Welcome to the crew!

Welcome aboard, friend!

I will for sure be playing ESO now that it's gone the GW-style free-to-play model.  I quite enjoyed it, even with the horrific game-breaking issues, during beta and at release but put it down simply because it was incredibly group unfriendly outside dungeons and PvP.  I tried to do general questing with a couple friends, and it was a mess.

I plan to just treat the non-dungeon PvE as a single-player game and enjoy the PvP.  Pretty much exactly how I played GW2.

That was actually pretty damn entertaining.  Love the drunken douchebag "acting."

I posted it on Facebook to get more people seeing it.

Welcome, friend!

I recently came back to FFXIV after a few months of playing ESO.  I honestly couldn't tell you specifically why I'm loving FFXIV so much, but I am.  I'm very thoroughly a fan of the open-world sandbox free-PvP full-loot MMOs, and this is so far in the other direction I theoretically should hate it.  It's essentially a Final Fantasy flavored WoW, and apparently that's enough to make me enjoy it.  Classes are very narrowly defined into the three major roles of Tank, Healer, and DPS, and all content is based on that division.  The main story is meant to be played solo, with a few mandatory dungeons (4 or 8 man) thrown in, and because they are mandatory to enjoy the story they are fairly easy.  When you reach level 50, the content branches off a bit with 4, 8, and 24-man dungeons as well as hunts and certain FATES (open-world events).

Where I can see FA excelling and enjoying our time is the Binding Coil of Bahamut, the major end-game 8-man content meant for a static group of committed players.  It's the weekly lockout dungeon that saves your progress through each Coil (sub-sections).  It's quite reminiscent of the end-game SWTOR content we had specific raid groups schedules for particular times each week.

The game also just recently released Frontlines, the 24v24v24 PvP arena that is also something we could excel at and potentially enjoy.

Really, it all comes down to WHO you play with rather than WHAT you play.  I really do think that's a philosophy that SE embraces with FFXIV, and I hope at least SOME of you try it out and enjoy it.  If not, there are plenty of games on the horizon as well as Rust (which I've been watching and waiting for the experimental branch to overtake the official game to play again).

EDIT: Also, I'm drunk.  Please view any opinions expressed through that lens.

I'm really enjoying it, though I can easily see how plenty of others would choose to stay away.

I think it does as good a job as possible in marrying an MMO game with a TES game, though it's certainly on the side of MMO.  As if they started with a basic MMO structure and attempted to make it as much like an Elder Scrolls game as possible, rather than the reverse (which I think many would have preferred).

Questing is, for me, the most enjoyable thing and is far more exciting than other MMO questing.  IF you care about the story and dialogue, then you can immerse yourself in the game and ignore the fact that you are, in fact, doing the same old MMO quests you've done a million times in every other game.  The fact that ESO can get me to forget that and ENJOY what is usually the biggest chore in other MMOs is wonerful!

I'm also enjoying the PvP (always my priority in any game), and it's most similar to DAoC and GW2, and proves to me that GW2 WvW could have been so much better with the tiny tweak of a larger map.  Cyrodiil is a pretty damn big place, and though the large zerg ball still exists in ESO, it's effect on the war is actually pretty minimal.  Organization and communication are key to victory, not numbers.

There are a number of fairly big problems existing in the game at the moment, but it is my opinion that most "problems," defined as things I personally don't like, are bugs and errors rather than intentional design choices.  That means that, in time, most everything I dislike will likely be fixed and corrected.  One of the BIGGEST downsides to me is the frustrating inability to benefit from your party members while doing quests. Each individual must complete each quest objective, making it seem like you are questing in parallel with your friends rather than questing WITH them.  That SUCKS, and I really hope they fix that so I can play with my friends and not constantly feel like we are wasting time doing everything twice.

So will you like the game?  Hell if I know.  All I know is that with the current MMOs on the market, I enjoy ESO far more than any other.  Maybe Shroud of the Avatar, Camelot Unchained, or Star Citizen will change that, but those games are still a LONG time out!