Is SE's Marketing / PR department -severely- hurting the games chances of success?

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Originally Posted by Verecund

The gil sink issue is definitely one that should've been prepared for before the game even launched.

At the very least they should have established a long-term means of progression for end-game that requires some monetary expenses (item collection, purchasable faction rewards, etc)

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You mean like some of this stuff planned for early 2011?
Goodbye, Tanaka
Yeah none of this content was probably planned to be the gil sink this game needed.

Don't worry, though, you'll get a new battle system instead.

While the scores were not too bad, the game still received a large ammount of critique from reviewers and fans alike. Yet it still sold million of copies. It's one of the lowest rated Final Fantasies that wasn't allready a remake.

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Originally Posted by TheRac25

There seem to be alot of SIMPLE things they could be doing, clean up the UI/Linkshell management/etc, but its been what 8 months. Many things i see that would take one coder a day or two to fix have gone untoutched, instead we get shitty run around quests with equaly shitty rewards, an updater that doesnt work through firewalls and needs to download 300mb for "targetmode c".

How much longer do you realy have SE? wake up.

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spot on, it is taking ages to get simple things done.

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Originally Posted by TheRac25

How much longer do you realy have SE? wake up.

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They can't wake up because their K.O'd, and I don't have any phoenix downs.

Pretty sure at this point any kind of marketing or promotions will only hurt the game more. 8 months down the road and the game is STILL a steaming pile of dog doo.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Pretty sure at this point any kind of marketing or promotions will only hurt the game more. 8 months down the road and the game is STILL a steaming pile of dog doo.

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How has it stayed so steamy after 8 months... mmhmmmm...

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Originally Posted by Joeking

How has it stayed so steamy after 8 months... mmhmmmm...

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Because the dog keeps eating it and repeating the process.

(I don't know where I'm going with this)

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Because the dog keeps eating it and repeating the process.

(I don't know where I'm going with this)

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Thats how the professionals recycle.

Maybe se should regroup and relaunch as the first scat mmo! heard there was a niche for that kinda stuff in japan.

Real talk: it would be a huge mistake to try to get more people on board with development going by so slowly. This is something that basically needs to be kept low profile until they can start pumping out good updates at a decent speed. This is almost as bad as Aion NA's updates.

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Originally Posted by TheRac25

Maybe se should regroup and relaunch as the first scat mmo! heard there was a niche for that kinda stuff in japan.

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Not really.. but there is this.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Real talk: it would be a huge mistake to try to get more people on board with development going by so slowly. This is something that basically needs to be kept low profile until they can start pumping out good updates at a decent speed. This is almost as bad as Aion NA's updates.

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this thread has nothing to do with getting ppl on board

and jynx.
You're saying that even if everyone on here thinks the game sucks, even if currency in the game is inflated to a point where new players can only get unique/untradable gear, even if the game is full of players who botted every job to 50, SE will manage to convince new players to buy the game AND CONTINUE PLAYING IT.

I seriously can't see that happening at all without a full char wipe, and if they did that its almost a guarenteed fail for the game.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Real talk: it would be a huge mistake to try to get more people on board with development going by so slowly. This is something that basically needs to be kept low profile until they can start pumping out good updates at a decent speed. This is almost as bad as Aion NA's updates.

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I just cant understand what is taking so long, they are either severely understaffed or got their heads so far up their bums it will never come out. i dont think the problem was/is tanaka or yoshi, seems the problem is higher up in the company or company wide.

Edit: some signs do point to understaffing, even before release (copy pasted maps, saying they brining in more developers working on different projects, hiring of a chinese developer house, etc).

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Originally Posted by TheRac25

I just cant understand what is taking so long, they are either severely understaffed or got their heads so far up their bums it will never come out.

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What I would give to sit down with some of the SE brass 10 years after this game finally dies and hear what truely happened.

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Originally Posted by Joeking

Not really.. but there is this.

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i was thinking more along the lines of Boong-Ga Boong-Ga

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Originally Posted by Azurymber

this thread has nothing to do with getting ppl on board

and jynx.
You're saying that even if everyone on here thinks the game sucks, even if currency in the game is inflated to a point where new players can only get unique/untradable gear, even if the game is full of players who botted every job to 50, SE will manage to convince new players to buy the game AND CONTINUE PLAYING IT.

