Know Your Maker?

[Nyuneko]

From the RPGamer interview, I can definately say that I have learned more about FFXI development team, and they know jack all about us...

-Do you see people actually forming three person parties?
-These folks (the development team) always form parties of two or three *laughter* The reason Dancer was developed is to give more options to form smaller parties.

I actually was quite disappointed from that, I mean, I know there are always people who would do small parties, but that kinda reasoning is just crap; next they can say "Why did we think INT+ gears would rock for MNK? Our development team always have MNK/BLM as main nuker, so we decide to make MNK a better nuker."?

In any case, back to the current argument in this thread, the best solution SE has for FFXI is to fix stuffs for both casual gamers and hardcore gamers, ie Dynamis, Einherjar, Salvage, etc can really use some fixes, at least make it so they won't lose item when being kicked out, may be? Like Limbus that we get a zone to distribute item after the run? While giving more options for casual gamers to play, ie more casual or solo option for those that can't seek 4h for a 2h party; or fellowship update???

But as far as I, and many others, can see right now is that SE actually are not giving much of a crap about whether there are more endgame or if there are more casual, they are just updating the game to cater their dev team party.

[Alistaire]

The main problem with FFXI is that there are two very different communities sharing the same game :

- 490.000 noobs + casual players
- 10.000 end-game players

In the end, even if the end-game players are full of great advices and awesome ideas, they still are a tiny portion of the game audience. And S-E, as a big company, may not always listen to the tiny share of people, no matter how vocal they can be at times :/

Where did you get those stats?

86% of all statistics are made up.

[Nazrious]

86.231546% to be exact! lol

but rly come on I tihnk if u and a friend want to go out and exp it should not be at the lvl of a 6man PT but look what SE did Signet, gives bonuses that are for only EM and lower and only 25% exp bonus...

how many of you have ran out with a friend to get that oh so sweet 25% exp bonus from killing EM mobs?????
Insted why doesn't SE make a zone with rly squishy mobs that can be killed and lower exp given.
that way sure you could 6 man in those zone but you wouldnt want to cus instead of like in say a 3 man PT getting 100exp each per kill max a 6 man would only get like 40-50exp each.

I dunno but all in all SE NEEDS to get the DEVs more in touch with the PLAYERS!

Why have middle men when you can easily step over them?

[vegetaa]

The main problem with FFXI is that there are two very different communities sharing the same game :

- 490.000 noobs + casual players
- 10.000 end-game players

In the end, even if the end-game players are full of great advices and awesome ideas, they still are a tiny portion of the game audience. And S-E, as a big company, may not always listen to the tiny share of people, no matter how vocal they can be at times :/

Where did you get those stats?

86% of all statistics are made up.

I lol'ed =)
To Alistaire, it's not *statistics*, it's numbers based on the 500.000 players S-E says they have, and on what seems to be the end-game-oriented crowd, compared to the Zam© crowd. Now if you think the main point of my post was the extreme accuracy of these numbers, I'll add as a cliff note that S-E runs a game for the crowd that makes them the more money, not necessarily for the one you're (that also means I'm, and most ppl at BG) part of.

More often then not it sucks to be us, because S-E will add the Chocobo Circuit to the game instead of fixing end-game issues that here at BG everyone consider like the game core (kings, 2H vs 1H vs Dual Wield, botting and what not). But S-E is a company, and as a company they work for their shareholders, who actually don't give a fuck about Nidhogg being botted or 2H being overpowered. They're more into profit and incomes.

[Nazrious]

thats actually now smart bussiness that you speak of man.

As a share holder I'd be very interested in all aspects of a product I invested in.

You wouldnt buy food that people say taste like crap, would you?

SE has the responsibility to maintain their products integrity and if they target the "Play for a month then quit" crowd there trying to push into the Console RPG market and not the MMO market.
Its in SE's best intrest to get as many people playing, and while that does mean adding crap like choco circuit, the only way to really do this is to have their "HArdcore/ longterm" players spread around how gr8 the game is.

WoW has commercials, they have word of mouth, hell they even give free copies of there game out with 1 month free to draw people in.

SE has?
A super scarce product that unless u searched down would be hard to come accross and they have 0 commercials and very little POSITIVE word of mouth.

If I was one of these so called share holders I'd be mighty pissed.
SE isnt doing so great in the overall game market either when compared to other prodcut brands.
so in short.

SE has no excuse! They need to revitalize FFXI or lose a large portion of there income and face decline in their stock.

and thats the cold hard basics of bussiness for you.

[vegetaa]

thats actually now smart bussiness that you speak of man.

