Return of the Tetra Master ?

[Trepan]

Hello everyone,

When Final Fantasy XI came out in 2001, at the start of playonline viewer, there was a very nice Card little game : Tetra Master.

Unfortunatly, Tetra Master ended the 31 december 2011, i think. I don't remeber the year. Square-Enix probably closed the server for this little game because not enough people played it, i don't know.

But personnaly, i liked it.

Would it be possible in the future, to hope a return of the Tetra Master in Playonline ?
Or maybe inside the game Final Fantasy XI itself ? We could play our card vs other player, buying card at the auction house, etc... And we could simply check our card collection in the menu or in our mog house by exemple.

And what about the Players Datas of the old Tetra Master of playonline. What did they become ? Have they been saved somewhere in the archives of Playonline's programmers office ? Or totaly deleted ? I had a nice collection of card in Tetra Master, i had almost all card. I would like to know. I miss this little game lol. I would like to play it again like it was before in playonline. :o

[Naraku_Diabolos]

I'm not sure if the devs will bring Tetra Master back. Everyone in my LS during my play of FFXI actually never touched it and would rather play FFXI instead. Wishful thinking, I know, but I doubt they will bring it back. However we have Triple Triad on FFXIV...

[Catmato]

Everyone in my LS during my play of FFXI actually never touched it and would rather play FFXI instead.
This, and since POL was almost always down for maintenance whenever FFXI was down for maintenance, very few bothered to play it. Not to mention there was a separate monthly fee, wasn't there?

[YosemiteYogorockBlondelle]

This, and since POL was almost always down for maintenance whenever FFXI was down for maintenance, very few bothered to play it. Not to mention there was a separate monthly fee, wasn't there?

No there wasn't a fee or even a monthly applied to playing it and I always assumed it was because it was a part of the fee you paid to play ffxi with tetra master essentially being free to play in this way, I used to play tetra master and I forget my user-name now that I used to have for that game but I know it was smoothy or had smoothy somewhere in the username I used to called by to play that game.

Funny thing is when I came back to play ffxi when installing it on my laptop for the first time it also installed the discontinued tetra master game plus the shortcut onto the desktop on my laptop with the playonline viewer and final fantasy 11. As a matter of fact it's still sits installed on my computer but only the couple times I tried to load it, the one time it brought me your first tetra master main menu screen with no options however it did have a msg that said thank you for playing Tetra Master the game has been ended and discontinued or it said both this: the Tetra Master Servers have closed and the game has discontinued no longer in service thanks for playing! Well you get the idea on the message however it was really said.

The 2nd time that I recall trying it, it didn't do anything as far as I know it being trying them out between the first and 2nd try being quite a time maybe even years apart. Honestly i felt if it was discontinued it should of no longer be included into the installation of the expansion collectors editions full installs of the game myself and actually quite ironically since its installed on my laptop but not in use or playable I think a game/whole game systems update should do a full safe removal of the tetra master game even though I've been told I could just uninstall it myself.

{Note}: I always did think it would be cool if they had turned the online tetra master game into an offline game myself :D

[bungiefanNA]

This, and since POL was almost always down for maintenance whenever FFXI was down for maintenance, very few bothered to play it. Not to mention there was a separate monthly fee, wasn't there?

Yes, it was $1 per month for the Content ID for Tetra Master. Every game accessible through PlayOnline Viewer had a monthly fee (Front Mission Online, Dirge of Cerberus, Jong How Lo, Tetra Master, Fantasy Earth Zero, Final Fantasy XI and Tetra Master). The first month was free when you activated the ID, but afterward it was monthly, like FFXI.

[YosemiteYogorockBlondelle]

Yes, it was $1 per month for the Content ID for Tetra Master. Every game accessible through PlayOnline Viewer had a monthly fee (Front Mission Online, Dirge of Cerberus, Jong How Lo, Tetra Master, Fantasy Earth Zero, Final Fantasy XI and Tetra Master). The first month was free when you activated the ID, but afterward it was monthly, like FFXI.

well don't ever recall being charged for playing it but okay! ;-) Anyways...

[BurnNotice]

I love to play that game while playing Final Fantasy IX. By far the most interesting mini-game I've played (Blitz Ball was cool too!). Yeah, it would be nice to see this game have its day in the spotlight again.

[Alhanelem]

it's simple really, two things killed it, even though I honestly thought it was fun:

1) it was a seperate game from FFXI, and you can't have two POL games open on the same POL account at the same time.
2) it had its own monthly fee, even if it was just a dollar, so that turned a lot of people off.

Now, I don't want to get into a big debate about any other aspect of the game, but this is something FFXIV handled correctly with the gold saucer. Things like Triple Triad and such were put in there as minigames. If FFXI had done this, and you could like challenge people to tetra master ingame and such, it would have taken off like crazy most likely.

[bungiefanNA]

Why it wasn't done in-game in FFXI was that the game already was using most of the memory resources of the PS2, and there wasn't a lot of screen real estate at the 640x480 interlaced resolution the console was limited to in order to have it pop up in a window over the game.

Funny now though that the situation is the opposite of when Tetra Master was active, and there was no official online multiplayer of Triple Triad. Now we have two ways to play Triple Triad against humans officially, the FF Portal App on iOS and Android, and the game baked into Final Fantasy XIV, and no way to play Tetra Master. It would be great if they added Tetra Master to both applications.

[Dsherman]

Tetra Master was taken down as of the JST Midnight that turned over from December 31, 2010 to January 1, 2011 in Japan (or a few minutes after). That would be 7:00 am December 31, 2010 PST.

It had been running for somewhere near 5 years without SE having to put anything into it at all except to keep the server up and running. They did not want to invest any money into Tetra Master if it was needed to keep it going. And right about that time, they were probably starting to prepare for the conversion of billing from the old Playonline billing system to the SE account billing system that we use today. And since they were charging $1. per month for Tetra Master, they did not want to put any money into converting Tetra Master to the SE account billing system at all, so they just took it down before that conversion went very far (along with a few other options that were not being used much in the POL Viewer).

The SE account billing system was implemented starting on July 27, 2011.

[Apie]

I LOVED the PlayOnline Tetra Master. I had every single card on it and was working on getting (I think) a 99 pack of Ahriman cards when it went offline. I remember there was some weird jacking up of prices for cards right before the game went offline, it was like everyone was trying to get rich at last minute. lol

I miss it and it was much better than the Triple Triad that is in FFXIV (and FFVIII) and it was better than the FF9 Tetra Master cause of the lightning attacks and other things.

$1 a month was very fair for that service, it's a shame they bailed on it.