Why don't they just give FFXI a graphical upgrade, add some new feautres and call it a day because that is the only way to revive the franchise.
Totally agree! If they were wise this is exactly what they would do. Anything is fixable, but FF XIV would take way to much resource and time, while likely having very low subscription figures.
I'm pretty sure those are PCU numbers (Peak Concurrent Users) or 'active players online' numbers, meaning measurements made of how many players were logged in playing. As an example: CCP mentioned a PCU of about 45k when it had 300-330k subs.
For a server, a number of players logged in at peak times of 1000-2000 is a well to high populated server, everything above 2k at peak times and a server is thriving to bursting. 500-1000 online at the same time generally feels like low to medium population.
I don't think this is the PCU of FFXIV. This chart is merely a snapshot of CCU (concurrent user) at Japanese prime time (possibly). It may be used as a PCU for Japanese prime time with errors.
Let's not forget that FFXIV does not have localization. So, the game server has at least 3 different peaks. Japanese peak, US peak and European peak. To get the PCU for FFXIV you have to take PCU of all 3 peaks time and add them together since these groups of players are quite independent.
This chart does not show much really. It shows a downward trend of Japanese players at prime time but it does not show anything about US as well as EU trend on those same days. Also, let's not forget this chart is compiled by players with no credibility and un-known intension.
Statistics can be manipulated. Numbers like these are snapshots and can be taken as very specific times to support the intension of the person who made the chart.
I don't know much about PCU's and stuff, only learned about them today. And maybe they can be manipulated.
But the CEO's statement isn't manipulated (disregarding minor translation itches).
Put those 2 together and the situation does not look very good tbh.
Why don't they just give FFXI a graphical upgrade, add some new feautres and call it a day because that is the only way to revive the franchise.
Totally agree! If they were wise this is exactly what they would do. Anything is fixable, but FF XIV would take way to much resource and time, while likely having very low subscription figures.
I agree with you guys they should have done this in the first place.
Can you imagine what the investors would do if you tried to pitch that in a meeting LoL
"Hey I know we just spent millions of dollars on a brand new game with enhanced graphics and it cost us 75% of our profits and made us the laughing stock of the worlds gaming community but can you invest some more money in this 5-6 year old game and give it a facelift?"
Somehow I don't think they'll buy it.
"I'm not cheap I'm incredibly subconsciously financially optimized" "The worst part of censorship is ------------------"
Why don't they just give FFXI a graphical upgrade, add some new feautres and call it a day because that is the only way to revive the franchise.
And ditch a large amount of player base on the PS2? The PS2 is already at capacity for graphical power. You cannot go any further in the graphic department but the player base sitll there.
Why don't they just give FFXI a graphical upgrade, add some new feautres and call it a day because that is the only way to revive the franchise.
Totally agree! If they were wise this is exactly what they would do. Anything is fixable, but FF XIV would take way to much resource and time, while likely having very low subscription figures.
I agree with you guys they should have done this in the first place.
Can you imagine what the investors would do if you tried to pitch that in a meeting LoL
"Hey I know we just spent millions of dollars on a brand new game with enhanced graphics and it cost us 75% of our profits and made us the laughing stock of the worlds gaming community but can you invest some more money in this 5-6 year old game and give it a facelift?"
Somehow I don't think they'll buy it.
Stupid question maybe ... but how hard would it be to replace the FFXI graphics with the FFXIV ones?
Why don't they just give FFXI a graphical upgrade, add some new feautres and call it a day because that is the only way to revive the franchise.
Totally agree! If they were wise this is exactly what they would do. Anything is fixable, but FF XIV would take way to much resource and time, while likely having very low subscription figures.
I agree with you guys they should have done this in the first place.
Can you imagine what the investors would do if you tried to pitch that in a meeting LoL
"Hey I know we just spent millions of dollars on a brand new game with enhanced graphics and it cost us 75% of our profits and made us the laughing stock of the worlds gaming community but can you invest some more money in this 5-6 year old game and give it a facelift?"
Somehow I don't think they'll buy it.
Stupid question maybe ... but how hard would it be to replace the FFXI graphics with the FFXIV ones?
Very. FFXI's engine wasn't designed to handle newer shadows, lager textures, etc. FFXIV is on a completely new engine wih graphical features that didn't exist 7 years ago.
Plus, the PS2 couldn't handle it, so you'd have to have the PS2 players separated from the PC players.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.- -And on the 8th day, man created God.-
Stupid question maybe ... but how hard would it be to replace the FFXI graphics with the FFXIV ones?
The models can be converted/imported easily. The problem would be getting the engine to handle the enhanced vertex load and the textures. Not to mention the animation programming and some bone weighting problems between engines. Also I'm not sure if FF11 makes use of bumbmapping, normal maps, specularity maps and any other additional texture layers added. So pretty much I have no idea but there is a loooooong list of things that would have to be checked off.
