Moment of Truth: How do you really feel

[TonyMontana]

exactly. the difficulty in FFXIV shouldn't be the battle system at all. thats like the easy cake. The hard part is server-related and they are still completely out on that. FFXIV was supposed to be a bunch of large seemless zones (and was like that at launch) but now we have fake-seemless zones where you can go from one to the other but have to wait 20 second for npcs and mobs to spawn when you cross the barrier (note: they dont tell you when it happens). That is seriously ridiculous. I've died so many times running into a group of agro mobs while they werent on my screen or radar yet.

So far it seems like its taken a year to do what should have been a weeks worth of tweaks. But it also sounds like they re-wrote a bunch of code so that might be why. Like they mentioned the old battle codes were completely convoluted and messed up and they simplified them. While that -is- easy, if the original code wasn't commented well, changing something can mess up other things and you spend weeks just trying to find and fix errors.

So if FFXIV was a restaurant what they gave us at release would be equal to them getting old canned food throwing it on a plate and selling it to us at the premium price. Glad to know they respected their customers so much.

[weeble]

So if FFXIV was a restaurant what they gave us at release would be equal to them getting old canned food throwing it on a plate and selling it to us at the premium price. Glad to know they respected their customers so much.

that's basicaly how i feel, i mean how long have they been working on this game supposedly? ..i just don't get how they launched this game as empty as it was and why. some really retarted stuff must of been going on, maybe some devs or overworked se workers that are on the way to getting canned can leak the truth to us... lmao. ty.

http://www.metalmusicman.com/forum/i...p?topic=3890.0

[Azurymber]

So if FFXIV was a restaurant what they gave us at release would be equal to them getting old canned food throwing it on a plate and selling it to us at the premium price. Glad to know they respected their customers so much.

best analogy i can give to you is from hells kitchen

Some dude or girl didn't warm the pasta up enough so the angry chef guy freaked out
Instead of doing the smart thing and warming it up more, they threw the pasta out and started over

They then failed about 5-10 times each time throwing out the pasta until finally the chef guy yelled at them and said "look at all the pasta you wasted, you could have just warmed it up for 4 more minutes"

In SE's case
they released an unfinished game
then tried to re-do half the stuff in it but failed (coblyn grind time)
then changed the dev team
then tried to re-do all the stuff and failed (leve linking joy)
the tried to re-do all the stuff and got halfway there (last patch)
are in the process of re-doing all the stuff again (by having mobs link and adding in chain things)
and will be in the process of doing all the stuff again once they release jobs and have to rebalance and move mobs around

as opposed to taking the original game, fixing the main thing right away, and then adding ontop of it to make it better.

Now i have a strong feeling the original code was so bad they had no choice. So I don't really think its right to blame Yoshi-P and his team. But still, its a bit ridiculous.

[Dargoth_Draconia]

1. How do you feel about the patch frequency?
2. How do you feel about the changes themselves?
3. How do you feel this game will fair against current upcoming titles?
4. Do you think this game will ever exceed niche popularity?
5. Do you think the changes are in the right or wrong direction?
6. Do you think the they have focused on the most important things historically with patches or should the focus have been elsewhere?

1. Slow as expected considering they are trying to fix the old system or breaking it down and rebuilding new stuff from scratch. As soon as the big bulk of patches that fix the games current state come out we will probably see patches go back to 1 normal patch and maybe a patch a/b follow ups.

2. I feel like they are fixing the game completely by everything they add or take away. Overall I am thoroughly happy with all of the changes to date.

3. Currently not so well with upcoming titles like Star Wars the Old Republic but with the PS3 release and the great work the current team is putting out there is a possibility for redemption. I think at the very least the game will be a minor success I highly doubt the game will fail because it has kept a fan base even when the game was in the worst possible condition.

4. I would have to say it depends on the final product. I am not totally sure if it will exceed niche popularity but that is actually a hard call to make at this time.

5. 100% in the right direction.

6. Focus has been pretty spot on because it has followed the guideline they showed us. Honestly I would have liked to seen some things come before others but at least they told us what to expect and delivered on it, even though I wish they would do some of it in multiple patches instead of one big patch.

P.S. Captn you may have redeemed yourself in my eyes with this post because it is a proper and straight forward post. Even though I would have personally wrote my answers to my own questions, instead of just drawing feedback.

[IStolzI]

1. How do you feel about the patch frequency?
2. How do you feel about the changes themselves?
3. How do you feel this game will fair against current upcoming titles?
4. Do you think this game will ever exceed niche popularity?
5. Do you think the changes are in the right or wrong direction?
6. Do you think the they have focused on the most important things historically with patches or should the focus have been elsewhere?

1. First 7 months: Bleh. Recently: amazing.
2. Awesome. Sidequests need some tweaking. Bubbles that are lower lvl could be kind of "grayed out," and recently unlocked could stand out more. More pre-requisites, more interesting stories. There needs to be more layer to sidequests, such as quests with big rewards that require 2 or 3 others to be done first. More Echo and harder instanced battles. Shot Through the Heart, I think it's called, was awesome story, but lame battle to match it. wierd.
3. I think most of it will come down to which franchise people like more; star wars or final fantasy?
4. Absolutely. More XI players and people who quit will return as the coming patches are released. The PS3 release will bring a lot of new players.
5. RIGHT.
6. No not historically. all that work on targetting and it's still a mess. All the work on market wards should have just been an AH. I like that there seems to be a foundation down for all the coming content now though.

