Open letter to Square FFXI staff.

[FondofSE]

Hello. I'm a fanboy of Squaresoft - Square Enix games. I've played most of the RPG's you've made, almost all FF saga, Xenos, Chronos, Kingdoms and Dragons. I enjoyed every single game so much that when I decided to try a MMORPG, it had to be FFXI. I knew that Square is a synonym of quality. I started playing it about august 2007, and it didn't deceive me, as was expected. I've been enjoying a lot the game in most of the aspects I've tried, and that's something I must thank you.

But suddenly, update after update, things started to go wrong. All started when the beastmen controlled all the areas in the past, when campaign battles only happened in the cities. That cut a lot WOTG for me, I couldn't move freely through the past, so I lost interest in that expansion. You didn't react on time, WOTG was already dead for me after 3 months. An enjoyable part dead. Of course you knew that was dead for a great part of us, but did nothing.

Then you came with that "great" idea of that level sync. In fact I thought it was a good idea, tweaking 2 levels above or below the exp party to get the most of it. But then you said that a mr. lvl 75 could be a lvl 10. That scared me, and later it was confirmed: Experience points party are dead for me, I can't enjoy them. When I leveled before, people had more or less knowledge of their job gained through levels, learned to use their abilities, got their skills at a healthy status and cared about their gear, so good parties where common. Now it's almost impossible. You know, people leveling until 50 @ qufim island and then going to lvl 50 camps with qufim skills and gear, abilities never used and so on. Before that thing, the levels to fear were those @ Valkurm noobs, it was called like that for a reason. Now the levels to fear are 10-75, and only the thought of leveling a support job to 37 is enough to make me close FFXI and go to do something else. Of course you'll never admit that level sync is a complete pile of garbage, that's the old know issue with "it's not a bug, it's a feature".

Later you introduced the MMM and FoV. From what I know, people don't care at all about that. Neither do I, killing a bunch of regular mobs can't be funny and shouldn't be considered as serious thing for a full update. But you still invest time and effort on it, with another free update almost fully dedicated to it. And with lies. That screenshot you published with the gambison also scared me, everybody was going to be able to have super armors if things where going to be like you said. I'm glad you realized soon enough that that was something too stupid, even for the latest FFXI standards, but the pain is already done. Even you don't know what to do to add new things to the game, it's just an essay-error things you throw to us.

And then the paid update, that Crystalline Prophecy. I promised myself I'd buy the first one, and if I don't like it, don't buy second and third ones. I have to say that I've done almost every single mission in the game (full zilart, full cops, full toau mission and full wotg, added to rank 10 san d'oria, rank 10 windurst and currently rank 7 bastok) because I like them. When you said it'd be a 1-month more or less missions, I thought: ok, at least 2 weeks of missions, maybe it's worth it. Now we find that 12 hours after the update, there's many people that has finished them. So it's a 20-minutes per-day 1 month-long missions. I feel scammed with this. Granted you give us a good item, but RMT's claim to give as a joyeuse for 10$ in more or less the same time. That makes you no much different from them (and let me link it to that another RMTish in-game item called Tidal Talisman).

The only positive thing I've found on the latest updates are the security tokens, I have a little education on cryptography and I know the value of it. I would've bought it without the extension on inventory room, but that move from your part was very clever to "force" people to buy it. That will save us users a lot of problems, and also to you a lot of problems dealing with our problems.

So what makes me log in every day? I really was thinking about this seriously, and then I realized: the online friends. We enjoy going to our limbus runs, our dynamis and even some of us go camp a NM while we speak and crack jokes. That's the only thing that you don't have direct control over it, and the only thing that I'm seeking on FF.

With all that, if it is possible:

1- You don't have any more good ideas for the game. I don't know if it's because you're tired after 6 years on the project or because most of the team moved to another project or whatever. Don't think, please.

2- You don't have enough testing power to do things right. Today we'll se the patch to the update, I can live with this to correct minor issues, but there are so many things to correct that it makes me think you're working ala microsoft, leaving the users to be the beta-testers and eating SE's policy of quality. But the worst part is not the amount of bugs. The worst part is that things that were more or less working, no longer work because the "added content" messes everything (campaigns, level sync, hours of service down because of the updates, patches to the updates, patches to patches to the updates...). That compromises seriously the prior Square Enix's quality guarantee.

3- If you feel like you have to do something, do what your base is asking: instanced dynamis, get rid of the bots (personally, I'd grant you permission to send you fingerprints of the processes running in my machine through the ToS, I've already given you my personal data and credit card info) or improve the PC and XBOX clients, leaving PS2 as is if there are such huge limitations. If you feel that you have to force youselfs too much to do anything, just leave FFXI alone and don't touch anything, but don't kill what's left in it.

Thanks sincerely, one of those 500.000 players you still have.

[oldoldman]

tl;dr: a crystalline prophecy beaten in one day wryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

[Thorny]

Would you like a tampon? Nobody is forcing you to play.

[Khajit]

Were the missions fun at least?

[Pharaun]

tl;dr Bitches don't like new stuff...

[The Blackrose]

1.) Wrong part of the forums to be breaking out your witty replies, people.

2.) Standard Discussion isn't SE's Suggestion Box. There is a better avenue you can take to make sure your voice is heard.