Fixing The MW 3-8 Cashgrab

Square Enix of 2022 is not the Square Enix of 2010, Square are worse than Blizzard now. So much ground has been lost at a company level that the argument is now about NFTs being added or not to their new titles. Even the way they designed and run housing on XIV is the most scummy awful thing I've ever seen in any game.

The finance people at Square know nothing about games, they just know XI costs "X amount of money and brings in Z" and XIV costs "X2 amount of money and brings in Z2". Honestly the XI producer is doing the bare minimum required to keep the game running to offset losses due to inflation.

At a point some suit will just ask, if this game is going to lose money every year due to inflation, why don't we just walk into the XI server room and take all those nice servers to use on the cash shop simulator we run instead?

Based upon what metric? I've been with both companies for a very long time. Both have their faults but I would say Blizzard is by far the worse company and it's not even by a little bit.

Not even Blizzard would do this



I don't care how big of an XIV fan you are, there is no excuse to design something you know will basically force people to stay subbed to not lose something they put hundreds of hours into.

I'm not a "fan" of XIV. I've played it, it's not a bad game at all. It just doesn't give me the sense of satisfaction that XI does.

That being said, you pointed out 1 flaw in 1 game of 1 company. I could sit here all day long and point out crappy and shady things Blizzard has done in and out of their games. Not to mention the recent lawsuit to add icing on the cake.

Are we comparing Blizzard vs Square? Which literally makes no sense to me in this day and age, or Activision Blizzard vs Square Enix because Activision Blizzard is the clear *** loser here. MMO's are not their only business.

Yes


I know, they blow.

See I'm still not sure since you decided to cut (Activision) Blizzard off the 2nd part after saying we were suppose to compare decade + companies before merges.

Shortcut, doesn't matter to me, they still blow no matter which we're talking about.

I have issues with both companies but my issues with SE/Square/^2 wouldn't make me want to unsubscribe. I cannot say the same for the aforementioned.

I had a medium sized personal house and a large sized guild house. *** bedazzled. The rest of the game got boring and all my friends stopped playing. I dropped that ***and came here. If you can't drop bad financial relationships then you're just going to keep getting taken for a ride. It's not like suckering people magically started in video games.

Blizzard on the other hand didn't make WC4. *** them and *** Activision for making them worse in every way. They managed to get into such a moral quagmire that I'm probably not going to be able to play D4 even with me pretending that Microsoft will come in a clean it up.

At least SE kept FFXI on slow burn for me to come back to and appreciate for what it is, slow content you can enjoy with decent people that still play. The other bit on SE is I enjoy *some* of their other games and don't mind my money going to them because I *might* get something out of them in the future. I don't believe Blizzard's IPs will ever produce for me ever again without a midsized miracle.

Also sorry for jumping in the middle of convo with a wall. Feel free to ignore

This is all so true and not limited to any one company. Monetization methods have gone predatory and there's no going back considering how much money they are raking in. Look at Rockstar, they barely make new games any more and profits are higher than ever thanks to microtransactions. I doubt we will see another triple-A game that doesn't have stuff like this baked in from the start. And I have yet to see a smaller venture that can stay afloat long enough to create an honest fun-of-playing type atmosphere.

Surely there has to be a better balance between sustainability/profit and taking advantage of your consumer base... The more I think about it, the 'less bad' this wardrobe thing looks. I just wish they released it with the actual commitment to make new actual content.

i think almost no one here would have a problem with it if this was the case.

the problem a lot of people have (on top of a million other small complaints and this just being a final straw) is that they are further monetizing a game they are no longer themselves putting money into.

ignore radialsock, we have countless examples of SE saying they are spending less and less on ffxi, i have linked them previously. he is trying to argue fact with his version of reality

They literally are making new content and have been working on it for years. They are adding a whole new storyline, new zones and new endgame to put into it.

Yeah I'm a little confused by what you mean. They have been putting out content.

If we're talking battle content, since 2015's announcement that big updates would stop for FFXI, we have gotten: Ambuscade, Omen, Dynamis Divergence, Master Trials, Aman Trove, Odyssey, 5 (more, less? idk) new high tier battlefields. We've gotten plenty of battle content, and Empy +2/+3 is most likely coming in May, which is right around the corner.

The Voracious Resurgence is currently rolling out for story content and has been since 2020.

