Potential Sub Price Decrease

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Originally Posted by LioJen

No, they were $50 until about 2006. And that was when almost every developer made their own custom engines for every game. Today they all use a standard licensed premade engine like Unreal, which means they don't have to train anyone in its use since every programmer and graphic artist already knows it. The industry being much larger as a whole means the pool of potential employees is much larger, meaning the cost of labor has been decreased with the increase in worker competition. Many games now use a whole host of pre-made stock assets, as seen even in FFXV where they used Chinese-bought enemy assets, saving on man-hours. Average computing power is also much higher than before, which nullifies any increase in cost you may assume due to "HD graphics" being resource intensive.

Logically the cost of development should be down, and likely is. The bloated budgets probably come from inflated executive pay and marketing agencies. Keep in mind that any increase in sticker price will NOT result in a pay raise for the actual programmers, artists, and real workers on these games. It will only result in a bigger check for the guy in the suit who did nothing but sign his name, and larger dividends for the stockholders who would gladly tear the company into pieces for the same result.

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nice to see a normal and informed take in a ff14 discussion which usually tend to be filled with fanatics shilling. big ups to our anti-capitalist king of these here comments :D

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

That's not the servers though, that's the network outside them lol.


That is XIV up website is also not a great indicator because it just pings the servers from where it's located. If the bad network node is in its path, it's going to show problems. Meanwhile, people who's path doesn't take that node will have zero issues.





We had raid the night those issues were reported, and no one in my group had issues. I have someone in Orlando, 2 in Ohio, 1 near Chicago, one near Detroit, one in Oklahoma, and I'm near Seattle.

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Still an issue isn't it? I'm willing to admit that they don't have control over the nodes, but they do have influence over them that they refuse to exert because they don't care about those of us outside of JP.

Anyways, a lot of people did have issues. There's 89 replies on the thread I snipped. I had issues, as well as most everyone in Eureka with me at the time.

But that's just a whole thread of individuals' words against you and your static. It's kind of silly to reach into individual experiences as a means of disproving/proving something. It's not like we can't tell from your post history that you love SE with all your heart and that you'll defend them regardless of the situation.

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Originally Posted by Nizzi

Why can't my sub run out and I can still have the same access that a free trial player has? I've already bought and paid for ARR, Heavensward and Stormblood in the past, yet I'm still forced to pay the monthly sub if I want to do POTD? It's a bit annoying to me. If it's because SE is afraid all of the idlers will unsub and just use /say to chat in Limsa, perhaps that means there's not much worth actually paying for this expansion?

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I think SW:ToR does something similar to this and I wish FFXIV did it too. But then again SW:ToR has instanced housing that doesn't hold your subscription hostage so I can see why FFXIV wouldn't do the same.

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Originally Posted by Metalface_Villain

with the amount and quality of content we got in endwalker the game should have been sub free.

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This seems like a hot take but I have to agree, and I haven't played the game even close to 10 years. It's not that people are playing the game for a long time and getting used to the formula. The formula is stale because it's 2023 and devs either don't know how to change it up or don't want to. My point being it is clearly growing increasingly irritating for some players to pay the sub...whether it's the content or the servers.

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Originally Posted by mana-burner

I think SW:ToR does something similar to this and I wish FFXIV did it too. But then again SW:ToR has instanced housing that doesn't hold your subscription hostage so I can see why FFXIV wouldn't do the same.

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SWtoR ftp is dreadful. I consider it unplayable: can't raid , can't get artifact armor, limited inventory and credits plus other inconveniences. And housing on swtor is boring and uninspiring: you can only place certain items on predetermined plates with little to no room for creativity. They could get rid of all my strongholds there I wouldn't even notice.

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Originally Posted by Toutatis

SWtoR ftp is dreadful. I consider it unplayable: can't raid , can't get artifact armor, limited inventory and credits plus other inconveniences. And housing on swtor is boring and uninspiring: you can only place certain items on predetermined plates with little to no room for creativity. They could get rid of all my strongholds there I wouldn't even notice.

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Well yeah, the point is to at least let us have access to the same stuff free trial players have when we aren't currently subscribed.

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Originally Posted by mana-burner

Well yeah, the point is to at least let us have access to the same stuff free trial players have when we aren't currently subscribed.

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And what I am saying is swtor ftp is so bad, I wouldn’t even play it.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

Cash Shop is almost all cosmetics with a few story and job skips (which doesnt serve much anyway). There's no purchase in-game premium currency which is why they're allowed to sell mostly cosmetics in a sub model. F2P means Pay to Win.

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In a game that even has glam as endgame it's not optional. It's manipulative. Plain and simple.

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Originally Posted by Orinori

To put it in perspective, at nearly $15 a month you are paying the entire box price of the game or an expansion *per patch* at their 4 month patch cycle. Do you think that $60 is a fair price for a half hour of MSQ, 1 dungeon, and 1 trial?

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The price was grandfathered in back when FFXIV used to be touted as a competitor to WoW, which has the same price. Square Enix has changed directions, though, and instead of being a competitor, it's more like an add-on. FFXIV in 2023 just fills in the missing social aspect that's missing from other games, without adding gameplay content to compete with them. So you can raid in WoW then go clubbing in FFXIV and so on. It's not meant to provide additional gameplay burden for players. And in that aspect, it should likely be priced accordingly. Much like add-ons on your movie streaming subscriptions never double the price of your sub, but only add a small extra fee, otherwise people wouldn't buy it.

Also, FFXIV is a completely different genre than what it used to be. It's more like Second Life than WoW. Seriously, most of the new content added to the game is player-generated. If you know, you know. Sticking to the stock content in 2023 is like playing Gmod on gm_flatgrass. So what is the sub even used for?

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Originally Posted by NekoMataMata

Still an issue isn't it? I'm willing to admit that they don't have control over the nodes, but they do have influence over them that they refuse to exert because they don't care about those of us outside of JP.

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And an East Coast Data Center would help, how? Cross-datacenter play is a thing. Your East Coast Data Center has issues because of Internet provider. It's your raid night, and everyone has travelled to a West Coast Data Center in order to raid. Too bad NTT/Comcast/<insert your own Internet Provider here> screwed up.

The truth of the matter is that multiple data centers in a region are just as susceptible to outside networking problems as single data centers in a region. Most of the "89 replies" you mentioned (yeah, I read through them) were along the line of "it's problematic" and "what the heck NTT?", not "this could be resolved by SE, they don't care because <mumble mumble> Japan".

"It's not like we can't tell from your post history that you love SE with all your heart and that you'll defend them regardless of the situation."

Don't have anything useful to say? Just said "it's kind of silly to reach into individual experiences" after providing "89 replies" that do exactly that? Slander the poster. Classic.