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I can understand the anger over this but I still can't help but laugh. I'm a HUGE console FF fan, but I actually took a look at the online games before jumping on the bandwagon. Perhaps you should have done your research first? What did the CE come with anyway? I week of early access, some crapy sketch art books, a bigger box...and extra account security, or some dumb shit. Oh and an ingame item that makes you look like a retard in a padded helm. And you want sympathy?
FF14 is a next-day release that people jumped on just because the screenshots were pretty. You have no one to blame but yourselves for falling for it all.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
What has the open beta or preordering the CE anything to do with an appeal to boicott a company that adheres to a bad practice? I dont understand you guys - you sound like you're blaming the customer for being an idiot buying snake oil, and defend the company making the bullshit. You are all turning this upside down.
Of course, joining a boicott is a personal choice, and many wont agree with the method, or cant be bothered. Ok, fine. But I think the market is in need of a radical change of praxis. How many games need to go down the toilet before the producers wake up? I know for a fact that a lot of people really looked forward to FFXIV, and were very dissapointed. Same goes for STO. How about Vanguard (back then)? APB? How about your favorite upcoming title? Would you like it to be released as an alpha as well?
So continue to kick the consumer and yourself in the balls. Hypocrits!
Nothing wrong voting with your wallet. Its the only way game developers / publishers will learn.
It isn't so much giving the company a free pass as it is simply stating if they frequented this and other sites then they knew what they were in for. Which isn't even a negative for everyone. There are those enjoying this game albeit they appear to be in the minority. I think the majority just feel that while the bulk of the blame lies at SE's feet that doesn't mean consumers shouldn't be held accountable at all.
SE will suffer the consequences of their actions just like consumers that read all of these sites yet bought the game anyways. In fact, seems to me that the fallout from their launch is already well under way.
The level of damage this company has done to their goodwill by this whole affair is going to be rather astounding by the time this is all said and done.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Developers don't need to spend any time on any forums if they've previously released an MMO the size of XI. They should've known better from their own experiences than to release a stinker like XIV.
One year from now it will be a game worthy of everyone's time I'd assume. Unfortunately, I've been waiting a year already for XIV, and I'm not interested in paying to beta test a game for another 8-12 months. I'll be playing The Secret World, Cataclysm, GW2, or a myriad of other quality titles come that time.
After all the complaining and years of waiting for FFXI to improve their interface, SE can't even offer a /r function to reply to tells with at opening. They didn't see the need for that coming? What about an autosort function for loot? Fair enough.. Why does it take me nearly a 1/2 an hour to sell off NPC trash..? Their stance is, they are fixing the things on the top of the users' wish list, but if we wanted to create a game, we would've put one out. SE has made XIV of these titles with dozens of expansions and hundreds of additional games/content. I don't believe any of us want to play the game we're all capable of creating. That's why we invested in SE's ability to make a game. In my opinion, that was a shit ass investment, and I won't be tossing them more crysta out of my wallet.
I'll play Fable III or hop back into Cata's beta. Hell, I might write a comic book or recycle more. Playing with dog toys on my carpet is more satisfying and offers more freedom than FFXIV does, and I can do it for free. Shit.. My dogs will even help me out.
If the folks who don't have the experience w/ SE are still interested in knowing why the rest of us are pissed: Right now.. my investment into FFXIV is this:
Custom built AMD Phenom II X4 PC: $850 (me)
Intel i7 laptop: $650 (wife)
Two copies of XIV: $80
I'm not too good at math, but that total seems to come to: Fuck me. We couldn't play Beta because we didn't have the money to upgrade our comps until just after release.
Sure, we get to keep the computers, and we were both due for an upgrade anyway, but we would've waited until after christmas. This was our Christmas present for ourselves. The last time we both got new computers was when we picked up FFXI 5 years ago. Certainly this story is specific to my wife and I, but if we did it, we're not the only ones. We've supported SE through dozens of titles, and we feel like this has earned us the right to be a little pissed off at what they farted our way. They broke our trust, and thousands of dollars spent towards supporting their company has given us the right to be fed up.
Other companies are making games twice as good as SE's in the same genres for less money. Their updates are more frequent, and their content is more vast. They allow us to create our own mods for problems we'd like to fix, and they don't make us jump through hoops just to sign on. They expand more frequently w/o making us pay for every small improvement, (shantotto ascension.. WTF!!??) and they are more in line with Tolkien/D&D/Western Fantasy than SE is. In short, Gamespot's review of XIV was correct. This is not the MMO we should be playing.
num num
I wasn't referring to the developers in my snippet about the forums and sites. I was referring to us, the consumers.
Anyways, the shame of it is that while I think in that space of time SE will get things in order least to some degree the damage may already be done. This isn't the same market as it used to be. Companies have a much smaller window to make an impression with gamers, and the community in general is not near as forgiving about things as it was in the past.
