I finished a Large map while waiting for the last 1% of the FFXIV beta download.

At least you got in bastard...I want to try before I buy cause I grew tired of FF 11 in less then a year....

Try again, i couldnt apply yesterday, the site said "blahblha no more applicants", but this morning it was open again

ff 11 was the worse mmo i ever played...the controls were so bad i never went past the first month..and dont get me started on the sign up process and logging in was a complete nightmare...sadly the new one looks to be more of the same...this franchise has sucked since FF7 anyway...

Um hate to break it to you but if you quit after ff7 you missed out on 9 which was one of the best of the series.  Also so far I've been pleasantly surprised by 14.  It has a very good questing system, and the battle system has been sped up with the new stamina bar.

Yeah, the FF XIV updater is terrible.

Incidentally, so is the game. It has the worst UI of any MMO I've ever played. Whispers are so limited in length they make twitter messages seem long. I never did figure out how to reply without typing out the persons full name again. Most things you'd expect to be able to do with a mouse (scroll around the map, drag skills onto your bars) can't be done and require either strange sequences of commands or downright odd keyboard buttons. It crashes like crazy.

If you disconnect while doing a guildleve (quest), you fail it. you then have to go back to who issued it to do it again, which if it happens to be a tutorial introductary one can be a problem since the NPC won't issue it again (and ones later in the game have 48 hour timers, so if you crash during it you fail and can't even try again for two days!). Since the game crashes frequently... yeah. Alt+Tab in full screen mode is prone to blowing up.

Hell, you can't even group with someone unless you're already in trade range of them.

It's kind of sad that UI design seems to be going backwards in this genre, but this plays entirely like a PS3 game that was given a low quality port.

To answer your question of "what were they thinking?", I really don't know. Who in their right mind designs a game where you use JKL as the shortcuts to scroll around the map instead of using the mouse? I don't think they have any designers who know a bloody thing about PC games. The patcher does illustrate the problems nicely though, I finally got around that by going to a fansite and grabbing a copy of the file someone uploaded.

I gave up on trying to download the client. This is the exact same garbage Square pulled with FF11 patching. It took nearly 10 hours to patch the launch day client.  I see they have learned nothing. They should've just paid to have the file up on fileplanet.

The problem with the UI in FF11 was it was built for the PS2 not the PC. I remember it took alot of getting used to cuz you had to hold CTRL down to navigate.

I have a friend at work that got into the beta and apprently its a buggy crap fest in alot of ways. Well they got 3 weeks to finish polishing it up, but I think I will use those funds elsewhere and just keep waiting for our dear Star Wars: TOR to release next year. (better be good god damn it so sick of bad star wars games...)

I couldn't believe it was BitTorrent only.

I couldn't believe the game has almost 140,000 files in almost 20,000 folders.

I couldn't believe it looked like FF11 with more options.

I uninstalled it. 

I could understand all of this if it was a dev build not meant for public consumption, which obviously it is not.

Yeah, I've got the same hope right now. Bioware has a LOT of people watching them. If they can pull it off it'll be the biggest thing in the genre since WoW.

You know the worst thing? I ran into a number of crash bugs and usability issues. I wanted to report them and give dump logs to help them get fixed.

I can't. Open beat testers are specifically EXCLUDED from providing feedback on the beta site. There is NO way to provide feedback.

It literally is a demo. And a very, very bad one at that.

I really should stop my download, especially when just this one file is going to take over 10 hours to download.

I can't help it though, I want to see this nightmare for myself.

That is pretty bad but I'm not sure how it'd beat having technologically illiterate developers on a multimillion dollar game.

Yeah lol i found it funny how it yelled in my face with a bold font, right after signing up; "Open beta testers have NO access to the forums!"

Sigh. I miss MMO's.. And i've tried them all. They are fun and exciting at first, when you discover new things, then its a boring rutine (doesnt matter if its grindy or not, either its kill-mobs grindy or do-quests grindy).
I even reactivated my ancient dusty WoW account, because i thought, maybe it is enjoyable after all, so many peeps play it.
Just, no. It wasnt. The entire game is empty, devoid of other players, everyone on every server is lvl 80, sitting around waiting for raids.

I've liked alot of mmo's, but they all bore me in the end. I love mmo's.. I loved Aion. No, i was in love with it, at the same time as i met a girl who i fell in love with who also was in love with Aion, perhaps that had something to do with it. Then they banned me by mistake as they tried to ban the bots. Then the bots and goldsellers persisted, and there was no point to play it anymore.

I just want, a fun mmo. That isnt ruined by hacks, bots, goldseller spam, or empty desolate landscapes. Why is that so hard?

DDO is pretty solid. No monthly, can spend as low as 20$ on the game and have access to all the major content. Character customization beats all the generic class crap you find in other MMos.

Just saying.

LOTRO goes free to play on the 10th (the 8th if you owned it previously) and blows DDO out of the water.

