I don't like ham. I never have. My family could never undertand that I didn't like something so tasty, and insisted that it was because I hadn't tried a good ham. So one day, I tried one right in front of my mother, chewed, and told her I didn't like it. Her reply was, "you tried it wrong".

I bring this up because I similarly I don't like MMOs. I found them boring and pointless, kill things in one place until you're strong enough to kill things somewhere else. However, whenever I say so MMO players would always say I've played the wrong one or I play them wrong. And since I travel around a lot, so having a game I could play together with my friends and keep in contact with them would be great, so I've kept trying. Over the years, I tried several MMOs (I can recall Aion, SW:TOR, Lineage, some pirate server WOW, a half porn one I tried from an add, and my favorite Fairyland), and they all sucked.

Recently I was recommended Final Fantasy 14: good story, good combat, best MMO I've ever played, etc... Seemed legit, and since my circumstances were good at this time, I went for it. All out. I've put more hours on this game than I'm willing to admit, reached max level, finished the story content. End evaluation: it sucks less than most other MMOs I've played, but it still sucks big time. What a colossal waste of time. And now I feel like discussing it and venting myself, but the main culprit in recommending it seems to take my dislike of the game as a personal attack and refuses to let me endlessly complain about it, so I'll instead try to organize my thoughts here and then link him to the thread. Hi there, mate.

So let's begin from the beginning: the free demo. 2 weeks, up to lvl 20, all free. yay. Except the first day and most of the second didn't count at all, as I had to create the account and get the clock ticking before I was allowed to even start the download of 20GB for the game; plus not being allowed to create a character on my friend's server until an arbitrary time I had no way of knowing when would come. Go, Square, way to hook players.

I eventually got to play, and I must say the first impression was quite good. A few tutorial missions to show you around and the basic mechanics, a beginning story as bland as Skyrim's but with some level of backstory, and some incomprehensive crystal telling me crap in space... with other characters also in space, which would lead me to believe that I'm not the one special snowflake of the world but just one more of many adventurers in my situation, which makes perfect sense on an MMO. Yay.

Another very good thing, and one of the main reasons I decided to play it seriously, was that there was a lot to do. Playing the story missions appeared enough to raise your level enough to keep going with the story, without having to do any grinding, but there were also hunting quests per class, side missions, leve quests, and radom fate events. I remember how in Aion, another one recommended to me because of the story, you had a main story quest that would raise your level by 25% and then you had to grind till the next level to continue the story. FF XIV seemed bearable, and it was.

However, the bad ugly head of MMOs was still there. The story was boring, the missions pointless, and the combat utterly simplistic. I'll try to expand on each:
-Story: As a newly arrived adventurer, I'm just looking for some work and a few adventures. While at it, I pick up on clues about big trouble behind the scenes, happent to meet one or two characters investigating it, befriend them and join their organization (scions of the seventh dawn, scions for short). It's not a bad story per se, more like the prologue, except this is the story up to lvl 20! Normally you could tell this story in what, half an hour? An hour? Not here! Here, it's stretched out so much it reaches DBZ levels. It's excruciating. And through all this time, you're interacting with one off random pointless characters. The important characters that have some level of personality and important to the story, the scions and the big leaders, show up maybe 5 minutes in total. It's mind boggling.
-Quests: I expected the secondary missions to be boring, it's an MMO after all. What I did not expect, was for even the main story to have nothing interesting. The highlight was an instanced fight where the scions would fight a powerful enemy while you just were fighting some random creeps around them. All the rest was unnecesary busywork: Go talk to this guy, then bring back the package, then kill 5 mosquitos. I had grand quests such as delivering cookies to the guards or getting the orders of the patrons on a bar. No difficulty, no thinking, no nothing. You'd think when picking the orders you may have to remember who ordered what, for example; but nope it's all automatic. When one random dude sends you to talk to some other random dude and tells you "the other random dude is quite picky, be respectful when you talk to him" I thought ok, thanks for letting me know, I'll keep it in mind. However, when I got there, the conversation was automatic! There is nothing to do there!
One of the fan favorites on all Final Fantasy history is the wall market, where all you did was run from talking to one character to another; just like in many of FF XIV's missions. Except, that in FF XIV reaching each character takes you five minutes of running, none of them have any interest whatsoever, and no minigame to spice things up. At this point my friend was telling me "but you are a no name adventurer, it's normal for you to do menial tasks. When you are more important, you'll do more important things. Well, at level 30 I was helping some dude prepare dinner, and at level 49, being a recognized hero of the kingdom, I was delivering stew to soldiers. My favorite was a mission where I had to throw cold water to a bar drunk, I loved it because I had to fill up a bucket with river water, which required 3 clicks with interaction waiting bars: one click to leave the bucket on the river, one to fill it with water, one to take it back. It represents the pointlessness of the game's quests so well. And remember: this is all the main quests; who knows how even more pointless those quest that didn't make the cut and remained secondary are.
-Combat: With my original gladiator, IIRC it was press 1, press 3, then again press 1 and 3. Plus 2 20s buffs for attack and defense. I heard from my friend that "each class has its own thing", so I tried every single class, all 10 of them. True, it class had its own thing. Conjurer: 1, 1, 1, 1, 3 if health is low, 1, 1. Rogue: 5 to start, 1, 3, 1, 3. Pugilist: 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. So much fun! I actually found the arcanist interesting, as it had some variety to it. The abilities it got were varied: direct damage, dot damage, summon, heal, debuffs... I decided to continue with that one, but I was certainly not very impressed.