[Andrien]

I'm overall pleased with the results. Mainly due to the fact I take my time playing I guess.

[Sonic_the_Hedgehog]

1. How do you feel about the patch frequency?
2. How do you feel about the changes themselves?
3. How do you feel this game will fair against current upcoming titles?
4. Do you think this game will ever exceed niche popularity?
5. Do you think the changes are in the right or wrong direction?
6. Do you think the they have focused on the most important things historically with patches or should the focus have been elsewhere?

1. Seems fine to me, about on par to WoW's update schedule. http://www.wowwiki.com/Patches
2. No problems, I love them.
3. I think XIV will be just fine.
4. Probably not, just because if the failed launch, but I believe it'll get around 500,000 people.
5. I think they're in the right direction. You need to have things that a modern MMO has, just make sure you put a FF twist to it. Also release engaging content.
6. They're going about it the right way IMO. Almost everything stems from the battle system.

[Catapult]

1. How do you feel about the patch frequency? - Passable
2. How do you feel about the changes themselves? - Fun
3. How do you feel this game will fair against current upcoming titles? - Meh. Couldn't care less, really.
4. Do you think this game will ever exceed niche popularity? - Meh
5. Do you think the changes are in the right or wrong direction? - A good direction. Right is a matter of perspective which I could write an essay on.
6. Do you think the they have focused on the most important things historically with patches or should the focus have been elsewhere? Given the departmental nature of the team, it makes sense that various things have been worked on at once. This means priority allocation of resources is not a simple topic, but I do believe that all teams have been prioritising the issues within their fields properly.

[Ilethius]

1. How do you feel about the patch frequency?
It is a slow output but I think they are still trying to sort the base code out and it is slowing things down (The crysta engine might have something to do with slow release too).

2. How do you feel about the changes themselves?
Some are good, some are bad, I think Yoshi has a clear vision but he seems to fail at getting that vision across to the playerbase, the updates are always cryptic and vague. I would like him to maybe give us something that helps explain what they are trying to create, they dont have to give future ideas away just let us know what the current path is and be honest about it, I want them to go into detail about the vision just not the specifics.

3. How do you feel this game will fair against current upcoming titles?
I think FF games always have there own niche market and as such cannot be compaired to other titles.

4. Do you think this game will ever exceed niche popularity?
I think the PS3 launch will obviously add new players but I cannot see it beating new next-gen mmo's in player numbers.

5. Do you think the changes are in the right or wrong direction?
I think its middle ground, some good, some bad, some indifferent, the issue is direction we dont know which way they will go which is problem in getting the playerbase behind your changes.

6. Do you think the they have focused on the most important things historically with patches or should the focus have been elsewhere?

I believe there focus was on fixing the core issues of the gameplay first which forced them to neglect coherent content so at the moment the released content seems cobbled together with not much thought put into it. I also think that simple changes like the linkshell admin tools should have been completed earlier as that seems to be a major pain for players in large linkshells.

[MeowMeow]

1. How do you feel about the patch frequency?
2. How do you feel about the changes themselves?
3. How do you feel this game will fair against current upcoming titles?
4. Do you think this game will ever exceed niche popularity?
5. Do you think the changes are in the right or wrong direction?
6. Do you think the they have focused on the most important things historically with patches or should the focus have been elsewhere?

1. Going by the lodestone news archives, the patches seemed to slow drastically once Yoshi took over. Granted, the patches are usually bigger individually, there is always way too much time between them. Tanaka probably released more actual MB's of patches per month than Yoshi did, he just released them twice a month instead of once every 2-4 months like Yoshi tends to do. So i'd say patches have slowed a lot. Most games update at least once a month.

2. For every 1 change I like, there are generally 2 that I don't. But this is to be expected since i don't like any of the games Yoshi is trying to make this game a clone of. (WoW and Everquest i believe? Those were the two he said he plays a lot and wants to adapt the game to be more like, right? There was a third but i cant remember it.)

3. Pretty sure the swarm of highly anticipated MMO's coming out will cripple FFXIV's chances, but it won't kill it. There are still people holding onto hope that the game will turn around and be successful, and then ofc there is the fanboys also.

4. I doubt it will exceed niche popularity... Aside from WOW, there really is no MMO that does. At launch, there are always massive amounts of people willing to try a game to see if it'll be the next big thing, but generally at least half will quit within the first month and go back to their usual games. Only niche-players remain in any MMO... Only those who the game appeals to will stay while the rest go back to the games their familiar with (usually WoW).

5. I'm on the fence here... Yoshi should have never thrown out all the stuff Tanaka was about to release. There was plenty of nearly completed content to be released that will never see the light of day again, but Yoshi does have a few good ideas as well... I wish they would have worked together instead of having yoshi replace tanaka.

6. Some of the stuff they tackle is important, but a lot of it is just silly. It seems like so much of the stuff theyre working on is just a waste of time when the ship is sinking. Why plan for the distant future when the game may not last if they dont start releasing real content?