I've tried a variety of class types so far, from the adventuring, to the harvesting, to the crafting. I've noticed that if I play an adventure class my physical level goes up faster, a harvester class levels both the class kill and physical level up pretty consistently together, and the crafting class promotes a faster skill level than physical for me. Just things to keep in mind.
Even with an Nvidia 465, the game is being terribly laggy at the moment. I know they are constantly working out packet issues with their servers however, so that's a plus. Every time I log in, the send/receive signals are in yellow - red. However I'm not terribly concerned about these problems because that's on their priority list of issues to resolve.
Controls:
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SpoilerThe new controls are a lot better than the old ones (couldn't control the camera angle for hardly anything). However they are still a bit awkward. J,K,L,I operate the movement of the camera while the numpad moves your character and zooms the camera in and out if that gives you full-keyboard users any idea of how awkward the use will be.
Interface:
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SpoilerProbably my biggest complaint, to be totally honest, is having to go the menu every time you wish to interact with something major (i.e. aetheryte). In Final Fantasy XI you are able to tab a target and press enter to interact. Here you are not even able to target what you need to interact, but must simply be in proximity of the object, then hit menu, and the ability to interact magically appears there. Why this was coded like that is beyond me. It's a small fix so I know it's not on the priority list. There's also the laggy response from the controls but that's already covered in previous posts. Other than that, it's not too bad of a deal.
Game Mechanics:
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SpoilerI know for a fact SE is doing some selective changes in how the game is working to see how it's striking the crowd. One of these could be the massive cooldowns for Leves. As ArmachiA stated it was only a 4 hour cooldown in Alpha so that is something that is arbitrarily changing. I do not see the real reason for its change but there might be one, such as group promotion, as stated earlier.
Graphics:
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SpoilerOn the lowest settings, it's still a very beautiful game. I think most everyone agrees on this who plays the Beta. In my opinion, it presents a more visually pleasing and intensive setting than Aion on its highest settings even with everything turned to minimum. So believe me when I say that if you can turn the game up to highest, with HDMI you will fall in love with the world almost immediately. Just keep in mind that even on high end cards right now the game is boggy because of SE running into last minute glitches (quite often as of late).
Potential:
It's very much there, overall I'd say for a Beta the game looks great for a pre-launch. I agree with Axl and a few others who stated that people are just never satisfied. Most of the people say things like they were in other Betas and they didn't look this bad, but this is untrue. If they were in other Betas they'd know that things were far worse in the game's development. WoW being a primary example. The game was absolutely terrible pre-launch. Aion had a good Beta launch because it was already pre-assembled, we just had to configure it for America so I exclude it, and others like it, from the Beta testing consensus. We have access currently to around 20% of Final Fantasy XIV in the Beta phases, and that seems about the norm. Because of this, there will be some issues at launch but those should be things such as environment interactions, class mechanics, and maybe UI functionality. The important thing that they fix at the moment is game performance. This is an absolute must for a pre-launch. New players will test the game for about the first 10 levels and make their decision then. It's critical the game runs smooth at this time. Things like higher-end interactions, other areas, balance, are able to be worked on after launch as players find them.
I think it's a positive direction, although it certainly won't be flawless at launch. It probably -would- be a lot better if it were going to launch in November/December as originally intended, but I'm sure there's a reason. Plus we get to play early so I see it as a fair trade-off.