Slashdot Mirror
Square Enix Attempting Final Fantasy XIV Damage Control
basscomm writes "Just the other day, it was discussed here on Slashdot that Final Fantasy XIV was released into the world as a buggy, incomplete mess. Now, it's been announced that due to 'generous amounts of player feedback' that lots of changes are coming (honest!). And, as a result, anyone who registers their game before October 25th will have their 30-day trial upgraded to a 60-day trial. But will it be enough to keep the game from hemorrhaging players once the free trials end?"
Not to be pessimistic, but I don't think it's possible to completely rewrite the game in just a few weeks.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
From the reviews I read it sounds like the entire concept was borked. The game itself is buggy, the installation is a mess, the game play is boring and tedious. One review I saw showed a five minute gameplay clip where the character was being relentlessly attacked by butterflies.
Is it sad that those little characters on the side didn't make me think of Final Fantasy, but 8-Bit Theatre instead?
Then use a phoenix down.
Those are never finished when they release them.
I already stopped my subscription to FFXIV. Even though I still had two weeks left before 30 day trial would've been over, they already disabled my logon. To me, this seems inexcusably bad. I paid for the game, which includes 30 days and they haven't given that to me. There's no way I'll be coming back.
Dear diary: Today I stuffed some dolls full of dead rats I put in the blender.
As a long time player of FFXI, as well as several other MMORPGs, my feelings were that a lot of the highly negative reviews were really harping on subjects that for the most part were irrelevant. That being said there is a LOT of work necessary to get this game going. I was about to cancel my subscription and wait 6 months and see where they were at.
AH, Interface issues, Repeating terrain graphics are all things that actually didn't matter much to me. I don't mind having to learn a new way of doing things for a new game. What got me frustrated quickly was that the world seemed to have no content.
One of the things I like about FF games is that when you're in a large city it tends to be well-developed, with lots of weird little quests among various townsfolk, and lots of hints about up and coming content that you won't see for hours, levels, or even at all depending on how you play. None of that is present in the game currently. Every step of the one major town quest (which is a chainquest) feels like a tutorial exercise (which it is of course)...not like environment deepening material.
The world is simply not alive enough. If you run around outside there are few monsters...no killer bunnies...95% of the mobs are instantly generated for a specific person's grind-quest and aren't attackable by anyone else.
I love FFXI, I love slow worldly feeling MMOs and regular RPGs, but at this point the game is a series of grindy-quests that you pick and choose at with no end-goal in sight...there is one story-arc quest line that gives you very little and reoccurs in your progression extremely infrequently.
At the moment the game feels like they got their basic systems down, but they've got nothing actually in the game that's game-like yet.
It's too late to make it a good game. But they can still make the game so bad it's good.
I think it's the hermaphrodite's version of Barbie dolls, but I'm not sure.
I assume you're talking about the offline Final Fantasy games.. Those tend to have a nice, somewhat deep storyline that western games often lack.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
Seriously, when was the last time you played a bugged-out game on a console? Do you need more than one hand to count the times? (and I don't count the PS3 and the XBox as consoles... really)
They're fun (Generally, maybe not this one)
Now someone explain to me the appeal of poems. As far as I can tell they're nothing but crazy poetic crap.
That can't just be because they're not to my taste or I haven't put the time into appreciating them, they're just crap.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Let's say what gamerankings says:
Final Fantasy XIV: 51.43%
Daikatana: 54.08%
That's a "throw it in the garbage bin and start over" rating.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
... I would like them to perform this kind of damage control. You know, the kind of damage control that involves listening to your user-base.
Mind you, it's not like they had a choice.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Holy shit, they aren't even releasing the patch for over a month?
I don't even play this and that sounds absolutely ridiculous.
I never thought about this until now, but you can draw alot of comparisons to Square/Enix and George Lucas. Both knocked a 3-4 early projects out of the park. But now just release products intended on demo'ing your home theater setup.
