If I could interview Yoshida.

[Mychael]

1) Tanaka commented on this. It was to allow players of XI who were attached to their characters a chance to create an avatar similar to the one on which they spent so many years.

2) Get over it. The whole thing is blown out of proportion. It's just a fun little gift.

3) It was as much a masterpiece as are the crayon-covered sheets of paper on the refrigerators of parents the world over. XI was a decent game in which I personally invested a lot of time but it was far from the shining example of what a game should be that people make it out to be.

4) What parts of CoP do you want, exactly? If you mean the phenomenal story line, I'm there with you.

But if you're talking about things like a frustratingly long grind for non-flavor-of-the-month jobs, arbitrary fetch missions that require exorbant amounts of time to essentially just clear a hurdle, RMT-dominated economy, the absolute need for at least five other players willing to sacrifice their time to do anything of value and the absurd amount of time spent watching a Moogle spin because a healer and/or tank just wouldn't give your group the time of day because there was no refresher/SATA/Sam army, etc. etc. etc. then no thank you.

1 & 2 are perfect.

With your answers to 3/4, I agree with you wholheartedly on every point you make. Nonetheless, I think you missed the point the OP was making a little. I can't say for sure, but I don't think the reference was to the CoP content, but to the time period. The "CoP era" as she called it was more-or-less XI's prime. It was around a year or so* after the NA release and somewhere near two* after the JP release, but people were still joining regularly, keeping--as someone else said--a balance between noobs, normal players, and elitists. I don't know if you experienced a bad server, but during this "era" for me there wasn't a shortness of players of any level. The problems you describe didn't start for me until the population started dying--in fact, when I remember CoP coming out, I remember the leveling areas being so full that we'd have to find unusual, non-optimal zones to level in (i.e. Movalpolos). And I remember a thousand pickup shouts for just about every CoP mission going on for a year after the release, because some people didn't get the levels needed for that long.

I think the OP made a mistake by using "CoP era" as a sobriquet for "a game's prime."

That said, I think the OP needs to realize that this game's release doomed it, and that it will probably never reach a "prime" like XI experienced.

Just in case I misunderstood the OP, I want to say that I don't want a copy/paste of XI anymore than anyone else. The first two points are questionable. While I feel your concern for the "game's direction," I think it's important to remember that the game still hasn't really moved forward in any direction. While we get little updates here and there to 1.0, the major changes aren't supposed to hit until 2.0, and so it's difficult to judge the "direction" until we see the "real" content that SE is working on and saving for the 2.0 release. What we should ask to be carried from the "CoP era" is merely the playerbase and depth of storyline. Some of the CoP cutscenes made me cry. I'm lucky to get a raised eyebrow out of most of the XIV scenes. And sadly, the playerbase is something a game developer can only help so much. If you want to see tons of players like we did in XI around CoP, go out and hang signs in your local malls, and convince all of your friends to buy the game.


*I can't remember exactly...