It's called good marketing:) people get fooled very easy this days, just in general not saying FF14 only does this to make it more then it is.
But who cares they have 10 people or 1 mil people as long there making it in this hard market for sub mmo.
Is this "good marketing" too?
Good marketing is misleading people to think it's something it's not? "under-performing" is the actual term. At least in their own eyes, because if it wasn't under-performing they wouldn't need to pull these kinds of tactics. Every time Square ban 50k RMT they get to bloat registered player numbers by another 50k again, since they will just buy the game again.
I'll blow peoples minds a little more, ESO had 770k subscribers on PC for North American and Europe alone. Swtor had twice/thrice as many subscribers as ESO.
FFXIV has/had 500-600k subscribers on PS3, PC, PS4 for North America, Europe and Japan combined.
The last part I agree with but not with the tactics they used, and still use in some places it seems.
If get people to come in spend money is good marketing, even is it's little or big misleading, if there goal is to get people in to spend money then it working.
I remember seeing someone doing some math in the thread about the recent quarterly report and he came to the conclusion that FF has about 500-600k players based on the game's revenue.
That seems to be a reasonable and successful number which leads me to say:
The 156k extra people mentioned by the OP are people like me who logged in during the free weekends and were counted as "active players"
About 600k subscribers is a very good number and there is no need to inflate it.
I remember seeing someone doing some math in the thread about the recent quarterly report and he came to the conclusion that FF has about 500-600k players based on the game's revenue.
That seems to be a reasonable and successful number which leads me to say:
The 156k extra people mentioned by the OP are people like me who logged in during the free weekends and were counted as "active players"
About 600k subscribers is a very good number and there is no need to inflate it.
SE has recently confirmed they have 500k subscribers. No need for any speculation at all. It's official, from SE.
"It's pretty simple, really. If your only intention in posting about a particular game or topic is to be negative, then yes, you should probably move on. Voicing a negative opinion is fine, continually doing so on the same game is basically just trolling." - Michael Bitton Community Manager, MMORPG.com
"As an online discussion about Star Citizen grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Derek Smart approaches 1" - MrSnuffles's law
"I am jumping in here a bit without knowing exactly what you all or talking about." - SEANMCAD
Originally posted by Soki123 It s doing good for sure, but still doesn t change the fact I can t sub to it longer then 1 month at a time. I can only take the WoW formula so long, and hell I may as well do it in WoW.
Everything I do in FFXIV does not exist in WoW. Different strokes I guess.
So you pay $9-13 bucks a month to play Triple triad and chocobo racing? Because just about everything else exists in a certain more successful game with 10 years of content. Oh sorry, I seem to forget relics because making those are so fun that I wouldn't even wish it on my most hatred inducing enemy.
Originally posted by Darkfalz89 Originally posted by FoomerangOriginally posted by Soki123It s doing good for sure, but still doesn t change the fact I can t sub to it longer then 1 month at a time. I can only take the WoW formula so long, and hell I may as well do it in WoW.
Everything I do in FFXIV does not exist in WoW. Different strokes I guess.So you pay $9-13 bucks a month to play Triple triad and chocobo racing? Because just about everything else exists in a certain more successful game with 10 years of content. Oh sorry, I seem to forget relics because making those are so fun that I wouldn't even wish it on my most hatred inducing enemy. Really? Smh
I really like most of the features of FFXIV, but I expect it will be losing subs. They created a beautiful world, interesting classes, amazing music, great questing, but left it with combat that is only passable. That is enough given everything else, but this expansion looks to me like it will be the first foot in the grave. Companies have to be careful when adding content that they do not vacate old content, but it seems like SE has fallen directly into this trap. Flying mounts ruin games by emptying the world of other players. Expect the game to feel very empty in just a few months time.
Focusing on instanced raid content is also going to be unsustainable for SE for the same reason it is unsustainable for everyone else - they cannot produce enough content for hardcore raiders, and gear treadmill systems lose players. Trying to compete against WoW on WoW's terms is a bad idea... and even WoW is not doing this successfully lately.
On top of it all, it feels to me like they are aiming for FFXIV: Game of Thrones Edition.
Don't take me as another hater, because I actually really loved the game. This just is not where it needs to go. They should be focusing on expanding the fates system, drop the flying mount idea completely, work on expanding existing zones with higher level sections, make the beastmen feel like more than just different factions with dailies, focus more on making combat faster paced and fun, do more storytelling, do more homages (not straight inclusions like the terrible lightning events), add more outdoor bosses, add more jobs (three is nice but they went out of their way to make the landmass and raid content as big as the original game, why not the jobs?), add large scale story events in the game (IE zone wide public quests), rework teleporting (add a cooldown!), do enormous events with each patch to progress the story, and they should get rid of the damn loading screens - on PC and PS4 this should be easily possible.
That is the game I want to be playing, not slower-paced WoW with better graphics and final fantasy classes.
I do agree with a lot of your points, especially the Vacating Content part. Although remember, FFXIV is known to take it a step further in old content/content that is totally crap (hunts/fates) and dangle forced incentives and pigeonholing you into doing content that had hardly any purpose when it was supposedly relevant. I will go as far as to say I'm a little salty/jelly on what FFXIV has become in the short time Yoshi had his hands on it. People rant about getting a documentary about the miraculous comeback FFXIV ROSE FROM THE ASHES and became the BEST MMO THEY PLAYED IN 10 YEARS!!!! I hated the games launch, was total utter garbage, came back in 1.9 and I must say I enjoyed the open world/open dungeons/open world exp parties/hamlets/Animations that had weight to them and were just orgasmic(your character would actually pivot their entire body when turning around, shit blew my mind) and the the ability to play with class combinations. I really felt like what the game needed was a rebuild of its zones,more animations, more open world dungeons e.t.c.
