Remember When ARR Would Fail...Follow

Think I'll just generally agree with most of what Filth has said about things.

Hoping that all MMOs eventually go toward the F2P model, or at least B2P, while being fair with its marketplace elements. I don't perceive a conversion as a failure and there's honestly little reason to do it the other way around when the F2P version can have premium services that effectively mirror the sub model. Bad games will be bad because they're bad games. Sometimes that's the direct result of bugs. Others are a cheater's paradise. You'll get those that just kind of seem to float along with little direction, too, or maybe more accurately bank on PvP keeping things "random" or "fresh" for people in the long-term. I guess there are lots of ways to easily say a game fails, but my motto there is that if they're still playable, they're technically not dead.

Anyway, my biggest issues with XIV I've seen little to no promise of remedying, and that's in meaningful alternative progression. There's no singular "right" way to play an MMO, but it kind of seems like the industry norm to perpetuate such with raiding. Those that enjoy such things have a pretty robust market, but everyone else is either left feeling left out or just trying to be blissfully ignorant of the development disparity that goes on.

Oh well.

Even if I conceded the point you had about SWtOR registrations, they still stabilized at half a million subs. Never mind trying to break down how many people are playing for free, how many of the registrations are duplicates, unused accounts, bots, spammers or what have you. Never mind trying to figure out what doubling monthly revenue means in terms of how many people are playing. We know for a fact that at the time, half a million people were subscribed. Half a million people is far, far from "yeah it's cool, but nobody plays it".

I don't really care what they decide to do with FFXI, but I can say with all honesty that what they're doing goes completely against Yoshi's justification for P2P games. It has nothing to do with my personal opinion on what they should or should do.

If someone wants to pay for a game that isn't receiving any content updates, I'm fine with that. I wouldn't do it personally, but I won't judge anyone who would. Your money, do what you want with it, to each their own ect. ect. Just realize that if you try to justify a payment model saying that you choose P2P over F2P because it allows you to bring players more content, but you turn around and charge for a game that is no longer producing content... that justification flies right out the window. Actions have always spoken louder than words.

I'm going to spend an hour tonight at Momocon convincing XIV players to give FFXI a try, if only for the Final Fantasy story aspect of it.

If XI can eventually be played almost as a single player game, with Trusts, then I think there will continue to be a reason for people to mess around with it even if it eventually goes buy to play.

I sure hope something like that happens. FFXI drove me insane sometimes, but it was a part of my life for 8 years, and holds a special place in my heart. I know nothing in life is permanent, everything dies. But a digital game can be immortal, if the developers allow it and a following is there.

I guess I'm on the other side of this statement(not surprisingly). A large part of the reason I enjoyed FFXI was the social aspect of the game. Just as much as it was exciting to me to go out and explore the world, it was exciting to explore the player base and try to find people to group up with. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy things I could do on my own, just that it was such a small part of what made the game enjoyable for me that I probably wouldn't bother if there were a single-player experience based around the events of Vana'diel.

This is also the main problem I have with the group finder tools. I understand that busy players like to be able to hop on for 20-30 mins and not have to spend time seeking out people to participate, but it takes a large chunk of the social aspect out of the game.

I don't think it would really be all that difficult to find help if XI had a solid player base that still enjoyed the game. That's a large part of why I point to Yoshi's comments. He seems to understand that players need content to keep a game healthy. He also says that sub fees are justified because they're put toward constantly generating new content, but that clearly won't be the case with FFXI. How are they going to keep players subscribing without any new content? Why would new players want to join and sub for old content? I honestly believe that if XI were to go F2P or B2P following Rhapsodies rather than remaining P2P, it would open the game up to a whole flock of players both new and old.

Aside from the obvious changes that have been made to the game, there is still tons of content there. If someone who had never tried FFXI before came to the game today, I have no doubt they'd find enough content already installed to keep them around for quite a while.


Edited, May 28th 2015 6:03pm by FilthMcNasty

Right now, I'd say the only storyline you couldn't complete solo would be Adoulin's. Maaaaybe Abyssea if you count brewless clears of the caturae/Shinryu. When they had the freebie time up, I'd managed to solo the first real Adoulin BC with trusts on my BLU, but it was close. Other people might not be as lucky. I was mostly in a mix of 109 to 119 gear, too. The big problem I faced after that, though, was simply having missed the train on most other pertinent content. Delve shouts weren't happening. The few people shouting for Skirmish had gear/job requirements I couldn't meet. Doing WKRs was impossible unless you were lucky enough to have a dozen others either already there or actually respond to one of the rare shouts. Basically, the limited time I wound up having to ***** around was left working on collecting sparks for pages to upgrade what gear I did have while clearing RoE objectives to improve CP gains, but I even hit a wall there in the Inner Court with mobs defending being too much (and unsleepable to boot). So, really, XI is suffering from the problem all MMOs do when it comes to older content. Cross-server LFG tools could help, but the game's structure apparently can't support them.

