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Top Final Fantasy XIV Devs Replaced, PS3 Version Delayed
After Final Fantasy XIV's troubled launch and subsequent attempt to placate angry fans, Square Enix has decided that the game's leadership needs to be replaced. They've asked players to patiently stick around until they're ready to unveil their new plans for the game, extending the free trial period to compensate. Square also announced bad news for PS3 owners who were still somehow interested in the game: "Regarding the PlayStation 3, it is not our wish to release a simple conversion of the Windows version in its current state, but rather an update that includes all the improvements we have planned. For that reason, we have made the difficult decision to delay the release of the PlayStation 3 version beyond the originally announced date of March 2011."
Doesn't count, since unlike Square Enix you were in time.
Yes, I said "was fired" because this is what is in practice, despite the announcement. The rest is always the same people, with different positions.
Personally, I find this announcement more worrying than the state of the game (which I've been enjoying, despite its flaws). The risk is that the "new" team will try to pull a "NGE-like" thing and scrap what was good and different about XIV to fix the problems the game has.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
So, the title says the developers were replaced, but the summary says the leadership was replaced.
TFA would seem to indicate that two people were taken out of leadership roles and replaced with a third guy.
Though it's abundantly clear that they released a product that wasn't ready, at least they aren't forcing the players to pay. Of course, this would have been the death of any game if it didn't have the vast backing of a major company. Square would prefer to write this off as a loss rather than a failure, but it appears that they simply have lost touch with their player base.
are always better than NO fans.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
FFXIV was and is a disaster but at least Square is dealing with it, not in outright denial like some companies *cough*Funcom*cough*.
The problem with the games might however be beyond fixing. At its core the current game is a Korean Free to Play style grind-fest. NOT a western quest/story MMORPG. And yet they price it very high, the 10 or so bucks is only for the base game, without ANY character slots. You need a character to play and those are extra. An extra charge EACH and EVERY month. 3 chars is 18 euro. EACH month.
And what do you then get? A rather bare world designed on the idea of MORE OPEN SPACE WITH ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN IT TO RUN BETWEEN, some lovely animation and lots of scripted scenes.
The combat itself is moronic and for a long time (until I stopped) unplayable. Take an action, wait minutes, see it hit. This wasn't lag anymore, this was insanity.
There are no quests and the story while intresting isn't related to the quests. It is more gain X levels, see a cut scene.
Anyone expected a western style MMO was deeply disappointed. This was a korean grind-fest with cat-girls. They are cute but there is only so many times you can /fume before it gets old (20432 times to be exact). Only fun thing in the game.
FFXIV is game that gives you the feeling it was designed by people who never ever played a MMO or a PC game and setout with a blueprint of the previous FF MMO and went, grind is good, content is bad. The game has so many wrongs in it, it is beyond believe. The cat-girls look nice. The ONLY good thing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The game in its current state is barely playable. Even if you stick with it past the gruesome interface and crippling performance issues, you're going to run head-on into over-complicated and badly explained class and tradeskill mechanics, boring combat and a serious lack of anything to actually do. Oh, and with all of the servers concentrated in Japan, Western gamers can expect fairly heavy lag even at the best of times.
There have been a number of updates since the game launched, but for the most part, these have been window dressing. There is, apparently, an update to the UI incoming, which is something, but even if this patch ushers in a new era in UI-perfection, it will still leave many serious flaws in the game that would need to be fixed before this could even reach the stage of being a low-quality, content-light WoW clone. Believe me, that's a stage that FFXIV can only dream of right now.
Anecdotally, the problem seems to be that Square-Enix resorted to that tried and tested technique for delivering high-quality, cutting-edge software. They drew up a loose, under-defined spec and pushed it at a Chinese outsourcing house. Given the spotless track record of this technique elsewhere, you can imagine their shock on getting back a shoddy, under-developed, non-cohesive game that even Square-Enix themselves didn't understand properly. It's a good thing for gamers that they just decided to push it out the door and hope for the best.
