SE Needs to Market FFXIV/Offer 10 Day Free Trials

[indira]

We already tried that with FFXI, remember?

/randomplayerf9320923u "Herro, u buy gil now? BUY GIL NOW! WHO POOP RAST!?!?!"

We can't have nice things because of hackers, RMT, and idiots.

excatly, and RMT can make alot of money in 10days

[Evangela]

If they want to give away free trials, do it after the game get fixed

[Levian]

You know, I don't get why people seem to think FFXI's weakness was marketing. If I remember correctly, FFXI had the most subscriptions for 2 or 3 years until being beaten out by wow, and then held the #2 spot with 2.5 million subscritions for a few years after being over taken. Even as of mid 2010, with the game declining it had 350k subscribers. That beat out LOTRO's 100k 3x over.

My honest opinion of free trial periods in general is that they're a scourge. The only reason to put in a free trial is to encourage RMT activity and spam. If there was actually a way to keep them from being abused by RMT I would see it differently. Aside from that, most games come with a free month's trial, so buying an MMO is almost no riskier than buying an offline game. Ok, so if it sucks and you don't like it after your trial period you can't resell it to game stop and get 15-20 bucks back. Seriously, fear of that would turn you off of the game?

That being said, this game isn't in a marketable state. All the Mr. T commercials, free trials, and MMO website banners in the world won't help bolster this game's population. If anything it would only serve to drive another nail in FFXIV's coffin once another 600k try it and rave about all it's faults on every forum they regularly troll.

[Wolfie]

Hmm..

I guess our pallet preference is different, being a pink pony all you must be eating is sugar and rainbows.

PS: Being that its so cheap I think people will understand the game is awful but the price tag matches its contents.

Thus be neutral.

Applejack made some cupcakes with a cup of lemon juice once. They were bad. Reeeeally bad.

[Wolfie]

excatly, and RMT can make alot of money in 10days

You can restrict communication for trial or low level players like... oh... every AAA MMO ever?

[Neptune]

You don't get a second chance to make a first impression. Better not turn off as many people as possible, so I say no free trial. When the game relaunches, then they'd be crazy to not offer a 14 day free trial.

[Levian]

You can restrict communication for trial or low level players like... oh... every AAA MMO ever?

You can restrict communication, but he wasn't referencing chat. He referenced the money they could make. I.E. setting up 20 trial accounts to bot low level crap and npc it off. It's chump change, but if you can run enough bots it ads up and fast. You can't limit low level "content" either, that would essentially invalidate the purpose of offering a free trial.

[Nuru]

In my opinion, they need to fix this game first and make us want to pay for it before they can even think about giving free trials out to others. I mean, this is currently the longest free trial in history for an mmo and even people that have access now don't want to play it.

Pretty much this. The game isn't ready for something like that right now, but when it is, i'm sure it will do some good. Perhaps make it part of advertising saying that the game is fixed, just give it another chance.

[Wolfie]

You can restrict communication, but he wasn't referencing chat. He referenced the money they could make. I.E. setting up 20 trial accounts to bot low level crap and npc it off. It's chump change, but if you can run enough bots it ads up and fast. You can't limit low level "content" either, that would essentially invalidate the purpose of offering a free trial.

That... won't really work. Sure, they can set up a dozen, two dozen, three dozen lowbie accounts. There's only so many low level monsters to go around, and when you're making chump change by vendoring the goods, it's not really worth the money to buy so many machines and set up so many bots. If vendoring lowbie stuff was ever profitable in any MMO, we'd have seen it. But we don't. That's why it's lowbie stuff.

[Levian]

Do I really need to point out the myriad of fishing bots that used to be set up in FFXI for the sole purpose of catching and auctioning off/vendoring moat carp? It's just 1 example of many that could be done en masse without hampering much of anything really. I'm sure if you think outside the box you can find something similar bots can accomplish in this game. Considering the quick (especially by comparison to FFXI) respawn of mobs, killing everything on the map isn't as much of a deterrent as you might think either.

It may not occur as often in games that use copper/silver/gold increments either. But if you look even there you can find work arounds. Taking an example from WoW, picking peacebloom, an item any lvl 1 herbalist could get could net 20 gold a stack when they added the inscription profession to the game. And last I played, they still sold fast and for about 2 gold a stack. I was rolling around on a lvl 19 character with more gold than my other toon had at 50. Of course it goes without saying no one cares about RMT in WoW because gold flows like water and has no value. I don't know why people buy it, but to each his own.

You write off "lowbie stuff" as worthless because performing it manually with a single toon on an account you paid for isn't getting your money's worth out of the game. To a cheater who's abusing the living hell out of free trials, things take on a different light. It becomes worth the money to setup the machines, because bots don't need a fantastically expensive lag free machine to operate. Let's also remember that most RMT operations are in countries where a dollar or euro goes much farther. And adding more exponentially increases the amount of in game currency you net. They pay for themselves, and I'm sure IGE has made millions off them. I'm willing to bet that any MMO offering a free trial has some facet that RMT abuse.