Are server merges ever going to happen?

[Castanica]

300-400 people online now and it's going to get worse, can we at least be told when you plan or if you care to do merges ever?

Most MMO titles have a handful of servers, we have way too many.

[kaerin]

SE already said no. Spend the $9 and move to Asura

[bungiefanNA]

They said they will consider them after November's patch. They are holding out optimism that Rhapsodies will cause people to resubscribe and increase server population, and merging would make them really crowded if that actually happened.

Also, making $9-18 profit per person that manually switches servers is some nice income to miss out on by doing merges.

[Runespider]

They said they will consider them after November's patch. They are holding out optimism that Rhapsodies will cause people to resubscribe and increase server population, and merging would make them really crowded if that actually happened.

Also, making $9-18 profit per person that manually switches servers is some nice income to miss out on by doing merges.

Wow they are crazy and completely out of touch, they think announcing the end of life of an mmoe will bring more players instead of make more leave?

Amazing, there are less people online now than have ever been online on my server. How can they possibly think announcing an end will bring players back?

The level of out of touch with the people in charge of this game is off the charts.

[Alhanelem]

There's no server merge planned, at least not until after Rhapsodies has concluded.

[bungiefanNA]

http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/125...a-diel-Project

They feel the storyline is strong enough that announcing they are ending it will bring people back to try to finish it who played and enjoyed it in the past, but maybe didn't have the time to dedicate to the game anymore. By making it easier to compl;ete the content, they hope to recapture the interest of people. This seems mainly aimed at the JP player base, as they keep advertising for the game up in Japan, just not outside of the country. Heck, they've been doing lots of FFXI videos over the years in Japanese, and each expansion got at least one TV commercial. They just don't try for the English-speaking audience.

Heck, their advertising was so strong for the Quality of Life patch in 2013, they got Megumi Hayashibara, a prolific and famous voice actor and singer for video games and anime over the past ~25-30 years, to voice Shantotto explaining all the features they added. I don't imagine she's cheap to hire. She has also voiced Shantotto for every appearance she has had in a game or media where she has had a voice in Japan. They tend to not change a voice actor for a character often, and will tend to kill the character off if the VA dies (look at Zato-One in Guilty Gear, who became Eddie when his VA died after GGX, and only became Zato again over 10 years after the VA death).

Japan is very different to how things work for the relationship with consumers than the rest of the world. From our point of view, they are weird and out of touch. For their home market, they are effective. Heck, Japanese has a word for the nature of things being transient, and an appreciation of such a thing. Giving a goodbye signal will attract attention.

[Runespider]

http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/125...a-diel-Project

They feel the storyline is strong enough that announcing they are ending it will bring people back to try to finish it who played and enjoyed it in the past, but maybe didn't have the time to dedicate to the game anymore. By making it easier to compl;ete the content, they hope to recapture the interest of people. This seems mainly aimed at the JP player base, as they keep advertising for the game up in Japan, just not outside of the country. Heck, they've been doing lots of FFXI videos over the years in Japanese, and each expansion got at least one TV commercial. They just don't try for the English-speaking audience.

Heck, their advertising was so strong for the Quality of Life patch in 2013, they got Megumi Hayashibara, a prolific and famous voice actor and singer for video games and anime over the past ~25-30 years, to voice Shantotto explaining all the features they added. I don't imagine she's cheap to hire. She has also voiced Shantotto for every appearance she has had in a game or media where she has had a voice in Japan. They tend to not change a voice actor for a character often, and will tend to kill the character off if the VA dies (look at Zato-One in Guilty Gear, who became Eddie when his VA died after GGX, and only became Zato again over 10 years after the VA death).

Japan is very different to how things work for the relationship with consumers than the rest of the world. From our point of view, they are weird and out of touch. For their home market, they are effective. Heck, Japanese has a word for the nature of things being transient, and an appreciation of such a thing. Giving a goodbye signal will attract attention.

Weird to the extreme, jp player numbers are very very low too btw. JP prime used to always be over 1k before the announcment, now numbers never go above 500 people at any time.

They are spending money on advertising while saying they don't want to spend money on the game anymore...

When you say a game is coming to an end all the grind seems pointless, how can they not see that.

End of the day you can watch the cut-scenes on youtube. Getting the gear rewards when they are putting the game into retirement is almost pointless.

I can't think of many old mmo titles that were canned, just go look at everquest 1. To say the game doesn't have enough players anymore to remain profitable and have a skeleton crew adding updates is nonsense, almost all mmo titles have 2-3 servers and are profitable. They have incredibly loyal players that will keep the game going for a long time. FFXI was killed by mismanagement, plain and simple.

[Obysuca]

Weird to the extreme, jp player numbers are very very low too btw. JP prime used to always be over 1k before the announcment, now numbers never go above 500 people at any time.

Eh, at least on Siren, it goes from about 300-400 during NA/EU time and skyrockets to around 1.3k-1.4k during JP time lately

[Zeargi]

I'm on the same server as the original poster, there was 1k people on two nights ago around 8ish PM EST. It's a small number, but it's still something.

[bungiefanNA]

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.