"I'm not cheap I'm incredibly subconsciously financially optimized" "The worst part of censorship is ------------------"
whats up with these "if it has less then a million users it fails!" crap?
Imho a community can be a succes with 25K + people loaded on 1 or 2 servers.....i realy do
It is more or less 250K or 200K players the game needs. The reason for that is the fact that the game needs to get in development costs and hopefully get in some money for the company by the side.
A small idie company can make fine with 30K players but they have a lot fewer expenses than a company like SE.
Look on Tabula Rasa, EA closed it down at 75K players but they didn't see it earning money ever. Even fixing up a broken game cost a lot of money.
SE have realized that they made a big mistake by releasing the game too early (like Funcom, Mythic, SOE, Cryptic and many others), lets hope they are smart enough to fix it for the PS3 release.
This is just a really simple look at what he said without any thought behind it. If those leaving think the game is irredeemable, which most don't feel that way, they won't come back to try it out again is what he was trying to say.
He wasn't saying FFXIV is going down the tubes, he was saying if those leaving think there is no potential in it, then they are in trouble.
Most I have heard is people have complaints but think it has potential down the road.
Glad to see that my server (fabul) has the 2nd lowest population. Maybe I will migrate away from this game as well. No fun if you have no one to play with.
I am entitled to my opinions, misspellings, and grammatical errors.
whats up with these "if it has less then a million users it fails!" crap?
Imho a community can be a succes with 25K + people loaded on 1 or 2 servers.....i realy do
SE have realized that they made a big mistake by releasing the game too early (like Funcom, Mythic, SOE, Cryptic and many others), lets hope they are smart enough to fix it for the PS3 release.
According to SE
"There's also a PS3 version of Final Fantasy XIV in the pipeline for March 2011. However, with ongoing PC problems that date may be subject to change. "
Looks like Se basically is gonna go down the route of champions, AoC, and other mmo's that never saw the light of day on console. The word is out that the game is garbage pulling a tabula rosa and cutting it off would be the wisest move they could make at this point. They will never see their investment pan out, and taking a 50-100 million dollar (total guesstimate) loss vs 100-150 million dollar loss seems the way to go. You will never make money and the the game needs millions more in development to make a quality game of itself with many of its core systems outright redesigned. On a game that is no doubt raping SE's profit margin for the quarter, why would they risk investing further into a game that has the worst metacritic rating of any AAA MMO to ever release? the more money they invest into this failboat, the harder it will sink them as an overall company instead of just sinking the FF name. IMO, cut losses, pull a tabula rosa, fire the right people and retire the FF name. If you build a quality game from scratch SE, people will come and play. It is all about quality and your FF games have undersold and disappointed worldwide because you forgot about quality ever since you merged with Enix, now it is all about shiny graphics and downright PITIFUL voice acting and steps backwards for the FF genre if not downright misteps altogether. FF14 is doomed and the writing is on the wall, it can definitely beat APB's 86 days though so that can be a reasonable goal for them before they pull the plug.
What baffles me is that alot and I mean ALOT of money was invested into FFXIV development and the end result was just appauling. What were they thinking is the constant question in my mind. The game was obviously by far not ready for launch, Square Enix wanted to rush it out (in my eyes to beat competitors, bet Blizzard CEO is laughing now). Many many game breaking issues, I had items of value vanish from my inventory, the leveling bug which saw people rank 30 in a day, the perm death bug, many other issues.
I praise them for been different then standard MMO's like EQ, WoW and Aion but when I play this game I feel like i'm beta testing something in it's Alpha stages. Then my mind goes Oh wait what, this is the complete game??
I'd argue no one expected "perfection" and that whole "oh people don't realize that all MMOs are rough at release and are expecting too much" doesn't really fit here.
The things that people are complaining about aren't bugs and glitches that were missed in Beta... They're things that SE has *deliberately* designed into the game. The UI isn't a "glitch" or "bug". The Market system isn't a "glitch" or "bug". The repetitive, copy and pasted terrain isn't a "glitch" or "bug"... And so on... Those are all things that are very deliberately part of the game's design. They are all things that people were saying going as far back as Alpha "Ahhh... we really don't like what you're doing here" and SE said, basically "Well, just bear with it. It'll all make sense after release".
Yes, the game is lacking content. Absolutely... it's extremely shallow in the content department and the way SE has - again, by design - placed arbitrary limitations on how said content is experienced doesn't help.
The only way you could argue "you need to give the game time to improve" is if, by that, you mean "give SE time to revamp numerous systems they completely botched on the first try... assuming they even bother"... which is pretty much exactly what people are left with.
/THREAD
Nothing else to discuss. He summed it up perfectly.
This is the latest example of developers who think they can just make the game however they want and expect people to play it. That works for single player games but not MMOs. Like it or not, MMOs MUST be a collaborative effort. Yes thats right. Developers HAVE to bring players onboard early in development and actually change the game based on feedback. There is a disturbing trend amongst MMO developers of bringing games to beta when they are pretty much finished and are unwilling to change anything. If they do this, they are doomed.
