A while ago I mentioned I was going to end my subscription to Final Fantasy XIV. Not because I am tired of the game or anything like that. It is just that because the economy here is so terrible right now that I have to be more stingy on what I spend my money on. Specially if it is something in dollars, which is the case with this game.
I should have done that a long time ago but I thought I could finish the Shadowbringers patches to see how that storyline ended. The problem was that I couldn’t do the content from those patches right away because it required a higher iLevel than what I had.
Still I thought I could grind enough crafting levels and dungeons to get the new gear that would give me the required iLevel.
Unfortunately I never got the patience for that grind. Yes, I know that getting crafting and gathering levels are stupidly easy right now. So much that it is barely a grind anymore. But it is still a grind, even if a minor one.
And I have no idea when I will get the patience for it, even more so when I am pretty much hooked into Minecraft. So it doesn’t make sense for me to keep paying subscription for a game I am not playing.
I eventually want to get back into Final Fantasy XIV and see how the story continues though. Shadowbringer’s story was one of the best in the entire Final Fantasy franchise which makes me want to see what comes next. It will just have to wait until I am in the right mindset for it (and hopefully the economy is better too).
My experience with FFXIV anymore is that their “catch-up” mechanics they implement with each new expansion means that once I feel “done” with FFXIV after an expansion (seems like whenever I cap all jobs again, usually about 4-6 months) I can then un-subscribe until the next expansion comes out.
At this point, I then can uses the old old old Poetics tomes to buy the top-end dungeon gear which has plenty of ilvl to enable me to play through the new expansion. Catching up the MSQ from the prior expansion generally only takes 3-4 days and that’s it — I’ve just caught up 18 months of the game in a week-ish. Sure I’m “behind” the content locusts, but eh…. being 1st in an MMO means nothing to me, so I’m happy with how it turns out for me.
Those are good points. I also don’t care about being “1st” in a MMO. But the reason I wanted to catch up on the story is because people on Twitter were about to spoil it for me. (in fact I think they may already spoiled at least one thing, through fanart). Since I didn’t want to be spoiled I decided to take a sort of sabbatical from Twitter until I got caught up.
I don’t begrudge anyone from wanting to talk about a story they love but Twitter is unfortunately a terrible platform to discuss anything that may spoil it for others.
Now it is been so long that I am pondering if I even should return to Twitter. The quietness and lack of memes every 5 minutes is kinda nice. But I also miss a few people who I only had contact with in there.
The mandatory nature of the MSQ coupled with the iLvl restrictions to even finish said MSQ has always been the game’s biggest turn-off for me personally. I really hate that.
I’m aware that ‘hate’ is a strong word to describe feelings towards what at the end of the day is just a game, but I really feel very strongly about this, especially because I would really like to ‘love’ the game instead. There’s so much to love about this game, but this stubborn insistance on game design that says “you MUST do this before you can do that, next you MUST do this…and so on” just kills it for me.
I don’t mind it because for me the story is engaging enough that I am willing to make some concessions. Plus it is better than in Everquest 2 where if anyone asked me why we were suddenly go to a new land the best answer I could give would be “… for reasons, I guess?”
But the iLevel restrictions do annoy me. Yeah, yeah, the carrot on a stick on MMOs is gear with bigger numbers and they need to give people an incentive to keep pursuing those numbers. As someone who couldn’t care less about bigger numbers though I find that method of “progression” highly irritating. :p