Welcome to the FINAL FANTASY XIV: A THREAD REBORN community thread! This thread is designed for the Warriors of Light on VGChartz can come together and chat about their adventures in Eorzea, as well as keep updated on the latest news and information for the game. Adventurers are encouraged to organize raids, parties, and share their Free Companies here as well! If you have any suggestions to help improve the thread, feel free to suggest below!

Post 1: Introduction, Story Overview

Post 2: Current Patch, News

Post 3: Adventurer List, Free Company Recruiting

Kind of hard to do when you're the one never playing it >_>

For those looking for a recap on the latest Letter for the Producer:

20m Registered Players! Great milestone! Game definitely deserves it

Finally, we have a preliminary set of notes for what they'll be adding into patch 5.3, click the image for the full set of changes:

Also we have some info about the changes to the Starter Edition and Free Trial post 5.3 as well:

We are pleased to announce that the FINAL FANTASY XIV Starter Edition will be updated to include Heavensward and all associated content at the release of Patch 5.3 on Tuesday, August 11! This change also applies to all existing owners of the Starter Edition as well.

Users will be able to experience the entirety of A Realm Reborn and dive straight into the Dragonsong War, take to the skies on flying mounts, level up to 60, play as Au Ra, dark knight, astrologian, machinist, and more.

* Service accounts will be updated to reflect this change starting on Tuesday, August 11. Please note that the registration status update may not be displayed immediately on the Mog Station.

Expansion of the Free Trial

Similarly, the FINAL FANTASY XIV Free Trial will also be upgraded to include the Heavensward expansion and related content at the launch of Patch 5.3! Spread the word to your friends and invite them to journey with you!

----------

I'm excited to see what it's like to fly around in the ARR areas, though to be honest I'm not the biggest fan of flying mounts in MMOs, I feel like it encourages people to not really enjoy the scenery as much if you're high up in the air. Wish the dev team would throw in some improvements to the Viera and Hrothgar races as well to bring them a little bit closer in parity with the other race choices, the lack of headgear and face/hair options compares to the others is a bit tiresome over a year out from the initial Shadowbringers release. 

Curious about how the ARR experience will be post patch too, might make an alt to see how streamlined it actually is.

Still waiting for the free trial to be expanded to players already owning the game. I think I bought the game mere months before the free trial was announced, and never even hit the level cap of the trial. I just don't have enough time to justify paying for the monthly free almost ever, so at this rate, so having bought the game only to hear I wouldn't actually have had to annoys me greatly. Now I'm worse off than not having paid for the game at all... And the thing is, if I ever hit the level cap in the free trial, I would probably have a much higher chance of paying for the subscription that I have now when I never play the game. In my case, this is probably a lose-lose situation.

Yeah the free trial still has the unfortunate drawback that once you've paid for a sub, you lose access to the free trial content entirely. It's a pretty clunky setup sadly, especially when you look at another MMO like World of Warcraft where they also have a free starter period that all accounts revert to once your sub runs out. I suppose it's partly due to the fact that free trial players in FFXIV aren't able to join Free Companies among other restrictions, but honestly I don't see the point of barring free trial players from joining them anyway, they could just relax that restriction and just give everyone the benefit of the free trial if their sub runs out. Maybe sometime in the future they'll reconsider. Always possible to make a secondary account in the meantime if you never got very far.

I sure hope they reconsider, although I'm not holding my breath. I'm aware I could make a secondary account but I'd rather not have more accounts than 'necessary'. I have other games to play and FFXIV is not that interesting (although it would certainly be nice to be able to play the game). I wish there was a model between a full subscription and getting nothing, for more than just this. PS+ is another case where I just can't justify paying for a whole month almost ever, but there are times when I might want to play online just a bit but there's no model that fits me. It's practically the same situation here, where I really won't get my money's worth if I pay for the whole month.