I assume you're talking about the offline Final Fantasy games.. Those tend to have a nice, somewhat deep storyline that western games often lack.
Unfortunately, it's frequently at the cost of interesting gameplay and/or player-controlled character development (that is to say, it's the point at which a role-playing game becomes a role-fulfilling game).
Dunno, it's just my opinion that if a deep storyline was the most important part of video games, I'd watch movies or read books instead. Cheaper that way.
Hah, deep storyline. Funny story. The video games that are making strides towards having a decent storyline are not JRPG's. And while they're making progress, they are still nowhere near the level of movies and books. Admittedly, it's a different medium so they get other advantages that can't be found in movies or books. Storyline isn't one of them.
The problem is the same with all big game corps. $$ drives the project timelines. Namely now $$ as apposed to future $$. It should have cooked for another month. There is really no excuse for a game to be released with out a proper market (which the last patch just tried to fix) Over all though, I like the game. The very crafting dependant economy really interests me, and I've found a great guild (Linkshell) which has really provided me with a warm community of adult players that also have day jobs (yes this is a shameless plug for LS Event Horizon, on the Saronia NA server).
I'm looking forward to what it will become not what it is today. If you want to try it wait a month what you see then will likely be much better that what I found a few days after release.
What I'm really hoping for is that this combined with EA louse's dirty laundry will start to convince game corps that they can't just release unfinished games and then try to make it up to the customers. At least not in the MMO space.
Now would be the time to announce PS3 remakes of Final Fantasy VI and VII, available together for $29.
It's just a paid Beta. Kinda like Microsoft products.
/Anon troll
//You can't see me.
what a terrible title
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
During the mid- to late- 90's I'd heartily agree; Square's RPGS were great in those days, and I still pick up Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI from time to time. These days, their popularity is more due to leftover nostalgia and riding on the coattails of their classics. Which, if response the the latest two games is an indicator, may soon be running dry.
Having played this game and read the list of "updates", they don't have a prayer. The "updates" are more like basic features and UI stuff that no serious MMO would launch without.
- They're adding a way to "search retainers in a ward for specific items." aka: Functionality like an auction house. It's good that they're adding this. It's not good that they launched the game with a system that was so completely and fundamentally broken at the design level that it never should have been let out of alpha. Seriously, someone thought it was a good idea to make players wander around from retainer to retainer in the hope of finding item that they need, in a game where crafting is heavily dependent on player made inputs? Have these people ever played a MMO?
- They're also adding a shortcut to reply to whisper messages directly. Which is good, since you can't right now. Again, who ever heard of a MMO where you can't reply to messages? This isn't rocket science, it's the most basic chat functionality on the planet. (While they're at it they should make message size limits something slightly larger then a twitter message.)
- They're adding a way to let you scroll the map with the mouse. Seriously. Go read it yourself. You can't scroll the map with a mouse. In a PC game. I can't make shit this stupid up.
These are just some of the changes. They're also hitting the broken targetting system (target, pick a spell, then... target again? For real? Who thought this up?). Hopefully they do something about the poor performance and terrible stability of the client. But it won't matter.
You only get one chance to make an impression in the MMO market. Recovering from the perception that you've got a bad game is extremely difficult after the fact. This game has nothing going for it except that it's pretty (if you spend enough on a computer that can actually run it with acceptable performance). In basically every other area, it's inferior to that other game that has 12 million players and just happens to have an expansion launching at the same time as the patch that will add basic functionality to FF 14.
And if you get past that, shortly after there's some Star Wars MMO coming out. Between those two games, a buggy PS3 port with the worst UI a MMO has ever seen has no chance of recovering. It'll be running at 80,000 subs (if they're lucky) in 6 months. Fortunately for them, it's really meant as a PS3 game anyway and on the PS3 the competition is much weaker.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
it should be released as Final Fantasy Free.
Kupo! Kupo! Kupo!
Lesson one is: Set up servers in specific geographical locations. Players do not want to play with 1200-1500ms latency. Players do not like it when they lose the competitive advantage because of something they have no control over.