I seriously can't see that happening at all without a full char wipe, and if they did that its almost a guarenteed fail for the game.

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Even with the current massive inflation gear is dirt cheap because it's easy to get materials. Currently gil has less meaning than Crystal shards. I'm not saying don't ever adress these issue, I'm saying that it's an issue that can be set on the back-burner for longer than core mechanics can. RMT are a non-issue at the moment, bots are not a issue at the moment, infaltion is not an issue at the moment.

They exist, but they are far less worrysome than making the game fun to play. Bots and RMT will always exist and strategies to foil them now would be fruitless as they don't even impact the current player base let alone a new one. No one is going to buy gil when it's worthless. All things will be adressed with time, but these issues are far from being high priority issues.

Hell it took SE years to even implement the STFU into XI and RMT were little more than a thorn in players sides for years. I don't see where even if all the current players were 50 every class how that would impact newer players aside being deprived of a small number of people to party with. What are they going to do? Cry that it's unfair that they could play/test the game for months prior to them deciding to shell out for the game? There are allready lots of people with multiple 50's who don't bot and those who did bot will continue even when SE starts to crack down on it.

Once an exploiter always and exploiter, they will get there just deserts in due time, so why worry about it right now when it doesn't impact a single soul in the game. Your views on what will cause the game to fail are fairly minor in the long run. Hell XI had massive inflation problems and they got by just fine, most MMO's have a few periods of economic inflation and repressions. It's not like SE is going to say "Pay 10m gil to access this conent" and exclude the newer players just to get rid of excess gil. The inflated gill WILL span out in the markets once they are more fleshed out. Many people are just hoarding cash to find items worth purchasing and those items will come in time and the gil will again...be spread out across the entire server.

Inflation wont kill the game
Bots wont kill the game
RMT wont kill the game

Crappy game mechanics will kill the game.

SE is getting there house in order before dealing with minor issues, let them focus on those and know that eventually these issues will be adressed.

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Originally Posted by TheRac25

i was thinking more along the lines of Boong-Ga Boong-Ga

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Sounds interesting you have enlightened me.

Have some Dorito Chips try this flavour, not quite perhaps this flavour will suit you better.

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Originally Posted by Joeking

Sounds interesting you have enlightened me.

Have some Dorito Chips try this flavour, not quite perhaps this flavour will suit you better.

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ill see your unkown doritos flavors and raise you bacon cheetos

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Originally Posted by Jynx

Even with the current massive inflation gear is dirt cheap because it's easy to get materials. Currently gil has less meaning than Crystal shards. I'm not saying don't ever adress these issue, I'm saying that it's an issue that can be set on the back-burner for longer than core mechanics can. RMT are a non-issue at the moment, bots are not a issue at the moment, infaltion is not an issue at the moment.

They exist, but they are far less worrysome than making the game fun to play. Bots and RMT will always exist and strategies to foil them now would be fruitless as they don't even impact the current player base let alone a new one. No one is going to buy gil when it's worthless. All things will be adressed with time, but these issues are far from being high priority issues.

Hell it took SE years to even implement the STFU into XI and RMT were little more than a thorn in players sides for years. I don't see where even if all the current players were 50 every class how that would impact newer players aside being deprived of a small number of people to party with. What are they going to do? Cry that it's unfair that they could play/test the game for months prior to them deciding to shell out for the game? There are allready lots of people with multiple 50's who don't bot and those who did bot will continue even when SE starts to crack down on it.

Once an exploiter always and exploiter, they will get there just deserts in due time, so why worry about it right now when it doesn't impact a single soul in the game. Your views on what will cause the game to fail are fairly minor in the long run. Hell XI had massive inflation problems and they got by just fine, most MMO's have a few periods of economic inflation and repressions. It's not like SE is going to say "Pay 10m gil to access this conent" and exclude the newer players just to get rid of excess gil. The inflated gill WILL span out in the markets once they are more fleshed out. Many people are just hoarding cash to find items worth purchasing and those items will come in time and the gil will again...be spread out across the entire server.

Inflation wont kill the game
Bots wont kill the game
RMT wont kill the game

Crappy game mechanics will kill the game.

