Tanaka or Yoshi?

[Duelle]

Yoshi is not promising much community-related content with the small exception of some instanced dungeons (which is itself a spit in the face of MMO design). Instances turn games into entrance lobbies. An MMO is supposed to be a persistent world, by definition.

Tanaka said in an interview that they would not have instanced dungeons primarily because he wanted players to be playing in the same world. If anyone knew what an MMO was, it was Tanaka.

You really need to take off the rose colored goggles about community when it comes to actual meaningful progression. That is, unless you enjoyed the needless competition and drama for certain mobs and drops in FFXI and suddenly want more of that here, despite there being people like me who grew sick of that crap very early in our time playing MMO's. The concept of an in-game community is not going to die just because of instanced content. And the positives far outweigh any of your perceived negatives on the matter.

Yes, I despise in-game drama and competition.

[Nuru]

Even with these fast-spawn NMS, there is still drama going around. >_> I've witnessed stupid shouts while doing R30 leves in Nanawa Mines. Kokoroon is a hate magnet. :P

[Arik]

What the heck are you Tanaka supporters smoking, cause I want a little bit.

Tanaka pulled a George Lucas, flat out.

Without getting off on a HUGE tangent here, the reason this game fell flat on its face is because of Tanaka, and his contempt for the player base.
It poured through almost every design decision.
He was well aware that the player base would have appreciated more playable races, but left them out, even after "admitting" that they were, in fact, completed.
He decided to create a game engine that uses server-side UI that will sometimes bring the game to an almost unplayable state, because he knew best....
He gave us the battle system that has no energy or identity...
He gave us stats that don't matter....
He gave us absolutely absurd recipe combinations that are too tedious to be bothered with...
He gave us the Market Wards with absolutely no tools to properly make the wards function in any reasonable capacity...
He made me have to level a crafting job simply to keep the cost of repairs down, even though I originally had little interest in being a crafter...
He gave us so many other problems that I'm just too tired to list ATM.

He did all of this because in his mind, regardless of what the player base begged for....he knew best.

He gave us a turd, and got angered with us when we told him that it stunk.

Basically, I think I found a metaphor that describes Tanaka's FFXIV experience.

Tanaka built an unbelievably exotic looking Porsche, but without an engine. He simply cut a hole in the floor for us to stick our feet out of.
I mean, yeah, you can probably get the car to move, and it would be an amazing accomplishment if you did, but it doesn't make the entire scenario any less ridiculous, frustrating, or absurd.

I just....I don't know.
LOL..how did we end up here...

I wish Yoshida all the best, because he has a herculean task ahead of him.

I appreciate him opening the channels of communication.
I appreciate the fact that he has decided to scrap the Tanaka stuff that made no sense, even if it does push development of other things back 6-9 months.
I appreciate the fact that Yoshida seems to acknowledge, in some capacity, that just because the player base isn't involved in creating games, that they do have valid perspectives on what works and what doesn't work.

Fatigue....really?

I mean, why in the world does this game function worse than FFXI....

I'm not asking for this game to be FFXI-2 in the least bit..

But why does this game not function, at a fundamental level, as well as a game that was created almost 10 years ago.

Peace out, go Yoshida!!!!!

[Daedae]

I'd love a balance between instanced content, and roaming NM competition, but we're veering off topic! The best thing we can do is provide honest feedback and not wallow in the past or nitpick the future.

[Ostia]

Tanaka = CC/CT

Yoshida.....= Some dragon quest card game.. nuff said

[gifthorse]

You really need to take off the rose colored goggles about community when it comes to actual meaningful progression. That is, unless you enjoyed the needless competition and drama for certain mobs and drops in FFXI and suddenly want more of that here, despite there being people like me who grew sick of that crap very early in our time playing MMO's. The concept of an in-game community is not going to die just because of instanced content. And the positives far outweigh any of your perceived negatives on the matter.

Yes, I despise in-game drama and competition.

You misunderstand me.

[Iron]

If I have to pick between Tanaka, whom we hold responsible for the piece of crap that this game was at launch, and any other random guy.. hey i'll give that other guy his chance. I don't really care what Tanaka's past accomplishments were and how many great games he was involved in. The game I am playing now is FFXIV, and if it isn't good, it is at least to some extent his fault.

