Comments from the Devs

[Lucavi]

To be fair, I really don't want a child playing a MMO. Not because MMO's are bad, but because I don't fucking want a child in my party. Ever.

[Adajer]

Welcome.....to the World of Warcraft!

[Kelenae]

To be fair, I really don't want a child playing a MMO. Not because MMO's are bad, but because I don't fucking want a child in my party. Ever.

I'm the opposite i dont want my dad in my party lol... i've seen him play wow

[LD]

So bullet point: Fuck Casuals.

[Lucavi]

^ I think we can all drink to that.

[Izzy]

Welcome.....to the World of Warcraft!

The biggest idiots in MMOs are kids.

The biggest assholes in MMOs are adults.

[Jamison]

Two folks in my XI linkshell were father and son, they were both pretty cool and played well.

[Draylo]

I've asked myself this a lot as well, I honestly think those people just want attention or something. Woe is me, 12.95 is super expensive for a month. Then they go out and buy tons of crap like junk food and such that easily passes 12.95 in a month. Just losers. (Why the hell does my browsers go to 3 pages before the last page when I click a thread...)

[Rocl]

Two folks in my XI linkshell were father and son, they were both pretty cool and played well.

I originally started playing FFXI as a young lad with my dad and I turned out perfectly normal!

[Gulkeeva]

I originally started playing FFXI as a young lad with my dad and I turned out perfectly normal!

I started ffxi as a highschool student and look at me now...! O_o

[SephYuyX]

Being old and married with no free time I hope FFXIV has a lot of casual / solo content.

[Kachiko]

In my case, I probably get a bit hyper-critical about what is offered in the span. Yes, MMOs are generally cost efficient entertainment, but that isn't a blanket sentiment that everything MMOs do is done well. For example, I'm someone on an unstable schedule who basically can't commit to an LS that runs events every night at 8pm. This has absolutely zero impact on my skill as a player, as I'm still capable of reading up on things on my own time and generally having a feel for the game with my own playing. I know I'm not alone here as others may have family, shift work, being on-call, or numerous other reasons that can inhibit steady play time.

My concern would be, say 2-3 months after launch after I've gotten my primary jobs to 50, that I find the only thing for me to do requires that schedule requirement for the large-man raid content. This invites the question of why I'm paying for content I can't experience when I am able to play. Of course, I can be okay with that as long as there is equal, alternate progression paths I could tackle on my own or in more PUG-friendly environments than 20+ man content so that maybe if the stars align I could poke my head in on such things, but then this just invites the angry rage of the leet gamer angry about welfare epics who wants to feel special about being a sheep in their 20-man flock. Basically, I'm not telling SE to stop making content for that crowd. All I can do is hope they don't ignore the casual majority that isn't bleeding edge hardcore and actually craves more than pet systems or other fluff activities once they've finished their leveling. I have yet to play a game that achieved this, with XI being closest during the Abyssea era.

It really boils down to how accessible the raids are. As an example, WoW started out with extremely high barriers of entry to be able to experience the only real end game content, and it took them a while to understand that making content, for the top 1%, was a stupid business model, and not sustainable in the longer run. It was slow, but there was steady progress in creating content, for lower numbers of people, and eventually creating content that, at the easiest level, was accessible to almost anyone and let you experience the story/content, while having harder modes that still challenged the 1%. How FF14 will tackle this is yet to be seen.

Essentially, any money the game makes should first go to the game, then you pay off the investors or fund other projects in the company.

That will never happen; the investors are always the first to be paid because they are the ones that gave the money necessary to create the product. Some investors are obviously more flexible, or believe more in the product, than others, and you can generally see when that's the case, but they will be paid and the product will take a back seat to that if plans do not go well. FF14 is, perhaps, the unique example of where a company has actually tried to re-boot an MMO, and used an older, currently successful one, to help finance the idea, and Yoshi-P, if he was the one who convinced the board that this was feasible, has exquisite cajones (doubly so, for Japanese culture) for being able to do that and hopefully deliver, which currently, seems like a very high probability of success.

I know the "vote with your wallet by not subbing" tends to be a popular sentiment in topics like this, but that rarely achieves informing a dev why you will not pay for their product. Pragmatically, general and free access with things fairly itemized will do a far better job in describing what players do and do not want. For example, I don't believe PvP will be popular in XIV. It rarely is in the western audience. You'll still have the die-hards that will believe it's where SE should focus and they'll naturally ridicule those who don't PvP or "get it" in the long term, but money talks. If people aren't buying new PvP maps/arenas, it's not what people want. A catch-all sub fee at best suggests there's at least one thing people like, but you can be sure if that could get things at a better value, they'd go for it. Additionally, SE could maintain a sub model where you get all the new dungeons, PvP stuff, quests, and so on for that monthly fee with the bonus of discounts on cosmetic stuff like pets and costumes. That would ultimately be the best deal, yes, but people also wouldn't feel pressured into 30 day blocks of time and interest if you don't want to sub.

This doesn't lend to a feasible development cycle; the company has a vision, for it's game, and the development team will create that vision, to varying degrees of success. What they can do is cater their content implementation to the desires of their greater player base, but what you suggests is far too financial risky to do.

[Cichy]

Being old and married with no free time I hope FFXIV has a lot of casual / solo content.

it seems that it will have plenty

[Spider-Dan]

I've asked myself this a lot as well, I honestly think those people just want attention or something. Woe is me, 12.95 is super expensive for a month.