SE is getting there house in order before dealing with minor issues, let them focus on those and know that eventually these issues will be adressed.

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Inflation caused huge population drops in XI and forced the game down a rare/ex gear only path. You say inflation can be dealt with later, but how? As an economist i can tell you pretty straight up. Without mass bans, inflation is almost impossible to combat. Especially when a lot of the players holding gil may not even play.
Inflation takes time to reverse both in real life and in a game. If prices are inflated when PS3 launches it means no one will sell any low level equip at a price that new players can afford.

And this game was designed so people can choose to be DOH or DOL. But if people join a game where every server has a bunch of people who botted multiple crafts to the max level, they will -never- be able to compete without botting themselves. By the final years of FFXI most crafts were useless. And thats whats -already- happening in this game.

If you ignore these problems what will happen is the PS3 launch will have a bunch of new players entering a world where people have been botting + leveling for a year (making it nearly impossible to ever compete with them). As such new players will not be able to partake in end game content (kinda like how on lots of servers in the past 3 years on ffxi, to join an HNMls that actually did the hard stuff you had to have 4 or 5 jobs at 75). Further new players will enter into an inflated economy in which they will never be able to catch up, and thus will never be able to reach the level of gear that is expected. (Kinda like if they started playing FFXI with p-charm going for 300mil, and staying there for 2 or 3 years). And seeing a game with a broken inflated economy and realizing that even with months of grinding they will not come close to other players, they will probably quit.

And if all the above wasn't true than FFXI would have gained population at every expansion-set launch. But they didn't. By the time WOTG was out the population wasn't going up, even though WOTG made the game epic. Instead it was falling and servers were merging.

Your position seems to be that no matter how bad the game is, and no matter how far ahead other people are, new players will join the game because SE will spend lots on advertising. And I'm assuming you think new players will stay in the game. And that seems really unrealistic when there are new MMOs and better alternatives out there.

If your position is right, then why not just shut down all the servers now, invest that money into redeveloping the game, and re-launch the game in 5 or 6 months from now letting us all keep our current levels or redistribute the sp we have gained? Because you seem to be saying what matters now is not the ppl playing, but fixing the game. And thus it makes no sense to waste money on the people playing. Or better yet, reset all characters. That would definitely attract a lot of people.

The people playing serve as free testers to all the changes in the game, wether you like it or not it's just the truth. Shutting the servers down wouldn't help them test content on a scale that having open active servers do. If history has shown us anything is that closed "Lab settings" tend to go awry almost all the time.

Far be it from "Ignoring" these issues but they are not huge issues. Inflation in XI did not cause a "large population decrease" if anything effected the games population is when SE mass banned RMT. Crafting is set to be self-defeating from the get-go, instead of acting on the people who are allready rank 50 "Botted or not" they should try and make the system rewarding at any rank. Botting doesn't compound the issue that the crafting system is easily monopolized. Did XI go ape on crafters who had high lvl crafts before anyone else? Nope, does any game with a level based crafting system? Nope.

RMT didn't cause XI to go into a mostly Rare/ex armour mode, it was the players themselves they clamoured for more attainable armour to be powerfull, they were tired of camping monsters for days to only get nothing to show for it, or see some jerk make a fortune off something they could have used. Rare/ex gear started to become quested because players wanted a system that allowed them to progress towards their items of choice.

My opinion on having crafters as a class on there own is beside the point "I think as it is it's pointless to call them classes, more like skills you need to have a item to use." They need to fix this system before they worry about if it's fair or unfair for people to be rank 50.

People join WoW all the time and people are "in terms of gear" Lightyears ahead of them, people join XI all the time and people are far far ahead of them in terms of progress. having a legacy playerbase doesn't hurt new gamers in the long run. Hell it gives them people to look towards becoming.

Hell when I first started XI I watched a Blackmage cast Freeze on a mandragora, bam I had a goal I wanted to reach to become that powerfull. Perhaps before worrying that a small percentage of the games overall user base will be high level before anyone else. We should worry about making the game fun. Once the game is fun, you can worry about the Economy, easing new players into the game, fighting Botting and RMT, all that fun stuff.

I'm not telling SE to shut down the servers and wipe characters that would be stupid. What I am saying is they need to focus on the big things before looking at the little things.

