Translations (JP to English)

[Fantasia]

Thanks for all the translations, Rein! I've been following you religiously ^^ <3

Only dungeon available is Tamtara Mausoleum (Aimed toward Lv15-20)

Just wanted to point out that this The Tam-Tara Deepcroft, which was in version 1.0 just as a random cave. Seems they've redesigned it so that it has an actual use =)

[Orophin]

Thanks for the translation. It's nice to know what's going on in the background.

[Reinheart]

done, sorry it took a while...

[Shougun]

done, sorry it took a while...

Thanks!

*turns off sublimen-signal*

[Reinheart]

More replies from YoshiP to players on that same JP thread.

クローズまで残り1週間強でα稼動は5日間（予想）ってとこでしょうか？
当選しても日程的にα触れないかたも結構発生しそうな気もします。
So for close it's about 1 week and alpha to run about 5 days (guess)?
Even if we get selected it would seem there will be many that wont be able to touch alpha.

フォーラムにポストした通り、できるだけαテストオープン期間は粘ります。
また明日より長時間稼働テストになりますので、初期のデイリー2時間程度のメンテナンスチェック以外、
αテストワールドは開きっぱなしで、常時プレイ可能になります。
Just as I posted on the forums we will try to extend the alpha test duration.
Also starting tomorrow we will start the extended operation test so aside form teh daily maintenance checks for about 2 hours we will keep the alpha test world open and it will be possible to play normally

現αプレイヤーのβテスト優先採用についてはスルー？
No information on priority status for current alpha players to get selected for beta test?

まだ検討中ですので、正式回答ができない状態です。
また、βテストはそもそも、αテスト負荷試験後の実施となり、
αテストよりアカウント配布数は多くなりますので、十分にカバー可能範囲と思います。
We are still looking into this one so currently we can't give any official answers yet.
Also the beta test is released after server load test in alpha test so the amount of accounts distributed will be much more than alpha test, pretty sure it will be enough to cover as much.

αテストを無駄に延長する意味はあるのでしょうか？
延長した分、βや正式サービスも将棋倒しの如く遅れるということにはなりませんか？
順調に進んでいるなら、計画を前倒しするべきではないでしょうか。
Is there any meaning to leave the extend the alpha test?
By extending would it delays the beta or official service?
If it's going smoothly I think it will be better to follow the plan.

開発はブランチと呼ぶ開発進行を分割する手法で進めているので、
既にβテストはαとは別のブランチでガリガリ作業が進んでいます。
αテストを延長するのは、あくまでテストとしてではなく、αワールドを開けておく期間だけ延長になります。
（それもβ用のワールド構築にハードウェア的な支障がないところで閉じます）
よってαテストは順調ですが、βテストが前倒しできるかと言えば、それは別問題なのです。
In the development we are taking steps called branching so the work for beta test is already being worked on aside form alpha. To extend the alpha test is not mainly for test but just to extend the timing on how long the apha worlds are open. (Even that will will close once there is no hardware issue for the beta world structures) So alpha test is going smoothly but when saying that will affect beta test, that's a different issue.

OK that's it for today's YoshiP posts~
Looks like Bay and them working on the official translations on these quickly too

[Dragonheart]

Thank you as always Rein, you're one of the pillar of the community

[Kerwin]

The subligar is strong with this one.

[Warlock]

Thanks!

*turns off sublimen-signal*

Isn't subliman that other crazy dude always wearing a subligar with a red dunce hat?

[Soukyuu]

Just an idea: like = thanks

[Reinheart]

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/27232571

This is the recording of the live stream about Square-Enix open conference - "what it means to rebuild a game" session done by YoshiP is interesting... no new information regarding FFXIV ARR but it's really good information regarding how YoshiP took over the FFXIV project and went into rebuilding this game.

