Do you think all the development for the past few years was designed to slowly kill the game?

[rate]

An MMO is really all about goals, starting with Abyssea they sped up pretty much all the goals this game had and killed many of the things that kept people chugging along (king camping/low drop rates/long waits to access content/slow leveling). They are even doing things that speed up the few goals the game has left, needlessly banning people, closing down consoles and now the ace in the hole of stopping all content.

Now we finally get to the point that they are stopping all development because they "don't have enough dev units" this is not a new revelation for the developers. They have known of this problem for a long time now.

So do you think Square have had a grand design scheme to lose players and kill the game over the past few years?

Given what we know now it makes so much sense.

[arus2001]

Did they likely want to scale things back eventually? Yes.

Are they doing it with the malicious intent you would see some claim? No.

Anything else could probably be summed up with, "This isn't 2005 anymore. Get over it."

[Draylo]

I think they plan to eventually phase out the PC version but they intend to continue FFXI in the form of that phone game. It's through another company so they might want to toss FFXI onto them and continue their focus on 14 sadly.

[Sonomaa]

The design of the game was based on the flawed thought process that the Everquest way of grinding so much it makes koreans cry. When WoW came out and showed that you could have a massive world that wasnt painfully hard to deal with, FFXI could and should have evolved without losing its core identity. We begged for kings to be poppable for YEARS and they said it wasnt possible, guess what, it was. We begged for years for instanced content, they said it wasnt possible, oh hey, another bullshit lie.

If the game was legitimately not able to handle what we asked for, thats one thing, the fact that we were lied to and treated like third world citizens, thats the big problem.
I firmly believe the devs wanted to do good things for us but the person in charge kept anything like that from happening. Even Sage Sundi admitted he had no real power at all, no real say, and very little of what he brought back was ever bothered with by the person who made all the choices.
Remember, the man in charge of FFXI decision making literally almost killed Square Enix as a company with FFXIV 1.0.

[Anoat]

I think its pretty clear that most of the changes you have seen in the last year have been to gradually phase the game into being more solo friendly. I'm certain SE realizes that a large percentage of players will stop playing after completing the end of RoV, but there will still be some who continue to piddle around until the servers close. This is all to gradually make life easier for those few players who stick around until the very very end.

[Lucavi]

The goal was to turn an EQ clone with FF skins into a non-EQ clone with FF skins. Maliciousness never has anything to do with it. Profit always does.

[Damane]

no the changes to the game with abyssea and onwards werent made to kill the game. there were still alot of achievements to get.
Even the changes now arent meant to kill the game.
I do believe abyssea was a fresh and needed change for FFXI and i do believe that the QoL adjustments following adoulin were excellent done. If all this stuff would have happened with the release of ToAU (and a possible revamp of the whole system) the game would be in a total different shape and position.
They announced the end of updates so they expect a huge drop of the playerbase after november, what they are doing right now is smart. They are changing everything around so people can enjoy vanadiel with solo/few people as possible. So no i dont think their intend is to kill the game.

[Celebrindor]

It's hard for those of us who don't wish to contemplate an end to differentiate between "killing the game" and "not actively trying to preserve". I don't believe that when they saw the writing on the wall for the dev kits they wanted (or maybe could, financially speaking?) to do anything about it, and that feels like killing it- but in reality, they're just making it as solo-able as possible.

[Fwahm]

You know what they would do if they really wanted to kill it? Shut the servers down. There's no contract saying that they have to keep the servers going, so if they wanted to kill it, it would be easy.

[Kaisha]

We begged for kings to be poppable for YEARS and they said it wasnt possible, guess what, it was. We begged for years for instanced content, they said it wasnt possible, oh hey, another bullshit lie.

I just find it crazy how many 'ps2limitations' sections of the game Matsui's crew just worked around and found solutions for in the game's twilight years, offering things we would have never thought possible in the past.

Spoiler: show

Aside from fixing the limited instancing issue introduced back in ToA, which seems to be something that would require a fair bit of an overhaul on the backend + hardware to address?

Despite how XI may have turned out, it may have possibly fared better in the long term if he was in charge much earlier in its life span.

[Damane]

I just find it crazy how many 'ps2limitations' sections of the game Matsui's crew just worked around and found solutions for in the game's twilight years, offering things we would have never thought possible in the past.

Spoiler: show

Aside from fixing the limited instancing issue introduced back in ToA, which seems to be something that would require a fair bit of an overhaul on the backend + hardware to address?

Despite how XI may have turned out, it may have possibly fared better in the long term if he was in charge much earlier in its life span.

the ironic fact is the game is "dying" now because of PS2limitation (no Dev-kits) ¬.¬

[BerenTebogo]

There's also zero evidence to support the game being better off now had they fixed stuff earlier. FFXI has had a long run. Are there any MMO that have had as long or longer run that still had more people playing than are currently playing FFXI?

It was never going to run forever. It was never going to run for 30 years. Will WoW, LoL, FFXIV run for the same or longer? Any answer is biased speculation, which people these days love tossing around as fact in these threads.