I've tried both recently, and I agree.  DDO is a solid MMO, especially if you like the more traditional AD&D 3.x rule set.  LOTRO is a really good looking game, the game flow and combat mechanics are handled well and the deed system is an interesting approach to personalizing your character.  LOTRO is superior to DDO in every way.  The story and lore seem handled well.  You see little connections to the original source material without it being thrown in your face.  The only thing I didn't care for was a crafting system that seems to require a substantial time and resource investment

Oh, and as for FF14, this thread is pretty much quoted for truth.  The UI is -clearly- designed for controller play, which you can do on the PC.  I hooked up my 360 controller and movement worked pretty well.  Navigating the menus was another story, but my controller setup might have been goofed.  But navigating the menus with a mouse and keyboard is also a poor experience.  The mouse feels sloppy and the sheer amount of menus to handle even basic tasks is overboard.  WoW's 6 years of polish really stand out against FF14.  For example, in WoW, you right click an NPC and bring up a quest box.  Hit accept at the bottom and you are good to go.  In FF14 you first click an NPC to target them, then click again to initiate conversation.  Text comes in small chunks in an undersized dialog box that you must continue clicking through.  Then, when the quest flavor text has finished you are presented with a traditional menu box to accept or decline the quest.  Its like the devs said "Let's look at the best best parts of WoW's interface and NOT handle things that way because we're going to be different."  

Considering the game is due out in 3 weeks, the lack of polish and the large number of remaining basic stability issues are clear evidence FF14 is going to need a lot of post release work to make decent.  I can't find the link atm but I read on another forum that the devs have all but admitted the PC version is really a giant final beta phase for the PS3 release early next year.

LOTRO goes free to play next week?? wow never knew, havent played it since beta. And DDO, i kinda forgot about that game after the beta
*goes to check out both of those games and see how they changed*

Ghostbit you are so right. So many games (especially mmo's) these days are obsessed with being "their own thing", even to the extent of re-inventing the wheel instead of being grateful for, and using, all the innovations and polish that previous games have built upon. Such as simple things like your example, right click + accept, quest accepted.

In a way it can be seen in Elemental too, where they also wanted to make it their own unique thing.. Which i respect, but the result is also that the game is unpolished and the gameplay is undeveloped (perhaps not completely figured out yet, considering the magic overhaul coming soon).
As opposed to if they used the decades of polish and previous game features / ideas other games have come up with, to build further upon that, to reach something better and improved, rather than just something new and half-thought out

An exagerrated (and stupid funny) analogy would perhaps be, if Mercedes decided to invent a new hexagonal wheel for their cars, instead of simply using the best known wheel already invented and refined for all these years
Sure the hexagonal weel is rad and different, but it sure does roll alot more chuggishly than the old circular tried and proved (and loved!) wheel.
I wonder which will be the most remembered and copied 5 years from that, the hexagon wheel or the circular wheel?

I don't think 'reinventing the wheel' really has relevance anymore as an analogy.  Everyone understands it but it makes no sense.

A wheel gets a new tread pattern and thats pretty much it.

Games evolve.  Some go farther than others.  Varying budgets, playstyles, company experience levels, programming languages...

It seems more like Stardock went outside their comfort zone and paid the price.  I'm sure they've learned from the experience, but if games never evolved I would stop playing em.

Although, hey, technically someone did that too.

http://www.dailytech.com/Michelin+Reinvents+the+Wheel/article13553.htm

You know the game isn't that bad once you find out it was designed to be played with a Gamepad and not a keyboard/mouse. Plugged in a 360 controller and tried it again and it plays pretty good. Though I did just find out that in an effort to throttle game advancement speeds (ie leveling) they are only allowing 8 thresholds (a threshold being however much xp they deem it should be) per week of 100% experience gain followed by 7 more thresholds of declining xp gain until you reach your limit.

Now this mainly applies to the Physical xp as you can change to one of the other jobs and gain skill points in it as regular when your current job is capped. I don't know exactly how I feel about this system. Sure it makes sure everyone progresses at roughly the same rate, but at the same time I tend to progress faster then alot of people so its almost a punishment in that aspect. Sure in the long run it won't matter because once you are max level it doesnt matter that you aren't gaining xp anymore.

ffxiv's download sucks hard..find the .torrent file and download with your fav torrent downloader seems to work wonders.  The game is still in beta though, and really feels that way.  Am really hoping the clean it up before release. 

I was getting some good elemental time in while waiting for ffxiv beta to download too..cept elemental would out of memory or other random crash on me every 20 turns or so....  Got an OOM crash while saving once, getting to the point I gotta restart every few turns to ensure I don't lose progress, for a released game this feels a lot like beta =P.

I don't have high hopes for FFXIV. BioWare indeed had better come through with The Old Republic. A lot more than just the game is riding on it, I think. If BioWare's Star Wars MMO fails, I really don't think we'll ever see another one attempted.

The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2 are all I'm interested in.  The MMO landscape has become supremely boring.

I don't even like Star Wars.  Meh.

Even with the gamepad there's still the issue of how small the whisper size limit is (added to trying to type text messages with a gamepad), the 48 hour timers, the fact that if you disconnect or crash (and it crashes frequently) you fail the thing and can't even try it again for 48 hours, and on and on it goes.

It really plays like a game with a 2001 MMO UI. Someone needs to tell them that the bar has been raised in the last 9 years.