Sarcasm aside, heads do indeed need to roll over FFXIV. Going for the lead developers is a start, but they need to go much higher. They need to go for whoever decided that they could do a modern MMO with the budget, development time and support resources they wanted to make available. They also need to go for whoever decided that Square-Enix should become a kind of Japanese EA, grinding out a constant succession of low-to-middling quality handheld titles, which seem to be locked into a cycle of commercially diminishing returns. As little as 5 years ago, Square-Enix were a great company putting out great games. It pains me to see what they've become.
And as for FFXIV, as it stands, it is dead in the water. A few fiddling-at-the-margins patches and a PS3 version won't save it. I would say that unless they want to flush good money down the drain after bad, they have two options. First, they could pull the plug now and forget the game ever happened. Second, they could close the game down on an interim basis and push it back into closed development for at least a year. Re-release the game when it's actually in a competitive state, ensuring, of course, that those who bought it first time around get a free-pass for the rerelease.
It's another stupid AC...
We have enough ACs and need more real commenters. Not those stupid 4chan/Dig/Reddit/Fox/CNN users that say they're commenters, but in reality, they are nothing more than troll users with commenter elements.
Calling those above mentioned users commenters is the same as calling Commander Taco an commenter because he can post.
The internet needs to release another great commenter like UID 1337.
That's the closest to a real insightful comment/commenter user that the internet has released in years save for that one last week, which sucked. That one was like an commenter with blinders on.
No, this isn't an unrealistic ship date problem. This is a fundamental design flaw problem. This game has the worst UI of any MMO post-WoW, and even most ones pre-WoW (the exception being FF XI). It was clearly designed for consoles with a very bad PC port.
The game was shipped with no AH and no mail, and a completely awful player store system instead that makes it a giant timesink just to *find* things that are for sale, let alone do price comparison and things that any modern game should allow.
A post documenting all the flaws in this game would be about five pages long, so I'll stop now. Suffice to say that the problems are much worse then simple lack of time.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The numbered series should have either been killed off long ago, or become what the offshoots are: explorations of genres with original stories, and attempts at not just different ideas, but NEW ideas.
Think back to the 4th, 5th, and 6th entries in the series. They all had intricate plots, with a huge number of characters and twists everywhere you looked...but they were still simple! Despite how much was crammed into each game, it was all laid out simply. The twists and turns were smooth, well-executed, and in many cases, completely unpredictable. Now, the storylines have to be as convoluted as possible, with a smaller cast than ever! I realize this sounds like me saying "bah humbug, it's too complicated to understand. Now get off my lawn!", but I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that the pre-VII games had amazingly epic yet simple storylines, while everything post-VII has to be as spaghettied as possible. Complicated doesn't equal epic, folks...in this case, it equals a lack of original ideas.
Living With a Nerd
(Well, normally I wouldn't answer to a sig, but it being in a thread about MMOs I figure it's on topic;)
Aye, but some of us want it to be a loving and intimate relationship, not a quick gangbang with whatever 24 guys were available. Err... I mean... I'm not the kind of slut who'll give everyone a go for attention, you know?
I mean, take my latest case from City Of Heroes. Classic story of boy tank meets girl healer, we seem to hit it off just nice, and soon I invite her to see my supervillain lair. And this time I don't mean mom's basement. They actually have lairs in the game. We hit it off just fine, then we change into spandex and are happily bumping uglies over the head. I mean zombies in the sewer. Can't get much uglier than those.
And then she says, oh God, then she says, "let's bring 6 more guys, it will be FUN!" (Groups in COH have up to 8 members.) I mean, geesh, I'm not even demanding monogamy, but SIX MORE GUYS. It's like she's trying to tell me something. Like that I'm not enough for her. Geeze, it can make a guy awfully insecure, you know?
