FINAL FANTASY XIV Billing Information

[shidobu]

You people should just stop caring about being the best when 2.0 comes out and just go to FFXI lol, its way better.

been there done that

[Ropeydonkey]

Be honest. If you plan to quit because SE want a few quid/dollars a month then SE are doing you a favour; you probably should have stopped playing anyway as you clearly aren't enjoying the experience. In fact, why did you invest thousands of hours in it in the first place? In case they made it better? Isn't that precisely what they're trying to do?

From the standpoint of someone who plays ~20hrs per week around work etc, there's just about enough in the game to make it moderately enjoyable/entertaining (when playing with RL friends). But for those with 10 or more classes @50... I would /wrists way before getting there.

I suppose one benefit of this may be a marginal reduction in unintelligible moaning in the official forums... meh, probably not.

And for the 'smart' comments on my previous post; I doubt there'll be any appreciable difference after you (collectively) quit. Servers are quiet now. I think they'll be equally quiet in Feb.

[Thiefami]

A lot of it falls on principle. It is the principle that people were duped into buying a complete game, and ended up in open beta v1. It is the principle that they are requesting payment for said beta on a noncontent patch when the most there is to do in the game is Ifrit. A lot of the frustration you see are from people who invested time into the game. Same people who would like to see the game succeed, and for SE to stop making assbackward mistakes. I think what the 'it's not enjoyable, just quit' crowd fails to understand is if very few are playing the game do you honestly think they will continue cranking out content for 1,000 players? Sure, they are going to get more money versus when it was free, but they risk effectively losing all of the attention, and momentum they gained after announcing 2.0.

[Corrderio]

Exactly. I just find it hard to believe a company would even consider charging for a game when the current producer admits the engine is shit and also made a public announcement a new engine is coming out in a year.

And they also picked the worst possible time to charge. Classes are going through a reform and for all we know it could crash and burn, and only one major battle.

[Grey Jorildyn]

SW:TOR is also on the horizon now. It may not be a huge deal, but any competition is bad for this game right now.

[Thiefami]

I have been pondering this for a good moment now. Remember all of the accusations that the game was developed by a third party Chinese company? How could Tanaka not forsee all of the impending issues? An experienced team of designers and coders, some with over a decade on an mmo under their belt, could not forsee the limitations of the engine, of the client? I call bullshit. They hung Tanaka out to dry, but the fact is he probably couldn't fix it if he desperately tried. Yoshi in my mind is nothing more than a PR element. I am sold on the rumor as it is the only thing that makes any sense right about now.

[Corrderio]

It's really hard to tell what went wrong with the game. I think one of the problems was they were developing a new MMO (Remember project Rapture?) and had no idea what it was going to be. So while they were trying to develop it they didn't have a base for what to add for classes/jobs, content, etc.

Also, Tanaka might have had experience, but he was still a pretty awful director for an MMO. He really didn't give a fuck about what the community thought and how he thought he was always right. Remember how many times we asked for ideas, features, etc. in interviews back in the XI days and all we got was a "We'll consider it" response and never hear from it again?

Yoshida does have balls to try to save a sinking ship, but at the same time I feel like he's adding stuff just to get attention for this game. (Jobs/Materia for example).

[Ambrosia]

Yeah I think one of the main problems is that Tanaka did not see any impending issues at all. Right before beta ended, one of the biggest concerns on the beta forums was the UI/Controls. And for the most part it fell on deaf ears, with a "We will look into it" response. The company knew exactly the product they were going to release, even if at a last moment they realized the shortcomings it had. But see this is not the first time a company that makes MMOs decided not to listen to their fan base and do with what they thought was right out of complete stubbornness/hardheadedness or their arrogance. I'll give you 2 perfect examples. Star Wars Galaxies and Age of Conan. Star Wars Galaxies at its pinnacle had around 250k to 300k subscribes before the most amazing thing on Earth came to pass. "New Game Enhancements" or the NGE update. On the forums people were shouting from the top of their lungs at all the horrendous changes that were taking place in front of their eyes. But it was thumbs up on that decision for Sony and for some odd reason mass exodus ensued and revenues went spiraling down.