If you have ever been classed in managment at all there is a term called "Moving all my rocks" You have a table full of rocks this table wont hold these rocks forever, there are rocks of all sizes on the table. To be able to retain the tables integrity for the longest time you generally would worry about moving the larger rocks first as they pose the greatest risk to the table bowing, once you get those rocks moved it's an easy task to move all of the little rocks without worrying about how long you have to get them off the table.

I can't say I put it as elloquinty as I had wished...But I'm sure you get the picture.

Even if Issues like RMT, Bots, and the Economy are issues that compound and get more serious as time rolls by. They are still by far less important issues than some things the developement team has on their plate. I would argue they are putting some things infront of the issues present "Like jumping wtf" But the main battle system and class system in general needs alot of work. Once they do that then I'm sure they will entertain these ideas in good time.

If you don't have faith in SE to do this, I suggest you put down the controler and find a different MMO to play. Because at the end of the day we are putting our faith in SE to fix this game, get it moving forward, and make it a fun game to play. No matter what we think differently we all want the same thing at the end of the day. A fun game.

Our roll is to provide our insight on how we feel the game should develope, posts like this are great for the developers to read over. I'm not saying we shouldn't debate these issues, far from it. I prefer this to someone complaining about patch notes or the patcher while not actually giving a solution. But harping on SE's marketing and PR doesn't help the game much, SE has taken leaps and bounds from where they used to be. Hell sometimes I wish they would just drop updates on us out of the blue and not even tell us half of the changes they made, at least then people wouldn't make 18 complaint threads about patches before they even released or people hype themselves up for invisible "Ultra updates". Look at the forums right now there are 5 threads whining about the lack of content in 1.17b when there was 0 indiciation that there was going to be anything in the patch.

SE clearly would have told us "Hey guys look out something cool is coming this week" but people got all hyped up anyways without any clear indication to do so just because Yoshi said "Maybe" we would get something. I also expect mid-june to be a gong show if they don't give the people 1.18 because Yoshi said thats "Around" when the patch would be coming.

I say they stop even trying to give us information as we don't seem to be able to do anything productive with it most of the time but complain. I digress though because there are a few people who can take the news about new job systems, and Auto attack and form a coherint opinion aside from.

I R HATE AUTO ATTACKS! MASH 1 MOAR PLEASE!

Instead of saying why they feel the current system would be better than the proposed AA sytem, and then we get people going ape about the AA system because they don't have details on how it will work. It's obvious SE wont say anything because nothing is in stone. They could be working in one direction, find out it sucks ass, and go another direction. If they don't tell us specifics they don't need to worry about informing us everytime they make a design change, and having us crap our pants when they do.

It really is hillarious how much debate those few words have caused, "up until summer"

Agree that they're shooting themselves in the foot all the time with their western audience.

All it'll take is one monster patch and it'll all go away though.

and................1.18.........GO

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Originally Posted by Akira_Tenshi

It really is hillarious how much debate those few words have caused, "up until summer"

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Yeah, this game really brings out the worst in people. I think at the end of the day, people are just tired of all the waiting so they snap at anything.

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Originally Posted by TonyMontana

What I would give to sit down with some of the SE brass 10 years after this game finally dies and hear what truely happened.

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Yeah, they need to do a postmortem on this game just like how they did one for FF13:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3...ntasy_XIII.php



And like how the did one for FF12:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=13052


I would be really really curious to see one done about FF14's development.

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Originally Posted by Jynx

The people playing serve as free testers to all the changes in the game, wether you like it or not it's just the truth. Shutting the servers down wouldn't help them test content on a scale that having open active servers do. If history has shown us anything is that closed "Lab settings" tend to go awry almost all the time.

Far be it from "Ignoring" these issues but they are not huge issues. Inflation in XI did not cause a "large population decrease" if anything effected the games population is when SE mass banned RMT. Crafting is set to be self-defeating from the get-go, instead of acting on the people who are allready rank 50 "Botted or not" they should try and make the system rewarding at any rank. Botting doesn't compound the issue that the crafting system is easily monopolized. Did XI go ape on crafters who had high lvl crafts before anyone else? Nope, does any game with a level based crafting system? Nope.