So I get talked into it against my better judgment. I can tell she's having the time of her life, what with all those ranged DPS-ers all around her, while I'm not even getting a second look. Says that's her role. Yeah, right. More fun in a group my ass. Which reminds me, the only one paying me attention is the melee DPS-er. That guy is practically getting on top of me all the time. I wonder aloud about that guy's sexuality. He calls me weird. Hey, I'm not the one trying to get on top of another guy, buddy.
So then we get to the big archvillain and he's this big and muscular guy, and I get thinking, "I bet HIS girlfriend doesn't ask for six more guys." And I'm in front of this guy as the tank, and everyone is looking at me and expecting me to perform for the big finale, and... oh god... I got performance anxiety and lost the erection. They eventually got the melee DPS-er to tank him.
Made me feel like I wasn't a man any more, it did...
So then next day I go to work, I come back and she's 10 levels higher. I figure she must have soloed it in the meantime. I'm no stranger to soloing an orgasm... err... quest or two myself, lemme tell you.
I ask her what happened, she says, "ah, there were these 7 guys who needed a healer for the respec taskforce, and then we kinda went at it all afternoon." Geeze, like I was saying, I'm not even asking for monogamy, but SEVEN GUYS? And is it that much to ask that I at least be around?
Fucking slut. I threw her out of the lair and changed the locks.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In that case, fire the designer and the people responsible for making those shitty decisions, not the guys who had to implement it, most likely against their own better knowledge. But don't fire the only people who know the friggin' code! They're about the only ones that could possibly pull the cart out of the moat.
I've been trying my hand at FF14. And I was appalled that a game like this can make it to the release in 2010. We're dealing here with a game that is not even on par with the standards of 2002 MMO gaming. You nailed the main problems quite well already:
1. A console game ported to PC. It feels, smells and plays like a console FF game. Which may be good considering the FF audience, but looking around my friends, few die-hard FF players jumped onto the game. It was rather the MMO players amongst my friends who tried it. And of course quickly tossed it, because of tedious gameplay. Everything you want to do contains a friggin' 5-10 seconds animation you have to endure. I say endure because that's what it becomes after the n-th time. Take gathering. It's not even the usual "We now watch our figure for 2-3 seconds while it does something" kind of animation. It's "5 seconds to get the tool from the back, 2 seconds for the interface to finish loading, 1 second to play the "hit the button at the right time" minigame, 5 seconds watching gathering animation, repeat from minigame for 5 times, then repeat the whole sequence 5-6 times". THIS IS NOT FUN! This is tedious and boring to the extreme. This was acceptable in 2002 when crafting in DAoC was a little like that. But even back then it was less tedious because at least you could do something sensible in the minute it took for your character to finish crafting that bow or staff.
2. Actions are handled by the server. A good idea to prevent cheating (hehe, as if... but I ramble), but it means it's HORRIBLE to play unless you have an insanely good connection... and even then it mostly depends on how much load the FF server has to suffer under. Let's keep it at that, you'd have to try to notice just how "sluggish" it feels. Imagine running on ice.
3. No AH, no sensible group finding tools, nothing to facilitate your interaction with other players. Sorry, but this is just not acceptable in 2010 anymore. Even in 2005 MMOs noticed the need to give their players an easier way to gain access to other players and cooperate, find groups, find sellers and buyers and so on. It needn't be the proverbial ebay AH system, but at least SOME way to facilitate interaction. Right now, if you wanted to buy something, you'd spend hours trying to find someone selling it. Or you keep watching the spam in the trade channel for a few hours. Either is just not what MMO players would accept anymore this time and age.
In short, the game is stuck somewhere a decade ago with its gameplay. Even free-2-play games have better player interaction tools by now. A full price game certainly must not be worse than that. And FF14 is worse.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There was nothing good about FFXIV.
It would seem logical that the first person to deliver a decent modern MMO on a console would become an instant goddamn bajillionaire. And yet, here we are five years later without one. MS seems actively hostile to the idea. Sony keeps promising but never delivering. Every time someone promises an MMO on a console, it gets delayed, delayed, delayed, and finally cancelled (DC Universe Online, I'm looking in your direction).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Does that mean that I can claim Final Post?
