Playing with Chinese?

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Originally Posted by Elexia

Lots of games doesn't officially get localized to chinese there.

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No shit, that has to suck for people living there that actually like to play alot of those games.

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Originally Posted by Lusavari

A lot of my friends in Grad school are Chinese. Actually, I was seeing one of the Chinese girls in my cohort... That aside to demonstrate I have some clue what I'm talking about...

China bans Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and several other things. They have government sanctioned versions which look VERY similar to their counterparts (renren looks 100% ripped from Facebook, and Baidu functions just like Google.)

A lot of it has to do with not wanting the outside world to influence people. Essentially, China doesn't want anyone to get any ideas about protesting or government overthrowing like the Arab Spring. So it's highly unlikely the legitimate Chinese players (Not talking about RMT farmers, we're talking about people who actually play for fun) will be on the same servers. They do not want Europeans, Americans, and Japanese people influencing the thinking of their people. Essentially laws and politics will prevent them from playing with us. It's a shame too. But anything that threatens the governments grip on the people isn't allowed. Which makes it a pain in the ass when you want to talk to a girlfriend in China during summer vacation, because her American phone is disconnected, she can't use Facebook, so you have to rely on school e-mail or I think skype works...

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Wow, China is a strict place to live. O.o

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Originally Posted by Avirex

Wow, China is a strict place to live. O.o

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Yeah, but you wouldn't know that if you hadn't grown up in a country that doesn't have all those restrictions.

i've got korean friends living in shanghai china that play on my server...... i dont know if that makes a difference.

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Originally Posted by Antipika

Seriously it's not because there was couple of news regarding this that it automatically become a fact. Lot of RMTs are just normal people like you and me. They farm gold sell it back to a website for cheap and in huge quantity. RMT slaves is more a myth than anything, people being forced to play etc. sure it does happen, but what doesn't happen in a country with 1.4 billion people?

It's just not the majority. Also people tends to forget that a lot of JP players and westerners are farming/selling gold as well. It's not only Chinese players. It can be very profitable even for people living in countries where life is expensive. Many skilled programmers use their own cheats/bots to get a huge amount of money and these aren't always the random Chinese farmer with no programming skills...

Using your own tool often guaranteed that it will remain undetected for a while.

I've got Chinese friends on XIV and it's annoying to often see people /pointing chinese people out and automatically consider them as RMT...

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Thank you for the answer, that's all I needed to know. I am not attacking Chinese, I had one friend and she told me I was her only friend until she quit for no real reason. Anyways, My rl friend and I were discussing about China until he mentioned gold farmers, that's what it got me wondering. :)

A lot of Chinese use VPN to play on servers outside of China. Also hong long and Taiwan don't have these laws. If square is smart (though I doubt they are) the will have a Chinese language version availed internationally. Then they could play with us. But no chinese character support don't expect many

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Originally Posted by Raldo

No one's said this yet? No one?

Ok, I will.

http://static.ffxiah.com/images/ffxi...d9YSA8vVcC.png


We already are playing with the Chinese! Ohohohohohoho!

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I was thinking the exact same thing.. it took 20 posts before that joke appeared??

People dropping the ball here... That should have been post #2

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Originally Posted by Avirex

No shit, that has to suck for people living there that actually like to play alot of those games.



Wow, China is a strict place to live. O.o

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China isn't that strict of a place to live. You have to go to China to understand I lived in China And can tell you China is not a country of law. There are laws but do people follow them? Not really. Chinese for the most part ignore there government and the government ignores that you ignore if you don't mess with the government in an organized way.

Organized way is the key term there. I know some families occasionally have a second child without meeting any of the criteria to have one (minority, child of 2 old children, disabled first child, etc) and don't pay the fine. But that's why all the blocked web sites are blocked; China wants to have the ability to monitor and prevent organization.

Also, for anyone playing right now, they're using international versions of the game, and as a few people have stated, they're using work around methods to get access through Hong Kong (which abides by different rules) and Taiwan.

"As I mentioned via press releases a while back, Square Enix has entered into a strategic partnership with SNDA, a major Chinese video game developer. With their cooperation, we’ll be bringing FFXIV version 2.0 to China, which boasts the largest online gaming community in the world. This is one market that no global online operation can ignore, ours included.

Official service in China is scheduled to commence a while after version 2.0’s global launch, and so I thought it’d be good to check out ChinaJoy, the nation’s largest video game expo. We’re not necessarily timing it with the event, but the new promo site will be unveiled very soon. Between the site’s kickoff, gamescom 2012 in August, and the FINAL FANTASY 25th anniversary event, we’ll be releasing a flood of info." ... Mr. FFXIV Producer

I'm assuming that this is what this thread is about and what it says to me is that the Chinese will be playing the game. I personally know and use to talk to some RMT in FFXI and they were Chinese. The particular RMT I'm talking about didn't impede on peoples play time and they played for fun as well as for money. It's funny because in FFXI Chinese were shunned because of RMT activity and nobody wanted to play with them for that reason. If their government was monitering their game time then they saw no threat because we all knew about the Chinese players on our server. They had a few people including myself that would sit and chat or do some activity with them but we were few and far between. The RMT that bothered me were the ones farming tree cuttings ( Joy Toy too) all the time, made it difficult to farm them but it also made for a little healthy competition which always makes farming more fun. So if Chinese could play with us in FFXI why could they not play with us in FFXIV?

