Lost faith in Yoshi-P?

[ZakarnRosewood]

If the question was "Have you lost faith in FFXIV?", I wouldn't know what to answer. I can't say I'm unhappy with how 1.x was in the end. In fact, I had a great time doing the relic quest and darnus hard. Seeing the game as it is now....I don't really know what to say. Of course, changing from one thing to another always seems awkward in the beginning- but 2.0 looks like it lost its unique flavor.
I've tried plenty of games, in many of them I got a char at max level - WoW,SWToR,Rift,Aion,Warhammer Online, FFXI, tera, EQ, EQ2,....

FFXI was unique
EQ was unique
WoW back then was unique

All of them were successful and profitable - but wow managed to catch the interest of a way bigger group than the other. And suddenly everyone wanted a piece of that cake. I cannot remember an mmo that has been much different to WoW ever since then.
FFXIV tried to be different - or they just failed at being just like the rest of the games, I don't know. Their own game, FFXI, had plenty of great concepts which could have been taken over, but instead they tried to be different in many ways. I still wonder why, didn't they want to compete with their own game? I'm not sure.
Anyways, you know how it ended - The perfectly sensemaking elemental wheel was chopped down and rearranged in a weird way, suddenly there are no white mages, but conjurers instead,.... and so on. We ended up getting a game that was different from FFXI and different from all the other MMOs on the market. Sadly this wasn't a good game in the end.
Then Tanaka got booted and Yoshida took over, trying to save what he could. We got our FF-type jobs back (sadly we still keep our rotten tail called "classes" with us for some reason), had a story that made sense and could be enjoyed - and now we get this new game. A game that looks like.....the rest.
Every single one of these games had something "unique" - Rift had its class system - Warhammer had its PvP - Aion had its flying - tera has its combat system - SWToR had its storytelling. What does FFXIV have now?
A unique class system, its FF-themed, possibly nice storytelling. Will that help FFXIV to get a large playerbase? No.

They admitted that they're watching other games to see what they could implement in 2.0 - we get the casual-questing from wow and the 23424 mmos that took the same route, we get the mass-quest-events from QW2, we get the standard mmo-hud, we get the standard mmo-control-scheme - all we have left is the job system - copied from our good old friend FFXI.
I'm not saying copying is bad - but in my opinion SE copies things to the worse and is bad at choosing what to copy.
Of course this is all alpha footage we have seen, but the basic idea is visible - noone can deny it that it looks like 2313234 other mmos on the market.
I really really hope that this "unique flavor" will be back in the final version of 2.0 and all what i say is bullshit - i really hope it. But right now it looks like the "feeling" 1.x gave me will not be there in 2.0...

However, I will still play 2.0 even if its just one reason: For Yoshida. I haven't lost faith in him and I was clearly aware from the beginning, that it might turn out to be a game I won't like anymore after hes done with it. That is totally ok. The way he changed 1.x was great, he did an awesome job. He does a good job with 2.0 as well, I hope he is successful with it.
You can say whatever you want: He tries his best. I don't know in what way SE is putting pressure on him, or if they gave him the order to make the mmo as it looks like now, but he makes as much as he can out of it. The most important thing to me is: He cares about the community. More than anyone. At the gamescom inbetween interviews and presentations, he used his short time inbetween to spend it by doing things for the fans there, taking photos, answering questions,.... . If i think back how Tanaka was....he did an autograph session. And thats it, he never showed himself, haven't said a word, nothing. I'm sure he wasn't lying about his sleeping times in the letters....

I still have faith in this guy, he has my support. And he deserves it.

Very well said. This is the kind of comment i like to see. You expressed concerns, disappointment, explained why, then explained something improtant. You explained why, even after expressing disappointment, you are still here. There must be something keeping you here, some reason you are sticking to the forums for news and waiting for 2.0. Otherwise you would just sound like an angry person trolling for reactions for a lack of anything better to do.

Thank you!

[Endigiont]

Just a random blurb, I'm sorry most previous FFXI players *(I'm a veteran myself)* want to live in a grey nonflashy super hardcore half broken game with characters wielding generic bland grey nerf weapons.

[Yrusama]

[*]Overly flashy weapons/gear for lvl 50 chars. - I'd prefer much more restraint in the designs. Save some flash for the future and eventual cap raising. - but I also understand that they need to attract players to ARR, so this may be a casualty of marketing.[/LIST]

This! I never really considered it until now, Zantetsuken, but you make a great point. Looking at FFXI, it appeared the level cap was going to stay 75 for a long time, so a lot of the endgame gear got to be really flashy. Now that the cap is 99 the gear is over-the-top intricate in its design. Some of it, particularly the Twilight Mail, looks like it's trying too hard. It's too much to take in all at once, especially for fan-art.

[Twiddle]

Well let's see how to word this correctly...

