At least you got in bastard...I want to try before I buy cause I grew tired of FF 11 in less then a year....

ff 11 was the worse mmo i ever played...the controls were so bad i never went past the first month..and dont get me started on the sign up process and logging in was a complete nightmare...sadly the new one looks to be more of the same...this franchise has sucked since FF7 anyway...

Yeah, the FF XIV updater is terrible.

Incidentally, so is the game. It has the worst UI of any MMO I've ever played. Whispers are so limited in length they make twitter messages seem long. I never did figure out how to reply without typing out the persons full name again. Most things you'd expect to be able to do with a mouse (scroll around the map, drag skills onto your bars) can't be done and require either strange sequences of commands or downright odd keyboard buttons. It crashes like crazy.

If you disconnect while doing a guildleve (quest), you fail it. you then have to go back to who issued it to do it again, which if it happens to be a tutorial introductary one can be a problem since the NPC won't issue it again (and ones later in the game have 48 hour timers, so if you crash during it you fail and can't even try again for two days!). Since the game crashes frequently... yeah. Alt+Tab in full screen mode is prone to blowing up.

Hell, you can't even group with someone unless you're already in trade range of them.

It's kind of sad that UI design seems to be going backwards in this genre, but this plays entirely like a PS3 game that was given a low quality port.

To answer your question of "what were they thinking?", I really don't know. Who in their right mind designs a game where you use JKL as the shortcuts to scroll around the map instead of using the mouse? I don't think they have any designers who know a bloody thing about PC games. The patcher does illustrate the problems nicely though, I finally got around that by going to a fansite and grabbing a copy of the file someone uploaded.

I have a friend at work that got into the beta and apprently its a buggy crap fest in alot of ways. Well they got 3 weeks to finish polishing it up, but I think I will use those funds elsewhere and just keep waiting for our dear Star Wars: TOR to release next year. (better be good god damn it so sick of bad star wars games...)

Yeah, I've got the same hope right now. Bioware has a LOT of people watching them. If they can pull it off it'll be the biggest thing in the genre since WoW.

I really should stop my download, especially when just this one file is going to take over 10 hours to download.

I can't help it though, I want to see this nightmare for myself.

Yeah lol i found it funny how it yelled in my face with a bold font, right after signing up; "Open beta testers have NO access to the forums!"

Sigh. I miss MMO's.. And i've tried them all. They are fun and exciting at first, when you discover new things, then its a boring rutine (doesnt matter if its grindy or not, either its kill-mobs grindy or do-quests grindy).
I even reactivated my ancient dusty WoW account, because i thought, maybe it is enjoyable after all, so many peeps play it.
Just, no. It wasnt. The entire game is empty, devoid of other players, everyone on every server is lvl 80, sitting around waiting for raids.

I've liked alot of mmo's, but they all bore me in the end. I love mmo's.. I loved Aion. No, i was in love with it, at the same time as i met a girl who i fell in love with who also was in love with Aion, perhaps that had something to do with it. Then they banned me by mistake as they tried to ban the bots. Then the bots and goldsellers persisted, and there was no point to play it anymore.

I just want, a fun mmo. That isnt ruined by hacks, bots, goldseller spam, or empty desolate landscapes. Why is that so hard?

LOTRO goes free to play on the 10th (the 8th if you owned it previously) and blows DDO out of the water.

LOTRO goes free to play next week?? wow never knew, havent played it since beta. And DDO, i kinda forgot about that game after the beta
*goes to check out both of those games and see how they changed*

Ghostbit you are so right. So many games (especially mmo's) these days are obsessed with being "their own thing", even to the extent of re-inventing the wheel instead of being grateful for, and using, all the innovations and polish that previous games have built upon. Such as simple things like your example, right click + accept, quest accepted.

In a way it can be seen in Elemental too, where they also wanted to make it their own unique thing.. Which i respect, but the result is also that the game is unpolished and the gameplay is undeveloped (perhaps not completely figured out yet, considering the magic overhaul coming soon).
As opposed to if they used the decades of polish and previous game features / ideas other games have come up with, to build further upon that, to reach something better and improved, rather than just something new and half-thought out

An exagerrated (and stupid funny) analogy would perhaps be, if Mercedes decided to invent a new hexagonal wheel for their cars, instead of simply using the best known wheel already invented and refined for all these years
Sure the hexagonal weel is rad and different, but it sure does roll alot more chuggishly than the old circular tried and proved (and loved!) wheel.
I wonder which will be the most remembered and copied 5 years from that, the hexagon wheel or the circular wheel?

Although, hey, technically someone did that too.

http://www.dailytech.com/Michelin+Reinvents+the+Wheel/article13553.htm

ffxiv's download sucks hard..find the .torrent file and download with your fav torrent downloader seems to work wonders.  The game is still in beta though, and really feels that way.  Am really hoping the clean it up before release. 

I was getting some good elemental time in while waiting for ffxiv beta to download too..cept elemental would out of memory or other random crash on me every 20 turns or so....  Got an OOM crash while saving once, getting to the point I gotta restart every few turns to ensure I don't lose progress, for a released game this feels a lot like beta =P.

Even with the gamepad there's still the issue of how small the whisper size limit is (added to trying to type text messages with a gamepad), the 48 hour timers, the fact that if you disconnect or crash (and it crashes frequently) you fail the thing and can't even try it again for 48 hours, and on and on it goes.

It really plays like a game with a 2001 MMO UI. Someone needs to tell them that the bar has been raised in the last 9 years.