Comments from the Devs

[Corrderio]

Well considering how behind times SE seems to be, it wouldn't surprise me. Wasn't there an article on BG somewhere about a company that was doing a joint project with SE and they had to fax SE their code?

[miokomioko]

That was Grin trying to safe face and blame their bankruptcy on SE (which was obviously from frivolous spending & multiple cushy offices around the world after they landed a Final Fantasy title).

[Corrderio]

Well if it's true, that's pretty sad.

[Grey Jorildyn]

Well considering how behind times SE seems to be...

When we talk about being "behind the times" what is really being said is that SE needs to westernize their MMO. That is almost always how players will interpret it. That's how I interpret it and I wholeheartedly agree with the statement if that is what is being conveyed. We all hate when people say "this game needs to be more like WoW", but the fact of the matter is that it does need to be more like WoW. This game isn't even an average MMO right now. We're dealing with a horrible UI (because it is trying too hard to be fancy and original), an unintuitive leveling system (that will neither keep players nor draw new ones; more of the latter), terrible drop rates (intended to extend the shelf life of current content), a god awful questing system (that has 0 flow, progression, or purpose), and non-existent class balance.

What we do have is a lot of promises. That's all we've had from the beginning. Now we're paying for the game, unlike that same beginning, and now we have a sense of entitlement to complain more so than ever before. Personally I think a community like BG, which draws in the most highly desirable players (and also quite a bit of trash), should really be doing more to get under SE's skin about the direction of this game. We need to unite to make suggestions and get them to be "liked" on the official forums and shoot down the utterly stupid ideas currently being posted and "liked" (which btw is the vast majority of suggestions made there and we all know it). We've got the tools, the ideas, the players, and the voice to do it, so let's just get to it huh?

Personally I think we need to take all our good ideas and suggestions and compile them into themed post(s)--one or many, it doesn't matter. Then elect a spokesperson to go and post our shit on the OFs. Now that I'm paying and they're "listening", I feel my right to bitch has just multiplied tenfold. However my desire to sift through all the meaningless bullshit (again the vast majority) is not there anymore. BG needs to be the base for this campaign and I really feel we need to bring it hard to make sure 2.0 is worth the money we're now throwing (away) at SE.

OccupySE, 1%, etc...

[Corrderio]

Grey, I wish people were more like you in General instead of the typical dumbass that has their head so far up Yoshida's ass they'll defend whatever he does even when the flaws are right in front of them.

[Crab_Cake]

That seems to be the right answer - SE did seem to pick Yoshida due to him being experienced with playing MMOs. While he did only have one or two games under his belt (AFAIK), him being an experienced MMO player is a huge plus over anyone else.

That was Grin trying to safe face and blame their bankruptcy on SE (which was obviously from frivolous on multiple cushy offices around the world after they landed a Final Fantasy title).

Didn't they become bankrupt due to SE not paying them for all the work they did thought? Also what's the source on them buying offices around the world?

I wouldn't be surprised if what they said here was trying to save face but if SE didn't pay them then that's disappointing. Though I guess their contract might have had something that allowed SE to do that.

[Manako]

You know, I also wondered what made them pick Yoshida (not that it was a bad decision whatsoever). I think the largest production project he was a part of was Dragon Quest: Swords or some shit. He didn't seem like he had the best resume SE could find for an emergency MMORPG ground-up redesign.

Makes sense to me. Have to assume that the heavy hitters are probably too busy on other projects/disinterested in managing a failing project. Get a guy who is obviously eager to get stuff done, who may be a bit inexperienced and has experience with the genre to boot was an easy option. If he fails, well the project probably would have failed anyway and he is probably super motivated to prove himself.

[miokomioko]

That seems to be the right answer - SE did seem to pick Yoshida due to him being experienced with playing MMOs. While he did only have one or two games under his belt (AFAIK), him being an experienced MMO player is a huge plus over anyone else.



Didn't they become bankrupt due to SE not paying them for all the work they did thought? Also what's the source on them buying offices around the world?

I wouldn't be surprised if what they said here was trying to save face but if SE didn't pay them then that's disappointing. Though I guess their contract might have had something that allowed SE to do that.

Yeah, I don't doubt that the contract allowed SE to just pull out without payment if they were downright unhappy with what Grin was doing. Small companies tend to overlook those shitty loopholes in order to land the fatty clients.