RMT didn't cause XI to go into a mostly Rare/ex armour mode, it was the players themselves they clamoured for more attainable armour to be powerfull, they were tired of camping monsters for days to only get nothing to show for it, or see some jerk make a fortune off something they could have used. Rare/ex gear started to become quested because players wanted a system that allowed them to progress towards their items of choice.

My opinion on having crafters as a class on there own is beside the point "I think as it is it's pointless to call them classes, more like skills you need to have a item to use." They need to fix this system before they worry about if it's fair or unfair for people to be rank 50.

People join WoW all the time and people are "in terms of gear" Lightyears ahead of them, people join XI all the time and people are far far ahead of them in terms of progress. having a legacy playerbase doesn't hurt new gamers in the long run. Hell it gives them people to look towards becoming.

Hell when I first started XI I watched a Blackmage cast Freeze on a mandragora, bam I had a goal I wanted to reach to become that powerfull. Perhaps before worrying that a small percentage of the games overall user base will be high level before anyone else. We should worry about making the game fun. Once the game is fun, you can worry about the Economy, easing new players into the game, fighting Botting and RMT, all that fun stuff.

I'm not telling SE to shut down the servers and wipe characters that would be stupid. What I am saying is they need to focus on the big things before looking at the little things.

If you have ever been classed in managment at all there is a term called "Moving all my rocks" You have a table full of rocks this table wont hold these rocks forever, there are rocks of all sizes on the table. To be able to retain the tables integrity for the longest time you generally would worry about moving the larger rocks first as they pose the greatest risk to the table bowing, once you get those rocks moved it's an easy task to move all of the little rocks without worrying about how long you have to get them off the table.

I can't say I put it as elloquinty as I had wished...But I'm sure you get the picture.

Even if Issues like RMT, Bots, and the Economy are issues that compound and get more serious as time rolls by. They are still by far less important issues than some things the developement team has on their plate. I would argue they are putting some things infront of the issues present "Like jumping wtf" But the main battle system and class system in general needs alot of work. Once they do that then I'm sure they will entertain these ideas in good time.

If you don't have faith in SE to do this, I suggest you put down the controler and find a different MMO to play. Because at the end of the day we are putting our faith in SE to fix this game, get it moving forward, and make it a fun game to play. No matter what we think differently we all want the same thing at the end of the day. A fun game.

Our roll is to provide our insight on how we feel the game should develope, posts like this are great for the developers to read over. I'm not saying we shouldn't debate these issues, far from it. I prefer this to someone complaining about patch notes or the patcher while not actually giving a solution. But harping on SE's marketing and PR doesn't help the game much, SE has taken leaps and bounds from where they used to be. Hell sometimes I wish they would just drop updates on us out of the blue and not even tell us half of the changes they made, at least then people wouldn't make 18 complaint threads about patches before they even released or people hype themselves up for invisible "Ultra updates". Look at the forums right now there are 5 threads whining about the lack of content in 1.17b when there was 0 indiciation that there was going to be anything in the patch.

SE clearly would have told us "Hey guys look out something cool is coming this week" but people got all hyped up anyways without any clear indication to do so just because Yoshi said "Maybe" we would get something. I also expect mid-june to be a gong show if they don't give the people 1.18 because Yoshi said thats "Around" when the patch would be coming.

I say they stop even trying to give us information as we don't seem to be able to do anything productive with it most of the time but complain. I digress though because there are a few people who can take the news about new job systems, and Auto attack and form a coherint opinion aside from.

I R HATE AUTO ATTACKS! MASH 1 MOAR PLEASE!

Instead of saying why they feel the current system would be better than the proposed AA sytem, and then we get people going ape about the AA system because they don't have details on how it will work. It's obvious SE wont say anything because nothing is in stone. They could be working in one direction, find out it sucks ass, and go another direction. If they don't tell us specifics they don't need to worry about informing us everytime they make a design change, and having us crap our pants when they do.

