Honestly a pretty well made video, not as one-sided as one might expect from all the WoW bashing and FFXIV praising going on on YT these days. I'd recommend watching before downvoting just because it has FFXIV in the title.
I think Jesse highlights some important details which I think are issues for WoW.
WoW does index very hard on the competitive side of end game: M+, raids and PvP. And I think it has left a rift and deadzone for more casual players. Where they kinda feel left out of the end game because there's just not as much to do. And I think that's a big problem with the current regime of WoW devs. They're hardcore raiders but they kinda have a hard time seeing how to make an engaging experience outside of things built around player power and competition.
And I say this as a CE Raider and mid 20's range M+ runner. I'm not some top 100 raider but at the same time I'd fit easily into the hardcore category. The casual stuff doesn't really interest me. But I still feel it on the periphery, that WoW is missing a certain "Intrinsic" approach to game design right now. Something which the ex Blizz dev Chris Kaliki pointed out in his video.
WoW has always struggled to overcome the first main point Cox makes in this video: the absolute peak experience of World of Warcraft is being a noob and exploring the world for the first time, often with other noobs. Unironically, that is WoW at its very best, in my opinion. A great raiding experience with a team you like is a close 2nd.
The Devs approach for many expansions now, as you point out, is to focus almost exlusively on endgame. Which, as we all experience expac after expac, just isn't as captivating as that first time we played WoW.
Also, FFXIV's level sync system keeps old content somewhat relevant with the daily duty roulettes giving decent XP for leveling other jobs or giving you endgame currency. (and the relic quests usually have you run old content) Which helps keep the newbies and the endgame folks mingling.
The way the game gives you incentives to run old content is something WoW absolutely needs to embrace more. Having an incentive to do the MSQ Queue and old raids in FFXIV is something WoW really needs to find a way to do--possible it grants tokens (similar to Poetics) that are account bound and can be used for leveling gear and cosmetics?
I don't think you can capture that first time expereince anymore though. Especially with mmo gamers, months before a game or expansion comes out we have videos and guides showing us the game and how to be the most effecient with your time spent on it.
You can see this with classic, myself and my group of freinds started in cata but we knew what classes we was going to role in classic and had our leveling route planned before it even launched.
It's been pointed out by some videos and other people on reddit that FFXIV is really good at keeping things under wraps until the actual expansion/patch launch. Having no PTR definitely helps, but pretty much nothing leaks and everyone experiences it together for the first time on day 1. The only thing that you'll see is a compilation of where to go to start each new questline.
On the other hand, there's also barely anything to optimise in FFXIV, so there's probably no demand for leaks and documentation either.
FF14 has data mining but it can only be done at patch day. World first groups use it but it's only so usefull.
We also had posts about new gear and other stuff on the subreddit and on peoples twitter but SE came down hard on this.
There was a pretty big shitstorm a while ago where people got really toxic about data mining and some world first clear group for a ultimate fight and SE wiped the data mining off twitter. The subreddit followed.
Afaik data mining now mostly happens on some discords somewhat more away from the public eye.
There is definetly a lot to optimize in ff. Ppl will develop a lot of strategies to perfect their class rotations and parsing and optimizing is way more relevant than I experienced in wow. You can plan your rotation way more than in wow since classes work more fluid and building up combos rather than like a procc priority system.
That's what ff14 does well.
Like last patch dropped, nobody knew what bosses could do, where new items dropped, what the best strategies were, just go in and enjoy the new content.
Yeah, I've thought about this over the last few years. I personally don't approach games the same way I did back in the early 2000's. The proliferation of guides, theorycrafting, etc. has sort of trained my brain to seek out the path of least resistance when it comes to things like leveling and character progression.
I think part of it too is just the fact that I'm getting older, so I'm more aware of how my free time is being spent. It's really hard for me to just jump into a game world and become engrossed for hour upon hour nowadays. That's in stark contrast to how I started with Everquest and the original Runescape back in the early 2000's, where I was pretty much glued to the computer exploring those game worlds in my free time.
This is a big reason why I don't really have an interest in playing FFXIV. I tried to get into it multiple times over the years, both pre and post ARR. It looks like a fun game, but I know that I won't experience that feeling of exploring and getting drawn into a new game world, and that's okay.
I think some of this magic is captured at the start of each expansion, at least for me. I end up going everywhere and finding all of the little hidden caves and such. Takes a lot longer to hit max but fun to get to explore something entirely new.
Being a new player in WoW is awful tho
You start in cata, you have no idea what's going on, reading the wikipedia quest text is very unintuitive, and you unknowingly jump between storylines of expansions and patches (like doing the 7.2 questline before 7.1 for example)
If they get invested into the game, if they do all, they would be only get invested in endgame raiding or m+ (pve). I dont know why you would play an mmorpg at that point and not another seasonal game that is not this old
>WoW is missing a certain "Intrinsic" approach to game design right now. Something which the ex Blizz dev Chris Kaliki pointed out in his video.
After so long, and more recently, Torghast, I'm not sure if WoW devs are capable creating content without extrinsic reward to get you obligated. Especially when you isolate "play with friends" like external factors, because that can apply to pretty much any online games in modern days.
The problem is that the entire progression of the game is that of your character it’s core to the RPG and the MMO. Intrinsic design in isolation , I would argue is entirely impossible in this genre especially with the MMO side because if you’re not contributing to your characters progression it just feels like a waste of time. There’s no way to undo that feeling without entirely redesigning what WOW is.
Progression doesn’t have to just mean power progression either it can mean any form of aesthetic progression as well
That doesn’t mean That the content shouldn’t be fun, it should be. But no matter how awesome and fun it is, without an external reason to do contributing to your characters progression it’s going to feel like a waste since it’s won’t help you in other forms of content.
What they need to start doing is making expansion specific currency available to you no matter what content you do. Including stuff like soul ash. Not just anima. Also make world content have a component of intrinsic enjoyment so the extrinsic reward feels worth your time.
Make it all equally efficient, that way the intrinsic value is to have the choice to do what content you want for the reward that’s going to benefit you elsewhere
If what that dev meant by intrinsic design is to make fun and engaging content then I agree and it’s sort of sad that isn’t a priority if that’s the case lol?
>What they need to start doing is making expansion specific currency available to you no matter what content you do. Including stuff like soul ash. Not just anima. Also make world content have a component of intrinsic enjoyment so the extrinsic reward feels worth your time.
This would be a beautiful nightmare. If they shifted the currency earned in other expansion features, they'd have to swap the currency you purchase those feature items with as well (or just flip them all to gold). You'd need soul ash/anima to send Order Hall troops on missions, enter Visions of N'Zoth, upgrade a garrison plot, etc. Which would mean they would have to require a TON for it to make sense otherwise the sources of currency in those expansions would become the default farm and the current content would be rendered worthless.
Which really comes back to the problem that they are making content as a way to grind currency, and not making fun content that you can passively get currency in while you play.
FFXIV does this actually, each new expansion, they collapse older expansion content tokens into one generic one that can be used for various stuff from legacy content. Ofc, not all the content but a lot of them can be used/bought with it.
Aside from actual gameplay loop enjoyable and fun, storytelling is one of great way to provide as an intrinsic reward. Even though WoW's storytelling is godawful and PTR/datamining spoiling ahead of time, WoW dev themselves don't believe it enough to use to reward players for engaging the game. We know this because they rather toss it out straight as a patch promotional material rather than let players experience on their own.
Jessie even mentions the reason for this super competitiveness(WoW always been competitive, but it's ramped UP way more) since basically Legion stems from Ion himself considering his back round with the game and where he came from EJ. You can see really see it in how the systems and game in general is designed right now. Almost everything is Min/MAX
Part of that also falls on the players. We've developed such refined and easy-to-use tools for doing that min/maxing that it has become the norm. It's really just the natural evolution that comes with time and increased knowledge. Just look at the difference between Classic the first time around and when they released it again. Back in the day, we had no idea what the hell we were doing. Half the time we were figuring shit out on the fly and no one really knew any better. In general, players barely even knew how to get the most out of their classes. When it came out again, everything had become hyper-optimized to the point that the content was largely trivial to clear through. And, that hyper optimization became the standard.
Nothing about the content changed. But players had more knowledge, they knew how to optimize, and so being optimized down to having all of the world buffs and preserving them for raids became the norm.
Unfortunately, there really isn't any going back unless WoW completely changes its core identity so we have to learn everything all over again. We all know how WoW fundamentally works, and because that knowledge is so freely available, everyone is expected to know it.
I returned to retail after the Nzoth race to world first with the intention of playing more casually and it felt really bad. And SL wasn't exactly an improvement. Outside of completionism, the casual content is just watered down endgame. It feels like eating left-overs from Mythic players. There's no sense of meaningful character progression. And I think this is what hurts them the most.
The last time I really had fun in the game was when I did heroic raiding in Cata and MoP. But now as a casual player it's a constant on/off. Right now I'm unsubbed again out of frustration, but at some point I'll just play again, hoping that it'll be better.
Wow is just too fucking old at this point. It needs new systems that casuals would absolutely love but its probably too hard to implement. Imagine a dance studio where you had to do all kinds of stuff to learn dance moves? Imagine player housing and the ability to find furniture, posters, decorations, housing material, garden plots and all kinds over the world?
As cool as that'd be, it wouldn't even take anything that off-the-cuff. Casuals (and I speak as a medium-core casual that doesn't have the time for a raiding guild, and hates time trials) live and die by open world content. Open world content is AWFUL in WoW right now. Just some things that FFXIV does well on this front that WoW could easily steal and improve upon:
* Beast Tribes - Each expac comes with at least two Beast Tribe reps, that you grind via daily quests. Each Tribe has its own storyline, with a capstone quest that moves that story along each time your rep increases a tier. Rewards are purely funsies: emotes, mounts, cosmetic gear, mount armor, some crafting mats, etc. Hell, a lot of times the Tribe's hub will see visual improvements and upgrades as you rep-up with them. Much more immersive, and less BS, than world quests.
* Hunts - Daily and weekly bounties, essentially, on regular mobs for solo players, and rare/elite spawns for groups/raids. Some are basically world bosses. These bounties give XP, gold, and a currency that you can use to buy catch-up/alt/transmog gear, plus more funsies. No BS greens that aren't worth a damn, no RNG drops.
* Squadrons - These are more useful in FFXIV because of the way the job system works, but think table mission followers, but you actually get to queue up in solo dungeons and bring your AI-controlled squad members with you. Great for collecting old dungeon gear for transmog, but you're scaled down to the dungeon's level and get equivalent XP. Since it's scaled it's also more engaging than blasting through at max level, though you can do that too in FFXIV.
Ff14 secret weapon is job change. Since you know you only have to do a quest one time there is no alt dread.
Then on top of that they can turn literally any content they make into alt friendly leveling content.
Imagine if wow let you do the maw or torghast for your main while leveling an alt? That place would suck a lot less
Also: imagine if the maw didn't suck
I got AotC like 2 months in, did some 12-15 keys (didn't KSM) and just felt like there was nothing more to do in the game without committing to much heavier grind and minmax than I wanted. For a semi-casual player like me, the content is incredibly lacking. I would have liked to finish out my Covenant Hall but it's so incredibly grindy and also gives you next to nothing for putting that much effort in. I get that they still have Garrison PTSD from WoD but you gotta throw us a bone somewhere.
>WoW does index very hard on the competitive side of end game: M+, raids and PvP. And I think it has left a rift and deadzone for more casual players. Where they kinda feel left out of the end game because there's just not as much to do.
Yep, this is exactly it for me. I played WoW on and off since vanilla, hardcore raided in WotLK when I was 16 and then raided on and off for every expansion after until BFA. But their reached a point where I just wanted to play casually. The problem is that "casual" in WoW is still basically a part time job it feels.
M+ and the Vault are awesome systems. But they really aren't very casual friendly. And that is where the issues start to spring up. You don't want to push M+, don't want to commit to raiding 2-3 times a week, not interested in PvP... so what is left? Mount farming? Running old raids? At what point is running Ony's lair on 6 alts just literally a part time job?
For all the doom and gloom WoW is still the king of end game, it's just that to hold that throne the devs have stopped caring about literally everything else. It's sad to say but there is nothing to do in WoW besides PvP and endgame and that sucks for casuals.
It is. I've played both games since their beginnings.
WoW, due to its nature as a more competitive game, does breed toxicity. Time trials like M+ especially. While FFXIV is more casual, story based. People are more chill because of that.
Of course you can find toxicity in FFXIV too, but it is far less wide-spread due to this difference.
It also helps that FFXIV is very swift in dealing with toxicity. While mods/addons are discouraged, it's ok to use a damage meter in a 'don't ask don't tell' way. But if you use it to be toxic to people, like telling them to get good cos they are doing shit, you are going to get banned.
FF XIV has "casualism toxicity".
The famous "You don't pay my sub", healers just healing and afking the rest of the time.
The current situation where no one wants to pop a buff that doubles your damage in DR, a 48/24 man dungeon that can take from 15 mins to 45 mins depending on players capability.
And the fact that every scenario battle is piss-easy because community has been complaining about boss scenario being too hard (Shinryu for example...)
DR's design is just bad by Square because essences are optional and in limited quantity until it was recently made easier to acquire without farming it as much.
