15 dollars for raiding , dungeons and rated pvp including stuff like trials , duties, levies and more which all exist in ff14 as well.
Because hardcore players will always exist even in FF14, candy crush e.t.c , they don’t quit even if you throw garbage at their faces. They provide no financial pressure to any company as their sub is always guaranteed.
Blizzard has been doing this as well just not towards casuals but how to increase the time played metric . 
It starts out slow and it has a longer gcd. The animations are more flashy. Overall I’m not finding it too much different than WoW so far. I’m around level 55 and just reached the first xpac. There are off-gcd abilities that make it feel a bit faster than the 2.5 sec gcd. There seems to be enough abilities to fill 2-3 bars.
If you give it a shot, it’s best to give it quite a while to do the main story questline and to reach the level cap to see what end game is like. The combat starts out slow - don’t judge the pace of combat based on earlier levels because it does get faster.
The main story questline seems like it’s at least well over a hundred hours long (I haven’t reached the end), so it’ll take a while to get through it. It’s a single player questline that sometimes asks you to use the dungeon finder.
Definitely give it some time before making a decision on how much you enjoy it.
Your complaints pretty much boil down to them gutting loot in SL.
As someone who played both…they are both different experiences.
Both have rich stories but differ in how they deliver it.
ESO: Random npcs start you on excellent quests that feel wholesome. One questline had me go through a creepy hedge maze/find a mansion that sent you through time via a mysterious spirit, shenanigans happened, you jumped time a ton, you find the npc who started the quest dead(future version), kill an npc from the past in the future? Then your sent back to the past to deliver research notes from future dead npc to past alive npc…yeah it was mind boggling.
FFXIV: Delivers a rich story campaign from the very base game to latest expansion - plenty of cutscenes voiced, to enrich the RPG feel that you matter and to give feel for your allies and danger.
Their open world is also truly amazing. Raids and dungeons are amazing(FFXIV has better dungeons thought and raids too).
It’s no Hello Kitty Adventure Island
Probably one of my biggest complaints about 14 is what most view as it’s best feature: all jobs one character.
Personally, I dislike this. As someone who doesn’t specifically role-play, I do still like to have a “feel” for each class I play. I lose that for the most part in 14.
I like hopping onto alts because it feels different. Often you’re a different race or sex, or even faction. It makes each class feel like it’s own character with it’s own story and experience.
For example perhaps I want to be an Orc Shaman…but I don’t necessarily want to be an Orc rogue. Maybe I want to be a Goblin rogue. That’s not happening in 14. Maybe you want to be a Hrothgar Warrior, and then a Lalafel black mage. Well…you can either roll another character (counter-intuitive and impractical) or pay for a Fantasia every time. Also impractical.
Then there’s the inventory and lockout issue. Alts in WoW IMO are better than alt-jobs in 14 because you can diversify without much hassle except for time. It’s simply impractical to have one character for every job in 14.
I myself have two characters in order to split inventory space and lockouts. It was a pain in the back end to get this done, and I don’t really like still being unable to send mail from one character to another.
But then again 14 does make a KILLING on Fantasias, so they were smart.
There is nothing else to do but push content for gear.
They aren’t really. If you put any modicum of effort into making money and don’t spend it on random BS that you don’t actually need making money is quite easy. The problem with FFXIV’s housing system is not price… at least not unless you buy a plot from players. The problem as you pointed out is as you said…
They’ve increased the number of plots and next xpac they are adding whole new housing district, but on high population servers it likely won’t be enough.
Shadowbringers is so much better than ARR. It might be worth trying it just for the story. Good news is you can play through the end of Heavensward for free.
Imagine having midget humanoid foxes, humanoid pandas, humanoid cows/moose, humanoid dogs
How weeb does this look?
FINAL FANTASY XIV: Heavensward Trailer - YouTube
Or this?
FFXIV: Heavensward - Final Nidhogg Cutscenes (SPOILERS) - YouTube
Maybe this?
FINAL FANTASY XIV: SHADOWBRINGERS Full Trailer - YouTube
Really? The what are the wow dungeons but the same thing over and over? Also pretty sure this is a subjective opinion.
Easy if you only do the ‘hard’ mode for max level players. There are actual hard version of the raids.
The Aetheryte Network is a transport network yes. You can literally teleport to each zone specifically once you touch the aetheryte in each zone, and then cities have aertheryte shards that allow you to teleport to different areas of the city specifically.
Limsa Lominsa
They did recently make the low lvl experience more streamlined, but it’s still a slog. Just slightly less of a slog. If you can make it into Heavensward though, it’s worth the effort.
I mean, Until Shadowbringers they released 2 - 3 dungeons per patch and had 5 patches per xpac, as well as 6 leveling dungeons and 2 max lvl dungeons in the xpac drop. In Shadowbringers they still had the 6 leveling dungeons and 2 max lvl dungeons in the xpac drop but cut back to 1 dungeon per patch. So that’s still 13 dungeons per xpac.
As for trial, 8 man raids, they have 3 per xpac drop plus the extreme mods for all three of them. Then a new trial every patch + the extreme modes. In the .0, .2, and .4 patches they have a set of story trials which add 4, 8 man raids per each so that’s, 20 8 man raids per xpac.
Then they add three 24 man raids per xpac on the .1, .3, and .5 patches.
And then they adds a lot of other content including housing updates, combat balancing, more mounts, more emotes, more things to the Gold Saucer (Dark Moon Faire for you wow types, only it’s open at all times). They have art contests and the winners get their items added into the game. And yes, we have actual gear sets designed by players that are in the game. Or at least their concept art was used as the basis for the armor and other things.
