PLEASE Learn from your mistakes......

[Dargoth_Draconia]

I don't mean to be negative or anything but to me it seems like SE is still making the exact same mistakes since this game was released. So rather than rant, I'm going to write out a point by point "final fantasy history" to demonstrate all the places SE has gone wrong. Feel free to skip the list and go straight to the argument at the bottom.

• Prior to the release of the game, SE allows speculation of surplus to go wild. As such people are already complaining non stop about how the game will be horrible. Rather than release a statement explaining surplus in detail. Tanaka lashes out accusing foreign sites of being full of false rumors and fabricated remarks.
  Lesson: COMMUNICATE. Don't leave things up in the air to be speculated on. Post exactly what you have done and if you intent to change it or not.
  
• During open beta people think the game essentially sucks. Countless people speculate that no one would release a game that bad and that release would come with a bunch more zones unlocked, Ishgard open, serious server improvements, etc. Obviously not true since the release was essentially a carbon copy of open beta.
  Lesson: COMMUNICATE. Don't let speculation go wild even if it makes you profit. So many people had purchased the game thinking the open beta was just part of the game and were extremely disappointed. Honesty would have avoided a lot of rage.
  
• Most people hate the initial battle system so SE -rushes- to change it. As a result we get Coblyn grinding. Archers can literally rank to 50 by 1 or 2 shotting coblyns with multishot. Every other mob in the game becomes pointless to solo on because they can't compare to coblyns, and parties become completely pointless.
  Lesson: DON'T RUSH. If they would have taken their time redesigning the battle system the game might have been a lot better. But instead they rushed out a broken system and left it for months causing many to quit.
  
• SE implements quests... sadly they stick a bunch of the "quest" mobs that agro right where gathering leves are, ruining a number of gathering leves. Quests are also rushed out and seem outdated compared to the ffxi quests that were out over 8 years ago.
  Lesson: Don't rush.... seriously quantity does not mean quality. There was no need to have nearly identical quests in each city (ex. go kill 6 marmots). Unique quests that continue along a storyline with moving stories and memorable characters is what makes a game. Running for 2 hours to kill mobs for 30 seconds or talk to someone for 3 lines, all for 3000gil when many people have over 50mil gil, is not competitive in today's world of MMOs.
  
• SE Replaces coblyn grinding with a leve link system. Sadly they openly allow people to exploit the system by failing leves, resulting in tons of people getting multiple jobs to 50 rapidly. As a result there is absolutely no reason to solo or party outside of leve link parties.
  Lesson: DON'T RUSH... again, rather than release a broken weighted system SE should have just taken the extra month and balanced out mob SP so that people started partying and soloing again
  
• 1.18 comes out, yayyyyyyy! Cept that with it comes a reshuffling of mobs that make gathering leves and gathering in general nearly impossible. Further, by capping sp 10 ranks above you and making mobs so weak, they create a system where there are -no- challenging fights really (cept maybe if you do beastmen solo) and the majority of levelling is off mobs you kill in 30 seconds each.
  Lesson: DON'T RUSH... Before you stick mobs somewhere check if mining or bot nodes spawn there and if gathering leves use the spot. Further, balance out the battle system so that party fights last longer than half a minute. To be honest, this patch wasn't horrible. But if you think about it, they will have to rebalance the raids each patch now to work with new battle systems each time.

So has SE learned any lessons? NO

1. look at these boards, look at the history of these boards. Do you know what they are? 50%+ speculation and people raging over speculation.
SE still fails to communicate properly. They constantly announce new initiatives that lack detail and end up causing massive rage threads to be created. The crafting "dumb-down" is the best example of the most current one.

What should SE do?: Easy... COMMUNICATE. Instead of releasing vague statements and posting "we will look into it" or "we intend to change it in the future", clearly state what you are doing currently in detail. If you are going to change how zones look have a thread explaining EXACTLY how you intend to do it, and update it when it changes.
DONT POST UPDATES ON ONLY ONE FORUM IN ONLY ONE LANGUAGE. I understand Yoshi-P likes to communicate directly with players. But when he posts something on the Japanese board and it gets mistranslated here, people speculate and rage.