Oh wait didn't someone say "We've learned a thing or two with our experiences with the NGE and don't plan on repeating mistakes from the past and not listening to the players." Oh of course that was John. Another example was the grey elites on Age of Conan. Pretty much there was an update that had it where if an elite no longer "conned" to you , in other words was "too weak" then all of sudden they can 2-3 shot you. This was done to avoid any sort of farming, because that may grief the lower level players from getting a camp or allowing someone to hoard all the items in existence. Wonderful idea by the company. Wait was there not a post from the official forums that is still there today that had over 130k views and over 1000 responses that most people disliked this idea? No? Nah, let us go with the idea anyways because Fun-com knows what is right for the people.

Some of these companies actually thought that they could get similar results in subscribers as well as longevity with their loyal monthly subscriptions like the old glory days, when you would release a buggy game but still churn out half a dozen or more mini/major expansions. (Thing is almost every MMO in the past 6 or so years didn't realize that several major changes have happened since then and hence why most of them don't even have 2 expansions out, let alone a healthy player base). Such as how information travels now versus the trickle of information one used to get, different ways of communicating online such as forums being the major one and fan sites, and finally the sheer amount of competition. And of course many others such as bad decisions or very slow at making them. And not just MMO games, but other genres that now utilize online and/or achievements to increase the longevity of those games by a considerable amount taking up the player's time.

So now you are going to tell me that a middle aged/old Japanese man that practically worked in that era as well as that type of atmosphere where you would only churn out multi-million dollar products to what seemed to no end, never really going out of his way to get ideas/criticism/responses from the fans(except just for the superficial looks like he cared with the usual we will look into it response) and worked for a company that had 13 major console titles that sold very well and in some cases extremely well(I think all the titles at some point sold over 2 million copies worldwide and in some cases hit that mark within a week or two) is going to all of a sudden look at said product and go ---> Hey you know what, these guys may be on to something, they may be right. Yeah... no... the team knew exactly what product they were releasing, especially Tanaka since he saw everything that was going on with the different teams and the projects they were responsible for. They just either had that old way of thinking like most MMOs did from the old era 1996-2004 or just plain arrogant or a combination of both. They were riding the coattails of the successes all those games had and were hoping this game would be no different. Back in the day most of these companies almost never went for feedback in any shape or form, let alone even having a forum for some of those games. And practically almost every single triple-A MMO or really hyped up P2P MMO that has come out in the past 6 or so years have shot themselves in the foot... or rather got a shotgun and shot both legs off. The only major exception is Eve Online for obvious reasons, and no its not because of When-Spreadsheets-Attack.




And Grey does make a good point. Any sort of competition of MMOs or games in general is not good in any possible way, a problem that Final Fantasy XI didn't have to go through with as much as XIV is (at least for the NA/EU population). With the current console games that just came out and add to that SWTOR, Diablo 3, Tera Online, Guild Wars 2, Archeage, Blade & Soul, and whatever else that may come this way, there are some games that can easily compete with a player's time (granted people that only play Square Enix games, or mostly only Square Enix games are excluded).

Without sugar coating, at the current time the only 2 "endgame" contents for level 50 really is either Batraal's room(dungeon does not count since you just skippity hop it) and Ifrit's arena of fire. So after almost 15 months that the game has been out... we pretty much have 2 rooms that are currently considered "endgame" The NM's that pop out are barely noting as endgame, such as Dodore... you just stand there and wail away. Same thing with the gold chests in the stronghold areas. For example the Kobold stronghold, just kill the main boss, wait for the right time when it uses its only 1 special move(as it is with most mobs in the game) in this case calling out the golems, shoot off sentinel and win. And considering that most if not all the gear got replaced with the use of materia, then the only "endgame" spot that most people go for these days is Ifrit. So after 15 months there is 1 popular room to fight an easy boss that takes less than 10 minutes to kill, and if you are good at it less than 5. Which still shocks me that the official forums still hail this as a challenging fight (considering I got down the patterns after my 3rd fight). Bad connection non-withstanding, I know quite a few people who have lag problems and have left the game frustrated over this. Outside of Ifrit there is very little if anything that poses a serious challenge of any sort. As far as higher level content from level 41-49 is concerned you have the 2 non repeatable main mission storyline, you have the 2 non repeatable quests that are rank 45(outside dungeon quests). Company quests you have 2 NPC's for each region which pretty much give you 2 types of quests, either stand there next to a helpless NPC and protect it for 15 minutes or kill as many mobs as you can within a certain amount of time. Everything else got replaced by materia socketed gear to make it even remotely worthwhile.