*** NOTE ***
This might not interest some people so just ignore it if you don't like reading long stuff LOL. For people like me who dreamed of becoming/helping game development this may be good read (if you can understand my translation lol)

The main talk is about how to rebuild a game and YoshiP is using FFXIV as an example. He talks about what it means to rebuild the game but in the beginning he mentions that in normal gaming industry once the game fails like it did for FFXIV, the company will 'normally' not even decide to rebuild and rather dump the entire project.

• When he took over FFXIV the first impression from the media + players was very bad.
• During beta test we received many feedbacks but didn't apply anything from beta and this made players feel that they have been ignored totally.
• Players felt that for this being a Final Fantasy there reaction was "what the hell is this."
• Many concerned that this was the end of Final Fantasy series.

But when I (YoshiP) took over no matter how much I complain about how this game ended up this way, this was a result of what Square-Enix did and complaining about it wont help the situation at all.

• He needed to figure out how to bring players trust back
• figure out what is wrong with the game, why was it called 'kuso-ge' (JP term used for crappy games, he said it himself in this interview lol)
• how would he communicate with the customers
• Also as this game being a Final Fantasy series he had to figure out how they bring it back to Final Fantasy feel back into this game.
• Also players called this game 'owa-con' (JP term for game that's finished, no way of saving) so they had to figure out how to get that feeling out from the players.

In order for these to happen in his position he needs to be calm and think over carefuly instead of running around and trying to jumping into the problems and fixing. (Personal note: If you remember when it was Tanaka in charge his goal was to fix everything right away, but after learning how much problems FFXIV servers had this wasn't even possible in reality so if Tanaka's team tried to do it back then without YoshiP taking over, most likely FFXIV would of really been a dead game 'owa-con' by now.)

Next his goal was not to jump into the problem but look everything over and figure out the goals first and figure out what needs to be done first, so he had to rethink of why people said this was said that it had no feel like a Final Fantasy title and to rethink the concept of FFXIV. If you know Final Fantasy series they follow a tradition where each title is built under a new world with brand new story but since it was 25th year anniversary it would of been good to bring back many features from previous FF series and give as much fan service out to those FF fans out there, he wants to bring as much of it in as possible.

Also since this is a MMORPG he had to think what kind of MMORPG this needs to be so he didn't see what FFXIV is at that time but looked at what a general MMORPG features are required to be an MMORPG.

He also was asked from media's overseas if this was going to become F2P with micro transaction, he needed to think of which business scheme to go by (F2P or P2P) to meet the current gaming industry market and current generation player base.

He had to think of what type of technology will be required to be able to operate this game long term.
By looking at all these you start seeing the clear image of the goal. If at this point if you think that you don't have enough knowledge to make this happen, only thing you can do is to go learn it.

Up until here isn't that bad since it's basically similar to creating a new game.
Next issue was to figure out what kind of problems current game have. By having a goal set up first
he was able to have try and come up with a solution to that problem at same time figure out how to reach his goal. By looking at both together you can start seeing how much this game was lacking compared to his ideal goal. Also as an business he had to figure out stuff like credit cards, payment methods as some countries doesn't use credit cards as much compared to other countries. For example in Germany they still have many stores that can't accept credit cards and because of that not many people own credit cards there. He had to figure out how to get those customers to be able to play their game. He don't want to have a situation where players want to play their game but can't just because they can't pay for it so he had to prepare a payment options for these players.

They also had to figure out how many subscription is needed for the project to figure out how much the project is going to cost.

When checking/listing up the issues/problems say if there is one problem that is so big that it too hard to fix and feel that there is nothing possible to do to fix this problem instead avoiding this problem entirely it's important to listing this as well and listing every problems in details. And in the end say you end up with over 10,000 problems found if you can get 10 hours per day to work hard and go through 100 issues each day you can get it done it done in 10 days. Since the problems were there and not going anywhere it's better to just get all of it out and not giving up half way.

From there you can start looking for people for help, it's no use trying to face the problem on your own so it's good to get the right key people in your team.