What I got was everything I hated about what WoW's succession has brought to games in the past 10 years. What did FFXIV do differently than other games in the past 10 years? 2.0 launched with no content, a staple with every new launch/relaunch. It managed to run like crap while each character had less pixels than a potted plant in FFXIV 1.0. Way more animations, while all the more lackluster in the quality of them all. UI looked clean/solid so that was a plus, but the 2.5 GCD was every similar to our 2-3 second delay on using actions back in 1.0 so not much changed there LeL. Managed to have a extremely boring storyline until about 2.4 when things started to pick up.The one thing FFXIV managed to do AT LAUNCH vs the past 10 years of MMOs was....wait for it....It was VERY polished. You can be a heavily salted 1.0 nonsense spewing FFXI v2 wanting moron like me, or even the most established whitest of knights and we could STILL agree on that.
Realistically I don't feel that Square Enix should be getting so much praise for doing their job, and whats expected of them. While 2.0 was a large drought for the game so it still facilitated the same woes of many launches, it still had more going for it thanks to a very tactfully placed content walling strategy. In time the game was spewing out content faster than WoW all the while throwing major content addons like housing/choco raising/gardening/not totally useless crafting (kinda)/treasure hunting/hunts/ later on we even got a Casino. Now as a player of a MMO(RPG) how much of this actually equates to progressing your character and making them stronger? The answer is NONE OF THEM!!! (at least as of now that is the case with hunts unless you like grinding your groin clean off)
In the end one of the most enjoyable aspects of FFXIV isn't the game itself, its the self righteous and conceited developers. Yoshi P has such a engorged hardon for tank swapping and two healers that if god forbid you try to make new strategies and beat something that wasn't meant to be defeated the way THEY wanted you to do it, emergency maintenance was scheduled to fix it. Like with Summoners using TANK pets to increase the DPS in their group SE saw very quickly to remove all enmity generation from bosses, making one of our few pets useless for the most part. Dungeons were boring, really boring, so boring that once Hunts came out it was fun to go hunt NM's and cap for currency for the week and not feel like i had to log in FFXIV every day because of lolcontentwalls and do my "daily" this and "daily" that. Yoshi P came down with the rage of 1000 weak asian neckbeards and nerfed it into the ground. HOW DARE YOU NOT DO 99.9% of this games content, and so the golden days of Hunts came to pass.
Remember for SE its no good when people dont do all of their boring content because its just disrespectful. "Yoshi, it seems our numbers of players actively doing Hunts has greatly declined", Yoshi P looks up with a smirk: "Don't worry, we will add the regrading materials from coil to Hunts so the other 90% of our playerbase can get gud and raise their item level". Prior to that ordeal players were so bored of dungeons they demanded "Speed Runs" and they were very responsible with the games flawless duty finder votekick system when any group member didn't comply. Get gud scrub, me and my friend are going to voteslap your casul a## into next week, enjoy your 30-40 min que. Once again SE stepped in and added "walls" that would only go down when you killed all the cute little trash packs they littered about the zone.
They say its the best MMO in 10 years, I just don't know what level of delusion you have to be in to say something like that.
Originally posted by Soki123It s doing good for sure, but still doesn t change the fact I can t sub to it longer then 1 month at a time. I can only take the WoW formula so long, and hell I may as well do it in WoW.
Everything I do in FFXIV does not exist in WoW. Different strokes I guess.
So you pay $9-13 bucks a month to play Triple triad and chocobo racing? Because just about everything else exists in a certain more successful game with 10 years of content. Oh sorry, I seem to forget relics because making those are so fun that I wouldn't even wish it on my most hatred inducing enemy.
Really? Smh
I'm so heavily salted foom, please satiate my saltiness by joining me in my RP session in Mor dhona next to the Labyrinth weekly NPC. We will stare into each others eyes while furiously sheathing/and unsheathing our Zeta weapons. I will then notice your weapon is not gud since its 125 and I'll leave you for a more "dedicated" player with a Mansion and Dedicated DDR legends of Turn 13 Coil group. Our group is so Gud we sell wins to all the casul scrubs that can't get gud and learn the the dance routine.
Originally posted by Darkfalz89 Originally posted by FoomerangOriginally posted by Darkfalz89Originally posted by FoomerangOriginally posted by Soki123It s doing good for sure, but still doesn t change the fact I can t sub to it longer then 1 month at a time. I can only take the WoW formula so long, and hell I may as well do it in WoW.
Everything I do in FFXIV does not exist in WoW. Different strokes I guess.So you pay $9-13 bucks a month to play Triple triad and chocobo racing? Because just about everything else exists in a certain more successful game with 10 years of content. Oh sorry, I seem to forget relics because making those are so fun that I wouldn't even wish it on my most hatred inducing enemy. Really? SmhI'm so heavily salted foom, please satiate my saltiness by joining me in my RP session in Mor dhona next to the Labyrinth weekly NPC. We will stare into each others eyes while furiously sheathing/and unsheathing our Zeta weapons. I will then notice your weapon is not gud since its 125 and I'll leave you for a more "dedicated" player with a Mansion and Dedicated DDR legends of Turn 13 Coil group. Our group is so Gud we sell wins to all the casul scrubs that can't get gud and learn the the dance routine. Lol you're drunk
Originally posted by Soki123It s doing good for sure, but still doesn t change the fact I can t sub to it longer then 1 month at a time. I can only take the WoW formula so long, and hell I may as well do it in WoW.
Everything I do in FFXIV does not exist in WoW. Different strokes I guess.
So you pay $9-13 bucks a month to play Triple triad and chocobo racing? Because just about everything else exists in a certain more successful game with 10 years of content. Oh sorry, I seem to forget relics because making those are so fun that I wouldn't even wish it on my most hatred inducing enemy.
Really? Smh
I'm so heavily salted foom, please satiate my saltiness by joining me in my RP session in Mor dhona next to the Labyrinth weekly NPC. We will stare into each others eyes while furiously sheathing/and unsheathing our Zeta weapons. I will then notice your weapon is not gud since its 125 and I'll leave you for a more "dedicated" player with a Mansion and Dedicated DDR legends of Turn 13 Coil group. Our group is so Gud we sell wins to all the casul scrubs that can't get gud and learn the the dance routine.