2. STOP RUSHING THINGS.
If you haven't sorted out the battle system don't release raids until you have. Raids are fun and all but you're going to have to change them and rebalance them once you implement "jobs" for each class. Put your effort into a stable battle system and THEN reshuffle world mobs, release raids, etc.

Don't release a materia system -BEFORE- you have a solid battle system in place. All its going to result in is people working hard to get a good materia, then the battle system and raids being re-worked, and all that hard work being completely useless. People -will- rage.

What should SE do?: Easy... do things in the proper order. Have a fairly stable battle + attribute system before you decide to create raids or implement equipment enhancing systems. Or put another way, Don't change the game on us every 1 month. Instead of rushing things out to please people, focus on the core first, and then expand. That way you don't waste huge amounts of time moving mobs around and messing up quests and leves every patch.

Overall: SE still hasn't learned to communicate. These boards are full of rage threads and speculation rather than people discussing how to have fun in the game.

And SE still hasn't learned to take things slow. Revamps to crafting and materia sound great. but making them before you actually have a working attribute and battle system is essentially pointless. Think of it in FFXI terms. Tons of ppl leveled dragoon for its penta-thrust ability. Then SE gimped drg and a bunch of people rage quit. If people spend money on materia investments only to find out 1 month later they wasted it all, people will not be happy. Further, if people invest in materia and then SE decide to mess up the system (like they seem to be doing with crafting), people will rage (as many crafters have over the possibility of specializing in 1 craft and making crafting easier)

TLDR?
-SE needs to learn to communicate
-SE needs to stop rushing things out.

Takes two to three months just to get a single patch and you call that rushing things? Are you daft??

[Murugan]

Wrong most people are upset with the state the game was released in and the fact SE chose to ignore those issues brought up in Beta. 1 year later still same issues and game was released...

Fair enough, but people are also upset over things they simply fail to understand/exist totally in their mind. Just a few notable threads:

• Archers were nerfed into a broken state and now no one will play them!
• You can't play mages anymore after 1.18!
• Square Enix refuses to move mob locations until after jobs! (except for the multiple instances where they have)
• Square Enix said they are never going to work on server lag issues! (except the bulk of patch notes since release working on this)
• Square Enix never communicates with players! (except for all the developer responses/letters from the producers)
• The Ogre's AOE makes it impossible for melee to play Darkhold! (except it can be easily stunned by melee, and AOE's are a pretty standard mob mechanic to throw such a fit over unless you have never played an MMO before.)
• NM's will become a zergfest after the claiming system changes!!! (though no word has been passed down on this, and NM's currently have a different claiming ruleset already preventing this)
• There are limited spaces in Darkhold!!!! This is 2011!!! People have to wait for hours just to do a dungeon???!!!!! (except to my knowledge this has never happened, yet we strangely still get people complaining about it who have never done darkhold.)

Just because someone can complain about something on an open internet forum, doesn't necessarily mean there is any validity to it. I'd say it's about a 1-3 split on the forums between actual problems and imaginary ones.

[Xianghua]

People will complain regardless how much Info they release. People complain just to hear themselves complain and because they can. reason why you see it more here? Because other games don't release an unfinished product 2 years before it should be completed. 90% of the FFXIV community is from FFXI and anything that they put in that wasn't in that game is going to cause mass panic simply because of how bad the game is right now. And for some reason everyone thinks FFXI was the best game in the world.

You are a huge Hypocrite though. Your advice to them is "Don't rush" yet you want them to rush out info to unfinished Projects and patches. They simply can not give out complete info to an uncompleted project, its impossible.

The bottom line. no matter what SE does how much they release, how much they talk. people WILL rage/complain/Speculate just because they can, just like you are now.

Btw just because someone disagree's with you doesn't make them a troll.

[Elkwood]

ok lets see....

Square Enix = Japanese
Bioware/LA = Western

two completely different ways of doing business and people still can not tell/care to distinguish this. I dont care what they are doing over on the SW:OR forums, does not have anything to do with these forums at all. Now I will say that yes many here do resort to name calling and trolling a lot more then other places, and there is no excuse to be honest.

The game is still under heavy development, and the problem here is that people have payed for the game already, even though we really are still in beta. Does that bother me? No I can wait, the game will get better. Many others on the other hand can not, they have no patience.