Sorry folks this game will not recover. It will also never make it to the PS3 release. Glad I saw this one coming and stayed clear.
Money is *always* the issue. It's what they make games with, it's *why* they make games. You think investors, banks and CEOs do this for "art"?
I disagree. Project management has a greater impact. I'm not denying that money is an important factor, but to me, FFXIV didn't run out of money. They made some terrible decisions such as UI design. Same with APB, where they focused so much on character customization but forgot to work on their engine. Or Warhammer where they aimed for way too high for their budget, only to butcher their content few weeks before a release.
Blaming it on the resources (money, number of developers, time...) is just an easy way not to take responsibility.
The issue with FFXIV is foolishness backed by unassailable arrogance straight from the top.
No game can survive that no matter how much money you throw at it. In fact it is a perfect example of the saying "Throwing good money after bad".
Gaming and enjoyment in general is a personal experience. You need to listen to the players. Part of that process is figuring out what they really mean and what is important and what is not really that important. Sometimes you do need to dismiss what some players say as people can be hard to figure or say stuff they do not fully mean. But still need to listen and understand what is communicated.
Money doesn't do this. Money doesn't even buy this. Of course you do need to pay someone to do this, but that doesn't mean you get it just because you have money. You also need to know who to hire to do it right. And of course understand it needs to be done and how to do it without sheer chaos ensuing.
Some projects are doomed to fail. Either because they are defined wrong and the people doing cannot change that or the people doing it are doing it wrong and are not going to change.
In reality most failures are more about bad management/design than lack of money. If they were managed well they would not bite off more than they could chew.
In fact you can usually tell bad management by the fact that they make the excuse of lack of money. Now in some cases a team is promised a certain amount of money and then that falls through and they have to rush crap out. But for many MMOs this is not the case, or if it becomes the case its because of years of poor management and an investor backs out (Microsoft did this to an MMO, vanguard I think).
I'd argue no one expected "perfection" and that whole "oh people don't realize that all MMOs are rough at release and are expecting too much" doesn't really fit here.
The things that people are complaining about aren't bugs and glitches that were missed in Beta... They're things that SE has *deliberately* designed into the game. The UI isn't a "glitch" or "bug". The Market system isn't a "glitch" or "bug". The repetitive, copy and pasted terrain isn't a "glitch" or "bug"... And so on... Those are all things that are very deliberately part of the game's design. They are all things that people were saying going as far back as Alpha "Ahhh... we really don't like what you're doing here" and SE said, basically "Well, just bear with it. It'll all make sense after release".
Yes, the game is lacking content. Absolutely... it's extremely shallow in the content department and the way SE has - again, by design - placed arbitrary limitations on how said content is experienced doesn't help.
The only way you could argue "you need to give the game time to improve" is if, by that, you mean "give SE time to revamp numerous systems they completely botched on the first try... assuming they even bother"... which is pretty much exactly what people are left with.
/THREAD
Nothing else to discuss. He summed it up perfectly.
This is the latest example of developers who think they can just make the game however they want and expect people to play it. That works for single player games but not MMOs. Like it or not, MMOs MUST be a collaborative effort. Yes thats right. Developers HAVE to bring players onboard early in development and actually change the game based on feedback. There is a disturbing trend amongst MMO developers of bringing games to beta when they are pretty much finished and are unwilling to change anything. If they do this, they are doomed.
Sorry folks this game will not recover. It will also never make it to the PS3 release. Glad I saw this one coming and stayed clear.
Exactly this game is more than just flawed or bugged.
It is a stunning paen to how arrogance can make someone incompetent through sheer ostrich head in the sand blindness.
As a professional software developer I am completely stunned and incredulous about the product they created. It looks nice but when you add it all up it is possibly the worst software product I have ever seen. It is so bad that I am taking out of gaming and saying ALL software.
There is only one way they thought this stuff was a good idea and that is by having their heads shoved so far up their own asses that red looked blue to them.
The very first part of ANY serious software project is getting requirements from you users. None of this stuff even makes sense from a user point of view. They never even bothered putting themselves in the users shoes. Their market system is assinine.
This is like someone telling you to make them a hat and you give them a shoe with no sole and half a shoe lace. You would looke at them and think they are crazy.
Its not flawed. Its just crap. It meets almost no ones desires and in point of fact everything they were tryign to accomplish has been done better and more user friendly in other games. Does anyone with even an ounce of objectivity think the market or crafting system is better than old SWG? Because it is not. Its just not. And SWG accomplished all the aims of this crafting/market system (and then some).
And this is not about testing. They genuinely thought alot of this was a good idea. Then bajlillions of people told them it wasn't and they were too arrgoant to listen. Even worse if they had bothered to take their heads out of their asses they could simply have looked at EQ2 to see how a crafting mini-game worked out and how its recieved by players. Hell at least EQ2's crafting minigame makes sense and is explained well via tooltips. I think I am doing it a disservice to mention it in the same paragraph, the shit might rub off on it.