Not only by law that they have to have segregated servers from us and the rest of the world, time limits and whatnot, (But the blatant racism still going on between the Japanese and the Chinese... I've played a few games released in Chinese territories, and it seems that they have a very strong dislike for the Japanese, especially when the time comes for group play, they'd either PK the player over and over, or kick them if they even spoke a lick of Japanese.)
Now it's not the case with all Chinese players but it's a rather huge majority of them, why they do it, idk, but they tolerate other foreign players.

I think this actually might be good for the rest of us....there would be more Chinese playing than the whole current playerbase multiplied by one hundred

That's completely untrue.... Sure, the Chinese have over a billion people, but they're not all gamers. Gaming is something only a small minority do. And it's not like every single one that does game is going to jump up and play FFXIV. At most, maybe 250,000-500,000 Chinese players are going to pick up, which would balance out to about 25% of the player base tops. China is not this big scary monster that's going to over run FFXIV.

I know there are tensions between Chinese and Japanese. The grad school I go to has a huge Chinese population (10% of the total student body). If you wear a shirt with Japanese characters on it, you will occasionally get some harsh looks. But overall my experience is my Chinese friends are pretty accepting of my Japanese friends. It could be because we're a little older than the average student though.

But considering this is a Japanese game, and the old jokes of GMs favoring Japanese players in XI, it's super unlikely that Chinese players, were they on the same servers, would last very long acting aggressively towards Japanese players.

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At most, maybe 250,000-500,000 Chinese players are going to pick up, which would balance out to about 25% of the player base tops.

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>250K-500K
>25% of the playerbase

Yeah right, so the whole player base would be ~1M? Delusional.

Well, I don't see it getting to 5 million. How many people did FFXI have? 2 million?

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Originally Posted by Lusavari

Well, I don't see it getting to 5 million. How many people did FFXI have? 2 million?

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More like saying it will be way lower. XI had 500K. If XIV gets at this level already (and maintain it for couple of years), it would be amazing.

The Great fireWall of China strikes again.

some random info on MMO gaming in China:

http://mmohuts.com/editorials/chinese-mmorpgs

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Originally Posted by Antipika

More like saying it will be way lower. XI had 500K. If XIV gets at this level already (and maintain it for couple of years), it would be amazing.

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No, XI had 750k+ people with 2 million+ characters at peak, it evened out to 500k for numerous years then started to drop off and evened out to 250-400k in recent years, now it's probably lower than that but the baseline for XI was 500k while it topped off 750k+, 500k was always the number thrown around because it was people's estimates before SE started releasing census data.

XIV had 650k at the start then dropped of significantly, that's why I'm saying it'll be amazing if it gets even half as successful as XI did if people count subs as success, and being supported in china will have quite the jump in sub numbers.

[1]Citations needed.

(Also don't care about the number of characters, we're talking active subscriptions. Find me a census where SE announced 750K.)

SE announced that they reached 2 million active characters a few years ago, for the first time in the game's history. A closed account with 5 characters would not count towards the amount of active characters (because they are inactive, not active), so this is not a completely irrelevant figure to work with.

Now of course, a character isn't a subscription, but how many characters do you really think the average player is paying for? I seriously doubt the average player has more than 5 characters. Of course, some have way more, in the form of crafting mules, AH mules, storage mules etc, but realistically, I doubt that's enough to push the average up to more than 5.

If we use 7.5 as a very rough estimate, (and most likely an exaggeration) for now, 2 million active characters means 266k subscribers. If we use an average of 5 characters per account (which I think is much more likely), we end up at 400k subscribers.

Who knows how much the population has decreased since 2009? I don't know. I would be surprised if it has decreased significantly, though. They added a lot of new stuff after 2009.

Source:
http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics...opics_all.html
Third entry from the top.

-edit-
For some more data, the 2009 census (picked this year because that's where the 2M active character count is from), 28.84% of characters were between level 41 and 75. Characters above lv 40 are unlikely to be mules, these are usually left at level 1-10.

This makes it probable that at the time the game reached 2 million active characters, ~29% or more of them were not crafting/AH/storage mules, which makes it plausible that the number of active accounts could have been around 500k at the time.

If you want to interpret the census statistics yourself, you'll find them here. I might not have interpreted everything perfectly, but I'm not trying to purposely skew the information that is available.

-edit again-
These statistics do not give us any information about how many players have multiple high level characters on one account. Dualboxing isn't unheard of, but this can't be done with characters on the same account, therefore the most common application of several high level characters on one account is when you would want to play on several servers. This is entirely guesswork, but I don't think this was a very common practice. Maybe it would be a fair assumption to estimate about 100k characters as being a high level alt on a different server.

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Originally Posted by Norack

Exactly. I think SE should ask them if there asian and female or male to. if there female, and asian they automatically get put on my server XD.

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I have a feeling 'server' wasn't your first choice of words there.

actually Mirage in ffxi I knew a leader of an ls who owned at least 20 accounts filled with different characters.... Papasmurf on Alexander.... and they were all active accounts