I also do not like ham.

Now I've gotten a bit ahead of myself on the quests, but remember that so far I'm still talking about the free demo up to lvl 20. When I say that the game sucks due to all the above, I still get excuses about "if you haven't even reached lvl20, you haven't seen the true game, of course it's simple and boring" or "you haven't even fought Ifrit, if you had you wouldn't complain that way". At this point, I can only be amazed by those comments. Taking them at face value, doesn't that mean that all the hours I had put into the game over those 2 weeks were pointless? And how come Square offers a demo of the most boring side of the game? Hey, player, here's a demo for our new game, try it out for free! What, you don't like it? Well of course, it's the most boring side of it after all, but it gets better I promise! But I won't show it to you. I don't get it, I really don't. When it's common understanding that there's nothing interesting to it, why does that part of the game even exist at all?

But anyway, I liked the name of my character and I had put a lot of hours into it, so having it deleted from not buying did not sit well with me. Plus, this was the furthest I had ever gotten on an MMO and knew it would be highly unlikely to ever reach such a level again. And so, I followed the sunken cost fallacy and payed 10€ to unlock the "real" game for a month.

How did it go? Well, I did those dugeon raids or whatever: quite boring like everything else. The game lets you find 3 other people to do it with, and then you bulldoze through without any time to explore, look around or put any thought into things. If you stop and lose your companions, they'll get annoyed so no sightseeing. There's also no chance to talk to them because you can type while fighting, and if you stop fighting to type then there's a problem. There were two cases when it was fun: once when the tank disconnected, so we fought half the dungeon without a tank while waiting for one of the party member's friend tank to join; and another when we were fighting some dragon whose eyes went purple and triggered an attack we had to get close to avoid, when I wasn't paying enough attention and got obliterated several times (the next day I defeated it on the first try). Why were those two cases fun? Because there was communication with my party members. We actually talked, crazy I know. The rest of the time, it was just bulldozing through with no player interaction whatsoever. The last couple of dungeons apeared to be more interesting, but they were completed while I was watching cutscenes so I'm not really sure if that's really the case.

Then I did those "trials", like the Ifrit fight: attack the boss, the boss dies, yay. No effort, no challenge, no fun. Not to mention how immersion breaking it is to be kidnapped by ifrit worshippers and prepare for the final fight, only to have to use the duty finder and wait 20 minutes for the fight while you teleport back home and craft stuff. So much for the feeling of tension. Sigh. Even towards the end of the game, you infiltrate the enemy camp and get all pumped up for the tribuno fight... only to once again wait fishing in the enemy camp and, once the battle starts with a full 8 or 10 people party, have it finished in less than a minute without any effort whatsoever. Such a letdown. One more pointless thing to the list. Not to mention that, unlike the dungeons, the game refuses to acknowledge that you fought the enemy in a party and acts as if you defeated it yourself. Disappointing.