Lol you're drunk
So is that a no because you aren't into elite cats like myself or are you just not GUD and dont have a 135 weapon?
Realistically I don't feel that Square Enix should be getting so much praise for doing their job, and whats expected of them. While 2.0 was a large drought for the game so it still facilitated the same woes of many launches, it still had more going for it thanks to a very tactfully placed content walling strategy. In time the game was spewing out content faster than WoW all the while throwing major content addons like housing/choco raising/gardening/not totally useless crafting (kinda)/treasure hunting/hunts/ later on we even got a Casino. Now as a player of a MMO(RPG) how much of this actually equates to progressing your character and making them stronger? The answer is NONE OF THEM!!! (at least as of now that is the case with hunts unless you like grinding your groin clean off)
In the end one of the most enjoyable aspects of FFXIV isn't the game itself, its the self righteous and conceited developers. Yoshi P has such a engorged hardon for tank swapping and two healers that if god forbid you try to make new strategies and beat something that wasn't meant to be defeated the way THEY wanted you to do it, emergency maintenance was scheduled to fix it. Like with Summoners using TANK pets to increase the DPS in their group SE saw very quickly to remove all enmity generation from bosses, making one of our few pets useless for the most part. Dungeons were boring, really boring, so boring that once Hunts came out it was fun to go hunt NM's and cap for currency for the week and not feel like i had to log in FFXIV every day because of lolcontentwalls and do my "daily" this and "daily" that. Yoshi P came down with the rage of 1000 weak asian neckbeards and nerfed it into the ground. HOW DARE YOU NOT DO 99.9% of this games content, and so the golden days of Hunts came to pass.
Remember for SE its no good when people dont do all of their boring content because its just disrespectful. "Yoshi, it seems our numbers of players actively doing Hunts has greatly declined", Yoshi P looks up with a smirk: "Don't worry, we will add the regrading materials from coil to Hunts so the other 90% of our playerbase can get gud and raise their item level". Prior to that ordeal players were so bored of dungeons they demanded "Speed Runs" and they were very responsible with the games flawless duty finder votekick system when any group member didn't comply. Get gud scrub, me and my friend are going to voteslap your casul a## into next week, enjoy your 30-40 min que. Once again SE stepped in and added "walls" that would only go down when you killed all the cute little trash packs they littered about the zone.
They say its the best MMO in 10 years, I just don't know what level of delusion you have to be in to say something like that.
"It's pretty simple, really. If your only intention in posting about a particular game or topic is to be negative, then yes, you should probably move on. Voicing a negative opinion is fine, continually doing so on the same game is basically just trolling." - Michael Bitton Community Manager, MMORPG.com
"As an online discussion about Star Citizen grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Derek Smart approaches 1" - MrSnuffles's law
"I am jumping in here a bit without knowing exactly what you all or talking about." - SEANMCAD
Suppose I wouldn't mind enjoying this game as much as the poor blind fools, but I've seen it all and this game does very little to prove otherwise. I suppose I wish the game was doing worse, to shock SE Into action and rethink the way things are unfolding for the future of this game. It still has a LOT of potential, but its being wasted on weekly lockout gimmicks and limited content walls wherever you go. In a game where you have the ability of playing all classes on a single character, you can only seriously gear one at a time. Like the earlier poster said, making linear raid progression does nothing for longevity. The extreme content walling in this game proves that much.Some emphasis in the open world would be nice, stop throwing me into duty finder please. Give me other daily activities I can do to obtain the weekly currencies. Make me and a group of players fight through a beastman stronghold so I could punch some general beast guy in the nads and let him drop some fancy prizes/sidegrade gear. This game has a very nice combat system but you spend more time waiting for a group/pop/playing cards than you do fighting.Stop punching me in the balls when I miss 3 days of 70 tombstone roulette's by making me do more than twice as many dungeons... I hated being punished for not logging in everyday.
People tunnel vision combat in MMOs its funny. No other mmo on the market has gathering crafting like this. The housing gardening is awesome. Rp tools are excellent. Chocobo racing and triple triad both add to the diversify of activities and "virtual worldyness" so to speak. Don't care about any of that? That's cool. There's a couple hundred thousand people who do and will finance this game indefinitely. But pretending like none of that matters just because you're a dungeon runner is smh worthy.
People tunnel vision combat in MMOs its funny. No other mmo on the market has gathering crafting like this. The housing gardening is awesome. Rp tools are excellent. Chocobo racing and triple triad both add to the diversify of activities and "virtual worldyness" so to speak. Don't care about any of that? That's cool. There's a couple hundred thousand people who do and will finance this game indefinitely. But pretending like none of that matters just because you're a dungeon runner is smh worthy.
Except you have to level to 50...except in order to complete the story or even access expansion content - combat is required. I don't care how many side activities a game has, combat is a core part of any MMORPG. Therefore combat being fun and engaging IS important to a lot of people who play these games. I had no problem with the slow paced combat of FF14 - it is different but not bad. What is bad is that I'm forced to do dungeons in order to progress the overarching story or even access an expansion - I considered giving it another try (having tried it at launch and quit before the month was up) but I have no desire to be forced to do anything just to access an expansion.
Originally posted by azurrei Originally posted by Foomerang People tunnel vision combat in MMOs its funny. No other mmo on the market has gathering crafting like this. The housing gardening is awesome. Rp tools are excellent. Chocobo racing and triple triad both add to the diversify of activities and "virtual worldyness" so to speak. Don't care about any of that? That's cool. There's a couple hundred thousand people who do and will finance this game indefinitely. But pretending like none of that matters just because you're a dungeon runner is smh worthy.