Of course later I'll have to explain that all subsequent posts are due to consumer demand for more.
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
In additional news...
Square Enix announced that the people responsible for the sacking have been sacked.
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
Now everytime I LFG, I will feel dirty :P
Anyway, if you are a guy, you are supposed to get 7 chicks! That is were you went wrong. Trust me, you find it a while different experience.
Try this.
Wife: I stayed home and got all hot and bothered and screwed the mail man.
Husband: Bitch!
vs
Wife: I stayed home and got all hot and bothered and screwed the cheerleader from next door, she is waiting for us upstairs.
Husband: I love you!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
and even most ones pre-WoW (the exception being FF XI)
Maybe now, but at launch, it actually managed to be worse than FFXI's, and that takes antiskill. Mainly because of minor things, like the inability to sort your inventory or the fact that replying to tells worked inconsistently at best. (Both of those were supposedly fixed in the November patch, I haven't actually checked because I only logged in long enough to verify that yes, the game still sucked.) I think they may have managed to get the interface on par with FFXI's, although you're still never going to want to play with keyboard and mouse. You have to use a controller.
The game was shipped with no AH and no mail, and a completely awful player store system instead that makes it a giant timesink just to *find* things that are for sale, let alone do price comparison and things that any modern game should allow.
The most annoying thing about that was how the developers completely disagreed that was a problem. Combine that with the fact that they have this potentially interesting player-driven economy set up, and you've got this potentially great crafting system completely hamstrung by their refusal to provide the most basic services to make it work.
Note that "potentially great" in this case assumes that they completely throw out the crafting UI as it currently is. There are a ton of interface issues, but the idea of an entirely player driven economy and the ability for players to do nothing but craft it they should choose to do so are good ideas.
But it only works with a working marketplace. Like the auction house that FFXI had. It's not like they don't know how to make a working AH, they've done it in the past.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
In that case, fire the designer and the people responsible for making those shitty decisions, not the guys who had to implement it, most likely against their own better knowledge. But don't fire the only people who know the friggin' code!
As far as anyone can tell, that's exactly what they did. "Development" in this case means "game development" and not "software development" - they fired the people responsible for designing the game, not implementing the software.
Of course, the client software is shit too, but...
No AH, no sensible group finding tools, nothing to facilitate your interaction with other players.
This aspect really pisses me off, because these are all things that Square Enix already tackled in FFXI. FFXI had a working auction house. I wouldn't call the group finding tools in 11 good but they were still miles ahead of FFXIV.
Square Enix not only managed not to learn the lessons that they should have from the rest of the industry, they managed not to learn the lessons that they already had learned from their own MMO.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Uh, dude, I hope that's a joke, because that sounds like the most idiotically game ever. I'm starting to congratulate myself even more for giving it a skip.
It's not about solo vs group, but if all that's to do is grind mobs for xp, that's practically the implementation of the snarky quip that MMOs are about beating small rats with a small stick for 5 hours, so you can get a bigger stick and beat bigger rats. And it was a dismissive quip, not one supposed to illustrate what's fun in them.
Beating up rat after rat after rat is a boring job for obsessive-compulsives. Most of us put up with that as filler, to see the next piece of the story, get the next reassurance that we're the great saviour of the furbolg race, or just the next achievement.
It's not even a new idea. The whole history of the MMO genre at least in the West has been increasingly discovering how to add more of that single-player DNA into it, so to speak. More quests, more story, more scripted events, more pretense that you actually changed the world, etc. That Square-Enix would basically ignore a decade of that being proven to work and attract players, is beyond surrealistic in its stupidity.
And... Jesus Fucking Christ, did you just measure fun in a game by xp gained per hour? What about gameplay, story, etc? WTF of a fucked up metric is just how big a number is. Ok, here's a big number for you: +1234567890xp. And you got all that in about a minute of reading this too. I trust this made this the greatest post ever.
