New advertising campaign, annual fee discount, win!

[Jile]

SE, its time.

I do not want to see xi end prematurely and your approach is pushing us in that direction.

I don't need a discount to keep playing but it's an effective tactic to bring in new users. You've made a lot of money and made an amazing product as it stands today but yet players are decreasing quick and your not advertising to bring in new players currently.

I suggest you immediately offer a 12-month discounted rate for new content id's, perhaps $5/mo with a 12-month payment of $60 and would give them 5 characters.

Advertising xi as a solid final product instead of making people feel like xi is dying and we're heading to a funeral is critical. Without advertising and putting xi in WalMart, pc-geek and gamer stores is murdering player counts.

You know how to market a product but your either giving up on xi and hoping that will migrate users to xiv (not working well, obviously). Please don't give up on xi.

Advertise, advertise, advertise.

Thank you for a great game.

[Alhanelem]

They don't have a budget for advertising (this game wasn't even advertised in its heyday in the US...)

And a fee reduction is unlikely to bring in a significant number of new users. Not that they shouldn't do it anyway if they aren't adding new content, but I think you overestimate the potential impact. No amount of advertising or discounts will likely entice new people to pick up a 12 year old game.

That said, FFXI is not ending like everyone keeps saying, but major content updates are. This isn't because they don't want to but because they may soon no longer have the hardware development platform with which to develop any new content.

[Jile]

Perhaps but some new players would be nice. As for the dev boxes, they're Linux boxes I can't imagine they are unable to build newer better boxes in their place, hire a few Linux geeks and provide an endless supply of hot pockets and mountain dew and boom, new box.

[bungiefanNA]

They're Linux boxes running code on a PS2 processor with a compiler for the PS2 architecture. They have porting tools to put them on a PC-compatible platform, but PS2's processor is not PC-compatible. Linux runs on a rgeat many devices, but that doesn't mean a compiled program on one architecture will work on another, and changes to the code may be needed to make it work on another platform.

[Jile]

Surely though one of their fantastic coders can build a ps2 emulator.... Meh, just saying they can keep developing, if they wanted to.

[Billnes]

Surely though one of their fantastic coders can build a ps2 emulator.... Meh, just saying they can keep developing, if they wanted to.

This is not a new discussion. I posted about the PS2 Developer's Tool several months ago. Alhanelem chimed in & posted additional information. Those posts can be found here.

[bungiefanNA]

Surely though one of their fantastic coders can build a ps2 emulator.... Meh, just saying they can keep developing, if they wanted to.

Making an emulator for different architecture that works at all is hard. Making an emulator that works perfectly enough to compile the necessary code is ridiculously hard. If they were going to go through that expense, remaking the development environment from scratch for use on standard PC architecture would be more reasonable, and they have decided it isn't worth the expense to do that. Thus they have opted to make the game from scratch for mobile platforms, as a new and separate game, which will be more attractive to the market than trying to bring people into an established game over a decade old.

The time that it would have been financially feasible, and that they still had the staff that made the original tools in the first place, was when ToAU released in 2006. They didn't move their development environment then, and the development team started to be replaced in large numbers after that, losing the core knowledge base to make such a change. PS2 was also becoming an obsolete platform with the next generation having been released, so training new people to code for the old platform would be a waste.

So no, they can't keep developing on PS2 development kits even if they wanted, since they aren't made anymore, there's no option to repair them as there are no spare parts stockpiled by Sony, and the last few dozen working ones in the world (not held by private citizens that won't sell them) are in SE's hands. Doing the transition now would be as expensive as making a new game from scratch, which is what they have opted to do with FFXI mobile. It's FFXI in spirit, but it's not the same game, it's a new one in the same setting.