Some may think FFXI has been dead for over a decade. Personally, I left FFXIV to come back to XI after years away and I have way more fun now than I've had in XIV total.

There is no script for how to make a MMO run long enough for .1% of the subscribers can play for their entire adult life. All these "is this malicious?" "Is SE tricking us?!?!?!?!??!" Bullshit ideas are fucking eye-roll and anyone who buys into them is the living version of the emotion you feel when you roll your eyes at someone. Probably think chemtrails are real and vaccines cause autism.

Fuck, I really hate some of you people for subjecting me to your shitty ideas.

[Firedemon]

I don't think there was ANY thought process for ANYTHING regarding the decisions of SE. I wouldn't be surprised that half the ideas came from a room of guys that said "FUCK YA THAT SOUNDS COOL" and then implemented it in an expansion. Now, they just dug themselves a hole they can't get out of, leading to the demise of FFXI.

Let's face it, they should have lowered Alexandrite requirements, amongst other things long ago. This has been brought up long ago yet nothing changed. If SE actually listened to the players, and forged a game that the majority of gamers wanted, I bet there would be a lot more people playing. Look at Delve...people returned because of that, but it took a week to cap out, then it was over.

Decisions like that lead me to believe SE was winging it all these years...game was pretty much fucked after CoP/ToAU. Either way, I've played from the start and intend to until the bitter end.....it's still a glorified chatroom most of the time, and I'm ok with that.

[Lucavi]

There's also zero evidence to support the game being better off now had they fixed stuff earlier. FFXI has had a long run. Are there any MMO that have had as long or longer run that still had more people playing than are currently playing FFXI?

It was never going to run forever. It was never going to run for 30 years. Will WoW, LoL, FFXIV run for the same or longer? Any answer is biased speculation, which people these days love tossing around as fact in these threads.

Some may think FFXI has been dead for over a decade. Personally, I left FFXIV to come back to XI after years away and I have way more fun now than I've had in XIV total.

There is no script for how to make a MMO run long enough for .1% of the subscribers can play for their entire adult life. All these "is this malicious?" "Is SE tricking us?!?!?!?!??!" Bullshit ideas are fucking eye-roll and anyone who buys into them is the living version of the emotion you feel when you roll your eyes at someone. Probably think chemtrails are real and vaccines cause autism.

Fuck, I really hate some of you people for subjecting me to your shitty ideas.

Don't be so upset, Sath. They're just really really passionate about their baby, man!

Just think back to when we were just two dudes hanging out at Valkurm dunes... some people never got past that part, mentally. Emotionally. Spiritually.

Sexually.

[ColenzoRidesAgain]

If you absolutely can't come to grips with them trying to kill the game then let me run a few things by you real quick.

1. The conference encompassing "The future of FFXI," was an hour long. Over half of that hour was spent talking about a stupid fucking FFXI phone game.
2. No more content updates after November.
3. Releasing the flood gates for Relics and Empyrean farming.
4. Absolutely no plans on server mergers, the only answer we got is "we will see how things look when November comes." Which is clearly fucking retarded. Are we supposed to be impressed by logging into a game in the middle of the week to see around 200 NA players running around or something? Half of those people are probably dual boxing on top of it. I think if they actually cared about player retention they wouldn't have let things get this bad.

Highly doubtful that they were trying to kill the game before any of this though. Through all the work they've actually been putting into quality of life adjustments and giving players more inventory space and just the myriad of different little things you can tell that they do care about making it better to play at least. I doubt the actual people developing content for the game have any say in whether or not servers get touched or not seeing as they're not the ones paying the bills. For all we know they could be afraid of merging, pissing everybody off and losing more subscribers. From a financial position it might be more beneficial for them to just leave shit alone in that regard.

One thing is for certain though, even if this game does end up taking a shit and the servers get turned off we should still be seeing the private servers becoming more and more developed. There are already some pretty unique and different ways to play FFXI now with them being available.

[Fwahm]

There's a difference between killing it and letting it die, you know. They're definitely doing the latter, and definitely not doing the former.

[Sirious]

Ive been saying they were purposely killing it off your at LEAST the last year. Turns out. I was right. Not exactly satisfying, but yeah. It's been blatantly obvious if you were paying attention.

[BerenTebogo]

Ive been saying they were purposely killing it off your at LEAST the last year. Turns out. I was right. Not exactly satisfying, but yeah. It's been blatantly obvious if you were paying attention.

Seriously, have seldom seen such an extreme example of someone who can't let go. Your ass doesn't even play anymore and your post frequency is higher than the most active half of the posters in this section combined.

Fucking conspiracy theorists.

Do you feel validated yet? Can I get you a blanket? Are you okay?!?

There's a difference between killing it and letting it die, you know. They're definitely doing the latter, and definitely not doing the former.

The truth.

[Draylo]

Now you understand my feelings haha, some people are just crazy. He is def. one of them for sure.

[Anoat]

FFXI is your grandma that just entered hospice care. The doctors aren't actively killing her, but they aren't actively trying to keep her alive anymore.