FF14 beta

[Don]

I'm hearing the beta isn't even continous right now. You just log on in select days (3 days a week) for 4 hours to play the game. And this game is supposed to be released on September? Who is going to actually test this game? Or do they think playing 4 hours a day at random time is enough?

I see no way this game is going to be polished at its current timeframe if beta isn't even continous 2 months before the game is going live. Now lack of polish doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad, and few MMORPG are polished at the moment they're out. But this seems like a bad way to start. I know people are going to always say "OMG your game needs more time to beta" which usually just means they want to play a game for free for longer, but you still shouldn't purposely shorten the time you have to beta test something by purposely restricting the playtime. Is the server technology so bad that they can't afford to keep it running 24/7? Is the content so bad that if you have your generic no life beta testers they'd find out something they shouldn't find out? If they're not trying to hide something, why do this?

[SineSwiper]

I don't even understand the release date. FF13 was just released a few months ago.

[Shrinweck]

Is it a dual release in Japan or has it been done over there for a while? If it's been out there for a while all they need to do is a stress test... But I'm guessing it isn't out in Japan or this thread wouldn't be here.

[Don]

It's a dual release.

My brother say now beta servers will be up for a day at a time and then offline the next day. It's better than being able to only play 4 hours I guess, but this whole thing just looks very weird. If anything you'd think taking the server off every day would actually cost more than just leaving them on since servers shouldn't be rebooted very often. I guess they can just leave them on and kick everyone off every other day but then what's the point to do that?

[Shellie]

I forgot what game it was, but a friend of mine was in a closed beta of a game, and they were only allowed in at certain times, and each time was to test various content, etc. Their levels changed, characters wiped frequently. Servers taken offline in the middle of "scheduled" beta to do an update.

If the beta right now is anything like that, I understand it not being on 24/7. Betas are supposed to be just that, BETAS..not demos.

[SineSwiper]

Agreed, but the fact that this beta is only two months away from the release date is kinda worrisome.

[Shellie]

Maybe they're trying to concentrate the number of users to a certain time to place the max load on the servers.

[Don]

Stress tests are usually very different from a normal beta test. You just hand out beta keys to anybody that wanted one and tell them to get on at this time for stress tests, and right now beta is still closed.

I think they had some issues with server stability for a long time which is why they had to test on that weird schedule. My brother says the it's crowded everywhere and every mob is killed as soon as it spawned so there certainly isn't a shortage of people playing, though picking the server "Sephiroth" might have something to do with it too.

[SineSwiper]

Yeah, nobody wants to be on server Yuffie.

[Don]

Beta on Thursday got postponed until Saturday. Looks like they really have problems keeping these servers running.

[Kupek]

I don't even understand the release date. FF13 was just released a few months ago.

The two games were in parallel development, but I think FF13 did start first. According to a podcast I heard (either a 1up podcast or Rebel FM), the FF14 announcement was almost a way to shame the FF13 team for being so much behind schedule.

[SineSwiper]

We'll see who's shamed when we compare the two.

[Don]

My observation from watching the beta...

UI still sucks.
Targetting sucks.
Can't click to mine resources is stupidly dumb (if you can, it's not obvious how, my brother thinks it might be a level 5 job skill to mine stuff by clicking on them as opposed to going to the menu and choose mine).

Rest of game plays pretty well.

Originally I was saying are they going to make giant rats do dragon breath when you put the difficulty on 5 stars (12-15 people) on the guildleves and apparently that's what they do. I didn't look at the whole combat log but the max difficulty setting doesn't appear to be just extra HPs/damage on the mobs. I mean of course they get more of that too but it looks like they also do plenty of other stuff that'd require having so many people. You can fight stuff by the Aetherite crystals though, which you can use while in combat to get all your HP/MP, so expect to see a lot of save point hugging action like Grandia and any similar game where you just dump all your big attacks and then run back to get a refill. I assume the more challenging areas won't have Aetherites located so closely.

It's still not clear to me how the game will work given MP does not refill naturally.

The battle system looks somewhat like FF13, you got an ATB bar and actions uses up a certain chunk of that ATB whether it's autoattack or mega super special attack of doom. Presumably bigger attacks use up more of the bar. Most skills appear to be AE based so maybe it's not intended that you fight one guy at a time.