It's gone too far about the mog station SE

[Adrestia]

Okay, this whole statement just completely baffles me. What, exactly would you have MMOs do then? Release every single thing at once and don't release anything else except maintenance/hotfix patches until the next expansion two years later? That seems like a bad business model to have for an MMO.

That is how it used to be done, and in fact when some things were “gated” out to give the development team time to finish the content, players got pretty upset. I imagine if you cruise the fohguuld forums (now on rerolled), eq2flames, and some old old WoW forums, you’ll find lots of stories about this. Players would get to a certain point and then just...the game didn’t progress any more. Bug reports would get responses indicating that the players just hadn’t figured it out yet, but one day a patch without patch notes would come out and suddenly we could get to places we couldn’t get before.

As far as viability of releasing all at once, in the context of the theme park style MMO wer’re currently playing, I think you’re right. The content isn’t meant to be repeated ad nauseam, the grinds are short to nonexistent, and the content would just never last.

That said, when WoW does a major point release, you tend to get something like 10-14 new raid bosses in a big zone to explore for the ambience. Recently there has also been “MSQ” type content that progresses the story of the expansion. The XIV community is accepting of vastly smaller patches, which is fine I guess.

There’s another thread going on right now that I’ve posted in a bit, discussing the way content is currently trickled out to us. Feedback on the 4.5 release schedule. I’m actually pretty sad about the micro-releases because as a player who wants to explore and fumble around at my own pace, I’m instead funneled down a narrow hallway of content that the dev team decided to give me at any point in time. It just plays differently and feels different. I’d rather get a gigantic mega-expansion. That comes with some costs though like requiring long grinds and repeat farms (non-instanced, contested bosses meant you had to race to them with whatever you had online, so it wasn’t always the same fight every single time). I know those costs aren’t okay with the majority and that’s why it’s done this way now. I’ll be interested to see if a game like Pantheon actually does better, but for now I make the most of the status quo and enjoy it for what it is. It’s just not the *only* way to release content. It’s the one that the majority like.

E: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...edule-FEEDBACK is a thread where that’s more the topic, Kaiva. There’s a lot of good discussion in there.