Stop Hand-Holding me!

[Doho]

stop hand-holding me. sounds like my first girlfriend ;___;

[JakeRoon]

Anarchy online is and has always been an extremely niche game (not to mention a commercial failure).

the "free play" program, started in 2004, has had the most significant effect on subscriptions to date. ”More than 400,000 new players" signed up for free subscriptions in the program's first ten months according to Funcom CEO Trond Arne Aas.[78] The next year, the number of free subscriptions created, independent of paid subscriptions, was stated as one million.[54] The income from the program—which had generated $1,000,000 by its second year—supplements revenue from paid accounts.[77][79]
Funcom attributed "higher than expected" company profits in 2006 to Lost Eden's release in December of that year.[79][80] Subscription revenue during this time was described as "steady" and "profitable". Subscription revenue remained "steady" for the next three years, until 2009 when they were described as "slowly declining".[81][82] It was stated that close to two million subscriptions, both free and paid, had been created by July 2008.[24]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy_Online (read the citations if you must)

For a commercial failure it sure seems to be making a lot of money OH and look at that it had over twice as many subscriber than FFxi........


I really wish you guys would stop talking out your @$$3$ before you make statements like this. It just drives home the point of how disconnected to the whole mmo gaming genre you really are.


OH Lahru_Hukurou!!!! wuv you baby! we'll have to go blitz some missions some time!

[AlexiaKidd]

I hope you didn't play FFXI, because If you ever looked up what to do in a quest on the wiki, if you ever looked up where to flag a quest on the wiki, or ever used a pair of coordinates from the wiki to complete anything in FFXI, complaining about this would make you a hypocrite.

How is following the ingame journal different than following the out-of-game walkthrough?

Hint: you have the option to ignore both, and ignoring either you'll be at a disadvantage compared to the people who don't. What has changed, exactly?

Exactly the quests in FFXI were very vague about what you had to do, if it wasn't for wiki I would never have been able to do half of them thats for sure. Sometime I would read the quest up on wiki and think, how the hell did someone figure this out from the info you are given in the game.

[Kurokikaze]

lol seriously... I'm 99% certain that the OP used wikis to find information on quests while playing FFXI. This thread is hypocritical.

What I see is complain over change more than anything.

[viion]

lol seriously... I'm 99% certain that the OP used wikis to find information on quests while playing FFXI. This thread is hypocritical.

What I see is complain over change more than anything.

^ this = truth

[Abriael]

the "free play" program, started in 2004, has had the most significant effect on subscriptions to date. ”More than 400,000 new players" signed up for free subscriptions in the program's first ten months according to Funcom CEO Trond Arne Aas.[78] The next year, the number of free subscriptions created, independent of paid subscriptions, was stated as one million.[54] The income from the program—which had generated $1,000,000 by its second year—supplements revenue from paid accounts.[77][79]
Funcom attributed "higher than expected" company profits in 2006 to Lost Eden's release in December of that year.[79][80] Subscription revenue during this time was described as "steady" and "profitable". Subscription revenue remained "steady" for the next three years, until 2009 when they were described as "slowly declining".[81][82] It was stated that close to two million subscriptions, both free and paid, had been created by July 2008.[24]

Perfect way to say absolutely nothing. Notice how they don't split between paid and free subscribers in their numbers (which, for the ones even slightly versed in understanding marketing jibberjabber, means that the paid subscriber numbers aren't at all impressive. If they were, they would be spelled out).
I'm a "subscriber" too. Too bad I didn't play for years, like a very large percentage of those "subscribers".

While the term "subscriber" is often used to trick the uninitiated in thinking that the relevant numbers are much higher than they are, unfortunately for Funcom a "subscriber" is a whole different animal than an "active user"

For a commercial failure it sure seems to be making a lot of money OH and look at that it had over twice as many subscriber than FFxi........

You mean that in several years of operation it accumulated twice as many free "subscribers" (which again, is very different from "active users"), than FFXIV in 5 months? Yeah, big discovery there.

I really wish you guys would stop talking out your @$$3$ before you make statements like this. It just drives home the point of how disconnected to the whole mmo gaming genre you really are.

The only sign of disconnection is believing that one million dollars in revenue for a MMORPG is any sign of "success". In scale with the market, it's a pittance.
Same can be said as considering numbers expressed in "subscribers" (that can very easily be people that subscribed years ago, and now don't even remember the game, or people that "subscribed" to try the game, and then uninstalled it after five minutes) anywhere impressive or relevant to the success of a F2P MMORPG.

If the numbers of "subscribers" was anywhere relevant, FFXIV would be a critical success by now.

[JakeRoon]

{sniff sniff} I smell the post of someone who is vainly trying to back up the fact he was talking out his @$$.....

I'll spell it out for you.

You said they were a commercial failure.....they clearly stated they were making a profit.....

also just so happens...free or not.....more ppl played it than ffxi (tit for tat "subscriber for subscriber")....just sayin' it had more than twice as many in 2008 than FFxi ever did in it's entire history even at it's peak.

How does that smell? Smells like victory to me. I'll be off to the party now, feel free to post one more post so you can attempt to retain whatever dignity you have left after I just gutted yours from you....it'd the least I can allow you to do.

PS : don't take me too seriously, I hardly ever am.

[Arturia]

Map markers are simply a feature that remove the need to look quest information up online. Which I can safely say, the mass majority of us whom played 11... Did anyways.

This is a good feature to have in the game, and should not be removed. If the devs see enough dislike on the topic I'm sure they can add as others have suggested... a feature to toggle it off. It should be on by default for new players regardless.

[Abriael]

{sniff sniff} I smell the post of someone who is vainly trying to back up the fact he was talking out his @$$.....

I'll spell it out for you.

You said they were a commercial failure.....they clearly stated they were making a profit.....

also just so happens...free or not.....more ppl played it than ffxi....just sayin'

How does that smell? Smells like victory to me.

LOL. You really mean to compare the number of subscribers of a free game with one that requires a monthly fee? Smells like panic to me
Mind you, you have no idea of how many "subscribers" FFXIV has and had, since Square Enix only ever released the numbers of active concurrent users.
Quite obviously those numbers weren't that impressive for Funcom, otherwise they would have released them, instead of talking about "subscribers".

I'll spell it out for you.

making "a profit" (and a very small one), is nowhere a sign of success for MMORPGs. if MMORPGs that "make a profit" were to be considered successful, critical failures like Warhammer Online, Age of Conan and Darkfall online would be a success. Companies don't invest years of development and resources to make a pittance in revenue.

Golden rule. if you know nothing about the market and marketing (or base what little you know on wikipedia lol), don't argue about it. You're well entitled to like a game, but basing some laughable concept of "success" on generic free subscriber numbers is laughable at best.

[Wolfie]

Yes ffxiv needs to be MORE user unfriendly. That way they can drop the user base down to 1000 players so they can cater to TRUE mmo connoisseurs and ff fans