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  1. #161
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    Quote Originally Posted by Malithar View Post
    Guess it's just that MMOs have become less grindy thus people actually do run out of things to do? Or just run out of "fun" in a given patch?
    This is it exactly. Content comes in slowish bursts and doesn't last long for hardcore players due to most games being catered to a more casual audience. Causes a dropoff in interest between major content patches as a result.

    Games like XI retained a sort of constant sub number over longer periods of time due to content being heavily based on RNG and low item counts. You'd get 1 item you were after 10% of the time, for example, for an alliance of 18 people. This draws content out artificially and thus also draws out the number of people who remain subbed.

  2. #162
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    Quote Originally Posted by arus2001 View Post
    I'm talking MMOs, in particularly their time sink-y nature, not one-shot titles where very few would be lucky to break 40 hours.
    There were plenty of MMOs on the market at the time, they were successful too. Just because you didn't play them doesn't mean FFXI WoW and Everquest were the only games around.

  3. #163
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kyreth View Post
    True. But it appears the double or nothing roll came up double. That's part of why FFXI got another development cycle despite being on the edge of having no hardware to do so- and FFXI's weak point is that it's utterly dependent on PS2 coding to produce something translatable into other platforms.

    FFXIV is making solid money now with 2.0, and being able to continue to develop what is, at it's core a PS2 game ported to the PC has gotten prohibitive. I do wonder if they're making sure that FFXIV doesn't fall into the same development trap FFXI has.
    I'm pretty sure that they realised this with FFXIV even before they started developing as by that time they would have known the PS2 limitations for a game that was running to around 8-9 years old? PS2 support was still there so it was less of an immediate concern. And if they didn't do it for 1.0 they had a chance to do it for ARR since that was essentially built from scratch as well.

    before WoW came out there was still stuff like Lineage I/II, DAoC, Ultima Online and uh.. RuneScape. Some were kinda old but they all had respectable followings for their time.. and this was before WoW basically opened up the MMO market.

  4. #164
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    Ragnarok Online, Star Wars Galaxies and a whole slew of free to play MMOs. There were a lot of options, if anything today it's much worse as all the games are WoW clones that flop.

  5. #165
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    Heh, I'd love it if American subscription games mimicked the Chinese thing of paying per hour logged in, versus per real month. I've got 230 days playtime in FFXI after being subscribed since 2002, minus 22 months for various reasons. If I could buy 8 hours to play and just have it deduct when I'm actually playing, I'd not have had to take the 14 month break for financial reasons.

  6. #166
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    Quote Originally Posted by ccl View Post
    I know dead horse etc but if it's "only" 500k it makes even less sense to kill XI now lol. Also china a big market for MMO!
    Im tellin you
    SE is banking on atleast half of their XI subs goin to XIV

  7. #167
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    Quote Originally Posted by Malithar View Post
    Guess it's just that MMOs have become less grindy thus people actually do run out of things to do? Or just run out of "fun" in a given patch?
    It's everything you said, but this in particular.

    Another important aspect is what I define with a word that's maybe not completely fitting but I can't find a better synonym.
    The user base has been progressively "spoiled", and this was quite frankly unavoidable.
    Once people get used to certain commodities, it's practically impossible to go back.
    These "commodities" of course end up affecting the lasting-appeal of the game and several other aspects, producing or simply accelerating the process of what you described.

    It's one of the reasons why I'm worried about Flying in Heavensward. If you follow WoW development you know why they decided to remove flying, and it's been a struggle and it still divides people and creates issues and drama (me myself I'm divided as well).
    Yet, if you followed these recent developments, you'll also know why they decided to do it and it's frankly quite reasonable to understand their perfectly legit reasons.
    It's been such a struggle becaue, obviously, people got "used" to Flying and were takin it for granted.
    If the same happens to FFXIV, it's gonna be equally messy to go back. It's one of those things from where it's really hard to go back, you really need to have big shoulders (like Bliz devs do) to be able to support choices like those and whitstand the consequences.

  8. #168
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    Quote Originally Posted by Draylo View Post
    There were plenty of MMOs on the market at the time, they were successful too. Just because you didn't play them doesn't mean FFXI WoW and Everquest were the only games around.
    This is an exxageration but it's also very true and it makes me sad.
    Paradoxically I feel like there was more variety back then than now (altough it would be a lie to say that every MMO that comes out is a flopping WoW clone. "Just" the majority maybe?)

  9. #169
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    to put it in another way.. the MMO market was still not settled. different MMOs of the time had different UI and gameplay systems and were unified simply by the fact that they were MMOs and they were RPGs. now an MMORPG is generally expected to look like and play like WoW, but with a different skin. quite honestly this is what FFXIV is as well.

    i agree with the MMO community being spoiled. its not just an MMO thing - convenience takes away from the adventure, to the point where the bulk of the game, which is supposed to be what immerses the player and all, simply becomes a backdrop for cookie cutter content.