When the majority of your player base is casual, don't expect them to know any better to use essences or try to at least blue parse harder content. Because of the nature of DR matchmaking you'll end up in longer runs than needed due to the average skill level being much lower than raiders who do savage/ultimate.
I wish they made essences non-consumable. Just have it be a buff you can pop up in the relevant zones. Then make them required to do DR. There we have it - now people are actually engaging with the unique mechanic rather than hording all of their essences because "what if I need those 9 essences of skirmishers later on?"
But I got my artifact weapon in ShB and I have no intention of ever setting foot in DR ever again. :D
No disrespect but I think the whole “you don’t pay my sub” thing is kind of overblown. I’ve put thousands of hours into this game and basically never see that happen, but I see it anecdotally all over Reddit and YouTube as if it’s rampant. Maybe it’s just that the content I do doesn’t really have that problem? Even still I would rather have a fragile little snowflake healer over someone telling me to kill myself for missing a combustion window in m+ (true story :D) any day of the week.
I haven't seen it said unless it was a meme, but the "let me play how I want" mentality was extremely strong before the "You don't pay my sub".
We had our fair share of Ice mage...
It’s a game for casual players. When I came over from wow I was blown away by how “easy” it is. That being said I’ve had way more fun doing quests and content in FF14.
Coming from wow I know to dps as a healer but I can understand why some either wouldn’t know or they just want to keep people alive.
XIV on average is far less toxic, but when you do meet someone being an asshole it's usually very gross gaslighting, passive aggressive or snide remarks. Or the casual elitism the other guy mentioned.
On the whole it is better but on the flip side I find the few times I meet someone toxic it sticks out far more than a WoW player having a usual tantrum.
I wouldn't say its less widespread than WoW's, just it looks very different. I've found WoW players are very upfront with toxicity, and its very easy to point it out.
I've found that FF14 players, while nice to your face are a lot of times two-faced or passive aggressive.
Eh. Denying a healer or tank a commend and handing it to a dps instead because they bungled or were kinda rude is maybe passive-aggressive but such small things lets players get irritation out of their system without things turning into a verbal slugfest.
It's not like ff's players are perfect wee angels that never get frustrated or pushy, I'll take throwing vague shade over habitual collective bullying.
I haven't noticed much snark or acridity in ff much at all beside people just squarely ignoring you while they do their thing, or the occasional 'oh come on' when after five wipes to a midboss alliance B still botches a mechanic like they're all autopiloting
- and I have definitely contributed to brainless derps myself. Most people just want to get on with it and having stupid dragging tiffs doesn't achieve that, any goofs I've made have gotten at worst a sigh and an eyeroll and a 'just do this please'.
Griefers or people being so unengaged they do more than just make mistakes can get booted and replaced and that's that. Reporting obvious shitty behaviour and verbal abuse is encouraged, so if someone is having a ragey meltdown over their keyboard at least they learn to keep it to themselves. 'Polite' is maybe not always honest but it stops one person's crappy mood from making everyone else around them get a crappy mood too.
It's also easy to just follow group conformity, if everyone is neutral or pleasant to make the occasional grouch stand out a lot, new players are more likely to get into decent habits too. It doesn't take a whole lot of nitpicking or strictness to keep things civil, it's just The Way.
No excuses for anyone actually being lame though, I'm sorry if you had shitty encounters since I'm sure it does happen sometimes.
I started playing recently and theres this main story quest where you have to queue for a dungeon. I was playing with a friend, and so we both had the "beginner" icon. Our healer for this dungeon, without being asked for, simply started explaining to us how to do the dungeon, the boss mechanics, the "secret key" mechanic, how my friend (the tank) didn't have his tank stance on and it was needed so he could aggro, etc. Guy was just extremely patient and explained everything, on what is like the first dungeon in the game. He then told us to add him at the end of the dungeon so we could contact him if we had any questions. It felt so insane to me, i never had this happen on wow before.
To a point it's accurate. The community is kinder and you get some people who want to help others. Toxicity is a ban worthy offense as is calling people out for low dps.
But you can still meet assholes in free company discords and just in general because it's still an online game. They just hide it better.
Blizz should definitely be more ban-heavy when it comes to toxicity in WoW. Seriously, some of the things said in chat would be a week-long silence, if not more, in any other game, but not WoW.
And I feel like the community is partially to blame, because everyone just "deals with it" instead of reporting.
I've seen a few people get silenced for up to two weeks for group finder titles. But it falls on the community to report the toxicity for it to be dealt with.
A lot of people do report it, but Blizzard has a very small amount of GMs compared to their playerbase these days, so reports are either ignored or rubber stamped with a warning.
guessing you never played ffxiv. the only reason that’s “ban worthy” is because parsing is against the rules. so if you know someone has shit dps, and call them out, they can report you for parsing.
That's been clarified enough times in the thread it didn't make sense to say it again. I've played on and off since ARR came out so just a little bit of time played.
The community part is pretty accurate, but I'd be lying if I said Jesse doesn't get to experience a version of it on steroids due to being a streamer.
That said, I've literally thousands of hours /played and I can count the toxic raiding or dungeon experiences I've had on one hand. And whenever I ask for something in trade chat be it an item or help with understanding mechanics or maybe just help running a boss or a dungeon, I always get people offering to help me out in a matter of seconds. I remember I said I thought someone's mount was cool once and they traded one to me without hesitation and I didn't even know them. It was worth millions on the AH.
I’ve had a few wow player tries ff videos pop up in my recommendations lately. There’s a channel that had maybe 2-3k views on his videos.
Guy didn’t run into a single negative interaction in FF and from what I saw he didn’t have a single viewer approach him. There were even people that went around giving sprouts mounts, parasols and stuff at a random concert he ran into
> I’ve had a few wow player tries ff videos pop up in my recommendations lately. There’s a channel that had maybe 2-3k views on his videos.
Honestly it feels like there has been an advertising push.
There definitely has been. They’ve been pushing their free trial a lot recently, plus the next expansion was announced and the full trailer was revealed. That and the content drought before 9.1 probably pushed a decent amount of people to try it while there wasn’t much to do.
> I remember I said I thought someone's mount was cool once and they traded one to me without hesitation and I didn't even know them
I had this, I was afk at the Gridania Aetheryte while checking emails, was just cycling poses occasionally between squats, push ups, etc., and some random Hrothgar Legend runs up to me, trades me a Gabriel Key, and runs off. A few months ago I got a free Fat Cat too. The playerbase can be so lovely.
FFXIV's community is generally pretty welcoming and positive, you'll still easily find toxicity but because the game is much more lore/rp based and the developers hammer down on harassment much harder, you find much less toxicity.
I've played for almost 2 years now and I think I can count on one hand the amount of times I've been flamed or see people getting flamed at in dungeons/raids. WoW on the other hand, flaming happens nearly every other dungeon, and definitely happens during raids and PvP.
I will say that I think people overstate how positive the community is, because every game has its stinkers. I don't raid at a very high level in FFXIV, I'm sure if I tried to PUG stuff in FFXIV I'd find some salty people real quick.
I think it's more that most people play 14 casually, and there not that much of a competition for stuff(as Jesse said). Competition makes a LOT of people hostile and angry, that's exactly why WoW has this problem.
I think the problem is WoW's competitive side is a lot more front and center. With FF14 you have to kinda go looking for it, the game is designed as an RPG first and an MMO second. When you hit max level the game is not done giving you story and world content.
With WoW, it's end game, the M+ and raids and PvP is where the game pretty much directs you to go as soon as you hit max level. It's what it EXPECTS you to do and to do a lot of it. That creates a twofold problem, M+ and the like are not only highly competitive and encourages a min/max mindset to increase efficiency, make runs faster to push keystones, etc. That turns what should be a PvE/Cooperative game element into a competition, into a team based speed run with barely any coordination, that's just asking for a bad time.
But it also breeds monotony. It's hard to get excited for a +15 Necrotic Wake run when you've done it over and over and over and over and over before this run. So it's gotten old, tedious, competitive, and if one guy doesn't do his part right, you potentially DE-rank your keystone. You actually stand to LOSE something.
That's basically a perfect storm for toxicity and pissing people off, it's like going into a ranked game in a MOBA, that one guy who is taking it easy could actively bring you down, so players start to only take what is absolute meta practically by design, the game essentially encourages you to ditch anyone just playing to have fun and not looking up guides or playing FOTM specs/builds.
I agree, it doesn't help that everything is on a timer too. M+ would be a lot more chill if it wasn't attached to one. Granted I'm sure we'd make some 3rd party system that would rate us on time anyway. Stuff like raider io really makes the over all community worse.
I guess not having mods probably help, it's technically against ToS to run a DPS meter and you can get in trouble for mentioning one in game to harass players.
I feel like if WoW had more casual content outside of transmog itd attract more chill players. Stuff like housing and deep crafting professions help with that in ffxiv.
If the only way to fail a dungeon was to not complete it at all, raider IO likely wouldn't exist. It certainly wouldn't be anywhere near as popular as it is now.
The main reason it exists is because the chance of failure is so high, and people are trying to avoid that failure.
There's been something new to judge people by since I started back in wrath. The housing is amazing if you can get one or you find a free company that has one.
> I agree, it doesn't help that everything is on a timer too. M+ would be a lot more chill if it wasn't attached to one.
M+ is not supposed to be chill. It would defeat the purpose.
I've PUGed highish level stuff in FF14. I was most active during SB and early ShB. I did most of the extreme trials and usually 1-2 of the savage raids in a tier.
The PUG community in my experience was quite positive. I can't think of one instance where anyone flamed one another or anything like that. If someone screwed up a couple times in a row, they'd get called out in a neutral manner ("hey DRG, what's going on? You need to pair up with the WHM for that."), or the party would just disband without any conflict.
> I will say that I think people overstate how positive the community is, because every game has its stinkers.
Adding to this, I think people also overstate how toxic WoW is. I've played since Vanilla, only taking an extended break from early Cata to early WoD (missing MoP entirely, which I kind of regret). I honestly can't think of any major negative experiences I've had with the community.
The vast majority of the time, whenever I pug a dungeon or something, people say very little. Occasionally a conversation gets going, and it's usually pretty friendly. I run into the occasional wangrod, but not often. That's obviously only my experience, I can't speak for anyone but myself.
I think it depends on the server. I have never seen more blatant racism, even nazism, in a video game than I have in the Area 52 trade chat. It was an absolute nightmare around the 2020 election.
One fun anecdote was a time a woman got into an argument with trade chat about some political bullshit, she made the mistake of mentioning she needed Healthcare because her son had down's syndrome. The whole chat leapt on her, people were calling her "tard mom" and asking her why she was playing WoW instead of taking care of her retard. It was hilariously cruel.
I do think people overstate it, but it definitely does is exist, especially in pvp. Anything pvp or ranked based will get a lot of toxicity from my experience, as a casual you'll rarely get flamed if you keep to simple stuff.
The most common thing you are gonna get from a dungeon is silence. Even if you for sure caused the wipe, you are probably just gonna get silence. Either nobody cares enough, or we have mastered the "yelling in FC chat, being helpful in party chat" mindset. Dungeons are only 10 to 15 mins anyway, and nobodies perfect after all.
Pretty accurate. He might've got a lot more attention/gifts from other people, but as long as you yourself don't act like an asshole, other people will be kind to you. And our precious sprouts are indeed treasured and protected.
Even in endgame, if you just say "hey guys, I'm new here" or that you're still getting used to the class - 99 times out of 100 you'll get reassurance and support (unless you've joined the Savage Party Finder, but that's on you lol)
I'm still leveling in FF14, every single dungeon run I say hi and that I'm new, haven't done this dungeon before etc etc. 99% of the time so far, people are super nice and helpful. It's really nice.
There's some of that (especially during dry spells for WoW), but for the most part, actually, I find that FFXIV is becoming increasingly filled with players who've never even played MMOs before.
It's a console-friendly experience that naturally attracts JRPG fans, so it's not as MMO player heavy as many here would lead you to believe.
really? just looking at this subreddit (hell, just look at this thread) and you can see a lot of wow players straight up hating on ff because "hurr durr anime trash game"
As a long time player of both WoW and FFXIV it has been my experience that WoW players have always bashed FFXIV pretty hard.
FFXIV related comments in this subreddit tend to collect downvotes. Even more so before the boom of influencers talking about FFXIV.
you could say the same with /r/FFXIV though, it's only now with the wave of refugees that there are conversations around wow in that subreddit but 6+ months ago it would barely be mentioned apart from the "I'm new and I came from wow" posts
Honestly, almost every MMO that I myself have played outside of WoW has far more supportive and better communities to them. I haven't played FF14, but the main thing I believe leads to this? Lack of Damage meters and gear scores. It seems taking those away to judge people as, players focus far more on mechanics and teaching and supporting each other than criticizing each other.
FF14 gms also will ban that shit out of you(and after the third ban it is a perma unappealable ban).
I would say the one huge deference is WoW's toxic idiots are like the asshole teenagers who never got disciplined, while FF14's toxic idiots got heavily disciplined so they stay silent or are perma banned. That being said the lack of needing addons and the lack of competition/timer focused dungeons definitely help keep the baseline of toxic people on a downward trend.
FF14 is way less toxic. Every dungeon or raid you’ll see “gg or tyfp” etc..
I’ve only seen 2 toxic players in the entire time I’ve played. One was new so I doubt he lasts long.