It's really more of two things:

1) Kids don't have credit cards, and convincing your parents to add an automatic monthly bill to their card is an argument kids want to avoid (though the prevalence of gametime cards in stores has reduced this problem).

2) MMOs don't lend themselves to play-this-month, skip-next-month. You can't really just start up and stop playing on a month-to-month like Halo or Starcraft.

I understand why P2P is a big deal for kids. That being said, there are plenty of F2P MMOs out there, so that's not my problem.

[arus2001]

So bullet point: Fuck Casuals.

Can basically call that the tl;dr of my post.

This doesn't lend to a feasible development cycle; the company has a vision, for it's game, and the development team will create that vision, to varying degrees of success. What they can do is cater their content implementation to the desires of their greater player base, but what you suggests is far too financial risky to do.

Risky, perhaps, but I guess I'm weird in valuing dev honesty. XI was plagued with its share of "We'll look into it..." and nothing happens. Rift devs have been a bit more honest about PvP development, much to the dismay of PvPers, but I still feel they're being dishonest about their endgame activity in pandering to the vocal minority of hardcores. Of course, they're F2P now, and in general their system doesn't seem unreasonable. I have a couple reasons for why I'm not giving the game much attention at the moment, though. The first is peculiar hardware issues I seem to be having with it. I've been trying to troubleshoot here, on their boards, and elsewhere, but have had no luck. Strangely, I played the XIV beta with no trouble at all. Doesn't mean I won't, but maybe the game engine is simply better coded. Second reason is, despite them FINALLY adding the Dendrome, there's no new progression for me to get out of it. 2.3, aside from the F2P conversion, was essentially a Raider patch. Same was true of 2.1. 2.2 was a joke. All I have to do is level alts, but they'll just hit the same gear wall my main has because they refuse to insert the needed alternate progression. On the plus side, now I don't feel obligated to grind infinity stones because there's no X days left in my sub going on. In fact, I've been enjoying some freebie web game the past couple weeks that, while there's some obvious P2W elements, it's still been accessible enough for someone who doesn't want to pay. Will it sustain me until XIV? Probably not, but it's been a change of pace from Rift or D3.

Ultimately, I think watching Rift over the next 6 months or so might be interesting in gauging the conversion, but you'll still have those who unconditionally believe a sub model is superior. XI taught me better.

[Hyan]

Until then, nothing about a sub model intrinsically screams our money is being better spent and is more likely ripping people off based on their own interests in the game. We'll have a good update cycle for the first year, that's practically a MMO requirement.

Sub model means you're charging a fee for a product that is not that much if at all better (subjectively) than products that other companies give access to play for free. As long as consumers know this and act on the fact then yes, it does scream to the developer that they have to up their game elsewhere to justify the fee. It pretty much has to be the update cycle. It's basically the sub model requirement. The dev HAS to do something better than the F2P competition. If they can't do it because they lack resources they bleed subs and go F2P.

If consumers find the product more appealing than other products then the dev (SE) can slack off. Yes, this does happen at some point when you have a stable playerbase that is hooked on the game. For all the successful P2P MMO's this process has taken a lot longer than a year (I'd say 5+ years for both XI and WoW until you could see the effort has taken a hit) so I don't know where you pulled that one year number from.

[arus2001]

I, and I suspect many others, don't look at any game and think, "I'm going to play this for years!" You can try to spin it as just seeking instant gratification, but I look at it more as the realization that there is competition out there, in turn, choices. All it takes is one patch to make or break any game for someone. If a game is genuinely good and churning out content at a decent pace, then yes, you'll see people stick around for potentially years. Some may get unhealthily attached to their avatars and stick with an ailing game just because, but I'd personally be hesitant of a group that just accepted everything offered without constructive feedback. I know I've argued before that this genre's biggest strength is the means to evolve, and that includes how we pay to play. So, sure, profit and philosophy may clash at points, but I'd also say our games won't evolve if players refuse to. With MMOs allegedly being about playing with others, I find it curious people endorse keeping potential players away by a pay wall, even if insignificant to them. The fictional invasion of 10 year olds wielding their parents' credit card has always struck me as a strawman, with oftentimes the worst personalities in MMOs being college kids with too much time and too few obligations. Anyway, this argument isn't going to go much further, and it certainly doesn't apply to XIV for the moment as there are still too many endgame unknowns and even post-launch plans. Hence the likelihood of waiting a year to see how things stand.

[Churchill]

It's those kind of MMO's that turn into F2P down the road, since they can't meet the playerbases expectations on content patches. Or MMO's with established playerbases and 5+ years of service, since said playerbases aren't going anywhere anytime soon lol.... Needless to say ARR will turn out like that someday too, but should give us a great ride until then.

Have you played an SE MMO?

[Manako]

The other side of the coin is with monthly fee based games you are pretty much paying for a service. If I stopped using netflix I would cancel it, regardless of the fact that I have enough disposable income. There are plenty of games that do not require a monthly fee so why would I spend money to towards either a game I'm not playing, or a game I'm playing to the detriment of another game?

FFXIV has me by the feels, and I'm definitely going to support it -- but I know other people who feel differently and its not because they are broke.

[Sephiroth]

I know other people who feel differently and its not because they are broke.

Don't worry, these same people wouldn't play it if it was free either because then they'd be bitching about the lack of content updates. They are expecting a subscription quality game for free and anything less isn't good enough. This will never happen, let them stick with their COD.