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i agree with a lot of this but focusing on the big things doesnt always work. when they did that survey stuff they saw people wanted more content and story. So they implemented sidequests that fail and NMs that respawn in 30 seconds. The battle changes and the job changes and companies are probably going to be just like that and fail. I mean really, what has this dev team accomplished big-change wise? its been 5 months since they took over and all they have really done is fix the wards a bit. Tanaka's team fixed the UI i believe and he had planned hamlet battles and companies for like january or february release. And then look at the guild task thing. Wtf is the point of that? Almost every patch since january has dissapointed people. So to assume they will just turn around and fix everything in 1 summer patch all at once is kind of wishful thinking.
If they focused on a lot of little things they would fix more, screw up less, and gradually transform the game into something good. Instead they are putting all their eggs in one basket. If the summer patch fails what then? "we will redesign the system again and complete it in 6 months"?

Well why a lot of you guys are complain the dev team is so slow. I got up this morning and called my friend asked him a few questions about development. Also to Note he has worked on a few big games out there like Gears of war 3 and some other stuff like a new game for nintendo's new system which he couldn't tell me.

He basically tells me that its amazing that they are getting out the battle system redone in 5-6 months usually would take something like this 10 months to a year to rebuild the fundamentals of the game that has already been set in stone and make new content at the same time.

Also for the people whining about info Dev's will never release info on a new title unless or the specifics of an patch unless they know it's gonna be implemented in the game that way 100%. Well that's what my friend had to say i hope this keeps some of you quite i am sure it wont but hey i am just giving you word straight from a dev i know.

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Originally Posted by Leeloo

Character wipes for PS3 release!!

<runs away>

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honestly if SE did this, I would not care, infact I think it would be for the better if they wiped characters for PS3 release

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Originally Posted by Kailea_Nagisa

honestly if SE did this, I would not care, infact I think it would be for the better if they wiped characters for PS3 release

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well wen u think about it ye it would atm wen all this stuff comes out alot if not 80% of the game pop will have capped or be most of there classes and its gonna make there content seem pretty small wen eveyone is focusing on it

About the "until summer" part..

He mentioned that those were his plans until summer, then during summer is when he is going to implement those said plans.

*shrugs* how hard is that to understand. xD

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Originally Posted by Firon

Well why a lot of you guys are complain the dev team is so slow. I got up this morning and called my friend asked him a few questions about development. Also to Note he has worked on a few big games out there like Gears of war 3 and some other stuff like a new game for nintendo's new system which he couldn't tell me.

He basically tells me that its amazing that they are getting out the battle system redone in 5-6 months usually would take something like this 10 months to a year to rebuild the fundamentals of the game that has already been set in stone and make new content at the same time.

Also for the people whining about info Dev's will never release info on a new title unless or the specifics of an patch unless they know it's gonna be implemented in the game that way 100%. Well that's what my friend had to say i hope this keeps some of you quite i am sure it wont but hey i am just giving you word straight from a dev i know.

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The thing is, most people don't care to know the truth because it will hurt their arguments and side of the debate -- this is why people tend to ignore things while they go out on their own tangent.

And you guys can simply not play a game you obviously dislike or the company. :) (being nice) I'm waiting on the battle fixes to start playing again because I just started playing and I do not want to relearn a new system after getting used to the old one.

All the points brought up have had community rep replies to them. Such as the linkshell stuff. There is no magic button for mmo fixes. They are reading what we want/ need and proritizing it. The battle fixes (which we know will be a 2 mnth process starting in mid june.) will happen first. And they hope have all the list which alot was put in since said list was out by late augest/early september. And a new list written. But also things happen.

Over speculation is what brings in the dissapointment. And the expectation of how things were in ffxi are how they will be in ffxiv. Which isn't the case. Somethings people just need to suck up on and stop crying over. Take the game for what it is and decide, play it or go do something else. :) (again being nice)

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Originally Posted by Jennestia

The thing is, most people don't care to know the truth because it will hurt their arguments and side of the debate -- this is why people tend to ignore things while they go out on their own tangent.

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Its either they are working hard, or sitting on their asses.

Most of them would think that they are sitting on their asses is because they are sittin on their own asses waiting for something to happen. Now if people would actually find something productive to do or just occupy themselves, time will fly by and the next patch would release before they realized.

Also note that making abd maintaining mmo is an on going process to make the game fun for everyone while at the same time add more content. Take WoW for example, with the launch of cataclysm that made most races found in game playable, that also remade most of the maps. They added and remade Stormwind taking out all "fake" buildings and only keeping the ones players could enter, they rebuilt Stormwind keep.

