FFXIV Flame Wars Thread: because ten threads is not enough threads

[Kaylia]

Completely lacking features and content was not a design choice. It was a deadline sacrifice.

One could say that design choice should take into account deadline. >_>

Prioritizing the wrong things is a very poor excuse imo.

There was some meaning to Campaign, but immediate exp always trumps long-term conquest in the eyes of players.

Some meaning? Winning a fight increase a point bar, and at the end of the week, whoever filled the bar get the area? That's not very immersive.

In Aht Urgan, you would see the immediate result of your fight on the world. Npc were kidnapped, the astral candescence was gone, and the side that won would gain many benefits. I want to see a world in motion, not a bunch of numbers that tell me if our side is doing good or bad.

[ronin sparthos]

The concept behind campaign was great, but the actual fights were pretty underwhelming. In besieged, I loved how you could see the fight slowly degenerate. Generals would fall on after another, and it was a pretty big deal everytime. Then the door would open and you had to give everything to keep them away.

Campaign look nothing like what you would expect from a fight. There is a bunch of npc/monsters running around mindlessly like a horde of hungry zombie, and the outcome is completely meaningless. I want an incensitive to win a fight other than the xp gains.

I agree, the flaw of Campaign was that the rewards that weren't EXP required a concentrated effort at one particular point in time (directly before Conquest tally) which ruined the event for all but the JP who basically made or broke the event. The horrible "secret" system to the forts and monsters running in predictable packs to the forts got old quick but I guess SE would say: PS2 limitations.

The ability to storm the Shadow Lords castle after taking the Baileys/Keep were amazing on paper but how many non-JP got to participate in this? Few. If you were in the wrong time zone, odds are you'd never get to even experience it. The same goes for taking Vaule/Oztroja/Beadeaux. The rewards were a joke for the *hours* of server effort required to access the loot.

I mean cmon where was the server reward for basically kicking the CPUs ass all over the map? Fucking Fafnir was more rewarding for AFKing and botting. For a company hellbent on ending RMT activities, they failed utterly to get the common player involved into a global struggle.

Allied Note rewards were good but in the long term nothing was set into place for those dedicated to the cause. After you got your shiny new AN sets, nothing was left to do in Campaign. This goes back to SEs shitty time/reward ratios but I digress, it was still better than Besieged.

The concept behind campaign was great, but the actual fights were pretty underwhelming. In besieged, I loved how you could see the fight slowly degenerate. Generals would fall on after another, and it was a pretty big deal everytime. Then the door would open and you had to give everything to keep them away.

My problem with Besieged was that the battles took way too long to happen. I mean you could AFK 4 hours, come back and the event still wouldn't have started. Then finally when Besieged starts it lasts only an hour and you had to stay in the battle in order to get any rewards.

Sure, Al Zahbi would shut down and some NPCs would depop but ultimately why did anyone care? The Astral Candy was nice and all but as long as you could chill in WG ultimately the town was "safe". The idea SE had with TOAU was that this empire was being bumrushed by endless hoards of beastmen yet when the attack finally happens you could just chill in the next zone over with no consequences?

Now had Besieged shut down WG and Zahbi you'd have incentive for people to participate and the story would make sense. You could still have some sense of normalcy but seeing some Beastmen attempt to enter the the town only to be pulverized by players or NPCs would have been more realistic. Hell SE could even had added some humor by having some Beastmen run into WG with the sole purpose of just being an annoyance.

There is also plenty of room to reward people who decide to do things other than bot NMs all day. I really hope SE learns from XI that point systems are the way to go. There is plenty of room to add uber gear for people who participate in global events over a period of time.

[Hyan]

Your Besieged "fix" sounds pretty bad... just saying :/

It's always nice in concept..

[Kaylia]

I agree, the flaw of Campaign was that the rewards that weren't EXP required a concentrated effort at one particular point in time (directly before Conquest tally) which ruined the event for all but the JP who basically made or broke the event. The horrible "secret" system to the forts and monsters running in predictable packs to the forts got old quick but I guess SE would say: PS2 limitations.

The ability to storm the Shadow Lords castle after taking the Baileys/Keep were amazing on paper but how many non-JP got to participate in this? Few. If you were in the wrong time zone, odds are you'd never get to even experience it. The same goes for taking Vaule/Oztroja/Beadeaux. The rewards were a joke for the *hours* of server effort required to access the loot.

