What's makes an MMORPG fun? - 4Gamer chats with the Producers of FFXI, FFXIV, and DQX

[EmiliM]

Lots of room for improvement is a huge understatement....

That is part of the reason why I translated the interview (btw, thanks for the comments everyone ). It's to demonstrate the challenges of running a game like this. Everybody has their own expectations when it comes to paying for the game they expect to get (and rightfully so). People expect the devs to fix or change something they're not happy about, which is fine in itself. The frustration comes when people expect the devs to do it a specific way.

What players needs to understand is that their "suggested solutions" does not always actually solve the problem (like Saito-san said). Take the b-list problem you mentioned in your post as an example. Could they have added a "block and auto report" feature to the game? Sure they can. But what happens if this is abused and people end up flooding the reporting system with tons of accidental or intentional false reports (because they dislike someone)? The devs will then need to sift through these false alarms to get to the legitimate reports, which wastes valuable time and ultimately probably make it even slower for them to deal with the real gil spammers. On top of that, if they end up banning some of the players named in the false reports, they'll have to deal with grievances from those players too, which is all extra work.

Now, you might say "but I won't abuse the system", but there's no way we can say the same for everyone else (just look at vote kick).

The same could be said for many other issues that people bring up. Everyone who complains about an issue usually say something along the lines of "it's such a simple problem that could be solved easily". And that may very well be true. But a lot of people seems to imagine that when the devs fix something, they do it as one giant mass of programmers and engineers, rolling around squishing bugs. The reality, obviously, is that a lot of times only 1 or 2 person is responsible or able to fix the specific problem that you have. And if this person is only able to deal with 20 bugs a day, then they're going to deal with the ones that are 1. most serious and 2. with the most complete information.

I may be sounding like a white knight, but this is the reality of running a commercial service where resource such as manpower and time is (always) finite. I hoped the interview was able to shed some light on this and ultimately help people become at least somewhat more understanding when their demands and reports are not being responded to the way they hoped. It's not because they don't care, it's because they have a lot more to consider than most people imagine when dealing with these things.

[ReplicaX]

BST, NIN, SAM, DRK and BLU were all added in expansion and were not part of the original release iirc.

Ppl mix up standard jobs, advanced jobs, and expansion jobs all the time. It can be very confusing.

FFXI Standard unlocked jobs: White Mage, Black Mage, Red Mage, Thief, Warrior, Monk
FFXI Standard locked advanced jobs: Paladin, Dark Knight, Beastmaster, Bard, Ranger

Rise of Zilart: Ninja, Samurai, Dragoon
Summoner<(Didn't require RoZ expansion, added in update for JP client at RoZ release)
Treasures of Aht Urhgan: Corsair, Blue Mage, Puppetmaster
Wings of the Goddess: Scholar, Dancer
Seekers of Adoulin: Geomancer, Rune Fencer

[Noxifer]

Thanks for posting.

Yoshida:
You'd have people like Aoki-san, who is the head of the world design team in DQX, almost not showing up at work at all so we'd end up having meetings with him in Norath (the EQ game world) instead.

lol. Good old days to skip school or work to play a video game.

I have a friend who, when FF7 came out here and he was able to buy it, called in sick to school for three days until he'd finished it XD
(If I'd have tried something like that, my mum would have kicked me out of the house and towards school before I could even come up with a better excuse... ^^; )

[Ryios]

Noticed you failed to mention anything about playing with friends or free company members.

I had friends, they quit, I made more, they quit, until eventually my overall demeaner towards new ones caused people to not want to be my friend. I got tired of it.

The main issue with a game like this, is that there isn't very much for friends to have interaction with you on. And when you do it's content, e.g. raids, which cause stress, and theres always that one thorn in the bush that ruins everyones experience (even if I am that thorn to some people). in games like FFXI... I made so many memories... And all of them are based around things people considered "Inconvienient" in that game. Like having to get high level help to escort you to jeuno. Or having to hunt down a white mage for a teleport to dem to go exp in the dunes. Or dieing in the middle of no where with a home point thousands of miles away and needing a raise. Or accidentally casting Aeroga on a fly in gusgen mines and agroing/linking the ENTIRE MINE and running for our lives out the front door. And then there was endgame, competing with 4 linkshell's thf's to pull pop trash to get items to make the stuff we needed to spawn the gods etc. All of those connections and aspects are just non existent in this game, and as such it feels empty and barren, no matter how much content they have.

In my eyes the entire world of eorzea is just a background picture that surves to purpose, they literally could just move the duty finder to the login client and have yuo pop in and out of stuff without loading eorzea...

[Jynx]

The thing about some of the things people considered "Roadblocks" to fun, in the end forced people to cooperate and overcome their hurdles.

With all the hurdles and "anoying" features removed, much like in the cell-phone age we are more distant than ever. Making things more convient isn't always the answer.

[Recaldy]

Yoshida worked at Hudson!!?? I gotta check the Bomberman credits now! <3

[Blackcanary]

I'm happy Yoshida San said this:

"Yoshida:
Yes. Of course, we don't want to turn our backs on players who play a lot. We have players who play a lot, and players who can only play a bit, and many other customers each with their own play style. What we tried to do is to launch with something that we feel was "the best choice that appeals to everyone". Beginning with patch 2.2, we will try to include more contents for those customers who tell us "I want to spend more time playing" and "we want to see more useless/trivial things". We do want to have something to address both of those needs. But these kind of intentions can sometimes be difficult to get across to our players."

Bring on open world content.

[OMEGAlomania]

An interesting read, thanks for the post

[Nahara]

This was a very good read. Thank you for translating and posting this.

[Vanguard319]

a pretty good read, as far as feedback, there will always be the haters who will spout shit about one feature or another, and there will always be demographics who will feel that they are left out. You can't please everyone because everyone has different views of what makes a good game.