Vanafest stuffs, various updates

Fast post... been busy lately. Last two posts pretty much cover what I've been doing outside of gaming life, so here's a fast one about gaming!

Vanafest Announcements
Tons of announcements about FFXI on the Vanafest website at http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/event/vanafes2010/index.html.

For this post, I'll just concentrate on my impressions on the "cons" of these updates. Maybe some other day I'll look at the "pros"

Level Cap Increase
I'm *really* not interested in grinding another... 24 levels, especially at the rate of exp that SE thinks is reasonable. Even doing 60-75 is a pain, and it just gets worse as it goes higher.

The way FFXI handles leveling is basically a time waster. It's the same as farming crops in Farmville or doing jobs in Mafia Wars. There's no value, no skill to it, and virtually no fun with the way it is currently set up. I'm currently trying to grind COR to 75, but will I grind it to 99? I mean, if I knew that they would be raising the level cap, I'd concentrate on one, maybe two jobs at all and not bother leveling everything else.

As it stands, I already know that I'll be focusing on DNC mainly, possibly taking up PLD, but probably no more than these two jobs. Yes, it'll limit what I can do, which was the main reason why I leveled up other jobs in the first place, but with the exp requirements even for 70-75, I'm really not willing to spend 2 years of actual time grinding exp for lesser jobs.

Add to that the pain of leveling subs from 37-49. They showed pictures of WHMs using Convert, so you know that you'll have to level your subs. For almost all my subs, it was a simple relief to be done with them and I threw all the gear out for the subs the minute I hit 37. Now I'll have to level at the very least NIN, possibly SAM, and if I take PLD up, RDM & WAR ~.~

Among everything, this is the #1 thing that will likely get me to consider /quitting.

Abyssea
Sooooooooooo... judging from the success of the last few add-ons, this is a great way to extract another $30 for... a zone or two and a HNM? Get those bots ready!

Server Merge
This is an amusing one... if anything indicates that an MMO is reaching the end of life, it's a server merge. This means that enough players have quit the game that they have to consolidate the servers to make the game viable to play. They are eliminating 8 servers out of 33, representing a general reduction in capacity of 24% for FFXI.

Of course, being one of the eliminated servers, this does mean that many people will have to give up names... character names, breaking of linkshells and stuff... Humans hate change. This is definitely a big change. We'll have to see what is left of Hades and the people who play with me to determine how much incentive there is to continue. May have people leaving the server, or simply quitting the game due to technical reasons. Losing your long-held name would be a significant one.

And... even if people stay around, with the server merge, this simply means that everything will get more crowded. I still haven't had a single day where I can go to a popular exp camp and see it empty even on the so-called "empty" Hades, and we've had many conflicts on Limbus scheduling in the past. Even doing MMM & Nyzul is difficult even though they are instanced because of the weird wait that the game imposes when someone else enters the instance. Given how badly programmed FFXI is, this all will just get worse.

Trial of the Magians
Minor nitpick... so... a series of successive quests, repeatable, with up to 80 different features that can be added to weapons/armor... wait... after experiencing Synergy/Evolith... and seeing the FoV NM fights and THAT randomness... this reeks suspiciously of yet another grind by dangling that 0.01% performance increase.

FFXIV
Wheee... beta starts 3/11! Who's in?