I mean cmon where was the server reward for basically kicking the CPUs ass all over the map? Fucking Fafnir was more rewarding for AFKing and botting. For a company hellbent on ending RMT activities, they failed utterly to get the common player involved into a global struggle.

Allied Note rewards were good but in the long term nothing was set into place for those dedicated to the cause. After you got your shiny new AN sets, nothing was left to do in Campaign. This goes back to SEs shitty time/reward ratios but I digress, it was still better than Besieged.



My problem with Besieged was that the battles took way too long to happen. I mean you could AFK 4 hours, come back and the event still wouldn't have started. Then finally when Besieged starts it lasts only an hour and you had to stay in the battle in order to get any rewards.

Sure, Al Zahbi would shut down and some NPCs would depop but ultimately why did anyone care? The Astral Candy was nice and all but as long as you could chill in WG ultimately the town was "safe". The idea SE had with TOAU was that this empire was being bumrushed by endless hoards of beastmen yet when the attack finally happens you could just chill in the next zone over with no consequences?

Now had Besieged shut down WG and Zahbi you'd have incentive for people to participate and the story would make sense. You could still have some sense of normalcy but seeing some Beastmen attempt to enter the the town only to be pulverized by players or NPCs would have been more realistic. Hell SE could even had added some humor by having some Beastmen run into WG with the sole purpose of just being an annoyance.

There is also plenty of room to reward people who decide to do things other than bot NMs all day. I really hope SE learns from XI that point systems are the way to go. There is plenty of room to add uber gear for people who participate in global events over a period of time.

I don't really have any issue with Whitegate not being attacked. From a technical perspective, locking many players out of the normal game wouldn't be a good idea (not everyone will want to get involved in besieged). They could have added visual cue that a fight was going on (sky changing color, music, stream of guard rushing from the palace to al zhabi), but locking both zone would be problematic. It would probably be difficult for the server to handle battle in a populated town zone as well.

I think the current situation was a decent middle ground, even if it could have been improved.

[ZarakiKujata]

Makes me wonder what the "theme" will be in the first expansion..

You really think this game will have more then 1 expansion if all the planets don't align and SE gets everything right before PS3 launch?

[Kaylia]

Expansion are very cheap to produce usually. Unless the playerbase drop under 100k, it might still be profitable.

[miokomioko]

Some meaning? Winning a fight increase a point bar, and at the end of the week, whoever filled the bar get the area? That's not very immersive.

I never claimed it was immersive. I was just stating that there were purposes other than selfish EXP/AN rewards, mostly Campaign Ops (which became extremely popular), even if you didn't care about them. As soon as there was tangible rewards in sight for gaining access to Bloodsoaked Crown, Fiat Lux, and the like, all of a sudden people cared about simply winning Campaigns and defending Fortifications, EXP/AN became frosting on the Orc helm cake.

The ability to storm the Shadow Lords castle after taking the Baileys/Keep were amazing on paper but how many non-JP got to participate in this? Few.

What? I've seen way too many people with that ugly-as-sin armor, definitely not Japanese.

[Kaylia]

I never claimed it was immersive. I was just stating that there were purposes other than selfish EXP/AN rewards, mostly Campaign Ops (which became extremely popular), even if you didn't care about them. As soon as there was tangible rewards in sight for gaining access to Bloodsoaked Crown, Fiat Lux, and the like, all of a sudden people cared about simply winning Campaigns and defending Fortifications, EXP/AN became frosting on the Orc helm cake.

That has nothing to do with my original comments. I'm simply said that campaign was much less immersive than besieged. It was more rewarding, but for something that is suposed to looks like a large scale battle, it fail pretty bad.

People would slam their head on a brick wall if it made gears drop. That's not saying much about the quality of the content.

[Meresgi]

Thank, I didn't notice the 2d maping when I picked the screenshot in folder...retard. That's what WoW look like. Most players who arent graphic whore won't mind things like this, but you're shallow, and we can't change that.
And lol at making fun of ulduar when FFXI has shit like alzadaal ruin. Do you really think FFXIV dungeon won't reuse the palette?

Apparently you missed my point about Ulduar...retard.

Algalon's room and General's rooms both looked great, but the instance as a whole was kind of a let down coming from Naxx. The first boss area took up most of the instance allocation it seems, which was cool, but the inside of Ulduar just seemed lacking, as it was 3 hallways into circle rooms with a boss and one big circle with foliage around.