I did not buy this game. I don't care about the Final Fantasy franchise it was never my cup of tea, but i have nothing against FF either. I don't feel burned in anyway either now or from past purchases. But this game is crap. I have such contempt for it that it almost makes me angry. Its not worth getting angry over since its a game, but since I am professional programmer it evokes memories of past projects and it brings back the disgust from those. But even more those memories pale in comparison to what must have gone on at SE to produce this steaming pile.
The sort of cranial rectal insertion must have been so truly epic that it boggles my mind.
When you code something as a programmer you MUST understand that other people will use. You must go through use cases and make sure it makes sense to other people and that their use of this product flows nicely.
FFXIV's market system is a slap in the face to a user. In no way does attempt to do this. In fact I would have to work hard to make something less usable. This is not about "easy" or "hard". This is about pointless busy work of clicking thing after thing after thing toward absolutely no purpose either aesthetic or functional. It is pure crap. Even if it worked out in a way where certain crafting player developed a reputation for having good stuff, just finding their selling NPC dude would be an annoying PITA or sorting through a horde of poorly spawning non-distinguishable avatars.
It is stunningly bad. Stunning. And so so so easy to have gathered data on implementation details from a frigging decade and more of other games. Its unconscionable. I can understand bugs, even a horde of bugs. But this, this just assinine crap its an insult. Bugs at least are tricky.
This is just purely bad ideas that only see the light of day because you allow arrogance to destroy any professional pride you have in doing the job properly. Any professional programmer can tell you this shit should not have gotten out of even an initial design phase. That they could not even ask basic questions about usability disgusts me.
hey i know nice little fairytales too. let us all tell some. Numbers of players were taken i think at NA primetime whic h is not JPN primetime. but hey who gives a buck. now let's get on with ffxi: numbers decreased a LOT since ffxiv came out and most don't want to come back to 11. what does that tell ya?
nevermind if the CEO of SE tells you this and asures you for your own sake : that SE will cancel support for ffxiv if it doesnt improve, you can be absolutely certain everytime that this will happen. there is no doubt about it.
IF this game gets pulled down by SE yeah it's a shame and yeah we all know a mmo these days has to be better than this. but will they really pull the plug? why not just freeze accounts in EU and america and let just japanese people play? because many of them enjoy the game. and i am not talking about the people writing in forums how awful this game is or on their blogs. the vast majority of japanese people enjoy this game.
if it gets cancelled completely worldwide: shame. yes i really would have liked to play this game in march 2011 when it was supposed to launch for ps3. that would be a sad thing.
but even SE is stuborn there is a pretty high number of people that find this game not apealing and boring. And SE should have known better. way better.
if it comes to an end: sad but there were reasons for that.
1. What is it that made you hate this game so much?
2. Don't you have a better game to play that is awesome and not a failure?
PS: Sure, you are free to post anything you want about the game. I just want to understand the motivation behind this because it seems to be an obsession.
No, it's a site for everyone, haters and fanbois alike. Don't like reading what you think are "bad" threads, don't read them.
Don't like what I or anyone else has to say about your "precious", use the block button, that's what it's there for.
1. If you have to ask, maybe you should do more reading and less ineffectual ranting.
2. I have plenty of other games that I'm playing right now, both mmo and singleplayer, so don't you worry yourself over me.
You're coming into threads threatening to report people for shit they didn't do simply because you can't handle anything bad to be said about the game, and you have the audacity to call anyone else obsessed?
I still don't see your, choujiofkono's or anyones point in bashing this game. If you don't like it then don't play it and move along. Why the hate?
I guess there is no reason or you would have told me by now. It's just the thrill of bashing a game. In a few weeks when the other new games come out you probably move on to their forums.
It's really sad. I feel bad for you.
Sorry but who are you telling people to move along? and if you love the game so much why are you not playing it? see what i did there?
I too feel bad for you, that you would rather attack OP and those who are discussing a statement given by CEO himself. It is not something players made it up so reading you lashing out at players is sad and funny at the same time.
Typical fanboy rage when every other defense for game fails. This is classic line 'why are you here if you hate game so much? move along.' yeah i never read that one before. lol
Who could have thought that WOW could bring super power like USA to its knees?
Originally posted by Arcken
To put it in a nutshell, our society is about to hit the fan, grades are dropping, obesity is going up,childhood the USA is going to lose its super power status before too long, but hey, as long as we have a cheap method to babysit our kids, all will be well no? Im picking on WoW btw because its the beast that made all of this possible
Best example so far for me........nice gfx and a gameplay with lots of flaws = fail. wow = good gameplay and bad gfx = win
Company's still dont get it dont they......the gameplay matters, not the gfx. One of the better examples is also Minecraft.......(very) bad gfx and good gameplay = win if this minecraft wasnt all about mining it would be my next UO. yeah i know its called MINEcraft but imagine the same concept of crafting in a game that is more then mining and building.......that would be awesome.
feel bad for the fans of FF series tough
Minecraft is only in the alpha stages. It will have more stuff in in like dungeons and combat once it's done.