As a share holder I'd be very interested in all aspects of a product I invested in.

You wouldnt buy food that people say taste like crap, would you?

SE has the responsibility to maintain their products integrity and if they target the "Play for a month then quit" crowd there trying to push into the Console RPG market and not the MMO market.
Its in SE's best intrest to get as many people playing, and while that does mean adding crap like choco circuit, the only way to really do this is to have their "HArdcore/ longterm" players spread around how gr8 the game is.

WoW has commercials, they have word of mouth, hell they even give free copies of there game out with 1 month free to draw people in.

SE has?
A super scarce product that unless u searched down would be hard to come accross and they have 0 commercials and very little POSITIVE word of mouth.

If I was one of these so called share holders I'd be mighty pissed.
SE isnt doing so great in the overall game market either when compared to other prodcut brands.
so in short.

SE has no excuse! They need to revitalize FFXI or lose a large portion of there income and face decline in their stock.

and thats the cold hard basics of bussiness for you.

About S-E shareholders, you're seeing them as people who have a passion for videogames, but you should see them as people whose job is to make 10 dollars out of 5, no matter what the product is.

In a modern videogames company, there are creative teams, coding teams, music-making teams, testing teams, marketting teams, quality insurance teams, all lead by managers whose job is to make the product the best they can, according to the resources they are given by their bosses and the goals their bosses set for them. The bosses I'm talking about may have bosses themselves, who may also have bosses, and at some point the bosses' job is to ensure the company makes money by selling stuff for more money it costs them to produce it. These guys have a very vague idea of what their company is selling simply because their job is to lead the people who lead the people who lead the people who make stuff they will perhaps never hear about.

And this is especially true in japan, where companies have notoriously static pyramidal structures.

About FFXI being far behind WoW, and S-E being far behind Blizzard...it's the "happy follower" thing you learn in your Economy classes. There's not much advertising around FFXI (there is in japan but it's marginal compared to WoW), and WoW has a player-base 15 times bigger than FFXI but all in all, if you think that WoW has the best profit-per-player ratio (notice I say profit, not income), think again

I'm pretty sure S-E shareholders are happy with the FFXI history. Game has been making money for more than 5 years now (which is most likely more than they initially planned, FFXI being S-E's first MMORPG), it still has an active player-base, and above all it doesn't cost much since we know they work with rather small teams and mostly recycle a lot of content elements instead of making new ones (which would mean more creative work, more testing and possibly more broken things to fix). They also have a single set of servers for the whole world, which lowers the costs a lot ven more.

Their methods are kinda rude to some FFXI customers, but you and I are still playing, so I guess it's not so bad for us. And they're still running the game servers, so it's not so bad for them.

[Nazrious]

About S-E shareholders, you're seeing them as people who have a passion for videogames, but you should see them as people whose job is to make 10 dollars out of 5, no matter what the product is.

In a modern videogames company, there are creative teams, coding teams, music-making teams, testing teams, marketting teams, quality insurance teams, all lead by managers whose job is to make the product the best they can, according to the resources they are given by their bosses and the goals their bosses set for them. The bosses I'm talking about may have bosses themselves, who may also have bosses, and at some point the bosses' job is to ensure the company makes money by selling stuff for more money it costs them to produce it. These guys have a very vague idea of what their company is selling simply because their job is to lead the people who lead the people who lead the people who make stuff they will perhaps never hear about.

And this is especially true in japan, where companies have notoriously static pyramidal structures.

About FFXI being far behind WoW, and S-E being far behind Blizzard...it's the "happy follower" thing you learn in your Economy classes. There's not much advertising around FFXI (there is in japan but it's marginal compared to WoW), and WoW has a player-base 15 times bigger than FFXI but all in all, if you think that WoW has the best profit-per-player ratio (notice I say profit, not income), think again

I'm pretty sure S-E shareholders are happy with the FFXI history. Game has been making money for more than 5 years now (which is most likely more than they initially planned, FFXI being S-E's first MMORPG), it still has an active player-base, and above all it doesn't cost much since we know they work with rather small teams and mostly recycle a lot of content elements instead of making new ones (which would mean more creative work, more testing and possibly more broken things to fix). They also have a single set of servers for the whole world, which lowers the costs a lot ven more.

Their methods are kinda rude to some FFXI customers, but you and I are still playing, so I guess it's not so bad for us. And they're still running the game servers, so it's not so bad for them.

You really should go back to that economics proff and as for a refund.

at no point in my post did I talk about shareholders caring about vidoegames, what I did say was THEY CARE ABOUT >>>>> FFXI as a product<<<<< which any shareholder be it in an oil company or video game company would care about.
How many shareholder rly care about the crude oil refining proccess?????
However a shareholder will care about a refinery causing an ecological disater.

