New Letter from the Producer, XII

[Xenor]

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

For sure. The patches always come when I'm out of town and the 18th is when I'm gone for a week. Based on this I'm placing 1.18a at August 9th and 1.19 around September 20th.

1.19 is a huge patch too so I'm doubtful we'll see it a month after 1.18.

[Anty]

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...

If i wanna do that (which i don't) i go play rift. If they go on that way they won't be any different from other mmos, except the fact that a lot of people can't even play it due to hardware reasons.
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?

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... lmfao... great job Before changing the recipes of crafts, they might change their recipe to fail first...

[Bethor]

Hmm he didn't lost a single word on the new flasy animations we're getting >_> or at least supposed to get... I hope they coming with 1.18 or I'm gonna be dissapointed once again ~_~
On the other hand I'd really like some informations about the new jobs and when they're going to be implemented (me wantz mah blue mage! XD ).

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? Oo

And I'm still waiting for a change in crafting. Some people do like it actually. But I think it's boring ._. crafted for 1 1/2 hours yesterday and it was so tiring at some point Oh well... maybe I should grind a 1-2 Weeks so I can hit 50 and be done with it.. but ooooooohhh hell.....

I hope the dungeons will have some huge replay factor. In the translated interview they said there going to be different routes to choose from and so on. That will be interesting.

Oh and one last point........ WHEN ARE WE GETTING THE CAMERA BIND ON ARROW KEYS? T_T

[Shura]

As mentioned by people already, i'm pretty sure changes to guild leves will bring overall less sp then what it is now, but some ppl are forgetting on top of leves, side-quests will also give sp now and so will doing a dungeon run so if at the end of the day, i'm overall making the same amount of sp then i'm happy. While leves are better then raptor grinding, leves tend to get boring too when it gets dragged by doing multiples of the same leve and repeating it every reset. Having the option to make the same or similar sp while doing different things is a bonus for me personally. I'd rather choose 1h of dungeon, and do leves at a faster pace, solo without having to wait on afk ppl, Instead of a 3-4h leve party with 16 guarantied leves with 8 ppl, +4-5runs for doubles.

[Seif]

Where do they think their casual audience is supposed to come from?

According to their own poll most players are XI players or FF players. All FF games are 30-60hrs of gameplay, not that casual.

XIV requires absolutely state-of the art PC to run at reasonable frame rates. How do these aspects reach an average casual player again?

If I hadn't followed the FF series very closely for the past few years I wouldn't even know XIV exists let alone what kind of game it is.

This is probably just me but I feel like they're trying to reach an audience that just isn't there to benefit from and while doing so they're turning against their old fans who given the state of the game are the only players they have left at this point.

Casual games are usually played on the web-browser or as apps while waiting for a bus. It's not deep enough to hold interest of players for years while paying a monthly fee for that kind of service.

Just like Wii, are people still playing Wii Sports resort after few tries?
What about Monster Hunter 3Tri? A game so hardcore the controls alone take almost 10 pages of the manual and most game features aren't even mentioned because there's so much of them. The European Servers alone are full of players especially considering how niche title that is usually thought to be.

[Richard]

Where do they think their casual audience is supposed to come from?

According to their own poll most players are XI players or FF players. All FF games are 30-60hrs of gameplay, not that casual.

XIV requires absolutely state-of the art PC to run at reasonable frame rates. How do these aspects reach an average casual player again?

If I hadn't followed the FF series very closely for the past few years I wouldn't even know XIV exists let alone what kind of game it is.

This is probably just me but I feel like they're trying to reach an audience that just isn't there to benefit from and while doing so they're turning against their old fans who given the state of the game are the only players they have left at this point.

Casual games are usually played on the web-browser or as apps while waiting for a bus. It's not deep enough to hold interest of players for years while paying a monthly fee for that kind of service.

Just like Wii, are people still playing Wii Sports resort after few tries?
What about Monster Hunter 3Tri? A game so hardcore the controls alone take almost 10 pages of the manual and most game features aren't even mentioned because there's so much of them. The European Servers alone are full of players especially considering how niche title that is usually thought to be.

so the way you see it is that casual gamers cant afford high end PC? Fathers and Mothers and students cant afford a 1000.00 PC? You sir are ignorant. I have maybe 5-6 people in my LS alone who are older and have a casual schedule and own a better PC than I do. They bought it specifically for this game.

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.

[Spellbinder]

so the way you see it is that casual gamers cant afford high end PC? Fathers and Mothers and students cant afford a 1000.00 PC? You sir are ignorant. I have maybe 5-6 people in my LS alone who are older and have a casual schedule and own a better PC than I do. They bought it specifically for this game.

Lets not also forget the PS3 which is surely a large chunk of the Japanese consumer base. If I'm not mistaken Japanese prefer consoles over PC's correct? PS3 sounds fairly casual after a hard day of overtime as a salary man.... if you get to come home that day.

[Richard]

Lets not also forget the PS3 which is surely a large chunk of the Japanese consumer base. If I'm not mistaken Japanese prefer consoles over PC's correct? PS3 sounds fairly casual after a hard day of overtime as a salary man.... if you get to come home that day.

You'd be surprised. Japanese Console gamers are pretty hardcore when it comes to their MMOs

[Spellbinder]

You'd be surprised. Japanese Console gamers are pretty hardcore when it comes to their MMOs

This is true. Just goes to show there's an untapped market there, and hopefully FFXIV is up to snuff to get a piece of that market.

[Seif]

so the way you see it is that casual gamers cant afford high end PC? Fathers and Mothers and students cant afford a 1000.00 PC? You sir are ignorant. I have maybe 5-6 people in my LS alone who are older and have a casual schedule and own a better PC than I do. They bought it specifically for this game.

lol, way to back up my example there...