Looking For More Players On Cerberus.

[Nyarlko]

Right, so just like that they can flip a switch an add more instances.

I am not sure if you are aware, but a popular player theory (one I happen to agree with), is that there is one-and-only one Abhaljs-Legion zone with multiple rooms in them, as many rooms as they think the server can handle simultaneously.

Adding more would mean creating another zone, or upgrading the servers.

C'mon now... they won't even give us a community representative and they've shelved pretty much all development on the game, heck they won't even give us the Windows UI that was in beta a long time ago, what makes you think they are going to spend money on upgrading the servers to handle more Ambuscade load? They are very clearly in the 'maintenance mode' where they want to the game to run with as few resources spent on it as possible. They are not interested in trying to entice more players to join up; they just want to keep the current paying ones there as long as possible to get monthly sub fees.

It's not entirely theory on our part as the devs have discussed the layer system before regarding multiple instances of the same zone. They are basically running multiple copies of one zone, but there is a limit to the maximum number of copies. And you are correct, it does not appear to be a simple task at all to add more layers. It's always sounded to me like less of a hardware issue and more of an issue with how the backend software was programmed.

In the last AMA, they said that they canned the new UI once they realized they wouldn't be able to have it completed before RoV was completed (and the majority of the staff were scheduled to leave the department.) There's a higher likelihood of seeing a new expansion pack than seeing the UI at this point.

[Sirmarki]

Right, so just like that they can flip a switch an add more instances.

I am not sure if you are aware, but a popular player theory (one I happen to agree with), is that there is one-and-only one Abhaljs-Legion zone with multiple rooms in them, as many rooms as they think the server can handle simultaneously.

Adding more would mean creating another zone, or upgrading the servers.

C'mon now... they won't even give us a community representative and they've shelved pretty much all development on the game, heck they won't even give us the Windows UI that was in beta a long time ago, what makes you think they are going to spend money on upgrading the servers to handle more Ambuscade load? They are very clearly in the 'maintenance mode' where they want to the game to run with as few resources spent on it as possible. They are not interested in trying to entice more players to join up; they just want to keep the current paying ones there as long as possible to get monthly sub fees.

No of course they can't just 'flip a switch'. It would require programming, obviously. Upgrading the servers? We'll they did that a few months ago. The 'servers' by the way are probably just a multitude of VM's running on a one server which I seriously doubt would require a huge amount of processing power by today's standards. But, that's all just speculation.

So essentially by your last comment you have resorted to the fact that nothing is going to change, nothing can be done, and it is what it is(?)

[Aysha]

So essentially by your last comment you have resorted to the fact that nothing is going to change, nothing can be done, and it is what it is(?)

Just keeping it real, being realistic, whatever you want to call it.

If something did change, it would surprise the crap out of me. I WANT things to change. I want them to develop new stuff, or finish stuff like the UI, or actually try to make the game thrive again. They've got serious potential here, and they are letting it collect dust and decay, THEY seem to be reserved to just let a what again, 15 year old game with so much history curl up and die after a few years life in a rest home on life support.

It's sad, and I really don't like it, but what can we do? We can only plead as much as we can, and they're Japanese; it's hard to even talk to them anyways. And besides, JP players are already doing that and nothing gets through to the suits&ties that run the whole business of Square-Enix who calls all the shots and they don't seem to care about us all that much. They're more worried about their bottom line, of whether or not they'd get a profit out of assigning any additional staff/developers/what-not to the game, and whether or not the profit was "good enough" for them.

I wish it weren't like this, and I hate to see the game slowly flounder like this, and I really hope they turn it around, that they can see that there are still people who want to enjoy this game, but have trouble doing so in its current state.

But.....

Again.

Reality.

It probably won't happen. Better to expect little and get a lot, than to expect a lot and get a little.

[Kylos]

Please try not to derail my thread. The subject is about getting more players on Cerberus. If we happen to get players on other low-populated servers that's a bonus.

Square Enix .. forum moderators .. I'm still waiting for someone to acknowledge this. I already talked about this on Tuesday night with a SGM and even he .. a SGM, admitted to me that he is fully aware of this issue and so are the other GMs. He told me that there's nothing he can do about it, even if he knows there's an issue and he plays the game too. I don't want to name him though .. might get him in trouble, but he gave me the advice to once again make a post here. I asked him where to put my post and he said to put it in General Discussion. We had a very nice chat, and we ended the call with me calling him a Super GM, and he calling me a Super Kylos.

A really cool guy who probably deserves more from his employers than allowing servers to reach such a harsh point of decline. Again, all I'm looking for is acknowledgement. Do SE even know of this issue? Or are they only looking at JP primetime and taking their "average population numbers" from that? It's what it feels like to me and a few other EU players. Like we don't matter.

