New prospective playerFollow

As an MMO that is 100% free to play, and you can pick up copies with reg codes for 5-10$ how can you go wrong. 1 lunch at McDonalds is about the same cost as picking up FFXIV. It will most likely be F2P for at minimum 3 more months and most likely till the end of summer/fall of this year at which point they plan to release it on PS3.

As far as the game goes and from the perspective of a 50 CON I can say CON is a great job to start with. Even if they make major battle changes CON will be the starting point for any BLM/WHM type jobs that they introduce or create. CON is the only job with prot/shell and basic cures.

Game play FFXIV is a work in progress, when you first start your going to be blown away. Everyone I know even at launch thought the opening and first few hours are amazing. Right now the UI and lag is fairly good and only shows some bad signs when in the wards (FFXIV's AH) and in larger battles when you spam abilities/attacks in quick succession. Its certainly not game breaking but something the devs intend to fix most likely by baking more actions client side.

The game is NOT balanced well. To me this is the worst part, they spent so much time revamping systems and trying to produce new content that they have not spent much time balancing things yet. This will start to get fixed with the patch due out in 1month. Its not obvious till your much higher in rank as you start seeking certain gear and you learn it doesn't seem to affect your spells/attacks etc.

Summary: Get the game and get a nice head start on 95% of the people who will be playing FFXIV in 6months. There is more then enough things to do to keep you busy for a long time and some of the best/biggest changes are due in the next patch.

Maybe it sounds bleak, but I'd rather not paint the game as all roses and daisies when its clearly a work in progress. That said I have hundreds of hours invested right now. And for me personally I love the game. I loved it at launch and its only gotten better. The ability to get things done in smaller spurts is great, I can log in at 5:45 in the morning and play for 30min. before work: I can pick up 3-4 local leve's and get a good amount of crafting done quickly turn in the leve's for rewards stop in on my retainer to restock anything. Even pick up supplies for the nights events. It rewards you to play in smaller bursts rather then long extended hours. Events are all tailored to 30-1hour increments and probably will continue in that direction, gone are the days of the 24hour pop.

I didn't intend to say gear is going to be free and easy to get for all but that the method used in attaining drops is more along the 4man or 8man small group instanced content vs the 24hour or 5-7 day spawn window thing.

For me I'd rather have content that is extraordinarily hard to beat and that is its limiting factor for exclusivity rather then the "who has the best bot" game we played in FFXI.