WHY?

because a company has a name to protect with out a good name people wont buy their products.

So once again SE shareholders do have a passion for videogames, just not the same way we do there passion stems from making sure good things are said about the video games they or the company they invest in are in charge of.

and if you think for a second WoW doesnt make more profit then SE your sadly mistaken.
Also in the time WoW has been out they have made more overall " PROFIT " then SE has in the long run of FFXI.
and if you look at Blizzard WoW was there first MMO and they did way better then SE ever did.
SE bosted 1million players
WoW bosts 10Million
even if they lost 3/4 of there player base tomorrow they would still have a larger player base then FFXI
AND
they would still bring in more profit then FFXI ever did.

and mock as you would but not only does Blixx/WoW have the "In thing" going for them right now they also have a very solid product they offer. They also are much much much more responsive to the player community then SE has ever been.

SE has even come out and said hey we have our #1 guy working on our next big thing.
which basically mean hey we making something new and FFXI will be set to "Low Priority."

and yes that is making fun of how windowed ffxi goes to low priority.

also any person who would try to talk about economics rly should not rest comfortably in what they know if they have only taken one eco class.

I mean I CLEPed macro and micro and found them both to be a joke and I wouldn't consider myself to know much on economics.

and if your talking about High school economics... thats just rofl lmao kind of funny.

[Lordender]

Lets not forget at how well SE covers up the population decline with adding small man events like assault, salvage, most toau missions, campaign op's seem solo to 3 people thus far. The dancer job being designed for duo,trio parties according to SE. Population decline is a pretty accurate assumption, over the past year my LS had to open up recruitment several times to keep a healthy number of 23-25 for dynamis.

Most friends/ls mates i talk to rate WoTG very very low, if i had to put a number on it I would say a 30/100 being a failing grade. The same people i talked to at the start of ToAU were very excitied, spoke very highly about it however the joy doesn't carry over to WoTG at all. I don't think the release of WoTG helped SE out much, while there is a few positives about the expansion most people seem to feel gipped. I rate WoTG with a very generous 79/100 being a C grade, ToAU release being a 95/100 because it gave me awesome blm shoes, turban, fast merits, algol right out of the box.

[vegetaa]

You really should go back to that economics proff and as for a refund.

No U.

and if you think for a second WoW doesnt make more profit then SE your sadly mistaken.
Also in the time WoW has been out they have made more overall " PROFIT " then SE has in the long run of FFXI.
and if you look at Blizzard WoW was there first MMO and they did way better then SE ever did.
SE bosted 1million players
WoW bosts 10Million
even if they lost 3/4 of there player base tomorrow they would still have a larger player base then FFXI
AND
they would still bring in more profit then FFXI ever did.

Read my post again.
Protip: The profit-per-player part. Which is a significant measurement unit when you're comparing 2 games with such different player-base sizes.

also any person who would try to talk about economics rly should not rest comfortably in what they know if they have only taken one eco class.

I mean I CLEPed macro and micro and found them both to be a joke and I wouldn't consider myself to know much on economics.

and if your talking about High school economics... thats just rofl lmao kind of funny.

Yep. Because you KNOW I only took one class, and you know I took it in your country, right ?

I have no fucking clue what CLEP means, but judging by your posts it's probably some kind of cult whose members vowed to spend their life travelling the interweb with the goal to teach the subtile art of macro and micro-economy on various MORPG boards. Good times ^^

[BRP]

The current player base is less then half of what it was....

Mass exodus right there.
Also the player base is not growing it is shrinking.

First off, I'd need proof. I don't recall the number ever reaching 800,000 and it rests around 400,000 to 500,000. Second, hundreds of accounts are banned every month. This is due to RMT purges. RMT being banned/quitting hardly can be considered people leaving the game over quality. Finally, the game is getting older and it does have a steady decline. But it is only steady. There are new players being introduced constantly. Still, over time, the population will decrease and over a long enough time it will be noticeable. This is still not a mass exodus.

Would you ever suggest someone to start the game from scratch now?

Yes. Why not? Now is probably a better time to join than ever. You'll have to explain your position.

SE has even come out and said hey we have our #1 guy working on our next big thing.
which basically mean hey we making something new and FFXI will be set to "Low Priority."

This is entirely assumption. The new MMORPG(as other products) have been worked on previously, even during ToAU. The quality has not dropped.