And practically if it hadn't been for the 1.19a update, chances are I would of given up on the game entirely. Before 1.19a I would play roughly an hour a week or two, and in some cases not log in at all for several weeks. Thanks to Mr. Yioshi I was able to cap out on all 7 jobs(I don't count sentinel as a class) in roughly less than 2.5 weeks and "experience" the endgame stuff that he wanted us to experience, or like he said to "get involved in the game quicker." Pretty much before Ifrit was implemented it felt like and I quote “For now in XIV, it seems that you're advancing toward... a higher level. There's no reason to advance in the game except for the sake of advancing. That's definitely one of the gaping holes in the game right now.”




So while it seems very unpopular, it seems charging is the only way to go to get some sort of revenue going at this point, even after all I said. And yes to point out the obvious since it has been said on other forums, we already know that Square Enix is not a charity company. We already know it is their decision to keep it open or not. Cannot get any more common sense that that. Practically this can be applied to all gaming companies online or not. One thing though is that now with the search function coming in, will the doom and gloom graphs of weekly population come back like they were from September to December. Granted numbers are not inherently good or bad, but chances are they can be taken as such if the numbers go down. And yes numbers aren't everything (especially for the diehard fans). Most MMOs even if they only have 10000 active players will swear to everyone else that the game is good. For startup small indie companies, sure it may work well. For larger companies to only have 20k-30k active players for a long extended period of time, maybe not so much. Besides WOW and Eve Online I cannot think of any other MMO that came out past 2004 that has expanded servers or its player base by a considerable amount (out of the 500 or so MMOs out there... well to be fair the 50+ MMOs that are P2P) without it changing to F2P or some sort of hybrid, or like most that came out past 2005 being reduced to 5 servers or less.

And why did some people invest thousands of hours in this game? Some wanted to capture what FFXI had in this game. Others just OCD on this stuff, they need to look at a screen and have a computer program tell them they have done this much or leveled this much. Funny sometimes I wished Pong had that. For example, how many times you turned on the unit to play Pong? How many times did you move up? How many times did you move down? How many times did you move sideways(ah I got you there didn't I)? How many points did you score? Did you play the game on Shigeru Miyamoto's birthday? Others still have the old 1996-2004 MMO mentality of actually thinking that they would get a "leg up" on the competition gear-wise etc. not realizing for one bit that MMOs these days "age" at a much faster rate than before. Sure before you could get X Y Z gear and have it last for half a decade or close to it. MMOs now mostly have stuff outdated within 6 months to a year most of the time, if not less is some cases. And with the leveling curve, they become much easier as the months go by. Back in the day experience point charts wouldn't budge for years on end. So you knew you would be ahead of the curve. Now? It's like every couple of months the leveling curve is softened. And when the changes are made you can get to the max level as well as getting most of the gear within days or weeks compared to months that it took to level just 1 class to max. Thank companies for shifting the focus towards casuals (not the only reason but certainly a major one). The only other main reason is if you love crafting, or at least want tons of gold would be a reason you would be a pioneer or invest thousands of hours in the game. Another reason is they want to escape real life, I won't go any more with this since real life and BG would be like saying oil and water mix amazingly. And others simply played because it was fun for them.

[Corrderio]

Damn that was a long post, but fairly true.

I'm not really sure if it was Tanaka, Wada or both of them to blame for the horrible disaster or not. Everybody pretty much knew that the game was going to flop after closed beta ended. There was no way they could have fixed everything in 8 days before the CE edition launched.

