Cancel your Dawntrail pre-orders

[Merrigan]

I enjoy playing the game, pvp specifically at the moment, but the points you made are simply wrong, and try to coat the glaring issues like content not being generous at all.

In what way, exactly? You just say I'm wrong. Alright ?

I wasn't aware SE's ego is so fragile we must preface every criticism with an essay full of praise.

Another one that proves my point. Dare to say that you find positive points, that the game is still enjoyable despite its flaws, and it's going to go straight to the relationship with SE. Is it possible, perhaps, to change the disc?

[Ramiee]

The game has positives and negatives it just so happens that Job design has been the main negative for the last 3 expansions. Many people still enjoy other aspects of the game and lets be real its not like the entire game is bad. There will always be people less satisfied than others, some people perfectly happy with the game and others inbetween (this is where i sit.)

I can't see a future where people will cancel their preorders especially when a lot of people don't ever go past normal mode raiding when it comes to PvE and some don't even ever try to learn how their class plays, these people play for the story or socially with their friends and that will always conflict with the people who prefer the game being hardcore. People will only agree to stuff like cancelling pre-orders if a major problem that effects every single type of player pops up. The best you can do for now is to cancel your pre-orders if you truly think you won't enjoy the game at all and take a break from it, maybe try other mmos and hopefully fill the hole old jobs lost, or even play completely different games.
It does suck when your favourite game removes things you like, I mained heavensward Scholar, but put your own happiness above arguing with other people and quit playing until the game draws you back in.

[Malthir]

The game has positives and negatives it just so happens that Job design has been the main negative for the last 3 expansions. Many people still enjoy other aspects of the game and lets be real its not like the entire game is bad. There will always be people less satisfied than others, some people perfectly happy with the game and others inbetween (this is where i sit.)

I can't see a future where people will cancel their preorders especially when a lot of people don't ever go past normal mode raiding when it comes to PvE and some don't even ever try to learn how their class plays, these people play for the story or socially with their friends and that will always conflict with the people who prefer the game being hardcore. People will only agree to stuff like cancelling pre-orders if a major problem that effects every single type of player pops up. The best you can do for now is to cancel your pre-orders if you truly think you won't enjoy the game at all and take a break from it, maybe try other mmos and hopefully fill the hole old jobs lost, or even play completely different games.
It does suck when your favourite game removes things you like, I mained heavensward Scholar, but put your own happiness above arguing with other people and quit playing until the game draws you back in.

I agree, pretty sure very few people will cancel their preorders most have already claimed the code so can't in the first place. Bigger fool us for pre ordering.

I can see a future where FF14 dies though, SE are in financial hard time and the dev team foolishly wasted this expac on a needless and generally unasked for graphical update, what the games been desperate for for the last 2 expacs was an actual job overhaul and level sync overhaul. They will haemorrhage players after the first month because turns our grass that slightly moves when your character walks through it, is far less important than actual gameplay, who would have thunk. In turn there is a very real world chance SE with reduce their budget which then prevents the devs from making the much needed job overhaul in the 8.0 and could potentially kill 8.0 in the water.

The greatest barriers to entry for this game are, The poor low level player experience (this includes level sync being god awful), the lack of job identities, the terrible movement aka fixed plane movement as opposed to collision based movement, on EU the server tick rate is god awful, still I heard other regions have it better though, and the lack of UI/text customisation. Graphically speaking ff14 wasn't terrible, don't get me wrong it wasn't great and needed updating at some point, I really like the graphic overhaul that they did and think the characters look great imo, but you should really fix the gaping leaks in your boat before you patch up the paintwork.

[Voidmage]

I agree, pretty sure very few people will cancel their preorders most have already claimed the code so can't in the first place. Bigger fool us for pre ordering.

I can see a future where FF14 dies though, SE are in financial hard time and the dev team foolishly wasted this expac on a needless and generally unasked for graphical update, what the games been desperate for for the last 2 expacs was an actual job overhaul and level sync overhaul. They will haemorrhage players after the first month because turns our grass that slightly moves when your character walks through it, is far less important than actual gameplay, who would have thunk. In turn there is a very real world chance SE with reduce their budget which then prevents the devs from making the much needed job overhaul in the 8.0 and could potentially kill 8.0 in the water.