FFXI doesn't need to be more popular than WoW to have a great profit. FFXI is one of the hottest MMORPGs outside the Korean/China/etc market. There is no denying FFXI was extremely successful and it is quite a reach to say it wasn't just because WoW is performed phenomenally. FFXI is still a success and its playerbase still show its appreciation for its content by continuing to play. You can say otherwise, but I'd like some cold hard facts. Had SE marketed their product in the MMORPG-crazy nations of Asia, the distance between FFXI and WoW would probably have been smaller.

Lets not forget at how well SE covers up the population decline with adding small man events like assault, salvage, most toau missions, campaign op's seem solo to 3 people thus far. The dancer job being designed for duo,trio parties according to SE. Population decline is a pretty accurate assumption, over the past year my LS had to open up recruitment several times to keep a healthy number of 23-25 for dynamis.

I'm sorry, but this just isn't true. Players asked for low-man content. While it is true population is declining, the idea content needs to be designed around 6 people in order to be done is ridiculous. People will quit after being in the endgame for awhile, so yes, it is perfectly reasonable that you will need to recruit new players to replace them. It isn't difficult to have 20-25 people in a LS.

[Nazrious]

Read my post again.
Protip: The profit-per-player part. Which is a significant measurement unit when you're comparing 2 games with such different player-base sizes.


Nazrious wrote:
also any person who would try to talk about economics rly should not rest comfortably in what they know if they have only taken one eco class.

I mean I CLEPed macro and micro and found them both to be a joke and I wouldn't consider myself to know much on economics.

and if your talking about High school economics... thats just rofl lmao kind of funny.

Yep. Because you KNOW I only took one class, and you know I took it in your country, right ?

I have no fucking clue what CLEP means, but judging by your posts it's probably some kind of cult whose members vowed to spend their life travelling the interweb with the goal to teach the subtile art of macro and micro-economy on various MORPG boards. Good times ^^

The profit-per-player, I see what you are saying here however you have proven that what ever econimics you leanered in what ever place you learned it is far far behind the curve when compared to the US. Also FYI MacroEco. is the study of Global economy....

let me simplify it for you.

W charges 12$ for his product and spends 6 of it on dev. advertising etc. and sells 10million = 60mil profit.
S charges the same 12$ and spends 1 dollars in only Dev. and sells 1million= 11million profit. (I'm being very very very generous here)

60mil- 11mil= ?
49 million dollars in PROFIT differance.

W now has 49 million dollars to spend specifically on pushing S out of the market and still maintains the exact same Pfofit as S.

S's share holders sell there shares when they see W's actions as they don't want to lose their money.

S goes bankrupt/ is bought out/ closes up shop.

Those who did not pull out b4 this /wrist or /jump out a window.

OH and BTW the actualy per profit ratios are no where near as favorable to SE. in reality Blizz makes 60%+ profit off of WoW devs servers and commercials on G$ etc don't cost as much as you think, hell even paying people to interact wit the community and get much needed player input does not cost that much.

Furthermore WoW outsold FFXI even b4 it touched the "Asia" market... BTW Geography 101 Japan is part of Asia.

oh and to the other guy RMT repurchase banned accounts SE has even stated this as one of the problems for why its so hard to manage the RMT issue. RMT do not represent the "Exodus" I was speaking of.
Had you been around back in the hay day of FFXI when they got the game of the year award or w/e etc they bosted 1million Subscribers.

Am I going to fish up all this well known info and post a link for your "I don't see air thus it does not exist" mentality?
The answer is no.

I breath just fine ty.


*edited for some blaring spelling mistakes *I* saw*

[Lordender]

It isn't difficult to have 20-25 people in a LS.

Being an officer in a heavy endgame oriented LS it becomes much harder to keep 23-25 people motivated for weekly events. SE moves at a snail pace, this probably wouldn't of been an issue had einherjar been done correctly, it would of made the weekly schedule with limbus/dynamis. Its not that its difficult having 23-25 people in a LS, its about being able to maintain quality 23-25 people.

[vegetaa]

Everyone is wrong, but me.

Have a nice day.

[BRP]

Furthermore WoW outsold FFXI even b4 it touched the "Asia" market... BTW Geography 101 Japan is part of Asia.

Find the portion of my post where I state WoW didn't outsell FFXI.

Additionally:

...MMORPGs outside the Korean/China/etc market... Had SE marketed their product in the MMORPG-crazy nations of Asia...

Please read my responses. I've shown the same respect to you(despite the "b4"s), it's the least you can do.

Had you been around back in the hay day of FFXI when they got the game of the year award or w/e etc they bosted 1million Subscribers.

I've been playing since NA release.

