FFXIV: ARR becoming TORtanic

[Keneblerz]

TLDR

Can we have a shorter one?

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

This made me laugh so hard LOL.

[Chrysania]

Can we have a shorter one?

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

[Akaasha]

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

Made me laugh

[Arriverderci]

I shall sing it to you in the language of your people: harparp derp derrrrrp herperp.

Post of the year.

[Miinister]

They should hire you Chrysania, effing good ideas. I want to play the MMO you envision and wonder why they can not do these simple things to make it FUN.

[Aenarion]

I want to play the MMO you envision and wonder why they can not do these simple things to make it FUN.

Time and money. It's one thing to sit here as fans thinking about the things we want, it's quite another when you're SE and have to pay for it, especially in such a short time frame.

[Yoko_Kurama]

Time and money.

Pathfinder Online, google it. Should launch in 2016, a game that was designed and funded by actual fans who know the genre and what an RPG should be. They actually proposed the idea of a real mmo-rpg which goes back to the rpg roots and asked for donations and said if they reached a mill they would begin the project...they reached more than a mill really fast lol.

[Aenarion]

Pathfinder Online

Yea, I've seen that. When it comes to indie projects with that kind of scope, I tend to take a "Eh, good luck... but I'm not gonna hold my breath" approach.

All too often they just never pan out.

[Chrysania]

They should hire you Chrysania, effing good ideas. I want to play the MMO you envision and wonder why they can not do these simple things to make it FUN.

Mighty kind of you to say!

Its long been an observation of mine that mmos are very commonly unfriendly environments and bad games, with the few that are not are cutesy or childishly shallow.

Why, for example, must it be regarded as a staple in mmos for there to be grind you will absolutely hate? Are we still trying to justify this lazy design absence as some sort of 'rite of passage'? Its not good game design; its crap.

Why also must mmo's be work? I define work as labor you may or may not enjoy, but must do whether you like it or not, for this concern.

While it is true that people tend to value more highly that which they feel they have earned, mmos try perhaps too hard to make you feel invested thusly (and more likely to keep passing whether you want to or not lest you have 'wasted all that time') and too little trying to genuinely earn that kind of loyalty.

To this, I think something my husband recently said says it best: "MMO's are like abusive friends in virtually every way. They're very demanding, prone to being manipulative and doing everything they can at all times to make you think you need them, when, in fact, they need you."

And its bloody well true. So why do we put up with it?

Do we, in general, not write yet imagine that it could be better? MMO makers are quick to bemoan how hard and expensive it is, yet it looks to me like the vast majority of their time and efforts are not spent trying to bring us a better game, but rather, refine ways to maximize our time wastes and treadmills.

They say its soooo hard to 'balance'. I suspect the truth is that its hard to make sure we can't have too much fun with any given thing. The balance they actually mean isn't the one we tend to assume.

I won't say that its cheap and easy to make a great game to modern specs, and mmo's have ongoing costs to boot. But I do not think it is as difficult as they would have us believe. Or, at last, it shouldn't have to be if they weren't so often trying to please too many types of gamers at once, and consequently leaving them all often dissatisfied.

MMO's should specialize. They should target a specific market and serve it well rather than trying to 'do it all' and generally sink at everything.

Why? Because WoW has been doing it all for 8 years, and if you can't do even one thing better than WoW, you cannot compete.

SWTOR, as a shining example, should have been more like mass effect as a game, because that style of game is something bioware does very well. Powerful action, great storytelling and lots of dialige-driven character development is, I'd daresay, what most of the audience wanted, along with space combat and rather a lot more to explore in general.

Nobody got what they wanted with SWTOR, however. You'd almost think they set out to screw it up in the most screwed up way possible, at least if you were me.

Here, 1.0 was...junk. Only the most undeterable bothered fighting with its insanities to play it, and having beta'd it, I can well say that SE WA told mammy times and in many different ways by many that out was a bad job and would not, as it was, go far.

I was there one day when a rep asked the group I was in for or opinion on something we'd just done and, in being told some things he clearly didn't want to hear, told us we obviously didn't understand the thing that was bad, and it was fine; we were the problem.

I remember it well, because it was the day I decided never to touch ff14 again.

Here I am though. Its not the same game, that's for sure, but its still an mmo in that it trites very hard, and very transparently, to waste as much of your time as possible while utterly minimizing its own effort on anything at all.

Maybe, just maybe, it could try being a good game instead, and the equivalent of a good business partner at least. Friend might be too alien to hope after.

[Gaddes]

The sad thing is that SWTOR actually had a lot to do on launch, despite however its popularity might've waned afterwards.

The one thing SWTOR kicks FFXIV's butt at is maintaining story quests/cutscenes for far longer than XIV does. The biggest problem I've had with XIV's content is the sharp dropoff once you've completed the main quest. With SWTOR, if you finish one class's large storyline, then you can go and do all of the other ones, and have brand new story content to keep you interested for far longer than XIV. Sure XIV has class quests/storylines, but they are so miniscule and far apart compared to SWTOR's. So once I've finished my main story with my first XIV class/job, there instantly doesn't feel like as much to do with my other classes/jobs in XIV in comparison. Then again, I am partial to plot and cutscenes as opposed to grinding endgame, and some people like grinding endgame, so for them this isn't a bad scenario.