Are server merges ever going to happen?

[Runespider]

WoW and EQ are also Western games aimed at Western audiences, with Western advertising principles, and on a platform a lot of Western people use for gaming. Notice how consoles took so long to get online multiplayer (since most consoles were Japanese)? Arcades fulfilled the need for multiplayer in Japan, and they prefer in-person matches. Internet has been more accessible on PCs here, and on phones in Japan, so of course online games matured in the west earlier, and we don't care so much about seeing the person we are facing. WoW was able to take advantage of a larger population because of that, while the average Japanese person doesn't have a mental concept of MMO being different from Online RPG.

Don't give them a free ride just because they are Japanese, I don't care what country they run in they should still have basic common business sense. Square have made many horrible decisions that make zero sense and they keep doing it.

WoW is old but still the market leader, it's the top MMO in the world. How could this be, it's "old" right?
Everquest is ancient and shows no sign of ever closing its doors, it's still fairly popular and gets updates. It has a hardcore fanbase that love it it has devs that love working on it.
Lineage 1 (2003) is really old and beloved by the fans it has, it's one of the most profitable games Ncsoft runs and indeed one of the most profitable in the world.
I could list more like eve etc.

As you can see old in the mmo world is not a negative, only the company running it can make it so.

Old in the MMO market is good, all the most profitable and popular mmo titles are old titles, they beat every new title hands down. You know why? Because they paid for themselves long ago and they didn't have a 100 million development budget, they reuse assets and the devs can make content for these old titles easily. They are also not top of the line developers who need to push systems to the max so they aren't paid as much.

Old MMO titles are always the most profitable and easy to run. Whatever reason Square have for doing what they are doing it's not for profitability ones, maybe they think they can retain a large number of addicted players and not give them any content and as such save money. Maybe they have future plans for the game but wanted to see how many people stick around after they drop consoles and just didn't want to play their cards until they see that... I don't know but as of right now it makes no sense at all.

People have this weird idea and I keep seeing it that new in the mmo world is good, it's not. At least not in terms of profits. If people think FFXIV is anywhere near the top they are deluding themselves, I play it and I post on the official forums and I know how deluded a lot of them are about how the game is doing but again they are very wrong.

I don't know why Square are doing what they are doing here but it's not for basic business reasons, if they sold FFXI to another company I'm telling you right now that with how many players this game has spread over the many servers they could make it profitable and keep it updated very easily.

FFXI is in the state it is in right now because of mismanagement, there is no argument here about this because it's easy to list a large number of things they did and are doing to destroy the game and the players it had. The player loss was because of bad decisions the company made and continue to make, if run correctly FFXI would still be as popular as it ever was and I dare anyone to say otherwise.

[Alhanelem]

As you can see old in the mmo world is not a negative, only the company running it can make it so.

Old isn't an automatic negative, but it is if you don't update your game to keep up with trends and technology. Many other MMOs have updated the tech, improved the graphics engines, and done other things over the years to help keep things fresh. The development mentality as well as the technology with FFXI just hasn't kept up with the times. Old problems are given old solutions, and far too late at that. Console as primary platform has majorly hurt the game's ability to recieve technical enhancements. A planned new UI designed for PC never made it past early testing stages (much to my dismay), and they never shifted their codebase over to PC in such a way that they didn't have to depend on ps3 dev hardware to continue development. If they didn't use PS2 in the first place, or at least shifted their development focus earlier, they could have done more to keep the game up-to-date. Some people cite gameplay changes midway though XI's history that hurt the playerbase, but if you ask me, not keeping up with the times technologically was just as responsible.

[madmartin]

Server merges will most probably happen after the console support ends.

[Runespider]

Old isn't an automatic negative, but it is if you don't update your game to keep up with trends and technology. Many other MMOs have updated the tech, improved the graphics engines, and done other things over the years to help keep things fresh. The development mentality as well as the technology with FFXI just hasn't kept up with the times. Old problems are given old solutions, and far too late at that. Console as primary platform has majorly hurt the game's ability to recieve technical enhancements. A planned new UI designed for PC never made it past early testing stages (much to my dismay), and they never shifted their codebase over to PC in such a way that they didn't have to depend on ps3 dev hardware to continue development. If they didn't use PS2 in the first place, or at least shifted their development focus earlier, they could have done more to keep the game up-to-date. Some people cite gameplay changes midway though XI's history that hurt the playerbase, but if you ask me, not keeping up with the times technologically was just as responsible.

This isn't true, Eve online has not updated graphics, Lineage 1 hasn't, Everquest surely hasn't. I can't think of any outside of WoW that have, WoW only did it because they were worried about Wildstar.