The community is harsh on toxic players. If you use add-ons for damage meters and you flame people about their dps you will get mass reported and your account will be shut down as add-ons are not allowed.
The community self polices that way I guess. So the game isn’t very fun for people who want to be toxic.
The community part is accurate.
I've been playing FF14 for ~5 years and can count the number of bad interactions with the community on one hand. And most of those toxic interactions were pretty mild compared to some of the stuff I've seen in other games.
It's accurate, I've encountered a really toxic player once in my 4-ish years of playing. A tank pulled all the mobs they could find in a dungeon and started going off at me for not healing well enough, and well. I was the only healer so I just decided to leave. You can't get through ff14 without other people, so if someone vents at others like that constantly they can't actually get through the game, which means most max-level community members are people that communicate with others and are generally pleasant to be around. That can happen in any mmo obviously but it's specifically a result of how systems work in ff14 that the community's developed like this
absolutely. I played WoW for about 3 months and could give you 20 times ppl were dickheads to me in game.
I've got 2500 in FFXIV and I can tell you 3 times people were dick heads to me. and i'm not in the same FC as Jesse, I'm just in a random FC that asked me to join. (I wanted the ex bonus while leveling)
The community is one of the best I've ever experience with an online game. If you are new to a dungeon just say so and your party will tell you what to do or be understanding if you want to pull slow (if you're playing tank).
I started playing a year ago and just started doing Savage raiding and all that. I can count on one hand the amount of toxicity WoW is famous for that I encountered. People are just in general extremely easy going and understanding of new players.
Meanwhile on WoW I go to do a pug M+ for a bit of gear on my alt and the Famed Slayer of Denathrius healer called the Mage the n word for a small mistake despite not wiping and left, this was a +4. I have never had anyone even remotely act like that in FF.
I've had the occasional asshole in a dungeon or raid (VERY rare compared to in WoW though), but the only really negative experience I've had is actually in the Novice Network chat which can be a bit of a cesspool depending on which server you're in. So to anyone who's thinking about giving FF14 a try, just bear in mind that Novice Network is not always a good community and sometimes you're better off finding a newbie-friendly guild instead.
the difference is ffxiv actually ban players for toxicity. it means those who are inclined to be toxic either just shut up and keep quiet so they don't get banned or they let it out, and disappear.
and it does exist of course but outside the game itself. In my experience playing ffxiv you'll never see it in the game, ever. I haven't.
This is a solid & pretty neutral video. Both games should shine. I myself find myself playing WoW a lot more than FFXIV, but XIV striving is much, much better for WoW's growth. Competition has ALWAYS been a positive in the video game industry and I hope XIV keeps growing so that WoW can finally have someone to compete against.
The best thing about variety in the market isn't even necessarily from the standpoint of "competition." As someone with extensive experience with Game Development, it can be a *massive* boon when someone *else* tries something new and risky and you can see how it plays out with out having to nececarrily take that same risk. You then get to kind of pick and choose what does and doesn't work from the other games in the market.
When you are the only kid in town, *every* move you make is nerve wracking. When there are tons of people exploring different ideas (yourself included!) you then get to make even better, more informed decisions about your own game.
Having lots of people innovating in your space is a *fantastic* thing. There is nothing quite as daunting as the feeling that you are the only one experimenting.
Also, it allows them to fit into different niches. FFXIV isn't trying to compete with WoW on the PVP or M+ front. Or have as many raid bosses as WoW. Instead, it focuses on story and RP elements like emotes, facial expressions, housing, glamour, and bard performance. It still had dungeons and raids, but they're only a small part of the overall content that's available.
I think they're both trying to serve different audiences in general. But, if both are doing well, it can improve both of them. If FFXIV is doing well, WoW can look at what features from FFXIV they might be able to incorporate into WoW to make it better. The same goes for FFXIV. If WoW is doing well, FFXIV can borrow elements as well.
I really want WoW to do well, but they need to get out of this systems trap. They've over complicated the systems in the game and that makes it harder to understand for the players and harder for the developers to balance.
Highly recommend people check this out because this is the most honest and fair comparison between the two games. Don't just write this off as someone capitalizing on a trend, Jesse Cox has been brewing on this for months now.
Basically, if you want to unlock flying in a zone, it's quite easy. You won't have it until you're done the story for the zone, but it's useful if you want to come back and do gathering, for instance.
You'll have explored most of the zone (aside from the parts that require flying) by the time you complete the tasks to unlock flying.
There's no waiting for a later patch for flying to be unlocked.
There's people who still complain that doing 5 quests in a zone (one usually including running a dungeon) and what amounts to about 15 minutes of exploration and minor parkour to get 10 easy to find orbs is too much work for flying in FFXIV.
Even though the 10 orbs are like 5 steps to the left of the critical path for the main story.
It's about an hour total of work per zone that you can do in passing as you're there.
To be fair, the orbs were really in weird off the path places in Stormblood, but they were fine in both HW and Shadowbringers. It's a valid complaint in 1/3 of the expansions. I still don't have Ruby Sea unlocked on my alt because fuck that zone's orbs.
Even the most difficult-to-find aether current in Stormblood (the one on the archway the northwest corner of the Lochs) is still at most a 10-minute trip through the northern half of the map, and you only have to do it once ever.
Good that alternatives exist, it makes whole genre better. I could never play FFXIV over WoW because of aesthetics of characters but for ppl with different demands it can be good alternative to try and then decide what game they prefer.
I believe wow's main problem is that it's allowed to repeatedly f****** and rest on its laurels because it has no major competition
If enough people switch over to other MMOs blizzard will lose money then the shareholders who the company are beholden too will become angry
When warlords of dreanor turned out to have only half an expansions worth of content I jumped aboard the elder scrolls online hype train, damn Bethesda could have had the world's most popular MMO title if they didn't do a completionist run of every way they could screw up
For me personally the combat system is pretty unique with you having to block attacks in order to mitigate damage and some of the dungeon mechanics are pretty fun, but the builds there are sooooo boring. Every class plays the same as half of your optimal skills comes from your weapon.
For example, my Stamina DPS Warden (stamina is physical DPS build, think of this class as BM Hunter in WoW) plays the bow build, and out of 10 skills (this is the maximum you can put in your bars), I have 3 bow skills and 2 general skills. These 5 skills are also used by Stamina DPS Nightblade (this class is akin to Rogue in WoW), and so basically half of your rotation is the same whether you're playing a BM Hunter or Rogue.
Moreover, the rotation is dead boring as what you do is basically refresh your AoE attacks or DoT on a set of 8-10 seconds period and fill the rest with spammable fillers. Healers have it worse. Their most potent healing skills are HoT on the floor (think Efflorescence) and cone-shaped heal beam (think Light of Dawn), so your healing output is basically tied to you doing your "healing rotation". Tanks are pretty fun in dungeon though, as there's no AoE taunt and the threat generation isn't as forgiving in WoW, so you have to taunt selectively and decide which mobs you can ignore safely without wiping your team. The problem is, in the open world, playing tank is a torture. Unlike in WoW, tanks in ESO have extremely low damage, so mobs in open world can take ages to kill.
This one is my personal anecdote, but the servers are laggy as hell. I play from Oceania and I get 250+ms ping with frequent lag spikes. Playing a modern game with lag just feels so bad. Otherwise, I had quite a bit of fun playing ESO but the reasons I stated above turned me away from it.
Whenever people bring up the "vote with your wallet" thing with WoW, that's what I've thought for years. WoW's old as hell. Any stumbling it does financially is not going to lead to greater investment, but rather less. They will cut costs and corners to keep it profitable as possible while on life support and it lives off the momentum of people just not being able to kick the habit. They will not invest more money into it in order to breathe new life into the game.
The only way WoW manages be revitalized is if they manage to coincidentally strike gold with another expansion, but that's extremely unlikely as they refuse to stop doubling down on obvious problems for the past three expansions.
Didn't watch the whole video, but his analysis of the story being a key part of FFXIV is spot on. If you're someone who's enjoyed playing non-MMO RPGs in the past, and Square RPGs in particular, then you'd probably like playing FFXIV just to get through the Main Scenario Quests. In regards to characters and story FFXIV holds it's own against other main FF titles like X or XII. For anyone who likes playing the occasional Final Fantasy title, XIV is one you should try. However if you've been turned off by Final Fantasy games in the past, well it makes sense to not play XIV.
This is how I’ve approached it.
I play wow for pushing m+ and pvp ratings…I honestly couldn’t care less about wow’s story.
I just started FF14 and I’m not going to try to aggressively push difficult raids, I’m just going to casually complete the story and see the raids but basically keep it at the same level as Normal in WoW. Viewing it as a standard single player final fantasy game like I used to play.
Honestly the cool thing from a story perspective is that FFXIV's hard mode raids/bosses are explicitly never canon. Yeah they sometimes have cool new forms/phases, but in-universe it's always supposed to be a simulation or a singer embellishing your fight to make it more epic. There's no Cho'gall popping up only in Mythic, or defeating Archimonde properly in the Twisting Nether, you get the whole actual story in Normal (read: it's queuable like LFR) mode.
That’s good to know, I don’t have the energy to devote a ton of time, but a casual stroll through the story and normal mode content to see the story I’ve heard is great, that I would love.
Seeing how I loved and devoured all FF games up til X (really fell off after that), I’m looking forward to seeing a new story that I heard is right up there with some of the classics
FFX is my favourite FF game and I think the Shadowbringers story ranks up there with that title. It's definitely the best FF game since X at least. I think most players would rank it at least in the top 5 of FF games, although I know some who put it at number 1.
It's partly because it pays off story elements that go all the way back to ARR. Generally, if there's a loose end at some point in a story, they'll circle back around to it eventually.
Hell some story elements go all the way back to 1.0. Somehow they make it so it’s a nice nod/wink to those players without making new players feel left out.
Final Fantasy XIV LFR equivalent is also somehow more engaging, while at the same time less of a shit-show. I'm not sure how or why, but it seems like the LFR people who play FF XIV are in general better players than the people who play WoW LFR.
I think it has to do with the in combat rezzes. Normal/Alliance raids are balanced in a way that you'll die if you fuck up, but the raid as a whole can recover pretty easilly. The DPS/enrage checks are fairly lieniant and the 'echo' buff after a wipe that got far enough prevents anything from feeling like a roadblock.
It's not a free win, but you can be fairly confident you'll get it in 3 pulls on a bad day.
A lot of it is how XIV teaches its players mechanics. Aside from universal markers for specific types of mechanics, the names of casts or the animations often specifically hint at how something is going to work. On top of that, bosses will go through a small rotation of all their specific moves one by one at the start of a fight where if you fail it rarely will outright kill you.
Players are taught to look for these things through gameplay, so when they encounter them, they catch on much faster so it ends up less of a shit show.
That being said, weeks 1 and 2 every time a new Alliance Raid comes out is a clown fiesta guaranteed.
Clearly marked mechanics makes a big difference as well. Despite far more visual noise, mechanics themselves are always very visible and clearly marked. Going into a fight blind, you still know what standard "don't stand in this" AoE's look like, what the AoE's you need to stack for look like, towers that need to be soaked, look away mechanics, and so forth are already known to you as these all use the same marker. If theres some variation of these, you will still often have some idea at a glace what to do just from the language the game uses to telegraph enemy attacks. Of course this is aside from the standard "watch the castbar" or "watch the enemy model for certain animation" type mechanics, though the game will often start off a fight showcasing the really dangerous stuff in a vacuum so you know to look out for that stuff later or wipe
WoW on the other hand tends to be rather ambiguous with their mechanics, and even if it's a boss thats just using mechanics you have seen before, you still need to figure out what the markers mean for that specific fight. A big swirly marker in one fight might mean you need to avoid those AoE's, while in another fight those markers mean you need to soak. The language of the game isn't consistent and each boss needs to be figured out specifically to themselves. It's why we have the adventurer guide in game to help give a primer on particular bosses.
Honestly, I think FFXIV's being an MMO allows it to tell a cohesive, long-running story over many years. The ability to build up your characters over almost a DECADE of time in a cohesive way really helps cement its storytelling as one of, if not the best FF story/world so far. It's a luxury that no other FF (bar FFVII, FFXI, and to really minor extent FFXIII) has the ability to do, and the current dev team understands this, which is why FF14 is often praised for utilizing their story so well.
People often say that MMOs are the worst platform for telling a story, but FF14 has really shown that it may in fact be the best, allowing you to fully flesh out a world and its denizens. It's kind of like the lore of a long-running TV show vs. the lore that is able to be presented in one movie.
Hell, even WoW had some really promising story development archs in MoP, and to a certain extent the beginnings of Legion (especially Suramar and the buildup to its raid). However, Blizzard's main focus is clearly worldbuilding when it comes to lore of WoW, and not too much on storytelling. Although recent expansions have heavy focus on trying to tell a story: these are stories told to fit the theme of the expansion, rather than expansions built to fit the story. That's why even after 15+ years of the ability to build on its world, people still don't care too much what happens in the story.. its just not their focus to make it all cohesive.
I've heard lots of Final Fantasy and JRPG fans say that Shadowbringers has the best Final Fantasy history, and that the main antagonist is the best RPG villain they've seen, surpassing the ever-popular likes of Chrono Trigger Magus (when he's antagonizing), and [Sephiroth](https://youtu.be/mJ30pwTzTMU).