So is TOR, ToR been in beta just as long as XIV and you still don't see any complaining. Yes SE has a much different mentality then the Bioware folks. But the Bioware folks realize you need more content before releasing the game and judging by the last Instance video they released the game is already 40000x more polished then XIV. The graphics may not b as astounding as XIV but the UI looks better its cleaner more simple. The land has an overall effect on battle, you can see how the turret towers block impending attacks, the Mob AI seems a lot more refined and intelligent then SE AI on XIV, and wow impressive each job already has a purpose, good storyline, and look at this Endgame content that is being thought out while the game is in beta.

People can complain all they want about how people are trolls for looking at other games and pointing out things other developers are doing. People can sit here and tell others to go play said game, hell many of those people have undoubtedly already made said pre orders and are just waiting for the game to get a release date. But that still does not negate the fact that SE is so far behind in the times that the game may never fully recover. It still does not negate the fact that it took the developers and company to long to drop its pride and finally listen to its customer base. If SE had listened to its customer base when it counted during the actual Alpha/beta stages of the game they would not be in the position they are. The Game would not be in the position it is in, and they would still have a good release ahead of them.

[Biggs]

What your talking about is a classic issue of a High Context Country (Japan) communicating with the largest Low Context Country in the world (The U.S.). If you dont know those terms I urge you to look them up as I don't want to take all day explaining what they mean. But the fact that SE is making an attempt with the official forums to communicate in any way shows they are making an effort to see things as we here in North AMerica see them. Considering this is the first actual attempt at doing so the company has ever put forth publically, I would say they are doing a great job with talking to Western players as best they can. But to be fair, your issue of communication between the two cultures is never going to be what you want it to. May as well be asking why the hell the earth isnt flat dude.

Also, its a well documented fact that people respond with criticism more frequently then they do with praise. May have something to do with why you see a lot of raging on here. People dont leave responses about products they are HAPPY with, they are ussually to busy using them to take the time to do so.

The link below does a great job at describing the difference between Japanese business culture vs that of north America's. It highlights why the way they communicate will NEVER be the same as the way we do here in the states and in most European countries.

http://mqjeffrey.hubpages.com/hub/Hi...-Communication

[PrettyPrincess]

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[Corrderio]

Just want to say one thing...
They did, they released a video explaining it in detail. The video was released before open beta started iirc.

That was XIV Core that made the vid IIRC. Either way it still didn't change the fact Tanaka added a very stupid system to the game.

[Biggs]

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Not quite what I meant, but seems like the sort of response one can expect from others on these forums. +1 sarcasm i guess.

[Cidolphus]

What I see here is more of that unattractive and chronic sense of entitlement that we FFXIV players have in spades. The devs don't owe us any explanations; they don't need to get a list of changes on our desk by Monday morning. While I agree it would behoove them at this point to handle us all with kid gloves, they aren't obliged to keep us posted on the nitty gritty of development. And besides, if they did fill us in, people would still complain. The whole reason developers need to keep things under wraps is so that forums like this one, full of raging contrarians, won't exist and kill whatever they're creating before it takes its first breath.

That said, since the forums do exist, and since SE has to clean up their mess, I would like to see more specific information about these systems so that we don't have any more nasty surprises or unnecessary confusion. And, of course, we are the only chance they have to make money from this game, so in a sense we're a little more like shareholders than the average gamer. It's tricky. For the most part, I think Yoshida has done a wonderful job of being an earnest politician (oxymoron? Apparently not!). I don't envy his job.

[Chain]

I think the major rule they haven't learned even from their 9 years of XI is that immense time wasting does not equal fun and it's in no way interesting or productive.

Side quests for example, no depth or reasoning behind them. Games like WoW were blasted a while back for having the same system "Go kill X mobs and come back" except in this case they ask you to run 3/4 of the way across the world. For the most part wow has moved away from that by adding more interactive stuff, such as controlling NPCs and vehicles to take on massive amounts of mobs or doing puzzles. I understand this game will probably never have such a thing due to the engine limitations, apparent lack of knowledge and/or resources at SE for creating anything other than pretty character models.

For some reason I still have a soft spot for FF games so I'm here and I'm playing (quit wow for it), but all I can say is, if WoWs new MMO has graphical quality on par with this game, look out because it will be an unstoppable force to put even warcraft to shame.