Happy anniversary, FFXIV!

[Austratus]

One year ago today, a realm was reborn.

 

It's been amazing how Yoshi-P and the rest of the developer team have turned what was thought to be one of Square Enix's biggest failures into something that's redeemed itself several times over. So I look forward to seeing what's next for Eorzea, and hopefully I'll enjoy the ride with this community!

[Berrod Armstrong]

It's also really awesome how the failed game itself has become a point of pride among those who played it.

 

The creativity and attention to lore behind making a canon reason a game shutting down and being reworked -- simply refreshing!

 

I started playing three weeks after 2.0's release and I haven't regretted it one bit. It's been an amazing ride, and the most satisfying MMO I've ever experienced. I hope they keep going like this for a good few years more!

[Zyrusticae]

This is one of the few games where I actually come back to it time and time again. Very few games like that these days. They've done some damn good work.

 

REALLY looking forward to that expansion. It's gonna be a treat.

[Jancis]

Agreed this game has a definite charm to it.

 

A friend bought it as a gift for me and then a few other friends started playing it so I kept up with it.

 

It is cute. Unfairly cute.

 

[Kage]

... It's so cute that you had to melt my insides with that?!

 

FFXIV is really my first true MMORPG. I don't consider Trickster Online or Flyff anywhere close to the way this game plays... and I love the aesthetics of the game.

 

I'm glad I finally gave in months after my friends started to play and bought it on Black Friday.

 

"I don't want to pay for a sub for a game I'll only play for a couple hours a week at best." Says the girl who plays like 4 hours a day on average. Usually a lot more >.>

[Berrod Armstrong]

I was playing GW2 at the time after getting totally fed up of WoW at the tail end of patch 5.3. My friends were all talking about it and I had refused to even bother with it because I wasn't really a Final Fantasy fan to begin with, and I heard something something catpeople ("What?! UGH!").

 

Then, my friend sent me a screenshot of his Highlander. The graphics impressed me, and mmmyes Highlander, but it still WASN'T ENOUGH. I stubbornly refused to play until two friends of mine purchased it for me for my birthday. 

 

Gosh, it was pretty but I HATED IT. A 2.43 second GCD? Were they serious?! Did that guy in the opening cutscene say 'Uwaaah!'? So many CAT PEOPLE EVERYWHERE, GROSS. 

 

But I played. I met up with my friends and roleplayed with them. I had fun. I did my first few dungeons and really really enjoyed how much they felt like DUNGEONS and not STACK AND RUN THROUGH AND AOE TO WIN. I fought babbu Ifrit, which blew me away with the visuals, mechanics and music. 

 

Very, very rapidly, I fell in love.

 

It's been almost a year since then, and I have no regrets!

[Aya]

I had made some good RP friends playing TERA, but they all petered away around the time TERA went free to play, and I kind of did too.  I had never had any interest in Final Fantasy MMOs, or really that much in the single player RPGs - but out of the blue over a year after I stopped playing TERA, I had a message from one of my friends there about how they were going to play Final Fantasy.

 

I tried the Beta, reconnected with my friends, and then bought the game when it came out (much to my surprise).  Most of those friends have since quit FF as well (though two still play), but the community here has really drawn me in and kept me wanting to log on and RP day after day.

 

To me, this game is about the players. So thank you guys! Stay Terrific :-]

[Whittledown]

I was a WoW player forever until around Cata, then drifted around from game to game, eventually settling in GW2 thinking 'Okay, THIS will be my game.' That lasted about six months before I was sick of it. I didn't even know FFXIV 1.0 was a THING. I had never heard of it until I heard a co-worker talking about getting into the beta for 2.0.

 

On a lark I applied for beta, got signed up, installed, and waited. Beta day came and I started it up and from those very first music cues I was HOOKED. I think I made a lancer first and was just blown away moment to moment by how the game felt and sounded and the visuals my god the visuals.

 

I've never been a twitchy gamer so the slower pace of fighting if XIV was a welcome treat and I've never played a game where there was such a good balance between difficulty and accessability. And this community. *grabs the RPC and gives it a noogie* This community right here is so amazing and welcoming.

 

FFXIV feels like home and I cannot wait to see what Yoshi-P has in store for us.

[Chika Ito]

Happy birthday A Realm Reborn!

 

Since we are all sharing our tales about how we came to the game I was actually 'asked' to buy the game. I was back on WoW playing with my friends on there. T'shina Vashka is my great friend of 8 years, so when A Realm Reborn was announced she began poking around. Most of the guild members, in the company I was apart of on there, were going to be leaving WoW to come to FFXIV. I watched the trailers, and I was a bit iffy on it. The first, and only, Final Fantasy game I played was FF 10 for Playstation 2. 

 

T'shina approached me about the game, and 'asked' me to come along and try with everyone. By 'asked' I mean beat me in the face with a virtual newspaper until I caved  Joking aside though I figured I would give it a try so I waited until their open Beta, and I fell in love with the game from level 1. To this day I love the game more and more with each patch. I've found that the love I have for it has tripled since moving to Balmung.

 

I am excited to see what they have planned for the future! So here is to many more patches *raises glass* cheers!

[DoomsdayClock]

This is actually my first MMO, admittedly I've been doing more Rping than actually leveling up Ol' Iron and doing actual game play lol.

