Min Maxing and FFXIV

Stats were a very big part of FFXI and even if you didnt completely buy into the idea of spending millions of gil for the slightest edge over the rest of the community, many people did their best to manage their stats in a way that would significantly improve their performance. I wasn't a hardcore player by any means, but I must admit that I took a significant amount of satisfaction from finally being able to afford that next big ticket item. Sure, as a casual player there was a lot that was out of bounds -- based on my commitment level and the time I was willing to dedicate to the project -- yet there were still more than enough reasons to be perfectly happy without having the very best the game had to offer those with the highest level of dedication and patience.

Even so, we're talking about an environment where at one point elitests would completely refuse to group with someone who didn't have a race that complimented their chosen job based on a few points of base stats. So, yes, there were some down sides to the system as well, but those came directly from the community and were not intended by the developers.

So I suppose that takes us to our next question, what role will item optimization take in S-E's next online addition to the Final Fantasy franchise? Will FFXIV have the same emphasis on stat stacking for specific abilities, enough to warrant complex macros to swap gear for specific spells or abilities? I, for one, greatly enjoyed having that much control over my own performance in FFXI.

So far, in Open Beta, I haven't really encountered these traits. Still, the game is pre-release and people haven't really figured much of this stuff out yet. A lot of these testers haven't played FFXI, or didn't make it past the trial if they did: based on some of the comments I've been seeing on the various forums I've been reading.

But I have hope. S-E is going to have to implement something to keep hard core to slightly-above-casual players not only occupied, but satisfied. There is the culinary profession, which will need to have some kind of demand to have a viable purpose in the game -- let alone the self-supporting economic component to make it more than just a time/gil sink. Let's face it, there has to be some kind of built on reward for spending all that time leveling up the job.

And of course, there are the Notorious Monsters, or NM's, that have made a reappearance. What would be the point of killing them without some type of reward that would justify the time spent camping/killing them?

In the end, I do believe there will be some form of min/max benefit to the game. Will it take the same shape as it did in FFXI? Maybe not, but only time and the player base will tell.

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