Also if someone can refresh my memory... Didn't Tanaka also vaguely admit he didn't scope out current competition at the time? I'm not going to dig through a crapload of reviews from over a year ago, but I could have sworn they said they never played any MMOs other than EQ, which is what they based XI off of IIRC.

[LD]

What a dark conversation.

SE beginning charges may be an unpopular move, but it's necessary from a business standpoint. That makes it (effectively) impossible to argue against. The real question is how many people will actually pay for it. It's getting to the point where I really might give the game a try again, but the billing structure is still a big issue to me. There's no reason character charges have to be separate and there's no reason the basic charge shouldn't cover a certain number of alts. Then there's the damn Clickandbuy and crysta horseshit and it makes me wonder why I have to jump through so many hoops to give SE my fucking money.

The restructuring and the premise of customization are in there, so FFXIV can pick itself out of the gravel, but my main problem right now is Funcom's The Secret World. It's coming out in the spring and promises the main thing I wanted out of FFXIV; the ability to make any type of fighter I want. If I want to punch shit and throw fire then spray with an Uzi, I can make that character. It even does it with a relatively original settling for an MMO, a conspiracy theorist's wet dream. I can be Fiery McPunch and fight Cthulu while solving mysteries. So if TSW is coming out, why am I still thinking about FFXIV? I also want to be Sabin in Ivalice, that's why. I want to punch things and do hadoukens and fight an empire in a world that looks like a god damn watercolor painting. There is still such a thing as a FF-feel, and Yoshida (I guess both of them) knows it. It's the same reason I'm not exactly chuffed about Pandas in WoW. Yeah, it's not THAT bad, but I was fighting a Fucking Dragon last expansion. Before that, I was fighting the Fucking Anti-Christ. Before that, it was Mega-Satan's Right-Hand man and his blind, dual glaive-wielding ex-employee. A good chunk of Lore can make a game world more enticing. The problem with pandas is that it isn't really in the minds of players yet. The problem with FFXIV (and FFXI too, really) is that decent lore has been around poor game design too long. You can only sell a game on lore when it's at least as good as most of your competition. FFXIV might be getting there by 1.20 and damn well better be there by 2.0 (otherwise, why bother having 2.0 at all?). But shit, I'm not even paying for WoW right now, so whatevs.

[Lucavi]

The problem is that its a Japanese company tasked with designing a game for the world. If XIV had simply been JP-ONRY, it would have done fine, especially if the Japanese had no idea about any of the alternatives. Japan does well when its the first to launch a product or a technology; it doesn't do so well when its tasked to be second or third in line, because Japan is far too stubborn for its own good in developing tech. Its a please Japan first mentality; always has been and always will be. I mean, look elsewhere; look at Marvel Vs. Capcom 3. Japan went with releasing another disk for UMVC3 basically because Japan itself isnt too keen on downloadable content. Its another example of Japan putting Japan first, and the world-be-damned. It hasn't really bitten them in the ass with UMVC3, as people will complain, but still buy it (because there's nothing comparable on the market to it), but with XIV, that shit couldn't fly. There are at least 5 MMOs right now that are comparable, if not superior to it, so the Japan-first mentality wasn't going to work this time.

Its simple. Its always been that way. We're just now starting to see Japan being forced to cater to everyone, not simply Japan, because Japan isn't a big enough market-share in the world to keep the Japanese companies running. The state of the economic world is forcing Japan to stop catering only to its own people and tastes, and appeal to a global market.

[Kaylia]

FFXIV will have to go free to play sooner or later. I think it's a mistake to go for a monthly fee model at this point, because the population is only going to go down.

[miokomioko]

It's going to get a relaunch come 2.0 and I'm sure their marketing will be a lot smarter the second time around to garner enough interest in the game to keep itself afloat. I honestly don't see them going free-to-play for a Final Fantasy MMO, ever.

[Grey Jorildyn]

FFXIV will have to go free to play sooner or later. I think it's a mistake to go for a monthly fee model at this point, because the population is only going to go down.

