New Letter from the Producer, XII

[kurokawa]

I reckon patch 1.18 will be July 18th. 1.19 mid August, 22nd.

Which makes 1.20 late September; the game will be 1 year old.

Mmm

[Richard]

I reckon patch 1.18 will be July 18th. 1.19 mid August, 22nd.

Which makes 1.20 late September; the game will be 1 year old.

Mmm

I have 1.5M riding on it being either the 11th or the 18th! I'm with you!

[Richard]

AWESOME!!! no new ideas!!! lets make this game into another solo-mmorpg (why online... hmmm).
I would love to have more party camps, more mobs to grind on. I don't play an mmo for solo questing only...

They aren't making everything soloable. Way to overreact.

The letter didnt say much but the few things pretty much pointed out that its casual (and easy mode) > hard and challenging. Why do they think that people wanna come home from work and play a game that offers no challenge at all?

The entire post was about levequests. The whole focus on XIV is not going to be the leveling but the character progression.

I don't get it. They are leaving the niche they could have been in, and will now have to fully compete with rift, aion, wow...

From a purely marketing standpoint SQEX can't survive in that niche anymore. XI survived 7 years of it and then finally went the way of the casual gamer because that is where the money is.

Chocobos are getting pushed back once again, that's sad. They should change the anima cost then once again. Haven't they said, they want to decrease the return cost to 0?

Chocobos never had a timetable. This is the first time they've confirmed when they are going to work on the mount system.

[Anty]

From a purely marketing standpoint SQEX can't survive in that niche anymore. XI survived 7 years of it and then finally went the way of the casual gamer because that is where the money is.

i have to disagree, since the games who keep failing all over again, are exactly the same games, without unique ideas, the easy-mode wow clones (who are usually far worse then wow in the end).

A niche in this HUGE market doesn't have to be 300k players (even though ffxiv won't probably see the 300k ever) max.
It can have millions of players. There is a shit load of players out there.
If the same recipe about wow cloning would work out so well, there would be a lot of 1 mio+ subscription based mmos out now, A LOT. But there aren't.

FFXI has a niche but it was too limited and well its just old now. But it did damn well compared to most other mmos, and it was a niche game.

People are tired of the same old concepts. no matter if its the pure grind or the mindless solo quest- click- go there- click - reward system.
People won't stay with an mmo like this for long. F2P might work for these games but not a monthly subscription.

And SE is way too slow to roll out all these fast-paced content updates that are needed to please the easy-mode masses. But well, some people just keep thinking that a niche has to be small. In this big market it can mean millions of players.

A lot of very successeful games of the last years didnt try be all average. And it payed out very well. The market doesnt need more of the same games.

[Richard]

i have to disagree, since the games who keep failing all over again, are exactly the same games, without unique ideas, the easy-mode wow clones (who are usually far worse then wow in the end).

A niche in this HUGE market doesn't have to be 300k players (even though ffxiv won't probably see the 300k ever) max.
It can have millions of players. There is a shit load of players out there.
If the same recipe about wow cloning would work out so well, there would be a lot of 1 mio+ subscription based mmos out now, A LOT. But there aren't.

FFXI has a niche but it was too limited and well its just old now. But it did damn well compared to most other mmos, and it was a niche game.

People are tired of the same old concepts. no matter if its the pure grind or the mindless solo quest- click- go there- click - reward system.
People won't stay with an mmo like this for long. F2P might work for these games but not a monthly subscription.

And SE is way too slow to roll out all these fast-paced content updates that are needed to please the easy-mode masses. But well, some people just keep thinking that a niche has to be small. In this big market it can mean millions of players.

A lot of very successeful games of the last years didnt try be all average. And it payed out very well. The market doesnt need more of the same games.

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[Anty]

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at least smart enough to be familiar with copy paste! +1

[Richard]

at least smart enough to be familiar with copy paste! +1

don't get mad because SQEX isn't designing your "ideal" game. With your innovative and fresh ideas I'm sure you could pump out a great MMO right?

[Wolfie]

i have to disagree, since the games who keep failing all over again, are exactly the same games, without unique ideas, the easy-mode wow clones (who are usually far worse then wow in the end).

