For me WoW felt like it exhausted all the story established in the rts games i cared about and the story that replaced it was largely pretty dull. That and patches lasting over a year with things like seige of orgrimmar were pretty ridiculous for a sub game. I already loved final fantasy games and it played similarly enough. I tried it and ended up having far more to do when i logged in and liked having a job system over individual characters per class. Thats about it.

• Mog Station

How can I get Final Fantasy XIV to update faster? I just got the collectors edition today and installed the game in under 5 minutes, but now it's updating and is taking forever! Not only that, it will upload and download at random high speeds, then very slow speeds, then won't update at all for at least 2-3 minutes before it does that. Mine started out fine at my usual.34 mb/s but towards the end plummeted to.04 it may have something to do with so many people downloading it at once.

I spent a lot of years and money on WoW but konamis treatment of silent hill kind of inoculated me to having any brand loyalty sentiment. If you arent having fun it doesnt matter what the name on the box is, case in point FF13. I like Warcraft but Warlords was my jumping off point. I had years of fun but i cant see anygame having any hold over me because of time put in.I mean shit i put like a thousand hours into dark souls and monster hunter 4, that didnt stop me looking into the clones of them y'know? I didn't really drop WoW for FFXIV since I stopped playing WoW quite awhile ago and just really started playing FFXIV a little over a month ago (I did play for a month last Oct. But stopped to play some single player games I owned first).

That said, there are two big reasons I that will keep me playing FFXIV over returning to WoW. Those are the Story and the Community. FFXIV's story is just so well done for an MMO.

It really does feel like a main line FF game with great characters, great world building, and lots of twists and turns that keep me interested. When I left WoW back in Warlords, the story just felt so stale and boring.

The characters were all so one dimensional and everything was so predictable. Never once in WoW did I feel like I just had to do the next quest because I just had to see what would happen next. I have gotten that feeling quite a few times with FFXIV.The other thing, the Community, is something you might say the developers have no control over and that is true but I really feel like the FFXIV devs have put in some systems that really do encourage and reward certain types of actions and behaviors. Things like the novice network/mentor thing, the roulettes, and the bonuses for completing group content with a player who has never done said content before in your group has seemed to almost trick players into being nice to new players and it has spread to most other aspects of the game. I have ran into so many kind and helpful players in the short time I have played FFXIV where as when I left WoW the community was almost reaching MOBA levels of toxic behavior.

Now granted, I have not done any max level content or pvp in FFXIV and I am guessing that is where you are most likely to find the elitist asshats, but even just asking questions in general chat seems to me to get way less joke or troll answers in FFXIV than you would get in WoW.Other than all of that, FFXIV just has everything I am looking for in an MMO right now. Fun leveling and quests. Interesting and unique classes.

Challenging group and solo content. The game has an amazing level of polish as well. It is gorgeous to look at and has an amazing soundtrack. I actually played a little bit of The Secret World before jumping into FFXIV and good lord is the game quality night and day between those two.

TSW feels like an early access version of an indy made mmo compared to FFXIV. It just feels like a lot of care and thought went into every aspect of FFXIV. It's not perfect because nothing is, but it is as close as any MMO I have ever played has been. I didn't really quit WoW, I'm playing both (even though I canceled my FF14 sub just yesterday until patch hits)I love how the boss fights look and feel. The music is awesome too.And the characters look pretty.Gameplay wise, it's inferior to WoW in most ways.

FF14 is really clumsy sometimes. Lets just take a look at the japanese styled end game dungeon right now, last boss.Picking up that gold is. I don't know. It doesn't feel good.This is just an example. It doesn't ruin the game, but some mechanics are questionable and feel sluggish.It feels like you could program a bot that could do mechanics just like you do them in this game.

Everything is so 'clean' and 'straightforward'. It's as if you are playing Chess and you are a Rook-piece. I am subscribed to both games. FF14 is such a mixed bag for me.The environments, character design, art, customisation are all top notch.Combat is very very slow and clumsy to begin with, before you have enough abilities to establish the proper late game rotations, but gets much better later. It's not as dynamic or responsive as WoW but there's more depth to it so it evens out.I really enjoy the dungeons and group content.The questing though. Is pretty awful. It gets very old and repetitive pretty quickly and there is far too much time clicking through meaningless fluff text and often not actually a lot of actual gameplay involved, especially in the main story questing.The story itself is awesome.

When things are actually happening. Why I tried?Because I am a Final Fantasy fan and XI and XIV were the only installments in the main series I didn't play(this was before XV released). A free trial during the first anniversary sounded like the best time to join.What do I miss in wow?-The more nonhuman looking playable races-The odd proc effects of more magical items-The transmog log.- The small ammount of racial identity you get from the starting zone and from the racial leaderWhat's better? I played WoW from beta to Legion with some off time in a few spots, particularly in Warlords cause that was by far the worst xpac to me. I was a Grand Marshal in vanilla. I was one of the few that raided Naxx40 before BC launched, I cleared Sunwell before the WotLK.

