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Squallion

Well, it seems many, many people are starting to get into p2p mmo's, and these two are the most popular among this comunity so far, AND were seeing ALOT of ''FF11 OR WOW???'' threads.
thing is, when they come and post about it, they ususaly get a really one sided opinion from people that had one or the other games that can lead them to buy a game that is really, not meant for them.

FF11 and WoW are two VERY diferent mmo's.
you can't say one is better then another, since neither of the games have anything alike(almost).

So, i decided to post a little buyer's guide i guess, since i played both games from release, up until now, and i still love each of them. i have recently left FF11, but this is only due to lack of time with my current lifestyle, and most of my LS finaly quitting the game.

Alright, let's start this!

===Final Fantasy 11===
Release dates(from wikipedia)
PlayStation 2
JP May 16, 2002
NA March 23, 2004

Windows (PC)
JP November 2002
NA October 28, 2003
PAL September 17, 2004

Xbox 360
NA April 18, 2006
JP April 20, 2006
PAL April 20, 2006

Payment options: credit card
montly fee: 12.95 +1$ per character slot (you are given one character slot in the initial 12.95$)


Final Fantasy 11 is a huge mmorpg, with 4 races, the hume, mirthra, galka and tarutaru.
The game also as many jobs, a character can be evry jobs, and can switch at any time by going to his home to change to any job he wishes, also keeping his lvl in the job he is curently using(lets say your a lvl 10 warrior, you could go change your class to thief, get it to lvl 5, then go back to your home, change your job back to warrior at lvl 10, and keep thief lvl 5)
You can also learn to have 2 jobs at once at lvl 18, your subjob will only be half of your main job's lvl (let's say you are a lvl 30 warrior, and you subjob is monk, even if your monk lvl is higher then 15, it will be capped at 15 until you reach higher lvls)
here is the job list:
Standard jobs(can use when initialy creating a character):
Black Mage
Monk
Red Mage
Thief
Warrior
White Mage

Advanced jobs(you get these once you reach lvl 30, requires you to do a quest for each of them to unlock them):
Bard
Beastmaster
Blue Mage
Corsair
Dark Knight
Dragoon
Ninja
Paladin
Puppetmaster
Ranger
Samurai
Summoner

Now for how the game is played.
When you first create your character, you will most likely solo till lvl 10(after that, its all partying, unless your a puppetmaster/beastmaster)
if your used to games with tons of quest wich you complete very fast, FF11 might confuse you a bit, the main quests in FF11 are storyline based, in are seperated in chapters pretty much. the quests are small stuff like ''run there, kill 10 of these, and come back'' the quests require alot of running around and finguring out stuff, some quests can take you a week to complete, or more.
Final Fantasy 11 is also one of the only MMORPG's to be story driven, with cutscenes, and such. Lots of other thing to do such as mining, fishin, blacksmithing, and such.
The game's PVP is in events called balista. there is no open pvp, the only way to pvp is to participate in the balista, wich is team based, and happens at certain times only.
The community is one of the nicest in any mmo, ever. I have personaly never seen such a big amount of helpfull people in any other mmo.
There is no actual Guild system but there is Linkshells, wich are more of a chat chanel with a roster.

The battle system is a slow paced one, wich is based around doing skill chains. how this works is that you will have someone from diferent classes do diferent skills in a certain order to finaly get a chain effect that will give exp bonus. this requires somewhat good knowledge of the game and strategy.

Downsides to the game: you will be grinding the entire game, that, however, might not be a bother to some. The economy is almost always going crazy, they have a hard time taking care of gil sellers, and once they do get them, they ban them all at once, causing the economy to take a big hit again, so due to these things, the economy is never really stable.
The game is also only played using the keyboard, all character movement/menu, is done using the numpad, you can bind skill macros and such to CTRL+ any number if you know what your doing.
The game also requires huge amounts of hours to get almost anything done, does not fit to evry one's shedules, thats for sure

Overall, Final Fantasy 11 is a game made more for PVE players, based around teamwork and helping each other out, and also requires some strategy. Not for pvp fanatics, that's for sure.


===World of Warcraft===
Release dates(from wikipedia):
North America: November 23, 2004
South Korea: January 18, 2005
Europe: February 11, 2005
China: June 6, 2005
Singapore: July 21, 2005
South Africa: August 1, 2006

Payment options:Credit card, prepaid card, paypal
montly fee:
1 month: $14.99
3 months: $41.97 ($13.99 per month)
6 months: $77.94 ($12.99 per month)
Prepaid card 60 days: 30$

World of Warcraft is curently the most p2p mmorpg. with a huge comunity reach millions and millions, the game aint anywere near ready to die.
The game is devided into 2 factions wich are at war with each other:

The Alliance: The Horde:
Humans Undeads
Dwarfs Trolls
Gnomes Orcs
Night Elves Taurens
Draenei Blood Elves

for All of those races, there are also many classes, wich are:
Druid
Hunter
Mage
Paladin
Preist
Rogue
Shaman
Warlock
Warrior

World of Warcraft is a heavily PVP based mmo, with lots of pve raiding. most people say the real game starts at lvl 70, wich is pretty much true, once you get there, you get some really long instance raids, ranked pvp arena's, epic flying mounts, and much more. The game tends to be getting bad publicity by fans of other games for being a ''kids'' game. it is true that world of warcraft as more kids the other mmo's due to many payment options and huge amount of publicity, but it also as a huge amount of nice, mature people. Its easy to get into a nice guild that will help you out, specialy if your a first timer, the game is also very easy to learn.

