW i just have to try, and try again, with no guarantee that i’ll ever get it. And I understand that this is in order to keep the players playing, but seriously, i’m playing plenty of FFXIV, and im nowhere close to getting everything. Theres enough content in the game so that drop rates dont have to artificially make me stuck into a raid for years on end.

In WoW if i want another class I have to start a new character completely from scartch. In final fantasy I can just swtich my weapon and boom. Im another class. Sure it starts from level 1 but it doesn’t feel like im throwing away my other class. This made me play so much more classes in final fantasy. The fact that I could gear up my warrior with my overleveled ninja made me actually want to play the warrior. And the fact that i could just swithc up my weapon back to whatever class I know I like, made me want to try the classes that I wasn’t so sure of. It feels like I commit to the game, not to just one character.

Raids. In wow you’re lucky if you can finish the latest raid in 6 hours. And the first 4 hours you just deal with thrash that you already have equipment for. You know what’s nice in Final Fantasy? One raid has 12 instances. Each instance has it’s own boss. That you can choose to fight in order to strive for the loot you need. And you still have a lot of content to do, enough that a normal person could get their fill in for the day and feel like they actually accomplished something in their game. In WoW if you dont throw away your social life or responsabilities you can’t really raid. And sure, some players are willing to do that.

But is it really healthy to encourage this sort of behaviour?

Rare mobs. Wow promotes so much hyper-individualism with their rare mobs. You find some rare mob that you can one shot and it gets you your mount. People are constantly competing against each other and spend hours camping it. In final fantasy, every “rare” mob that gets your mounts needs tens or hundredes of players to defeat. This way the community engages together, and when a rare is spotted, everyone gets to fight it. And you don’t drop the mount instantly. You drop a “mount piece” amd after you have ~5 pieces you can get the mount. You can still artificially inflate the time players put towards a certain achievement without being toxic about it and promoting a toxic game-life balance. And also creating a community.

I don’t like anything much about final fantasy, and I preffer WoW in literally every aspect. But the completely oppossing foundation that the games build up from made me choose final fantasy. Final fantasy feels respectful of me, the player, and of my time. WoW feels like a toxic gamble. You just don’t gamble money, you gamble your time. Do you want Invincible Reins? Prepare to spend over an hour each week for the next years doing IceCrown, getting through all the bosses you dont need, walking your character to the crown (which actually does feel a bit immersive, not gonna lie, i like the idea of having to go where the raid is actually happening), and prepare to either not get it for years or get it in 2 weeks.

In final fantasy, if you want something, you can also try your RNG, as many times as you want, and if youre still unlucky the developers say “hey buddy, that’s alright. you’ve spent a good while farming this. heres the totems you needed to get your silly mount, and go enjoy some other parts of the game”. It feels healthy. It feels respectful. And most importantly it doesn’t let me get to a point in which I dread doing a certain instance just because i want that mount.

And even with this mindset there’s still plenty of things to do in the game. I can still enjoy myself, and I still have content to play through without having a toxic relationship with the game.

In my case, being a collector in wow felt like a sadic routine job. There we go again boys, it is wendesday, time to run IceCrown, Kael’thas, Garrossh etc. on every character hoping i can finally cross one of them off my list.

Point is, that I feel like if wow adapted the game so that it doesn’t only cater to people who are willing to dedicate all of their free time towards the game in order to achieve something, it would be much more enjoyable. What if you could do the raids with level sync on, and have the mount drop at 100% rate. People would gather to raid IceCrown often. Old content would re-become relevant, and actually fun to play.

What if instead of making rare mobs that drop some mount with 1% chance, that you can solo, you’d make them tougher, and with a better rate, so people can actually work together towards that. Just because someone is willing to hunt TLPD for days on end and not move from the computer, it doesn’t mean that we should design games that go into that direction.

What if i didn’t have to re-beat the same old raid boss that i dont need anything from, just to get a bit further. What if i didn’t have to say goodbye to my social events just to make some progress in a raid. What if the developers of blizzard coded a game so that it’s “ethical” not just so that it lures players in and form an unhealthy addiction.

That is why I choose final fantasy. I like mmos, and I wanna play them. And honestly wow and ffxiv are the biggest and best ones. So even if WoW is much more attarctive to me, the simple fact that I feel like the devs of final fantasy make a game that is meant to be played and enjoyedm, a game in which if you put a reasonable amount of time you’re sure to get what you want, while the the devs of wow simply try to see how much most people are willing to gamble their time on before quitting, and then making a game exactly at that limit, is what made me choose ffxiv.

I feel like wow promotes a toxic balance when it comes to the playerbase’s time in game vs time outside the game, and just because there’s people who are willing to give into that, doesn’t make it, in my opinion, and ethical, or respectful thing to do.

I want to get back to WoW so badly, but everytime it really itches me, I remember how I couldn’t go to the gym because I just “had to” try one more time to get that mount. How I had to say no to my friends on friday night because that was one of the 4 times I had to be online with my guild to raid. How I just ended up neglecting my life in order to make progress in the game, and how I gambled hundreds of hours of my time just to have nothing to show for it.

