Final Fantasy XIV: No You Can't.

Since nearly the entire Moogle Army was headed to Eorzea I figured I should too with Final Fantasy 14 being released within a month or two. The benchmark finally came out a couple weeks ago, so I got downloaded it, crossed my fingers and hoped. While my computer could probably run ff14, the settings would have to be at minimum as a maximum. I'm not interested in playing a fancy new game if the graphics aren't going to be much better than ffxi. So, I'll just buy the PS3 version when it gets released. This also means I'll have to buy a PS3. That's not too big a deal, what with my wife completely uninterested in the system. She'll probably just complete her stranglehold on the xbox. I didn't play it anymore, anyway.....


With that news, I've decided to head back to ffxi until I get 14. SE, realizing that the game doesn't have much time left, has decided to life nearly all the level caps from Chains of Promathia areas. Sounds awesome, but it's still impossible to get people together to do missions. Fuck them, I won't be here much longer anyway. Visions of Abyssea, on the other hand, is how SE should've been doing most endgame-level events the whole time. Quick trip through yet another Cavernous Maw, join an alliance of people and start killing. There aren't any xp chains, but the amount of xp you get slowly builds as long as you kill the same type of mob. I wish I had a screen shot of the time I was getting 600xp per mandragora. That makes it possible to go from 75 to 80 in about 4 hours. I went from 77 to 80 and maxed merits out. After I got back to my mog house and spent those merits, I went back the next day for a couple hours and maxed them back out. Then I noticed I stopped Beastmaster at 46. With the level caps gone, I could go get a gaudy harness and get back to it. Getting the subligar didn't take long, and the harness looks just as fruity as I remember. I've decided to run with that, so I went back and got another subligar. I hit level 50, so it's sexytime:

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig.

After I quit FFXI, I decided to give World of Warcraft a second chance. “I like playing MMORPGs, and this is the biggest ever. They’ve got to be doing something right. Surely this will tide me over until FFXIV comes out,” I thought. As is a popular theme of this blog, I was so very, very wrong. Most of the “people” I encountered reminded my why I quit playing WoW the first time I gave it a shot: They are fucking retarded. Day after endless day of encountering lowbrows, no-brows and ignorammi, ceaseless unfunny quotes. Granted, you can put people on an ignore list pretty quickly. The problem arises when it is every. Single. Person. Doing this.

Over.

And over.

And over.

And over. Alliance or Horde, it was everywhere and all the fucking time. It doesn’t take very long to just get tired of having a chat window when everywhere you go looks like the old /sh fights in Lower Jeuno a few years back. Except it’s about mudkip instead of “Sephiroth/Kefka/Anime Character is the greatest villain of all time! Of all time!!”

I have found that Warcraft does have a few good qualities:

It is so stupidly easy any idiot could do well.

You don’t buy maps.

Hunters get permanent pets. FFXIV should let whatever they call BSTs do that.

Spiders look like spiders. (In 2 models! Woo!)

Very easy to make money.


Of course, there’s always bad to go with any good:

It is so stupidly easy any idiot could do well.

Graphics. I know FFXI is not a very pretty game, but good god damn. Even on the highest settings, World of Warcraft looks like somebody puked neon paint all over an early ps2 game. Seriously.

The player vs. player gets old after about 3 “Battlefields”.

Grinding. What was supposed to be a complete opposite of FFXI’s sit in town lfg/logoff after 4 hrs is instead just as boring. Cleverly disguised as Quests, they slightly change the dialogue on the same 4. “Gather me X of Y and return, oh noble dwarf.” “Kill me X of those nefarious ‘whatever the mobs is in this region’, brave hunter.” “Slay X of slightly different colored Y’s, and bring me the Z’s they have stolen from us! Your honor demands it!” “Use this flaky, white rock to scrawl expletives upon yonder mountainside so that when the orcs look upon it, they will become aware that they suck!” I’m sure there are more. It did not lessen the monotony as much as I thought it would. Oh, but you make money doing them, and you can get awesome items!! You want some dumbass tabard that has a poorly drawn dragon head on it? Get ready to do the same quests I just described with slightly altered dialogue every day for a couple weeks until you can get it. Want to ride a wolf instead of a horse? Better be near one of the levels ending in zero if you want to have a good time on the pvp battlefield.

Endgame. Just as bad as FFXI’s if not worse. Since so many more people play, endgame guilds are pickier about who they allow into their little groups. Most of them will not help you level your character; they’re only interested in making you pay money to redo all your talents to accommodate group play. Mine were all wrong for that, since I’d only been playing solo to the cap of 80. I then had the schedule of events explained to me using as many acronyms as fucking possible. Guess what? Acronyms don’t do me any fucking good if I don’t fucking know what they stand for. Of course my gear is crappy; I played solo the whole way. Anything on the Auction House is obsolete in about 5 levels, so I didn’t spend much time there. “So I only need to do a few runs through this dungeon to get what I need? Can you guys help with that?” Of course they couldn’t. So I’m supposed to join a different guild to get the gear I need to join the guild I first made the mistake of expressing interest in, after they asked me if I’d like to join. Reminds me of that dynamis shell that wouldn’t let me join unless I had Xarcabard access, but wouldn’t help me clear Jeuno and Glacier. Of course, I had those two cleared when I was in that one linkshell with Mogwae. Too bad he’s moved to Pandemonium.

I logged off WoW that night and cancelled my account. A couple days later, POL was updating itself and I was back on FFXI. I’d seen a little bit about the add-ons SE released, and decided to get the first two. If they were good I’d get the last one. As anyone (if anyone) who reads this knows, warrior is the only job I’ve gotten to 75. Naturally, it means that the final battle of A Crystalline Prophecy is a massive pain in the ass. Summoners, Rangers and Samurai Rangers can apparently clear the battle with few problems, if any. Guess what? My friend list has maybe 2 people still active on it, and I don’t think Bass has Ranger or Summoner at 75. So I have to /shout for help and hope I can get people that know what they’re doing even if they aren’t the “proper” jobs. 0/5 on that last BCNM so far. For 10 bucks, why not just let us download the stupid armor itself? The add-on’s story is stupid and contradicts several things you learn about earlier in the game. I haven’t even started on A Moogle Kupo d’etat. So far, it looks like I wasted 20 bucks and a few hours. Could be worse, I wasted a couple months and 110 bucks on WoW. About a week after I returned to FFXI, I got an Askar Zucchetto in a random Nyzul Isle group. No more fugly turban for me. Here's a nice pic of that:



Now, let's all count the days until FFXIV comes out.