Except you have to level to 50...except in order to complete the story or even access expansion content - combat is required. I don't care how many side activities a game has, combat is a core part of any MMORPG. Therefore combat being fun and engaging IS important to a lot of people who play these games. I had no problem with the slow paced combat of FF14 - it is different but not bad. What is bad is that I'm forced to do dungeons in order to progress the overarching story or even access an expansion - I considered giving it another try (having tried it at launch and quit before the month was up) but I have no desire to be forced to do anything just to access an expansion. Im not saying its not important to a lot of people. I know it is. That is a given. Over the past year and a half, I would say that combat has made up a total of about 10% of my gaming sessions. That includes taking two classes to 50, finishing the main scenario, and leveling various combat classes to the mid 30s. Its been so long since Ive done a dungeon, I dont even remember half the ones I did when I was leveling up.
People tunnel vision combat in MMOs its funny. No other mmo on the market has gathering crafting like this. The housing gardening is awesome. Rp tools are excellent. Chocobo racing and triple triad both add to the diversify of activities and "virtual worldyness" so to speak. Don't care about any of that? That's cool. There's a couple hundred thousand people who do and will finance this game indefinitely. But pretending like none of that matters just because you're a dungeon runner is smh worthy.
Except you have to level to 50...except in order to complete the story or even access expansion content - combat is required. I don't care how many side activities a game has, combat is a core part of any MMORPG. Therefore combat being fun and engaging IS important to a lot of people who play these games. I had no problem with the slow paced combat of FF14 - it is different but not bad. What is bad is that I'm forced to do dungeons in order to progress the overarching story or even access an expansion - I considered giving it another try (having tried it at launch and quit before the month was up) but I have no desire to be forced to do anything just to access an expansion.
Honestly, the story feels a lot greater for making you do dungeons, and this is a story centric MMORPG, damn it. Of course you have to do the story. Why would you even want to skip it? And, then there's the complaint against dungeons. You are essentially saying, "I want combat but I don't want to do that combat, I want to do this combat because that combat has to be done and no one tells me what to do!"
FFXIV is basically designed so that you actually have to play the game to play the game. It's not a sandbox.
I don't stand against them implementing other features, but you have to recognize what this story is and unlessit really bombs again, it's not going to see an overhaul of formula.
I mean, there are things they could do:
- SS Rank Hunts that are as strong as raid bosses with Raid tier equipment
- FATE logues to keep track of what ones you've done in an area, unlocking new quests and/or battles in the area with harder more complicated quests
- Fix the story a bit for 2.0 to turn anything not plot moving into optional quests, add more boss fights over trash battles, break up the first few minutes up with being able to move and a battle, make main quests longer and less back tracking, etc.
- A regular dungeon and not a "mission dungeon" as I call them.
- Group based side quests
- Class specific side quests
And, more. I recognize they can do more, but you have to work in the system.
People tunnel vision combat in MMOs its funny. No other mmo on the market has gathering crafting like this. The housing gardening is awesome. Rp tools are excellent. Chocobo racing and triple triad both add to the diversify of activities and "virtual worldyness" so to speak. Don't care about any of that? That's cool. There's a couple hundred thousand people who do and will finance this game indefinitely. But pretending like none of that matters just because you're a dungeon runner is smh worthy.
I can think of several MMO's that have a really awesome crafting system like FFXIV, but you are absolutely right in the regard that crafting is just as in depth as the combat in FFXIV. On the flip side crafting gear even up until recently took a back seat in regards to is usefulness. Crafting was very enjoyable in this game, but as a crafter I felt like I wasn't crafting to make a small fortune, but crafting to get more gill to buy more mats. This made me feel like a junky that needed to craft as his fix to pay for getting more of his fix. While crafted gear is finally decent, its necessity and usefulness waned very greatly from the start to end of each major patch. Gearing up my crafter and getting perfect melds/getting the new mainhands/boosting stats felt really enjoyable, but when I realized how the 4 star market was on my server it was the end of the road for me.
One thing I can say I thought of as a goal would be obtaining a mansion as a small guild due to housing playing a large role in the Expansion. Though I realized unless I had 7 other DDR master friends that wanted to sell wins or I bought gill, It would take far longer than its worth. Still after managing to get halfway there, I discover the same clear groups I mentioned were kind enough to buy out all the large properties and hold them hostage at an even higher rate than I could ever afford, making it like AA all over again.Ill agree with the gathering being flipping sweet, but due to the rampant terrain clipping botters that farm endless amounts of resources to only destroy your opportunity to make profit.
When looking at other venues you see the combat is slow, but it is definitely very "enjoyable" which makes me enjoy the combat aesthetics of the game, which wouldn't think you disagree that content is quite lacking. FFXIV has a large spread of many activities to do, but this isn't a F2P game so you have to ask yourself is it worth 15 bucks a month to water virtual plants and craft nearly useless trinkets? I feel the game has spread itself thin and is trying to imitate the success of games I just don't feel is enjoyable.
-Crafting and gathering classes with two full toolbars of abilities and the expansion adding more
-Resource pools, stats, gear sets, tiered items, storyline quests, and faction hub for crafting and gathering classes
-expansion bringing mastery system, lore system, new levels of stat customization beyond just NQ HQ.
-yes Chocobo racing, breeding, triple triad, gold saucer activities. all welcome additions to the game
-the housing neighborhoods, the stables, the gardening (which is its own meta by itself), the ability to craft instruments, place them in your house and play them, making crafting stations and in the expansion modifying a house to be a dedicated workshop specific to one class
-the fact that they add content for rp'ers, crafters, gatherers, every patch.
-the interdependence between all gathering and crafting classes and the multiple ways you can approach the market with your wares. Supplying items for end game raiders, crafters, gatherers, home decor, grand company supply and provision missions, Ixal delivery missions, spirit bonding, desynthesis, and levemetes.
-it is one of the most polished mmos out there. you can download and play on huge patch days right from the start. other mmos release a patch and the game is broken for a week.
-the devs have a clear roadmap of where they want to take the game and so far they have delivered.
For all of these things and more, hell yes they can get $12.99 a month from me. It is money well spent and I'm happy to support them.
-Crafting and gathering classes with two full toolbars of abilities and the expansion adding more
-Resource pools, stats, gear sets, tiered items, storyline quests, and faction hub for crafting and gathering classes
-expansion bringing mastery system, lore system, new levels of stat customization beyond just NQ HQ.