I'm not sure what content you think we're missing

TVR is basically the size of a large quest line, multiple of which are released per expansion. of which, we used to get yearly until it slowed down after wotg.

no source on the new zones from radial

no source of the new endgame from radial

this is all conjecture. we don't even know if empy+2/3 is coming in may, they have not promised it.

none of the things radials sock LS member listed were new zones except for omen.

calling AMAN new battle content is a laugh.
calling rotating ambuscades new content is a laugh.

omen / dynamis-d / odyssey i can't argue with but the former two are over 5 years old (omen December of 2016) and over 4 years old (dynams-d november 2017). i'd say odyssey is a swing and a miss for a lot of people but who cares, it's copy/paste content in old zones nonetheless.


source on what we know is coming for 2022:
http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics/ff11us/detail/19018/detail.html
no promises on any of that in may.

i think if you set a bar it should be a bar that is low to hit for a game that has a successor in ff14, that being said... In the first 10 years of the game we got 20 jobs and 4(debatable if there are more since abyssea) expansions spanning across over 200 zones, in the last 10 (this is including adoulin) we got 2 new jobs and 20 or so zones.

the battle content in both is also not comparable, the first 10 dwarfs the last 10. there is no point discussing it because you'll get a bunch of very angry people dumping on the kings era, but it was content regardless of how you look at it and the subscriptions from that time period paid for the game you play today, deal with it.

all in all, although development pipelines for games and industry standards have made game development easier, SE has put out 5% of the content they did in the first 10 years of the game while expecting more money per player out of their playerbase.

back to that low bar, i would say 20% should be the expectation and they are nowhere near that.

if you take adoulin out of the mix and look at the last 10 years (which you will have to in a years time) you've gotten 3 new zones and 0 new jobs and the only battle content that in my opinion has resonated even remotely during that time period was omen and dynamis-d.

final edit: i really believe many of you will be let down by the 20th, historically SE has always given updates when big patches are in the works many months prior, we haven't seen anything like that recently. we have known about empyrean+2/+3 for going on 4 years now so it could simply just be a system for that, but i wouldn't expect anything more.

thanks!

I have seen plenty, hell, there was someone running a ***ton of Free Companies on Excalibur for YEARS (literally owning 30+ plots of land) with single socks in each Company to make money off the company workshop. all online games have their whales.

I don't understand the mindset of those outliers. There is no need for that at all.

There it is, and applies to both games. What percentage of players do you honestly think need 6-8 mog wardrobes on this game.

I don't really agree. TVR is almost 30 missions long, with a fully fleshed out story. ROTZ, a full expansion, has an extremely small storyline. I created an alt character to go through the stories just for the *** of it and because I enjoy them, and had forgotten how small RoTZ is. ROTZ has 17 missions, many of which are just " go talk to this guy" and the mission is done. TVR is 30ish missions long, with almost every mission having a fight and multiple stops/cutscenes, ect. Of course, this is just talking from a narrative standpoint. RoTZ came with jobs, zones, ect. I'm just saying, TVR shouldn't be written off as just another quest line.



I don't recall saying they promised anything. We know empy +2/+3 is coming this year. We've also been told TVR will conclude with the 20th anniversary, which is in May. We've also been told TVR will include battle content. It really isn't difficult to see where my May prediction came from.



Aman Trove is content, not super engaging or interesting content, but content nonetheless. I don't see how we can say Ambuscade isn't content. All those fights that are cycled in had to be developed, and Ambuscade is still, 6 years later, getting new fights added (last month's update included 2 new Ambuscade fights).


I really don't get the point of this comment. They told us we'd get no big updates all the way back in 2015. It's not even remotely a fair comparison to compare the era that had a full development team to an era with a skeleton crew. It really shouldn't be a surprise.


7 of those last 10 years you mentioned are in the era of skeleton crew development team. I think it's pretty safe to say that those who have had tempered, realistic expectations have been pretty happy with the updates FFXI has received. It's just those who can't seem to understand this game is in it's twilight years that are disappointed.

Why 6-8? Why not 3+? Those other 3 still cost money.


WoW is 1 year younger than FFXI and it's still rolling along and getting full expansions. The age of an MMO is not as cut/dry anymore.

casually ignoring the thousands of other quests in the expansion, very well played.

the rest is just your opinion, no one cares what your opinion is. looking at it from a straight content perspective getting 5% in the last 10 years than of what you got in the first 10 shouldn't be acceptable.

other thing to keep in mind is those first 10 years also introduced the infrastructure that built the entire rest of the game. truthfully if anyone has had any experience coding, quests are literally copy/paste functions from a format, it's why they mess things up so often. as far as the work load goes i would say 99.9% was done in the first 10 years compared to the last 10 of the overall game.

i'd hate to see the standards of the work you expect in other aspects of your life, that is truly a demoralizing thought.