I've already talked about how the quests didn't improve with time, but what about the story? Well, that actually did improve. Not that it was hard from that prologue, but whatever. The story focuses on investigating the primal threat all around the world, and it becomes something like an 80s cartoon such as Inspector Gadget: go to a location, do a bunch of busywork and pointless forced sidequests, fight a boss and resolve the situation only to have the bad guys show up at the end, gloat about how powerful they are and how everything was their plan all along, and then leave without actually doing anything. Even worse, while you are finally a member of the scions and should be surrounded by characters that could be interesting, they will still send you somewhere where you will still only talk to pointless characters and not the interesting ones. Who thought that was a good idea?

There was only one character I grew to like: a catgirl that came with me to investigate Titan. She would actually bring up the point that with a powerful monster about to attack the city, it was no time to waste time asking the hero to prepare dinner; she was also quite understanding with lines like "you look like you have been through seven hells and back" after you come back from all the pointless busywork. Not that the game will stop wasting your time anyway, mind you, but it's acknowledgement was something. Even better when you finally get dinner ready and can finally fight the threat, only to be stopped because you aren't lvl 34 yet. Fuck you, game.

Anyway, at lvl 35 shit finally hits the fan and stuff starts happening, and after 5 more levels of pointless busywork, the story finally kicks off at lvl 40. Yes, you are still doing busywork, but now there is an actual, clear goal in front of you: rescuing your friends. You still have quests to go and kill 6 enemies, but the reason for it is reasonable (getting their uniforms to use as a disguise to infiltrate the facility). And you are surrounded by characters that actually do matter. At this point, I was thinking that it was at last getting somewhat interesting... except, at this point, story missions were no longer enough to lvl up, so I had to go sidetracking and getting out of the story, pretty much ruining it. Why do they feel the need to do this? Is it really that horrible if I just do the story missions and finish the game at lvl 45 instead of 50? Specially now that there's tons of content added after the end of the original game. Why block me from continuing the story until I max out, and then keep me playing once I maxed out?

And then I finish the game, didn't even see the final boss as it was defeated while I was watching the cutscene, and good ridance to the whole thing. I never, not even once through the whole game, felt any emotional attachment to anything, felt threatened, had to make an effort, or felt satisfied, or had interesting human interaction. The closest was that one dungeon I mentioned before, while it wasn't much it at least let me have an idea of how interesting things on an MMO could be. But they sure as hell aren't.

There are two additional thoughts on I'd like to share. One is about crafting: I originally quite liked it. You can mass produce or you can create on by one with care, giving you more XP and higher quality. Materia also allows some degree of customization of items. Unfortunately, it's all linear upgrades; up to lvl 25 at least the numbers get higher but there's no interesting variation on items. Plus, apparently dungeons give better items, so ultimately what's the point in crafting anyway? Besides repairing your own gear.

Second is a thought that has bothered me a lot trhough the whole game: with all the message carrying, checking on people, and talking to this or that guy; I feel the game would be 75% shorter if there were telephones on them. It would solve so many problems! Unfortunately, in this fantasy world there are none... except, I got a radio when I joined the scions. How could this be? Well, I rationalized maybe it's high tech only available to elite groups such as the scions... only to see them be widely used during the end game military assaults! And they still have me go up a tower to give them a message! Dafuq is wrong with those people? I'm pissed! Seriously, RAAAAAGEEEE!!!!! I was about to flip the table at the end. May seem like a minor issue, but It really, really bugs me.

I agree with you. I find MMOs boring and repetitive as well. Pointless grinding. But in some of them you could just ignore the game itself and socialize. I did that a long time ago in Ultima Online. Even though I regret spending so much time inside a game, I had some fun there, RPing with other like minded individuals. But everything we enjoyed we really made up ourselves. Player storylines, player "quests" etc..

But I like ham. I like ham, a lot.

