New Vanafest incoming.

[Spira]

If they closed down XI you can guarantee around half of it's players would sub to XIV within a month, no doubt on that at all (that's at least 100-200k box sales and subscribers).

please do show us how you can statistically prove this scenario.

MMO players are like addicts and XIV is the only thing that resembles XI in even a small way. You think the majority of interested possible XIV v2 players aren't the people that play XI right now? There aren't vast numbers of WoW players check back in on FFXIV, to most people XIV is just another failed and unimportant MMO (like AoC/Warhammer etc). XI is and always was direct competition for players with XIV, they thought they could attract offline FF fans/other MMO players but they were wrong.

i am currently subbed to XI and XIV and happen to be playing neither at the moment, but thats just me.
MMO players may be like addicts, but an increasing lot of them have the palate and/or affordability to play more than 1 MMO at a time, or at least be willing to pay for them at the same time.
Exclusivity is common, but more players are moving away from that approach as MMOs become increasingly casual or come with different business models that do not require long term paying commitment. GW2 is a good example of this.

I want to say you have a point that XI players make up the bulk of XIVs current supporters, because it makes sense. But that doesn't necessarily mean its true. Based on its forums you can tell a good number of XIV players have at least tried XI in the past, but not all are still playing it, so its hard to truly gauge without statistical support.

The last few years of FFXI have not only been complete shit but they are offering no assurance that they plan to carry on with FFXI long term, the vanafest can be seen as the celebration of 10 years more than the continuation of the game.

um. first of all, totally subjective, but.. Abyssea was complete shit? even if you didn't enjoy it you cannot deny its success at reigniting interest in the game.

What have they done in FFXI since removing the good leaders, staff and money to give any indication they won't close it down/retire it with no content and make that announcement at Vanafest? (even the shitty roadmaps are short-term) Compare how FFXI was during Abyssea when they thought they could run 2 MMOs at once to how they run FFXI now when it's obvious they care more about XIV v2 than pretty much anything else for the online dept.

removing good leaders, staff and money.. what?
what are you even getting at?

its not like the same people are running both at the same time.

[Churchill]

I would never play another Square MMO. I would never buy another Final Fantasy console game. (I bought X/X-2, played XIII) Even having their hands on stuff like Just Cause, Deus Ex, etc, is a bad taste in my mouth, but at least other companies are actually producing those games.

If I played any other MMO, it would have to be like XI. I don't like cartoony worlds, I don't like where everything is designed to be some sort of role playing shitfest. Oh wow, I can play as an Orc and I get an Axe and it's bigger than a fucking dump truck. That shit is so lame, lol. What do I do now, macro a shitton of abilities and scripts to keybinds and spam them relentlessly, I win.

The game at 75, where you had to control hate on NIN/RDM/PLD or be a boss ass tank (with great support) on SAM/MNK/DRK is unmatched in terms of skill/fun involved.

[Darkmagi]

FFXI has always been an extremely easy game as far as actual skill goes. It simply required you to devote a lot of time, learn the standard game mechanics, and have somewhat of an attention span. It's extremely slow paced and I really think most people who think this game is/was difficult have never really played many other games.

[Churchill]

I hardly found anything in WoW as difficult as 5-6 manning Khim/Tia in a decent amount of time, lol.

[scaevola]

I imagine it wouldn't be much easier to clear any given 25-man raid in WoW with 8-10 people.

The fact that you can even do 18-man content with 6 shows how easy FFXI really is.

[machiko]

I hardly found anything in WoW as difficult as 5-6 manning Khim/Tia in a decent amount of time, lol.

Tera

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmR9...layer_embedded

Dunno if any American guilds have beat this at all yet

[ronin sparthos]

whats with people with the fallacious logic that XI and XIV have to be mutually exclusive to be successful?

Because Spira, it's all we've seen from SE since XIV started making waves years ago. Remember '09 XI? How abandoned the game seemed to be with shit for content, an absent dev team and all hands on deck building XIV? I do and it was a terrible time for FFXI where many people quit because all that mattered were the dated content of kings, Colibri merits and going 0/152 on QQTH.

Nothing SE did seemed to indicate they had a long term plan for FFXI and when content like Yilbegan and Evoliths rank among the worst content ever squeezed out by SE it was quite fair to say to yourself "are they even trying anymore?" because from their actions they simply seemed to be phoning it all in.

Square Enix has numerous development and support teams. They have no need to put all their eggs into 1 basket. They have enough funding/staff to throw around at various projects.

Yet XI only started to get serious attention when Tanakas XIV crashed/burned and the wagons started to be circled as bad press began to tarnish the brand. For a small window of time, we saw SE give this game serious attention in an attempt to keep their base while XIV was being pulled out of a death spiral. Updates were quick, devs were doing what players asked for and buffs to jobs were significant and meaningful. This point in time may have been planned out ahead of time with Abyssea to begin with but then I'd point to the current cold spot this game has been in after Abyssea with content like Voidwatch.