Lesson two is: Do not release the game until it is finished. Finished means having end-game content on release. It is essential that the hardcore players feel comfortable from the beginning... THEY are the foundation of your game's diversity because they are the ones who truly keep the economy and community churning. This seems obvious, but a long string of MMORPG failures point to this not being followed.
Lesson three is: If players have come to expect certain things of a new MMORPG, like an in-game mail system, auction house, and custom keyboard bindings, then you had better damn well have those in your game if you hope to have the success of the current vanguards of the industry. If all you're going for is a place that fanboys can be self-delusional and happy, great, you can succeed without such things. But be aware that you're creating an insular player base and the reason you have fanboys at all is because of previous great work you did, not this current garbage. It is not sustainable, and you will go out of business.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
"The bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after the sweetness of meeting a deadline is forgotten." -Charles Kettering
so were back in beta officially ? who will go through a boring buggy game 30 more days ? people complained about a missing auction house or item search functions since start of beta. SEs big fix was "renaming" the zones where the market npcs are standing (glovemaker ward, smithy ward etc.) and expects players to set up their retainers there voluntary at the rght place. and this took them 4 weeks after their big announcement.
still got to pay 50 bucks for the FF haters on slashdot to say "see i told ya so"
Right now, all the servers are only in Japan. I'm playing from the U.S., and I have a pretty high ping, placing me at a disadvantage.
this needs to be modded funny.
Sometimes, you can, you go to hell for the rest of your life! That's a true thing.
I do believe you're the first person who has ever pointed this out. Thanks! I certainly wouldn't have realized it.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Back in the Verant days, yes, MMOs were dicks to their players and that was ok (well ok in that people would put up with it). You canceled your account, they deleted your character and other silly punitive measures like that. However WoW showed everyone that isn't how you do things. You be nice to players. Cancel your account in a rage? No problem you can keep playing for all your paid time. You wanna come back later, even years later? No problem, all your characters are just as you left them, database space is cheap. Get really mad and delete your characters? No problem, they can be recovered from backup. Someone steal your account and sell all your hard earned shit? No problem, they can trace that and recover to an earlier state.
That is how things should be done and, no surprise, what gamers want now. Once Blizzard started doing that, other companies learned. SOE went and screamed at EQ's developers and producers and they went and recovered all the deleted characters and sent out a "Please come back and play we've restored your shit," e-mail and EQ and EQ2 now operate similar to WoW.
Square sounds like they are still in the old "Us vs them," mentality. The users are the enemy, and if they do something you don't like, such as cancel their account, they need to be punished. No, sorry guys. As a subscription service with lots of competitors, you are in the customer service business. That means making your customers happy PARTICULARLY your angry ones. If someone leaves in a huff, you want to be nice to them. Tell them "We're sorry to see you go, feel free to play out the remaining time, and come back any time you like." Maybe then later they change their mind. If you are a dick about it, more likely they do write you off forever.
Also I could potentially see this opening them up for a lawsuit. If the agreement is X dollars buys you Y days of access, and there are no refunds for partial time, then I can't see how it is ok to refuse to provide the complete paid time. If I call and cancel my cable, they'll shut it off immediately. However they will also refund all unused time. If I call and cancel my AC service contract, they won't refund my money, but it'll continue for the rest of the time I've paid.
The real reason Alt-Tab crashes the game is because the PC engine is amateur hour.
Please leave the TurboGrafx out of this.
But seriously, with both the 360 and the PC using DirectX on a Windows-based kernel, what's the big difference?
Back in the Verant days, yes, MMOs were dicks to their players and that was ok (well ok in that people would put up with it). You canceled your account, they deleted your character and other silly punitive measures like that. However WoW showed everyone that isn't how you do things. You be nice to players. Cancel your account in a rage? No problem you can keep playing for all your paid time. You wanna come back later, even years later? No problem, all your characters are just as you left them, database space is cheap. Get really mad and delete your characters? No problem, they can be recovered from backup. Someone steal your account and sell all your hard earned shit? No problem, they can trace that and recover to an earlier state.
