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To me, this game has no relation to FF11, aside from the fact that it has renamed mithra in it.
I guess that's good in a way, that the game has its own identity.
Guild Leves are by far the saving grace for me in this game. I hope to get to do them often, and that they continue to be creative with them.
They've certainly improved on the ability to travel. I can only assume that chocobos and airships will be roadblocked with level requirements and quests. But to be honest, they're a mere convience right now.
What confuses me is that SE made travel much easier, yet made everything else a very long tiedious grind.
I don't expect them to release all their planned content at once at release. We'll probably have the chocobos and airships in place, with a roadblock. They mentioned each city will have some sort of "tourist attraction" but the only two mentioned by name were a casino and battle stadium in uldah. I'm not sure if those, and whatever is in the other two cities, will be available on release. I somewhat figure they wont right away. If they were it would be interesting.
As for now, there's not a whole lot to hold my attention. Most the time I feel liek I'm grinding, but not having fun doing it. At the very least, I'm still accomplishing something rather than standing around jeuno with a seek party flag up heh.
Things that they really need to fix:
-The downloader/patcher. Its absolutely unacceptable that players have to seek out and physically patch the game themselves. And let's face it, a lot of players who will buy the retail will probably not have the knowledge to do so. There's no excuse to have to wait 3 hours for 1kb of a patch that never comes.
The fact that its been broken from the first alpha, and still hasnt been addressed, makes me believe that it never will be.
-Better monster population. I am going to optimistically assume that the placement of mobs in open beta is temporary. There just isnt enough around to make viable parties. If you were to play with yourself or in a group you spend the majority of your time running long stretches trying to find something to kill. The zones are so huge, and yet most of them are very vaccant. I get that SE wants people to have roaming parties, but a whole lot of roaming and no party is a little extreme. Let's just hope that SE plants large concentrations of monsters in more locale.
-Durability limits. Durability by definition is, "lastingness: permanence by virtue of the power to resist damage or wear," not I'm running around in broken underwear I cant fix after 2 days of play. So far armor and weapons in this game wear down far too quickly, and the punishment for having a worn, mind not totaly broken, weapon or armor is far too harsh. It upsets me that i have to buy a new weapon every 2 days because no one can fix the one I have and if I don't, I jsut dont get any skill points. I can't imagine camping an nm for months SE style to finally get a rare drop armor or weapon from it, just to have it break on you after using it only once or twice. Unless you have the time and money to raise all the crafts yourself, or have really good friends to hound on constant, you'll likely always be in a permanent state of nerf.
Fixing an item via a crafter should last you at least a few weeks, not a few days.
-SE didnt install the auction houses for about 3 weeks into FF11's release. I'm hoping that they eventually do the same for 14. Although I fail to see how it "establishes the economy" by omitting it from launch. They seem enamoured with the terrible market ward idea, and I'm pretty sure they realize that once an auction house is in place, hardly anyone will bother shopping in the wards. Since they have a financial gain from selling you a retainer, they are hesitant to add the auction house. The impression they give in interviews is that they'd rather not have one at all. Whilest the retainer idea isnt per se, a bad one entirely, its nothing in comparison to the ease of an auction house. I hope that auction houses and delivery boxes will be in the game sooner than later.
I know that first launch mmo's are a work in progress so I'm in a wait and see posistion. If they were to fix the things I mentioned I'd at least be content to jump on and grind on ocassion.
However, for a lot of people, the game might be better played a year from now. Most MMO's are content shy the first year.
For the record though, it feels to me that SE was really trying hard to avoid all the negatives in ff11 such as making helming and crafting harder to bot, or making the game soloable, but I feel that they didnt take any of the positives from 11. There were so many things that were good, even brilliant ideas in 11 that they seem to have taken a step backwards in 14. Or tried to take the idea and make it needlessly complicated.
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PS3 Friend list name: Pantherxx Wii code 1629-0463-4657-0263 (revised 9/28/07) Steam ID - Pantherxx010 62BLU 75PLD Reactived 7/5/10 
