"Oh btw, FFXIV Online in 2010"

[Reg]

Margalis - It makes a big difference now that you've  refuted a couple of things people have been saying about the game and provided actual reasons.  Up until now you haven't done much except make grand pronouncements and called people liars without saying anything to back it up. If you work for Square Enix but don't want a red name for some reason you shouldn't expect anyone to give your posts more credence than they would some random internet loudmouth.

[Samprimary]

A group of 4 people will go through mobs at least 4x as fast and will earn 4x the sp over time.. If they are doing leves they can do 4x the number of leves. Total SP gain in a party is 4x to 16x that of solo. So you tell me, why is there no advantage to grouping?

I think you might be able to re-read the post where I talk about issues with grouping and figure out why it is important to re-assess what I have actually said!

[Simond]

Margalis - It makes a big difference now that you've  refuted a couple of things people have been saying about the game and provided actual reasons.  Up until now you haven't done much except make grand pronouncements and called people liars without saying anything to back it up. If you work for Square Enix but don't want a red name for some reason you shouldn't expect anyone to give your posts more credence than they would some random internet loudmouth.

Technically...hyping up a game released by your employees (while not stating that minor detail) is usually known as 'shilling'. 

[Lantyssa]

I've yet to see him claim it was good, only refute some speculation.  Maybe with too much zeal, but kicking people when their source of employment is down and all...  (If he does think it's good then he's broken. )

His name isn't red though because he got his position after having thousands of posts.  That's a lot of history for a red name, and he's mostly avoided this topic.  Were he really free to comment, one way or the other, I think he'd have some more definitive statements.

[Bzalthek]

His name isn't red though because he got his position after having thousands of posts. 

What about MrB?

[Lantyssa]

MrB didn't ask to have the red purged, to my knowledge.  Employment conditions and relative position on teams is different, too.  We have lots of people connected to the industry who don't have red names.

[Chimpy]

MrB's post history has also not been something that an employer might not want reflected back on them as a whole. All he did for the most part was post GWAR videos in the Music Thread and re-post pictures in the various pic threads.

Margalis, on the other hand, has been spewing vitriol at anyone that disagrees with him for years. That is just part of his M.O.

[Bzalthek]

Ah, I'm not being argumentative, I just thought Lant was saying Marg wasn't red cause he's got a lot of posts and that was it. I was just confused is all.

[Mrbloodworth]

I didn't ask for the red name, however I also didn't reject it. To clear that up. And my "boss" reads F13. 

[Abelian75]

These things are not a matter of opinion. When you activate a leve normal world enemies do not disappear - the end.

Er, sorry, I wasn't saying this was the case.  I was referring to the fact that you can only see guildleve targets when you are on that guildleve, and that furthermore only one guildleve can be active at a time.

[Margalis]

Margalis - It makes a big difference now that you've  refuted a couple of things people have been saying about the game and provided actual reasons.

Imagine a thread where people were complaining that WoW sucks because it has permadeath and the only playable race is elephant. In that case you could provide "actual reasons" why that is wrong but really "you have no idea wtf you're talking about" is probably sufficient.

Not many people are familiar with FFXIV so that stuff slides by. I don't think I'm guilty of "hyping" FFXIV or defending the overall quality of the game and I'm trying not to constantly jump in and correct people, but it's very hard to let page after page of completely false statements slide by.

I suppose since I may or may not have some sort of not-very-secret secret ulterior motive it's bad form for me to even simply correct bizarrely false statements. But I am playing the game. It's a little hard to go on a leve where I fight three different enemy types at once while 2 or 3 other types stand around then read that a major problem with the game is that it can only display one enemy model onscreen and that the entire game is designed around that. Or group up with some people to do a behest much faster and safer than I could do alone, get a lot of SP, kill the final mob that would be way too hard for me to kill on my own, then read that there's no reason to group.

Especially when I get the distinct impression that the people I'm correcting probably don't know what "behest" or "SP" even are and could not for the life of them name specific camps or leves that demonstrate these problems.

[Draegan]

Ha ha ha.

Margalis you made my night. 

Thanks for defending FFXIV.

[Samprimary]

Imagine a thread where people were complaining that WoW sucks because it has permadeath and the only playable race is elephant. In that case you could provide "actual reasons" why that is wrong but really "you have no idea wtf you're talking about" is probably sufficient.

Haaaa. You know, if someone is mentioning that they're trying to have it explained to them that there's no reason to group after a recent patch, there are better ways to respond to that if you hope to clear up misconceptions! :)

[Margalis]

Haaaa. You know, if someone is mentioning that they're trying to have it explained to them that there's no reason to group after a recent patch, there are better ways to respond to that if you hope to clear up misconceptions! :)

If you have a good-faith desire for an explanation of how certain in-game systems works that's cool. Do you? (Not that I know how they work other than experientially)

Abelian75 launched into a multi-post tirade about how the game can only support one enemy mob type onscreen and your response was completely credulous and sincere. To put it charitably you seem eager to believe and report highly dubious claims about the game as long as they are negative.

