Interesting FFXIV articleFollow

Wow wasn't really in the toilet though; it was just that the starting areas were getting a bit stale. The overhaul wasn't because there were terrible things broken with the game, it was to freshen and modernize the experience to be more welcoming to new players as the level caps continued to go up and new technologies such as phasing were introduced. XIV's redesign is because it was horribly broken.

Now I'm not arguing in one direction or the other - I've heard good things about what's been done so far so I'm not going to give an opinion here - but the spirit of the article really hits home for a lot of folks. XIV already had the stigma of XI to overcome, and now it's got the stigma of... itself to overcome.

Yoshi-P needs to hit it out of the ball park to shut articles like that up.

Actually it doesn't. I have both an NA and JP account and the JP account is just as confusing as my NA one. Matter of fact, it took me all of 3 minutes to purchase WebMoney for crysta at Familymart. It took another 30 minutes trying to figure out where on the site you entered the damn code. I was even switching between both accounts trying to match the screens.

My wife was completely confused and just said "Have fun with that..." she being japanese and all should have been able to figure it out

Dear SE: I happen to know an Internet Technology specialist with formal UX training from the best in the business who would be happy to act as a consultant to your web development team. She is intimately familiar with the SE billing system and has plenty of suggestions on how to improve the information architecture behind the layout.

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(My university doesn't have a UX faculty member on staff. So they hired one of the top consultants to come teach it instead. They did that with our HTML5/Javascript class, too. No prof available? Offer to fly out the guy who wrote the book for a summer vacation...)

That article is not being negative, just saying what we already know. Revamps up to this point have only become surviving or failed. None have become super successive later. Well unless you count APB which had an abysmal p2p launch then relaunched f2p with 4 million users. World of Warcraft already had a huge following before the mmo came out. And Swg tried going from a sandbox to a themepark! By the time it changed, it wouldn't matter what they added because the WoW frenzy took off. Darkfall just had a smaller following in comparison to FF or WoW.

None of that guarantees ARR will be a smash hit nor does it receive a get out of jail free card. Imo ARR has to do four things to do the seemingly impossible.
1. Get a metacritic score of at least 80, the higher up from there the better.( This shows potential players that the game at least has the fundamentals and isn't a piece of crap) But as TOR found out, that only gets players in the door, you still have to keep them there.

2. Make it as accessible as possible. Meaning make the game able to run decently on as many machines as possible. (ARR aims to do this evidently.) Offer different payment plans. I know many here shun hybrids but I really feel it's needed. Not just because 1.0 but also due to XI. Yes XI is their most profitable FF to date. But look at the translation from millions of FF offline buyers versus the 500k to 1 million users XI had. Is it the platforms released on or the strict p2p only model. You tell me? I'm not suggesting f2p. I'm suggesting a p2p/b2p hybrid.

3. Polished content, lots of content, variety of content.

4. Get the word out. Because no matter what if people don't know about a game. They won't even get near the front door.

Whether or not they do everything perfect. From what I've seen of ARR, it will survive at the very least under or on par with the current XI. By the way ARR is going to get trash talked no matter how things turn out. The internet community on the whole likes to be fickle, they love to hate, the herd moves to where they are told the green grass is. If the game is enjoyable to you & you have your friends to play with. Who gives a flying **** what society tells you to do?

One hopes they will start to advertise more the closer we get to launch. Perhaps 6 months out they're content with the attention they're getting from various blogs for now.

Yoshi has done pretty much everything else right, I would bet he has a plan for marketing as well.

Se sucks at advertising? no one every told any main FF game that.... heck I seen a FF13 and 13-2 commercial literally 5 times a day everyday the first month of their release.. and the FF games before it were no different....


the commercials are what got me into FF.... I bought FF7 on PS1 because of the commercial thinking it was a badass animated (of FMV/CGI) movie for the PS1... imagine my surprise when I popped it in and saw it was actually a playable video game lol.

I even remember seeing FFXI commercials for PS2 during WWF Raw a lot

most ppl that play video games play em on consoles (yes i know theres pc ganmes out there) but SE is a largely console company and since you hook a console up to a tv it makes since that most their ads are on tv sooo

oh and netflix has ads? lol i didnt even know that (really i didnt but then again i dont use netflix lol)

Tv is overated anyway. Nothing but reality shows, news, and commercials. I can watch anything, anytime I want to on the web. Sometimes it's free.

Ahh I never get tired of that little gem.

Cord cutting is definitely a thing now.

http://paidcontent.org/2013/01/11/pay-tv-will-shrink-for-first-time-in-history-study-says-cable-watching-peaked-in-2012/

We got signed up with DISH for a ridiculously good contract, they were practically begging us to let them install. Before that though we spent more than a year with just an antenna and a home built DVR that worked perfectly. The amount they are charging us is more than worth it, plus we get a Hopper