Why only attention during these 3 expansions that just happened to coincide with serious internal chaos with the failure of a flagship MMO?
Why did things suddenly return to shit with Tanakas return upon Yoshi being given the keys to XIV?
Why the sudden return to an '09 style XI after the success of Abyssea to some degree?

SE had everyones interest with Abyssea and while they fouled up at the end with making the content too easy they had a working model that most people enjoyed and what did they do with it? Completely abandon it for a system where people rip their hair out in frustration chasing pulse equipment with droprates that make D.Ring and Kraken Clubs blush. Sometimes I have to wonder if the dev team is all there with regards to cognitive functions.

It's clear they do not have enough manpower on XI because patches and simple fixes that could be easily implemented if a large team were running this game take months to be done and clearly from even the content you can see the corners being cut to hash out a patch. New gear isn't even reskinned, the revamped content is literally cut/paste and the worst timesinks are put in to keep players busy while the skeleton crew moves on to the next project.

If SE wants us to believe XI and XIV can co-exist they're doing a frankly abominable job showing that through action. I don't need the empty words of a SE employee telling me XI will be alright when action dictates otherwise.

you are really overgeneralizing the JP company pride > profit thing btw.
Square Enix is a public corporation. They answer to their investors/shareholders, who don't even have to be Japanese and definitely care for the profit.

This didn't stop XIV from bombing and it is clear SE is having issues competing in the global market with their style of games recently. Be this the stubbornness of JP to adapt or simply not having fresh minds working on titles we don't know for sure but something has been plaguing this company and even their top management has no choice but to accept that to some degree.

if you really look at the writing on the wall, you will see that they are willing to continue to support the playerbase so long as they're there playing. if not, why bother with a 10 year anniversary event in Japan? and a 10th anniversary concert in the US aimed at FFXI players? These events are not free to hold and they clearly have the budget for it.

another key point i cannot stress enough. FFXI is still in profit. very much so. sure they may be Japanese and pride means everything to keep the reputation of the flagship title high, but they're also not stupid.

Why wouldn't you have a 10th anniversary event? You're trying to keep those XI fans placated whilst slowly encouraging them to give XIV a chance because frankly without the support of hardcore fans the game stands less of a chance of being revived in the marketplace.

Again, I point to what SE says/does and see significant variation that leads me to question their motives. If they planned for XI to be around for a while you'd see significant effort being taken to make this game 'fresh' - well as fresh as a 10 year MMO can be and things being done that'd keep fans happy yet all we've seen in the collapse of Abyssea has been the worst types of grinds, a refusal to move this game in the direction of modern titles and more excuses about 'balance' than you can shake a stick at.

SE is proving that they can take 2 steps forward and then take another 6 backwards and unless Vanafest drops some serious news I think it is fair to say this game is on the fast track to nowhere.

[Whaleporn]

Final Fantasy XI doesn't give you as many options for dealing with enemy abilities but has much simpler enemies. The challenge comes from the planning it takes to have a character 'ready' to do any given thing in the game and the patience to see your goals through.

WoW, style aside, had the goal of making you understand then master complicated fights. While the lower tier of content is mash button, make number, win treasure, quite a few of the heroic fights I've personally done are about stone cold execution of your classes abilities, rarely as simple as 'healer cow heals, tanker cow tanks'

Final Fantasy fans want recognizable classes and monsters. JP players (or perhaps developers?) seem to want 'partyfeel' that they band together with people they know, go out on a quest, and spend a few hours doing it then come back to home base and drink coffee on a floaty crystal table.

[Vandalhart]

Seems the Vanafest site went live.

The Official VanaFest 2012 Site has Launched! (06/13/2012)
http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics.../8814/8814.jpg
VanaFest 2012 is drawing ever closer and we are happy to announce that we have launched our official English landing site! Adventurers looking forward to all the juicy announcements from the Development Team panels and full live coverage, need not travel any farther than this one-stop site, as it houses both the main stage and Community Team stream! We're also putting the finishing touches on a special giveaway which we can't wait to reveal to you in the coming days!

Make sure to tune in to the stream from 5:30pm (PDT) on Friday, June 22 and Saturday, June 23 for an event of epic proportions that you won't want to miss!

Visit the site here and get ready for the festivities!

Rukkirii isn't a bad looking individual :D

[Spira]

i'll agree that 2009 was a pretty bad year. This due in part to the lack of replayable content from the add-ons and the fact that a good majority of SE's PDD3 were focused on XIV since 2008. That said, XI is usually not run by its full development team because prior to that it's usually already split in half to focus on developing expansion content, and they were aware of this, which is why they felt the need to bring in an additional mini-dev team for the add-ons.

but that was 2009. this is 2012. with the turnaround in content planning that they brought in 2010 (which was way before XIV launched and crashed), they had shown there was in fact some concrete plan in the works. at least this time round they had the decency to release a roadmap, which is some form of assurance to players.