The greatest barriers to entry for this game are, The poor low level player experience (this includes level sync being god awful), the lack of job identities, the terrible movement aka fixed plane movement as opposed to collision based movement, on EU the server tick rate is god awful, still I heard other regions have it better though, and the lack of UI/text customisation. Graphically speaking ff14 wasn't terrible, don't get me wrong it wasn't great and needed updating at some point, but you should really fix the gaping leaks in your boat before you patch up the paintwork.

While its true that the game will one day die like any other, the graphic update wasn't a waste in my opinion.
Lots of players play casually and for the glamour or chatting or the story. The graphic update will make these things a better experience for them and even hardcore players will like it I guess (be honest, we all did harder content for the glamour at one point).
While I am pretty disappointed by the "new" job designs as well even I know that a change to that had lower priority then making the game more pretty. One can say whatever they want to the graphic update and the trust system. it is future proofing in a way.

Some posters here said it better. Just because people don't like some aspects they still can like others. It also goes another way.

That said though, one thing I would agree is that the devs became too comfortable with thinking they could do no wrong and that the midcore upward playerbase would stay no matter what and now they slowly get the answer for that.
Yoshida's recent interviews were quit full of those things even if some of that was probably pr talk.

[Burmecia]

Have they explained the changes open recently? Because I haven't followed that trashcan fire discussion at all.

[Rekh]

I agree, pretty sure very few people will cancel their preorders most have already claimed the code so can't in the first place. Bigger fool us for pre ordering.

I can see a future where FF14 dies though, SE are in financial hard time and the dev team foolishly wasted this expac on a needless and generally unasked for graphical update, what the games been desperate for for the last 2 expacs was an actual job overhaul and level sync overhaul. They will haemorrhage players after the first month because turns our grass that slightly moves when your character walks through it, is far less important than actual gameplay, who would have thunk. In turn there is a very real world chance SE with reduce their budget which then prevents the devs from making the much needed job overhaul in the 8.0 and could potentially kill 8.0 in the water.

The greatest barriers to entry for this game are, The poor low level player experience (this includes level sync being god awful), the lack of job identities, the terrible movement aka fixed plane movement as opposed to collision based movement, on EU the server tick rate is god awful, still I heard other regions have it better though, and the lack of UI/text customisation. Graphically speaking ff14 wasn't terrible, don't get me wrong it wasn't great and needed updating at some point, I really like the graphic overhaul that they did and think the characters look great imo, but you should really fix the gaping leaks in your boat before you patch up the paintwork.

Whether you preorder or not is not the biggest bulk of their profit, it's continuing subs. The less months subbed the more they notice the lower monthly/quarterly profit.

[Malthir]

Whether you preorder or not is not the biggest bulk of their profit, it's continuing subs. The less months subbed the more they notice the lower monthly/quarterly profit.

Well that's not been my experience working in the games industry. Normally the marketing team will be given pre order targets. Their bonuses and pay rises depend on these targets, which is why alot of games oversell themselves in the marketing campaign. I have personally and have had friends at other companies, seen the marketing team speak about the game at say pax and then turn to the rest of dev team like, wait when did we promise that? Marketing don't care if the game belly flaps on release, they got their targets so when the game fails because of over promising in marketing they just blame the dev team for not being able to deliver, Corporate types really really care about pre orders as most games get their budgets from loans essentially, pre orders are very very useful for companies.

Anyway I think you maybe misunderstanding my point, or maybe I just didn't make it well enough. What I was saying was, the game will have a massive drop off in subs after the first month of release, Normally there's a small drop off but by enlarge they keep the playerbase that decided to level other jobs etc, however due to the gameplay being worse then it's ever been, worse than we already have (which is already bad for alot of jobs) they will have a massive drop in players. Also factor in WoW's upcoming expac release. Blizz are not dumb, they will release in late August/September and try and capitalise on the decline interest in FF14 post dawntrail to try and capture back alot of lost players. This will have big ramifications on the teams budget with SE doing poorly financially. 8.0 will be starting it's PoC dev now for the job changes, once done they will be trying to get a budget approved. But when sub figures are massively down, they will struggle to get approval.