Geesh.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So there's no content. Most developers wouldn't release a game until they had content. (Of course, most wouldn't release a game that was broken in every way, either)
Square Enix not only managed not to learn the lessons that they should have from the rest of the industry, they managed not to learn the lessons that they already had learned from their own MMO.
Maybe it's time for Square Enix to learn from their past and come out with Final MMORPG ;).
Are we talking about the same game? Because it has problems but it is enjoyable: however the community (the same FFXIV community) has been very hostile to people who play and enjoy the gaem (which are different from people who think that Square Enix is always right).
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
(The only current game that I've played is Mass Effect 2 (Unreal engine) that actually uses 2 CPU's... still no games using 4)
Dragon Age. I've got a CPU monitor on my second monitor, and all four cores get pegged at 80%+ while playing Dragon Age. Also, I noticed a HUGE performance boost when I upgraded from an Athlon X2 6000+ to an Athlon II X4 635. I know the Athlon X2 -> Athlon II alone makes a big difference, but those two extra cores bumped my FPS in Dragon Age to the point where they never dip below 50 anymore (whereas before with the Athlon X2, they stayed around the 40 FPS area.)
Living With a Nerd
This is the 14th and final time! And that's FINAL!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
You know, though, I just have to wonder how much better this is for the Japanese after all.
I mean, looking at the history of single-player RPGs, for a long time the Japanese were years ahead of what we had in the west in terms of story and all. I mean before 1997 or so, real RPGs on the PC and in the West were few and far in between. Even Square was releasing Final Fantasy VII in 1997, whereas on the western PC front the world was taken by surprise by Fallout 1. It was like, "whoa, you can actually have a game with a lot of story on the PC?" Though arguably the one that really got the ball rolling and the RPG genre taken seriously in the West was Baldur's Gate in 1998.
Before that -- and even a long time _after_ that -- western PC RPGs were mostly brainless grind implementations, a la SSI's Eye Of The Beholder series or Might And Magic. If you even had a quest at all, it would be of the kind, "hack and slash your way across the continent and down that dungeon and back, and bring back the item at its end." And not as one of many quests for that dungeon, but as the whole story of the first half of the game, or sometimes even the whole game.
I mean, someone back then could have said essentially the same thing you do, only in reverse: "see, the Japanese want a lot of story and dialog and quests, while the West is content to just whack rats for several hours for xp and loot." Heck, there were even people being dismissive of Japanese games and gamers, and viewing that lot of story as some failure.
Now I'm getting to hear the exact opposite for MMOs: see, we westerners want lots of quests and story and dialogue, while supposedly the Japanese just want to grind.
Something doesn't add up, IMHO. You can't really have both X and Not X be true at the same time.
My very uninformed wild guess would be more like probably in Japan too there are a lot of people who think FFXIV is stupid.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Does that mean the game is now a cutscene streamed from a server instead of a disc?
*ducks*
3. No AH, no sensible group finding tools, nothing to facilitate your interaction with other players. Sorry, but this is just not acceptable in 2010 anymore. Even in 2005 MMOs noticed the need to give their players an easier way to gain access to other players and cooperate, find groups, find sellers and buyers and so on. It needn't be the proverbial ebay AH system, but at least SOME way to facilitate interaction. Right now, if you wanted to buy something, you'd spend hours trying to find someone selling it. Or you keep watching the spam in the trade channel for a few hours. Either is just not what MMO players would accept anymore this time and age.
I disagree. I think the WoW AH does more to harm player interaction than enhance it. And I'd prefer a game that de-emphasizes the importance and relative ease of player trade. I my opinion too many players end up motivated to gear up by farming / trading rather than adventuring because its more efficient.
In my opinion the path to gear upgrades and advancement in general should *never* be "farm spider silk", or "collect ore", then sell it at the market, and buy nice gear."
Its perverse because very few players actually enjoy this activity, but it is by far the most efficient use of time in terms of generating wealth / gear.
