"Real ID" Concept

[Nikita]

from what I understand, PlayOnline was a nightmare for both players and developers.
The former is at least true, given they used it as a download client and it was notoriously slow.

The only nightmare I can recall is all of the sexually frustrated teenagers ERPing in the chat rooms during maintenance.

If you saw the original POL concept video, you'd know Blizzard made it a reality for all intents and purposes. Not only do they have cross server dungeons, chat, blacklists, and grouping, you can even talk to people in different games! Hell, you don't even have to be in game to talk to them.

Here I am playing FFXIV in 2015 and I can't even blacklist some annoying jerk in my duty finder party.

These aren't new concepts. It's about time they brought us into the modern era.

[kyuven]

These aren't new concepts. It's about time they brought us into the modern era.

You should, however, ask yourself WHY they would drop the concept and why only about 4 different games/companies actually use the concept at all.
EVE, GW2 and TESO don't really count since they use megaservers.
Cryptic games (NW, STO, and CO) use the concept but all three are built on the same network framework.
Blizzard games use it but again, they're built on the framework from the word go, and it took them nearly a decade to get everything to work the way it does.
The EverQuest games use it as well but again, and this is becoming a theme, they were built on the same framework as well.

FFXIV was not built on the PlayOnline framework, probably due in part to being unable to do cross-platform integration with the FFXI platforms, of which there are about 4. One of which was a miracle to get at all since they don't have it for 14.

[Nikita]

Lol here's the thing.

No, I shouldn't have to ask why not. I shouldn't have to settle for less. I'm paying monthly for a game that has a cash shop.

I'm not going to sit here and be a SE apologist. That's not how we're going to move forward. I'd rather move forward than stand still.

[kyuven]

No, I shouldn't have to ask why not. I shouldn't have to settle for less. I'm paying monthly for a game that has a cash shop.

I'm not going to sit here and be a SE apologist. That's not how we're going to move forward. I'd rather move forward than stand still.

Before I continue note I'm not an "SE apologist." If they screw up something stupid, I'm more than willing to call them on it. I'll ride their ass about the english localization choices til the game shuts down.
You "settled for less" when you started paying for the game and it didn't have this feature.
You also don't seem to grasp what your monthly fee entitles you to. It doesn't entitle you to have any say whatsoever in how the game is run, managed, or developed. That's a fun bonus called "listening to what players want." However, listening isn't the same as actually being able to DO these things, or at the very least just because you want something doesn't make it practical.

Let's go into why a PlayOnline-like feature that works cross-server and cross-game isn't practical.
First, and foremost, cost and time. You would not only need brand new servers to be able to handle this, and to develop new software to unify the systems that currently exist. And then you have to test it, and retest it, and test it again. This game is on three different platforms, so the testing alone would take months. And you have to pay all these people in addition to buying new servers. And that's before factoring in that you'd need to do even MORE testing if you decide to tack on more games like FFXI or DQX.
Second, we have practicality. What would you use this system for? The obvious answer is "talking to my friends across servers." Well, see, that's great...but most players don't have friends across multiple servers, and those that do either a) have some form of third party means of communication to contact them, such as Skype, Facebook, etc. or b) Use PS3 or 4, and thus have this functionality built in to their system anyway. The other excuse given was "we want to talk while the servers are down!" Well...that's great too but...if you want it integrated into the game, if they're doing a patch they'd generally have to take the chat servers down too. So...yeah. And if you have your chat server and game servers running separate but interacting...well, let's just say I've seen a lot of issues with that when latency is involved.
Thirdly, there's exploitation. Let's put it this way. The only game I know of that had chat you could use without being connected to it eventually shut it down entirely (this is the same game that had latency issues between the chat client, which frequently crashed, and the game client). This was partly because it was costing a lot to maintain (going back to my first point), partly because people just weren't using it, and partly because it could be used to harass. And you can bet dollars to donuts that RMTers would figure out within an hour how to use this concept to their advantage.
Then we have simply "server resources." The servers are already being taxed, and they're not brand spanking new servers.
Finally, there's culture and priorities. This is kind of shocking to a lot of people, Japanese companies are slow to adopt new technology. Fax machines are still popular there. Documents are still filled out by hand with no option for digital submission. This should be obvious from that very fact that they're using old servers and tried to release 1.0 using mechanics that players hadn't tolerated for half a decade prior. The team since then has been spending their time sussing out "what works" and "what doesn't work" from each angle. Before they even THINK about adding a feature such as this, they need to get new servers.