I got Dragonwrath in cata when it was current content. MoP was the first time I took any significant break from the game due to disliking the direction of development. Warlords was far worse. Legion was better but I will always look back at WotLK as the best era of WoW to me barring the lack of a few good features like transmog and the account wide wardrobe and mounts.While all mmo's tend to be treadmills in some fashion, WoW's treadmills became too obvious for me. I felt like no matter what I did there was no 'getting to max level' and hanging out there for awhile.

It became 'oh you beat the raid? No no you don't get to really farm it for a couple months and enjoy your power, instead you simply do the same raid again but harder! And that gear you got?

You'll replace that with the same gear but slightly higher ilvl and a different color!' I began to feel like a hamster in a wheel.When I stopped playing WoW I still felt the desire to play something. So I looked around, tried several games, and ultimately landed on FFXIV. What really drew me in was the story and graphics. I was able to make what I felt was an attractive character and the story was all about ME. Unlike WoW, FFXIV's story centers around the Warrior of Light.

In WoW you're just a nameless 'hero' that does all the grunt work while the big name npc's get all the glory and cut scene honorifics, while in FFXIV, most cut scenes are centered around you. When a major event cut scene occurs, you're there front and center doing the major deeds 99% of the time. Minfilia/Thrall isn't the one in the spotlight, its YOU. The story also has a nice way of explaining other players helping you (they are adventurers with the Echo, while you are the Warrior of Light).The combination of great graphics and aesthetics (impossible for me to make an attractive male character in wow that isn't a Blood Elf), alongside a story that centers around me and doesn't just write me off as some nameless faceless 'hero' among countless others that 'helped' while major npc's are the ones who get the cutscenes and accolades, makes me far more invested in my character and the game overall. The story is also great most of the time, with twists and turns you might expect to see in a big scale single player rpg but not in an mmo. WoW's narrative post WotLK just falls flat by comparison for me.Other features of FFXIV that really sell me is the fact that we can be all classes on one character.

I don't need alts to experience different gameplay styles and I get to enjoy the extra class story content without having to start completely over on a new character. I can master all the crafts and gathering, I can try all the tanks/healers/dps to see which ones feel the best for me, I have all my achievements on one character, I can use the resources (gil, items, etc) I've accrued leveling one class and use them to help prop up another that I'm leveling. I can be almost entirely self sufficient if I invest the time to level crafts/gathering. These things are all very appealing to me.And finally, FFXIV is not a 'raid or die' game. While WoW fast tracks you to current content and funnels you into raids as 'real' endgame, FFXIV gives alternatives for people who don't wish to do max difficulty raiding as their endgame. The gap between savage raid gear and tomestone gear is very small, meaning raiders don't really have a significant advantage over non-raiders in player power.

WoW kinda/sorta tried this with Mythic+ dungeons but the fact that a) constant treadmill doing the same dungeons over and over again. And b) gear that's still significantly inferior to raid gear, and it just becomes very 'not fun' for me.I'm older now. After two decades of mmo gaming/raiding, I'm just not interested in the obligation to be on at certain times to do certain things. I'm not interested in 'being the best' and 'having the very best gear that far outstrips anything else'.

I'm not interested in beating my head against a wall of high difficulty content. But at the same time, I want to increase my player power, I want to be able to outgear the content I DO engage in and I want content to engage in regularly (that isn't raids). FFXIV doesn't put anywhere near the emphasis on max difficulty raiding as WoW does, and it hides its treadmills a bit better while also pacing things so that you can actually max out your gear and enjoy it for awhile before a new tier of content comes out to get you back on that treadmill. I don't feel like a second class citizen because I choose not to do savage raids, and thanks to tomestone gear, if I DO choose to do savage content, I still have gear that's perfectly fine for it even though I rarely if ever step foot into savage raids.If I miss anything from wow its addons, a shorter GCD and the vast amount of resources Blizzard was willing to devote to WoW. WoW is coded better and had a lot more money pumped into it over the years to make it easy for the devs to fix things, while FFXIV devs are still hamstrung by the emergency shortcut coding they did to turn 1.0 into A Realm Reborn and save the game.

Don't get me wrong, the FFXIV devs did an amazing job in turning the crapfest of 1.0 into the wonderful game FFXIV is now, but optimization was not on their priority list at the time and thus features I took for granted in WoW are harder to implement in FFXIV until they do a lot of optimizing under the hood. Stuff like a glamour log and inventory, and how character data strains the server.Ultimately, the story, the focus on me as the hero of the story, not just a nameless one of many, and the fact that max difficulty raiding is treated as a niche activity rather than the primary endgame, are the main reasons I pick FFXIV over WoW. I left wow for FF because I can't recall the last time wow did something innovative. 99.9% of the features in wow were found in another mmo, usually years before. For a game as old as wow that only makes it seem more stale to parade a 2 or 3 year old feature of guild wars as a cool new thing.What I found worse than wow is the leveling is kinda slow, and you don't start getting off the GCD skills to keep you pressing buttons for a little while.