The games that keep failing are ones with little content, poor developer practices, unresponsive community reps, tons of bugs, boring or otherwise uninteresting world and lore, etc.

RIFT is a WOW clone through and through and it's doing VERY well. So there goes your whole argument.

[Anty]

The games that keep failing are ones with little content, poor developer practices, unresponsive community reps, tons of bugs, boring or otherwise uninteresting world and lore, etc.

RIFT is a WOW clone through and through and it's doing VERY well. So there goes your whole argument.

looking at the servers that all were "full" and now are at low/medium... isn't all "well" to me.
It did a lot of things right but its losing a lot of players every day due to the lack of content. Many are leaving back to wow, what a surprise. But well you know everything. That's not new to me.

[Ashthra]

looking at the servers that all were "full" and now are at low/medium... isn't all "well" to me.
It did a lot of things right but its losing a lot of players every day due to the lack of content. Many are leaving back to wow, what a surprise. But well you know everything. That's not new to me.

They just effectively shut down 20 servers (they're now "trial" servers), but the funny thing is, because of that unofficial server merge, all those low/medium servers are now medium/high/full again. Also, they opened, what, 40 servers at launch? How many was FFXIV forced to open? Oh, and by the way, the most casual and easymode game out there has over 11 million subs (that's at least 2775 times the population of FFXIV currently), and all the other MMO releases failed because they sucked. They were unoriginal, bland, buggy, poorly developed and managed, and when the playerbase realized they got fleeced, they fled in a mass exodus back to their old MMO.

Sound familiar to any games in this zipcode? I'll give you three guesses.

Let me put it this way: even though Rift had to merge servers, the game still has several hundred thousand subscribers more than this game does -- and come to think of it, so do all those "failed" games like Aion, and AoC, and maybe even Warhammer. So, if you have a point that I can't easily refute in 30 seconds, I'd like to hear it.

Insofar as your casual = OMGEASYMOOOODE T_______________________T ...You seem to be working under the erroneous assumption that time equals skill, and that "casuals" who cannot devote the exorbitant amount of time required to get this or that done are automatically terrible players who want everything handed to them on a silver platter without a shred of effort on their part. This is the exact same argument I've read on the WoW forums for years from angry raiders who felt that they should be allowed more because they want to waste their life in a virtual world instead of the real one -- or rather, that those who don't want to waste their life in a virtual world shouldn't be allowed to lick their boots, let alone acquire anything of merit while online.

Let me tell you something. I'm a casual player. But I'm also an intelligent one. I may not know everything, but I do my research and learn what I can to be an asset to myself and other players, along with how to be efficient at what I do. I do not, under any circumstances, want everything handed to me. I don't care if raiders or people who play far more than I do get the really high end stuff -- I'm okay with not seeing absolutely everything in the game, so long as I'm not locked out of practically everything if I don't have 4-5 hours to spare getting a PT like I was in FFXI circa-2004. You want the best of the best gear? Fine. But give me the option to get something done in the 1-2 hours I may have set aside after a 10 hour shift that began at 3 am of heavy lifting.

Casuals like myself don't want 'easy', we want engaging. I left Rift not because it lacked content, but it lacked interesting content. All those awesome rifts and invasions that were the central focus levels 1-49, and at 50 we got relegated to an instance-gated gear-grind again? Blah, pass. If they'd given us dailies where we had to spawn and solo certain specialized rifts, I'd have been as happy as a pig in mud. But they didn't, so I left and came here. I don't want easy. I want fun. Rift endgame wasn't. FFXIV any-game currently isn't. If YoshiP wants to change that, they're going to have to entice everyone, not just the minority who feel that unless the game is kicking you in the babymaker with a spiked-toe combat boot every time you change a piece of equipment, it's for children.

God I hate elitism.

Edit: Oh, one more thing -- just because the devs are throwing casual players a bone doesn't mean that the game is now Hello Kitty and all hardcore players are now being tossed on their derrieres and told to go elsewhere. I'm sure they'll emphasize grouping via other means, like dungeons, NMs, and non-instanced elite areas. As they should, if they want to attract a wider audience.