Now, I'm not saying it would be a bad idea per se, but I am saying without a hint of hesitation that you won't see anything even close to this for at least a year or more after Heavensward due to the absolutely staggering amount of work required.

[Mykll]

If I can't even bring up my Friend's list or send a tell t someone on my own server while in a dungeon... Or bring up my list of LS's, then yeah I don't see this happening.

[Zumi]

I think Blizzard spent a lot of time restructuring the way their servers communicate with eachother. Besides having a universal friends list for all their games. It actually let you invite your friends on a different server even in a different data center and they would appear on your server, then you could quest, do dungeons or raids together. SE would have to do a lot of work to gain that type of functionality, which would cost them a lot of money to totally rewrite the server code. Blizzards game has about 20x as many subs too so they had a lot more money to work with.

[314159265358979323846264338327]

I can talk to my friends through battle.net using in game chat even if they're playing a different game entirely, or not even playing a game at all. In FFXIV I can't even talk to friends through tells if they're in an instance of any kind.

That's just simple things like chat. Nevermind the fact that in WoW I can invite a friend from an entirely different server to a party, and they will be transferred temporarily to my server. People need to stop acting like "tecnilogy is hrd" and making excuses why a current gen game can't have the same QoL services that one made over 10 years ago has.

[Zumi]

That's just simple things like chat. Nevermind the fact that in WoW I can invite a friend from an entirely different server to a party, and they will be transferred temporarily to my server. People need to stop acting like "tecnilogy is hrd" and making excuses why a current gen game can't have the same QoL services that one made over 10 years ago has.

Blizzard didn't have the play with your friends from other servers feature until the pandaria expansion so it still fairly new tech, not like they had that when their game first launched.

[kyuven]

That's just simple things like chat. Nevermind the fact that in WoW I can invite a friend from an entirely different server to a party, and they will be transferred temporarily to my server. People need to stop acting like "tecnilogy is hrd" and making excuses why a current gen game can't have the same QoL services that one made over 10 years ago has.

10 years ago they didn't have it. They've HAD 10 years to develop the system, as well as consistency and funding within their own company to establish the framework needed to make it work.
It DOES take a lot of work to get *right*. And which would you rather have? Something that barely functions at what you want it to do, or something that works right right out the gate?
We all want the latter. SE would want the latter. The latter takes time.
Patience.

[Nikita]

10 years ago they didn't have it. They've HAD 10 years to develop the system, as well as consistency and funding within their own company to establish the framework needed to make it work.
It DOES take a lot of work to get *right*. And which would you rather have? Something that barely functions at what you want it to do, or something that works right right out the gate?
We all want the latter. SE would want the latter. The latter takes time.
Patience.

You say you're not an apologist yet you have such a hard-on for this thread rofl.

Blizzard had 10 years to develop their tech.

http://youtu.be/_42la3foiCc

Square had plenty of time too. I've already went on to say how we already had cross server chat functionality with FFXI's PoL service yet we've lost that. And yes, I'm sure they had their reasons to get rid of it, however I'm pretty damn sure it wasn't the chat functionality.

Why would we want to chat with people from different servers? Because some of us have friends on different servers. Because we would like to be able to make friends in the duty finder and group up with them again. We want more depth to the cross-server grouping. Is reduced queue time for dungeons really the sole purpose for the feature? Are we just supposed to forget about the people we meet and enjoy grouping with from different servers? Because that's all we can do! What about blacklisting? What about all of the times a person gets kicked from a group only for them to queue in progress and join right back in. I literally saw this happen 7 times in a row once. With Blizzard, if you blacklist someone from a different server, it won't group you with them. Period.

No shit, the implementation of this would take time. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know this obvious fact. We aren't saying we want it NOW, we're saying we want it period.