I know where you're coming from, and you're right. But, 36hr updates? Really? Sounds like more of a connection problem. I never had an update take longer than 4 hours, and that was from reinstalling the game.

I think he was actually referencing the time that he was locked out of FFXI and not the actual amount of time it took to download the file.

I remember atleast two times where users were unable to play FFXI for almost a 24-hour period. I didn't play FFXI all that long but I wouldn't doubt if there had been more of these events in the game's lifetime.

On the other side, I've play WoW for about 4 years and can count a good 3-4 times where the servers were completely unplayable for 24+ hours. I can also recount every tuesday for the first year of the game's release (or the first year from when they introduced 'Maintenance Tuesdays') players wouldn't be able to login between about 8:00am - 5:00pm at night.

Edited, Nov 8th 2009 9:49pm by chemicalpenguin

Edited, Nov 8th 2009 9:50pm by chemicalpenguin

SE should take a bunch of pages out of blizzard's playbook.

Mostly the customer service section. I trust SE can write an exceptional playbook on gameplay and grahpics.

For example: if for some reason SE screws up a patch and the servers go down for a day, then compensate your customers with another free day of play time. All added up, it is a minimal cost to keep subscribers happy.

An open dialogue with the customers wouldn't be bad either. Don't bow to the whims of every poster who whines, but at least keep us informed about what you are changing and why. (Blizzard has learned this the hard way it seems, at first doing whatever the forum-base wanted, then later sticking their feet in the ground. Ghostcrawler swearing to be less active on the forums is an example of this).

First, I hope SE doesn't take pages from Blizzard's playbook when it comes to a variety of things...including Customer Service

I, personally, have been part of FFXI since NA release. Anytime I've ever had to contact SE about an issue with FFXI, I've never had problems contacting them & resolving issues. The means to contact them might be buried a bit, but they're there and an option for all to use.

Likewise, I've never had a problem contacting Blizzard when I played WoW. But unlike SE, I've not always had the problem fixed on WoW's side. I've also been hacked in WoW due to an infected Add-On back just before Burning Crusade was released, and my character was not restored.

As far as patching goes, Blizzards method is only slightly better than SE's. And personally, distributing patch files through 3rd party outlets lays the ground work for people getting hacked from trojans & keyloggers being dispersed into the patches. Anyone ever wonder why WoW is so popular with account stealing hackers? Likely because it's easy due to the amount of downloadable content for the game (ie. Add-Ons, 3rd party patch downloads, etc).

In my opinion, Champion's Online has a amazing patching system in place that I think developers should duplicate. Likewise, WoW's weekly Tuesday maintanence is expected and consistent, but they also have so many servers that major patches ALWAYS results in multiple worlds with spotty downtime for 24-48 hour periods.

Everyone has different experiences with each game. I swear, people won't be happy until every MMO out there is a cookie cutter of WoW with a different skin. That's not the way to do it, and I'm sure SE has no plans to go that route...for which I'm personally happy about. Everyone is always going to complain about downtime to some extent. That much, will never change with MMO's.

As far as open dialogue...um, no? WoW is where it is because their official forums are clouded with millions of complaining whine-o's. Their community managers and dev's that frequent the boards are often dismissive, and in the case of Ghostcrawler...vindictive and rude. They say they're there to listen and contribute to community discussions, but they're really just there to toot their own horn and call people QQ'ers like the rest of the community, and dismiss anything with weight against their current content. I do not want that from SE. There's a time and place (and way) to consider customer feedback regarding the game, and official forums polluted with 12 year old crazies is not the place to do it.

Edited, Nov 9th 2009 8:58am by Ryneguy

You won't get a keylogger from patching the game. If a website was including something along those lines with patch files, they would not be trusted again. And like the above poster said, you won't get a keylogger using filefront.

If you get a keylogger/get hacked, it's nobody's fault but your own. Don't buy gold, or get a power leveler. Watch what addons you install. It's not hard to prevent.

I'm still waiting for an error like this

POL-Matrix
There is no FFXI

The only time I tried to contact FFXI customer service it was about a person training loads of mobs into a NM camp. Possibly trying to lag people out and kill some. The GM responded, I gave a name, and a few seconds later I watched as the player simply dissappeared. It was over a week before they were playing again. (He/she/they were always in the same spot when they were logged in.)

I never tried to contact WoW customer service so I can't say anything for or against it.