-yes Chocobo racing, breeding, triple triad, gold saucer activities. all welcome additions to the game
-the housing neighborhoods, the stables, the gardening (which is its own meta by itself), the ability to craft instruments, place them in your house and play them, making crafting stations and in the expansion modifying a house to be a dedicated workshop specific to one class
-the fact that they add content for rp'ers, crafters, gatherers, every patch.
-the interdependence between all gathering and crafting classes and the multiple ways you can approach the market with your wares. Supplying items for end game raiders, crafters, gatherers, home decor, grand company supply and provision missions, Ixal delivery missions, spirit bonding, desynthesis, and levemetes.
-it is one of the most polished mmos out there. you can download and play on huge patch days right from the start. other mmos release a patch and the game is broken for a week.
-the devs have a clear roadmap of where they want to take the game and so far they have delivered.
For all of these things and more, hell yes they can get $12.99 a month from me. It is money well spent and I'm happy to support them.
Also may want to add there is mention of a token based drop system for endgame, if that's the case I may never have to deal with being 0/49 on T4 casting pants... There are at least some thoughts about adjusting how content difficulty is tiered and how insta wipe mechanics work. One of the many things I can't put past me is the necessity for a 8 man group size for raiding. I had statics in First Coil and SCoB and me +3 RL friends made 4 and we managed to find 2 dedicated raiders to make it 6. The struggle was always finding the last DPS/Healer every week, and after over a month of failed recruitment/no shows (we were willing for players to learn, players however were never patient nor willing to show up each week so note I didn't put "baddies" as a reason) we gave up. Always felt that Duty finder could be 5 members, adding one more DD into each group to balance out clear speed responsibility and to severely cut down DD que times because yes we needed another Melee DD...
You have a very meaty bullet list of features but most of it suffers for the very reason I mentioned above.
~New stat allocations will not give players more incentive to purchase crafted gear due gill being such a limited resource to those not:
-Selling wins for such outrageously large sums only obtainable from RMT.
-Buying Gill from RMT for the purpose of purchasing wins/gear to bypass retarded content wall restrictions.
~Crafted gear will sell well for the first few weeks to said farm groups to pump very high amounts of VIT to learn strategies but will then take a nosedive to where your lucky to see a piece sell weekly followed by:
-As other crafters lagging behind the new gear wall catch up, the undercutting wars begin.
New abilities do little to nothing to help the problems listed above, paired with each crafting class not being created equal by desynth or crafting standards. I'm sure some of us can remember after blowing up a bunch of gill crafting whatever silly untrade-able item, finally obtaining our new crafting book to open it and find out all we can do is make ingots and catalyst's for other crafters. Pair that with the over consistent uselessness that Alchemy has had over the games entire existence. The fact that you purchase a Spiritbond potion from a NPC because a ALECHEMIST;maker of POTIONS cannot make it. Along with the very limited market of hardcore players that use potions because they marginally help DPS while fighting undercutting wars with the other idiots doing 40-50% mark downs because they can't be patient. The very fact that there is no cost to repost items on the AH is both a great convenience and most terrible idea of all MMO's I've seen.
There is one thing you mentioned that sells well in your list; crafting gear. I have made the most consistent and highest income per transaction from selling demateria and HQ crafting/artisan sets. What this means is essentially selling into producing another competitor to undercut me all the while selling false hopes to would be crafters that don't know what awaits them.What is left is as you mentioned, being able to pay money to do things I couldn't fathom to do In RL in a video game. RPing is something I will simply not judge, there are those who enjoy it and I am glad they can find a game that does it so well, because I sincerely think SE does an amazing job with it.
There is one thing I'm sure you aren't thinking of when you play FFXIV, you are playing a Final Fantasy game. A genre of games ranging from the protectors of the crystals to a fabulously attractive band of teenagers that needs to save the world from equivalently fabulously attractive male evil dudes that want to wipe it out. I seem to recall a certain Gaius Von Baelsar, the Black Wolf of the Imperial Legatus being quite the badass in 1.0 moving into ARR. Well he was pretty cool until Yoshi neutered him in the fall of ultima. Was a really cool mission but I felt they really undersold his merits with the boring and poorly scripted event you defeat him in. He's the kind of guy I can see bringing many more abominations of ancient machanima and I hope he does. I don't care about some chick that bangs dragons and a kingdom of stuck up Elezan nambly pambly dragoons.
What I'm trying to say is final fantasy games have always been about the story (which FFXIV is a bit rocky with but seem to be finally getting some traction with it) and all the mean and challenging monsters/bosses/mid bosses you could readily shake a stick at. Pair that with party configuration/customization/upgrading e.t.c. allowing many freedoms in that department is what I loved about them. This is what the primary staple RPG's have created in my youth and what I enjoyed so much about them. Now moving into mmos some sacrifices to make "holy trinity" work FFXI did show it was a necessary evil but still allowed enough freedom to let players try to play the way they wanted to. Hell, 14 years later Ninja in FFXI was actually a DPS but that didn't stop them from functioning as awesome tanks for the past 10 years. We had furniture/housing/RP elements in FFXI but the beefy core was still story/events/socializing e.t.c. Each update brought varied battle content and side grades offered a lot of replay-ability. In FFXI you got a amazing story, and a accessory that is still good 14 years later. In FFXIV you get a shitty materia and about 5 bucks, don't spend it all in one place big spender!
FFXIV has a great combat system, and does not suffer the same pitfalls FFXI did where in FFXIV all classes are useful. At the same time the cost is you being like every other player playing your class with next to 0 breathing room to experiment with. Even having such a great system, you have no battle content outside of WoW Themepark instances and inflated and rescaled/reskinned monster models with large HP pools out in the world. I feel that's where the game needs to work on some things because that's what a Final Fantasy is all about. I like the content diversity across types of players, but I think we should focus more on varied battle content rather than new teasets and coffee tables you can drink your virtual tea with Mrs. Longbottom. There is plenty of vanity by now, we need something to change things up a bit. I'd love to stop calling this game Final Vanity 14, and call it Final God Damn Dragon Puncher Fantasy online.