Lost faith in Yoshi-P? No, i think he is doing a great job.. and i can honestly say i can not wait to see the finished result for ARR... If what i have seen so far in any indicator of what's to come, I simply can not wait for the official launch version. And am am sure am not the only who shares this view.

Now with that in mind, i don't want to sound like a suck up, so I'll add something on the flip side. While Yoshi-P is doing a good job, I do wish he had done a few things more differently. Some thing's i think should have not changed, have and i am not very happy about the new result.. while for other things i wish they had been changed differently. And others should have been changed even more then they have been. Again this is my take on it...

[Tinks]

I have not lost faith in Yoshi P. That said, I'm very concerned with the fact that ARR at this point looks like most other MMOs on the market. As others have said over and over, if we wanted to play those games, we'd be playing them. I desperately hope that Yoshi and his team pull off a great and UNIQUE MMO experience, and that people will flock to it because you can't find that experience in another MMO. As much as people like to hate on those of us with FFXI nostalgia, that game was (and continues to be) successful because it offered a unique experience. I don't think ARR needs to be an FFXI copy with shiney graphics by any means, but I also don't want to see it become a Final Fantasy themed WoW clone either, and the more I see of the game the less excited I'm becoming

I'm here because I still have hope that Yoshi and team will build an amazing game for us to play. Unfortunately I also understand that my preferences for what I want in ARR may not coincide with what Yoshi feels will give the game the widest appeal. In that event I'm prepared to bid FFXIV farewell, wish those that DO enjoy it the best, and congratulate the dev team on their success (and without all the bitterness I keep seeing on these forums.) I hope more than anything that ARR succeeds because I think Yoshi deserves it, even if in the end I choose not to be a part of it.

[Gentaro]

If the question was "Have you lost faith in FFXIV?", I wouldn't know what to answer. I can't say I'm unhappy with how 1.x was in the end. In fact, I had a great time doing the relic quest and darnus hard. Seeing the game as it is now....I don't really know what to say. Of course, changing from one thing to another always seems awkward in the beginning- but 2.0 looks like it lost its unique flavor.
I've tried plenty of games, in many of them I got a char at max level - WoW,SWToR,Rift,Aion,Warhammer Online, FFXI, tera, EQ, EQ2,....

FFXI was unique
EQ was unique
WoW back then was unique

All of them were successful and profitable - but wow managed to catch the interest of a way bigger group than the other. And suddenly everyone wanted a piece of that cake. I cannot remember an mmo that has been much different to WoW ever since then.
FFXIV tried to be different - or they just failed at being just like the rest of the games, I don't know. Their own game, FFXI, had plenty of great concepts which could have been taken over, but instead they tried to be different in many ways. I still wonder why, didn't they want to compete with their own game? I'm not sure.
Anyways, you know how it ended - The perfectly sensemaking elemental wheel was chopped down and rearranged in a weird way, suddenly there are no white mages, but conjurers instead,.... and so on. We ended up getting a game that was different from FFXI and different from all the other MMOs on the market. Sadly this wasn't a good game in the end.
Then Tanaka got booted and Yoshida took over, trying to save what he could. We got our FF-type jobs back (sadly we still keep our rotten tail called "classes" with us for some reason), had a story that made sense and could be enjoyed - and now we get this new game. A game that looks like.....the rest.
Every single one of these games had something "unique" - Rift had its class system - Warhammer had its PvP - Aion had its flying - tera has its combat system - SWToR had its storytelling. What does FFXIV have now?
A unique class system, its FF-themed, possibly nice storytelling. Will that help FFXIV to get a large playerbase? No.

They admitted that they're watching other games to see what they could implement in 2.0 - we get the casual-questing from wow and the 23424 mmos that took the same route, we get the mass-quest-events from QW2, we get the standard mmo-hud, we get the standard mmo-control-scheme - all we have left is the job system - copied from our good old friend FFXI.
I'm not saying copying is bad - but in my opinion SE copies things to the worse and is bad at choosing what to copy.
Of course this is all alpha footage we have seen, but the basic idea is visible - noone can deny it that it looks like 2313234 other mmos on the market.
I really really hope that this "unique flavor" will be back in the final version of 2.0 and all what i say is bullshit - i really hope it. But right now it looks like the "feeling" 1.x gave me will not be there in 2.0...

However, I will still play 2.0 even if its just one reason: For Yoshida. I haven't lost faith in him and I was clearly aware from the beginning, that it might turn out to be a game I won't like anymore after hes done with it. That is totally ok. The way he changed 1.x was great, he did an awesome job. He does a good job with 2.0 as well, I hope he is successful with it.
You can say whatever you want: He tries his best. I don't know in what way SE is putting pressure on him, or if they gave him the order to make the mmo as it looks like now, but he makes as much as he can out of it. The most important thing to me is: He cares about the community. More than anyone. At the gamescom inbetween interviews and presentations, he used his short time inbetween to spend it by doing things for the fans there, taking photos, answering questions,.... . If i think back how Tanaka was....he did an autograph session. And thats it, he never showed himself, haven't said a word, nothing. I'm sure he wasn't lying about his sleeping times in the letters....