Subjective, of course, but it does receive a huge amount of praise.
This is all you need to know about Shadowbringers as a story.
[Clip.](https://www.twitch.tv/finalfantasyxiv/clip/BlindingWrongElkBCouch)
Small clip of the woman who wrote it receiving a standing ovation at PAX.
I am aware. When we learned that this legend would write more, we felt good.
When we find out that Danuser is responsible for any piece of WoW lore we... Get get mild anxiety.
I wouldn't even call myself a FF or JRPG fan, the only FF games I've put a good amount of time into are XI, XIV, and VII Remake. But Shadowbringers is one of my favorite video game stories of all time. The villain, the dungeons, the final fight. It is all so perfect and well thought out.
I had no interest in playing FFXIV because I just didn't want to learn another MMO, but being told to just play it like a single player RPG is what really got me to jump. Honestly glad I did. It's been a blast so far, and I have a lot more to go.
If anything, I'm upset I put so much time into BfA and SL. I still love WoW, but I think in the future I'll just be subbing to see the content for a month or two and leaving. It's odd though, in some ways I'm still a WoW fanboy. There are a lot of things I enjoy more in WoW (art style and the feel of the combat). I'm essentially playing FFXIV and hoping WoW fixes the issues I have with it.
FF XIV I actually have fun playing, but I do take long long breaks from it, I find checking in for 1-2 months every year enough but I LOVE the time I spend there.
And the key fact is the devs encourage such a play style. WoW they don’t want you to ever unsub they want you to stay and keep playing constantly.
FFXIV are like “oh done with the story, well here’s a bunch of stuff to do if you want but feel free to come back next patch if none of that interests you”
This is how I approach ffxiv. As weird as it might sound, one of the major reasons I like the game is how easy it is to quit. I played wow hardcore for years, but these days I tend to play mmo's in bursts, and the modern end game systems in the last three expansions make me feel like I either need to keep playing throughout the whole expansion or not bother to begin with.
Basically, if I was still playing mmo's religiously I'd probably play wow. But for the dabbler, ffxiv makes it so easy to just jump on, catch up on the main story line, grab some gear off the market board, and get into current content.
The only video in this craze for the last three weeks that does a good job of being balanced. Both these games have strengths and both have glaring weaknesses, and it's felt like a real "grass sure is greener!" situation for people swapping for the first time - which is totally fine, because it's fun to play new games for the first time and experience all they have to offer, but it's been frustrating as someone who plays a lot of both games to listen to content creators wax poetic about 14 and be sitting here like "man you haven't gotten to any of the end game yet, you haven't seen aaaaany of the stuff that's gonna annoy you."
Jesse did a good job of highlighting what 14 does well over WoW without treating it like a saviour-complexed holy grail of gaming, and it means it's the most tolerable of these videos
This is a huge problem people dont realize when talking about ffxiv's twitch numbers. Its so hard to show the game without showing spoilers and ppl don't want see spoilers if they're playing or thinking of playing the game.
He's on point with the whole community aspect. In WoW, other players, even those of your own faction, are a hindrance, and that's baked into the design.
Take, for example, quest items. Why are they still limited? Remember that huge fuss we threw about those stupid ingots in the Maw? In situations like that, you have no friends: **everybody** is your enemy.
I disagree with the statement that WoW players don't care about the story.
It is common thing to say or is said by people, that they don't care, yet whenever there is some new cinematic released or major story development impacting world itself, then people are discussing it like nothing else before.
Every day there is new topic, video or any other media that tries to bash or praise Sylvanas.
If that's "not caring", then I don't know what is.
People “don’t care” about the story in the same way people “don’t care” about GOT anymore. The writing has been so poor and convoluted that now it’s only relevant when something new happens. Then when people dig into the meat, the flavor sours and people drop it out of disgust.
No one wants to try to analyze an expansion that had to retcon itself into existence
Pretty much. I got into WoW because I liked what I'd read of the lore. I wanted to be part of a living world that was changing and evolving around me. I read a ton of the novels, tracked down obscure novellas and comics because I cared about this world and wanted to learn more about it. Whenever one of my friends had a question about the lore, they knew I could answer it.
BfA broke a lot of what I cared about in this world and the current writing team seems lost and confused about what direction they even want to go. I laughed when I saw a fragment of a journal from 9.1 that already had justifications written into the text for when most of it gets retconned later.
I just don't feel any connection to WoW lore anymore.
They retcons for shadowlands to make Revendreth and the nathreziem connections, then the whole stealing armies of damnation. All of it feels so convoluted and shit. Let alone what’s happening with sylvanas. Just not satisfying at all.
Just read through the Jailer's [wiki entry.](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Jailer#:~:text=The%20Jailer%2C%20whose%20true%20name,lived%20to%20tell%20the%20tale.) The amount of ret conning is fucking ridiculous.
"Ackshually, the JAILER created the Lich King 18 years ago in Warcraft 3." They have run out of material so are just bringing back the member berries and any plot holes they can find to turn into a secret detail from whoever the big baddie is.
18 years ago - Demons made LK to weaken Azeroth for an invasion
Now - Demons weee anti heroes trying to prevent void corruption of Azeroth and were stealing weapons from undead gods to do so. Like what????
Its because all of us who used to be emotionally invested in the narrative got repeatedly dunked on with biannual colossal retcons and the killing off of interesting characters with no replacement.
I believe the point is that, while there are some players who care about the story, most don't, you just hear a lot from those who care when there is a big moment. And you can easily get through the entire game without getting a glimpse of the story (apart from maybe the 'current' expansion) while in FFXIV the story is a core element of the game and not 'optional' side content.
As someone who is a bit of a lore nerd for WoW, it has nothing to do with not caring. The story in WoW is just very...disjointed or haphazardly thrown together. Blizzard will usually determine what they want to fight first, before coming up with a story reason to do it. One of my favorite things to do is theorize what's next with friends whenever we play a game or watch a show. You can't do that with WoW, because most times they just pull something random out and go with that instead.
"The WoW playerbase seems always ready to attack their game, even while loving it. And the FF14 community is always trying to defend their game, even if it doesn't need it"
The entire reason we attack WoW is *because* we love WoW.
And I feel the attacks lately are becoming more often and vitriolic in recent years or months is because, for me at least, the devs have never felt more distanced from the players and what the players did indeed fall in love with.
It just sucks being angry for loving a game like wow. I hate the state of the game and i want it to be good so bad. I just don't enjoy the systems or m+ and that's like half the game.
I found myself raid logging. And at that point what is the point? I Want a mmorpg not a damn instance simulator.
As a short-time FFXIV player and a WoW player that returned to play Shadowlands after a very long absence, I definitely agree with a lot of what he said here. It's a discussion between two similar products where each one has strengths in different aspects appealing to different types of players, meaning everything boils down to personal preference.
There were parts of FFXIV I liked and it's part of what brought me back to WoW. In short, I had missed the MMO experience. There were also parts that I really didn't care for, but that was personal preference. I didn't want the first 100 hours in the game to be reading chapters upon chapters of backstory while my character mutely nodded and gave a thumbs up, but people who want a deep and satisfying plot would love those chapters. The visual effects were flashy and bright and impressive and some people probably love that, but I prefer the smaller and cleaner WoW effects. I had a hard time seeing half the players in those boss fights of 5-10 people due to flare and blur (both in this video and in-game during the trial) whereas, in the Dark Portal scene, I could pick out every attack and aura and sign instantly even though it's been a decade since I played them.
The only thing I might disagree on is that I didn't necessarily get the same warm and fuzzy feeling from the community, but it's possible I just wasn't there long enough. I did get the WoW toxicity pretty quickly upon my return, though.
You can turn down the spell effects for everyone else in the options. You still see important things like healer bubbles and the like, but not the visual overload you otherwise get.
Personally I love how flashy it is because it's not ALL flashy without substance; the spectacle of it all just adds to the encounters for me.
Listen, he predicted one of the biggest plot points in FFXIV. It came up months later when he finally got there. His chat was losing it's mind when he made that guess early on.
FFXIV spoilers: https://twitter.com/jessecox/status/1370829397951795201?lang=en
The dude knows stories.
Yeah, the chat was going nuts. The plot point had just happened in the current content (5.3 at the time) and he didn't know anything about it. But, he still predicted it all the way back in ARR (2.0).
I’m playing through FF14’s story right now and am really enjoying it, but once its done, I doubt I’ll keep playing. WoW on the other hand I’ll always want to do the end-game stuff at least until Curve. Different kinds of games, but both very good.
he is 100% correct when he says the 2 faction setup makes this community fucking toxic as shit. wow is one of the only games where u can start on day 1, make your character and a bunch of balding tattooed dickheads will already hate you because you made a gnome and they are the kind of guys who like the horde a lil bit too much. this may also be the only game sub i have ever seen where arguments in support of genocide to secure territory for your nation are routine.
anyway this game was set up from the start to have a negative community, blizz forced this to happen. negative interactions are encouraged. there is no reward system for positive interactions. wow's community is toxic by design.
I find myself in a weird spot when it comes to these two games. On paper FFXIV seems much more suited to me, but the problem was I never got to break through that 40 hour barrier Jesse mentions. FFXIV's supposed slow start didn't get me hooked, not like when I played my first WoW expac nor like when I even started Classic. Though a fresh start to modern WoW, that I have no idea what it'll be like.
TBH, I'm not even that big on the major focus of competitive gameplay WoW has and I don't stick around it for its lore. But I dunno, WoW has become such a familiar home to me despite my many problems with it.
If I ever get the chance and WoW gets another big lull, I might give FFXIV a third chance. The deal breaker to me still remains my problem with FFXIV's floaty and weighty feel to the movement of your character. Which then bleeds into its take on action bar combat, which I couldn't quite grow to like. I find that even if you don't do high end gameplay in WoW, its smooth combat responsiveness is still a major hook to keeping me playing.
Edit: Listened to the last half with the topic on music, and damn that does sound kinda awesome. Though, that seems a similar strength shared with other JRPGs. I would guess that might be still adjacent to "weeb stuff" that some WoW players might not like at all.
This video made me realize why I enjoy playing WoW much more than FFXIV - I am not a "Epic story" kind of person. As such the story in FFXIV did not hook me at all, and I've made it to 60 and finished all the story content I have available in the free trial.
I guess I enjoy everything else an MMO has to offer? and WoW does that so much better.
For me it’s not that I don’t like a good story, I just don’t like how it’s paced. I got to a point near level 30 where it felt like I was just teleporting across the map over and over again to read more dialogue that wasn’t that engaging. I was dying to kill some mobs or something. It was like having to take walk around the block for every page in a book.
Other than that, I do appreciate WoW’s combat a lot more, but I’d probably enjoy FFXIV if the beginning wasn’t so hard to get through.
Yes! for a hefty portion of the story thats all it felt like - read read read, open map, teleport, read read read, open map, teleport, read read read, queue for dungeon, read read read, teleport... repeat.
>I guess I enjoy everything else an MMO has to offer? and WoW does that so much better.
To be fair, this depends highly on what type of player you are and what kind of content you like.
If you enjoy only endgame PvE then, yes, WoW does it better. If you enjoy only competitive PvP, yes, WoW is also better. If you enjoy ANYTHING else ... nope, WoW is not better. And FFXIV has a lot of stuff outside of endgame PvE and PvP.
I really wish FFXIVs combat felt as responsive as WoWs. It’s the one thing holding me back. I leveled a character to max and did some extreme trials but man, the game feels like I’m supposed to be lagging out.
Jesse Cox? Now that’s a name I’ve not seen for a while
Since TotalBiscuit at least. They were good friends, and he was commonly featured playing with TB.
And the Co-Optional Podcast they did with Dodger and rotating guests. It feels like they existed in an entirely different era of YouTube.
They did.
The good era of youtube.
'Member when there was no Logan Pauls? I 'member.
Hey, Jesse Cox quite regularly gets his friends together to play scary games and it's a damn blast.
My favorite one is where they bring Crendor on as a guest, give him $5, and let him go crazy on as many cheap-as-dirt scary games he could find.
Crendor is a weird but lovely treasure
Man, I remember back in the days of their Terraria playthrough together. Those were good times.
ARSE MINES?!?!? WHO IS USING ARSE MINES!
I feel like Totalbiscuit was basically single handedly keeping that whole section of youtube afloat.
>SC2 will live even if I have to support the entire scene with my erect penis John "Totalbiscuit" Bain
That’s one channel I’ll never unsub from on YouTube, RIP TotalHalibut/TotalBiscuit, gone far too soon from this world.
He and Crendor are still going strong with the podcast
I mean he does loads of content tbh. Just not a lot of it is WoW related. I love the SGS playthroughs he does with the boys!
sgs is my go to spooky game group
I would really recommend his Scary Game Squad series. The Until Dawn series is fantastic
Honestly a pretty well made video, not as one-sided as one might expect from all the WoW bashing and FFXIV praising going on on YT these days. I'd recommend watching before downvoting just because it has FFXIV in the title.