[Samprimary]

You seem to be under the interesting assumption that I was ever under the impression that the game only rendered one enemy type at a time! Where what has actually happened is that I made no comment necessarily showing that I ascribed to his specific beliefs, only that, counter to the post I was responding to, it's probably best not to assume anything on the part of Square-Enix as long as their effort on this game leaves you wondering if they had any clue whatsoever what they were doing!

You don't reinforce the notion that I don't know what I am talking about with a post which is a concerted and repetitious effort to ascribe motivations and strawman assertions to me that don't exist in any real form anyway, so I suppose whether you think I believed abelian matters little more than if you believe I actually think you have to sacrifice babies to play an absolutely terrible mmo, so.

Criticism of this game and of square enix appears to be making you testy!

You don't need to explain the systems to me anymore, either. Well after I made that post I figured it all out on my own time, which is an important thing to do when, by one's own admission, there's insufficient understanding of the claims that are being made. Since you're in the know, you probably could have responded right away with helpful information too!

[Samprimary]

Also to note, in that post, I am responding to your original post, which I note you have scaled back and removed most of the testiness and strawmanning from. I appreciate it!

[Margalis]

You don't need to explain the systems to me anymore, either. Well after I made that post I figured it all out on my own time, which is an important thing to do when, by one's own admission, there's insufficient understanding of the claims that are being made.

Sweet. I look forward to your future more well-informed complaints.

[Samprimary]

FINAL FANTASY XIV

• Is terrible
• Built by freemasons to summon Ur-Shagot?

[Reg]

Hold on there Mister!  I'm not about to just idly stand by while you lie about the Freemasons!

[Ashamanchill]

If I may jump in:

I was out drinking with some of my buddies recently and FFIV came up. It seemed to be universally regarded as how not to do a game, even one that had potential. I have never heard such scorn for an MMO, even through the AoC and WAR days.

Honestly, I haven't even read this thread up until now.  I just wanted y'all to know what the MMO equivalent to the unwashed masses think of this title

[Count Nerfedalot]

It matters from the perspective that they very publicly removed the guy at the top who is pretty much responsible for this cock up in it's entirety.

It's a bit of a shame, in that the guy is really old school Square (went to University with Sakaguchi and they both dropped out to work at Square ,worked on the NES FF games, and stuff like Xenogears and Crono Cross).  Not that any of that excuses the game's problems, but just like with Sakaguchi, I think it sucks when you've got a guy who has helped put out a lot of successful products in the company's history, but they publicly highlight the one time he fucked up really bad.

Sounds like a classic Peter principle circumstance - was he promoted to his level of incompetence?  Note promoted can mean same position just bigger budget, expectations, etc.

It's a sad fact of today's world that craftsmen rarely get rewarded for excelling in their craft, but have to play the corporate ladder game to get to the bigger rewards.  Software development in general, and game development especially, is very much a craft - a whole assortment of very specialized crafts actually.  But good people don't get rewarded for getting better at what they're good at, they only get rewarded if they "advance" to doing something else higher on the corporate food chain.  This even more painfully true within the micro-ecosystem of a single development house.  At least if you change companies regularly you can often negotiate yourself reasonable advances in compensation commensurate with your increased skills and experience while still practicing the same craft.  Try that in the confines of a single organization and you will likely find yourself totally screwed financially.

[Murgos]

Hold on there Mister!  I'm not about to just idly stand by while you lie about the Freemasons!

Yeah, everyone knows they are trying to summon Shub-Niggurath not Ur-Shagot.

[palmer_eldritch]

If we're talking about what a PS3 can do then I'd point out that the Pulse area of Final Fantasy XIII (the huge open area you can explore freely) lets you see all sorts of different monsters at once, running around, flying and stomping like big ol' dinasours. It looks pretty impressive too. So FFXIV doesn't have that excuse.

I know FFXIII doesn't have a great reputation but Pulse is good fun with its mini-quests and things to discover. They could have used that as the basic starting point for a good MMO.

[Lakov_Sanite]

pulse was not even 1/10th of the actual game. Seriously, it was fun in a "the whole fucking game should have been this" sort of way. Don't even get me started on the "quests" they weren't quests, they were statues that went and told you to go kill a mob, then another and then another. FF13 was wretched shit on a stick, oh sure it was shined up real nice and pretty but it lacked any kind of depth in the gameplay.  I bought the thing and it is the last FF I am going to buy.

[palmer_eldritch]

pulse was not even 1/10th of the actual game. Seriously, it was fun in a "the whole fucking game should have been this" sort of way. Don't even get me started on the "quests" they weren't quests, they were statues that went and told you to go kill a mob, then another and then another. FF13 was wretched shit on a stick, oh sure it was shined up real nice and pretty but it lacked any kind of depth in the gameplay.  I bought the thing and it is the last FF I am going to buy.

Well yeah, but I wasn't defending FFXIII as a whole, just the Pulse bit of it (a small bit as you say).

[Abelian75]

Abelian75 launched into a multi-post tirade about how the game can only support one enemy mob type onscreen and your response was completely credulous and sincere. To put it charitably you seem eager to believe and report highly dubious claims about the game as long as they are negative.