Give me proof or shut up. You have no argument. I on the other hand could link some of SE's censuses.

PS: WoW didn't and isn't pushing FFXI out of the market. Your "complex" economics simply do not apply. I have to admit I wish you had major in English.

Being an officer in a heavy endgame oriented LS it becomes much harder to keep 23-25 people motivated for weekly events. SE moves at a snail pace, this probably wouldn't of been an issue had einherjar been done correctly, it would of made the weekly schedule with limbus/dynamis. Its not that its difficult having 23-25 people in a LS, its about being able to maintain quality 23-25 people.

This is a much more reasonable complaint. It is certainly different than claiming SE is or must shrink the amounts of players who can participate in an activity. I believe finding reliable people has always been a problem and a real anchor in the progress of many people which makes lowman content great. Whether SE is slow with their endgame content is something I don't feel like arguing or in the case of WotG, it is something I cannot deny, but I can argue that despite this, it there hasn't been much of an exodus of quitting players.

[Nazrious]

don't forget that those 20-25 people have to actually be on during specific times.

It awsome to have 25 people but if there are only 9 on at a time doesn't help you much.

nice to see you can use the quote function but quotes of your self and then saying the same exact thign does not clarriffy what you are trying to get accross if it was even taken the wrong way in the first place.

I'm actually being quite nice to you, I could nit pick at the many blatant flaws in every aspect of your post and comment on the absurd "I'm right because I claim to be able to back up what I say with more of what I have said" thought proccess and even talk about you in nasty terms but I'm not.

However if you think mean is logically going through your post point by point and rebutting what you say whith facts and actual economic methods then damn color me red and give me a pointy tail and pitchfork.

But I digress

SE vs WoW

SE, might, lolwins in the "Per- Player- Profit"
But does not make the same amount of profit as a company in the same exact market as they do.

and rather then waste more time showing whos Economicspenis is larger lets get back on topic.

SE NEEDS, not should or please, to come to terms with the lack of development of decent, not even asking for extraordinary, content.

One way to do this is to take more from the playerbase.
most player would climb over each other to help out the Dev team with bring some exciting or even just decently interesting content to FFXI.
heck a SE run forum where we could just post some ideas about specific jobs/ aspects of the game that players (know) for sure SE devs will be made aware of would be a huge step in the right direction.
Even if said site only brought about 1 implementation of a good idea/tweek out of 500,000 submitted.

hey does this sound like Blizz, yeah it does and you know what it works so why knock it?

[BRP]

nice to see you can use the quote function but quotes of your self and then saying the same exact thign does not clarriffy what you are trying to get accross if it was even taken the wrong way in the first place.

I used bold to point out where you went wrong. I only mentioned countries of Asian where MMORPG popularity is extremely high. I did not say "Asia". Japan is no where near the scale of China for example.

SE NEEDS, not should or please, to come to terms with the lack of development of decent, not even asking for extraordinary, content.

What if I say they do have development of decent content right now? What if I say not enough people are leaving and it is not the end of the world(as people have claimed with every expansion/time period of FFXI)?


And please, don't make it seem I'm bad mouthing just for asking for some proof. You claiming facts, but can not prove it.

[Langly]

If you ever wanted to see the devs/employees. Or just wanted to see my thumb holding a book open. Look ahead.

Sorry I can't provide you with the translation. It' take me somewhere on the order of a week, for I'm incredibly slow at reading Japanese.

(As of now the quality SUCKS hard due to the lighting in my room. I'll try to see if I can't scan them or get a better picture of them later and simply load them over these.)

Don't I have a nice comforter?
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...k/IMG_1859.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...k/IMG_1860.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...k/IMG_1862.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...k/IMG_1863.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...k/IMG_1864.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...k/IMG_1865.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...k/IMG_1866.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...k/IMG_1867.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...k/IMG_1868.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...k/IMG_1869.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...k/IMG_1870.jpg

I love how Sundi is in his own window, as if he chose to not stand with his team. As well, if I should put these as links instead of actual images. Say somethin.

[Gere]

Somebody activate the Elmer-signal!

[Langly]

As a note, that magazine is old. I got that back in July during a stint in Tokyo. I kinda doubt there's any 'good' information in there outside of general developer ramblings.

Edit: I just checked Elmer's pointy history forum and he's got the 5year Anniversary interview listed as a poll-able option. So he's already seen this as well. And if he didn't make a fuss over it, chances are it's nothing too incredibly fantastic.

[vegetaa]

Thank you for posting this, it gives a pretty good idea of the size of the teams. Now I wish I could read japanese :/