The reason that they decided to skip the 2nd ShB Ultimate was because the whole covid thing pushed their time frame for things back and thus they didn’t really have time to finish the 2nd Ultimate.
People keep saying this and it’s like… do you even do the extreme and savage content?
I mean, this is a debatable point on that, but I meant the collection system not by products of it. Only having to collect appearances once and having them forever is superior to only being able to collect 400 item appearances across all gear slots.
I will also point out something. For those of you would don’t like how large the gap in ilvl is between “casuals” and mythic raiders in wow, the difference between the best gear in FFXIV and the gear everyone else is 10 ilvls. And it’s always 10 ilvls.
Point being, compare that to say, ESO, where there’s no limit on plots at all. Same with many other games that have player housing. The only restriction is the cost of the house itself, and yeah high-pop servers, you have no chance of getting anything other than an apartment. I used to play on Balmung, so, no housing there, and I guarantee you if I logged on to buy a house in Ishgarde once they became available I wouldn’t get one.
Yeah we agree. There is a serve lack of housing on high population servers in FFXIV. This is an issue that the FFXIV devs have acknowledged.
Yes and I’d say it’s on par with some heroic content in WoW which is leaving out an entire level of difficulty and then all of M+ comparatively.
Speaking of raiding in FFXIV, who came up with the stupid static model for raiding??
I mean, I suppose. Ultimates are supposedly as hard as Mythic raids, but they only make 2 of those per expansion it seems.
M+ isn’t all that great tbh. “Race the clock” isn’t exactly something super innovative 3 xpacs later.
Who came up with the guild model of raiding in WoW? It’s basically the same thing. The same group of people raiding week to week. It’s just a different name. I would assume the “Static” name came about because it’s a static group of people.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion, but it is not one that I and thousands of others share.
I think its more about layers of increased difficulty for increased reward. Leaps and bounds above single difficulty that has zero replayability outside of token farm in my opinion.
The guild model has been around well before wow and is pretty much the standard in MMOs. FFXIV is the outlier here and I personally don’t like it. Finding and applying to guilds is much easier than finding random group of players.
I like 14, but not for endgame or power progression. It’s fun for the single player campaign experience, world immersion, and glams.
I agree that Mythic Plus gives mid-level players something do that helps them feel like they are continuing power progression - meanwhile in 14, none of the raids, alliance raids, dungeons, or trials are meaningful outside of roulettes for capping weekly tomes.
Savage isn’t that hard, but it still requires forming a group of 8 individuals and having them all memorize single-boss arena fights. Meanwhile, in WoW, M+ allows you to quickly assemble a group of 5 players to tackle small but increasingly difficult at-your-own-pace challenges that rotate in play every week thanks to affixes.
With content being irrelevant (above) and then just…Savage…there really is a huge gap in things to do for your average player.
I can’t for the life of me understand how anyone can say with a straight face that 14 has more end-game content, or more meaningful end-game content.
Specifically dungeons, they are completely and utterly irrelevant. And that’s a problem.
Nothing at all.
I’m subbed to XIV and buying tokens with gold in WoW so, for now, I play both.
The only thing I enjoyed was skilling, but it doesn’t even make money so it’s pointless.
The scaled content sucks because your class gets gimped, not just scaled down.
The PvE was all a joke difficulty wise.
Zero PvP.
No addons.
Requires you to install out of the way programs to have a DPS meter and decent graphics.
The MSQ which you must complete takes months to do even skipping all the cut scenes.
Leveling alt classes sucks.
The class balance is horrible. A trash class will always be trash because of a low skill ceiling.
A bunch of the older content is considered dead content and you rarely will get queues to pop for it.
Outside of one shotting the raids on my first go around, the most fun I had was sitting in town playing music with a friend. As you can guess, it got boring really fast.
If you only play for like an hour a day maybe. I mean, yes it’s long but it’s not months long.
There is PvP it’s just a small community of players that do it. There is no world pvp though and you can only duel in 1 specific area of the world.
Uh what? No, the classes aren’t ‘balanced’ in they are trying to make every class do the same dps. Class balance is determined by group utility. The more group utility you bring the less dps you personally do. Black Mages and Samurai have basically no group utility so they do the most DPS. Bard and Dancer have a lot of group utility, so they do some of the least amount of dps.
The devs don’t want players to have dps meters or other addons. That’s not a bad thing. Personally I would love some non-combat related addons, but I don’t foresee it happening.
Yes, when you queue for a random leveling dungeon, you get scaled down to the level of the dungeon and only skills you have available at the level of the dungeon are available. It’s kinda dumb, as it means you can’t practice your rotation because your rotation at max level and level 20 and level 50 are all vastly different for most classes.
Lvl 1 to 80 MSQ and the after quests to unlock the dungeons and raids takes FOREVER. I used a skip(lvl 70) and neck bearded hard and had a macro to spam skip cut scenes and it still took me a week lmao. It’s ridiculously long. This doesn’t even begin to bring the side quests you need to do to unlock the other content in the game like flying and the palace of the dead and Heaven on High. As well as the place where you can infinite farm mining etc. All the quest chains take a decade I swear.
From 70 - 80 when ShB dropped, watching all the cutscenes and doing all the side quests and reading all the quest text took me 3 days.
Edit: I’m not saying it’s not long. I’m just saying you’d have to take your sweet, sweet time to take months to go from lvl 1 in ARR to the end of ShB.
Literally doubt, unless you had flying day one. I want to see video evidence of that even being possible.
It literally says the quest line is roughly 60 hours and that’s not counting the attunement quests after hitting 80. It’s easily 80 hours, but you did it in 3 days? Seems weird to me.