You greatly overestimate how much impact you think graphics have on established players.

I've played FFXIV, the graphics are pretty but you know what? I prefer FFXI graphics over them any day, if they put the XIV engine here I would quit in a second.

[Alhanelem]

This isn't true, Eve online has not updated graphics, Lineage 1 hasn't, Everquest surely hasn't. I can't think of any outside of WoW that have, WoW only did it because they were worried about Wildstar.

You greatly overestimate how much impact you think graphics have on established players.

I've played FFXIV, the graphics are pretty but you know what? I prefer FFXI graphics over them any day, if they put the XIV engine here I would quit in a second.

I really doubt that. Also, updating graphics != changing one game's graphics to be another's. I'mproving the graphics engine doesn't mean changing the look of the game, it means polishing it. Better shawdows, better texture resolution, better effects, etc. Also, the games you mentioned have at a minimum updated their engine internals to ensure their game runs properly on newer hardware. SE hasn't even done that. They could update the game to fully use DX9 or later without changing one pixel of the graphics and they haven't even done that.


Also, D&D Online updated its graphics, added DirectX 10 support, and without any other game to be allegedly afraid of (saying WoW was afraid of wildstar is absurd, especially when you look at it today)

This is the FFXI board, everyone here looks for any opportunity to bash FFXIV because they resent its existence as the reason XI is in its current state.

Finally, graphics were just one example of improvements. You ignored the other facets, like improving the UI, improving internal system stuff for better compatibility, and enabling them to implement new mechanics that the systems currently prevent them from doing.

The other reason FFXI is where it is is because of poor marketing. You see advertisements for WoW and other MMOs all over the place. They've run lots of promotions and incentives over the years. SE hasn't. Short of emailing its existing customers, when it runs promotions it doesn't even tell anybody. How is that supposed to promote anything? Even XIV's marketing could be a lot better than it is. Marketing is the biggest driver behind WoW's success.

[Runespider]

I really doubt that. Also, updating graphics != changing one game's graphics to be another's. I'mproving the graphics engine doesn't mean changing the look of the game, it means polishing it. Better shawdows, better texture resolution, better effects, etc. Also, the games you mentioned have at a minimum updated their engine internals to ensure their game runs properly on newer hardware. SE hasn't even done that. They could update the game to fully use DX9 or later without changing one pixel of the graphics and they haven't even done that.


Also, D&D Online updated its graphics, added DirectX 10 support, and without any other game to be allegedly afraid of (saying WoW was afraid of wildstar is absurd, especially when you look at it today)

This is the FFXI board, everyone here looks for any opportunity to bash FFXIV because they resent its existence as the reason XI is in its current state.

Finally, graphics were just one example of improvements. You ignored the other facets, like improving the UI, improving internal system stuff for better compatibility, and enabling them to implement new mechanics that the systems currently prevent them from doing.

The other reason FFXI is where it is is because of poor marketing. You see advertisements for WoW and other MMOs all over the place. They've run lots of promotions and incentives over the years. SE hasn't. Short of emailing its existing customers, when it runs promotions it doesn't even tell anybody. How is that supposed to promote anything? Even XIV's marketing could be a lot better than it is. Marketing is the biggest driver behind WoW's success.

I'll explain why FFXI is where it is now:

FFXIV took most of the developers leaving a skeleton crew and a lot of the budget that was supposed to be for FFXI during it's creation, this was way back when they started working on ffxiv 4-5 years ago. FFXIV was basically a parasite feeding off of FFXI players money during development.
FFXIV is a sequel no matter how you want to play it, offering a sequel would be like blizzard making wow 2 and it would hurt wow just as much as xiv hurt xi. It splits the playerbase that would never usually move to another game.
The creation of FFXIV made 2 groups of players that hated each other and wanted the other game to die, the most vocal haters of each game play the other. If you're a regular on FFXIAH you will know of many XIV players there that fit this category and took extreme joy at the last SE announcment.
Square care more about ffxiv looking to be a success to the world than making a profit or running 2 mmo titles, this is why xiv has a blank cheque policy and ffxi is not worth the cost.

Having said all of that, again I like how XI looks I don't want extra shadows or whatever you think we all want. I've played all of the "pretty" mmo titles like Tera, FFXIV, B&S, Black desert etc and I still prefer the look of ffxi and would hate to see the characters "updated". To think all XI players want to see any updated engine is like thinking all star wars fans wanted CGI to replace all the old effects.