So anyway, after all this, I finally reach the conclusion: I don't get MMOs. Why are they fun? Where is the fun in them? The ones that boast about their story, like this FF XIV or SW:TOR, still have a sucky story; although at least they try in comparison to others I guess. All the low level stuff, when you have very few abilities and there's nothing going on, is considered to "not be the real game". Why does it exist at all then? Why do people tolerate it? Why can't they manage the dissonance between the story and the MMO mechanics? Why bloat the main quest with pointless stuff? If the fun part is only X, why not let me just do X directly from the get go? Why are people paying subscriptions to games that actively try to prevent you from actually playing?

There are genres I don't enjoy: sports, racing, diablo clone loot whores, flight simulators. I don't enjoy them myself, but I understand how a more competitive person can. However, with MMOs I just don't get it. Even this one, with so many good press and recommendations, sucks so badly; and I know how much worse others are (looking at you, Korea). Why would someone not clinically insane want to play them, when there is so much else on the market? Where is the appeal?

Yesterday I talked to my friends about this. Their defense goes on the lines of "That's how MMOs are. Why? Because that's how they are, end of discussion". When I complain about the arbitrary lvl requirements for story missions, their answer is "But your lvl needs to be in sync with others doing that instance!". When I suggest that maybe allowing your chocobo and you to go through a single player instance of the story dungeon first, so you can fully explore and experience the mechanics at whichever lvl you are, and then unlock the standard dungeon on the duty finder; the response is "Can't do that because it's an MMO". When I complain about the bosses being too easy, the answer is "it's old content, it used to be so much more challenging". When I ask why it isn't/can't be challenging anymore, the answer is "it would bother those who rush for the last content". If I ask why don't they let them skip it to the end content while letting those wanting the old challenge keep it, the answer is once again "nope, it's an MMO". When I ask why I must spend dozens of hours to reach the "actual game", as it appears what I've done is not really important anymore and I should now spend 30€ and who knows how much more time on the expansion to reach the "actual game", the answer is "because it's an MMO".

The best answer I've gotten so far is "It's a subscription MMO, the longer they keep you playing the more money they will make, so of course they will drag things out as much as possible". Cynical, but probably true. I can't find any other explanation, not one that makes sense to me at least. One of the MMOs I played made full use of the radio: When you reached a new area, they would radio you with the kill quests of the area. You may get quests on the city, but you could just radio in with having finished instead of spending 5 minutes running to get back and find the guy. It made things so much more fluid and less cumbersome. Why don't more MMOs do that? Is it really the whole "drag it to keep you playing" alone?

Anyway, I've written quite a lot so far, I'm getting tired. So I'll post this and see if I feel like ranting more later. Bad enough I had to split this into three to actually get it posted.

Oh shit, now I just feel I'm interrupting. Sorry. :D

High five! The problem is, there was hardly enough time for it. I can't type while in combat, and if I need to make the group ahead of time with friends I already have then I'm extremely limited on when I can play. How am I supposed to socialize in game? Then you are obviously a horrible person and your opinion is invalid. Nah, I'm done. But the forum hangs up if I try to post it all at once, I had to keep trying and editing to see how much fit in a single post. I had a LOT to vent.

I'm with the OP on this one. Of course a lot of games I adore people despise with a passion so who the hell am I to judge? :D

bloody hell old fruity did you try to write a novel ?

i also dont like ham
or cheese

Yeah! No kidding! :) And I officially stopped liking you now...

thats a lot of rage

I will respond to this part.
MMOs are fun because you play them with other people. Not strangers, you play MMOs with your friends, as something to pass the time while talking. Story and single player content (as much as there might be) is to pass the time while waiting for your friends to join in.

Think of MMOs as a big LAN party where everyone plays the same game (eg UT). You go there with your friends, set up in a place you like, and pass the time. Every now and then someone you don't know (or some of you don't know) will join in, then move on again.

The story and mechanics of an MMO is just the hook, to draw the player in. A player may be more compelled to join a game exploring Middle Earth than Generic Fantasy World 53, or he may prefer a twitchy MMO to a more laid back one.

But the reason you play an MMO is because you play with friends.


Edit: Forgot to comment on ham. It's lovely with pineapple.

Ah, yes! Hawaiian style!

Stopped reading here, obviously a bot post :p