I'm not trying to be Nostradamus/chicken little. I'm simply stating the way they've bungled things with this expac focusing on graphics instead of the gameplay issues that put off alot of the playerbase and potential new players. Could put the entire project future at risk.

[Rekh]

Well that's not been my experience working in the games industry. Normally the marketing team will be given pre order targets. Their bonuses and pay rises depend on these targets, which is why alot of games oversell themselves in the marketing campaig. I have personally and have had friends at other companies, seen the marketing team speak about the game at say pax and then turn to the rest of dev team like, wait when did we promise that? Marketing don't care if the game belly flaps on release, they got their targets so when the game fails because of over promising in marketing they just blame the dev team for not being able to deliver.

Anyway I think you maybe misunderstanding my point, or maybe I just didn't make it well enough. What I was saying was that the game will have a massive drop off in subs after the first month of release, Normally there's a small drop off but by enlarge they keep the playerbase that decided to level other jobs, however due to the gameplay being worse that what we already have (which is already bad for alot of jobs) they will have a massive drop in platers, also factor in WoW's upcoming expac release, blizz are not dumb, they will release in late august September and try and capitalise on the decline intrest in FF14 to try and capture back alot of lost players. This will have big ramifications on the teams budget when SE doing poorly financially. 8.0 will be starting it's PoC dev now for the job changes, once done they will be trying to get a budget approved. But when sub figures are massively down, they will struggle to get approval.

I'm not trying to be Nostradamus/chicken little. I'm simply stating the way they've bungled things with this expac focusing on graphics instead of the gameplay issues that put off alot of the playerbase and potential new players. Could put the entire project future at risk.

Game artists and battle content devs are different people physically and project-wise. The blame lies at yoship's feet as the producer of the game, he should've instructed the battle content designers to overhaul the gameplay system; instead the better battle designers were probably made to put 80% of their effort into designing upcoming savage and ultimate raids, as well as a portion of them siphoned into whatever dlc they have planned for ffxvi and vii remake.

What they should've done was cut ultimate raids to maybe 1 per expansion and have those devs focus on reworking most/all jobs.

[Malthir]

Game artists and battle content devs are different people physically and project-wise. The blame lies at yoship's feet as the producer of the game, he should've instructed the battle content designers to overhaul the gameplay system; instead the better battle designers were probably made to put 80% of their effort into designing upcoming savage and ultimate raids, as well as a portion of them siphoned into whatever dlc they have planned for ffxvi and vii remake.

What they should've done was cut ultimate raids to maybe 1 per expansion and have those devs focus on reworking most/all jobs.

You're right with it's Yoshi-P's fault, however what you have to understand is he decided that this expac was a graphics update. so he would have got a budget approval for getting alot of engine designers/tech artists (what ever title SE use, job roles are so weird in the industry for what people call what)to update the graphics.

Put it this way, in 8.0 they are focussing on doing jobs, supposedly. The technical artists that did this graphics update wont just be sitting on their hands doing jack. SE is a big company, they will be moved to a different project, specific skill sets are taught to people, people moved from project to project as business needs. Yoshi-P decided to focus on the graphic overhaul, so the team for this expac had more devs with tech art skillset instead of more designers for jobs, all down to how he decided this expac was going to go. He could have easily had more designers and had 7.0 focus on jobs and do the graphic update it 8.0 but he didn't and it's a MASSIVE risk, not just business wise but also talent wise risk. The devs have done a great job with the graphics overhaul, however player sentiment is at the floor due to the gameplay being bad. If you've just spent 2 years of your life mostly in crunch and the game is released to negative feedback, alot of talent will feel burnt out and leave.

[Kazmarek]

Instead of a graphical update, I wish they'd have spent the time on going back and fixing "the spaghetti code from 1.0" because the amount of times they've used it as an excuse not to do something or listen to player feedback is a little ridiculous. Seriously, "we can't do X because of leftover code from 1.0" is just dumb at this point. You're telling me we're 6 versions in the future and still relying on that excuse?

Granted, I don't think they've used it recently, but the point still stands.