Yea when Seraph got Merged with Bismarck I quit too. Because of loosing my name that I started back in the beginning of Nov 2003 and tried relentlessly to gather the perfect names on my 5 specific characters which took non-stop grinding for a Year and Half were loss due to Square Enix's I don't care deal with our decision cause we always know what were doing here. Well this is a different genre where there is interactive audience and you can't shut them out like on a single player console RPG. First why would you do that to your fans you made RPG before and doesn't that stand for Role Playing Game? Well maybe you never rolled dice on Dungeons & Dragon but creating a reputation and cooperative social network world like FFXI to loose it all on a whim of a server merge is just not acceptable. You loose your drive to want to continue when you put all that hard work into a persona and settle for mispelled or completely different left over names. Seraph server was an amazing experience where i came up with a tarutaru who was mithra obsessed that shouted till his audience ears bleed "meow POW POW" and other forms of mithra teasing notions. Now lucky enough I didn't loose this name but other characters that I commited to were all lost. I liked my Mithra named Valkyrie, I pulled non-stop and she lived up to her name as a ranger and thief puller for years. Then Liberty my elvaan tank majestic and proud had to settle for a lesser name. I won't mention my galka name but lets just say the japanese loved it and I represented it with lots of respect and reputation. Why didn't you even allow the gamers to have rename option fee to pay like all other MMORPG to custom there characters the way they want to. Like racial changes to appearance changes to allow the players who mostly play 1 character to change it up rather make 5 characters like I had to. Feels like its money motivated than customer friendly to me. Yes we will drive the public crazy in wanting to try out different things. Well it contributes to the gamers to quit. Really bad customer service too where one promises to fix it then another GM goes and makes you file multiple tickets till you give up. Nothing ever gets escalated for the sake of a longterm player. I think FFXIV was very much overlooked on basic design and vision really. Its like they said lets make a WoW this is easy game so we can horde more customers than pleasing our exsisting customer base. It's eye candy and pretty shallow in content. Should consider FFXI was the complete opposite of WoW clones for mainstream content and design. What made FFXI community was it filtered out the button mashing players and served to the more commited and patient players. Where are the 2 things that made FFXI so good that were forgotten? The ninja tank which btw was invented by the players Square Enix had no notion of making it a tank till the players made it to be so. The redmage the ultimate support and soloist mage melee character who ironically puts out the fire in most situations. In raids no one earns experience points we don't care to have the same feel of outside raiding moving all over the place and dealing with raid issues. The camp site experience pulling was fine got people to learn there jobs in the slower action style and actual develope better timing and management of character abilities. If anything I think dungeons should be left as gear content no experience is needed there if you wanted to have diversity in the game. Quests should just stay as fame and story rank developement just like you had in FFXI. Gets people to share the more important reason for playing an MMORPG, social aspect is developed through teamwork in story impact plot turns. The valor fields works fine for stacking experience this guild level thing turned FFXIV into a soloing game. Final Fantasy XIV should of came up with rift idea where the avatars shattered the crystal and brought forth minions like ballista events all over the world. That design would of fitted the cooperative gameplay style of what final fantasy XI was about very well. Why not make the warrior a tank class is a question I never quite understood. Well I hope this gives you guys some motivation in putting in some suggestions to Square Enix and may we save the classic FFXI from cookie cutter mmorpg that seem to be spreading like a virus out there in the community of mmorpgs. Untill then my fellow taru taru bust out a meow POW POW \(^-^)/ to every mithra you see and let them know that cabbit has come out to play!

I'm sorry for your loss, When Garuda transfered I had to change all mine names. It was one of the main reasons I left. The game didn't feel the same anymore.