I still don't see your, choujiofkono's or anyones point in bashing this game. If you don't like it then don't play it and move along. Why the hate?
I guess there is no reason or you would have told me by now. It's just the thrill of bashing a game. In a few weeks when the other new games come out you probably move on to their forums.
It's really sad. I feel bad for you.
I think I can safely state that most of us don't like what we're seeing, and certainly don't enjoy seeing SE releasing such statement. In the perfect world, we would all be cheerfull in the games we like, and we're all looking forward to play a quality MMO we enjoy.
In this case, I believe we want to keep discussing about it because we feel concerned. We want to let them know that they need to improve the overall quality of their product, especially at release. Just take a look at the other super hyped games in development; there are often posts that sound like this: "OMG I cannot wait! Please release this game now!!", then followed by "I've learned my lesson from some previous released game and I'm ready to wait."
Finally, forums being forums (and so are any form of newstertainment), negative posts and comments always draw much more attention than positive ones. There are few good posts here, but they're not likely to provoke as much reaction or discussions as bad ones.
The game is at a breaking point right now. It can definitely be salvaged or can it crash and burn as one of the biggest MMO/GAME failures of all time.
I enjoy the game, but it's far from perfect. It has a fraction of the content as most mmo's coming out right now and it also has a fraction of the content of FFXI. It's reasonable to assume a new game will not offer as much as one that was in developement for 3-4 years and released for another 8 years after that. But lets compare apples to apples. FFXIV has huge potential and is failing to deliver.
The answer to whether or not this game is salvaged depends on how fast the game can be "fixed." The two biggest issues are the UI (November Patch) and Content (December Patch).
They NEED to make huge stride in the UI. Meaning, people who quit and come back to try it out again, need to feel that the UI is fundamentally different and they're not frustrated everytime they want to do something in game. (for example, having 123012931 confirm menus before a single Synthesis). However, returning players need to be realistic. You will NEVER get the type of UI you see in Wow, Aoc, Warhammer, Aion, etc. None of the those games are designed to be played on a PS3, FFXIV is fundamentally designed to be played on a console (whether or not SE should have done this is a topic of debate for another thread). IT can be done. Look at the UI for FFXIII, much smoother and faster than FFXIV. Heck, the UI in FFXI was smoother and faster.
Content. Adding NM'S isn't enough. It's the same thing as faction leves currently. The December patch needs to bring Chocobos, flying, NM'S and other content to keep people busy. FFXI had so much content its not even funny... they need to get the ball rolling and fast. Whatever content they put in the backburner or for a rainy day needs to be released, adn fast.
Once the other AAA MMO's come out (GW2, Tera, Rift, etc), you can kiss FFXIV chances goodbye. SE has 4-8 months to get things done or FFXIV will go down as the worst MMO in history when you factor in the budget, expectations, and its failure to retain even 100k subscriber base.
With that said (lol), I'm stay until the PS3 release. This game has soo much potential it's not even funny... Why am I staying? Because of FFXI. I saw what this company can do when given the time. They have earned my playing time based on their previous products. Yes yes, some of the new reiterations are not as grand as FFVII or FFVIII, or IX and definetely not FFXI (yet!), but I have hope.
When March comes around the game is only made small steps, I'll be long gone and looking forward to the next game that actually lives up to expectations.
Once you get fairly far along in development of a product if you then find out the majority of your target market hates the product then it can be quite hard to stop and go back into development to fix the issues. Squenix they got a lot of negative reaction to the game and the design choices being made but they felt they had to forge on and release it anyway. If maybe a few less of the boosters of the game had stopped accusing people with concerns of being too stupid, too lazy or not understanding the game maybe Squenix would have listened a bit more. Though probably not.
It's a shame as the game had a lot of potential and a number of very interesting ideas in it. But by the time they get it patched and working well it will just be another Age of Conan.
If the upcoming patches don't at least stabilize the player population, it's not impossible for them to cut their losses I guess. They may decide it's simply not worth investing in anymore, who knows.
Comments
Why don't they just give FFXI a graphical upgrade, add some new feautres and call it a day because that is the only way to revive the franchise.
Totally agree! If they were wise this is exactly what they would do. Anything is fixable, but FF XIV would take way to much resource and time, while likely having very low subscription figures.
I don't know much about PCU's and stuff, only learned about them today. And maybe they can be manipulated.
But the CEO's statement isn't manipulated (disregarding minor translation itches).
Put those 2 together and the situation does not look very good tbh.
I agree with you guys they should have done this in the first place.
Can you imagine what the investors would do if you tried to pitch that in a meeting LoL
"Hey I know we just spent millions of dollars on a brand new game with enhanced graphics and it cost us 75% of our profits and made us the laughing stock of the worlds gaming community but can you invest some more money in this 5-6 year old game and give it a facelift?"