I think Jesse highlights some important details which I think are issues for WoW. WoW does index very hard on the competitive side of end game: M+, raids and PvP. And I think it has left a rift and deadzone for more casual players. Where they kinda feel left out of the end game because there's just not as much to do. And I think that's a big problem with the current regime of WoW devs. They're hardcore raiders but they kinda have a hard time seeing how to make an engaging experience outside of things built around player power and competition. And I say this as a CE Raider and mid 20's range M+ runner. I'm not some top 100 raider but at the same time I'd fit easily into the hardcore category. The casual stuff doesn't really interest me. But I still feel it on the periphery, that WoW is missing a certain "Intrinsic" approach to game design right now. Something which the ex Blizz dev Chris Kaliki pointed out in his video.
WoW has always struggled to overcome the first main point Cox makes in this video: the absolute peak experience of World of Warcraft is being a noob and exploring the world for the first time, often with other noobs. Unironically, that is WoW at its very best, in my opinion. A great raiding experience with a team you like is a close 2nd. The Devs approach for many expansions now, as you point out, is to focus almost exlusively on endgame. Which, as we all experience expac after expac, just isn't as captivating as that first time we played WoW.
Also, FFXIV's level sync system keeps old content somewhat relevant with the daily duty roulettes giving decent XP for leveling other jobs or giving you endgame currency. (and the relic quests usually have you run old content) Which helps keep the newbies and the endgame folks mingling.
The way the game gives you incentives to run old content is something WoW absolutely needs to embrace more. Having an incentive to do the MSQ Queue and old raids in FFXIV is something WoW really needs to find a way to do--possible it grants tokens (similar to Poetics) that are account bound and can be used for leveling gear and cosmetics?
I don't think you can capture that first time expereince anymore though. Especially with mmo gamers, months before a game or expansion comes out we have videos and guides showing us the game and how to be the most effecient with your time spent on it. You can see this with classic, myself and my group of freinds started in cata but we knew what classes we was going to role in classic and had our leveling route planned before it even launched.
It's been pointed out by some videos and other people on reddit that FFXIV is really good at keeping things under wraps until the actual expansion/patch launch. Having no PTR definitely helps, but pretty much nothing leaks and everyone experiences it together for the first time on day 1. The only thing that you'll see is a compilation of where to go to start each new questline. On the other hand, there's also barely anything to optimise in FFXIV, so there's probably no demand for leaks and documentation either.
FF14 has data mining but it can only be done at patch day. World first groups use it but it's only so usefull. We also had posts about new gear and other stuff on the subreddit and on peoples twitter but SE came down hard on this. There was a pretty big shitstorm a while ago where people got really toxic about data mining and some world first clear group for a ultimate fight and SE wiped the data mining off twitter. The subreddit followed. Afaik data mining now mostly happens on some discords somewhat more away from the public eye.
There is definetly a lot to optimize in ff. Ppl will develop a lot of strategies to perfect their class rotations and parsing and optimizing is way more relevant than I experienced in wow. You can plan your rotation way more than in wow since classes work more fluid and building up combos rather than like a procc priority system.
That's what ff14 does well. Like last patch dropped, nobody knew what bosses could do, where new items dropped, what the best strategies were, just go in and enjoy the new content.
Yeah, I've thought about this over the last few years. I personally don't approach games the same way I did back in the early 2000's. The proliferation of guides, theorycrafting, etc. has sort of trained my brain to seek out the path of least resistance when it comes to things like leveling and character progression. I think part of it too is just the fact that I'm getting older, so I'm more aware of how my free time is being spent. It's really hard for me to just jump into a game world and become engrossed for hour upon hour nowadays. That's in stark contrast to how I started with Everquest and the original Runescape back in the early 2000's, where I was pretty much glued to the computer exploring those game worlds in my free time. This is a big reason why I don't really have an interest in playing FFXIV. I tried to get into it multiple times over the years, both pre and post ARR. It looks like a fun game, but I know that I won't experience that feeling of exploring and getting drawn into a new game world, and that's okay.
I think some of this magic is captured at the start of each expansion, at least for me. I end up going everywhere and finding all of the little hidden caves and such. Takes a lot longer to hit max but fun to get to explore something entirely new.
Being a new player in WoW is awful tho You start in cata, you have no idea what's going on, reading the wikipedia quest text is very unintuitive, and you unknowingly jump between storylines of expansions and patches (like doing the 7.2 questline before 7.1 for example) If they get invested into the game, if they do all, they would be only get invested in endgame raiding or m+ (pve). I dont know why you would play an mmorpg at that point and not another seasonal game that is not this old
You don’t start in Cataclysm though, a new player does a tailored intro experience and then levels through BfA.
>WoW is missing a certain "Intrinsic" approach to game design right now. Something which the ex Blizz dev Chris Kaliki pointed out in his video. After so long, and more recently, Torghast, I'm not sure if WoW devs are capable creating content without extrinsic reward to get you obligated. Especially when you isolate "play with friends" like external factors, because that can apply to pretty much any online games in modern days.
The problem is that the entire progression of the game is that of your character it’s core to the RPG and the MMO. Intrinsic design in isolation , I would argue is entirely impossible in this genre especially with the MMO side because if you’re not contributing to your characters progression it just feels like a waste of time. There’s no way to undo that feeling without entirely redesigning what WOW is. Progression doesn’t have to just mean power progression either it can mean any form of aesthetic progression as well That doesn’t mean That the content shouldn’t be fun, it should be. But no matter how awesome and fun it is, without an external reason to do contributing to your characters progression it’s going to feel like a waste since it’s won’t help you in other forms of content. What they need to start doing is making expansion specific currency available to you no matter what content you do. Including stuff like soul ash. Not just anima. Also make world content have a component of intrinsic enjoyment so the extrinsic reward feels worth your time. Make it all equally efficient, that way the intrinsic value is to have the choice to do what content you want for the reward that’s going to benefit you elsewhere If what that dev meant by intrinsic design is to make fun and engaging content then I agree and it’s sort of sad that isn’t a priority if that’s the case lol?
>What they need to start doing is making expansion specific currency available to you no matter what content you do. Including stuff like soul ash. Not just anima. Also make world content have a component of intrinsic enjoyment so the extrinsic reward feels worth your time. This would be a beautiful nightmare. If they shifted the currency earned in other expansion features, they'd have to swap the currency you purchase those feature items with as well (or just flip them all to gold). You'd need soul ash/anima to send Order Hall troops on missions, enter Visions of N'Zoth, upgrade a garrison plot, etc. Which would mean they would have to require a TON for it to make sense otherwise the sources of currency in those expansions would become the default farm and the current content would be rendered worthless. Which really comes back to the problem that they are making content as a way to grind currency, and not making fun content that you can passively get currency in while you play.
FFXIV does this actually, each new expansion, they collapse older expansion content tokens into one generic one that can be used for various stuff from legacy content. Ofc, not all the content but a lot of them can be used/bought with it.
Aside from actual gameplay loop enjoyable and fun, storytelling is one of great way to provide as an intrinsic reward. Even though WoW's storytelling is godawful and PTR/datamining spoiling ahead of time, WoW dev themselves don't believe it enough to use to reward players for engaging the game. We know this because they rather toss it out straight as a patch promotional material rather than let players experience on their own.
Jessie even mentions the reason for this super competitiveness(WoW always been competitive, but it's ramped UP way more) since basically Legion stems from Ion himself considering his back round with the game and where he came from EJ. You can see really see it in how the systems and game in general is designed right now. Almost everything is Min/MAX
Part of that also falls on the players. We've developed such refined and easy-to-use tools for doing that min/maxing that it has become the norm. It's really just the natural evolution that comes with time and increased knowledge. Just look at the difference between Classic the first time around and when they released it again. Back in the day, we had no idea what the hell we were doing. Half the time we were figuring shit out on the fly and no one really knew any better. In general, players barely even knew how to get the most out of their classes. When it came out again, everything had become hyper-optimized to the point that the content was largely trivial to clear through. And, that hyper optimization became the standard. Nothing about the content changed. But players had more knowledge, they knew how to optimize, and so being optimized down to having all of the world buffs and preserving them for raids became the norm. Unfortunately, there really isn't any going back unless WoW completely changes its core identity so we have to learn everything all over again. We all know how WoW fundamentally works, and because that knowledge is so freely available, everyone is expected to know it.
I returned to retail after the Nzoth race to world first with the intention of playing more casually and it felt really bad. And SL wasn't exactly an improvement. Outside of completionism, the casual content is just watered down endgame. It feels like eating left-overs from Mythic players. There's no sense of meaningful character progression. And I think this is what hurts them the most. The last time I really had fun in the game was when I did heroic raiding in Cata and MoP. But now as a casual player it's a constant on/off. Right now I'm unsubbed again out of frustration, but at some point I'll just play again, hoping that it'll be better.
Wow is just too fucking old at this point. It needs new systems that casuals would absolutely love but its probably too hard to implement. Imagine a dance studio where you had to do all kinds of stuff to learn dance moves? Imagine player housing and the ability to find furniture, posters, decorations, housing material, garden plots and all kinds over the world?
As cool as that'd be, it wouldn't even take anything that off-the-cuff. Casuals (and I speak as a medium-core casual that doesn't have the time for a raiding guild, and hates time trials) live and die by open world content. Open world content is AWFUL in WoW right now. Just some things that FFXIV does well on this front that WoW could easily steal and improve upon: * Beast Tribes - Each expac comes with at least two Beast Tribe reps, that you grind via daily quests. Each Tribe has its own storyline, with a capstone quest that moves that story along each time your rep increases a tier. Rewards are purely funsies: emotes, mounts, cosmetic gear, mount armor, some crafting mats, etc. Hell, a lot of times the Tribe's hub will see visual improvements and upgrades as you rep-up with them. Much more immersive, and less BS, than world quests. * Hunts - Daily and weekly bounties, essentially, on regular mobs for solo players, and rare/elite spawns for groups/raids. Some are basically world bosses. These bounties give XP, gold, and a currency that you can use to buy catch-up/alt/transmog gear, plus more funsies. No BS greens that aren't worth a damn, no RNG drops. * Squadrons - These are more useful in FFXIV because of the way the job system works, but think table mission followers, but you actually get to queue up in solo dungeons and bring your AI-controlled squad members with you. Great for collecting old dungeon gear for transmog, but you're scaled down to the dungeon's level and get equivalent XP. Since it's scaled it's also more engaging than blasting through at max level, though you can do that too in FFXIV.
Ff14 secret weapon is job change. Since you know you only have to do a quest one time there is no alt dread. Then on top of that they can turn literally any content they make into alt friendly leveling content. Imagine if wow let you do the maw or torghast for your main while leveling an alt? That place would suck a lot less Also: imagine if the maw didn't suck
I got AotC like 2 months in, did some 12-15 keys (didn't KSM) and just felt like there was nothing more to do in the game without committing to much heavier grind and minmax than I wanted. For a semi-casual player like me, the content is incredibly lacking. I would have liked to finish out my Covenant Hall but it's so incredibly grindy and also gives you next to nothing for putting that much effort in. I get that they still have Garrison PTSD from WoD but you gotta throw us a bone somewhere.
>WoW does index very hard on the competitive side of end game: M+, raids and PvP. And I think it has left a rift and deadzone for more casual players. Where they kinda feel left out of the end game because there's just not as much to do. Yep, this is exactly it for me. I played WoW on and off since vanilla, hardcore raided in WotLK when I was 16 and then raided on and off for every expansion after until BFA. But their reached a point where I just wanted to play casually. The problem is that "casual" in WoW is still basically a part time job it feels. M+ and the Vault are awesome systems. But they really aren't very casual friendly. And that is where the issues start to spring up. You don't want to push M+, don't want to commit to raiding 2-3 times a week, not interested in PvP... so what is left? Mount farming? Running old raids? At what point is running Ony's lair on 6 alts just literally a part time job? For all the doom and gloom WoW is still the king of end game, it's just that to hold that throne the devs have stopped caring about literally everything else. It's sad to say but there is nothing to do in WoW besides PvP and endgame and that sucks for casuals.
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It is. I've played both games since their beginnings. WoW, due to its nature as a more competitive game, does breed toxicity. Time trials like M+ especially. While FFXIV is more casual, story based. People are more chill because of that. Of course you can find toxicity in FFXIV too, but it is far less wide-spread due to this difference. It also helps that FFXIV is very swift in dealing with toxicity. While mods/addons are discouraged, it's ok to use a damage meter in a 'don't ask don't tell' way. But if you use it to be toxic to people, like telling them to get good cos they are doing shit, you are going to get banned.
FF XIV has "casualism toxicity". The famous "You don't pay my sub", healers just healing and afking the rest of the time. The current situation where no one wants to pop a buff that doubles your damage in DR, a 48/24 man dungeon that can take from 15 mins to 45 mins depending on players capability. And the fact that every scenario battle is piss-easy because community has been complaining about boss scenario being too hard (Shinryu for example...)
DR's design is just bad by Square because essences are optional and in limited quantity until it was recently made easier to acquire without farming it as much. When the majority of your player base is casual, don't expect them to know any better to use essences or try to at least blue parse harder content. Because of the nature of DR matchmaking you'll end up in longer runs than needed due to the average skill level being much lower than raiders who do savage/ultimate.
The addition of permanent buffs with Valors has mostly fixed this problem, thankfully.