Now comes the new guy Yoshi to replace him. I'll say I don't know much about his past work.. Again I don't care. After the fiasco that was the FFXIV launch, anyone put in charge to replace Tanaka would have been seen as a messiah, even some hobo from the street..(well give him a bath and put a suit on him 1st maybe). I just want to see concrete improvements, irrespective of who is in charge. Right now, the game is progressing but I'll probably need to wait for 1.18 to really see where this game is going.

In the meantime, I've liked some of the changes.. I haven't liked some, for example, how NMs were made way too easy.. I don't like things being dumbed down.. but that's another topic.

[Shai]

What the heck are you Tanaka supporters smoking, cause I want a little bit.

It's called "Reality," brother. You can have some. Take a look at what changed in FFXIV from September 20th to December 31st and don't skip the patch notes that Tanaka outlined before he left that got thrown away (even though we were assured they wouldn't be). He transformed the game from a heaping turd to an actual working game. He fixed the wards. Created the searches. Added the ONLY end-game content. All of that in 2.5 months.

Here's a short list of Yoshida's accomplishments. He made SP/EXP increase (especially 1-24). He made the monsters bigger. He made spell effects bigger to match them. Finally, 5 months later he added some new gear and some mid-Rank content. SideQuests are good but completable the day they are released.

I'm not saying Yoshida is worthless, I'm just saying he hasn't delivered. Tanaka may not be very personable, but he got things done. Yoshida may deliver some quality work to the game and turn it around, but you can't rule out that Tanaka wouldn't have simply because he was borderline rude to his consumers.

Without getting off on a HUGE tangent here, the reason this game fell flat on its face is because of Tanaka, and his contempt for the player base.

Bold words. Too bad everything you list could be the result of MANY things, first on my tongue being "pressured to release an unfinished game" and then he scrambled to make what it was (a big stinker) something that actually worked. The Market Wards are the absolute BEST example. He turned that around so fast. It's now basically an Auction House and the whole "Auction House" argument has all but died - because it WORKS. It didn't work, I can understand the contempt for it, but your blaming Tanaka's attitude without any clear evidence how contempt for players equals poorly delivered launch.

Also an alternative to Crafting (that I found useful) is making friends. Imagine that, a reason to network. Shame on him. I joined several LS just because I wanted more "crafter" friends and they are still my friends (and still fixing my gear for free) to this day.

Your metaphor I won't even quote because it basically describes nothing.

I'm one of the biggest "Tanaka haters" around but clearly he knew what he was doing. He was going to bring this game somewhere and it looked like it was going to be in the 1st Q of 2011. We're now getting into summer and haven't gotten ANYTHING except minor UI fixes, latency issues and some tidbits of content that last a day or two at best.

Where is Yoshida bringing us? He's about to slap together a brand new battle system that we know NOTHING about. We haven't heard a whisper of a HINT what it's going to be like - aside from auto-attack. How are we any more in the loop now than when Tanaka was at the helm? Yoshida doesn't even bother to tell us ... what he plans to change, how he's going to change it, how it's going to affect stamina/abilities/strategy. It's all a big mystery. It drives me crazy. I thought this guy was gonna communicate with us.

As I said, I may be too critical of Yoshida at this point. He may have a great vision, but not sharing it with us is doing him a huge disservice - especially with me (and apparently with others).

[darkstarpoet1]

give me tanaka and his vision back anyday. for those of you talking about we are spitting in yoshi's face, wasn't that exactly what you did with tanaka? he told you they had problems and even told you what he wanted to do, but you spit on him. he had plans and a vision and put it out for everyone and people spit on him because they did not want to wait. now we put in a new crew and they are destroying the game and you want to give them time.

i'm sorry i do not care to go back to pre-teens to play another lame rpg single player. if i wanted to i have my nintendo and ps1 sitting in the room with me. at least they have a direction and a story. this game is getting closer to the complexity of the old seseme street 123 game on nintendo. i may stop playing soon with this new direction and play some real tough games like pong.

[Shai]

Oh, I forgot to add to Tanaka's accomplishments in 2.5 months that he threw away the "SP as you attack" and threw together "static SP gain per kill" due to fan response. He changed the entire way you gain SP (based only on poor reception to his previous system). He changed all that by Dec 15. Then Yoshida left us in the dark for 4-6 weeks, and still hasn't bothered to tell us where the game is going. It doesn't meet my expectations.