Somehow I don't think they'll buy it.
"I'm not cheap I'm incredibly subconsciously financially optimized"
"The worst part of censorship is ------------------"
And ditch a large amount of player base on the PS2? The PS2 is already at capacity for graphical power. You cannot go any further in the graphic department but the player base sitll there.
Stupid question maybe ... but how hard would it be to replace the FFXI graphics with the FFXIV ones?
Very. FFXI's engine wasn't designed to handle newer shadows, lager textures, etc. FFXIV is on a completely new engine wih graphical features that didn't exist 7 years ago.
Plus, the PS2 couldn't handle it, so you'd have to have the PS2 players separated from the PC players.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
The models can be converted/imported easily. The problem would be getting the engine to handle the enhanced vertex load and the textures. Not to mention the animation programming and some bone weighting problems between engines. Also I'm not sure if FF11 makes use of bumbmapping, normal maps, specularity maps and any other additional texture layers added. So pretty much I have no idea but there is a loooooong list of things that would have to be checked off.
"I'm not cheap I'm incredibly subconsciously financially optimized"
"The worst part of censorship is ------------------"
It is more or less 250K or 200K players the game needs. The reason for that is the fact that the game needs to get in development costs and hopefully get in some money for the company by the side.
A small idie company can make fine with 30K players but they have a lot fewer expenses than a company like SE.
Look on Tabula Rasa, EA closed it down at 75K players but they didn't see it earning money ever. Even fixing up a broken game cost a lot of money.
SE have realized that they made a big mistake by releasing the game too early (like Funcom, Mythic, SOE, Cryptic and many others), lets hope they are smart enough to fix it for the PS3 release.
This is just a really simple look at what he said without any thought behind it. If those leaving think the game is irredeemable, which most don't feel that way, they won't come back to try it out again is what he was trying to say.
He wasn't saying FFXIV is going down the tubes, he was saying if those leaving think there is no potential in it, then they are in trouble.
Most I have heard is people have complaints but think it has potential down the road.
Becouse they wouldnt get 50euro/$ per box.
Glad to see that my server (fabul) has the 2nd lowest population. Maybe I will migrate away from this game as well. No fun if you have no one to play with.
I am entitled to my opinions, misspellings, and grammatical errors.
According to SE
"There's also a PS3 version of Final Fantasy XIV in the pipeline for March 2011. However, with ongoing PC problems that date may be subject to change. "
Looks like Se basically is gonna go down the route of champions, AoC, and other mmo's that never saw the light of day on console. The word is out that the game is garbage pulling a tabula rosa and cutting it off would be the wisest move they could make at this point. They will never see their investment pan out, and taking a 50-100 million dollar (total guesstimate) loss vs 100-150 million dollar loss seems the way to go. You will never make money and the the game needs millions more in development to make a quality game of itself with many of its core systems outright redesigned. On a game that is no doubt raping SE's profit margin for the quarter, why would they risk investing further into a game that has the worst metacritic rating of any AAA MMO to ever release? the more money they invest into this failboat, the harder it will sink them as an overall company instead of just sinking the FF name. IMO, cut losses, pull a tabula rosa, fire the right people and retire the FF name. If you build a quality game from scratch SE, people will come and play. It is all about quality and your FF games have undersold and disappointed worldwide because you forgot about quality ever since you merged with Enix, now it is all about shiny graphics and downright PITIFUL voice acting and steps backwards for the FF genre if not downright misteps altogether. FF14 is doomed and the writing is on the wall, it can definitely beat APB's 86 days though so that can be a reasonable goal for them before they pull the plug.
What baffles me is that alot and I mean ALOT of money was invested into FFXIV development and the end result was just appauling. What were they thinking is the constant question in my mind. The game was obviously by far not ready for launch, Square Enix wanted to rush it out (in my eyes to beat competitors, bet Blizzard CEO is laughing now). Many many game breaking issues, I had items of value vanish from my inventory, the leveling bug which saw people rank 30 in a day, the perm death bug, many other issues.
I praise them for been different then standard MMO's like EQ, WoW and Aion but when I play this game I feel like i'm beta testing something in it's Alpha stages. Then my mind goes Oh wait what, this is the complete game??
endrant2
/THREAD
Nothing else to discuss. He summed it up perfectly.
This is the latest example of developers who think they can just make the game however they want and expect people to play it. That works for single player games but not MMOs. Like it or not, MMOs MUST be a collaborative effort. Yes thats right. Developers HAVE to bring players onboard early in development and actually change the game based on feedback. There is a disturbing trend amongst MMO developers of bringing games to beta when they are pretty much finished and are unwilling to change anything. If they do this, they are doomed.
Sorry folks this game will not recover. It will also never make it to the PS3 release. Glad I saw this one coming and stayed clear.
The issue with FFXIV is foolishness backed by unassailable arrogance straight from the top.
No game can survive that no matter how much money you throw at it. In fact it is a perfect example of the saying "Throwing good money after bad".