Consider everquest in its early days, before automated market places. It was exactly the situation you describe... there were a couple meeting grounds that worked as de facto open air markets with people hawking their stuff. If you wanted to buy or sell something it was a "hassle", it was time consuming, and to do it well you had to develop relationships (gasp) with other people. You had to physically meet up with the person you wanted to buy from. Because people weren't on 24x7 you had to come and go and keep checking the market.
It was primitive and inefficient.
It was also one of the fondest memories a lot of players had. It really felt like a bazaar. It was alive and it had its own pulse... you knew if you came in at such and such a time who would be be around would probably have some perfect pelts, you knew who specialized in spell research.
Their was haggling, arguments, and games. You'd ooc you wanted something unique and leave word with a few of the marketplace fixtures, and move on... perhaps getting a tell half an hour later, and then coordinating with a guildmate to pick it up for you since you were deep in a dungeon.
If was a "hassle" but hassles are what build friendships.
That's not to say EQ was perfect. There were many flaws with its marketplace that needed to be fixed. But a searchable spreadsheet and instant delivery to your mailbox a la WoW was not the right solution, or even a good one.
Creating inefficient tools isn't a good way to promote socialization. I played Everquest in the early days, and frankly, I just didn't bother with the marketplace. It wasn't worth the hassle. Similarly, in Guild Wars, because there's no marketplace, I just don't bother trading with other players. In Everquest II, there was a fantastic market system and I made use of it. This made absolutely NO difference in how much I socialized with other players in-game.
Some MMOs in development are trying some different approaches to get people playing together. For instance, eliminating the idea of kill stealing. Full XP to everyone. Or making sure in-world content scales to current populations.
Carrot > Stick.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It was designed to be similar to FFXI. The problem is that FFXI had terrible controls back then but people tolerated it more. Now everyone has experience with many different MMO's and even the worst MMO's allow you to pick your preferred control style. The game needed more polish for the game controls and user interface. That's what happens when you focus on cutscenes and graphics and not gameplay and user interface.
The problem is that they're beating a dead horse to a pulp, and then they're beating it to a fine powder, then they're beating the ground that the powder used to sit on.
Final Fantasy is done. The sooner they realize that, the better.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I have heard a few people express the same opinion as you. Simply put, some people enjoy shopping.
If Macy's was always empty and I could get in, find what I need and get our, fine. I can live with that. I don't want to do it, but if I need to I will. If I have to go to the mall to get something because I don't know which store will carry it, if any, ouch... It will take a lot to get me to do that.
Now consider a bazaar system. Bazaars are the worst possible type of store. They are a store that can carry anything at all, no signs, no indication of what is inside, no name recognition, nothing. A complete craps shoot. They are also tiny, so you will end up checking a LOT of them. And best of all, there is a very real possibility that what you are looking for simply isn't there.
Given this scenario most people will do exactly what I did in XIV. We simply won't use the system. If we can find something with a shout or 2 we will do it, else, que sera, sera!
Oh btw, your last point about the ah in pretty much every mmo is kind of funny... lets try a word substitution shall we:
> But a searchable spreadsheet and instant delivery to your mailbox a la EBAY
> But a searchable spreadsheet and instant delivery to your mailbox a la AMAZON
> etc...
grape - the GNU free, open source rape
FF isn't done,its just a bad idea to make it a MMO. The series was never conceived to be more then a single player game, trying to make it a MMO was just dumb. I look foward to more FF for the PS3 in single player format
Jack of all trades,master of none
Creating inefficient tools isn't a good way to promote socialization.
Thinking of it as "creating inefficient tools" is the wrong way to frame the question. The core mechanic of the game is an inefficient character builder tool from that perspective.
Carrot > Stick.
EXACTLY. The trouble with WoW's AH is that they've put the carrot and stick in the wrong place.
In everquest you skipped the marketplace and got your items through interacting with guild mates, picking them up off monsters in groups, completing quests, etc. That was the most efficient way to play. Players were motivated to group and go get things.
