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

[Akira_Tenshi]

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

[kurokawa]

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

[Mug]

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

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.

[Rentahamster]

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.

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.

[Azurymber]

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.

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"?

[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.

[Kailea_Nagisa]

Character wipes for PS3 release!!

<runs away>

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

[sketch]

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

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

[Nuru]

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

[Jennestia]

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.

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.