I’ve been taking french classes. Currently I did around 120 hours. I can speak some french and could really do well in a conversation. And ive spent less time on it than I did in IceCrown.

What are your opinions about making the game more “time friendly” ?

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Sir this is a Wendy’s

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:man_bald::gun: :arrow_right: :skull_and_crossbones: :coffin: (i have to write minimum 10 characters so here they are)

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the argent dawn forums thank you for your contribution

bye

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wow bad

ffxiv good

edit: thank you for the gold stranger!

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time friendly
has to play 100 hours on the promise of “it gets good bro i swear”
takes 200+ more to get near endgame.
endgame feels more repetitive than wows with minimal overworld content.
ive 7k hours in the game and i cant agree. the bait is low tier. thank you come again.

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:dotted_line_face:

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The last time I pointed out the stupidity of these posts (them making a new topic and just leaving Argent Dawn as the category instead of something sensible) netted me a 3-day vacation.

So in the spirit of Blizzard’s moderation team, god speed with your endeavors OP. I’m sure this specific realm’s community is your target audience, even if you have never played here, instead of one the other dozen appropriate categories/forums.

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I still don’t understand how it happens so frequently. Like I know we show up as the top spot in the category tab if you make a new post right from the forum homepage.

But even then, you specifically have to click the very obviously said “CATEGORY” listing, so you physically can’t do it by mistake(it wont let you post without a category, it wont assign one for you), you have to specifically select the category tab, then specifically select AD.

Surely that is easy to see right? Surely people care enough especially if they write a 20+ paragraph text and not just a random two sentences thread.

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It’s the most popular spot in the category tab and it’s a board of the forum that people who are not currently subbed can post in.
So it’s just an outlet unsubbed people use for their frustrations, similar to shouting at the TV in the privacy of your own home. It’s a healthy way of venting your anger into the void with no consequence.
Except it’s actually more like shouting at the TV in someone else’s home, because Argent Dawn is the most popular spot for a reason. This server is pretty much the only one with an active community on its official forum, and other people don’t realise and/or don’t care that they’re disrupting it when they come in to shout their grievances at the void.
In the end though, it’s not a big deal.

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If FFXIV is so good then where’s the proper monster race, huh?

No, Hrothgar do not count. They have hands and feet, and I demand claws.

(Au Ra do kind of come close though.)

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Pardon me, adventurer?

First of all, I believe you have gotten lost in the forum topics? General Discussion might be the more appropriate section for this topic?

Secondly, “Doesn’t feel respectful towards my time”. It has been quite some time since I traversed the realm of Eorzea, but I do recall back then that you were forced to play through all expansions, unless you pulled out your MasterCard. In fact, most of the time saving things are mostly supported by the function of an online payment.

Third, “Ethical coding”? If you have an issue with addiction, that is not something coding in a game can help you process. You need to seek out professional help for that.

Last, but not least, FFXIV sadly suffers from the same issues as World of Warcraft, the existence of toxic members - except, that in FFXIV you are also going to experience toxic positivity.

My final notion is though, we do not need a farewell message if you wish to venture out on a different path. Explorers some times finds a route more suited them than others. You give your farewells and waves, and set forth. As the Goblins always say, this is not charter zeppelin, we do not need to announce our departure

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I’d say they have claws? But I’m also not a hrothgar player on ffxiv.

I just wish they were more like the concept art :frowning: I want my au ra to be SPIKEY

Imgur

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consider instead the folly of grinding 20 years worth of content

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all this work to write an essay that will only be seen by the popularity of argent dawn, that can’t change anything at all

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FF14 lacks Murlocs.

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I don’t think that’s the case at all. In fact, I devoted years to FFXIV but recently returned as the game went in completely different direction to what it started out as. Shifting the tone, aesthetics and content offerings quite substantially and arguably not for the better, either.

Time management is largely a personal responsibility, at any rate - though I daresay that WoW itself has recently become a lot better at allowing players to ‘catch up’ and not full behind.

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This is really funny given you posted this on AD forum, since from what I´ve experienced (both by myself and by talking to others), having everything centered on only one character is absolute pain for RP because of what it means for alts: Absolutely no care given for catch-up.
In WoW, you can level 1-70 in under 15 hours (and I´m being generous here, if you catch timewalking week, you could easily do it in 10) and for RP, you only need to get to 60 which takes around 6 hours. In FF14, levelling an alt character takes insane amount of time.

And, ironically, the focus on one character at least for me killed the interest in collecting things. What´s the point of trying to get some mount when I´ve already gotten one that perfectly fits my character? What´s the point of getting glamours when I already got the look I love?

If anything, FF14 (after finishing the main story) feels like a game that´s not interested in your time. If WoW´s idea of world content would be 3 reputations, each of which takes 5 minutes a day for a week or two to finish (and 2 are gated behind pretty much separate gathering and crafting games), with main casual content feature being its own separate singleplayer minigame, people would probably riot. And, judging by what I´ve seen online, FF14 players are not quite happy with how the expansion has turned out either.

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MMOs, by design, suck up your time because it’s designed with the assumption of you paying for every second of active play.

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I despise the FFXIV system of having all jobs on one character. It is truly one of the worst features for me.

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