I was strictly against a sub based game, didn't see the logic in paying monthly for something when I'm somewhat of a collector and too often don't even play through the games I have...

But a good friend got my to give it a go and I've spent at least sometime nearly every day popping on since.

Very glad to have given it a chance! I hadn't Rped in well over 10 years...I thought that part of myself was long since behind me. Glad to have it back, and glad to have a very interesting community to interact with too..

[FreelanceWizard]

I played the beta of 1.0 way back in the day and was lured in by the devs' promise that "beta is just a tiny fraction of the content available in the live game!" So, I bought the CE, because damn, if the game wasn't pretty -- and the idea of picking up abilities from multiple classes and mixing them together was pretty neat.

 

Then 1.0 launched.

 

Then my CE box became a monitor stand. I didn't play at all despite the apologies and the months of free game time.

 

When I heard 2.0 was coming out and they were taking beta applications, I thought, "Hey, they're revamping it, so it might be fun." I got into beta 2 and was instantly hooked. Here was a game that had everything I'd been missing since EQ -- challenging small group content, clear party roles, abilities that felt useful instead of being "cooldown filler" -- with all of the prettiness, small touches, and great writing of CoH and TSW. I haven't been hooked on a game this much since, well, CoH. Add to that a great RP community going all the way back to the 1.0 days and it should be no surprise that I plan on staying around for a while.

[111]

Wooo a year of my life wasted.

 

Here's to wasting several years to come.

[Melkire]

Wasting? Pffft. Enjoying.

 

Here's to enjoying. :moogle:

[DreamedReality]

My experience mirrors Freelance's pretty much. Got beta invites because of my 1.0 CE and decided to try it out. LotRO, my mmo for years, had become stale and I wasn't happy with some of the directions they were going since going F2P. So I was looking for something new. And damned if Eorzea wasn't beautiful. Then I got hooked and here it is a year later, still enjoying it.

 

Here is to more years and more friends. :thumbsup:

[Aysun]

Haven't stopped playing since 1.0 OB (RP kept me there even when the game was terrible). Not stopping any time soon!

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY FFXIV:ARR!

[Gharen]

So, I started my time RPing in MMO's on CoH's Virtue server, (City of Heroes for the uninitiated.) I played there from the games beta until it's unfortunate demise. I didn't really bother with mmo's for a bit after that.

 

Back when 1.0 was released I was excited and interested in checking the game out, I'd enjoyed my time in XI back in the day however short it was. Then I saw the gametrailers review, amongst several others. That was enough to sour my outlook and cause me to not buy the game, something I often look back on now and kind of regret.

 

In the weeks leading up to XIV's release I did my research even going so far as to do a quick google search for "Final Fantasy XIV Roleplay server" this led me to a post on some forums from one Alothia Starkwood directing someone here to the RPC. Which I followed suit. And thankfully I found a great community where I've managed to form some lasting friendships, and hopefully will form even more as time passes.

 

Here's to a years worth of success, and many more to come!

[Mewnie]

[Menelwen]

Woah! Mewnie, did you bake and decorate that? That looks amazing!

 

[ArmachiA]

Story time!

 

I got sucked into 1.0 thinking it was going to be great because I had such fond memories of FFXI that I played for 3 and a half years. Everyone was very excited about the idea of having a "reunion" in a new FF game so guild members new and old started planning to come over. So I started the guild up in FFXIV - the Crimson Blades (A combination of "Night Blades" and "Crimson Pirates" that we used in FFXI) and found the RPC. We were really active on the RPC, super gung ho, ready to go.

 

Beta was blah.

 

Not to worry, we said! They promised Beta wasn't the finished game!

 

Oh, but it was the finished games.

 

We lasted a month and I WAS MAD AT SE FOR SO LONG.

 

So long that when the Realm Reborn Alpha invite was sent to me, my fiance, AND my roommate, I didn't even want to play it. My fiance always had a soft spot for it, he was pretty convinced SE HAD to fix FFXIV or they company would lose a lot of respect and money. There was no way this could fail, he said.

 

I, of course, laughed at him. I played Alpha for 10 minutes and shut it off, muttering something about it being too much like WoW.

 

Then I got a Beta invite as soon as Alpha was over. My fiance convinced me I might as well play Beta so I can give feedback and try to fix what I didn't like, and I wasn't playing any MMO's at the time so I figured why not.

 

I HAVE NOT STOPPED PLAYING SINCE. I've been playing non-stop since Beta Phase One. My guild is full of awesome and amazing people and it continues to grow each day (And we just got our T7 full guild clear yesterday!) and I've met some people on here who I just don't think I was live without.

 

It's been a journey. Ups and downs and amazing times. Here's to many more years to come!

[Arianne Beaudonet]

I came a bit late to the party compared to some here, as I didn't join FFXIV till Beta 4, however when I did join, I was instantly hooked. I'd pretty much been drifting since my days in EQ on the FV server. Only a few games have been able to hold a candle to EQ as far as my enjoyment, FFXI among the short list. In most games, what caused me to stay as long as I did was the friends and community. This game has that going for it too While I did take a break over the holidays, I was back in the game by February and have been enjoying my time spent here. As Freelancer said, this game has a lot of the elements I missed from my EQ days and it keeps drawing me back. I have the feeling I'm going to be here awhile :love: