The Round Table. A fair debate thread...

[Asriah]

...for those of us with too much time on their hands. Lets be honest, there's nothing better to do then either promise ourselves things will get better or be angry (i.e. RABBLE RABBLE).

So let us begin. No wait, first I have to say something. I am a 1.0 player who did not qualify for Legacy status. So since Saturday morning I've been glued to the streams who have permission from SE PR department under a media license (MMORPG.com and Gametrailers). To be honest, I'm not too happy that I can't play, but after seeing all that has happened this weekend I'm pretty sure that if I could things may have been way worse.

Now we begin. There are a few vocal minorities here. Two main groups. The first are people who can't play the game and are very unhappy about it. The second vocal minority are the people who can't play the game and are still optimistic. The vast majority of the rest of the player base hasn't had much of a problem and probably has yet to even visit these forums.

I want to start from the perspective of the people who are not happy with this situation.

Some want to argue that Early Access is a privilege and that is fine if you want to convince yourself of that. But realistically speaking, Early Access was offered as a bonus in order to get more people to preorder the game. Knowing the way that I am, I have to say that if I had access to Early Access and had problems playing the game I wouldn't have been bothered by it too much. I've been waiting since the announcement for 1.0 to be delivered a quality product, I can wait another week if required. However this does not change the fact that people who are unhappy with the situation have VALID complaints.

Now from the perspective of people who are still optimistic.

Just because someone can be patient and wait does not mean they are FF Fanbois4lyfe. A lot of people are used to this stuff and can do other things while they wait for things to settle down. Also for the record, the whole 'DIS WURST LUNCH EVAH' discussion is redundant. It is silly and pointless to compare a game launch with another when there are countless factors setting them apart.

Either side is not being unreasonable. There is indeed a level of expectation to be met when there is a monetary investment. You can't hate on the consumer. Results speak louder than apologies. I think it can be agreed from both sides that SE really needs to work on communication. Too often we find ourselves perplexed at how every MMO company fails to communicate with Its player base. Being a Japan based company who prefers to use squiggle squiggles (Japanese) is no excuse either.

The worst part of this whole situation for me is the amount of false information flying around. It is typical of a rough MMO launch of this much hype to be the victim of hater bandwagoning. So there are a few points I want to touch on.

1. "This game will go f2p in a few months, watch".

Lots of people throwing this one down. Sad to burst that bubble, It is never going to happen. It isn't that Final Fantasy is automatically cooler in the whole mix of things (well actually, considering the loyal fanbase it really is, but that's not the point). I'd like to give some insight to the MMO market as a whole in order to explain this better.

There are two sides to the coin that is MMORPGs. You have the developers with the investors that back them, and then the consumers. Consumers look for, and ultimately value, efficient entertainment. They will only spend money on what they feel to be worth it to them. The business side of the MMORPG industry looks at it and sees nothing but $$. Believe it or not, most MMORPGs these days are planned around business models and cost of development. What most consumers don't know or care to know is how much money development companies actually have to spend. The truth is, it is very rare that a company has the funds to develop an MMORPG, as it is the most expensive kind of game to make.

2. "P2P is dead, look at the last several AAA releases and how they went F2P in no time".

The most important thing to remember that it is never the business model that causes the game to fail. Games that fail do so because they suck, period. All these P2P games that go free to play are funded by investors that expect their money back with profit. If a game fails to have enough funds in order to meet these 'demands', then it must go free to play in order to bring in more players and essentially increase the income.

Why doesn't this apply to Square Enix? Because like Blizzard's World of Warcraft, FFXIV's development was funded internally. In fact, SE had a lot of money already from their success with FFXI, which is still active today with a P2P business model.

3. "If FFXIV fails the company will go bankrupt".

It isn't possible for FFXIV to bankrupt SE. This game is internally funded so all SE has to do is make back the money they put into it. I believe Yoshi-P stated somewhere that they only need 400k subs to break even in a reasonable amount of time. There are well over 400k froth-at-the-mouth super fanboys in Japan chomping at the bit.

