Quote Originally Posted by Azurymber View Post
i run a marketing business so i know somewhat about what will make profit and what won't. A game with a 5.0ish average rating that has been out a year and is considered one of the worst MMOs on the market, reviewed poorly 100s of times, will have a VERY difficult time making profit. Even if the game improves, people researching the game (and its an MMO so they will), will see low ratings and poor reviews. A commercial can't change the negative press. The only way to pull off a ps3 relaunch will be mouth-to-mouth. And for that to work the game has to impress the majority of players enough to get their friends playing. Right now its no where near that stage, and SE is alienating players (see like 80% of posts on this forum)
You are correct, there are many hurdles that the game will need to overcome. The biggest of which is it's initial failed launch. There's no denying that, but this patch was never supposed to be the fix-it-all patch. This was only the foundation for future patches (as someone else already mentioned, sorry I don't remember who.)

This patch was anything BUT rushed. What we are seeing on the forums are growing pains with the vocal minority that don't want to readily accept that their class/job isn't working as it was previous to this patch. Don't just count the threads on the forums, look inside them too. In every thread I've been reading since the patch came out, it isn't just the OP declaring their frustrations and everyone replying and following suit. In many cases, the OP is declaring their frustrations and the majority of following posts are disagreeing with that person, just like this thread.

1.18 is just the beginning, now we are going to see how the game is altered for 1.19, 1.20, etc. and so forth. The game is NOT ready for primetime. You know that, I know that, SE knows that. They are not going to be releasing the PS3 version of this until it is and at that point, we will most likely have an official re-launch. This patch was just about introducing the base groundwork mechanics for everything else coming to be built off of. I think it would be naive to think otherwise that this was going to somehow be the release-worthy patch that some think it was supposed to be (not necessarily referring you here).

Mages seem to not be happy with the high MP costs of heals. SE isn't going to drop a hotfix to change that. If this is deemed correct and according to their plans, they will most likely put it into 1.19. Same thing with the current state of the dungeon being cluttered with ARC/ARC/ARC/ARC/CON/CON/GLA/GLA formats. How were SE supposed to know before hand that, that would happen? Hell, from what I saw on day one of the patch, you'd be liable to think that ARC class was destroyed by the mighty swing of SE's nerf bat, yet clearly it is not the case. I feel mages will be the same way, but that's purely my opinion. I wouldn't be surprised if we see heals get lowered back down some in cost. As for THM being stripped of the AoE heals and CON being changed to healer du jour, the majority of players voted for clear-cut jobs in the player polls. It had to happen sooner or later. We won't see the full extent until the job system is unveiled a bit more.

Lastly, I don't believe SE is alienating it's players. Sure, the patch has gotten knee-jerk anger threads posted, but what game doesn't have that? Look around at other MMO's. If we're going to decide success of an MMO based upon what their general forums looks like, World of Warcraft must have tanked years ago and is surely a marketing disaster, no?


P.S. Edit - Crediting Vahzl for saying that this patch was the foundation for 1.19 and beyond. Well put chap. Cheers.