One thing that annoyed me from FFXI to WoW to FFXIV is the gear. WoW's gear is far out there and sometimes looks great...but only the shoulderpads/helm look good. They finally put in some decent looking boots, but the body armor/leg armor always just looks painted on in MSpaint and doesn't pop out or feel like armor. Opposed to FF games where you can actually see your character is wearing something. That's not shallow, that's an observation a lot of people noticed. The world of FFXIV looks dead as shit but the scenery looks great, opposed to WoW where most scenery looked like crap but the atmosphere looked nice and the towns felt alive (well the towns in WoTLK and a few in BC. old world towns were kind of meh. hopefully changed in Cataclysm a bit)

Seriously, 3 things make up a good game: Graphics, Gameplay and Story. WoW had 2 of those, FFXIV has 1 right now, FFXI had 2 of those.

One could say that design choice should take into account deadline. >_>

Prioritizing the wrong things is a very poor excuse imo.

Making the game not crash constantly and be "somewhat" playable seem to be a better priority then adding some content and fixing issues that can be patched a few months into game. It's not like developers when making a MMO put in a nice 35-40hr week and then shrug and say "well we can play catch up I guess, I mean its 5pm guys and it's quitting time for today!"

We can't expect every MMO that hits market to be WoW right out of the gate. WoW was a fluke, you can't plan for a fluke, you can't design for a fluke. Hell Blizzard didnt even plan for what WoW became, they had a budget set up to let them at least have a few paychecks if the game tanked to hell and went offline in the first few months.

[Lucavi]

I liked the idea of Campaign alot but once again SE made the idea far more complex than it needed to be. The encouragement to work together as a team was good but the average player had little idea what was going on a large scale. It boiled down to an event where people just wanted to work alone because the "group" rewards came weekly. I thought it was a significant improvement over Besieged however.

There were so many layers that served little purpose in Campaign. It really over-complicated the system because so many of the details were unexplained. (What are my Campaign Ops doing for the war effort? What do my suggestions to the CB NPC do? Where are my rewards for luring freelancers to my nation's aid? Why does the weekly tally which largely depends on Japanese effort remain the only way to shift regions?)

Any of the flaws you listed with campaign would basically be "fixed" if under the rules of how they're handling FFXIV. I wanted campaign "simplistic, yet complicated". I knew the story behind it, and was begging for updates to want to know more about it. If someone else didn't care about why we were supposed to fight; about what was at stake, then so be it. If they just wanted Allied Notes for phat lewtz, then hey, that's their prerogative. If they just want some solo XP to kill time, then cool.

Yes, the pathing issues were there, and yes, Besieged had a "whittling down" feel to it, but the pathing issues were there as well. Pathing flaws are just a part of SE's design. Pretty much every HNM had some kind of pathing glitch or exploit, and SE basically admitted in the recent interview that they were working on trying to fix pathing issues, so I'm pretty satisfied on that end.

As for individual efforts being weighty, I felt that my efforts were plenty weighty. When my Pld/Dnc is tanking 3-4 mobs while a random Whm or Rdm cures me, while everyone else works on a boss, I feel plenty weighty. If I wasn't there, perhaps those mobs slaughter others because no tanks are around or just aren't focused on adds. If that healer drops, perhaps I die after awhile and those adds run free and start rampaging. There's plenty of "weight" there if you actually play your class well, have the gear for it, and have the ability to make an impact on the fight. I don't -want- to be able to solo it. Its totally unrealistic and breaks the feeling of overwhelming desperation that Campaign is supposed to elicit. There's enough games and enough places in XI where its one man against the world.

The point was that SE was able to wrap multiple "aspects" of what people view as the strong points of FFXI (plot, characters, story, combat system, community aspect and teamwork) into a single system, and also to allow us the freedom to make our own choices. I'll elaborate.

Do I just like defending? I can do that.
Do I just want to assault crap? Can do that too.
Do I want to heal only? Okay.
Do I want to attack during the fight only? Sure.
Do I want to team up? Can do.
Go it alone? No problem.
Hell, do I just want to stand and watch without the fear of getting skull-fucked by some huge-ass mob, because hey, I don't know much about campaign yet it looks cool seeing all these people fighting heavily-armored mobs? Yes. Yes you can.