I cannot claim to know SE's current development team structures but I'm fairly certain that in the aftermath of XIVs failed launch, they reorganized the dev teams in such a way that FFXIV's dev team now operates by itself, and thus there really isnt any of that mutual exclusivity problem because the 2 games are no longer sharing the same man-hour resources.

i'm not too sure about them stepping up on XI only after XIV bombed tho. the timing doesn't exactly line up. Abyssea was planned, in the works and announced well before the release and failure of XIV. And it had proven itself to be an engaging addition to the game as early as June with Vision.

i'd give them the benefit of the doubt in that scenario. and I think a lot of it has to do with the acting director at the time (Akihiko Matsui) and the one that followed after (Mizuki Ito). It seems as though Ito was doing a pretty good job even up untill May 2011. (some of the major Abyssea adjustments happened then)..

a lot of what goes on does depend on the direction he gives, and i think if anything they've currently lost focus on the direction of end-game.
you cannot deny the vast improvements that FFXI has seen in terms of QoL updates this past year tho.

personally i'm a bit more of an optimist, based on what i perceive moreso from a business logic point of view. they have made mistakes or decisions that have proven to be highly unpopular (CoP, post-Abyssea content) but they have also righted their wrongs and made good as well (ToA, Abyssea). Yes it has been 10 years, but the total time thats lapsed isn't the real issue. It's their proactive/reactive timing that counts.

I'm willing to bet they're being all hush hush now because they want to pull out all the stops at VanaFest next week. I highly doubt they'll ever pull the plug on the game, but the fate of FFXI as far as future content is concerned does fall upon the cards they're likely going to show then.

As such, I think its a bit early for anyone to judge either way now

edit:

Final Fantasy fans want recognizable classes and monsters. JP players (or perhaps developers?) seem to want 'partyfeel' that they band together with people they know, go out on a quest, and spend a few hours doing it then come back to home base and drink coffee on a floaty crystal table.

chai, after my regular weekend dose of classic Nyzul Isle.
those were good times.

[Eurell]

All i know is people have been using these exact same arguments for ffxi dying since about 2005/6.

[NynJa]

I know it was a complete failure but they are putting everything into making it succeed, throwing money at it and putting almost everyone they have into working on it. They want XIV to succeed and it's obvious that a big part of that is XI is leeching players that would move over if they put it out of it's misery. XIV v2 being a success is about pride, to a JP company that is more important than profits XI brings in for 4-5 years.

You mean to tell me they werent putting everything into it to make it succeed 2 years ago when they pretty much moved their entire FFXI staff to FFXIV? The only problem is the archaic japanese social etiquette, they moved old and outdated to FFXIV and brought in some new fresh ideas into FFXI...as such FFXIV was a total fucking flop and FFXI actually had some new life breathed into it from Abyssea.

If you're going to say "well those new fresh ideas from FFXI are now working on FFXIV", the games rep is pretty much destroyed beyond repair. I know a lot of people who were going to give FFXIV a shot are going to avoid it like the plague now.


Actually Spira's post made me think about the timelines, I was doing my Mandau trials for lv80 when I was trying out XIV, which means Abyssea was indeed already planned before word got out about how much of a fail XIV was. Abyseaa can not be believed to be a backup plan to keep subscribers while SE tries to fix the XIV ship, and anyone who says "SE put out XIV as a total fail" is a complete idiot. Throwing out incomplete beyond broken content that will make the average person puke relentlessly is a LOT worse than not meeting the deadline release date, especially considering a lot of people paid 60 bucks to beta test the game for 2 years.

[ronin sparthos]

but that was 2009. this is 2012. with the turnaround in content planning that they brought in 2010 (which was way before XIV launched and crashed), they had shown there was in fact some concrete plan in the works. at least this time round they had the decency to release a roadmap, which is some form of assurance to players.

i'm not too sure about them stepping up on XI only after XIV bombed tho. the timing doesn't exactly line up. Abyssea was planned, in the works and announced well before the release and failure of XIV. And it had proven itself to be an engaging addition to the game as early as June with Vision.

This is 2012 and SE is moving backwards from the successes of 2010, eating into any gains they may have made from the community by releasing overall sloppy content. Yes, I agree with them about certain aspects of Abyssea being mistakes but to simply throw the baby out with the bathwater is exactly what has led the team to content like Voidwatch and Legion that harken back to an age that simply is not compatible with FFXI anymore. Who at a dev team meeting thought a 36man battlefield was a good idea at this point in FFXI? Further, the rewards don't even match up to the numbers players are asked to amass and yet this passed the sniff test?