Lastly lets be honest here, most Free to Play MMOs are too restrictive to be healthy for the entire playerbase. It is my opinion that the F2P model is a cancer in the MMORPG industry. It's a fantastic model for other genres that don't require such a monster budget like League of Legends (and other MOBAs).

4. "3102 error has been around since 1.0, SE STILL hasn't fixed it!".

3102 is just an error code. Who is to say that it's the exact same error? That seems highly unlikely considering how 2.0 (A Realm Reborn) was rebuilt from the ground up.

Now I would like to talk about some speculative thoughts. This is where I'm really hoping to get some opinions from people.

It seems to me like the biggest problem right now is that there are not enough servers/capacity to support everyone trying to play the game. I'm willing to bet that all the errors associated with game are caused by server load. Every time SE takes down the servers for maintenence it is either to add capacity or redirect hardware to other functions. Simply put, there is just not enough hardware.

Something I've thought about. A lot of people think that SE should have been more prepared for the situation. But theres a factor here no one could have proper insight on. That being, who knows for sure how many players are returning to the game from 1.0? 1.0's launch was also majorly hyped and there was a huge number of players who quit early and a highly decent number of players who are Legacy. None of these people had to rebuy the game so they are not part of any preorder statistic. while I personally also like the idea that SE should have had a lot more hardware on standby, this seems to be a constant problem with every single big MMO launch. I'm not educated enough on the details of why these measures can't be taken. But I do understand that the highest load on the servers is always around launch and that not everyone likes what they see and cancel, which could result in a lot of unused hardware/low pop communities.

A lot of people have been saying this game is too simplistic and easy. Considering where we're at right now, first impressions of low level content are hardly proper when talking about the whole game. We have to remember that MMORPGS have to appeal to the casual massses as well if they have to be successful. That is unavoidable. But why is this a problem for 'hard core' players? Is it just the idea that the game has ANY easy content that bothers them? If you ask me, the real question is "Is the developer also keeping 'hard core' players in mind?" How can you answer this question if all you've experienced is the lower end content? Maybe there isn't enough content to challenge players, but that doesn't mean easy content is anything you should complain about.

It's more realistic to expect that there wont be any huge difficulty choke holds leading up to level cap. Because with respect to casual players, everyone has to get there. So again I ask, is there enough difficulty to please the masochists? Maybe some legacy players can give some good insight by now.

Alright I'll wrap up with the announcement that SE is extending Early Access. I find this to be a good move by them. Although I find it interesting that the NDA will still be in effect.

[Azurus]

The one point I'd like to make straight away as I could not ignore it, whether on the optimistic side or angry side most people are not playing with no problems on the NA/EU servers so I don't know why you think these groups are a vocal minority. Hell it would be closer to say the entire population is split between these 2 camps. Maybe some dodge the errors by afking not zoning or doing instances, but I'd consider that being an affected play experience as well.

Edit: also I like the idea of this thread however I think it would have been better to take each point on at a time as this format is very overwhelming and will just lead to a series of novels. Wed get much better discussion if we could focus on one point at a time.

[Asriah]

The one point I'd like to make straight away as I could not ignore it, whether on the optimistic side or angry side most people are not playing with no problems on the NA/EU servers so I don't know why you think these groups are a vocal minority. Hell it would be closer to say the entire population is split between these 2 camps. Maybe some dodge the errors by afking not zoning or doing instances, but I'd consider that being an affected play experience as well.

Edit: also I like the idea of this thrwad however I think it would have been better to take each point on at a time as this format is very overwhelming and will just lead to a series of novels. Wed get much better discussion if we could focus on one point at a time.

A far smaller percentage of players actually visit the forums. That is why everyone up here is part of a vocal minority. I only mean to identify the different people visiting these forums.