[Shiyo]

At this point I'm sick of square enix's funding/priority/development cycles. They literally completely abandoned this game for other games, they use all of ff14's funding for other games, and they give ff14 basically NO funding, no dev team, and the lowest amount of content I've seen in a MMO in my entire life. It's absolutely insane how this company handles it's games people LOVE and have been playing for YEARS and just gives them no life and attention and instead puts all their time into crappy games like FF15 that take 10 years to be made.

FF11 has made Square more money than any game they've ever made, yet they won't even give it a proper dev team or funding? Insanity.

Give your game a dev team and a proper content cycle so people come back. Give a reason for people not to all zerg hop onto asura, keep your game alive and active. Why are you letting your game that made you the most money ever die off? People love this game, no other MMO exists like this in the world, take care of your game.

[Aysha]

and they give ff14 basically NO funding, no dev team, and the lowest amount of content I've seen in a MMO in my entire life.

What in the world are you talking about? Did you really mean ff14 or ff11?

Because I dunno if you know this, but Stormblood just released in July, and it had a fairly large amount of content in it.

Please try not to derail my thread. The subject is about getting more players on Cerberus. If we happen to get players on other low-populated servers that's a bonus.

It is not a derailment at all, as the low population of not only Cerberus, but all servers is directly related to SE's refusal to put any budget into FFXI's development.

No Development/New Content/Bug Fixes/Updates/Etc = more people lose interest in the game and leave which results in servers' dwindling population. The game just slowly stagnates.

[Shiyo]

You probably haven't played FF14 for more than 5 minutes but it literally has less content than any MMO to ever exist, it released an expansion with 2 completely trash primals, and an extremely easy raid. Six relevant bosses to last for 6 months, but in reality it's only two bosses because first 2 raid bosses are a joke and primals are a joke.

Square enix puts 100% of ffxi and ff14's profits into trash games like FF15 and KH3 which barely make any profit, it's disgusting.

[Aysha]

You probably haven't played FF14 for more than 5 minutes but it literally has less content than any MMO to ever exist, it released an expansion with 2 completely trash primals, and an extremely easy raid. Six relevant bosses to last for 6 months, but in reality it's only two bosses because first 2 raid bosses are a joke and primals are a joke.

Square enix puts 100% of ffxi and ff14's profits into trash games like FF15 and KH3 which barely make any profit, it's disgusting.

Wow, somebody's picky. Yeesh.

I dunno, I play FF14 and I thought what was added was reasonable.

Okay, Omega Normal is rather easy. Dunno about Savage, I don't go for that kinda stuff. But maybe they wanted to ship a raid out the door as fast as they could so that they can start on the new glob of content? There's quite a bit of areas to explore yet and maybe they wanted more time to flesh those out? *Shrugs*

I like to take a break sometimes. But going all hyperbole and saying it has "less content than any other MMO" is an exaggeration. There have been other MMOs, plenty of them, that have had less content. What about Warlords of Draenor? Ever played WoW? When WoD came out, it was very shallow. It was basically FarmVille with nothing to do in the actual game world whatsoever, and the raid that shipped with the expansion's launch was "meh".

[Jile]

the low population of not only Cerberus, but all servers is directly related to SE's refusal to put any budget into FFXI's development.

This is indeed the real problem. If SE were to announce a new full expansion with new graphics upgrade patches, a re-launch of sorts and get the game into game stores and ADVERTISE to get new blood into the game (and stop breaking jobs).. we'd have more people than we'd perhaps even 'want' on our servers... lol.

[Aysha]

This is indeed the real problem. If SE were to announce a new full expansion with new graphics upgrade patches, a re-launch of sorts and get the game into game stores and ADVERTISE to get new blood into the game (and stop breaking jobs).. we'd have more people than we'd perhaps even 'want' on our servers... lol.

While these things would help, I don't think it would have THAT big of an effect. A lot of people are skeptical about this game, because it has a history and that history is not really... "compatible" with the modern MMO scene. Those who actually know what FFXI is, know it to be an "old, slow grindy game with low APM".

This isn't exactly false (though some of it is exaggerated). Some people will say FFXI has bad graphics, but THAT I don't agree with (it has better graphics than many games, WoW included if you turn up the resolutions which isn't hard to do).

You can only change so much in FFXI before you start driving away the old veterans who like the game the way it is now. You could add new content, sure (be careful about this, though: if you add content people don't like, it can also drive people away). You could even do the UI to make the game easier to interface with (but you had better make it an OPTION -- there will be people who will dislike it because they are used to the old one).

Graphics upgrade patches? I don't see that as being necessary; this game already looks ridiculously sharp if you turn the background aspect ratio up to 1600x900+. Some people go as crazy as 4k for that and the game is incredibly sharp. Character faces and such look like plastic models, but does every game need to be uncanny valley levels of "realism"? I think there's something nice to be had here, where this came could be different.

Family member I play FFXI with does not like FFXIV graphics, though I don't understand why. They say they don't like the character models... maybe they trigger Uncanny Valley for her? Doesn't me, but I think everybody has different levels of tolerance for that kind of thing? *shrug* That or she is just used to this game and doesn't want it to change.