Almost forgot about my experience with Final Fantasy XIV – maybe that was just wishful thinking.

MASSIVE disappointment from such a franchise as Final Fantasy.   The game was advertised as “designed for the casual player”.  It became apparently that meant “We want to charge as much as other games, but don’t want the player load to ding our profits”.

The downsides:

1)  Work on a skill for more than 1 hours and you start getting penalized.  Work on it for more than 8 hours and the penalty is 100%.

2)  Broken marketplace – each major town as a room were people collect to sell things.  No broker system.  You need to click on each person (and there were often over 100) to see what they were selling.  Perhaps realistic, but in reality, people would make up signs to give you a clue what they sold.  So, if your looking for, say, knife handles – you might need to click on 35+ people to find one, and then since its your first, you have no idea if they are selling at a competitive price.  Hell, they probably don’t know either.

3) Excessively realistic crafting system.  Want to learn fishing?  You need a fishing pole.  Want to build it?  No problem, its a low level skill.  Big problem: it uses high level skill parts.  The pole might be level 1, but the line eyelets are level 12, and the reel is level 26.  Somehow, if you want to make everything yourself, you need to level up at least a half dozen skills, all which have skill dependency’s on other skills.

It was SO bad, that about a month after it released, the president of the company wrote all registered players a formal apology and informed us our subscriptions would be extended indefinitely until the game became playable.  Apparently they also fired the somewhat junior development time and replaced it with their top-tier development team.  Got to give them credit for that, but I’ve never been back to see if it made a difference.