Also as far as forums go, it's impossible to organize a thread to speak about one issue at a time. Especially considering the limiting post counts. There's nothing wrong with people replying with what they want to talk about. The whole point of this anyways is to make time pass faster anyways :P

[ShenDrakar]

Great post op.

[Bubaru]

So, as for saying it is the minority/majority, without numbers it is really speculation at this point. Even if you count that there are 50k people on the forums because they are having issues, how many are playing? I don't have an answer, just point out that bringing up that there is a majority/minority with issues/no issues is silly (unless you have data, then please share, I love numbers ).

As for the more servers bit, I am not sure that would fix it. From what I gather it sounds more like they are having issues with their queueing system rather than capacity. Sure, it does look like there are a lot of NA/EU players looking for a home, hence the full servers, but the issue is that their queue cannot handle the load that is present. This leads me to believe that SE didn't anticipate this level of response on the NA/EU side. That's a sad thought, but maybe promising? I like to think that there is some good in thinking there are a lot of people with interest in the game right now. I've been enjoying it, and I'm glad others are too (well, at least when we can play). I don't know their back end, so I can't really present any facts there but that is what it sounds like. As an example, their queue to fetch from the data server was built to take a load of x number of requests/second, and they are now hitting x+100/second, which is causing backup to their queue, thus slowing the time for every request. This can ramp up with more flooding, or it could just be that their load was never able to handle the amount of requests going on right now (once again, from probably poorly judging the demand on NA/EU). Once again, this is speculative opinion on my behalf.

The game is a bit simple at the moment, but I haven't faced higher end content. Even if it is early solo content that is easy, this happens a lot with MMO's that I've been part of. The game does trigger nostalgia for the old MMO's for me, though. Reminds me of when I played EQ back in the day, but that might be just the feel/being able to see people in cities. I do hope there is some challenge later on, but I wonder which ideology they took on, being Western (individualism, can do it all myself) or Eastern (collectivism, let's work together). I honestly enjoy the latter more, although it can be rather frustrating to classes who primarily are of a damage role.

Question though: what do you mean extending early access? Not sure I saw that note. Also, I do like topics that are well thought out with punctuation. Thanks .

[Asriah]

So, as for saying it is the minority/majority, without numbers it is really speculation at this point. Even if you count that there are 50k people on the forums because they are having issues, how many are playing? I don't have an answer, just point out that bringing up that there is a majority/minority with issues/no issues is silly (unless you have data, then please share, I love numbers ).

Question though: what do you mean extending early access? Not sure I saw that note. Also, I do like topics that are well thought out with punctuation. Thanks .

Official Forums being the home to the vocal minorities is actually very typical of any MMORPG. I mean lets say that for all 25 NA/EU servers the max capacity load for each is 1000. This of course does not include those trying to access them. Do you see even a fraction of that number posting here? What about those who are just browsing? Do you think it takes more than 50% of that, or 25% of that to completely hang up these forums?

It's just simple logic really, even if it's speculation.


http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...cfe40c90154d51

Early Access Period
August 24, 2013 (Saturday), 2:00 a.m. to August 29, 2013 (Thursday), 11:59 p.m. (PDT)

Alright, that confuses me a bit. If the game launches tomorrow (27th), how is it early access through the 29th?

It essentially means the free month everyone who preordered got starts Friday instead of tomorrow (Same with the 2 weeks for welcome back campaign people). Everyone gets to play starting tomorrow but SE has given 2 extra free days as compensation for the problems.

[Bubaru]

Early Access Period
August 24, 2013 (Saturday), 2:00 a.m. to August 29, 2013 (Thursday), 11:59 p.m. (PDT)

Alright, that confuses me a bit. If the game launches tomorrow (27th), how is it early access through the 29th?

edit: I guess this could mean they are pushing back launch day, but nothing seems to be updated saying that is the case, yet. Hmm.

Also, got ya. Extra play time makes sense.