Now this game could be the exception simply because of its loyal fanbase and their eventual PS3 launch. So it could be one of the few exceptions. Time will tell but frankly seems to me SE missed a golden opportunity with this game because of their stubbornness and their insistance on rushing this game out before it was clearly ready to be launched.
This could have been one of the games on the forefront and set a new standard in the industry. Instead it appears it will go down as one of the worst launches by a well known company in the industry.
Least on a bright note maybe this will finally set a benchmark that other companies pay heed to when they consider whether their game is ready to be launched or not.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
lol ill boycott because im really upset i paid 80 dollar for the Collector edition i was really hoping a finished game only to find out that its not done and its broken there is noway im paying monthly to wait and see if they fix things and fix things to my liking. Its not worth my money and time i will never buy another SE product. Idk how people can play this
Maybe, but the same hope has been voiced for every poor mmorpg launch that I can recall. The industry seems to have a learning disability.
its mmorpg nature
"we can add later" lol
I think it's the users that have the "learning disability." We're the ones that keep clogging up the checkout lanes for pre-release parties and opening day purchases.
num num
I get the feeling that anyone who's trying to spearhead a boychott against Square-Enix solely because Final Fantasy XIV didn't completely blow their mind is going to be largely unsuccessful in their boychotting attempts since Square-Enix is apparently so far up on a pedestal in their mind that they will be unable to resist buying from them again.
Sadly, I agree with the sentiment of both posts to an extent.
What really concerns me is that I have a suspicion many companies are going to take the recent success of Turbine's changeover to f2p to the next level and plan on marketing their games as p2p intially until after their initial burst in sales/subs decline and then change over to the f2p hybrid model.
In other words, instead of taking more time before launching their game to ensure it is ready simply shrug their shoulders at the condition the game is in and use the revenue from the first several months to fully flesh out the game since they may now think it doesn't matter to a degree. Because they can simply switch their payment model at a later date to gain back a lot of customers or possibly even end up being more profitable on a long term basis.
What was really a Hail Mary to save a dying game may very well end up becoming the industry standard and giving these companies a mulligan to an extent least in their eyes if their initial launch doesn't go well.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
I'd like to say you were wrong and that this will ring a note that resonates to other game companies, but then I'd be lying. It is looking like an article on this website MMORPG.COM over a year ago may have been correct, that SWTOR and WoW are some of the worst things to ever happen to the genre. They claimed over a year ago that because of the astronomical development costs of SWTOR, CATA, and similiar games that the genre will be filled with underfunded and bad titles because it is simply impossible to compete with games that have funding of the 100+ million dollar range. Although in the case of FF14, their game was around 100 million so their failure should still serve as a titanic failure to the industry. BTW, I happen to think wow is fun (if not abit kiddy) and SWTOR looks like my favorite all time MMO and could be my mmo home for years to come (i've long dreamt of a KOTOR mmo by the same people) but how can companies be willing to try things outside of the norm and think out of the box if the risks are catastrophic? The development costs have just gone way too far this last decade and I wonder why, are game developers just asking for Kobe Bryant style contracts? I grant alot of these game expenses, but I fear for the future of games if the only ones that have a prayer of making it are the mainstream 100+ million dollar babies.
I'm not going to boycott SE since I am still a die hard Star Ocean fan and they still producing other good rpg games. I used to be a strong final fantasy fan, with my first game being ff7. After completing ff7 I fell in love with the series but that only lasted till ff11 (my first, and a great online game). Just a few days before FFXIV's normal release I had the money to pick between two games, FFXIV and Fable 3. However being the Final Fantasy fan with hope on the game I bought FFXIV. After setting up the game and playing it I was completely disappointed. It was the worst game I ever played, even the free to play mmo's were more fun. After a week I uninstalled the game and kicking myself for buying it.
Because of this disappointment in FFXIV many fans won't be happy unless they continually tell people how much the game sucks to prevent such disappointment from happening to another possible buyer. If you want people to stop saying the game sucks its not going to happen. Their hopes were crushed and money was wasted. Many people are saying this isn't a mainstream game, but its name purely represents mainstream. Almost every gamer should know the Final Fantasy name.
I am going to continue to tell people how much FFXIV sucked and create negative posts about it to satisfy my disappointment.
FFXIV really was my hope for MMOs 2010. I personally hated every minute of playing it, from the clunky Interface, to the bad lagging I experienced, the bazaar, so few quests, the mobs that didn't look epic at all, the copy/paste landscape...
. I cannot understand why a company like SE would want to rush with such a big title as XIV. I just don't get it.
Anyway, I wish everyone who will keep playing good luck, no hard feelings, maybe XIV just wasn't my taste, but that means Im MMO-less again until 2011. So needless to say, Im disappointed. Im not sure I will buy another FF title, at least not before reading some reviews first.
Noone really has to do much to "spearhead" anything. It happens naturally when something of this magnitude happens in an industry like this one.
I don't really get the other part of what you're saying.