I played FFXI for nearly a year and WoW for around two months.

edit: spelling


Edited, Nov 10th 2009 3:17am by Nalamwen

36 hours? sh*t, back in December of 06, I had an update that took me literally 5 days to even download. My connection was fine, the download server was just so clogged that I could never get the update to finish without the server pinging out.

I almost quit then. Then I finished my console game (I think it was Persona 2 at the time or something.) and went back. :/

Actually Funcom is worse. I've had good and bad from SE. Only bad from Funcom.

While Blizzards service might be friendlier it fails in the fact that its overly friendly. I have 2 friends that are senior GMs for WoW. They can reavtivate a hacked account as many times as they want, and they have repeatedly even when the person doesn't learn, thus making them get hacked again the following week again and again and again. I'd rather not have such retards playing my game.

I think the longest update DL I've ever had was 5hrs, but I was away from my awesome internet and leeching someone else's wireless (which kept dying). 36hrs+ of downtime is a little unbelievable.

Blizzard can suck it for all I care. They should mind their own business, and consider the fact that WoW sucks.

Er, doublepost.

Edited, Nov 11th 2009 2:24am by Zackary

I vaguely recall being refunded for days that FFXI wasn't available. I believe this was once and it was on a very extended period? Anyone else remember this, or did I dream it up?

They just need to pay Akamai to seamlessly mirror the update content.

fix'd

I'm confident that the PS3 is an advanced gaming machine fully capable of receiving updates in the form of torrent packages.

I'm pretty sure SE has figured out by now that money is pretty awesome and since blizzard has got the whole money thing down, I'm fairly certain SE will be taking a lot of the innovative features WoW had like:

Not having to buy your maps.
Not having to run for hours upon end, get slaughtered a few times and wind up back home to make the 3 hour journey again.
Not having to do missions to make traveling to other cities an epic adventure in dying to aggro.
Not limiting their auctionhouse.
Making muling and storing things 'easy'.

From a customer service point of view, I hope to hell its a bit more like WoW's, though I doubt it will. One thing I've noticed, most japanese companies don't really get into the whole dev > forum > player relationship. I love how the WoW dev's actually comment and fill you in on crap. Some people may not like GC, but I do enjoy how he bans and makes fun of the retards and babies.

Then again, I basically want FFXIV to be WoW but spun for final fantasy with a job system. Sort of kidding, but WoW did so much right, I'm hoping SE can take it all and then put their good innovation on it without adding the 'stab myself in the eye, why the @#%^ am I playing this game' feel.

I dunno, I think most of those wow clones did poorly simply because they really sucked. WoW has a lot going for it that, in my opinion, should be included in most, if not all, fantasy MMORPGs. I think combining certain aspects of WoW and certain aspects of FFXI along with some varying aspects of other games would make a great game...just depends on what exactly you combine and what the purpose of the game is.

Because it's not FFXI and anything not FFXI is eeeeeeeeeeeeeevil and WoW players are dumb poopieheads! Intergame drama rulez~

I'm sorry but it never took me 36 to update. The most was maybe a day when ffxi was at it's prime and everyone was trying to download the patch at the same time. FFXI server just weren't equipped to handle that.

But if you want to compare SE to Blizzard here this, Blizzard takes down it's servers every Tuesday for at least 5 to 8 hours for maintenance. That about 80 hours or 4 days in a 4 month period compared to SE 24 hour patch downtime for update.

Yeah, don't take a note from Blizzard.

There's a chance I probably have said something similar in regards to Aion against FFXI fanatics, but if it wasn't me, I'm sure someone else has.

Almost think what it boils down to are people can get so obsessive over one game's positives that the negatives become inconsequential to them when countering another game's own positives while multiplying its negatives exponentially. Or something. z.z

The original post I quoted said that FFXIV should just be WoW with some SE-made innovations added to it, because "WoW did so many things right". I never said that WoW didn't contribute anything to MMORPGs, and in fact admitted there there have been success stories which are essentially WoW-clones (I didn't specifically mention Aion, but that's obviously one example. In fact, Age of Conan and Warhammer Online would be my other examples, despite their critics). Of course I expect FFXIV to take stuff from the WoW playbook, because some of those ideas really deserve to be standard in all MMOs, I'm just simply disagreeing with the quoted poster that FFXIV should just be WoW with some Final Fantasy on top of it. As I said before, the "let's take WoW and add our own spin to it without changing the formula" thing has been done to death already, with the number of poor clones vastly dwarfing the number of good products.