I think the reason why everyone is freaking out is...

[MrLion]

Another fanboy topic trying to convice people to play.
/facepalm

Umm no...I'm not convincing anyone to play it...I'm simply reading the roadmaps for you, which is what many people failed to do, as you can see nowadays in society, at least in the english-speaking countries, common sense has become a rarity.

[Synfrag]

Agree completely. $13 isn't bad and for the people riding on the "It's the concept, not the amount" wagon, boycotting isn't going to do anything good if you want to help for the future. It's everyone's choice to stay or go. If you want cookie cutter MMO with a few new features there are numerous other games.

Warning! Comparisons and Opinion to follow

Personally after seeing many MMO launches and continuing to play some I have the most hope for FFXIV.

Aion's launch for example, the first 3 months were terrible (and payed for). There wasn't much content, server outages, server rollbacks, almost no items and now 2 years later they have added only a handful of endgame instances, a "new" graphics engine which is a joke and completely broken the game by quadrupling drop rates. Their "content" patches were at 6-8 month intervals if even that vs. our 1-3 month intervals. What is NC Soft's development plan? Add more costumes and cosmetic garbage! Yay!

WoW cannot be used as a comparison for development because their budget dwarfs FFXIV. Not to mention they don't have to pay writers, modelers, animators, lighting artists or texture designers because it either doesn't exist or any 12 year old can do it in google sketchup

SE on the other hand is not only overhauling it's entire world, adding content and fixing broken things over the next 11-13 months but at the end of that it's dropping in our laps a whole new redesigned game for no additional cost. The time and money going into this project deserves our paying support. 1.19 was great, golden no but still great and come 1.20 or 1.21 I truly think it will be at it's launch ready state.

So we will begin paying for a launch ready game when it is launch ready, then getting a new 2.0 version for free. How do people argue with that logic?

[Molly_Millions]

How do people argue with that logic?

With illogical arguments. You've been reading these threads, right?

[Efrye]

I didn't read further than the first page, but I still want to add that I agree wholeheartedly with the OP. Especially with his answer to "Why pay for an incomplete game with no content till 2.0?".

There is tons of content already and there's going to be more with each patch, some of which is developed specifically for those of us who stay with the game pre 2.0. For me, that's more than enough to justify the full monthly fees.

[Synfrag]

With illogical arguments. You've been reading these threads, right?

Oh right... that!

[Zeroeffect]

I would pay for this game even if it was crap just as long as I enjoyed it.

If you enjoy the game then pay for it and if you don't like the game don't it's really that simple.

[MrLion]

Please keep it to the topic...I don't care about who doesn't have common sense or who's dumb.

[Kinghoran]

I would pay for this game even if it was crap just as long as I enjoyed it.

If you enjoy the game then pay for it and if you don't like the game don't it's really that simple.

That's so simple and yet people either don't want to see that logic or just can't fathom that they could just walk away from this game.

OR, they could sign up for a paid account and if it turns out that paid PC accounts also get the 3 month free to play trial period like the PS3 people then they could just cancel the account before the 3 months are up if they really hate paying for a game.

[Valdir]

Very well phrased post. Hopefully it will clear up a few things for some people.

Just wanted to say that ^.
I agree with your post; and i Love Alerith's signature. XD

[feint2021]

Hey Feint. Allow me to illustrate this through an analogy which may assist you in understanding this a bit more.

FFXIV at launch was similar to a train wreck (literally). Tanaka was the conductor and he derailed the train. It's a huge mess and after a little bit of time (2-3 months for ffxiv) the company that owns the train (SE) put it back on the tracks and found a new conductor Yoshi-p. The development of FFXIV is similar to a train which starts up slowly, slowly, then builds momentum until it becomes an unstoppable force.

The new development team took over a project that wasn't theirs, they had no familiarity with the coding, database or any other project elements. It takes time to get familiar with these things in order to build something you are confident in. Give them a few months to 'get the feel' of how the old team designed the game, find there resources and be able to confidently understand what they need to do. Very few changes, small changes, come in this time... they are basically exploring the game (from a coding standpoint) and what they can do to make changes.

Eventually they become 'experts' in the design of the game and can make changes with greater speed and efficiency. Back to the train, it's now cooking up a lot of power and starting to move at near full speed.

So it's very possible in the first 6 months they only got 5% of the current "FFXIV feel", the following 2 months they could have manage another 10%, the next 2 another 15%, and the following another 20% - which brings us to the one year marker. Where they claimed it was 50%. Now however they are moving at full speed, have more resources assigned to the project and can slam through changes easily. Getting another 40% is fairly reasonable if you think about it like this, and again as it has been repeated 4 dozen times in this thread... they said CLOSE to 100%. I would consider 85-90+% "Close" to 100%.

Just remember that this project was foreign to the new dev team and they had to figure out everything inside and out. They have said a few times that the coding is very sloppy and complex. Working on a coding project that isn't your own and trying to figure out what others did takes time. They took the time in the beginning to figure things out, which was slow to start, the changes came slow, the learning curve was massive. People shouldn't be surprised that a year later things are being pumped out quicker than before. They should be able to make more impacting changes in the same time that it took to do small tweaks beforehand.

And so is the life of a developer..... this is why I changed majors


I hope this helps to alleviate some of your worries.

That goes along what they have been saying. Well thought out reply, thanks I suppose I was surprised what that comment because of jobs not being here yet but then again it's not far away either.