  10. #170
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    Quote Originally Posted by Spira View Post
    to put it in another way.. the MMO market was still not settled. different MMOs of the time had different UI and gameplay systems and were unified simply by the fact that they were MMOs and they were RPGs. now an MMORPG is generally expected to look like and play like WoW, but with a different skin. quite honestly this is what FFXIV is as well.

    i agree with the MMO community being spoiled. its not just an MMO thing - convenience takes away from the adventure, to the point where the bulk of the game, which is supposed to be what immerses the player and all, simply becomes a backdrop for cookie cutter content.
    Yeah as much as I sort of hating spending 2 hours just getting to xp areas or whatever it certainly made the event an event and not just a show up click the ??? and use some spells and abilities and go home

  11. #171
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    Doing the 5-25 minute run for your 100th time gets kinda repetitive though. Imagine doing bismark/qilin without teleports

  12. #172
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    i kinda wonder if they take into account travel time for those events when determining drop rates and all....

    but beyond that it also has a lot to do with this generation of gaming. everything is packaged to be smaller and meant to be attempted in pockets of 30mins to 1hr. attention spans are getting shorter.. and they now have to compete with other games that rely on constantly keeping up (mobile games).. so they need to keep it competitive

  13. #173
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    It's hard to compare.
    In a scenario where you can't spam content XXX that fast because of several reasons (among which quick transportation) that content would take much more time to complete, which means you would do way less repetitions of the same content over the same window of time (due to time lost in other things etc). That way developers could raise drop rates slightly and results would be overall similar. Same amount of time spent by players, just less of it spent on actually doing content and more spent on random annoying stuff.

    Which is exactely the reason that brought devs like Blizzard and others to minimize those parts and maximize the content ones, which they judged to be the important ones. Their way of reasoning still stands, but they kind of underestimated what a MMO is, considering only practical aspects and judging everything else as a "boring annoyance". It somehow was tbf, but it also was much more than that, it contributed to a sense of immersion and adventure that's lost nowadays, for the sake of extreme grind/repetition and content that gets completed very very very efficiently with minimal loss of time, but the result of this is that content lasts much longer and people get bored faster.
    The pace has completely changed, basically.


    Can't go back anyway, because of over 9000 reasons among which us being spoiled by the modern commodities. It's impossible to go back once you pass a certain threshold.

  14. #174
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    thats why we have the "good old days". it isn't just hindsight

    edit: in some ways you can kinda still do all of that immersion and adventure by yourself in XIV.. but the game doesn't encourage it, and at times you simply can't (like entering dungeons alone for example) but that seems set to change with the first expansion.

    XI is a such a beautiful and immersive game partly because SE went in and developed an MMO with all the design principles they had established which made offline FFs great. It would appear that their view somewhere along the line changed - although later expansion FFXI areas have never really degenerated into generic areas, they do seem less unique than they did before (might also just be a natural limitation to the types of landscapes you can introduce?). XIV 1.0 didn't seem to adopt XIs original philosophy.. but does now

  15. #175
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    Quote Originally Posted by NynJa View Post
    Im tellin you
    SE is banking on atleast half of their XI subs goin to XIV
    I think they can survive if 45-70k people don't make the jump over, if there is even that many. I'd actually be surprised if there were more than 100k people actively over paying for the game.

  16. #176
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    Quote Originally Posted by Shenrien View Post
    I think they can survive if 45-70k people don't make the jump over, if there is even that many. I'd actually be surprised if there were more than 100k people actively over paying for the game.
    Just like XIV has over a million subs...when its really 500k, eh?

  17. #177
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    Quote Originally Posted by Prothescar View Post
    @rate
    Direct measurement of subscribers for a game like XIV is difficult, and is a much less reasonable metric to measure the popularity of the game without taking an amalgamated average over the course of several months. For someone who seems to be so interested in MMO subscription trends, I'm surprised you haven't understood this on your own and taken it into consideration, but then again most of your posts are devoted to XIV bashing so the bias isn't totally ruled out.

    Think of the subscription total as being the posts that hold up a rollercoaster's rails. During periods of content activity, i.e. patches, mostly major content patches, the posts will be high, towering well above the ground and possibly even over the posts of many other rollercoasters. During periods of less content activity, the posts will be far shorter, creating dips and dives in between each one of the taller posts. This is an unavoidable circumstance in today's MMO economy; WoW sees this too. In between expansion packs and major patches, WoW loses millions of subscribers at a time only to regain them when the next big thing rolls around. It's a symptom of a vprog model and one that will continue to occur for the foreseeable future. In order to assess the average height of the rollercoaster, you need to measure each set of posts individually and average them together; taking the values of the highest posts, or in this case the lowest ones, and using them as what you can expect from the rollercoaster throughout the entire ride is foolish.

    At the end of the day, the cost:reward ratio for XIV is significantly higher than that of XI, and the amount of effort and resources required to maintain and produce more things and receive more of an audience for XI was deemed too high for one reason or another. It's basic economics and it isn't difficult to assess why the decision was made; if you want to blame anyone, blame whoever decided that building the framework of an MMO on architecture that would obviously become antiquated relatively quickly was a good idea.
    FFXIV costs more to create content for, Yoshi recently stated it takes millions to make those cgi cuts. When was the last time you saw those in ffxi? Ffxi does not have regional servers either.