That is how things should be done and, no surprise, what gamers want now. Once Blizzard started doing that, other companies learned. SOE went and screamed at EQ's developers and producers and they went and recovered all the deleted characters and sent out a "Please come back and play we've restored your shit," e-mail and EQ and EQ2 now operate similar to WoW.
EQ did a lot of dumb things. Looking back, I often wonder why I bothered playing through such painful design decisions. The only reason I can come up with is I liked the idea of an MMRPG so much that I played despite the design, not because of it (not to mention that every following MMRPG tried to copy EQ's minor success by making the same boneheaded design decisions as EQ did, all the way up until WoW came on the scene and shook things up). When I speak of the game, it's the same way that I might speak of an ex-girlfriend who cheated on me, stole my money, and humiliated me in front of my family.
However, what you write about EQ's policies, as far as my bitter memories and experiences go, is a completely bogus and revisionist history.
EQ would not *guarantee* canceled accounts would remain after 3 months, however I've never once heard of them actually deleting accounts. I've known several people, myself included, who canceled anywhere between months and years and then came back with all their stuff intact.
As far as account restores go, the first maybe 2 or 3 years they did not do full restores on characters who had lost all of their stuff (usually due to dying in a weird place and not being able to get to your corpse... one of many dumb mechanics in the first few years). However, even back in those early days, they would often give you a starter kit that had gear to help get you back going again. This kit varied over time and sometimes sucked (but was far better than nothing) and sometimes was ok. However, further down the road, they did implement being able to further restore complete characters (as I had to have one done once).
And tying both of these together, they've even had players who *deleted* their characters, then canceled their accounts, then came back months later, and were successfully able to have their characters restored from the player's own deletion. However, I do have a vague recollection that they once announced that they were going to create a limit on how long they would store *deleted* characters before they would be permanently lost, but that's a far cry from what the above poster has stated.
This all happened before WoW came on the scenes, since I never touched EQ after WoW came out.
EQ was bad... but it wasn't because of the false reasons you gave.
I played FFX-2 forever ago. I thought it sucked. The whole game is just SO limited.. You don't even have free-control of the camera, and the main intro cannot be skipped. It feels like a game from the '80s with a new graphics engine and nothing more. The only good thing is you can do missions in whatever order you like.
Let's compare it to something like Deus Ex. In Deus Ex, you get an objective. However you want to accomplish it is up to you. If your orders are to knock out the terrorist leader but not kill him, you can disobey the game's orders and it goes on. Characters react differently to you depending on how you've been playing the game.
There is added complexity with the whole computer terminal/security system thing too. It is too bad that they don't make games like that anymore.
I've enjoyed a single game they made: FF8.
Nothing else. FF7 was palatable, but not really enjoyable.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
... some poetry really is just crap by another name, though!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
There's just no second chances in this industry. I can't speak from experience because playing FFXI was enough to leave me with absolutely no interest in any follow-ups, but if it's really that bad then they are finished. People will say, 'Oh, but WoW was buggy at first', and that may be true, but I played WoW on release (the reason I canceled my FFXI sub) and it was a very entertaining game regardless.
Having played the beta, I have to ask this: where were the promised changes during the HUGE amounts of feedback given that the game was going to suck? Reading the beta test boards, people were saying left and right that major game changes needed to be made, or else the game was going to flop.
Square-enix pretty much ignored the majority of the feedback. And now they're scrambling to fix things that, had they listened, could have been fixed well before the game went live.
Well with EQ I can only deal with my experience. I played it for a time, got pissed off at the continual shitting on the players and left. Just canceled the account, nothing dramatic. Some time later, probably a year or so (pre WoW), coworkers tried to get me back in. I said sure, since I happened to have been on the same server as them and time causes us to remember the good parts more than the bad. Figured it would be fun with other players I knew. Went and started things up, and my characters were gone. That was the end of that, stopped payment and went on my way. If they couldn't be bothered to keep my characters I couldn't be bothered to play.