No wonder I had like 500k Allied Notes in like 5 months.

That's the SE I want to see more of. The SE that thinks of systems that combine FFXI's rigid structure with themes and concepts that are popular in other MMOs that XI traditionally didn't explore. Besieged was a start, but it didn't offer a ton of choice, other than how you want to fight. With Campaign, you can choose your place, your time, your role, and what you want to fight. You can also do outside quests to benefit the war cause. If you were a lore-whore like myself, you could wrap yourself up in the plot and fight for your nation, or just to protect the fledgling treaty. If you didn't care for plot, you could fight just to kick the shit out of things and get a nice reward. It wasn't perfect, but its still the best thing I've seen from SE in either of their MMOs.

When those kinds of ideas come back; when those people responsible for those ideas start pumping work into XIV, that's when I'll be happily paying my fee each month to play. I'll finally have something worth paying for.

Edit: And people claim I hate SE or something.

[Kaylia]

@Meresgi
We havent played in the same Ulduar. The tramway leading to mimiron, Freya's garden, hodir's frost tunnel, thorim's arena...there is a large diversity of setting, even if it's not the largest instance. Naxx look the same everywhere (add spiderweb, greensludge, or war supply depending of the wings you're doing). It also has very little story going on in it, unlike ulduar.

I don't care if you hate Ulduar, but you're just bitching for the sake of bitching here.

Making the game not crash constantly and be "somewhat" playable seem to be a better priority then adding some content and fixing issues that can be patched a few months into game.

What? that has nothing to do with the discussion.

SquareEnix should have spent less time on pretty graphics and more on building a solid gameplay during the development. that's what I said.

[miokomioko]

So now, if graphics matter to you, you're shallow.

God damn you can be ignorant.

[Kaylia]

So now, if graphics matter to you, you're shallow.

God damn you can be ignorant.

What?

Explain.

[bruiser]

SquareEnix should have spent less time on pretty graphics and more on building a solid gameplay during the development. that's what I said.

I disagree. The good graphics are necessary. What they should have done is released the game in January for PC, and May/June for PS3.

Although the more I think about it, the more I start believing that what's happening now, despite the fact that it fucking sucks right now, is absolutely the best possible thing for FFXIV's future. Before this happened, they had no intention of building a separate UI for PC users. There was one UI, and that was it, by design. It's exactly because of the overall backlash of the game that they're now making a native keyboard/mouse UI. This is a huge win for the game in the long term. If they had released the game 4 months later, and fixed the lag issues, fixed the market wards, had a search system, had more content, etc etc. People still would have complained about the UI, but it wouldn't have been nearly as fierce. And then we probably wouldn't be seeing the shift in strategy that SE is adopting.

[Shaskoru]

We can't expect every MMO that hits market to be WoW right out of the gate. WoW was a fluke, you can't plan for a fluke, you can't design for a fluke. Hell Blizzard didnt even plan for what WoW became, they had a budget set up to let them at least have a few paychecks if the game tanked to hell and went offline in the first few months.

Even if Blizzard planned for WoW's failure, they were able to build a game that is still fun to millions of people today, and they continuously make smart development decisions. Pushing a game like FFXIV is one of the worst development decisions that any company can make. Seriously, it's baffling that people still don't get this after seeing the public reactions to the game as well. Not even to fucking mention, this is not the first time that SE has made this mistake. FFXI's introduction and history was littered with extremely bad development decisions.

I disagree. The good graphics are necessary. What they should have done is released the game in January for PC, and May/June for PS3.

Although the more I think about it, the more I start believing that what's happening now, despite the fact that it fucking sucks right now, is absolutely the best possible thing for FFXIV's future. Before this happened, they had no intention of building a separate UI for PC users. There was one UI, and that was it, by design. It's exactly because of the overall backlash of the game that they're now making a native keyboard/mouse UI. This is a huge win for the game in the long term. If they had released the game 4 months later, and fixed the lag issues, fixed the market wards, had a search system, had more content, etc etc. People still would have complained about the UI, but it wouldn't have been nearly as fierce. And then we probably wouldn't be seeing the shift in strategy that SE is adopting.

While I agree with the majority of your points, the bolded part is pretty nonexistent at this point. Also, until more time passes, we won't know if SE will finally wake up and realize that their development decisions throughout the years are becoming increasingly retarded, or if they will continue to push out trash like the latter part of their works and this seemingly new attitude is just damage control for a specific product.