Comments
If get people to come in spend money is good marketing, even is it's little or big misleading, if there goal is to get people in to spend money then it working.
Well the 4 mil players are of course nonsense.
I remember seeing someone doing some math in the thread about the recent quarterly report and he came to the conclusion that FF has about 500-600k players based on the game's revenue.
That seems to be a reasonable and successful number which leads me to say:
The 156k extra people mentioned by the OP are people like me who logged in during the free weekends and were counted as "active players"
About 600k subscribers is a very good number and there is no need to inflate it.
SE has recently confirmed they have 500k subscribers. No need for any speculation at all. It's official, from SE.
Here is the reddit thread with all the sources.
"It's pretty simple, really. If your only intention in posting about a particular game or topic is to be negative, then yes, you should probably move on. Voicing a negative opinion is fine, continually doing so on the same game is basically just trolling."
- Michael Bitton
Community Manager, MMORPG.com
"As an online discussion about Star Citizen grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Derek Smart approaches 1" - MrSnuffles's law
"I am jumping in here a bit without knowing exactly what you all or talking about."
- SEANMCAD
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
So you pay $9-13 bucks a month to play Triple triad and chocobo racing? Because just about everything else exists in a certain more successful game with 10 years of content. Oh sorry, I seem to forget relics because making those are so fun that I wouldn't even wish it on my most hatred inducing enemy.
So you pay $9-13 bucks a month to play Triple triad and chocobo racing? Because just about everything else exists in a certain more successful game with 10 years of content. Oh sorry, I seem to forget relics because making those are so fun that I wouldn't even wish it on my most hatred inducing enemy.
Really? Smh
I do agree with a lot of your points, especially the Vacating Content part. Although remember, FFXIV is known to take it a step further in old content/content that is totally crap (hunts/fates) and dangle forced incentives and pigeonholing you into doing content that had hardly any purpose when it was supposedly relevant. I will go as far as to say I'm a little salty/jelly on what FFXIV has become in the short time Yoshi had his hands on it. People rant about getting a documentary about the miraculous comeback FFXIV ROSE FROM THE ASHES and became the BEST MMO THEY PLAYED IN 10 YEARS!!!! I hated the games launch, was total utter garbage, came back in 1.9 and I must say I enjoyed the open world/open dungeons/open world exp parties/hamlets/Animations that had weight to them and were just orgasmic(your character would actually pivot their entire body when turning around, shit blew my mind) and the the ability to play with class combinations. I really felt like what the game needed was a rebuild of its zones,more animations, more open world dungeons e.t.c.
What I got was everything I hated about what WoW's succession has brought to games in the past 10 years. What did FFXIV do differently than other games in the past 10 years? 2.0 launched with no content, a staple with every new launch/relaunch. It managed to run like crap while each character had less pixels than a potted plant in FFXIV 1.0. Way more animations, while all the more lackluster in the quality of them all. UI looked clean/solid so that was a plus, but the 2.5 GCD was every similar to our 2-3 second delay on using actions back in 1.0 so not much changed there LeL. Managed to have a extremely boring storyline until about 2.4 when things started to pick up.The one thing FFXIV managed to do AT LAUNCH vs the past 10 years of MMOs was....wait for it....It was VERY polished. You can be a heavily salted 1.0 nonsense spewing FFXI v2 wanting moron like me, or even the most established whitest of knights and we could STILL agree on that.
Realistically I don't feel that Square Enix should be getting so much praise for doing their job, and whats expected of them. While 2.0 was a large drought for the game so it still facilitated the same woes of many launches, it still had more going for it thanks to a very tactfully placed content walling strategy. In time the game was spewing out content faster than WoW all the while throwing major content addons like housing/choco raising/gardening/not totally useless crafting (kinda)/treasure hunting/hunts/ later on we even got a Casino. Now as a player of a MMO(RPG) how much of this actually equates to progressing your character and making them stronger? The answer is NONE OF THEM!!! (at least as of now that is the case with hunts unless you like grinding your groin clean off)
In the end one of the most enjoyable aspects of FFXIV isn't the game itself, its the self righteous and conceited developers. Yoshi P has such a engorged hardon for tank swapping and two healers that if god forbid you try to make new strategies and beat something that wasn't meant to be defeated the way THEY wanted you to do it, emergency maintenance was scheduled to fix it. Like with Summoners using TANK pets to increase the DPS in their group SE saw very quickly to remove all enmity generation from bosses, making one of our few pets useless for the most part. Dungeons were boring, really boring, so boring that once Hunts came out it was fun to go hunt NM's and cap for currency for the week and not feel like i had to log in FFXIV every day because of lolcontentwalls and do my "daily" this and "daily" that. Yoshi P came down with the rage of 1000 weak asian neckbeards and nerfed it into the ground. HOW DARE YOU NOT DO 99.9% of this games content, and so the golden days of Hunts came to pass.
Remember for SE its no good when people dont do all of their boring content because its just disrespectful. "Yoshi, it seems our numbers of players actively doing Hunts has greatly declined", Yoshi P looks up with a smirk: "Don't worry, we will add the regrading materials from coil to Hunts so the other 90% of our playerbase can get gud and raise their item level". Prior to that ordeal players were so bored of dungeons they demanded "Speed Runs" and they were very responsible with the games flawless duty finder votekick system when any group member didn't comply. Get gud scrub, me and my friend are going to voteslap your casul a## into next week, enjoy your 30-40 min que. Once again SE stepped in and added "walls" that would only go down when you killed all the cute little trash packs they littered about the zone.
They say its the best MMO in 10 years, I just don't know what level of delusion you have to be in to say something like that.
I'm so heavily salted foom, please satiate my saltiness by joining me in my RP session in Mor dhona next to the Labyrinth weekly NPC. We will stare into each others eyes while furiously sheathing/and unsheathing our Zeta weapons. I will then notice your weapon is not gud since its 125 and I'll leave you for a more "dedicated" player with a Mansion and Dedicated DDR legends of Turn 13 Coil group. Our group is so Gud we sell wins to all the casul scrubs that can't get gud and learn the the dance routine.