Some time later, after I was a happy WoW player, Sony e-mailed me saying "We have recovered everyone's characters, you can come back to EQ! We've even given you some free time!" Ya, none of that.
Compare that to WoW where the stated system has always been "We keep your stuff forever." Makes good business sense, as well as being nice for the players.
I did play EQ2 for a time though and they learned a lot about not being assholes, I just didn't care for the game that much.
I would wager that several of the key decisions about this game's design were made under the duress of office politics, with key personnel chosen via nepotism rather than merit.
This is why you need game design decisions to be made by the experienced and expensive game designers who actually know what their target audience finds entertaining and do plenty of market research to ensure that horrible, non-competitive designs like this one don't get money wasted on them.
It's not like this is some unexplored market where you have to just throw random stuff together and see what works. The utter wrongness of these designs would have been clear-and-obvious to a talented game designer long before a single line of code was written. It blows my mind that a company would sink this kind of money into a project and wind up making such monumentally bad, and completely preventable, decisions.
Oh well. They deserve what they get.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Mod parent insightful. Even Final Fantasy, the king of RPGs, is a shattered ruin of its former glory. Like Ozymandias, the series is a shade whose greatness lives only in our memory...
I see the fnords!
I'm sorry to inform you that the appeal of poems will never be grepped by computer nerds. Maybe Guido van Rossum. but certainly not Bill Gates, or any of the readers here.
Consider the fact that beta testers weren't allowed to report bugs or provide feedback, you have to wonder why the fuck they released the friggen game in that state except maybe to hit a "pre-christmas" launch.
At least with a MMO you can get away with this provided the customers don't quit due to frustration.
I played beta, got nothing but feedback looks when trying to report bugs, and ultimately bought the game anyway hoping that the bugs chase away the hardcore greifer types.
They're fun (Generally, maybe not this one) Now someone explain to me the appeal of poems. As far as I can tell they're nothing but crazy poetic crap. That can't just be because they're not to my taste or I haven't put the time into appreciating them, they're just crap.
Good point. Poems are stupid...
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Actually, the effectiveness of that is not beside the point at all. If it doesn't even actually solve a problem, it's taking away basic functionality without offering anything. Plus, you can gauge people's (or companies) competence by the solution they come up with: seeing someone come up with a pencils-up-the-nose pants-on-head retarded solution is actually a bad sign.
First of all, it's an idiotic solution anyway. I've seen, used and in ye olde DOS days even _made_ trainers for games, and none ever needed switching to the trainer to activate. The way you do it, is you hook on certain key combinations that the user can press while in game. E.g., numeric 1 = add a million cash, numeric 2 = infinite health, etc. The game never sees a task switch at all.
Second, if you're really determined, even that is old hat, and you run the game in a virtual machine instead. Glider did basically that to get around WoW's checks. Again it's not stuff that'll need a task switch, or the game to notice one.
Third, and even more important, it was defeated already by making it run windowed. So it's a thoroughly incompetent solution even for the stated problem.
Fourth, and the most important, anything important should be checked by the server, and you shouldn't trust the client for more than movement and animation. It's not possible to memory-hack WoW and give yourself more money or duplicate items, because the server doesn't trust the client with that. That Square-Enix even needed something like that, is reason to worry. If the client is trusted enough to worry about client-side cheating tools, that's a crap MMO implementation and reason to expect a deluge of duped gold or duped items or whatever down the line.
That's the real important part. Crap implementations aren't beside the point, and aren't just academic discussions in how competently the game is implemented. A crap implementation can set the stage for bigger problems down the line. And that they even need to try to disable ALT+TAB is not a good sign.