Similar with ffxi, they took out the level caps on stuff to make them more replayable for newbies. They remade how wait works in ffxi so players can have full use of the macro system. Even when as far as combined all the AHs (or soon) .

Currently they are fixing the game after they fixed it, that when they will start maintinging it. Which means a better LS system etc.

This is a good thread, i wish more people read about it. Especaily members from dev team.

This is very constructive becuz it tells many important points dev members have missed/skipped.

Also it prove that we're not just dumb/young/naive player who know nothing.

If dev can't convince old player to stay, how do they expect to maintain new player?

I believe giving dev more pressure will result a better result. Not just let them do whatever they want.

1.18 is a Very Very important turning point. It will determine IF previous players will be back to support the game or not.

Watch out! Yoshi. You only get 1 shot in this summer. 2 the most( July update?)... well, GLuck!

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Originally Posted by Nuru

Its either they are working hard, or sitting on their asses.

Most of them would think that they are sitting on their asses is because they are sittin on their own asses waiting for something to happen. Now if people would actually find something productive to do or just occupy themselves, time will fly by and the next patch would release before they realized.

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This is always how I felt.... lets see what am I doing to pass the time.....

Building an arcade cabnet
playing other games (right now Yakuza 4)
doing a few leves here and there at complete random
studying for my CCNA (god my brain hurts)
working......

am I bored? no, do I complain about SE? no, why? because I am smart enough to let SE do their thing, as I do mine.

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Originally Posted by Rentahamster

Yeah, they need to do a postmortem on this game just like how they did one for FF13:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3...ntasy_XIII.php



And like how the did one for FF12:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=13052


I would be really really curious to see one done about FF14's development.

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I only read 12's so far, but you do realize that's a discussion about the "success" of 12?

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Before getting to the main content of the talk, Murata announced that Final Fantasy XII has sold more than 5 million units worldwide, and that it has garnered many awards from various publications.

With that in mind he wished to discuss what he felt helped the game achieve this success. The first thing “the team” tried to consider was what they consider the core ingredients of Final Fantasy. The narrowed down the key ideas to innovation, quality and volume.

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I don't know about you (all) but this little blurb explains to me why I feel the Final Fantasy series isn't being marketed to me any more. Aside from "quality" I don't see innovation or volume as the leading strengths of (previous) Final Fantasy games.

I haven' tread the XIII one, but I'm sure it's about how successful it was, too. SE only reads $$$ signs.

They don't really care if I like the game anymore. They certainly don't make the game feel as loved as they used to as if they were worked on by a team that cared more about making a good game than it did about how badass they are they work at SE and how much money this game will make! That's how SE makes me feel as a consumer.

They probably should have tried to flip that around before XIV, but XIV is just another example.

I read 13 and it does a better job of discussing the strengths and weakness.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

Real talk: it would be a huge mistake to try to get more people on board with development going by so slowly. This is something that basically needs to be kept low profile until they can start pumping out good updates at a decent speed. This is almost as bad as Aion NA's updates.

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I think that if we as players want this game to succeed faster we are going to have to "donate" by allowing them to start subscription fees with the promise that it makes a big difference in development. If it would help get this game on its feet I would pay. Not saying its worth paying for at the moment, but this might give us a brighter future.

Many of you have pulled this way off track or didn't bother reading anything more than the title.
This is NOT about the dev team not pulling through or sitting on their asses.
It is NOT about the game sucking.

It is about SEs inability to keep people happy.
I think Jynx has made the only legit argument against this so far which can basically be summed up at SE should just work on fixing the game instead of making the current population happy.

It doesn't matter how hard things are for the dev team. That doesn't mean they can't communicate better, or manage patches better, or fix small things that get on everyones nerves before wasting time on things like guild tasks.

Right now, this dev team has not shown much. They fixed the wards a bit, added in sidequests, nms that most ppl find to be a joke, and guild tasks which seem pointless.
June will be a turning point. if they release another disliked patch there's a good chance a lot of people will just leave the game.

But the point is, this thread is about their inability to appease players and improve the games reputation. Instead, their actions have been significantly hurting the games reputation. Especially when a patch gets hyped up and then has nothing.