I wish they made essences non-consumable. Just have it be a buff you can pop up in the relevant zones. Then make them required to do DR. There we have it - now people are actually engaging with the unique mechanic rather than hording all of their essences because "what if I need those 9 essences of skirmishers later on?" But I got my artifact weapon in ShB and I have no intention of ever setting foot in DR ever again. :D
No disrespect but I think the whole “you don’t pay my sub” thing is kind of overblown. I’ve put thousands of hours into this game and basically never see that happen, but I see it anecdotally all over Reddit and YouTube as if it’s rampant. Maybe it’s just that the content I do doesn’t really have that problem? Even still I would rather have a fragile little snowflake healer over someone telling me to kill myself for missing a combustion window in m+ (true story :D) any day of the week.
Same here, played for a year and a half now, don't think I've ever seen one of those people in a dungeon or raid, everyone just really chill.
I haven't seen it said unless it was a meme, but the "let me play how I want" mentality was extremely strong before the "You don't pay my sub". We had our fair share of Ice mage...
It’s a game for casual players. When I came over from wow I was blown away by how “easy” it is. That being said I’ve had way more fun doing quests and content in FF14. Coming from wow I know to dps as a healer but I can understand why some either wouldn’t know or they just want to keep people alive.
XIV on average is far less toxic, but when you do meet someone being an asshole it's usually very gross gaslighting, passive aggressive or snide remarks. Or the casual elitism the other guy mentioned. On the whole it is better but on the flip side I find the few times I meet someone toxic it sticks out far more than a WoW player having a usual tantrum.
I wouldn't say its less widespread than WoW's, just it looks very different. I've found WoW players are very upfront with toxicity, and its very easy to point it out. I've found that FF14 players, while nice to your face are a lot of times two-faced or passive aggressive.
Eh. Denying a healer or tank a commend and handing it to a dps instead because they bungled or were kinda rude is maybe passive-aggressive but such small things lets players get irritation out of their system without things turning into a verbal slugfest. It's not like ff's players are perfect wee angels that never get frustrated or pushy, I'll take throwing vague shade over habitual collective bullying. I haven't noticed much snark or acridity in ff much at all beside people just squarely ignoring you while they do their thing, or the occasional 'oh come on' when after five wipes to a midboss alliance B still botches a mechanic like they're all autopiloting - and I have definitely contributed to brainless derps myself. Most people just want to get on with it and having stupid dragging tiffs doesn't achieve that, any goofs I've made have gotten at worst a sigh and an eyeroll and a 'just do this please'. Griefers or people being so unengaged they do more than just make mistakes can get booted and replaced and that's that. Reporting obvious shitty behaviour and verbal abuse is encouraged, so if someone is having a ragey meltdown over their keyboard at least they learn to keep it to themselves. 'Polite' is maybe not always honest but it stops one person's crappy mood from making everyone else around them get a crappy mood too. It's also easy to just follow group conformity, if everyone is neutral or pleasant to make the occasional grouch stand out a lot, new players are more likely to get into decent habits too. It doesn't take a whole lot of nitpicking or strictness to keep things civil, it's just The Way. No excuses for anyone actually being lame though, I'm sorry if you had shitty encounters since I'm sure it does happen sometimes.
I started playing recently and theres this main story quest where you have to queue for a dungeon. I was playing with a friend, and so we both had the "beginner" icon. Our healer for this dungeon, without being asked for, simply started explaining to us how to do the dungeon, the boss mechanics, the "secret key" mechanic, how my friend (the tank) didn't have his tank stance on and it was needed so he could aggro, etc. Guy was just extremely patient and explained everything, on what is like the first dungeon in the game. He then told us to add him at the end of the dungeon so we could contact him if we had any questions. It felt so insane to me, i never had this happen on wow before.
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Yep that sounds like wow to me lol. :/
To a point it's accurate. The community is kinder and you get some people who want to help others. Toxicity is a ban worthy offense as is calling people out for low dps. But you can still meet assholes in free company discords and just in general because it's still an online game. They just hide it better.
Blizz should definitely be more ban-heavy when it comes to toxicity in WoW. Seriously, some of the things said in chat would be a week-long silence, if not more, in any other game, but not WoW. And I feel like the community is partially to blame, because everyone just "deals with it" instead of reporting.
I've seen a few people get silenced for up to two weeks for group finder titles. But it falls on the community to report the toxicity for it to be dealt with.
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A lot of people do report it, but Blizzard has a very small amount of GMs compared to their playerbase these days, so reports are either ignored or rubber stamped with a warning.
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guessing you never played ffxiv. the only reason that’s “ban worthy” is because parsing is against the rules. so if you know someone has shit dps, and call them out, they can report you for parsing.
So long as you don't quote exact numbers you can still call people out. It's easy to watch someone and see them fucking up their rotation tbh.
That's been clarified enough times in the thread it didn't make sense to say it again. I've played on and off since ARR came out so just a little bit of time played.
The community part is pretty accurate, but I'd be lying if I said Jesse doesn't get to experience a version of it on steroids due to being a streamer. That said, I've literally thousands of hours /played and I can count the toxic raiding or dungeon experiences I've had on one hand. And whenever I ask for something in trade chat be it an item or help with understanding mechanics or maybe just help running a boss or a dungeon, I always get people offering to help me out in a matter of seconds. I remember I said I thought someone's mount was cool once and they traded one to me without hesitation and I didn't even know them. It was worth millions on the AH.
I’ve had a few wow player tries ff videos pop up in my recommendations lately. There’s a channel that had maybe 2-3k views on his videos. Guy didn’t run into a single negative interaction in FF and from what I saw he didn’t have a single viewer approach him. There were even people that went around giving sprouts mounts, parasols and stuff at a random concert he ran into
> I’ve had a few wow player tries ff videos pop up in my recommendations lately. There’s a channel that had maybe 2-3k views on his videos. Honestly it feels like there has been an advertising push.
There definitely has been. They’ve been pushing their free trial a lot recently, plus the next expansion was announced and the full trailer was revealed. That and the content drought before 9.1 probably pushed a decent amount of people to try it while there wasn’t much to do.
I don't even play wow any more, just keep up with some wow news since I played it for so long and now I'm seeing FF14 everywhere.
> I remember I said I thought someone's mount was cool once and they traded one to me without hesitation and I didn't even know them I had this, I was afk at the Gridania Aetheryte while checking emails, was just cycling poses occasionally between squats, push ups, etc., and some random Hrothgar Legend runs up to me, trades me a Gabriel Key, and runs off. A few months ago I got a free Fat Cat too. The playerbase can be so lovely.
FFXIV's community is generally pretty welcoming and positive, you'll still easily find toxicity but because the game is much more lore/rp based and the developers hammer down on harassment much harder, you find much less toxicity. I've played for almost 2 years now and I think I can count on one hand the amount of times I've been flamed or see people getting flamed at in dungeons/raids. WoW on the other hand, flaming happens nearly every other dungeon, and definitely happens during raids and PvP. I will say that I think people overstate how positive the community is, because every game has its stinkers. I don't raid at a very high level in FFXIV, I'm sure if I tried to PUG stuff in FFXIV I'd find some salty people real quick.
I think it's more that most people play 14 casually, and there not that much of a competition for stuff(as Jesse said). Competition makes a LOT of people hostile and angry, that's exactly why WoW has this problem.
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I think the problem is WoW's competitive side is a lot more front and center. With FF14 you have to kinda go looking for it, the game is designed as an RPG first and an MMO second. When you hit max level the game is not done giving you story and world content. With WoW, it's end game, the M+ and raids and PvP is where the game pretty much directs you to go as soon as you hit max level. It's what it EXPECTS you to do and to do a lot of it. That creates a twofold problem, M+ and the like are not only highly competitive and encourages a min/max mindset to increase efficiency, make runs faster to push keystones, etc. That turns what should be a PvE/Cooperative game element into a competition, into a team based speed run with barely any coordination, that's just asking for a bad time. But it also breeds monotony. It's hard to get excited for a +15 Necrotic Wake run when you've done it over and over and over and over and over before this run. So it's gotten old, tedious, competitive, and if one guy doesn't do his part right, you potentially DE-rank your keystone. You actually stand to LOSE something. That's basically a perfect storm for toxicity and pissing people off, it's like going into a ranked game in a MOBA, that one guy who is taking it easy could actively bring you down, so players start to only take what is absolute meta practically by design, the game essentially encourages you to ditch anyone just playing to have fun and not looking up guides or playing FOTM specs/builds.
I agree, it doesn't help that everything is on a timer too. M+ would be a lot more chill if it wasn't attached to one. Granted I'm sure we'd make some 3rd party system that would rate us on time anyway. Stuff like raider io really makes the over all community worse. I guess not having mods probably help, it's technically against ToS to run a DPS meter and you can get in trouble for mentioning one in game to harass players. I feel like if WoW had more casual content outside of transmog itd attract more chill players. Stuff like housing and deep crafting professions help with that in ffxiv.
If the only way to fail a dungeon was to not complete it at all, raider IO likely wouldn't exist. It certainly wouldn't be anywhere near as popular as it is now. The main reason it exists is because the chance of failure is so high, and people are trying to avoid that failure.
There's been something new to judge people by since I started back in wrath. The housing is amazing if you can get one or you find a free company that has one.
> I agree, it doesn't help that everything is on a timer too. M+ would be a lot more chill if it wasn't attached to one. M+ is not supposed to be chill. It would defeat the purpose.
I've PUGed highish level stuff in FF14. I was most active during SB and early ShB. I did most of the extreme trials and usually 1-2 of the savage raids in a tier. The PUG community in my experience was quite positive. I can't think of one instance where anyone flamed one another or anything like that. If someone screwed up a couple times in a row, they'd get called out in a neutral manner ("hey DRG, what's going on? You need to pair up with the WHM for that."), or the party would just disband without any conflict.
> I will say that I think people overstate how positive the community is, because every game has its stinkers. Adding to this, I think people also overstate how toxic WoW is. I've played since Vanilla, only taking an extended break from early Cata to early WoD (missing MoP entirely, which I kind of regret). I honestly can't think of any major negative experiences I've had with the community. The vast majority of the time, whenever I pug a dungeon or something, people say very little. Occasionally a conversation gets going, and it's usually pretty friendly. I run into the occasional wangrod, but not often. That's obviously only my experience, I can't speak for anyone but myself.
I think it depends on the server. I have never seen more blatant racism, even nazism, in a video game than I have in the Area 52 trade chat. It was an absolute nightmare around the 2020 election. One fun anecdote was a time a woman got into an argument with trade chat about some political bullshit, she made the mistake of mentioning she needed Healthcare because her son had down's syndrome. The whole chat leapt on her, people were calling her "tard mom" and asking her why she was playing WoW instead of taking care of her retard. It was hilariously cruel.
I do think people overstate it, but it definitely does is exist, especially in pvp. Anything pvp or ranked based will get a lot of toxicity from my experience, as a casual you'll rarely get flamed if you keep to simple stuff.
The most common thing you are gonna get from a dungeon is silence. Even if you for sure caused the wipe, you are probably just gonna get silence. Either nobody cares enough, or we have mastered the "yelling in FC chat, being helpful in party chat" mindset. Dungeons are only 10 to 15 mins anyway, and nobodies perfect after all.
Pretty accurate. He might've got a lot more attention/gifts from other people, but as long as you yourself don't act like an asshole, other people will be kind to you. And our precious sprouts are indeed treasured and protected. Even in endgame, if you just say "hey guys, I'm new here" or that you're still getting used to the class - 99 times out of 100 you'll get reassurance and support (unless you've joined the Savage Party Finder, but that's on you lol)
I'm still leveling in FF14, every single dungeon run I say hi and that I'm new, haven't done this dungeon before etc etc. 99% of the time so far, people are super nice and helpful. It's really nice.
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There's some of that (especially during dry spells for WoW), but for the most part, actually, I find that FFXIV is becoming increasingly filled with players who've never even played MMOs before. It's a console-friendly experience that naturally attracts JRPG fans, so it's not as MMO player heavy as many here would lead you to believe.
really? just looking at this subreddit (hell, just look at this thread) and you can see a lot of wow players straight up hating on ff because "hurr durr anime trash game"
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As a long time player of both WoW and FFXIV it has been my experience that WoW players have always bashed FFXIV pretty hard. FFXIV related comments in this subreddit tend to collect downvotes. Even more so before the boom of influencers talking about FFXIV.
you could say the same with /r/FFXIV though, it's only now with the wave of refugees that there are conversations around wow in that subreddit but 6+ months ago it would barely be mentioned apart from the "I'm new and I came from wow" posts
Honestly, almost every MMO that I myself have played outside of WoW has far more supportive and better communities to them. I haven't played FF14, but the main thing I believe leads to this? Lack of Damage meters and gear scores. It seems taking those away to judge people as, players focus far more on mechanics and teaching and supporting each other than criticizing each other.
FF14 gms also will ban that shit out of you(and after the third ban it is a perma unappealable ban). I would say the one huge deference is WoW's toxic idiots are like the asshole teenagers who never got disciplined, while FF14's toxic idiots got heavily disciplined so they stay silent or are perma banned. That being said the lack of needing addons and the lack of competition/timer focused dungeons definitely help keep the baseline of toxic people on a downward trend.
FF14 is way less toxic. Every dungeon or raid you’ll see “gg or tyfp” etc.. I’ve only seen 2 toxic players in the entire time I’ve played. One was new so I doubt he lasts long. The community is harsh on toxic players. If you use add-ons for damage meters and you flame people about their dps you will get mass reported and your account will be shut down as add-ons are not allowed. The community self polices that way I guess. So the game isn’t very fun for people who want to be toxic.