Gaming and enjoyment in general is a personal experience. You need to listen to the players. Part of that process is figuring out what they really mean and what is important and what is not really that important. Sometimes you do need to dismiss what some players say as people can be hard to figure or say stuff they do not fully mean. But still need to listen and understand what is communicated.
Money doesn't do this. Money doesn't even buy this. Of course you do need to pay someone to do this, but that doesn't mean you get it just because you have money. You also need to know who to hire to do it right. And of course understand it needs to be done and how to do it without sheer chaos ensuing.
Some projects are doomed to fail. Either because they are defined wrong and the people doing cannot change that or the people doing it are doing it wrong and are not going to change.
In reality most failures are more about bad management/design than lack of money. If they were managed well they would not bite off more than they could chew.
In fact you can usually tell bad management by the fact that they make the excuse of lack of money. Now in some cases a team is promised a certain amount of money and then that falls through and they have to rush crap out. But for many MMOs this is not the case, or if it becomes the case its because of years of poor management and an investor backs out (Microsoft did this to an MMO, vanguard I think).
Exactly this game is more than just flawed or bugged.
It is a stunning paen to how arrogance can make someone incompetent through sheer ostrich head in the sand blindness.
As a professional software developer I am completely stunned and incredulous about the product they created. It looks nice but when you add it all up it is possibly the worst software product I have ever seen. It is so bad that I am taking out of gaming and saying ALL software.
There is only one way they thought this stuff was a good idea and that is by having their heads shoved so far up their own asses that red looked blue to them.
The very first part of ANY serious software project is getting requirements from you users. None of this stuff even makes sense from a user point of view. They never even bothered putting themselves in the users shoes. Their market system is assinine.
This is like someone telling you to make them a hat and you give them a shoe with no sole and half a shoe lace. You would looke at them and think they are crazy.
Its not flawed. Its just crap. It meets almost no ones desires and in point of fact everything they were tryign to accomplish has been done better and more user friendly in other games. Does anyone with even an ounce of objectivity think the market or crafting system is better than old SWG? Because it is not. Its just not. And SWG accomplished all the aims of this crafting/market system (and then some).
And this is not about testing. They genuinely thought alot of this was a good idea. Then bajlillions of people told them it wasn't and they were too arrgoant to listen. Even worse if they had bothered to take their heads out of their asses they could simply have looked at EQ2 to see how a crafting mini-game worked out and how its recieved by players. Hell at least EQ2's crafting minigame makes sense and is explained well via tooltips. I think I am doing it a disservice to mention it in the same paragraph, the shit might rub off on it.
I did not buy this game. I don't care about the Final Fantasy franchise it was never my cup of tea, but i have nothing against FF either. I don't feel burned in anyway either now or from past purchases. But this game is crap. I have such contempt for it that it almost makes me angry. Its not worth getting angry over since its a game, but since I am professional programmer it evokes memories of past projects and it brings back the disgust from those. But even more those memories pale in comparison to what must have gone on at SE to produce this steaming pile.
The sort of cranial rectal insertion must have been so truly epic that it boggles my mind.
When you code something as a programmer you MUST understand that other people will use. You must go through use cases and make sure it makes sense to other people and that their use of this product flows nicely.
FFXIV's market system is a slap in the face to a user. In no way does attempt to do this. In fact I would have to work hard to make something less usable. This is not about "easy" or "hard". This is about pointless busy work of clicking thing after thing after thing toward absolutely no purpose either aesthetic or functional. It is pure crap. Even if it worked out in a way where certain crafting player developed a reputation for having good stuff, just finding their selling NPC dude would be an annoying PITA or sorting through a horde of poorly spawning non-distinguishable avatars.
It is stunningly bad. Stunning. And so so so easy to have gathered data on implementation details from a frigging decade and more of other games. Its unconscionable. I can understand bugs, even a horde of bugs. But this, this just assinine crap its an insult. Bugs at least are tricky.
This is just purely bad ideas that only see the light of day because you allow arrogance to destroy any professional pride you have in doing the job properly. Any professional programmer can tell you this shit should not have gotten out of even an initial design phase. That they could not even ask basic questions about usability disgusts me.
hey i know nice little fairytales too. let us all tell some. Numbers of players were taken i think at NA primetime whic h is not JPN primetime. but hey who gives a buck. now let's get on with ffxi: numbers decreased a LOT since ffxiv came out and most don't want to come back to 11. what does that tell ya?
nevermind if the CEO of SE tells you this and asures you for your own sake : that SE will cancel support for ffxiv if it doesnt improve, you can be absolutely certain everytime that this will happen. there is no doubt about it.