While SE claimed that they were not liking what Grin was doing and that it wasn't true to the Final Fantasy brand. Grin claims their shit was awesome so far and that SE just tried to make things difficult for them and wanted an excuse to save money by cancelling a project and simultaneously rubbing their name in the dirt. Honestly, the concept work Grin had done and leaked (in hopes of people siding with them) didn't look "Final Fantasy" at all. Grin was trying to do their own western spin on it for sure.

Meanwhile:

Spoiler: show

Their Barcelona office:
http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/3...lona_super.jpg

Their Stockholm office:
http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/3...holm_super.jpg

Their Jakarta office:
http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/3...arta_super.jpg

The whole thing just screams a small company landing a fat client with a less-than-desirable contract, and then blowing all their money and blaming the big guy.

[Charismatic]

Did you miss the part where if you have a WHM around (you know, the only way to actually get Esuna) everyone will be using jobs? Remember the part about cross-class abilities being locked out when using jobs? Yeah....
Unless they've changed their mind on them (and it is a possibility) only WHMs will be able to Raise in job situations. In that case a spell that cures weakness wouldn't be useful at all. Unless you're planning to ask your Thaumaturge and melees to gladly not use their jobs to enhance their roles to have Raises around.... and let's remember that job bonuses won't be limited to simply extra spells or abilities.
Actually there's something I have yet to try even if it most likely won't work... has anyone tried Sacred Prism with Raise yet?
I'm assuming Raise is the exception like it is for Accession in FFXI but you never know.

Um... the WHM being on their job doesn't mean everyone will. We don't even know yet how effective jobs will be in every case.

[Grey Jorildyn]

Assuming jobs are built upon their base class and they have access to the abilities of the base class(es), jobs ought to be fairly effective. But who knows. It would be kinda weird if PLD only had access to GLA abilities up to 30 and MRD ones up to 15. I could see it working in a few cases though.

Personally I think they should just require a single class to 30 and have all the abilities of their base class available all the way up to 50 (or however high you currently have that class).

[Seravi Edalborez]

I'm hoping they changed their minds about restricting abilities to those of the base class for jobs:
1) 15 main class, 10 cross class, 5 job abilities fits perfectly into the current 30 action bar. Though ARC has 17 with Lightshot and Refill so who knows.
2) The list of cross-class abilities after 1.20 is already pretty limited.
3) Some main/sub combos would be pretty pointless assuming the only abilities of the sub were usable cross-class. Take MNK: PGL+THM. lolmeleenukes. (or is it CON?)
But weak reasoning/hopefulness on my part.

Slightly aside: Lodestone general needs to go; keep everything in its class/topic forum to alleviate the 1000 stupid topics to every half of a good one. Then enforce off-topicness in other forums. We don't need original content ideas yet, fix what's there first.

[Grey Jorildyn]

Well if they "simply" adjusted the action bars so there were 3 visible and 2 toggle-able on the left and right sides of the screens, then allowed us to hotkey those slots to whatever we wanted, the amount of action slots wouldn't make any difference.

Some day SE, some day.

[Lordender]

I wouldn't even be banking on jobs to bring "balance" to the game, everyone seems to have this mindset that once jobs are implemented everyone can call it a day and the game is magically balanced for all future content.

They have yet to show anyone that they can balance any game, SE has showed nothing in the past that they can. People put up with SE's incompetence with game balance by saying "well, you can be every class/job! just level all of them!" thats such a piss poor argument, how about SE does a better job?
Class stacking is so retarded, If I want to play x-job than I shouldn't have to level y-job just so I can be considered for z-content.

I don't know if they're going to ever get it right, if I go on just track record alone I have to say they won't.

[Lucavi]

If jobs didn't bring balance in XI (and they didn't, and still can't - check out the dev tracker thread for all of the fun), what makes anyone think they will in XIV? Balance has to start from the ideas in the dev's heads - their mindsets - not from constant additions of new jobs. Its why Blizzard so rarely introduces new jobs to WoW; it takes enough effort to balance what already exists.

If SE cannot balance the few jobs that the game came out with, how the heck are they going to balance double the number? It makes no sense. There's a difference between the statement "I'll have more fun with double the jobs" and "the game will be more balanced with double the jobs".