Abyssea had to have been in the works before Sept '10 when XIV bombed but you're forgetting many of the changes that occurred due to player feedback and the number of things that were changed via SE inquiry. For the first time in the history of XI, SE was asking for input and actually taking that back to the dev table and using it. For a small glimmer of time there was some back and forth between players/devs and the game benefit from that relationship.

SE, listening? These must have been the endtimes indeed.

Speculation it may be on my part but such drastic changes in the character of the company lead me to the conclusion that the aftermath of XIV had something to do with that.

In the post Abyssea stage of XI, we're right back to the chorus of no, things needing to be balanced and clearly bad systems like the ticket scheme that will be implemented into Voidwatch or even the notion of 36man Legion. The responses to issues players bring up have returned to the icy responses of "you're just not doing it right" (Legion), "1500 Heavy Metal Plates ensures balance among R/M/Es" (95-99 Emps) or "we wont be doing that because it might just be too fun" (Voidwatch).

Something changed and it changed for the worst.

personally i'm a bit more of an optimist, based on what i perceive moreso from a business logic point of view. they have made mistakes or decisions that have proven to be highly unpopular (CoP, post-Abyssea content) but they have also righted their wrongs and made good as well (ToA, Abyssea). Yes it has been 10 years, but the total time thats lapsed isn't the real issue. It's their proactive/reactive timing that counts.

Looking at it from a business point of view, I see no reason the game needed to be taken back to annoying grinds with no clear path to victory after Abyssea proved to be such a success on the model of part instant-gratification and part-"I can log in and know I'll make some progress on my weapons/armor". Yeah, no one expects SE to churn out expansion packs without some time lapsing but for all the use of the word balance that gets thrown around, I see no balance in using what worked while also trying to maintain some timesinks.

To put it short, Voidwatch could have had some point systems with badass gear/HMPs costing alot of points and we'd have had something superior to the pure luck rocks/logs/ore frustration-fest that we have now. From that business point of view you give your players what they want (a mountain to climb) while also buying yourself time to create more content. The current SE model simply frustrates the customer with as many "fuck yous" that can be built into the system. Nyzul Uncharted ramps up the "fuck you" design from SE to 9.5 and what has resulted is naturally individuals yelling "fuck you" right back at SE and cheating the hell out of it.

I'm willing to bet they're being all hush hush now because they want to pull out all the stops at VanaFest next week. I highly doubt they'll ever pull the plug on the game, but the fate of FFXI as far as future content is concerned does fall upon the cards they're likely going to show then.

I'll remain optimistic on that until next week.

[dannyl]

Seems the Vanafest site went live.

Rukkirii isn't a bad looking individual :D

I totally dig that Nintendo belt

[lolwut]

Seems the Vanafest site went live.

Rukkirii isn't a bad looking individual :D

She's been long known as a camwhore. Her facebook account has been posted a few times, ton of "please look at me" cosplay.

[scaevola]

Looking at it from a business point of view, I see no reason the game needed to be taken back to annoying grinds with no clear path to victory after Abyssea proved to be such a success on the model of part instant-gratification and part-"I can log in and know I'll make some progress on my weapons/armor". Yeah, no one expects SE to churn out expansion packs without some time lapsing but for all the use of the word balance that gets thrown around, I see no balance in using what worked while also trying to maintain some timesinks.

Yeah, and again, imo the most damning point against RNG reward systems being necessary to prolong the life of content is that people are still doing and loving the shit out of Abyssea, two years later.

[Eurell]

Yeah, and again, imo the most damning point against RNG reward systems being necessary to prolong the life of content is that people are still doing and loving the shit out of Abyssea, two years later.

Who's doing abyssea that isn't returning to the game, just leveled a new job, or just started working on an emp?

[Spira]

before i took a break from XI in general, i was doing it to clear its 'achievements', ie. all atma, all abyssite, all quests.
the atma is the hardest part as a mostly solo mage, but i was doing ok (and getting a lot from just asking people who were fighting nearby). 5/9 atm i think.

edit:
speaking of achievements, i really wish FFXI had some kind of achievement board.
synthesized atma were in some ways an extension of that, and i wish they just had something of that sort in general for players to keep a record.
gives players additional reason to do certain content too.

[arus2001]

Man, if VW did to HMPs what Limbus did with ABCs, the event could've been a hell of a lot better between guaranteeing a plate every kill with some tiers of pouches that could load too. The whole 1500 lump on Emps might've even been tolerable, too.

[Damane]

All i know is people have been using these exact same arguments for ffxi dying since about 2005/6.

the difference is, it actually is now really dying. We had one big server merge allready, and alot of servers arent looking good on the population side atm. You cant deny that ALOT of players have left FFXI, due to post Abyssea content. Everything is a big pile of shit atm.