I hesitate to say WoW shouldn't be counted in a conversation about the normality of an aging MMO's capabilities, but...yeah...

WoW isn't normal. I think we can all agree on that.

As an aside, I really do wonder how WoW's decision not to be on consoles has done it's for longevity.

The best way to deal with GetHelpNerd is to ignore him completely, he is a bad actor and only posts to troll and insult.

If you really want to argue they've provided content (it's all reskins, minimal mechanics, basic stuff with little innovation in my opinion), then let's pivot.

If they're reinvesting in the game and doing the upkeep it needs, why are there still hour-long queues to enter instances? Why are we not getting the packets that say what our characters are doing, making certain circumstances borderline unplayable? Why did they release the wardrobes when it takes nearly 30 seconds to load inventory post-zoning, without doing anything to address that?

Having to wait an hour to enter an instance when you've already assembled your entire party, only to have it barely function once inside, is completely and utterly unacceptable. If the problem is Asura's population concentration, why didn't they do something about that years ago while it was still an option? Because, much like wardrobes, they stood to make profit by encouraging people to transfer to Asura on their own dime.

They could have closed transfers to Asura so other servers weren't slow bleeding. They could have merged other servers, so the drive to head for Asura was less. They could have evaluated their instance code to find why it's so utterly incapable of handling the scaling being expected of it. They chose to do none of that for years, and now you've all just become so accustomed to it that you no longer realize how unprofessional it is compared to any modern game.

The quests you're referring to don't match the scope of what TVR is doing, so yes, they aren't really important in this conversation.

Thousands is an exaggeration too.

Interesting XIV housing being isolated as a big scam. Ultima Online had housing that had the very same mechanic going all the way back to 1997. Drop your subscription. Drop your house.

About 8 years ago, I would say WoW isn't normal but it's not so special anymore. There are MMOs older than FFXI that are still chugging along.

EDIT: WoW went though even engine upgrades because it suffered the same issue FFXI has... where it was designed with 1 CPU core in mind. Yes, it took them until 2016 to finally fix this but at least they worked on it. This is what happens when you keep getting support.

I know that FFXI would not get the kind of support WoW gets because people are now fully into the fast-paced MMOs that give high rewards for trivial things but I still imagine what they could do.


Not taking sides in that comment but he would say the exact same about you.

On the same token, he's been right about a lot of things.

You, and the others that endlessly bash the game, are completely misunderstanding the point of many who defend the game.

The point that at least I've been trying to make (won't speak for anyone else) isn't that they're pumping large amounts of money into the game. It isn't that the last 10 years have been jam packed full of huge, engaging updates. It isn't that the dev team is equivalent to god and they should be worshipped and everything is perfect.

The point is, we should be getting nothing. Zero. From a business perspective, they could easily pivot from the smaller but occasionally medium sized updates we get now to zero. This wouldn't even dent SE's income. They could have done this back in 2015. Instead, they kept a small crew, enough to drip feed us updates, some of which have been very nice.

Something is better than nothing. Wishing for more, when we've been told straight up, transparently, crystal clear, that more isn't in the cards, is wasted energy. This low bar people keep mentioning is constantly being confused with realistic expectations. I'll say the same thing, over and over, to the people who endlessly ***. Stop paying the *** subscription if you don't like the game.

Is that so? Explain.

I don't bash the game because I hate the game, I bash the game because I love the game and I wish it would get the minimal amount of attention it needs to fix these key issues. I can feel jaded about the lack of attention while still feeling it's worth a sub. Same goes for the wardrobes.

Your arguments just boil down to 'Sorry, SE will never make anything better, but I am fine with that so you all should shut up and deal with it'. You could very well be right, but you're not providing any real support for that. Quoting years old things that have been proven wrong numerous times does not establish a credible argument.

Obviously what they said back then no longer applies, or none of this content you're worshiping them over would have come to pass. They didn't do that out of the goodness of their heart either, they clearly decided the remaining subs they have are worth keeping. Their yearly contracts wouldn't have been extended to 3 year contracts otherwise.

The game is not a blockbuster, but it's pulling in at least 5x what they invest into it. Whether that's worth it to them or not is anyone's guess, and you're speculating on things you don't have any firmer information on either.

it's pretty interesting going through bosworth's posts (he's clearly a sock account, look at the AH history on his registered character) that he appears to just be an SE bootlicker in general

https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/56108/ffxi-news-during-14-live-stream/3#3586101

https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/56108/ffxi-news-during-14-live-stream/2#3586052

or he just likes to stir ***up.

bosworth, how long have you worked at SE. can you link us your linkedin?