#the us is not the only place where the proces arr fucked it's a world thing

[rocker-by-heart]

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[katarh-mest]

The WoW Exodus Culture Clash

It’s not happening so much on Tumblr, but the Facebook XIV groups have become pretty painful lately due to the influx of WoW (and other MMO) folks who heard XIV was “good” so jumped ship to our game without understanding why the XIV community went batshit over the expansion.

XIV’s game play has always been secondary to the story.  It’s a Final Fantasy game.  We’re hanging out in a virtual world where we can be something we’re not in every day life, whether that’s a warrior of light/darkness, a master goldsmith, or a casual fisherman.  We’re here because Square Enix has a reputation of building masterful fantasy worlds and telling cool stories, with a big helping of running jokes and occasionally interesting gameplay experiments.

This is long so I’m gonna shovel it under a cut.

XIV’s raiding community is a tiny portion compared to its creative community.  Yeah, there are a few thousand folks that compete in the World First Race every couple of months, but there are another million people who are here because of the stories and art that the game inspires.  I mean, I help run the ENTM screenshot contests.  Actual combat is secondary to the aesthetics for many of us in the creative community!  The only time we bother grinding out endgame content is when there’s a cool looking piece of gear we need for a glamour idea.  (Then you will find us throwing ourselves in O12S dozens of times in a desperate attempt to get what we want.)  Hell, just last month I was able to experience a full blown theater performance within the confines of the game, thanks to Stellazio Virtual Theater’s The Little Prince.  XIV’s creative community is about taking the game engine, and using that as the building blocks to make the whole more than the sum of its parts. 

I don’t mind the idea of story skips - ARR is in dire need of a rework and levels 1-50 are a glorified tutorial anyway.  And if your friends are level 70 and you want to play with them, then go ahead and join them.  (But please ask them for help and advice.)

What concerns me is when I see new players who use the story skips to jump to level 70 and then proceed to skip all the cutscenes, under the assumption that they need to get to 80 as soon as possible “to get to the good stuff.”  Excuse me?  The cutscenes are the good stuff as far as I’m concerned.   This isn’t quite like WoW, where the level current 80 raids are going to be obsolete the second a new patch drops (and no one will ever run that content ever again.)  XIV’s game has been built from the ground up with the assumption that they want to reward veteran players for going back and redoing old content to allow people to experience it, and that means that you will never want for a group to run stuff if you make friends and reach out to people for help.  (Or roll into duty finder.  Or find a group doing it on Party Finder if you have anxiety and don’t want to ask for help.  Totally understand that.)

So my advice to anyone who is coming in from WoW is going to be this:  SLOW DOWN.  Take your time and savor the game.  Watch the cutscenes.  Go back and run old raids.  Pick up a craft from level 1.  Go fishing.  (Seriously, fishing in this game could be a game unto itself.)

It’s a Final Fantasy game - it’s all about the journey, not the destination, even though the destination this go round has been really fucking awesome.  

Our level 80 content isn’t going anywhere.  Our level 50 content is still being run multiple times a day.  XIV’s community is all about the glim glams, all about finding beautiful places in the open world and in the dungeons to have photo sessions and role play sessions, all about inspiring art and creativity and storytelling and music videos and having fun as a group.   (The only dead content in XIV right now is Diadem - I suspect that once people have hit all 80s that even Eureka is going to get a resurrection by the achievement score crowd.)