It's a matter of mathematics and the human condition. If 100 people play the game and 70 of them hate it and tell 2 friends then you have a torrent of spreading negative information on the product. Some of the people that will hear about it will just simply not buy it and the ones that do buy it will be part of the original 70% equation of people that end up hating it. Then you have those people being doubly irritated with it because they heard about the game in the first place and curiosity got the better of them and they bought it anyway. The more "numbers" you see on the servers the more this theory will hit home. As the downward spiral of players becomes a straight drop off after the pay period restarts you can imagine more and more people outside of the original equation becoming aware of the game and the developers business practices.
The 70% is just theoretical but I don't think it's to far off the mark to assume that 7/10 people that play this game thinks it sucks. A lot of people even describe it as a rip off.
So a Boycott is really just making the original group aware of all the information and the rest will take care of itself.
This will send a message to more than just the developers of the game it will give clear precedence that this kind of development is unacceptable and will be more costly than just avoiding it in the first place.
Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated... into the equation.
"I'm not cheap I'm incredibly subconsciously financially optimized"
"The worst part of censorship is ------------------"
Will it? I mean lets be honest here this isn't the first company to drop the ball. Might be the most significant one and their version of dropping the ball might be more like hammering the ball into smithereens but look at the pattern as of late:
Funcom did it with AoC
Cryptic did it with STO and many would argue CO as well.
EA did it with Warhammer and APB
NCSoft did it with Aion
Acclaim/Frogster did it with TCoS
...and now SE
Granted some were worse than others and some recovered to an extent. Others are still in a downward spiral or in the case of two games are already kaput.
I'm not trying to give SE a pass or anything but they certainly aren't alone. What is it going to take before they get the message? Or is their reaction when they do really going to be simply to hold off releasing the game until it is "ready for launch"? Any more I have to wonder.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Fixed.
Aion has it's niche market and has a very solid playerbase.
.. But in a good way.
That one works better. However, I would argue that if NCSoft actually had some customer service in place when the game went live and the content existed for people to level at the higher levels as it is at the lower levels in the game then the number of players would be way higher than where it stands now.
All in all though TR was definitely the bigger screwup by far. Can't believe I forgot that one.
EDIT: Edited my runon from hell to have one "that" in it instead of fifty.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
I would have to agree on that. A lot of the issues that Aion had at the start could have been mitigated had they used common sense and learned from the past and applied that to the launch of the game.
Another thing is that they didn't have "official" forums until after the game launched. Aion Source was the main place for news. Suddenly they launch other forums. I find this a bit ridiculous as it seem common sense that where your community is used to going as the game is developed will be looked at as the main community forums.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Well, I enjoyed Just Cause 2. They're usually pretty good with single player games (although I admit I haven't played the last few FFs which were supposedly awful). I will certainlty never buy another MMORPG from them though.
Actually, I still enjoy the company as a whole.
Their last few DS games have been system buying worthy and I recommend them with confidence.
I think with FFXIV there was a really poor business call on their behalf, and for that they're not going to get any more money out of me on that front.
All I can think of is The World Ends With You.. which was phenomenal.
.. But in a good way.
AoC was a fairly decent game that easily made a profit.
Warhammer was fun for what it was. Wow Battlegrounds.
Aion was a success even before its North American release.
All these games had 10 times more content than FF 14 and none of them had UI's that made you want to blow out your brains.
The rest I agree with.
All the evidence is out and around on what's happening to SE and the reasons certain games are badly designed.
There is some decent information scattered all over the net on wikipedia and several other sites...
Y?ichi Wada (?? ??, Wada Y?ichi?) (born May 28, 1959) is the current president and CEO of Square Enix. He was formerly the president of Square and carried over his title in 2003 when the company merged with Enix. He is also the current chairman of the Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association (CESA) and the president and CEO of Taito Corporation.
He was quoted as saying "it's very difficult to hit the jackpot, as it were. Once we've hit it, we have to get all the juice possible out of it".
[ Well maybe instead of "juice" he's talking about milk? LoL ]
As of 2003, Square Enix's production staff was divided in eight different Square teams and two Enix teams.[19] As of May 2005, Product Development Division 10 was headed by Yoshinori Yamagishi.[20] Yusuke Hirata left Square Enix in June 2005 to join Aquaplus,[21] Yasumi Matsuno left in August 2005 for speculated reasons.[22] and Koichi Ishii left in April 2007 to start his company Grezzo.[23]
The company has made two forays into the film industry. The first, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), was produced by Square subsidiary Square Pictures prior to the merger (Square Pictures is now a consolidated subsidiary of Square Enix).[29] Its box-office failure caused Enix to delay the merger, which was already considered before the creation of the film, for fear of associating itself with a company that loses money.[30]
[ so you can see they aren't taking the FF games lightly, somebody is crapping bricks due to this release. No doubt about it.]
You also have to keep in mind that SE does not develop all the games they release. A lot of games are simply distributed by them and get the SE tag on it. You can google your game and see if they actually developed it. I saw a list someplace but I forget where.
"I'm not cheap I'm incredibly subconsciously financially optimized"
"The worst part of censorship is ------------------"