Tell that to all the kiddies that connect "Free to Play" with "Horribly Bad MMO". Most of the official forum posters are just down right fucktarded. They've played XI and XIV and "some WoW" (ie. 2-5 weeks). They think they know everything there is to know about mmos. It makes my eyes bleed.

This game would be glorious as free to play with a Final Fantasy-esque vanity cash shop (as opposed to a pay-to-win cash shop). Too bad the whiny majority wouldn't stand for it.

[Alkar]

Tell that to all the kiddies that connect "Free to Play" with "Horribly Bad MMO". Most of the official forum posters are just down right fucktarded. They've played XI and XIV and "some WoW" (ie. 2-5 weeks). They think they know everything there is to know about mmos. It makes my eyes bleed.

This game would be glorious as free to play with a Final Fantasy-esque vanity cash shop (as opposed to a pay-to-win cash shop). Too bad the whiny majority wouldn't stand for it.

If the game doesn't generate any kind of profit what's the point in updating it all the time? A vanity cash shop covering all development costs for a FF game? Please.
It's not about kiddies, it's freaking common sense.
Comparing Square-Enix to korean developers is downright stupid. If some can afford to have free to play MMOs it means their income is coming from somewhere else. No company in the world will hand out free MMOs if they have nothing to gain from it and this usually leads to stupid cash shops being the only way to get good items or even levels. I'd rather earn that stuff by clearing content instead of throwing money their way.
I've yet to see a good free MMO.

[Corrderio]

Bit off topic, but is there such a good thing as a F2P MMO? Most I seen try to nickle and dime you into buying EXP boosts/random perks.

Vanity item shops aren't too bad, but the thing that worries me is if they get greedy then start charging for other perks.

[miokomioko]

It can indeed be a very slippery slope.

[Grey Jorildyn]

Developers are generally more concerned with making "profitable" mmos rather than "good" ones. F2P model is profitable either way you splice it.

of course SE could pull a WoW on us and let us get to like 20 for free then charge us lol

[Thiefami]

If the game doesn't generate any kind of profit what's the point in updating it all the time? A vanity cash shop covering all development costs for a FF game? Please.
It's not about kiddies, it's freaking common sense.
Comparing Square-Enix to korean developers is downright stupid. If some can afford to have free to play MMOs it means their income is coming from somewhere else. No company in the world will hand out free MMOs if they have nothing to gain from it and this usually leads to stupid cash shops being the only way to get good items or even levels. I'd rather earn that stuff by clearing content instead of throwing money their way.
I've yet to see a good free MMO.

You truly underestimate how many fucktards would pay 50 bucks to dress like Cloud. I underestimated how many idiots would go for that gaudy POS tidal talisman for the ingame coat.

[Kaylia]

Tell that to all the kiddies that connect "Free to Play" with "Horribly Bad MMO". Most of the official forum posters are just down right fucktarded. They've played XI and XIV and "some WoW" (ie. 2-5 weeks). They think they know everything there is to know about mmos. It makes my eyes bleed.

This game would be glorious as free to play with a Final Fantasy-esque vanity cash shop (as opposed to a pay-to-win cash shop). Too bad the whiny majority wouldn't stand for it.

Playing LotRO made me appreciate the model a lot. There is a lot of "vanity items", "outfit" or stupid stuff you can buy, but you can get through most of the game without paying anything. In the end, paying might be necessary to unlock some of the content, but when you have played over 2 months and enjoyed your time, it's not like giving them 30$ to unlock an expansion is a crime. It's actually cheaper than what I would have paid in monthly payment in another game, and I didn't buy it in the first place (not to mention I can play whenever I want)

Bit off topic, but is there such a good thing as a F2P MMO? Most I seen try to nickle and dime you into buying EXP boosts/random perks.

Vanity item shops aren't too bad, but the thing that worries me is if they get greedy then start charging for other perks.

Exp perk and stuff like that aren't a huge issue as long the game is playable and fun without them. If someone want to pay to get through the content faster, it doesn't really change anything.

As long that paying real money doesn't grant you an advantage over other in the end game, I wouldn't worry about it.