[Lordender]

If jobs didn't bring balance in XI (and they didn't, and still can't - check out the dev tracker thread for all of the fun), what makes anyone think they will in XIV? Balance has to start from the ideas in the dev's heads - their mindsets - not from constant additions of new jobs. Its why Blizzard so rarely introduces new jobs to WoW; it takes enough effort to balance what already exists.

If SE cannot balance the few jobs that the game came out with, how the heck are they going to balance double the number? It makes no sense. There's a difference between the statement "I'll have more fun with double the jobs" and "the game will be more balanced with double the jobs".

Hopefully they don't add jobs just to sell expansion copies. Too many jobs in XI.

[Draylo]

Jobs are a selling point for Final Fantasy, especially a game like this.

[Ambrosia]

Japan Land just came out with a new population trend spreadsheet yesterday.


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...Gc&hl=ja#gid=0


This is the main tab, it shows you the entire FFXIV Population History Trend and if you scroll at the bottom the FFXIV Population Recent Trend. If you notice on the bottom left there are 4 tabs you can choose from or change the number at the end of the address to 0 (the current number) 1 2 or 3.


Yeah the numbers are quite low but it was expected (more so from the NA/EU population which are lower than these ranging from 350-450 in most servers the week prior to billing). Square Enix was already prepared for this. According to Wada he said:


"This decision will not be popular, but it is a necessary step in building upon the foundation our fans and development team have made together and to realize the full potential of FINAL FANTASY XIV."


Chances are he got together with the supervisory board committee/executive team members maybe even some key shareholders/investors (these folks usually choose people in the supervisory board that share and promote their interests) and ended up with this as the only possible solution. I think the folks giving Wada his paycheck would not budge for anything else i.e. this is the only thing we are offering to you on the table: no more extensions and you may not use money from other projects/departments etc. Hence why he said this decision was not going to be popular, had he other choices on hand, he would of probably taken it.


As far as the balancing act for PVE and PVP... seems you guys have that covered. Don't get me wrong seeing stuff like (and maybe in the future) Artifact Version 1 and 2: level 50 ad 60 Relic Armor Version 1 and 2: level 70 and 80 and Ancient Armor Version 1 and 2: level 90 and 99 and top that off with all the possible summons and stuff like Bahamut Version 1 and 2 is nice... but at the end of it all it has to be much more than this to bring back all those people back as well as keep them for the long run (for the diehard fans of course this may be enough). Pretty costumes and arena fights and "flashy weapon skills" only go so far. Other MMOs have used the gimmicky Version 2.0 even a Version 3.0 to hype the masses up.


And the official forums are just glorious. There are people stating that they have around 200ish people online and that is just perfect, for MMOs I guess that is a perfect number. And then you have one that just recently said that there are tons and tons of people (maybe heavyset?), the reason people are complaining about not seeing enough people online is because they are running within towns too fast and not allowing the computer to load the other players. So then maybe the same can be said about console games? All those console games had billions of people playing online but I never saw one because I was going to fast? Holy. Shit. Bat. Man.

[Lucavi]

Jobs are a selling point for Final Fantasy, especially a game like this.

Quality design is a selling point for any company. I figure XIV would have sold a lot more had it actually been good than being shitty with classes/jobs in it.

The official forums are awesome.

[Burningthought]

Stuff.

I thought that Wada or Yoshi-P said something about the development being all in-house. They don't have to worry about investors and stuff. I mean I know that SE is publicly traded, but i'm sure that the other games they've produced is keeping their profits up. It'd make sense(at least to me) that investors would want SE to put as much work into XIV as possible, because if it relaunches and it is successful they will have a brand new cash cow.

On the other hand I could've heard wrong and all of this was me bullshitting.

On-Topic: There was a bunch of comments about them allowing us to turn on/off the Help popup/window thing. Personally I'd like an option that would place a scrolling marquee at the top of my screen like in all the other Final Fantasy games, but i'm too lazy to post that on the official forums. In any case who's with me on this one?

[miokomioko]

Personally I'd like an option that would place a scrolling marquee at the top of my screen like in all the other Final Fantasy games, but i'm too lazy to post that on the official forums. In any case who's with me on this one?

You'll just have to wait for them user-made UI widgets... I just hope people with some actual typo/graphical talent work on them...