I didn't even believe my OWN claim.  It wasn't intended as a claim at all, in fact, and I phrased it as a question that was legitimately meant as a question.  ("Is the answer "one", by the way?")  I communicated poorly that I meant it as true conjecture (particularly the specific number involved.  While it is still conjecture that they are using that system to manage memory by adding predictability to what mobs can be displayed when, I think it's a pretty reasonable conjecture, though by no means certain.)  I like to think aloud and discuss possibilities.  It is interesting to me to consider why decisions were made.  Sometimes bad decisions have causes that are not immediately obvious.  Simply saying that a bad decision was made because the person was stupid is useless.  We are all stupid, after all, so that does nothing to prevent future stupid decisions.

I was about to write "I shouldn't have said a specific number," but I realized that's a bit silly.  I asked if the answer was one because I was legitimately curious.  From my experience I remembered always fighting a field of one type of monster model, and I remembered guildleves either sending me to a field of that monster model (where I fought different version of the same monster), or on top of an isolated hill.  What I communicated particularly poorly is that I actually thought the chance that the limitation was one monster model was outrageously unlikely.  It was just that I realized that _I_ personally, in my fairly limited experience (edit: and extremely fallible memory), couldn't actually recall seeing more than one.  If people in general, and not just you, really thought I was asserting "FFXIV can only display one monster model at a time" as a fact, then that's actually fairly horrifying to me, and I will work on making that shit way more clear.

Now, all that said... it kinda should be ok to propose possibilities without being certain of their truth.  That's sort of the point of discussion, right?  Otherwise it's just a bunch of people yelling.  The intention of my post was to specify a particular reason the game might be "not fixable" (or whatever the phrase was that had been used in the previous post).  In particular, I was saying that many of the design decisions that some people may assume were just "stupid" were in fact done in order to support the technical requirements of the game that had been thrust upon them.  The reason that matters is that, if (again, as a possibly untrue example) the guildleve system had technical motivations and not just design motivations, then even if they were to decide to do a more "normal" questing system, then it may not be possible without making many other changes.  I do, in a general sense, suspect that many of the oddities of FFXIV are due to the cross-platform nature of the game. Certainly we can at least agree that is the case with the UI.  I suspect it goes deeper than that, and I was pointing out a possible way that kind of thing can occur.

[Abelian75]

If we're talking about what a PS3 can do then I'd point out that the Pulse area of Final Fantasy XIII (the huge open area you can explore freely) lets you see all sorts of different monsters at once, running around, flying and stomping like big ol' dinasours. It looks pretty impressive too. So FFXIV doesn't have that excuse.

I know FFXIII doesn't have a great reputation but Pulse is good fun with its mini-quests and things to discover. They could have used that as the basic starting point for a good MMO.

Yeah, I sorta have caused a lot of confusion with that statement I made and I am horrified by the results.  Obviously the PS3 does not have a specific limitation of models it can show on the screen, and it certainly not as low as I made it sound.

Just... MMOs are tricky because you can take any scene you have in the game, and add 500 players to it, all wearing different outfits, multiple races, different combat animations because of different weapons, etc.  So take any scenario you want to support in the open world, and then add every player on the server to it.  That has to be supported unless you work around it.  Obviously at some point you just kinda stop drawing players, or you automatically instance the players (or "phase" them, which is what I believe FFXIV did, but again am not certain of that and am raising it as a discussion point, not an assertion) but that's why it is useful to create controls on how many enemy types you might have to display at once.  It's not because the typical situation is stressing the system, it's because the extraordinary example may either crash the game or make gameplay impossible.

[waffel]

Hold on there Mister!  I'm not about to just idly stand by while you lie about the Freemasons!

Yeah, everyone knows they are trying to summon Shub-Niggurath not Ur-Shagot.

[Simond]

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6285481.html?tag=latestheadlines%3Btitle%3B1

Square Enix recently extended the free trial periods for players of Final Fantasy XIV on the PC indefinitely while apologising for the poor state of the game. The game's troubles have now been reflected in the company's financial forecasts. Today, the company revised its profit projections downwards by more than 90 percent for its current fiscal year, with projected sales and operating income also seeing sharp declines.

 

[ghost]

This is going to be the game that sinks Enix.  It sounds like there's more trouble than just with FFXIV though. 

[Rasix]

I would guess that FFXIII fell well short of projections.   Game was more heavily marketted than most FFs I've seen.

[Ard]

FFXIII was in their last fiscal year, at the very end, for the most part.

I'm more surprised that Dragon Quest 9 didn't drag up the numbers some, but it looks like it came out last year in Japan, so maybe it sold poorly over here as well.

[ghost]

I see a lot of used copies of FF XIII at Gamestop, so they had to sell some of them.  It would be interesting to see those numbers. 

[Trippy]

> 6 million.

[Draegan]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTOE6BF05720101216

God damn.


Edit:
--Removed Quote.
--Damn this was posted already in another form.  Nm.