    FFXIV is not about profits, also to the person saying it's from march 2014 the updated part is from january 2015 when they asked Square directly.

    Also what is this it's a year older so it has more subscribers thing? MMO titles get more subscribers as they become older now?

    People discount numbers because it makes them feel better.

    FFXIV shamed Square Enix, so ARR was to show people they are pro. Problem is they aren't and ARR is only a marginal success, a failure if you consider they wrote off the costs of development and that a game with only 500k subs has such a large development cost associated with it for such a small sub base.

    As someone else said, they are banking on retiring FFXI and making them all move over to FFXIV to make that game look better. It's also cheaper in the long run to have one mmo with most of your players on that than to run 2 with them spread out.

    FFXIV is fairly weak in Japan, which would explain the closure of the console version of FFXI. Since consoles are the dominant platform there.

  18. #178
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    Quote Originally Posted by rate View Post
    As someone else said, they are banking on retiring FFXI and making them all move over to FFXIV to make that game look better. It's also cheaper in the long run to have one mmo with most of your players on that than to run 2 with them spread out.
    I really doubt they're trying to push players to XIV. Before it ever launched? Sure. At this point? Players have demonstrated their preferences, and there aren't likely enough XI players left for them to really care either way. You can bet if a million people were still subscribing to that, they would have found a way to keep adding to it.

    At this point, mobile profits are just much higher. They're making, what, close to double per quarter with mobile products than PC/Console MMOs? Why would they care so much about pushing XIV when that's where their market is shifting to, especially in Asia?

  19. #179

    Quote Originally Posted by rate View Post
    Except you're wrong.

    They wrote off all the development costs from v1 and ARR to make it profitable, they ate the massive losses from the games. The other parts of the company are what made them profitable, mobile games and gambling machines.

    ARR is not about profits, it was about not being humiliated. That's all that game is and all it will ever be, it will never even break even and they have long ago accepted that.

    It's easy to be "profitable" again if you write off all your expenditure the year before. ARR has 500k subscribers, has a very large development budget as well as regional servers.

    They managed to make a game with similar numbers to ffxi that costs vastly more to run. Since ARR is only about saving face it's not going to run as long as ffxi did, not even close.
    I guess they must just magically make all the money appear to keep this many servers online for well over a year now http://www.arrstatus.com/ because they're losing money on it. That makes sense. I guess it also makes sense for them to promote Yoshi-P to a higher position within the company and to keep the game online too because its costing them shit loads of money.

    Look, I'm not a huge fan of FF14 either but you gotta be living in some sort of weird fantasy world yourself if you think a company would purposely run itself into the ground after fucking up twice in a row(or what you deem to be fucking up twice in a row anyways) and then "going with the flow because fuck it we have an image to maintain." Naw, thats just plain ignorant and makes absolutely no sense.

    There may not be like a billion chinese kids playing FF14 but its clear that they have enough people interested in it to make money on it.

  20. #180
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    Quote Originally Posted by ColenzoRidesAgain View Post
    I guess they must just magically make all the money appear to keep this many servers online for well over a year now http://www.arrstatus.com/ because they're losing money on it. That makes sense. I guess it also makes sense for them to promote Yoshi-P to a higher position within the company and to keep the game online too because its costing them shit loads of money.

    Look, I'm not a huge fan of FF14 either but you gotta be living in some sort of weird fantasy world yourself if you think a company would purposely run itself into the ground after fucking up twice in a row(or what you deem to be fucking up twice in a row anyways) and then "going with the flow because fuck it we have an image to maintain." Naw, thats just plain ignorant and makes absolutely no sense.

    There may not be like a billion chinese kids playing FF14 but its clear that they have enough people interested in it to make money on it.
    Firstly, did you just show servers the game has as if it means anything? FFXI has about 4 times as many servers as it needs now and has for the past few years, they point blank refuse to do merges. This also applies to FFXIV, many servers are ghost towns but they will not do merges because of the message it gives. This applies doubly to JP servers on XIV, playerbase for FFXI was always JA > NA > EU, for XIV it's NA > JP > EU yet JP magically has about 4 times as many servers as it actually needs.

    Secondly, if you have played FFXI for a while you should that Square are fucking retarded, are complete greedy assholes but who put pride above everything else.

    There is no way on earth Square would ever admit FFXIV ARR was not anything but a success, no matter what happened.

    FFXIV could be losing money and they would still keep it going, you should know this if you have been around them long enough. As I said, they already wrote off the development costs because it would never of been able to dig itself out of the hole otherwise. Elder scrolls online had more subscribers than FFXIV and had to go b2p, you think FFXIV isn't having the same financial issues? It is, but Square are just eating it.

    For FFXIV players this is a good thing, it means no matter how shit it gets they will still keep it going and put a lot of effort into it to appear to be successful. When a company says they have 11 gabillion registered players and won't say how many subs they have in financial reports you know they aren't happy with how it's progressing.

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