Thats honestly about it.The better stuff would be the story for me. No more a hodgepodge of 80 peoples different visions smashed together and held up with countless retcons. The graphics that require more than a 1984 toaster to run on. The side stuff, you can get so lost in the world and thats exactly what I want from a mmo.Oh, and in general the people are way more chill. I could go on for a long time but most of this is covered above.

I tried FF14 when it was announced that WoD would have no flying. I tend to alternate between the two every couple of weeks and play casually as a collector.I enjoy both for different reasons. As a casual, the boss fights are more fun in FF, the story is quite good and i love the outfits I can collect.

For Wow I prefer its music and open world, ease of play (more relaxing) and more stuff to collect (mounts! )There nothing stopping anyone playing both if you want to. Obviously if you want to be a top raider etc you will have to devote more time to one or the other.

And finally, FFXIV is not a 'raid or die' game. While WoW fast tracks you to current content and funnels you into raids as 'real' endgame, FFXIV gives alternatives for people who don't wish to do max difficulty raiding as their endgame. The gap between savage raid gear and tomestone gear is very small, meaning raiders don't really have a significant advantage over non-raiders in player power. WoW kinda/sorta tried this with Mythic+ dungeons but the fact that a) constant treadmill doing the same dungeons over and over again. And b) gear that's still significantly inferior to raid gear, and it just becomes very 'not fun' for me.I hear this a lot, but having played both I really struggle to see this. What truly engaging non-raid content does FFXIV really offer that WoW does not?

I hear this a lot, but having played both I really struggle to see this. What truly engaging non-raid content does FFXIV really offer that WoW does not?What content we find 'Truly Engaging' is entirely subjective. I enjoy running dungeons, ex primals, and normal mode raids as my endgame. The When I say it gives people 'alternatives to raiding', I am not talking about the subjective 'engaging-ness' of the content but rather the player power progression.

I can do the content I enjoy and my gear will never be significantly worse than a savage raider's gear. They have a very small ilvl advantage but I can still perform nearly as well with the tomestone equivalent gear. Some people bemoan the lack of procs and set bonuses but those only widen the gear gap further in WoW and would do the same in FFXIV unless the tomestone gear got equivalent treatment and even then procs and set bonuses can cause big balance issues as WoW can attest. In FFXIV I feel like I have something to do (that I enjoy) and something to strive for that doesn't require max difficulty raiding.

I hope that makes sense. I hear this a lot, but having played both I really struggle to see this.

What truly engaging non-raid content does FFXIV really offer that WoW does not?Depends on what you find engaging. But raids are a side content. The main story is always told in dungeons and trials (an arena with a single boss. Think Lair of Onyxia).

If you want high end gear you can get tomestones(currency for said high end gear) that you can get from endgame dungeons, pvp, or daily quests. High end weapons also drop from trials. Or you can craft pretty good gear. Or you can get stronger weapons from deep dungeons. Or you can do the relic questline.But another important thing is that the dungeons you unlock with the main scenario and the story that comes with it really does not need you to have raid gear. And that's not even mentioning the other often quite long questlines you can unlock at max level.You can also do hunts, exploration missions, treasure hunts.Oh and one more thing.

Final Fantasy does not do heroic dungeons. Raids and trials may have two difficulties (there are 3 trials with three) but a hard mode version of a leveling dungeon actually continues it's story and has a different layout, bosses and drops. New stuff is actually new. What content we find 'Truly Engaging' is entirely subjective. I enjoy running dungeons, ex primals, and normal mode raids as my endgame. The When I say it gives people 'alternatives to raiding', I am not talking about the subjective 'engaging-ness' of the content but rather the player power progression. I can do the content I enjoy and my gear will never be significantly worse than a savage raider's gear.

Mog Station

They have a very small ilvl advantage but I can still perform nearly as well with the tomestone equivalent gear. In this way I feel like I have something to do and something to strive for that doesn't require max difficulty raiding. I hope that makes sense.So it's just a matter of the size of the item level gaps and not the actual existence of different content? So it's just a matter of the size of the item level gaps and not the actual existence of different content?No that's not what I am saying. I am saying that the fact that 'actual different content' exists and is nearly as rewarding as max difficulty raiding, and the fact that less focus is put on max difficulty raiding as the end all be all, makes FFXIV a more enjoyable game overall and for me in particular.

WoW almost had something like that with Mythic+ but its still too treadmill-sih, too RnG gated, and still inferior to mythic raid gear by a wide margin.Non-raiders in FFXIV aren't miles behind raiders in player power and raids don't dominate the major content patches in FFXIV, making the game much more enjoyable for someone who doesn't enjoy max difficulty raiding.