IF this game gets pulled down by SE yeah it's a shame and yeah we all know a mmo these days has to be better than this. but will they really pull the plug? why not just freeze accounts in EU and america and let just japanese people play? because many of them enjoy the game. and i am not talking about the people writing in forums how awful this game is or on their blogs. the vast majority of japanese people enjoy this game.
if it gets cancelled completely worldwide: shame. yes i really would have liked to play this game in march 2011 when it was supposed to launch for ps3. that would be a sad thing.
but even SE is stuborn there is a pretty high number of people that find this game not apealing and boring. And SE should have known better. way better.
if it comes to an end: sad but there were reasons for that.
Sorry but who are you telling people to move along? and if you love the game so much why are you not playing it? see what i did there?
I too feel bad for you, that you would rather attack OP and those who are discussing a statement given by CEO himself. It is not something players made it up so reading you lashing out at players is sad and funny at the same time.
Typical fanboy rage when every other defense for game fails. This is classic line 'why are you here if you hate game so much? move along.' yeah i never read that one before. lol
Who could have thought that WOW could bring super power like USA to its knees?
Originally posted by Arcken
To put it in a nutshell, our society is about to hit the fan, grades are dropping, obesity is going up,childhood the USA is going to lose its super power status before too long, but hey, as long as we have a cheap method to babysit our kids, all will be well no?
Im picking on WoW btw because its the beast that made all of this possible
Minecraft is only in the alpha stages. It will have more stuff in in like dungeons and combat once it's done.I think I can safely state that most of us don't like what we're seeing, and certainly don't enjoy seeing SE releasing such statement. In the perfect world, we would all be cheerfull in the games we like, and we're all looking forward to play a quality MMO we enjoy.
In this case, I believe we want to keep discussing about it because we feel concerned. We want to let them know that they need to improve the overall quality of their product, especially at release. Just take a look at the other super hyped games in development; there are often posts that sound like this: "OMG I cannot wait! Please release this game now!!", then followed by "I've learned my lesson from some previous released game and I'm ready to wait."
Finally, forums being forums (and so are any form of newstertainment), negative posts and comments always draw much more attention than positive ones. There are few good posts here, but they're not likely to provoke as much reaction or discussions as bad ones.
So true but it is better to save face and get something rather than fall flat on your face and get nothing.
The game is at a breaking point right now. It can definitely be salvaged or can it crash and burn as one of the biggest MMO/GAME failures of all time.
I enjoy the game, but it's far from perfect. It has a fraction of the content as most mmo's coming out right now and it also has a fraction of the content of FFXI. It's reasonable to assume a new game will not offer as much as one that was in developement for 3-4 years and released for another 8 years after that. But lets compare apples to apples. FFXIV has huge potential and is failing to deliver.
The answer to whether or not this game is salvaged depends on how fast the game can be "fixed." The two biggest issues are the UI (November Patch) and Content (December Patch).
They NEED to make huge stride in the UI. Meaning, people who quit and come back to try it out again, need to feel that the UI is fundamentally different and they're not frustrated everytime they want to do something in game. (for example, having 123012931 confirm menus before a single Synthesis). However, returning players need to be realistic. You will NEVER get the type of UI you see in Wow, Aoc, Warhammer, Aion, etc. None of the those games are designed to be played on a PS3, FFXIV is fundamentally designed to be played on a console (whether or not SE should have done this is a topic of debate for another thread). IT can be done. Look at the UI for FFXIII, much smoother and faster than FFXIV. Heck, the UI in FFXI was smoother and faster.
Content. Adding NM'S isn't enough. It's the same thing as faction leves currently. The December patch needs to bring Chocobos, flying, NM'S and other content to keep people busy. FFXI had so much content its not even funny... they need to get the ball rolling and fast. Whatever content they put in the backburner or for a rainy day needs to be released, adn fast.
Once the other AAA MMO's come out (GW2, Tera, Rift, etc), you can kiss FFXIV chances goodbye. SE has 4-8 months to get things done or FFXIV will go down as the worst MMO in history when you factor in the budget, expectations, and its failure to retain even 100k subscriber base.
With that said (lol), I'm stay until the PS3 release. This game has soo much potential it's not even funny... Why am I staying? Because of FFXI. I saw what this company can do when given the time. They have earned my playing time based on their previous products. Yes yes, some of the new reiterations are not as grand as FFVII or FFVIII, or IX and definetely not FFXI (yet!), but I have hope.
When March comes around the game is only made small steps, I'll be long gone and looking forward to the next game that actually lives up to expectations.
Once you get fairly far along in development of a product if you then find out the majority of your target market hates the product then it can be quite hard to stop and go back into development to fix the issues. Squenix they got a lot of negative reaction to the game and the design choices being made but they felt they had to forge on and release it anyway. If maybe a few less of the boosters of the game had stopped accusing people with concerns of being too stupid, too lazy or not understanding the game maybe Squenix would have listened a bit more. Though probably not.
It's a shame as the game had a lot of potential and a number of very interesting ideas in it. But by the time they get it patched and working well it will just be another Age of Conan.
If the upcoming patches don't at least stabilize the player population, it's not impossible for them to cut their losses I guess. They may decide it's simply not worth investing in anymore, who knows.
pie.