1. Professional person who you can trust on technology part. You will need at least one person who can do this in any type of situation .
2. Core staff who can make decisions on what direction this game needs to take.
3. Specialist who's good at battle system.
4. Specialist who's good at user interface.
5. Get the staff who knows the most about the current issues and can be calm and point out the existing issues. Pointing fingers at who's fault at this point won't help at all, you can do all that later, what needs to be done at this point is have these members who can look through these issues.
6. Also you will need a strong management staff who is willing to keep up with the current issue.

Without these 5-6 key people, most likely your project will not work out. You have to pick out these core members rather than having a lot of staff who can't take part in these tasks.

While looking over the problems he needs these members to review his goal and see if it's possible technology wise, if it will be possible to get it done from designers point of view. When looking from business just getting high end spec players won't be good for business so they need to draw a line to what point is good for it being Final Fantasy without dropping quality too much. Also make sure the UI isn't over fetched and can be done. And adding the management to talk about the cost.

Yoship then goes off saying as side track this can be applied to new game still but to make sure not get too much staff into a project as it's going to cost a lot and it isn't really required in many cases. They have to figure out if it's even possible to do it from technology point of view. Don't create something just from feeling when you do that it may end up different from the original goal was. Make sure the goal can really be said that it's the goal. Will this work as a business. Also this is common keyword in the industry but say you got 80% fixed and 20% is remaining at this point saying "We can fix that later" by saying that and running away from the problem is just putting it off for later. That problem will still exist so you have to figure out the solution first instead of putting it off for later where the situation may be much harder to resolve.

How to fix the issue - to spend as much time as needed.

• - what is needed to show as much characters possible?
• - Can the servers be made worldless?
• - Can the server stand the search overload stress?
• - Can the battle system be changed? Can this be done while running the current version
• - Can the interface be fixed?
• - Can the copy/paste maps be fixed?

These are not good examples as they are just problems and not takling about what solution is.

• - What is current spec of the rendering engine? What is the cost to fix this?
  For FFXIV they borrowed the tech team specialized in this section for 2 weeks and asked theteam to borrow map from FFXI and figure out where the bottle neck is. Using FFXI's map is to use a map which is much lighter to find the solution faster. But in reality doing this it didn't change anything at all which was a disappointing result but by not trying these we wouldn't of known these issues as well.
• - What kind of server specs does current have? what's the cost to fix this?
• - What kind of server system structure the current have? What's the cost for this one?
• - Is it possible to replace the resources and calculation/formulas used in the battle system?
• - What is the cost to to fix the UI? Can this be done while running the current version.
  We looked into this we talked about changing but it will take at least 3 month to switch and 3 month for debug so we decided we can't update it. Even this is getting the answer out so it's good.
• - Would it be possible to add new non copy/paste maps on top of current map?
  We also looked into this by adding new zones and keeping new maps on top aside from existing maps but doing this it will end up where it uses 2 rendering engines on two separate maps and becoming a weird game so we decided to not do that. But our first part was to try it out to see how it goes since no one tried it.

But after carefully deciding with the team we have decided that

• - Rendering engine - Need to replace everything
• - To make server worldless we had to restructure everything
• - To make the server where it can handle the stress from search handling
• - It's possible to fix the battle but will need to rebuild from the core.
• - Remake the user interface better
• - Not go with the 2 map engine system as if done so looking long term you will need to look at these two every time.

So once all the situations and goals were talked over only thing left to do is not to wasting time but setting the final direction here. When looking at the solutions it meant to rebuild the entire game.
There isn't any way to fix the current existing version, we had to rebuild it and this was our decision to start ARR project. Many may think it's faster to make a new game and winning over with this new game but the main goal is to figure out how to get the players trust back, this was our main goal. If we can't get this done there is no point in doing FFXIV. This was bigger goal for the company than the profit it will make, we had to make sure not to disappoint the players any more.

Say those existing players who logged in every day hoping that it will be fixed one of these days by giving up now as a numbering title in Final Fantasy series it is against our pride. The game needs to be fun for the customers and not to disappoint the existing players, therefore after looking at all those we decided to

1. Not to stop the current game but rather make major changes on current version.
2. Make sure to communicate with the customers.
3. Avoid doign any PR's to get new players in the current game and put those current existing players first priority, then once the ARR is rebuilt bring that up to get those customers to hope once again for this game.