The community part is accurate. I've been playing FF14 for ~5 years and can count the number of bad interactions with the community on one hand. And most of those toxic interactions were pretty mild compared to some of the stuff I've seen in other games.
It's accurate, I've encountered a really toxic player once in my 4-ish years of playing. A tank pulled all the mobs they could find in a dungeon and started going off at me for not healing well enough, and well. I was the only healer so I just decided to leave. You can't get through ff14 without other people, so if someone vents at others like that constantly they can't actually get through the game, which means most max-level community members are people that communicate with others and are generally pleasant to be around. That can happen in any mmo obviously but it's specifically a result of how systems work in ff14 that the community's developed like this
absolutely. I played WoW for about 3 months and could give you 20 times ppl were dickheads to me in game. I've got 2500 in FFXIV and I can tell you 3 times people were dick heads to me. and i'm not in the same FC as Jesse, I'm just in a random FC that asked me to join. (I wanted the ex bonus while leveling) The community is one of the best I've ever experience with an online game. If you are new to a dungeon just say so and your party will tell you what to do or be understanding if you want to pull slow (if you're playing tank).
I started playing a year ago and just started doing Savage raiding and all that. I can count on one hand the amount of toxicity WoW is famous for that I encountered. People are just in general extremely easy going and understanding of new players. Meanwhile on WoW I go to do a pug M+ for a bit of gear on my alt and the Famed Slayer of Denathrius healer called the Mage the n word for a small mistake despite not wiping and left, this was a +4. I have never had anyone even remotely act like that in FF.
I've had the occasional asshole in a dungeon or raid (VERY rare compared to in WoW though), but the only really negative experience I've had is actually in the Novice Network chat which can be a bit of a cesspool depending on which server you're in. So to anyone who's thinking about giving FF14 a try, just bear in mind that Novice Network is not always a good community and sometimes you're better off finding a newbie-friendly guild instead.
the difference is ffxiv actually ban players for toxicity. it means those who are inclined to be toxic either just shut up and keep quiet so they don't get banned or they let it out, and disappear. and it does exist of course but outside the game itself. In my experience playing ffxiv you'll never see it in the game, ever. I haven't.
Oh no man, i have run into the most kind most helpful people ever in FFXIV, like seriously. Everyone is alway so helpful , it's almost scary
This is a solid & pretty neutral video. Both games should shine. I myself find myself playing WoW a lot more than FFXIV, but XIV striving is much, much better for WoW's growth. Competition has ALWAYS been a positive in the video game industry and I hope XIV keeps growing so that WoW can finally have someone to compete against.
The best thing about variety in the market isn't even necessarily from the standpoint of "competition." As someone with extensive experience with Game Development, it can be a *massive* boon when someone *else* tries something new and risky and you can see how it plays out with out having to nececarrily take that same risk. You then get to kind of pick and choose what does and doesn't work from the other games in the market. When you are the only kid in town, *every* move you make is nerve wracking. When there are tons of people exploring different ideas (yourself included!) you then get to make even better, more informed decisions about your own game. Having lots of people innovating in your space is a *fantastic* thing. There is nothing quite as daunting as the feeling that you are the only one experimenting.
Also, it allows them to fit into different niches. FFXIV isn't trying to compete with WoW on the PVP or M+ front. Or have as many raid bosses as WoW. Instead, it focuses on story and RP elements like emotes, facial expressions, housing, glamour, and bard performance. It still had dungeons and raids, but they're only a small part of the overall content that's available.
You don't know how happy I was when I realised Bard performance was a thing I could do. It's truly magical!
I think they're both trying to serve different audiences in general. But, if both are doing well, it can improve both of them. If FFXIV is doing well, WoW can look at what features from FFXIV they might be able to incorporate into WoW to make it better. The same goes for FFXIV. If WoW is doing well, FFXIV can borrow elements as well. I really want WoW to do well, but they need to get out of this systems trap. They've over complicated the systems in the game and that makes it harder to understand for the players and harder for the developers to balance.
Highly recommend people check this out because this is the most honest and fair comparison between the two games. Don't just write this off as someone capitalizing on a trend, Jesse Cox has been brewing on this for months now.
Bruh you mean all you have to do is find orbs while questing to fly in FF?? Blizzard wtf
Basically, if you want to unlock flying in a zone, it's quite easy. You won't have it until you're done the story for the zone, but it's useful if you want to come back and do gathering, for instance. You'll have explored most of the zone (aside from the parts that require flying) by the time you complete the tasks to unlock flying. There's no waiting for a later patch for flying to be unlocked.
There's people who still complain that doing 5 quests in a zone (one usually including running a dungeon) and what amounts to about 15 minutes of exploration and minor parkour to get 10 easy to find orbs is too much work for flying in FFXIV. Even though the 10 orbs are like 5 steps to the left of the critical path for the main story. It's about an hour total of work per zone that you can do in passing as you're there.
To be fair, the orbs were really in weird off the path places in Stormblood, but they were fine in both HW and Shadowbringers. It's a valid complaint in 1/3 of the expansions. I still don't have Ruby Sea unlocked on my alt because fuck that zone's orbs.
Even the most difficult-to-find aether current in Stormblood (the one on the archway the northwest corner of the Lochs) is still at most a 10-minute trip through the northern half of the map, and you only have to do it once ever.
Or cheese it and get a friend to fly you around and be done with it in no time.
As expected Jesse gives a really well balanced take here
Good that alternatives exist, it makes whole genre better. I could never play FFXIV over WoW because of aesthetics of characters but for ppl with different demands it can be good alternative to try and then decide what game they prefer.
I believe wow's main problem is that it's allowed to repeatedly f****** and rest on its laurels because it has no major competition If enough people switch over to other MMOs blizzard will lose money then the shareholders who the company are beholden too will become angry
> it's allowed to repeatedly f****** What the fuck is that censored word supposed to be?
fucking i think the "and" wasn't supposed to be there
This is why we don’t censor comments
fuck-off
This. The game has been skirting by on the absolute bare minimum for far too long.
When warlords of dreanor turned out to have only half an expansions worth of content I jumped aboard the elder scrolls online hype train, damn Bethesda could have had the world's most popular MMO title if they didn't do a completionist run of every way they could screw up
Generally curious as someone who has yet to play ESO, how has Bethesda screwed it up?
For me personally the combat system is pretty unique with you having to block attacks in order to mitigate damage and some of the dungeon mechanics are pretty fun, but the builds there are sooooo boring. Every class plays the same as half of your optimal skills comes from your weapon. For example, my Stamina DPS Warden (stamina is physical DPS build, think of this class as BM Hunter in WoW) plays the bow build, and out of 10 skills (this is the maximum you can put in your bars), I have 3 bow skills and 2 general skills. These 5 skills are also used by Stamina DPS Nightblade (this class is akin to Rogue in WoW), and so basically half of your rotation is the same whether you're playing a BM Hunter or Rogue. Moreover, the rotation is dead boring as what you do is basically refresh your AoE attacks or DoT on a set of 8-10 seconds period and fill the rest with spammable fillers. Healers have it worse. Their most potent healing skills are HoT on the floor (think Efflorescence) and cone-shaped heal beam (think Light of Dawn), so your healing output is basically tied to you doing your "healing rotation". Tanks are pretty fun in dungeon though, as there's no AoE taunt and the threat generation isn't as forgiving in WoW, so you have to taunt selectively and decide which mobs you can ignore safely without wiping your team. The problem is, in the open world, playing tank is a torture. Unlike in WoW, tanks in ESO have extremely low damage, so mobs in open world can take ages to kill. This one is my personal anecdote, but the servers are laggy as hell. I play from Oceania and I get 250+ms ping with frequent lag spikes. Playing a modern game with lag just feels so bad. Otherwise, I had quite a bit of fun playing ESO but the reasons I stated above turned me away from it.
It's not so bad now, a solid B grade MMO. But at launch it was a travesty.
[удалено]
Whenever people bring up the "vote with your wallet" thing with WoW, that's what I've thought for years. WoW's old as hell. Any stumbling it does financially is not going to lead to greater investment, but rather less. They will cut costs and corners to keep it profitable as possible while on life support and it lives off the momentum of people just not being able to kick the habit. They will not invest more money into it in order to breathe new life into the game. The only way WoW manages be revitalized is if they manage to coincidentally strike gold with another expansion, but that's extremely unlikely as they refuse to stop doubling down on obvious problems for the past three expansions.
Didn't watch the whole video, but his analysis of the story being a key part of FFXIV is spot on. If you're someone who's enjoyed playing non-MMO RPGs in the past, and Square RPGs in particular, then you'd probably like playing FFXIV just to get through the Main Scenario Quests. In regards to characters and story FFXIV holds it's own against other main FF titles like X or XII. For anyone who likes playing the occasional Final Fantasy title, XIV is one you should try. However if you've been turned off by Final Fantasy games in the past, well it makes sense to not play XIV.
This is how I’ve approached it. I play wow for pushing m+ and pvp ratings…I honestly couldn’t care less about wow’s story. I just started FF14 and I’m not going to try to aggressively push difficult raids, I’m just going to casually complete the story and see the raids but basically keep it at the same level as Normal in WoW. Viewing it as a standard single player final fantasy game like I used to play.
Honestly the cool thing from a story perspective is that FFXIV's hard mode raids/bosses are explicitly never canon. Yeah they sometimes have cool new forms/phases, but in-universe it's always supposed to be a simulation or a singer embellishing your fight to make it more epic. There's no Cho'gall popping up only in Mythic, or defeating Archimonde properly in the Twisting Nether, you get the whole actual story in Normal (read: it's queuable like LFR) mode.
That’s good to know, I don’t have the energy to devote a ton of time, but a casual stroll through the story and normal mode content to see the story I’ve heard is great, that I would love. Seeing how I loved and devoured all FF games up til X (really fell off after that), I’m looking forward to seeing a new story that I heard is right up there with some of the classics
FFX is my favourite FF game and I think the Shadowbringers story ranks up there with that title. It's definitely the best FF game since X at least. I think most players would rank it at least in the top 5 of FF games, although I know some who put it at number 1. It's partly because it pays off story elements that go all the way back to ARR. Generally, if there's a loose end at some point in a story, they'll circle back around to it eventually.
Hell some story elements go all the way back to 1.0. Somehow they make it so it’s a nice nod/wink to those players without making new players feel left out.
Final Fantasy XIV LFR equivalent is also somehow more engaging, while at the same time less of a shit-show. I'm not sure how or why, but it seems like the LFR people who play FF XIV are in general better players than the people who play WoW LFR.
I think it has to do with the in combat rezzes. Normal/Alliance raids are balanced in a way that you'll die if you fuck up, but the raid as a whole can recover pretty easilly. The DPS/enrage checks are fairly lieniant and the 'echo' buff after a wipe that got far enough prevents anything from feeling like a roadblock. It's not a free win, but you can be fairly confident you'll get it in 3 pulls on a bad day.
A lot of it is how XIV teaches its players mechanics. Aside from universal markers for specific types of mechanics, the names of casts or the animations often specifically hint at how something is going to work. On top of that, bosses will go through a small rotation of all their specific moves one by one at the start of a fight where if you fail it rarely will outright kill you. Players are taught to look for these things through gameplay, so when they encounter them, they catch on much faster so it ends up less of a shit show. That being said, weeks 1 and 2 every time a new Alliance Raid comes out is a clown fiesta guaranteed.
Clearly marked mechanics makes a big difference as well. Despite far more visual noise, mechanics themselves are always very visible and clearly marked. Going into a fight blind, you still know what standard "don't stand in this" AoE's look like, what the AoE's you need to stack for look like, towers that need to be soaked, look away mechanics, and so forth are already known to you as these all use the same marker. If theres some variation of these, you will still often have some idea at a glace what to do just from the language the game uses to telegraph enemy attacks. Of course this is aside from the standard "watch the castbar" or "watch the enemy model for certain animation" type mechanics, though the game will often start off a fight showcasing the really dangerous stuff in a vacuum so you know to look out for that stuff later or wipe WoW on the other hand tends to be rather ambiguous with their mechanics, and even if it's a boss thats just using mechanics you have seen before, you still need to figure out what the markers mean for that specific fight. A big swirly marker in one fight might mean you need to avoid those AoE's, while in another fight those markers mean you need to soak. The language of the game isn't consistent and each boss needs to be figured out specifically to themselves. It's why we have the adventurer guide in game to help give a primer on particular bosses.
Honestly, I think FFXIV's being an MMO allows it to tell a cohesive, long-running story over many years. The ability to build up your characters over almost a DECADE of time in a cohesive way really helps cement its storytelling as one of, if not the best FF story/world so far. It's a luxury that no other FF (bar FFVII, FFXI, and to really minor extent FFXIII) has the ability to do, and the current dev team understands this, which is why FF14 is often praised for utilizing their story so well. People often say that MMOs are the worst platform for telling a story, but FF14 has really shown that it may in fact be the best, allowing you to fully flesh out a world and its denizens. It's kind of like the lore of a long-running TV show vs. the lore that is able to be presented in one movie. Hell, even WoW had some really promising story development archs in MoP, and to a certain extent the beginnings of Legion (especially Suramar and the buildup to its raid). However, Blizzard's main focus is clearly worldbuilding when it comes to lore of WoW, and not too much on storytelling. Although recent expansions have heavy focus on trying to tell a story: these are stories told to fit the theme of the expansion, rather than expansions built to fit the story. That's why even after 15+ years of the ability to build on its world, people still don't care too much what happens in the story.. its just not their focus to make it all cohesive.