Lvling is pretty fast, and you can either chose to grind solo, or with friends, or quest solo, or with friends, you will never be forced to grind, or do a quest you dont want to in order to reach the next lvl, and if you rather solo, you can, or if you rather play with friends, you can also.

Unlike FF11, wich as slow paced combat, WoW as fast paced combat, now, most people tend to say that WoW's gameplay is near brain dead compared to FF11, but this is far from true, its just really diferent. The pve combat for questing/grinding, is indeed pretty much brainded, spam the same 3-4 skills and get exp. But, once you get to instances, you need to know how to play your class, and well, since each class needs to play there role perfectly to avoid wipes, and such. Not only that, but once you start doing serious arena pvp, you need to know how to get out of almost any situation if you want to get a good ranking.
With this said, yes, there are childish idiots on the game, but none of them actualy make it very far.

Blizzard also announced that they would be releasing a new expention evry year after burning crusade was released.

The game also as diferent kinds of servers to fit your gameplay style:
Normal:normal realm, wich is good for beginer players, barely any world pvp.
PVP: after your initial area's, evry area is contested, and in these areas, you are at war 24/7, so better be ready. this allows some fun pvp raids with guilds and such.
RP: same thing as normal servers, xep with actual rules that force players to RP, to give a more fantasy feeling to the game
RPPVP: same thing as an RP server, with the PVP server features.

Game also as Battlegrounds, wich is instance pvp that is crossrealmed(servers are devided in battlegroups, about 10 servers per group) and these will have shared battle grounds, there are smaller (10 vs 10) battlegrounds (horde vs aliance, obviously) and much larger (40 vs 40) battlegrounds. really fun, also allows you to get decent gear early into the game.

Downsides of the game are:
having to actualy somewhat look for nice people to play with, there's lots of people, but you dont want to be with all of them since they arent all that good at the game or to mature, but as i said, get into a decent guild, and this factor pretty much disapears.
Graphics are pretty dated for such a recent mmo, but they fit the game nicely.
Lack of a good imersive storyline.

Overall, World of Warcraft is more of a game for people who enjoy pvp and masive raids.Game does not require you to spend countless hours on to actualy get somewhere so it is pretty flexible to anyone's shedule.


hope this helps!

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Greed

Nice review. 10/10 ^_^

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Aru

Racist.

The one thing of note, that has always bothered me (being both an avid FFXI and WoW fan);
FFXI fans will always say WoW sucks, and give you extremely transparent, fake reasons for it.
And, unfortunately, WoW fans will do the exact same for FFXI (though, it's actually less common, and not many people in WoW know of FFXI, surprisingly. Likely, this is due to the extreme popularity of WoW- who hasn't heard of it?)

It's very hard to get a good, unbiased opinion, on either game-- but I think Squallion's done a pretty good job here.
FFXI is a slower-paced, extremely time-consuming game, which features some unecessarily difficult aspects (crafting system, for example). However, the endgame in FFXI, though time consuming, is not extremely difficult in execution.

The one thing that has always bothered me about FFXI, though, is some of the functionality of endgame-- in WoW, you can PvP with other players to obtain gear, and you will be competing. There is also a PvE alternative, where you are not competing with other players.

In FFXI, PvP is purely for fun. There is no character advancement whatsoever through it, and the function is not very balanced.
Now, in PvE, though you are never directly competing with players... you almost always are, in a sense, because of the almost complete and utter lack of instancing. Bosses will spawn in the world, and the best high-end guilds will be standing there, waiting to "claim" them (whoever uses an ability, spell, or attack on a monster first, grants his party the right to fight that monster. No one else is able to engage it, or harm it). This can be very frustrating, because you, along with your guild, can spend hours waiting for a monster to spawn, only to have another group claim it. Many people use hacks, and it is practically impossible for the "average" player to claim a mob.

Other than that, FFXI's a really fun game, if you can get into it. It's certainly not for everyone, though.

My preference has been, as of late, playing WoW. Simply because, I don't have the amount of time I used to, available to commit to MMORPGs. FFXI is a huge timesink.

neothaka

i reckon this is the first good guide since long time.
as objective as it could get.

well done

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TehChaos

Ha now that you posted this, more people are gonna make new threads like "z0mg W0W/FFXI is t3h uber l337orz" But yeah nice info, I had no clue about the character slots for FFXI.

Arri

Raids, Arenas

^_^

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Greed

HOLY MODERATORS! IT ARRI! o_o

I thought you also had to pay for the character slots in WoW o_O or was that GW..

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elazulblack

xD Very nice review, you did what most fail to do.

You actually made me want to start playing FFXI even worse. Good job XP.

Squallion

WoW as ulimited character slots,
Guildwars you get 4 with your first account with 1 game, +2 for each game/expention you add, and you can buy extra slots for about 2$ or so if i remember.

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Reveille

Nice review on WoW but u left out Battlegrounds.