When an official forum has more "this fails" threads than anything else you have an obvious problem.
Since day 1 SE has ignored a lot of this.
If I was incorrect then surplus would be gone by now. But its still here. And it hasn't stopped RMT or botters. So all it does is annoy people. And thats just one of 100+ things SE has done wrong marketing/PR wise.

Also i think its unfair to call this an early beta test because we all -PAID- for a game, not for a beta. If you accept this is a beta test you are saying its legit for companies to lie to you and sell you an incomplete product that they claim is complete so that you can test it for them....
Imagine buying experimental toothpaste passed off as real toothpaste and finding out 6 months later when you have 3 cavities. Would you ever suggest the company to friends or buy from them again? If the people arguing that this is just a beta are correct, then this is essentially what SE is doing now.

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Originally Posted by Azurymber

Many of you have pulled this way off track or didn't bother reading anything more than the title.
This is NOT about the dev team not pulling through or sitting on their asses.
It is NOT about the game sucking.

It is about SEs inability to keep people happy.
I think Jynx has made the only legit argument against this so far which can basically be summed up at SE should just work on fixing the game instead of making the current population happy.

It doesn't matter how hard things are for the dev team. That doesn't mean they can't communicate better, or manage patches better, or fix small things that get on everyones nerves before wasting time on things like guild tasks.

Right now, this dev team has not shown much. They fixed the wards a bit, added in sidequests, nms that most ppl find to be a joke, and guild tasks which seem pointless.
June will be a turning point. if they release another disliked patch there's a good chance a lot of people will just leave the game.

But the point is, this thread is about their inability to appease players and improve the games reputation. Instead, their actions have been significantly hurting the games reputation. Especially when a patch gets hyped up and then has nothing.

When an official forum has more "this fails" threads than anything else you have an obvious problem.
Since day 1 SE has ignored a lot of this.
If I was incorrect then surplus would be gone by now. But its still here. And it hasn't stopped RMT or botters. So all it does is annoy people. And thats just one of 100+ things SE has done wrong marketing/PR wise.

Also i think its unfair to call this an early beta test because we all -PAID- for a game, not for a beta. If you accept this is a beta test you are saying its legit for companies to lie to you and sell you an incomplete product that they claim is complete so that you can test it for them....
Imagine buying experimental toothpaste passed off as real toothpaste and finding out 6 months later when you have 3 cavities. Would you ever suggest the company to friends or buy from them again? If the people arguing that this is just a beta are correct, then this is essentially what SE is doing now.

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The more I think about Jynx's argument, though (or my interpretation of it) - the more I'm inclined to agree.

You say that not pleasing us is hurting the games reputation. From our perspective I would say that is true. We grow more frustrated and disgruntled every day. I believe the developers don't want us to leave, but even if we do their master plan is to re-capture the world's attention at a later date. Who's to say (from their point of view) it won't recapture ours as well if we quit now?

You follow what I mean so far?

As for the rest of the world (those not playing XIV), the majority has written this game off already. They don't want to hear about it (for the most part) when we say it's gotten better. They laugh at us when we say we enjoy playing it. They simply accept the game as a failure (based on their first experience, or reviews, or sales/returns, on something) and are happy to look to the horizon for new games or return to tried & true game experiences.

This is better for Square Enix because XIV is literally biding its time. It's not changing overnight or exploding into exciting new adventures every day. It's a long, arduous process of transforming from what it was in September to what it might be when they are ready to relaunch it on PS3. At this moment there may still be many who have been pushed too far (as you suggest we may be) or stick to their guns that the game isn't worth playing, but...

New reviews will come out that (presumably) sing the praises on what Square Enix has managed in "only a year" or "only 16 months!" (a lifetime to us players, but not long to people who aren't thinking, or caring, or wondering about what happened to XIV). Instead they would be interested in seeing how a company turded (edit: lol Freudian slip, "turned") such a launch flop into a praise-worthy game. It will recapture their attention (and presumably our attention) in an instant.

What we say, think, feel right now doesn't really amount to much. We may bring back 1, 2, 10 friends, or we may naysay and turn off 1-10 friends. They're looking to suck in THOUSANDS of people, and those of us still playing the game may even be on board (by then) saying "It was a rough 16 months, but damn this game is fun now."

So yeah, I think Jynx has hit it out of the park upon further reflection of the marketing strategy.