Fifth, MMOs are inherently social setups and in more than one way. It's not just a SP game plus an in-game chat. A lot (most?) players also use guild web sites, some have an IRC channel too, check or update sites for advice with quests and whatnot, have at the very least as Ventrilo or TeamSpeak running, many use some form of IM to keep in touch with other players or just friends, etc. Restricting access to those is seriously crippling something which is by now pretty standard MMO gameplay. Needing to basically close the game every single time you even do basic stuff like post something to the guild site or checking some guild schedule or to post a screenshot of your char or to IM a guild mate, isn't just a pain in the butt, it's crippling the experience of playing the damned game as a MMO.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I beta tested this game a month ago. I have never alt+f4+uninstalled any software so quickly before. Next-gen MMORPGs that aren't at least World of Warcraft are doomed to automatic failure.
I played FFXI for years and enjoyed it. And I am enjoying playing FFXIV, the game is not flawless, what MMO is. It is still less that one month since the game was launched and all MMOs have been buggy at launch. From the reviews I have read it seems like all the reviewers are expecting FFXIV to be Warcraft and it is not(thankfully).
/BTW I ALT-TAB in FFXIV all the time. I run with Firefox, Winamp, Messenger, and Thunderbird up all the time. I have never had FFXIV lock-up or crash on me yet ALT-TABbing back and forth.
So lets go through the complaints:
No Auction House - Correct, this means the goldfarmers/gilsellers can't game the Auction House and create obscene levels of inflation that everyone complains about in MMOs. It would be nice if there was a signboard to list what you're selling but that wasn't in FFIX either, neither was the search function. However next update a search function for bazaars will be added.
Fatigue System - Did no one read any of the information on this game before they bought it? I knew about the fatigue system a good month before the open beta. The game is biased towards casual gamers not hard-core gamers this has never been a secret.
Interface -Bugs, big bugs -Developers say next months patch will have lots and lots of fixes.
Terrain is cookie cutter Yes the basic areas of the game have very similar terrain. Most of the zones in FFXI either large open areas or various twisty tunnels or corridors too.
Crafting - you either love it or hate it. Craft or don't craft it usually cheaper and faster to make what you need, or get your guild mates to craft for you. But the developers haev said that there will need to br crafters in the party at high level guild leves.
Server Lag -This is also a big problem -The Developers say that they are working on better load sharing on the servers. I have never played an MMO yet that did not have server load issues. Popular games have congested areas when lots of players are in the same area.
So in closing FFXIV may just not be the MMO you want to play. If you give FFXIV a few months I imagine it will get much better all around. I feel much better about paying for a 6 month sub to FFXIV at launch than I did about Age of Conan.
Meh...
I'd rather send $15 bucks to some random Swedish programmer guy for a lifetime account on some Java based game where I can play with virtual Legos while running from hordes of zombies and skeletons while setting up traps for them. Not to mention the occasional grief from what appears to be exploding penises. And not only is the individual player mode decent, but where each multiplayer server has it's own unique world and possibly a backstory all created by the users themselves.
And people may think I'm making this shit up. It's fun. It wastes a lot of hours. And it made that Swedish programmer guy a millionaire.
But if people keep blindly wanting to play Square Enix stuff because of things they made in the past, well, I'm not stopping them.
I bought the limited edition so I could get in 8 days early, and I don't think this effort will make a dent. I've already stopped logging in to the game out of sheer boredom,, and canceling my account has merely become a formality. This game is GARBAGE. Reading the next version update notes was paramount to someone saying they'd plant a single tree to prevent global warming. This game needs so much work, even a 30 day extension gave me the feeling "...so what? I don't care." If they really want to salvage it, what they should be doing is refunding those of us that paid money, retracting the game for a year, then begging us to come back in October of 2011 saying they have finally finished it and giving everyone who already paid a generous free trial. My only thought right now is, I got ripped off and what a waste of money.
Developers are usually very well aware when they have a bad game on their hands. This can't be news to Square. If they couldn't fix it before release, they can't fix it with one extra month.