So you pay $9-13 bucks a month to play Triple triad and chocobo racing? Because just about everything else exists in a certain more successful game with 10 years of content. Oh sorry, I seem to forget relics because making those are so fun that I wouldn't even wish it on my most hatred inducing enemy.
Really? Smh
I'm so heavily salted foom, please satiate my saltiness by joining me in my RP session in Mor dhona next to the Labyrinth weekly NPC. We will stare into each others eyes while furiously sheathing/and unsheathing our Zeta weapons. I will then notice your weapon is not gud since its 125 and I'll leave you for a more "dedicated" player with a Mansion and Dedicated DDR legends of Turn 13 Coil group. Our group is so Gud we sell wins to all the casul scrubs that can't get gud and learn the the dance routine.
Lol you're drunk
So is that a no because you aren't into elite cats like myself or are you just not GUD and dont have a 135 weapon?
Sums it up nicely.
"It's pretty simple, really. If your only intention in posting about a particular game or topic is to be negative, then yes, you should probably move on. Voicing a negative opinion is fine, continually doing so on the same game is basically just trolling."
- Michael Bitton
Community Manager, MMORPG.com
"As an online discussion about Star Citizen grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Derek Smart approaches 1" - MrSnuffles's law
"I am jumping in here a bit without knowing exactly what you all or talking about."
- SEANMCAD
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
People tunnel vision combat in MMOs its funny. No other mmo on the market has gathering crafting like this. The housing gardening is awesome. Rp tools are excellent. Chocobo racing and triple triad both add to the diversify of activities and "virtual worldyness" so to speak.
Don't care about any of that? That's cool. There's a couple hundred thousand people who do and will finance this game indefinitely.
But pretending like none of that matters just because you're a dungeon runner is smh worthy.
Except you have to level to 50...except in order to complete the story or even access expansion content - combat is required. I don't care how many side activities a game has, combat is a core part of any MMORPG. Therefore combat being fun and engaging IS important to a lot of people who play these games. I had no problem with the slow paced combat of FF14 - it is different but not bad. What is bad is that I'm forced to do dungeons in order to progress the overarching story or even access an expansion - I considered giving it another try (having tried it at launch and quit before the month was up) but I have no desire to be forced to do anything just to access an expansion.
Im not saying its not important to a lot of people. I know it is. That is a given. Over the past year and a half, I would say that combat has made up a total of about 10% of my gaming sessions. That includes taking two classes to 50, finishing the main scenario, and leveling various combat classes to the mid 30s. Its been so long since Ive done a dungeon, I dont even remember half the ones I did when I was leveling up.
Honestly, the story feels a lot greater for making you do dungeons, and this is a story centric MMORPG, damn it. Of course you have to do the story. Why would you even want to skip it? And, then there's the complaint against dungeons. You are essentially saying, "I want combat but I don't want to do that combat, I want to do this combat because that combat has to be done and no one tells me what to do!"
FFXIV is basically designed so that you actually have to play the game to play the game. It's not a sandbox.
I don't stand against them implementing other features, but you have to recognize what this story is and unlessit really bombs again, it's not going to see an overhaul of formula.
I mean, there are things they could do:
- SS Rank Hunts that are as strong as raid bosses with Raid tier equipment
- FATE logues to keep track of what ones you've done in an area, unlocking new quests and/or battles in the area with harder more complicated quests
- Fix the story a bit for 2.0 to turn anything not plot moving into optional quests, add more boss fights over trash battles, break up the first few minutes up with being able to move and a battle, make main quests longer and less back tracking, etc.
- A regular dungeon and not a "mission dungeon" as I call them.
- Group based side quests
- Class specific side quests
And, more. I recognize they can do more, but you have to work in the system.
I can think of several MMO's that have a really awesome crafting system like FFXIV, but you are absolutely right in the regard that crafting is just as in depth as the combat in FFXIV. On the flip side crafting gear even up until recently took a back seat in regards to is usefulness. Crafting was very enjoyable in this game, but as a crafter I felt like I wasn't crafting to make a small fortune, but crafting to get more gill to buy more mats. This made me feel like a junky that needed to craft as his fix to pay for getting more of his fix. While crafted gear is finally decent, its necessity and usefulness waned very greatly from the start to end of each major patch. Gearing up my crafter and getting perfect melds/getting the new mainhands/boosting stats felt really enjoyable, but when I realized how the 4 star market was on my server it was the end of the road for me.
One thing I can say I thought of as a goal would be obtaining a mansion as a small guild due to housing playing a large role in the Expansion. Though I realized unless I had 7 other DDR master friends that wanted to sell wins or I bought gill, It would take far longer than its worth. Still after managing to get halfway there, I discover the same clear groups I mentioned were kind enough to buy out all the large properties and hold them hostage at an even higher rate than I could ever afford, making it like AA all over again.Ill agree with the gathering being flipping sweet, but due to the rampant terrain clipping botters that farm endless amounts of resources to only destroy your opportunity to make profit.
When looking at other venues you see the combat is slow, but it is definitely very "enjoyable" which makes me enjoy the combat aesthetics of the game, which wouldn't think you disagree that content is quite lacking. FFXIV has a large spread of many activities to do, but this isn't a F2P game so you have to ask yourself is it worth 15 bucks a month to water virtual plants and craft nearly useless trinkets? I feel the game has spread itself thin and is trying to imitate the success of games I just don't feel is enjoyable.
Here's what I take into consideration:
-Crafting and gathering classes with two full toolbars of abilities and the expansion adding more
-Resource pools, stats, gear sets, tiered items, storyline quests, and faction hub for crafting and gathering classes
-expansion bringing mastery system, lore system, new levels of stat customization beyond just NQ HQ.