With WoW, you farm junk, and then buy gear in the market (for the low - mid game particularly). That's the most efficient way to play. Its demented. There is no reason to group because you can farm low level crap faster than level appropriate crap and make more money doing it.
The auction house shifts the maximum economic benefit to playing the game in a tedious and antisocial way (farming low level crap), and then the AH itself is tedious and antisocial.
The problem isn't that the "AH is efficient". The problem is that the relative efficiency of the AH is greater than anything else. For example, getting level appropriate drops from group encounters pays MUCH WORSE. If you want players to be motivated to get level appropriate drops from group encounters which is ostensibly the primary point of the game THAT is where the carrot needs to be.
Its a -game- and it needs to be designed around being a game. Rating it in terms of tool efficiency is absurd. Would wow be a better game if you could just go into the character creation screen, select your level, attributes, gear, and hair colour? Of course not.
But that would certainly be a much more "efficient" way to get high level uber geared characters.
Now compared to that the whole "kill monsters with groups of friends and acquaintances for xp and hope for random drops mechanic" by comparison is creating an extremely inefficient alternative. But that's the entire point of the game! That inefficient mechanic is what makes the game fun. Players WANT high level uber equipped characters, and they want to get them by playing through these encounters to get them.
Providing them shortcuts like getting all their gear through the auction house. Or simply selecting what they want at character creation... these may be far more efficient but they rob players of the very reason they want to play. As I said, its demented.
You can design an efficient auction house, but its horribly flawed if it results in players bypassing the core mechanic of the game and avoiding social interaction. It accomplishes precisely both of these in WoW.
Simply put, some people enjoy shopping.
And WoW is ostensibly a game where to advance you form groups kill monsters gain xp, and loot items. It isn't primarily a shopping simulator. Its fine that it has a shopping component. But as soon as it becomes more efficient to "go shopping" than "form groups kill monsters and loot items" something is broken.
For the low/middle/mid-high game in WoW, it is more efficient to "go shopping" than to "get gear from encounters".
Given this scenario most people will do exactly what I did in XIV. We simply won't use the system. If we can find something with a shout or 2 we will do it, else, que sera, sera!
Exactly right. The bazaar model serves a niche - its the best way to find the rare and unique items, but it isn't your one stop shop for all your gear. And people who 'enjoy shopping' can browse to their hearts content for deals and treasures. Meanwhile the rest of us pass through, and if we see something great... but our time is more productively and enjoyably spent playing the actual game.
Oh btw, your last point about the ah in pretty much every mmo is kind of funny... lets try a word substitution shall we:
I'm not sure I see your point. Amazon / Ebay are great for the purpose of shopping efficiently. In the real world shopping is how I obtain most of my gear. But I'm not playing MMORPGs because I'm looking for an efficient shopping simulator. I was sold on the "form groups with other people/kill monsters together/take their stuff" mechanic... so its counter productive if the game rewards "efficient shopping" with better gear with less effort.
I disagree. I think the WoW AH does more to harm player interaction than enhance it. And I'd prefer a game that de-emphasizes the importance and relative ease of player trade. I my opinion too many players end up motivated to gear up by farming / trading rather than adventuring because its more efficient.
In my opinion the path to gear upgrades and advancement in general should *never* be "farm spider silk", or "collect ore", then sell it at the market, and buy nice gear."
Its perverse because very few players actually enjoy this activity, but it is by far the most efficient use of time in terms of generating wealth / gear.
Consider everquest in its early days, before automated market places. It was exactly the situation you describe... there were a couple meeting grounds that worked as de facto open air markets with people hawking their stuff. If you wanted to buy or sell something it was a "hassle", it was time consuming, and to do it well you had to develop relationships (gasp) with other people. You had to physically meet up with the person you wanted to buy from. Because people weren't on 24x7 you had to come and go and keep checking the market.
It was primitive and inefficient.