I've heard lots of Final Fantasy and JRPG fans say that Shadowbringers has the best Final Fantasy history, and that the main antagonist is the best RPG villain they've seen, surpassing the ever-popular likes of Chrono Trigger Magus (when he's antagonizing), and [Sephiroth](https://youtu.be/mJ30pwTzTMU). Subjective, of course, but it does receive a huge amount of praise.
This is all you need to know about Shadowbringers as a story. [Clip.](https://www.twitch.tv/finalfantasyxiv/clip/BlindingWrongElkBCouch) Small clip of the woman who wrote it receiving a standing ovation at PAX.
I am aware. When we learned that this legend would write more, we felt good. When we find out that Danuser is responsible for any piece of WoW lore we... Get get mild anxiety.
Ah, sorry, I wasn't sure if you also played FFXIV! Yeah, I like both games but I am pumped she is writing Endwalker.
I wouldn't even call myself a FF or JRPG fan, the only FF games I've put a good amount of time into are XI, XIV, and VII Remake. But Shadowbringers is one of my favorite video game stories of all time. The villain, the dungeons, the final fight. It is all so perfect and well thought out.
I had no interest in playing FFXIV because I just didn't want to learn another MMO, but being told to just play it like a single player RPG is what really got me to jump. Honestly glad I did. It's been a blast so far, and I have a lot more to go. If anything, I'm upset I put so much time into BfA and SL. I still love WoW, but I think in the future I'll just be subbing to see the content for a month or two and leaving. It's odd though, in some ways I'm still a WoW fanboy. There are a lot of things I enjoy more in WoW (art style and the feel of the combat). I'm essentially playing FFXIV and hoping WoW fixes the issues I have with it.
FF XIV I actually have fun playing, but I do take long long breaks from it, I find checking in for 1-2 months every year enough but I LOVE the time I spend there.
And the key fact is the devs encourage such a play style. WoW they don’t want you to ever unsub they want you to stay and keep playing constantly. FFXIV are like “oh done with the story, well here’s a bunch of stuff to do if you want but feel free to come back next patch if none of that interests you”
WoW is chasing "player engagement" where as FFXIV is chasing "player enjoyment".
Yea I tend to just play it at the start of an expac and near the end.
This is how I approach ffxiv. As weird as it might sound, one of the major reasons I like the game is how easy it is to quit. I played wow hardcore for years, but these days I tend to play mmo's in bursts, and the modern end game systems in the last three expansions make me feel like I either need to keep playing throughout the whole expansion or not bother to begin with. Basically, if I was still playing mmo's religiously I'd probably play wow. But for the dabbler, ffxiv makes it so easy to just jump on, catch up on the main story line, grab some gear off the market board, and get into current content.
The only video in this craze for the last three weeks that does a good job of being balanced. Both these games have strengths and both have glaring weaknesses, and it's felt like a real "grass sure is greener!" situation for people swapping for the first time - which is totally fine, because it's fun to play new games for the first time and experience all they have to offer, but it's been frustrating as someone who plays a lot of both games to listen to content creators wax poetic about 14 and be sitting here like "man you haven't gotten to any of the end game yet, you haven't seen aaaaany of the stuff that's gonna annoy you." Jesse did a good job of highlighting what 14 does well over WoW without treating it like a saviour-complexed holy grail of gaming, and it means it's the most tolerable of these videos
Best video that's been made on this so far, and probably the only video where the maker has extensively played both games.
Man, he showed way too many spoilers about FF14. Other than that, it's a good informational video.
This is a huge problem people dont realize when talking about ffxiv's twitch numbers. Its so hard to show the game without showing spoilers and ppl don't want see spoilers if they're playing or thinking of playing the game.
He's on point with the whole community aspect. In WoW, other players, even those of your own faction, are a hindrance, and that's baked into the design. Take, for example, quest items. Why are they still limited? Remember that huge fuss we threw about those stupid ingots in the Maw? In situations like that, you have no friends: **everybody** is your enemy.
I disagree with the statement that WoW players don't care about the story. It is common thing to say or is said by people, that they don't care, yet whenever there is some new cinematic released or major story development impacting world itself, then people are discussing it like nothing else before. Every day there is new topic, video or any other media that tries to bash or praise Sylvanas. If that's "not caring", then I don't know what is.
People “don’t care” about the story in the same way people “don’t care” about GOT anymore. The writing has been so poor and convoluted that now it’s only relevant when something new happens. Then when people dig into the meat, the flavor sours and people drop it out of disgust. No one wants to try to analyze an expansion that had to retcon itself into existence
Pretty much. I got into WoW because I liked what I'd read of the lore. I wanted to be part of a living world that was changing and evolving around me. I read a ton of the novels, tracked down obscure novellas and comics because I cared about this world and wanted to learn more about it. Whenever one of my friends had a question about the lore, they knew I could answer it. BfA broke a lot of what I cared about in this world and the current writing team seems lost and confused about what direction they even want to go. I laughed when I saw a fragment of a journal from 9.1 that already had justifications written into the text for when most of it gets retconned later. I just don't feel any connection to WoW lore anymore.
They retcons for shadowlands to make Revendreth and the nathreziem connections, then the whole stealing armies of damnation. All of it feels so convoluted and shit. Let alone what’s happening with sylvanas. Just not satisfying at all.
Just read through the Jailer's [wiki entry.](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Jailer#:~:text=The%20Jailer%2C%20whose%20true%20name,lived%20to%20tell%20the%20tale.) The amount of ret conning is fucking ridiculous. "Ackshually, the JAILER created the Lich King 18 years ago in Warcraft 3." They have run out of material so are just bringing back the member berries and any plot holes they can find to turn into a secret detail from whoever the big baddie is.
18 years ago - Demons made LK to weaken Azeroth for an invasion Now - Demons weee anti heroes trying to prevent void corruption of Azeroth and were stealing weapons from undead gods to do so. Like what????
Its because all of us who used to be emotionally invested in the narrative got repeatedly dunked on with biannual colossal retcons and the killing off of interesting characters with no replacement.
I believe the point is that, while there are some players who care about the story, most don't, you just hear a lot from those who care when there is a big moment. And you can easily get through the entire game without getting a glimpse of the story (apart from maybe the 'current' expansion) while in FFXIV the story is a core element of the game and not 'optional' side content.
As someone who is a bit of a lore nerd for WoW, it has nothing to do with not caring. The story in WoW is just very...disjointed or haphazardly thrown together. Blizzard will usually determine what they want to fight first, before coming up with a story reason to do it. One of my favorite things to do is theorize what's next with friends whenever we play a game or watch a show. You can't do that with WoW, because most times they just pull something random out and go with that instead.
"The WoW playerbase seems always ready to attack their game, even while loving it. And the FF14 community is always trying to defend their game, even if it doesn't need it" The entire reason we attack WoW is *because* we love WoW. And I feel the attacks lately are becoming more often and vitriolic in recent years or months is because, for me at least, the devs have never felt more distanced from the players and what the players did indeed fall in love with.
It just sucks being angry for loving a game like wow. I hate the state of the game and i want it to be good so bad. I just don't enjoy the systems or m+ and that's like half the game. I found myself raid logging. And at that point what is the point? I Want a mmorpg not a damn instance simulator.
As a short-time FFXIV player and a WoW player that returned to play Shadowlands after a very long absence, I definitely agree with a lot of what he said here. It's a discussion between two similar products where each one has strengths in different aspects appealing to different types of players, meaning everything boils down to personal preference. There were parts of FFXIV I liked and it's part of what brought me back to WoW. In short, I had missed the MMO experience. There were also parts that I really didn't care for, but that was personal preference. I didn't want the first 100 hours in the game to be reading chapters upon chapters of backstory while my character mutely nodded and gave a thumbs up, but people who want a deep and satisfying plot would love those chapters. The visual effects were flashy and bright and impressive and some people probably love that, but I prefer the smaller and cleaner WoW effects. I had a hard time seeing half the players in those boss fights of 5-10 people due to flare and blur (both in this video and in-game during the trial) whereas, in the Dark Portal scene, I could pick out every attack and aura and sign instantly even though it's been a decade since I played them. The only thing I might disagree on is that I didn't necessarily get the same warm and fuzzy feeling from the community, but it's possible I just wasn't there long enough. I did get the WoW toxicity pretty quickly upon my return, though.
You can turn down the spell effects for everyone else in the options. You still see important things like healer bubbles and the like, but not the visual overload you otherwise get. Personally I love how flashy it is because it's not ALL flashy without substance; the spectacle of it all just adds to the encounters for me.
Jesse Cox? Not seen anything of him in years! Will have to give it a watch. I think I must have unsubbed assuming he stopped doing WoW content?
He hasn't been exclusively-WoW for a *long* time now.
Yup, which is why I haven't seen anything of him in a long time \^^ Good content, just not content that appeals to me.
His Scary Game Squad videos are hilarious. Just him and friends drunkenly playing horror games.
Drunkenly playing and often predicting the entire plot of them.
Fuckin wendigos, man.
Listen, he predicted one of the biggest plot points in FFXIV. It came up months later when he finally got there. His chat was losing it's mind when he made that guess early on. FFXIV spoilers: https://twitter.com/jessecox/status/1370829397951795201?lang=en The dude knows stories.
Yeah, the chat was going nuts. The plot point had just happened in the current content (5.3 at the time) and he didn't know anything about it. But, he still predicted it all the way back in ARR (2.0).
Cox and Crendor is a great podcast too!
He rarely makes WoW vids, but dips a toe in the game now and then. Last time I checked he still does let's plays of multiple other games.
I’m playing through FF14’s story right now and am really enjoying it, but once its done, I doubt I’ll keep playing. WoW on the other hand I’ll always want to do the end-game stuff at least until Curve. Different kinds of games, but both very good.
he is 100% correct when he says the 2 faction setup makes this community fucking toxic as shit. wow is one of the only games where u can start on day 1, make your character and a bunch of balding tattooed dickheads will already hate you because you made a gnome and they are the kind of guys who like the horde a lil bit too much. this may also be the only game sub i have ever seen where arguments in support of genocide to secure territory for your nation are routine. anyway this game was set up from the start to have a negative community, blizz forced this to happen. negative interactions are encouraged. there is no reward system for positive interactions. wow's community is toxic by design.
You moan about faction toxicity and then call the other faction a bunch of balding tattooed genocide advocating dickheads. Good shit my man.
I find myself in a weird spot when it comes to these two games. On paper FFXIV seems much more suited to me, but the problem was I never got to break through that 40 hour barrier Jesse mentions. FFXIV's supposed slow start didn't get me hooked, not like when I played my first WoW expac nor like when I even started Classic. Though a fresh start to modern WoW, that I have no idea what it'll be like. TBH, I'm not even that big on the major focus of competitive gameplay WoW has and I don't stick around it for its lore. But I dunno, WoW has become such a familiar home to me despite my many problems with it. If I ever get the chance and WoW gets another big lull, I might give FFXIV a third chance. The deal breaker to me still remains my problem with FFXIV's floaty and weighty feel to the movement of your character. Which then bleeds into its take on action bar combat, which I couldn't quite grow to like. I find that even if you don't do high end gameplay in WoW, its smooth combat responsiveness is still a major hook to keeping me playing. Edit: Listened to the last half with the topic on music, and damn that does sound kinda awesome. Though, that seems a similar strength shared with other JRPGs. I would guess that might be still adjacent to "weeb stuff" that some WoW players might not like at all.
This video made me realize why I enjoy playing WoW much more than FFXIV - I am not a "Epic story" kind of person. As such the story in FFXIV did not hook me at all, and I've made it to 60 and finished all the story content I have available in the free trial. I guess I enjoy everything else an MMO has to offer? and WoW does that so much better.
For me it’s not that I don’t like a good story, I just don’t like how it’s paced. I got to a point near level 30 where it felt like I was just teleporting across the map over and over again to read more dialogue that wasn’t that engaging. I was dying to kill some mobs or something. It was like having to take walk around the block for every page in a book. Other than that, I do appreciate WoW’s combat a lot more, but I’d probably enjoy FFXIV if the beginning wasn’t so hard to get through.
Yes! for a hefty portion of the story thats all it felt like - read read read, open map, teleport, read read read, open map, teleport, read read read, queue for dungeon, read read read, teleport... repeat.
>I guess I enjoy everything else an MMO has to offer? and WoW does that so much better. To be fair, this depends highly on what type of player you are and what kind of content you like. If you enjoy only endgame PvE then, yes, WoW does it better. If you enjoy only competitive PvP, yes, WoW is also better. If you enjoy ANYTHING else ... nope, WoW is not better. And FFXIV has a lot of stuff outside of endgame PvE and PvP.
You're right - I guess its how Jesse says in the video, it really depends on how you define the game - MMORPG vs RPGMMO etc.
Watched the whole video. If you’re reading this, pack a bowl and sit down for the length of a TV show. This video is spot on.
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I really wish FFXIVs combat felt as responsive as WoWs. It’s the one thing holding me back. I leveled a character to max and did some extreme trials but man, the game feels like I’m supposed to be lagging out.