Do you want to play Final Fantasy XIV?

[giftforce]

And yet, here you are, much to the dismay of many.

Not even going to have a crack at the ridiculous Tanaka-worship going on here, but he had a shot and he totally, absolutely and unquestionably ruined it. The game he turfed out was a steaming pile, and he was completely out of touch with what the MMO community wanted (His ideas for the market ward system looked like a damn train wreck from day 1, he expected the community to go there, barter and act as if it was the real world? Sorry but that's not how games work.)

Yoshida seems like he's pretty much the last hope for this game to be pulled out of the gutter and into something remotely playable, but sure, you play the battered housewife, because at the end of the day it won't change anything.

Tanaka managed to launch possibly the biggest failure in Square-enix's history (yes, there was probably pressure from above, but he certainly seemed to continue his stupid archaic distant attitude all the way through development and 'beta'). He sucked, and sadly they put him back on FFXI rather than ditch him.

It didn't appeal to ANYONE except the hardcore few, do you not see that? Do you really think telling people to go play something else is going to make this a successful game?

I don't think Tanaka pulled it off either, but his vision had more promise than what Yoshi promises us. As I said, different games appeal to different people, and the FFXIV concept obviously wasn't your kind of game. For many other people, that's what they wanted.

It wasn't polished, it had many flaws, but time-constraints were part of the reason those problems were never fixed. FFXIV went to sale way too quickly.

TERA was in beta before FFXIV was even in alpha and yet hasn't been released in the west yet. FFXIV was in dire need of more time. And still is.

Tanaka didn't blow it. He didn't even have a chance to.

There are many types of market systems a game can have. And FFXIV chose one type. It desperately needed work, but that isn't to say a free-market system is without hope.

The crafting classes were positioned by SE as having their own role in the game world. Hence, buying and selling were by extension positioned as a part of the game world. An auction-house would have removed this aspect of the game for crafting classes.

Im not defending the market system, because it was a very sloppy implementation, but the concept fuelling it was not as ridiculous as everyone claims. If you wanted an auction house or a WoW-clone, it would appear ridiculous, but to other people it just appears as a failure in implementation (rather than a failure in concept or vision).

FFXIV's biggest problem was having to live with the baggage of the WoW and FFXI hopefuls who wanted exact replicas of those games.