We're just bunch of people with brains to build games so only thing we can do is to try out best and deliver a fun game.

So with this we started a development of ARR while going through major scale fixes on the current version at same time.

There was a time I called current version of the game "genkou-ban" (Current version) as "Konjou-ban" on the live letter and players thought it means to stay strong (strong spirit) and play the game but that's not what I meant here. This Konjou-ban is what we discuss in the development team where players want these fixes in the current version but no matter how much we tried there is nothing we can do to fix on the current version so we had to have a strong spirit in the dev team to keep on developing, this is the reason why we called it "konjou-ban".

There are staff in here that knows this but because we have ARR development going writing the source codes for the current version is meaningless as the entire current version is going to be dumped in the end. I know this and what I requested to the development team is really hard for them to do. That is why I told them lets keep on going with strong spirit (konjou)

Now there is one major problem remaining this is the part that will be our challenge but how will we overcome those with negative comments, even in the development team at beginning there will be situation where they will be negative thinking what is there to do to fix it. We have to get this negative image out and have the customers look back at FFXIV. There were many players who touched FFXIV and didn't get good impression so I believe the only method is to have them touch the ARR again, but with this negative image being there they would probably not even touch the game again so they need to figure this out. Even for the development team they had to figure out how to keep the motivation up and make it a fun environment or they can't give in their full power. If we did simple map connection with the existing maps will just make players disappointed so we talked about destroying the entire world.

At around this time in 2010 there were lots of TV shows that talked about mayan prophecy about end of the world in 2012. In there they talked about different catastrophy that could happen such as ice age, or a meteor crashing into earth... at that time he thought... Hey there is "Meteor" in Final Fantasy and in FFXIV there was a red planet he asked around if he can drop it since it looked like Meteor form Final Fantasy series.. at the same time he said not to bring up any information on this, let the players figure out gradually that the red planet is getting bigger every update... then once players started talking about it to start bringing in the Meteor story. But at this time everyone would expect that planet is going to drop and that's going to be it... and just dropping it would be kind of boring so then he thought of the meteor was round shape... round shape.... ball.... egg....... egg... make it look like Meteor and bring up Bahamut up. As playing through Final Fantasy series in his earlier ages Bahamut shoots lazer outside of the planets atmosphere... so if that's it it will destroy the entire planet... so thinking of that he thought this is going to work.

So at this time he wanted to deliver a story to the players where the players needed to stop the forces from dropping the meteor but in actual meteor was just a exterior but there was Bahamut inside and burn the entire world. He needed to make sure this information will never leak out and keep quiet about it all this time since this was the grand finale of the current version. Once the players seen that and say "so it was Bahamut all this time!" then look back and look at the hints they gave out. Also doing this was able to deliver Final Fantasy like feel and since they tried this they may want to touch ARR FFXIV.

As I mentioned earlier for the development team to dump the entire current version project out is a really hard deal and it's unusual and haven't been done before so it's fun, and since it's fun the development team will follow through since they can try something that is unusual and crazy and that fits in a Final Fantasy.

So now that meteor dropped only thing we have left to do now is bring out the entertainment in ARR.

It is true that Square-Enix caused a major failure with FFXIV but to get that back for us is to by creating games so we believe that's what we must do. There are many supporters for FFXIV and people looking forward. We want to keep on staying as a company creating games. Honestly I haven't thought much until I started FFXIV not only the players but the stores as well which announced that PS3 is going to be out then having to tell their customer that it got delayed, we caused inconvenience to all of them so I want everyone to remember even a little that there are customers out there that is looking forward and waiting. However for rebuilding... I want this to be the last and not have to go through it again.

That is it, thank you very much.

EDIT: 00:19 am finished translation - fixed up some parts from earlier translation since it was bit unclear (was just typing as I was listening to the video)