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I am a former ffxi player, I had a lvl 54 whm on the server Cerberus named Sparkle.

I can point out what I like more about WoW then I did about FFXI:

-Partying is optional, for most quest even elite ones if you try you can do them yourself, by leveling up a bit more then the suggested level, for most elite quest I only had to be 1-2 levels higher then the 'suggested' level to do on my own. You do NOT need to party to level, EVEN if you are a priest (the WoW equivilent of a whm)

-You get exp for quest, which let me tell you, makes them WAY more worth doing

-No exp loss at dying (though dying can get kinda expensive in higher levels)

-PVP - If you like PVP WoW is great, it goes far beyond ballista, and they have 3 types of servers for what you prefer, either you can be pure PVP in a more challenaging dangeorus enviorment, PVE where you chose when you go PVP, or RP, which is PVE & you get to interact with rpers rping thier characters.

The best I can say is try it out however, everyone I have made play the game who used to play on ffxi has switched almost entirely to wow. =) That in itself should say something.

I'm a former FFXI player who went through the game quite a bit, and I've got a lvl 38 Rogue on WoW, so I feel I'm qualified to list the pros, cons that differentiate WoW + FFXI...

Pros

- First of all, this game is basically idiot proof. It is much easier to accomplish a great deal of things in this game than in FFXI. You do not need to sit around in a major city LFG for hours at a time as *any* class is able to solo if they desired. It should be noted, however, that depending on your play choice, soloing may be harder or easier if you go PvP or not. If you go PvE, you will have a much easier time soloing than if you went PvE.

- Also, there is no real 'standard group makeup' in this game. I went through and did a bunch of quests in a mid level zone, some of which were against elite mobs (mobs that are alot tougher than their actual level denotes) with three Paladins, myself (Rogue) and a Hunter. I've also done stuff with a Warlock, Warrior and another Rogue. While there will be some situatiosn where you cannot proceed with a mishmashed group (instanced dungeons would be one good example, as the higher you get, the more you need certain jobs, such as a tank, healer, etc), a good chunk of the game can be done solo, or without the 'usual suspects'.

- The tradeskill system is also very nice, but is level dependent. What this means is that you are not clicking every single goddamned item for synth like in FFXI, but you also cannot make a lvl 1 mule and powerlevel up say, Engineering or Alchemy. It is also dependent on recipes, patterns, blueprints, etc, some of which are store-bought, some of which have to be found on monsters. Also, within the tradeskill system, you have some flexibility within a chosen trade. Say you take up Blacksmithing. Well, at a certain point (I believe it's 'Artisan' level, but crafters, please correct me if I am wrong), you can choose to become a Weaponsmith or an Armorsmith. Later, you can specialize even further, becoming say, a Swordsmith or Axesmith. Certain really good items and features can only be unlocked if you go into a certain specialized role, so no one player cannot be 'the' crafter of a particular type.

Additionally, for the hunter/gatherers out there, trades like mining and herbalism (which is probably the closest equivalent to logging in WoW) aren't as frustrating, are alot easier, thanks to little buttons you can push that will put ore veins and bushes on your radar as little blips. Very useful and not as aggravating as running around in Ifrit's Cauldron looking for a friggen mining point.

- As well, character builds have alot of variety in them. Most, if not all jobs, allow you to pick from 3 different types of talent trees and build your character however you wish. Now, there are some talents that really aren't that useful or sought after, and there are some that some jobs really would be stupid not to pick up, but the rules are not as strict as they are in FFXI where say a Paladin *HAS* to take /WAR as it's subjob, and they *HAVE* to play their job in a specific fashion.

As a Rogue, I know that you can setup your character to revolve around a couple of character builds, all of which have their pros and cons, and none of them really being all that more 'uber' than the other. That basically ensures that not every character you meet up with will be an exact carbon copy of one another.

- The game world is very rich and indepth, both in look and in content. Instead of having a generic Ye Olde Castle with Knights in it, there's a wonderful backdrop put to the game. NPCs walk around and talk with one another, there are 'books' to read, etc, etc. The game world is alot more vibrant and fleshed out than FFXI's generic fantasy world where every goddamned fantasy stereotype can be spotted from a mile away. While alot of these stereotypes exist in WoW, the presentation is done alot better than Square's approach to it. Whether or not that is because FFXI is a Japanese game designed for Japanese gamers initially is the case or not, I'll leave up to other people to debate about, but for me, I find WoW's world to be alot more engaging, entertaining and...well, fun.

- No Galka in subligar. At all.

- Quests in this game actually give you useful rewards. Some will give you money, others will give you gear (that isn't some piece of crap thing that is 100% useless to you), while others will just give you big, fat wads of experience. Yes, questing gives you experience, and can be used as a primary source of exping if you desire. While quests do get tougher the higher you get in levels (I keep hearing 40 is sorta the cutoff point for questing exp being viable as exp *on it's own*) it is still a helpful boon to help get through those levels.

- Blizzard seems to be taking the issue of exploiters (or botters/cheaters, depending on what terminology you would like to use) and money farmers very seriously. Approximately 300 people have been banned thus far, with Blizzard still hunting down anyone who might want to try and ***** with their game. Whether or not this behavior will continue is in the air, as alot of game companies have been known to be quick on the trigger at the start of launch, and become increasingly apathetic the further you go from launchdate.

- No "JP ONRY" bull. Now, all of you FFXI players can go and talk about what 'JP ONRY' means, but the fact of the matter is that alot of jerks that would refuse to group with you simply because of the language you spoke, despite having an in-game translator built in. For those who might decry this point, I challenge you to go and play during JP Prime Time (say 2-5AM MST) and see if you're cheerfully optimistic about our fellow players on the other side of the Pacific. Blizzard also has seperate servers for people from different parts of the world. Basically if your billing address isn't in NA, you aren't playing on NA servers. Same goes for the Korean servers, etc, etc, etc.