And seriously, Mio, you're using WoW's art style as a scapegoat for your distaste of competing MMORPGs. That's extremely shallow, but not surprising considering it was an older consensus among FFXI players. I don't see you striking against Minecraft. You can't really say that you have a problem with kids, either, as all MMORPGs are infested with kids. There are greater numbers of kids in WoW because there are greater numbers of people in general since, you know, the game is actually fun. I'm sure even FFXIV has its share of kids in the community, but the general user-unfriendliness of the game and the general lack of a population makes encountering them few and far between.

[miokomioko]

What?

Explain.

I'm tired of quoting you just to remind you of what you said.

[Kaylia]

I disagree. The good graphics are necessary. What they should have done is released the game in January for PC, and May/June for PS3.

Everyone want great graphics, awesome gameplay, and massive amount of contents. It's stupid to think that with limited ressource, a developper will be able to deliver such product. Delaying a game is not just a question of pushing back release date, they lose millions doing so.


Good graphics are not a necessity, and they drain a lot of ressource during the development. Going all out on it is never going to be the smart thing to do, even if it might grab some attention at first.

I'm tired of quoting you just to remind you of what you said.

Nice. You post nonsense, then refuse to clarify your idiotic statement.

And yes, people obsessing on graphics are usually shallow. Loving art is one thing, wanting next gen graphic on everything is another.

[Ksandra]

We can't expect every MMO that hits market to be WoW right out of the gate. WoW was a fluke, you can't plan for a fluke, you can't design for a fluke. Hell Blizzard didnt even plan for what WoW became, they had a budget set up to let them at least have a few paychecks if the game tanked to hell and went offline in the first few months.

While I agree with you that in a way wow was a fluke (but only partially since they have shown they know exactly how to keep/grow their customer base), at this point companies do need to have the mentality that they need to be "wow right of the the gate". I'm not talking about a wow clone, but it has to be ready. MMOs simply cannot survive on the old concept of "make a basic game, add more later." THat ffxi/eq/wow/etc were able to do back in the day. The mentality of the player is way different now, and in many ways it is an extremely poor business decision to ignore wow as if you'd be able to come up with your own player base even with it taking in that 12+million players.

Simply put, people don't have the patience they used to for an unfinished game to be released. It doesn't have to be full on wow with 7+ years content. But it better be damn good enough to keep people's attention until it can add everything to "catch up".

[Ezek]

Been following the 2ch FFXIV threads and there's one with 500+ replies ongoing (http://2chnull.info/r/ogame/1289478946/301-400). According to them, this is the combined server population peak at JP prime time:

　 リーブ更新　 　　　09　　　　21　　　　無 　 　

┃10/07～10/09　 ┃　　42217　　39216　　46499*
┃10/10～10/12　 ┃　　47565* 　45504* 　41894
┃10/13～10/15　 ┃　　40516　　39502　　36525
┃10/16～10/18　 ┃　　43271* 　44582* 　39279
┃10/19～10/21　 ┃　　38905　　38339　　36546
┃10/22～10/24　 ┃　　24907**　40548* 　40392*
┃10/25～10/27　 ┃　　36309　　35832　　33867
┃10/28～10/30　 ┃　　31553　　32518　　36264*
┃10/31～11/02　 ┃　　36112* 　33877　　30929
┃11/03～11/05　 ┃　　32672* 　29031　　29064
┃11/06～11/08　 ┃　　32384* 　33373* 　28968
┃11/09～11/11　 ┃　　28675　　28052　　27023

Considering how there's usually anywhere from 700-900 people max on Besaid at any given time (that I'm on, anyways - evening times EST), I'm not overly surprised at all. Also, some of the ASCII figures are just lol:

edit: shit looks fucked up with encoding, #388 in above link for reference.

[bruiser]

Everyone want great graphics, awesome gameplay, and massive amount of contents. It's stupid to think that with limited ressource, a developper will be able to deliver such product. Delaying a game is not just a question of changing pushing back release date, they lose millions doing so.

I understand this better than you think. Hindsight is obviously 20/20 though, and now we can see the negative ramifications in this specific case that resulted from not delaying the game. Although like I said earlier, if they pull through, and are able to rebuild their trust (and player base), it will have been for the better, ironically.