It was also one of the fondest memories a lot of players had. It really felt like a bazaar. It was alive and it had its own pulse... you knew if you came in at such and such a time who would be be around would probably have some perfect pelts, you knew who specialized in spell research.
Their was haggling, arguments, and games. You'd ooc you wanted something unique and leave word with a few of the marketplace fixtures, and move on... perhaps getting a tell half an hour later, and then coordinating with a guildmate to pick it up for you since you were deep in a dungeon.
If was a "hassle" but hassles are what build friendships.
That's not to say EQ was perfect. There were many flaws with its marketplace that needed to be fixed. But a searchable spreadsheet and instant delivery to your mailbox a la WoW was not the right solution, or even a good one.
Did "farming take over adventuring" in WoW or any other MMO that has an AH or sensible trading options? Not really. Why? Because the player made stuff is invariably inferior to the "end game loot". Also, if you look at the way FF14 works and the choices it offers, you will notice that the existence of a simple way to trade is pretty much a necessity, given their promise that crafting is supposedly a "job" just as viable as adventuring, and the lack of "drops" suggests that they did want to create a similar player-driven economy as EvE has (maybe not to THAT degree, but given the complexity of the crafting system, the lack of item drops and the fairly complicated drop tables / harvesting tables of crafting raw material, there are strong indicators that point towards a player-driven economy).
This isn't really possible as long as there is no sensible way to actually trade between players besides permaspamming the trade channels.
EQ, and I hope we can agree on that, was another time. It was a decade ago, and that was VASTLY different from today. People back then spent hours looking for a group and some more hours waiting for a farming spot to clear up. And I kinda doubt it was like that because most of them liked it that way. There was simply no option. Now, I'm not really a fan of the "handout" style games like WoW, where you get pretty much everything handed to you as long as you spend some time on it, no matter how or if you play, but I like games that are hard because they force me to play well coordinated, not hard because I fight more against the interface and that game system than the monsters it hurls at me. And EQ really sometimes felt like you're fighting the game rather than its content.
Also, some things simply are not possible anymore. Take the AOBay of Anarchy Online, which pretty much depended on a hack that allowed the communication with the game from a non-standard client (in this cas
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
All nice and fine, but the core problem of FF14 is a different one:
1. Square Enix wanted to make crafting a "worthwhile experience" on par with adventuring (i.e. killing mobs).
2. Mobs hence do not drop any equipment but only equipment parts (wool, linnen, ore, raw food ingredients...) that require a crafter to make something useful out of them.
And while I definitely enjoy the idea of making crafing a "worthwhile experience" (I love crafting in MMOs), crafting without fighting can only work out under one of two conditions: Either, all materials are readily available from NPCs or there is an easy way to buy and sell them from player to player. It becomes quite impossible to level crafting sensibly if neither exists.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I believe I heard that FFXI is WHY they didn't want an AH in XIV... groups of players, often RMT, would monopolize the selling certain necessities or high-value items. In theory, not having an AH can do away with that issue.
Not saying I agree with their decision, as I believe the convenience of an AH is more than worth the cost of possible cheaters and price-fixing, but I can see their point.
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It becomes quite impossible to level crafting sensibly if neither exists.
Agreed. Thanks for the clarification.
Personally I really think "crafting without fighting" and craffting being the sole way of gaining equipment is sort of a flawed game premise in that there is no connection between your equipment and your accomplishments.
But I concede that may be a personal bias.
Supreme Commander. It will create dedicated hardware threads to handle things like unit AI (it's an RTS, so better AI means things like superior pathfinding and possibly less risk of friendly fire) based on the number of CPU cores it detects. You *can* play it on a single-core system, but performance will suck. It's specifically intended to use multiple CPUs/cores.
It's also one of a few games that uses multiple monitors. The second display is generally a full-map overview, like a minimap expanded to the resolution of your entire display. This provides a really superior strategic view, though of course there's also a classic minimap for those without this, and you can zoom out the main view until you're viewing the game at this level on the main display (but that makes precision selections and orders harder).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...