Basically, rest assured that people won't group with you because you are indeed a pompous, loud, rude jackass, and not because you are perceived to be a pompous, loud, rude jackass.

- Money making is also rather painless in this game. At level 38, I've got approximately 50 gold on my character, and I am equipped in fairly good gear (I say fairly good, as I do not know what constitutes 'uber' gear in this game...all I know is it's on par with most other rogues I bump into, so it works). The thing is, I really haven't sought out to make money. As in, I didn't go camping NMs, farming hordes of mobs or whatever. This money basically came to me as I went about my business playing the game.

The flipside to this is that alot of stuff in this game costs money. You want to send an item to someone, ala package delivery in FFXI? That'll be 30cp. You want to learn the new abilities that you obtained upon levelling up? More dough. Spells? Same deal. While you will never be paying the insane amounts of dough that WHMs pay for Erase for basic spells or skills, you will have to pay to make sure your character has all abilities, etc. The best example I can give is that you'll basically be forking out the same amount of dough you'd be needing for a chocobo on skills, sending packages, flying places, etc.

Cons

- I'm not a fan of the Auction House system, which can get annoying at times. It's not as well designed as most everything else in this game and, I actually prefer FFXI's AH over WoW's. Minor detail, but hey.

- The UI is also a little annoying, partially because Blizzard has a hard-on for hotkeys, and partially because I'm used to playing FFXI. Some people share this sentiment, and their have been alternate UIs introduced, with Cosmos (I think) being the most popular. The fact that if you have enough know how to come up with your UI might be listed as a big Pro for some people, but I'm a big idiot when it comes to this junk, so it is a Con for me. :P

- Alot of this game seems to be geared towards the 'endgame' which is basically the junk you do once you hit level cap, and are sick of bashing gnolls heads in. Instead you get to go and bash dragon skulls. Or giants or whatever uber mob du jour that is out there. While the ease that comes with levelling makes it rather painless to hit 60 and thus enjoy this content, being able to actually go after this stuff is another story altogether, and I'm not sure how many people are going to be able to kill Onyxia or whatever other uber mobs are out there once there are 250,000 people sitting at level 60. I know that alot of highend stuff will be instanced, but I also know that not everything will be. This might turn off casual players, it might not, I really don't know, as alot of the endgame content is still being worked on afaik. That said, I also know some very good people are working on the endgame content, so this whole paragraph should hopefully be irrelevent. Who knows?

- Horde apparently is still unfinished as a 'side', as material is still being worked on for them. Bad news if you're an Orc lover, pointless if you're going to be going Alliance. Basically, this is like having all the junk for Bastok and Sandy finished at launchday, but not having all the Windurst quests, missions, etc finalized. I will also point out that this is scuttlebutt I've heard from various people, so if this is not the case, again, please correct me.

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That about does it for me, it's a rather lengthy discussion regarding FFXI vs. WoW. I tried to cover as many bases as I could, so I hope that helps.

I am by no means experienced in WoW playing just few days however I play FF since US launch and plan to continue playing it.

In my understanding WoW is not comparable to FF XI. It's kinda like comparing ice hockey and bobsleigh. Both are sports, both are team sports both are played on ice. But should you leave hockey for bobsleigh or vice versa? Which is better? I played hockey for 6 months, will I like bobsleigh? These are same kind of questions as "Which is better FF XI or WoW?"

FF XI is very community based - you need a lot of people helping you to be able to advance in game. You are to make a lot of friends by helping others to achieve their goals. Friends are being made because almost every help is a sacrifice. Sometimes you get 18 people to spend many hours, dieing and spending expensive potions just to help one of them to get a pice of equipment or a quest done.
Even simple exp grind requires a lot of effort from every party member so even people who just partied together and did their best feel bound to each other. FF is truely a *multiplayer* game.

WoW seems to be trying to be a single player online game. You can advance without much help - sure, you may want to group sometimes to do quests but it's by no means a sacrifice, few people needing same quest can group to everyone's benefit and the quests are easy.
For me soloing is boring but I just cannot find exp parties, nobody is LFG at low level, I see people looking around 30-40, but that's a lot of mobs clicked to death before you get to those levels. You can probably level 100% solo up to level cap.
It's fun to just log on, kill some mobs and level up but if leveling up is your goal but I feel more and more that I could do the same with any single player game and would get some nice story on top of it. I really hope end-game content is interesting because low level stuff is plain boring for me. Getting rewards without effort is not satisfying for me.

Very wrong. Horde side is quite done. Playing Horde is quite alot of fun.

Wow, I was thinking this was going to be a thread that many people worked on, and we all contributed to explain what was good about WoW. But, uh...like everyone else, I can't think of a single thing Tao didn't say - it was an awesome post.

About the Horde thing...I have yet to make a Horde character, but I assume it's just as much fun as Alliance (if not more so in some ways, I mean...there's a quest to poke peons with sticks to make them work). However, I don't think Tao was saying that the Horde is worse, just that they're still working on content for it, where they're not for the Alliance currently. I would like some elaboration on this myself - did you hear from a dev or anything that there were new quests still being added to the Horde side?

Alright, my bad regarding the Horde issues. I had heard that not everything has been implemented yet for Horde, whereas Alliance is 100% done. I'm not trying to rumour monger, and I could probably dig up posts from other forums I frequent that had the sentiment.

Good to know that the only downside to going Horde is a complete lack of personal hygiene. ;)

My Tauren in his red thong is Teh Sexy!!!




During the 2nd stress test there was alot of Horde stuff that wasn't done, but it got added in during Open Beta.