Long Term Options

[Enochroot]

Even though I'm sure it's a consideration to SE and to others here, discussion of XIV is outside my intended scope of this thread. Apart from what we hear from SE (assuming we choose to believe them after all the times they've let us down in the past) all we have to go on are best guesses, suppositions, conjectures, whatever. I don't pretend to know their financial situation or their motivations in the decisions they make.

It's not about whether XIV is any good. It's about being able to satisfy the urge to goof around in Vana'diel whenever one pleases - using the characters that we've spent so much time and effort building. There's still time for them to change their tune on the mobile native client so that we'll still have our characters. To be honest, that might be good enough for me. It all depends on the experience.

They say they're not going to support PS2/360 because the hardware support isn't there any more. That makes sense and I understand it. I believe it. Have they thought about moving the toolchain to Windows so they could keep support going? Their lack of detail about the long-term future troubles me and makes me lose confidence in them and the service. That's no fun. What I'd love to hear is "we've heard you, we're committed to keeping the servers online as long as there are folks playing - and when there aren't we have a transition strategy for the service. Your character data is safe." Simple and vague enough not to actually mean anything - but it'd still make me feel better.

With regards to crowdfunding, I figured it'd be something that SE could set up to gauge interest in continuing the service. If it meets the funding goal, it'd be a good indicator to them. They've got lots of ways to raise funds using the XI intellectual property - what would be nice to hear is "we're going to re-invest some of that money in keeping XI running."

[bungiefanNA]

Even though I'm sure it's a consideration to SE and to others here, discussion of XIV is outside my intended scope of this thread. Apart from what we hear from SE (assuming we choose to believe them after all the times they've let us down in the past) all we have to go on are best guesses, suppositions, conjectures, whatever. I don't pretend to know their financial situation or their motivations in the decisions they make.

It's not about whether XIV is any good. It's about being able to satisfy the urge to goof around in Vana'diel whenever one pleases - using the characters that we've spent so much time and effort building. There's still time for them to change their tune on the mobile native client so that we'll still have our characters. To be honest, that might be good enough for me. It all depends on the experience.

They say they're not going to support PS2/360 because the hardware support isn't there any more. That makes sense and I understand it. I believe it. Have they thought about moving the toolchain to Windows so they could keep support going? Their lack of detail about the long-term future troubles me and makes me lose confidence in them and the service. That's no fun. What I'd love to hear is "we've heard you, we're committed to keeping the servers online as long as there are folks playing - and when there aren't we have a transition strategy for the service. Your character data is safe." Simple and vague enough not to actually mean anything - but it'd still make me feel better.

With regards to crowdfunding, I figured it'd be something that SE could set up to gauge interest in continuing the service. If it meets the funding goal, it'd be a good indicator to them. They've got lots of ways to raise funds using the XI intellectual property - what would be nice to hear is "we're going to re-invest some of that money in keeping XI running."

Making the tools to make game assets on PC would be a substantial investment of time and or money. The big problem is that the original dev team that made the tools is not working on this project anymore, so the current dev team would have to study up on just how all of it works, and then code from scratch a tool kit to make compatible assets on the PC instead of on PS2 dev kits. Just because you know how to use an existing tool doesn't mean you know how to make that tool. They stated in the press meeting and Freshly Picked that they are now shifting focus from trying to grow the userbase to trying to reduce costs of this game (and making a new tool kit would go against reducing costs). If they were going to make a replacement tool kit, they should have done it before WotG released. Too much of the old team is gone now, which has led to a major brain drain on the project for people being able to manipulate certain core functiona of the game. Is it really worth training peopl to code for PS2 so they can understand the existing code, and then convert an equivalent to PC, when this is going to be the very last official software release for PS2?