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

[Joeking]

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

Not really.. but there is this.

[Azurymber]

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.

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.

[TheRac25]

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.

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).

[TonyMontana]

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.

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.

[TheRac25]

Not really.. but there is this.

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

[Jynx]

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.

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.

[Joeking]

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

Sounds interesting you have enlightened me.

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

[TheRac25]

Sounds interesting you have enlightened me.

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

ill see your unkown doritos flavors and raise you bacon cheetos

[Azurymber]

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.

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.

[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.