WoW has done so many things right and it keeps getting better and more refined. Now they are even updating old areas. I really wonder if anyone can dethrone WoW. Even WoW 2. I would think they could just keep updating WoW and making it better and smoother and no one will ever touch it until someone takes control and completely screws it up.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
There are sooooooo many misconceptions and things I have seen about this topic that this has to be said... This is a much to do about NOTHING... and I will explain why:
(quotes are from a poster (Sycraft-fu) with some general concerns and I use them with the understanding that I am going to clear up these misconceptions... Sorry dude but your going to have to think outside of the box to the find the answer that you all seek and I have to use you as an example of why all these arguements and complaints I have seen online have absolutely no validity and it's a problem that is acrost the entire MMO market... Not just problems with Final Fantasy XIV and Square's crazy people whom are in charge... it's because all these people posting the questions and comments suck up to the great big dong in the gaming industry... Blizzard... Oh and by the way: EA is the asshole and can guess what Bioware and Bethesda would be? Definately the Tits...Yes I just compaired the gaming market to a tranny, get over it.)
"If the agreement is X dollars buys you Y days of access" -Not the case, Square uses a 30 day cycle period... It's the same way t-moble does their phone subscriptions. You pay from the 1st to 31th each month. You cancel in the middle of the month (say the 15th) you have untill the 30th then your account is disabled. You buy in on the 15th, your paying from the 1st to the 30th of that month... You will loose that first 15 days of that month. Same was for 11.
"Square sounds like they are still in the old "Us vs them," mentality" -Straight out... NO. This is Blizzard vs Square. The kids vs the old boys club. Square is trying desperately to get rid of the same old WOW format, because every single MMO is a WOW clone. It's a battle for market share and money (for example: I see complaints about the FF UI but if you open your eyes you can see WOW's is almost EXACTLY the same. Drag and drop is coming for FF, WOW didn't have it from the start either... It's all about "features". The overall look and FUNCTION of FF's UI is just fine, a bit confused why they won't let me re-size the party's satus window, again... Features. Did everyone forget all those UI hacks and cheats people released for WOW independently and probably got sued for making because theirs sucks/sucked balls too?).
Square is going for some kind of gusto, the changes of MMO philosophy are all over the game: From how you pay (using the 30 day system as oppose to keeping track of everyones different start times, whether that is a good thing or not I'm not really sure, kinda evil either way you look at it considering the FEE's you are nickeled and dimed for with both systems of pay) to how you gain exp (the new level/rank system in FF is nuts, they really are going out on a limb to change the way we play an MMO, so don't be confused by frustration because you don't UNDERSTAND how this new, insane system works. Honestly I don't find the WOW way: "level up a fully stocked character in 4 days" to be appealing... or fun. But the "not getting exp because I already spent 3 hours on a Job class today" isn't good either. They both suck.
Same paradigm as the auction house... Do you want instant gratification on obtaining that spear you want? or do you want to EARN it by scowering the land untill you find it? Two totally different philosiphies of gaming. I could easily have a fully completed character in a few days on WOW if I shell out some real mulah to get some gold, something like 12 hours to buy everything needed to start following and "earning" all the neccesary exp without ever attacking an enemy, 4 days later I'm ready for what I have seen called "end-game". Where it looks they are going to be keeping us at bay on 14 for at least a month or more untill you can actually get to the lv cap and find all those sought after equipment peices, that is of course if your not bat-shit crazy and play 24/7 while sitting on a toilet cause you won't even have time to shit. So once again... this is called Pacing... Most Square-Enix games have wonderfull pacing (look
The crafting system is horrid. To make a level 5 armorer helmet, you need to make a level 11 armorer bronze plate - and level 8 leatherworking sheepskin. Really? Why have low level item recipes if the base materials require level 10-20+ sub materials.
Crafting is an almost required part of the game for upgrading and repairing your own equipment - which will frequently need repairs.
Not player friendly!!!! Grind and grind, only to find you need to grind more to craft that item you need. :(