I know I am late on the ball with this, but with a busier than normal schedule last week it was really hard to find time to really sit down and collect my thoughts without wanting to bang on head on something.

Anyway, FFXIV formerly known as Rapture is the hottest topic lately and I can’t help but get giddy with excitement with the thoughts and ideas of what could possible be with the new MMO. Firstly, I am incredibly thrilled that there will be no leveling up via experience points. I’m personally exhausted of this system, and it always seemed so daunting even in WoW when you would look to see your EXP would be… a lot. Sure its fast to level up, but its still kind of a pain in the butt to see how much further you have to get to in order to get to the next level. But now the bigger question is: what will we be striving towards? Orophen/Derrick informed me that a lot of talk has been going on in the forums of weapons having learnable skills/traits/spells, possibility of needing to increase weapon affinity to get ahead, or maybe the introduction of a sphere like grid system into the game like FFX and FFXII. I’m ok with the first two, but the later? Ugh… I know a lot of people like this sytem, but I for one am not very fond of it at ALL. It won’t be a deal breaker for me, but I will most definitely not be in strong favor of this unless it was changed to curb my tendency to be really OCD about these kind of charts.

But since its really late for me and I’m practically running on fumes, here are some hopes/wishes I have for the new MMO:

• Return the Mandragora and give us a “boss” style of him.
• Please give us a better “guild” system. As much as I like the Linkshell system and find it useful, I also want a more intuitive Guild system that really helps us know what is going on (attendance, guild banks, etc).
• Allow us to interact with the environment more. I always thought it was crazy that we couldn’t lay on our own beds or sit down on chairs. Even RO allowed people to sit on chairs! Which is even older than FFXI!
• Mini-map. Seriously. This would make my life easier if I can see I am near my marker instead of having to always do /map or whatever. I get lost easily. Let me see where I am going on a mini-map! That way I won’t have to go in the wrong direction for 2 minutes or lead my entire linkshell in the wrong direction only to go “oops!” And, yeah, the later has happened to me before… /blush
• Let us have more customizable features. I’m worried that this won’t be possible. The game so far looks really gorgeous, but I have no idea if the Crystal Tools will actually give us the capability to customize our character a little more than the pre-set designs given to us in FFXI. Though its convient, I sometimes wish I had different color hair and/or eyes.
• Get rid of the senseless time sinks. Mostly the pauses inbetween synths and stuff.

And that is all I have in mind for now. Need to sleep now before I start to go crazy dreaming about Gremlins again…