Full translation of Yoshi interview, including his openness to F2P

[Theonekitten]

Looks like he is opening the doors to Horizontal Item Progression.

Might be too little too late...

[Tupsi]

I think that you not realizing you do not represent the majority of the player base is the disconnect. VAST majority of players have never beat Twintania or all three of the primals. That's a fact.

"WoW is the best.

We need to design after WoW.

WoW. WoW. WoW."

This is the mentality every MMO developer has followed suit and majority of those MMOs flopped hard or had to be relaunched. There's a reason WoW's number's are falling fast and it's not because there's amazing new MMOs out on the market.

[LordSaviour]

lol ... pay for 1 hour hoping to clear coil and tank gets booted for non payment with final boss @ 15%.

[Stanelis]

Perhaps he's better connected with the userbase than you think...

No, as a vanilla wow player who raided from burning crusade to the beginning of mist of pandaria in what he'd call "hardcore" guilds I can assure you that the current FFXIV difficulty can't be compared to the difficulty of the old wow (even twintania). Furthermore, most of the former wow raiders who starded ARR because the game seemed to go back to the fundamentals of wow actually stopped the game.

Even the current wow is more difficult than FFXIV in heroic modes raids (and it's way easier than it used to be, with only a few bosses currently difficult).

[Vespar]

Rather than focusing on F2P like everyone else, I read a lot of good things in this article that make me very happy. The major one that we'll see right away, is the supposed removal of philosophy tomes! While I dont know how we will now get items like Potash and Animal Fat, I'm happy to see this go! I love that he is now going to make it so that darklight will drop in dungeons! What that means for myth and philo items, Im not sure but I like it!

I also like to hear that they've got atleast two years of content planned out. With the rate we've been getting major patches, it sounds like a lot of content I'm super happy about this. However, I still feel like we need more lower level content as well to help round out the game. Many more good things in that article but these two were my highlights!

(My only request now: please make fishing more than just a "fun" thing. Make it as useful as the other gathering classes)

[Tupsi]

And 90% of the "this is too easy I have nothing to do" posts in this forum are from players that had a 3 year head start.

P.S Most of the content in ARR didn't exist in 1.0 or 1.23.

Just saying.

Just saying.

[Fendred]

As much as I think free to play works fine in some cases, I do not want to see FFXIV go free to play. I'd rather see changes done to make the world more immersive, add replayability to end game, and interesting sports-type pvp minigames so that the subscription fee feels very much worth it to even the most penny pinching of players than for the devs to figure out how the game will be rebalanced around a F2P model.

It takes money and resources to make changes like that to a game, and I want those resources to go to improving the game rather than rebuilding it yet again.

[AlexNiculaie]

Boy, people sure do take a comment and run with it. "I'm not opposed to the idea of F2P in of itself" "we plan to offer some items for sale, but nothing which effects game balance" = "F2P on the horizon for sure!"
Take a xananx.

Surprised that with all the whining about vertical progression no one has even mention this part - "Increasing the item level is just one direction, though, we also need to increase the breadth of items available at each level, which we plan to address in the future." Certainly more interesting than flying into hyperbolic seizures over pointing out that F2P is just another option out there.

[Doo]

He mentioned specifically that people only want to pay for the amount of time they play... could that not necessarily mean F2P as we know it but the potentially for a pay per hour type system?

Nah that's f2p at it's finest. DCUO made you pay for DLCs you only want. So in FFXIVs case probably like pay for 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc and maybe if you spend enough money, you get to play for free for a certain amount of time. Then have to buy something again. It's sad sad sad stuff really.

[LordSaviour]

Boy, people sure do take a comment and run with it. "I'm not opposed to the idea of F2P in of itself" "we plan to offer some items for sale, but nothing which effects game balance" = "F2P on the horizon for sure!"
Take a xananx.

Surprised that with all the whining about vertical progression no one has even mention this part - "Increasing the item level is just one direction, though, we also need to increase the breadth of items available at each level, which we plan to address in the future." Certainly more interesting than flying into hyperbolic seizures over pointing out that F2P is just another option out there.

I did, and only one person snipped my comment and made a condescending remark about it.