I still have faith in this guy, he has my support. And he deserves it.

Something i want to add on that:

The best implementation in 1.x was the combo-system with abilities you had to use from different directions - that made the fight livelier. What we probably get now is a mindless buttonsmashing from anywhere.

faster != livelier
faster != better


And now they remove it...I just don't get it - They said it was because of PvP - but I'd prefer to see the directional skills in PvE. Cause this feature made the game somewhat special to me.

[Radacci]

The only people who have "lost faith" are those crybabies who can't cope with the fact they haven't been invited to alpha.

that, and he looked at wow for inspiration

[finiteHP]

I haven't lost faith in Yoshi, nor am I disappointed. What he did to 1.x was amazing and I think ARR will be great, possibly not the greatest thing ever, but still great. Yes it's sad that we don't have the finished game yet, but there aren't any well made games that have come out when the developers originally hoped. At least he's told us why they're later than the original tentative roadmap, so I see no reason to be greatly disappointed.

[strallaalaa]

upper management is always the cause of some on the job BS. there usually clueless and try to make as much money as they can with out spending a dime then the workers suffer for it.

this is very true, http://www.arenajunkies.com/topic/17...rep-will-fail/

lol i love posting about this thread cause it can show everyone what are the type of things that happen in the mmo and gaming world. they totally deleted the real thread where he talks way more, and there is other devs too, fact you can find other devs from games talking the same way if you take the time to find them lol. is funny cause EA didn't really take it down cause it was up for years and people started linking this thread to lots of mmo's and then it got taken down.

either way i not lost faith cause i never really had any faith in one man. if no one wants to believe he has a destination and yeah he is probably taking some of his own path to get there but in the end it's mostly planed out(lol probably no diff then picking our president but anyway) from vague questions in our polls to changes that i bet lots didn't realize they were voting or asking for. to 360 the game rather then fixing the engine and going as planned, it is obvious there is only one plan and that is to try and get the game up to the standards of failed mmo's that at least made some cash b4 f2p. it is obvious that it would be in the front of the minds of devs and yoshi that the game might still fail so really you need to look at the mmo and the devs and there actions towards the ffxiv in that stand point first and for most.

in the end though, i think the game is going in wrong directions, but i'm still hopefully that after launch, after they start patching in new content it will go in a different direction. just like wow went from harder content, to easy content, then back to hard content. i think the devs if smart enough know that the easy route will kill them off totally. any and all mmo's for that matter should always start with something huge and large scale and lots of casual play stuff too. witch is what i think/hope ffxiv will start with. then it will be like a real game getting harder and harder as time and patches go by.

the question really is if we have enough content b4 first patch, cause most won't stick around cause it's been long enough of a disaster. my hopes is crystal towers and the labyrinth will be epic stuff that will hold a lot of players to the game long enough for them to be confident in pumping out more content. think of it like atari, they bankrupt back in day. then made cheaper version for the people but guess what the older version was selling for like 8bucks a game now cause it's failure and was way cheaper and almost went bankrupt again. this is like content, they are making it but most of us are 50's everything but they are making the game for new people, learning our classes again and looking around won't be content like yoshi keeps mentioning witch worries me. it might not be enough.

i had over 750+days of game play in 5+ years of ffxi, i've played like every mmo since then. warhammer, swtor, gw2, d3, tera, secret world, allods, dcu and i quit every one of them in 2-6months except warhammer it was epic pvp for a good year and was my first true pvp game witch has made any other pvp mmo feel stale and not worth the time. either way, i am pulling for yoshi and his team but i've lost faith in the mmo industry (and tv industry but that is another topic lol) as a whole and till they prove me wrong then i don't need to keep feeling let down every year by multiple mmo's.

and for those who say stop comparing mmo's or ffxi to ffxiv. maybe we are not comparing mmo's we are comparing ourselves and our enjoyment and entertainment value. what games did that just comes along with it at times. any who since i always sound like i'm complaining lmao, i have to always repeat. i still am here, i'm still on forums and still excited to play ffxiv. it still looks like a funner mmo then any that has come out since ffxi ...but i'm not so blind and wishful for it to work that i'm going to ignore all the issues they are pumping into it. first was how to make it not ffxi and stuff like yoshi has stated, now it's more how to kiss butt and make at the least our money back. any one think diff is just nutty.

[Endigiont]

The only faith I've lost is in this current community (wholly welcome new casual not so elitist players), for having such impossible to live up to expectations for this game.