[Stuzey]

Not to be picky, but work on XIV started over 10 years ago, the first mention of it (Rapture) was back in 2005

But, when it failed after the 2010 release they did put a lot of additional resources into making sure ARR would be a success

[Alhanelem]

I
Having said all of that, again I like how XI looks I don't want extra shadows or whatever you think we all want. I've played all of the "pretty" mmo titles like Tera, FFXIV, B&S, Black desert etc and I still prefer the look of ffxi and would hate to see the characters "updated". To think all XI players want to see any updated engine is like thinking all star wars fans wanted CGI to replace all the old effects.

everyone's tastes and preferences are different. Just because you don't want something, doesn't mean nobody else does. I would love to see the game's visuals upgraded (But without changing the overall art style. I'm only speaking of improving the texture resolutions, and other technical stuff to make it look more polished- Not fancier, just less... dated. Let me take advantage of my hardware.). Of course, in saying this, that doesn't mean that I think the game looks bad now. It doesn't- but it CAN be better. Your analogy of star wars is poor, since it isn't even part of the same industry, much less the same kind of thing. Remastering isn't adding CGI and fancy stuff, it's just updating the material to look more presentable on modern equipment. Even some really small things would help, like increasing the drawdistance or eliminating the back clipping plane entirely, because no one with a PC made in the last 10 years needs to have this to improve performance. And before you say anything, this is something they could easily do, because people already do it with Windower. Windower also can apply some simple lighting enhancements. The game also needs to support antialiasing, so we don't have to fake a high graphics resolution to make edges look smoother. These are all very basic things, and they don't change the graphics at all, they just improve visual clarity and eliminate detail-reducing things that we don't need to have to enhance performance.

The engine needs to be updated to actually use our graphics hardware. Currently, even the fastest, most powerful machines experience slowdown in FFXI with many characters on the screen. There's no good reason for this. FFXI only uses one CPU core and doesn't really use your graphics card at all, which means even the most modern PCs don't run the game as well as they should. These are technical problems that need to be addressed. Sorry you don't want a quality game experience, but many of us do.


I'm not in any way suggesting that they transform it's visuals into that of FFXIV (or any other game for that matter.)

At any rate, that was just one example of things older games do to stay relevant. Another one of those things is something some people here oddly enough complain about often- reducing the grind. Most games have realized their clientele mostly doesn't have the same time to devote that they used to, so the newer content they create either has less grind as a whole, or is designed in such a way that you don't have to spend many hours in one sitting.

But, when it failed after the 2010 release they did put a lot of additional resources into making sure ARR would be a success

The reason they put such a big effort into making FFXIV a success is because they feared its original failiure would irreperably damage the Final Fantasy brand (That is, the entire franchise, not just FFXI). They were afraid that after FFXIV 1.0, everyone would doubt their ability to produce quality games.

FFXI's biggest problem, more than anything else, has always been marketing. The game always has been and still is marketed poorly. They don't even try. Think of how many players might be in this game if they actually advertised it throughout the last 10 years. I still know lots of people who haven't even heard of the game other than my mentioning it to them. SE just doesn't know how to market things. Even FFXIV could be getting marketed better than it is.

The resentment in this forum definitely runs deep... in spite of the fact that FFXIV was being developed less than 2 years into FFXI's existence- largely because at the time they didn't expect the game would run for 10+ years. They figured they'd need to replace it in half that time. The fact that people are still here is a testament to how much better of a product they created than even they thought- but that doesn't mean they deserve to be hated on for making a new game.

[bungiefanNA]

They market it poorly outside Japan. In Japan, lots of commercials and advertisements, and crossover events with things.

When they made weddings available to Japanese subscribers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuM8ZEXdaUk

Xbox 360 release:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmJ2dF4cz2w

PS2 had 3 commercials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmJ2dF4cz2w?t=13m40s

I recall NA having one or two commercials, one for PC and one for PS2. I recall seeing maybe one or two magazine ads.

I may be able to find other commercials later, I'm not equipped to search in Japanese on my current system. Will be able to do so from home.

[Isal]

Seems to me like the biggest mistake was designing the game to rely on the PS2's devkits rather than building it for PC and porting it over... Then again, like it's been pointed out many times already, they weren't expecting the game to last as long as it did. I remember reading an article years ago that seemed just as shocked then that the game was still running.

I was never able to spend much time on FFXI until recently, and I'm taking a short break (MMO overload and RL situations), but I can sympathize with those who don't want to see the game's story come to a close, or even see the graphics change one iota (I have a similar attachment to the city of Kelethin in EverQuest, hated what they did to it in EverQuest 2's expansion). Would be cool if/when SE makes a third FF MMORPG, that it was a full blown return to Vana'diel. I know, not likely, but a gamer can dream, right?