The social aspect is really a strength and weakness of the genre. Even when XI was more peak, I partied with enough people who didn't really have any interest in becoming a friend, just doing what the group was intended to. Matchmaking tools are really just that same kind of party with some of the formalities mechanically covered. In the case of XIV, they probably should strive to better let cross-server people interact at will rather than leaving it up to the RNG gods, as friends can still be made even if these tools are used. What I don't miss, however, are the forced acquaintances I had to keep on at least neutral terms with, otherwise the larger group suffers. And that tended to carry the burden of logistics and drama over who deserved what. In the end, I think some get too caught up in how many "friends" they make as opposed to the quality of what friends they do.

Can't say Wildstar's conversion surprises me at all. Mix the launch bugs with pandering to hardcore nostalgists (Like going back in time to mirror WoW's olden raid attunement process) and, well...

Yeah I think Wildstar catered to a small part of the market. On the upside, they did pave the way for XIV's mob AoE indicators.

Quite a few people play vanilla WoW and even a variant of vanilla FFXI so there is a presence there, just not enough of one to support the large amount of casual players who boarded the wagon.

Guess I could be wrong. I didn't bother with the beta for ARR. After being roasted here on the forums for being critical of 1.0 I had decided that I didn't want to formulate any opinion about ARR prior to it's release.

I don't have exact dates, but I remember hearing about Wildstar's systems and mechanics by mid 2011. I know that because it followed closely behind the release of TERA and being very closely related to that battle system in that you have to control your aim and positioning rather than just target something and cross your fingers for the right dice roll.

Didn't mean to come across as pinning ARR's success on a specific mechanic they borrowed from Wildstar, but I wouldn't have any problem saying that ARR has been successful because it's been able to implement mechanics mirroring or similar to those found in many other games.

The problem is still thinking "F2P is the only way to survive" when it's the most successful model and even when Yoship himself has said that for example NA players are FAR more willing to pay for what they want than a flatline sub fee, as proven by not only the mogstation but any MMO that exists in the western market. Tera has actually been breaking records since going F2P, kind of negating the negative connotation to F2P, especially when going F2P makes -more- money than a paid sub in a lot of instances.

WoW is losing millions of subs at a VERY accelerated rate and yet they all aren't flooding over to ARR but instead, Tera, especially since going live on Steam. You won't see "ragequit" or "boredquit" popping up because people who do said things, just stop logging in altogether. I guarantee if you can see the login times on LS like you can on FC there will be -plenty- who haven't logged in for quite some time. Newer servers take the less hit because there's still things to do for new people despite being obsoleted trash content for the most part - However on legacy servers it's a lot more apparent.


Yoship has said he wouldn't want to go F2P but he's not against it as well because he said at one point it will never go F2P then later he said he keeps his options open. Hell, ever since post 2.3 he has said his team doesn't want him to "confirm" things because as we've seen things tend to 180 from what he says it is, so for the most part just take a lot of stuff for face value until the day comes, but the main benefit to ARR is that it released when not only WoW was going through a content drought but anyone who's played MMOs or kept up with them between 2007-2015 know full well MMOs do have an alarmingly high failure rate whether they're good or not because of either content issues or because people stay too attached to the 'WoW model' and when something comes along that is vastly different, it rarely goes over well.

It's been F2P for quite some time now. The steam release is just what's boosted it further.

People will play Tera for 3 months, get bored, and quit, which is what happened before.

It's what always happens.

Like I said earlier, the position you want your game to be in is the game that people return to after they quit.

I think that's exactly what they're banking on. That's another benefit of being a F2P/P2P hybrid MMO. You have the people who enjoy the game enough that they don't care how frantic the pace of content releases who will subscribe. You also have tons of other players who either play just because it's free, they play it intermittently because they don't have the time to justify an MMO subscription, or they are career MMO-hoppers.

The general population is never satisfied with the content updates they receive for subscription based MMOs because to be fair, they're not much better than some of the F2P MMOs. When they get fed up or bored, they either go try something new or go back to something familiar.

I know I've probably beaten the horse into glue by now, but your comment really brings the point to light. I'm on record as stating that starting a second MMO alongside a current, very successful(though not currently) MMO is a bad idea. I weighed the pros first and the cons last simply because the cons far outweigh the pros, but the one solid pro for it was that they could've had that 'fallback' MMO on lock.

The way I see it, that would only work well if...

1) FFXI were F2P
and/or
2) FFXI were still creating at least enough content to keep those players busy for the few months they were waiting for new content in XIV

At the very least(and purely from a business standpoint), SE should have allowed for a subscription to XIV to allow free access to FFXI. If you wanted to play XI only then you'd pay a subscription fee, but if you subscribed to XIV then you could play both.

Players get more for their subscription. Not only do they keep the option to login to XIV whenever they want, but the added boost in players who do 'fallback' to XI makes that game feel more alive. Going further, they could have also staggered their content updates so that XI was receiving updates as interest in recently released content for XIV tapers off. SE wins because they retain subscriptions and those subs are technically for XIV so the IGN articles they pay for would actually hold some weight.

The only variable in all of this is the FFXI-based app. Yoshi himself said that content justifies subscription fees so unless that content is somehow funneled through the app, charging for FFXI is questionable at best. Again, not a final condemnation until we see how it plays out.



Edited, Jun 1st 2015 5:46pm by FilthMcNasty