As for leaving us behind doing this, it's really their only choice. Jumping into a "new" game and finding players with characters they've had for 13 years and having the resources that come along with that would break the economy right away, so they can't transfer anything meaningful. One appeal of starting when a game releases is that everyone is at the start of the curve, so you have a chance to get to the top of it. If there are already people way ahead of you on day one, you aren't going to be interested in climbing the curve to try to catch up, especially if they are that far ahead. You tend to just give up in Mario Kart if you get completely lapped by the person in first, there's no hope of catching them, and it's the same mentality here.

[Stompa]

As for leaving us behind doing this, it's really their only choice. Jumping into a "new" game and finding players with characters they've had for 13 years and having the resources that come along with that would break the economy right away, so they can't transfer anything meaningful. One appeal of starting when a game releases is that everyone is at the start of the curve, so you have a chance to get to the top of it. If there are already people way ahead of you on day one, you aren't going to be interested in climbing the curve to try to catch up, especially if they are that far ahead. You tend to just give up in Mario Kart if you get completely lapped by the person in first, there's no hope of catching them, and it's the same mentality here.

I totally agreed with your post, and I really enjoyed your fascinating analysis of the technical aspects, which you know way more about than I do.

I snipped the above piece, because I don't really agree with this. I might be misunderstanding it, or taking it in the wrong context, but FFXI is a teamwork / helping-others game. Mario Cart, FPS, racing games etc. are all competition gaming, you want first place and you hope that everyone else enjoys the taste of dust because that's all they're gonna be eating today etc.

I have done LB3 hundreds of times, for the endless waves of new players that swept through our LS in the last eleven years. I have helped people build finished Empys, while my own Empys are all in various stages of unfinishedness. I would think nothing about spending my whole evening just helping a new player with mundane stuff, or stay up half the night farming a hard drop for someone. And I'm not special or unique at all, a huge number of FFXI players are famous for being helpful and welcoming to new adventurers.

So I'm not saying you are wrong, only that there is a difference between games like FFXI and pure competition games, racing games or whatever. I just look at the scenery as we farmed another Glavoid for somebody lol. I don't mind, because I'm happy just being in Vanadiel, even if I'm not in First Place and making progress.

But you are right about the hardware problems, which you described far better than I could. And we all know its over. SE have completed the repairs to their spaceship, which crashed on our barbarian world in the late 1980s. They realised it would take about 30 years to fix their ship, and so they used our primitive Earth tech to make awesome games, in the hopes we might learn something before they left us. Soon they will blast off into space and return to planet Square and leave us with this new loltablet game and this confused look on our faces lol.

[Jile]

So no, they can't keep developing on PS2 development kits even if they wanted, since they aren't made anymore, there's no option to repair them as there are no spare parts stockpiled by Sony, and the last few dozen working ones in the world (not held by private citizens that won't sell them) are in SE's hands.

SE could always do what I did, take 20 seconds, go to ebay and search PS2 development and I found one for sale for $1000. I think they can find them, they're just not looking. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Playstation-...8AAOSw~gRV410u

[bungiefanNA]

SE could always do what I did, take 20 seconds, go to ebay and search PS2 development and I found one for sale for $1000. I think they can find them, they're just not looking. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Playstation-...8AAOSw~gRV410u

Even systems like that, there aren't too many remaining, and keeping them in working order at the age they are is a sisyphean task. Eventually the equipment is going to wear out, and leave them with no development environment. The call for Rhapsodies was done because they don't expect remaining systems to last long enough to do a full expansion rollout over 1.5+ years, and they don't want their equipment to completely fail in the middle of an expansion. Congratulations, you found ONE system, and on an auction site, from a questionable source who may not have everything needed for it in an environment like SE needs.

Stompa, watch Extra Credits. Even in a game with cooperation elements, you still have the progress curve to consider, which puts people into competition, and not being able to climb that curve if you start too late is a disincentive to remain playing. I've tried endgame shells and been unable to remain in them because I couldn't get the help needed to catch up, they'd rather kick me than help me come back from a time of being unable to play. As you approach the end of the curve, it becomes competitive, and you can't make the last of it in many conditions if you are too late to the game.