-yes Chocobo racing, breeding, triple triad, gold saucer activities. all welcome additions to the game
-the housing neighborhoods, the stables, the gardening (which is its own meta by itself), the ability to craft instruments, place them in your house and play them, making crafting stations and in the expansion modifying a house to be a dedicated workshop specific to one class
-the fact that they add content for rp'ers, crafters, gatherers, every patch.
-the interdependence between all gathering and crafting classes and the multiple ways you can approach the market with your wares. Supplying items for end game raiders, crafters, gatherers, home decor, grand company supply and provision missions, Ixal delivery missions, spirit bonding, desynthesis, and levemetes.
-it is one of the most polished mmos out there. you can download and play on huge patch days right from the start. other mmos release a patch and the game is broken for a week.
-the devs have a clear roadmap of where they want to take the game and so far they have delivered.
For all of these things and more, hell yes they can get $12.99 a month from me. It is money well spent and I'm happy to support them.
thats totally fine. like i said, different strokes. for some reason people took issue with that lol
Also may want to add there is mention of a token based drop system for endgame, if that's the case I may never have to deal with being 0/49 on T4 casting pants... There are at least some thoughts about adjusting how content difficulty is tiered and how insta wipe mechanics work. One of the many things I can't put past me is the necessity for a 8 man group size for raiding. I had statics in First Coil and SCoB and me +3 RL friends made 4 and we managed to find 2 dedicated raiders to make it 6. The struggle was always finding the last DPS/Healer every week, and after over a month of failed recruitment/no shows (we were willing for players to learn, players however were never patient nor willing to show up each week so note I didn't put "baddies" as a reason) we gave up. Always felt that Duty finder could be 5 members, adding one more DD into each group to balance out clear speed responsibility and to severely cut down DD que times because yes we needed another Melee DD...
You have a very meaty bullet list of features but most of it suffers for the very reason I mentioned above.
~New stat allocations will not give players more incentive to purchase crafted gear due gill being such a limited resource to those not:
-Selling wins for such outrageously large sums only obtainable from RMT.
-Buying Gill from RMT for the purpose of purchasing wins/gear to bypass retarded content wall restrictions.
~Crafted gear will sell well for the first few weeks to said farm groups to pump very high amounts of VIT to learn strategies but will then take a nosedive to where your lucky to see a piece sell weekly followed by:
-As other crafters lagging behind the new gear wall catch up, the undercutting wars begin.
New abilities do little to nothing to help the problems listed above, paired with each crafting class not being created equal by desynth or crafting standards. I'm sure some of us can remember after blowing up a bunch of gill crafting whatever silly untrade-able item, finally obtaining our new crafting book to open it and find out all we can do is make ingots and catalyst's for other crafters. Pair that with the over consistent uselessness that Alchemy has had over the games entire existence. The fact that you purchase a Spiritbond potion from a NPC because a ALECHEMIST;maker of POTIONS cannot make it. Along with the very limited market of hardcore players that use potions because they marginally help DPS while fighting undercutting wars with the other idiots doing 40-50% mark downs because they can't be patient. The very fact that there is no cost to repost items on the AH is both a great convenience and most terrible idea of all MMO's I've seen.
There is one thing you mentioned that sells well in your list; crafting gear. I have made the most consistent and highest income per transaction from selling demateria and HQ crafting/artisan sets. What this means is essentially selling into producing another competitor to undercut me all the while selling false hopes to would be crafters that don't know what awaits them.What is left is as you mentioned, being able to pay money to do things I couldn't fathom to do In RL in a video game. RPing is something I will simply not judge, there are those who enjoy it and I am glad they can find a game that does it so well, because I sincerely think SE does an amazing job with it.
There is one thing I'm sure you aren't thinking of when you play FFXIV, you are playing a Final Fantasy game. A genre of games ranging from the protectors of the crystals to a fabulously attractive band of teenagers that needs to save the world from equivalently fabulously attractive male evil dudes that want to wipe it out. I seem to recall a certain Gaius Von Baelsar, the Black Wolf of the Imperial Legatus being quite the badass in 1.0 moving into ARR. Well he was pretty cool until Yoshi neutered him in the fall of ultima. Was a really cool mission but I felt they really undersold his merits with the boring and poorly scripted event you defeat him in. He's the kind of guy I can see bringing many more abominations of ancient machanima and I hope he does. I don't care about some chick that bangs dragons and a kingdom of stuck up Elezan nambly pambly dragoons.
What I'm trying to say is final fantasy games have always been about the story (which FFXIV is a bit rocky with but seem to be finally getting some traction with it) and all the mean and challenging monsters/bosses/mid bosses you could readily shake a stick at. Pair that with party configuration/customization/upgrading e.t.c. allowing many freedoms in that department is what I loved about them. This is what the primary staple RPG's have created in my youth and what I enjoyed so much about them. Now moving into mmos some sacrifices to make "holy trinity" work FFXI did show it was a necessary evil but still allowed enough freedom to let players try to play the way they wanted to. Hell, 14 years later Ninja in FFXI was actually a DPS but that didn't stop them from functioning as awesome tanks for the past 10 years. We had furniture/housing/RP elements in FFXI but the beefy core was still story/events/socializing e.t.c. Each update brought varied battle content and side grades offered a lot of replay-ability. In FFXI you got a amazing story, and a accessory that is still good 14 years later. In FFXIV you get a shitty materia and about 5 bucks, don't spend it all in one place big spender!
FFXIV has a great combat system, and does not suffer the same pitfalls FFXI did where in FFXIV all classes are useful. At the same time the cost is you being like every other player playing your class with next to 0 breathing room to experiment with. Even having such a great system, you have no battle content outside of WoW Themepark instances and inflated and rescaled/reskinned monster models with large HP pools out in the world. I feel that's where the game needs to work on some things because that's what a Final Fantasy is all about. I like the content diversity across types of players, but I think we should focus more on varied battle content rather than new teasets and coffee tables you can drink your virtual tea with Mrs. Longbottom. There is plenty of vanity by now, we need something to change things up a bit. I'd love to stop calling this game Final Vanity 14, and call it Final God Damn Dragon Puncher Fantasy online.