The Shrine

So I logged on, it says the server is full, which is hardly surprising, and then it just kicks you out back to the character screen saying try again later. I mean, seriously? No queue? Or even at least something to tell you how long you should be waiting? Look, I know the servers are only going to be congested for like a week or so but having a queue for full server should be something that's mandatory. The whole FF14 feels like the game went from 20 years behind to just 10 years behind. I can see they have good ideas but it'd really help if anyone on the developer team actually played a MMORPG in the last 10 years.

It would really help if they just stopped making MMOs. It's always a bad idea every time they do it. They aren't good at it. Hell, every successful MMO except WoW has been made by smaller companies.

Er, Final Fantasy XI is the most profitable Final Fantasy game in the entire series, was a success, and is still going today with a subscription.

And Zynga is making a shitton of money on Farmville. Your point?

That...your entire statement was false? That they are good at it, and it was a successful mmo? Do I really have to explain this? lol

Played the game some more. It's not going to work as a sub because there's really only one sub based game in the NA market now (WoW) and it's probably a matter of time before it goes F2P. For that matter it's not even necessarily better than any F2P, but it's definitely very different. If it was like Guild Wars with a modest cash shop it can work. Looking at the history of these games I'd imagine FF14 is going to fall under the 'way too hard' spectrum and it's okay to have a 'way too hard' game if you didn't have to pay $15/month to have your face continually smashed in. Like it or not, in today's MMORPG enviornment paying $15 a month means loot should rain down from sky, because a lot of games do that even when you're not paying them. As a philsophy, it's not necessarily a bad idea. EQ1 was also way too hard and did fine until WoW came along, but since WoW exists now you can't expect to slap people's face continously while still taking $15/month from them.

I'm probably going to get it and just hope that the Japanese being 10 years behind the world will continue to prop up this game like they did with FF11 so that you don't have to worry about the game shutting down.

I really like the crafting game which basically takes forever to do anything. Why is that a good thing? Because ever since WoW, crafting might as well be a talent tree choice you pick when you level up. It's not really a different game if it's something you happen to max while killing stuff. Crafting can only be its own game if it's tedious/hard. If you got a game like WoW where it's expected everyone max out a craft from doing no special effort, why even have it?

Eric wrote:That...your entire statement was false? That they are good at it, and it was a successful mmo? Do I really have to explain this? lol

FF11 is more or less propped up by the fact that the Japanese don't buy anything not from their own area. If it was a western MMORPG it'd have closed down about 7 years ago for being too sucky. I didn't get past killing two mobs before uninstalling the game, which is an even shorter time than the time I spent playing the first FF14 (I lasted about an hour there). FF14 ARR is actually playable if you're part of the 'way too hard' crowd. That said I don't think there's enough guys who like having their face smashed while paying $15/month for the privilege to do so. I mean there must be a good deal of those guys out there or the original EQ1 or even FF11 wouldn't have lasted as long as they did, but they do seem to be a small minority now. Also if you just want your face smashed there's RIFT which is F2P now.

Overall I'd say they actually have some good ideas on the genre but literally no one on the development staff has played a game as new as WoW.

When playing this game it reminds me of Austin Powers when Dr. Evil is talking about all these antiquiated stuff becuase he's been in freeze for the last 30 years, back when one MILLION dollars was a lot. For example you have to type a command to leave your party (/pcmd leave), at least if there was a way to leave the party in the UI I can't figure it out what it is. I expect like when it's launched we'd be told now there's actually a queue to get into a full server because surely no other game has ever encountered such a problem.

And the game is actually not that bad, but some parts are so antiquiated it really makes you wonder if they just unfreezed a bunch of guys out of cyrogenic sleep to develop this game.

Eric wrote:That...your entire statement was false? That they are good at it, and it was a successful mmo? Do I really have to explain this? lol

My point is that "successful" and "good" aren't exactly the same thing. It was only successful because JAPANESE. I admit that I played FF11 for a short time, and it did have a few nice elements, but ultimately, it was a flawed and grind-happy MMO. FF14 almost died before it even launched.

There are much, much better MMOs to spend your time on, so why bother with this one?

FF11 was the first MMORPG that I didn't even play for the entire free month.

FF14 just isn't doing anything that's grabbing my interest.

FF14 is likely to occupy the 'way too hard' niche though you already have RIFT which is F2P.

I don't actually mind 'way too hard' games but you got to get money from some suckers somewhere to prop up the game. Hopefully the Japanese will continue to pay like they did in FF11. Without Japanese support FF14 is going to go F2P or shutdown in 3 months in the western market for sure. With the Japanese, it's hard to say because they apparently are willing to put a lot of money into totally obselete concepts. Now, the fact that most of the game is obselete isn't necessarily saying it's bad. There's still a charm to the 'way too hard' game and it can even be done correctly.

Do you actually still like Eastern developed games Don? I find myself going back and forth quite often.

Eric wrote:Do you actually still like Eastern developed games Don? I find myself going back and forth quite often.

The type of games I prefer from the eastern world don't seem to get developed very often on the PC or even on a next generation system. I see more of such games on mobile but I think they're usually a total ripoff as you're getting something with very little capability and they still want you to pay like $15 or more for it.

For example I'm willing to pay say $20 for something that looks like Shining Force EXA. However these days $20 will get you cutting edge graphics for a system designed 10 or 15 years ago on a mobile system, and if it's on a next gen system it'd probably be like 3 installments of $30 or whatever they can do to wrap things around a DLC. It seems right now the eastern games are either stuck with the mega title like another Final Fantasy, or they're something like Megaman 9 where they hope you're dumb enough to pay $20 for something they put together with 3 interns and there's no middle ground. It's a problem I have with Indie games too, like it seems like the fact you're paying $15 for a game means it has to have extra ghetto graphics on purpose. It's not too much for a game to look like Torchlight 2 or at least Dungeon Defenders even if it cost only $10.

Another thing is that games in general, but particularly eastern games, feels too expensive compared to MMORPGs. I'd rather pay $15 to do Pokemon in WoW for a month than playing most medicore games, and I don't even play WoW. But at least I know I'm getting something with a known quality that's likely to be around for a while. A lot of games really need to ask themselves: is this game better than playing WoW for a month for $15? Most of the time it won't be so that's why they shouldn't even cost more than $15. I think $5 is a fair value to pay for most Eastern/indie games given how sloppy they look like. For 1/3 the price of 1 month of WoW I'm willing to take a chance. As overpriced as I feel MMORPGs are in general, they still set the bar pretty high when it comes to cheap entertainment.

Good news everyone, Final Fantasy XIV is having servers full of people and login issues. Glorious MMO launches.

The login issues is especially bad even for a launch. Though I saw a quote from a guy saying, "I figured the smart thing to do was to wait a few weeks until all the launch problems are solved before I even touch the game. Only problem is that I am an idiot."

I really don't get why a modern MMO is going to have login issues. Just order a ton of servers, and if you don't use them, repurpose them. Hell, in this day and age of VMWare, there's no excuse to not have flexible server capacity.

SineSwiper wrote:I really don't get why a modern MMO is going to have login issues. Just order a ton of servers, and if you don't use them, repurpose them. Hell, in this day and age of VMWare, there's no excuse to not have flexible server capacity.

If you have a lot of servers you just end up with a lot of ghost towns 1 month later.

What I don't get is why don't they just have a few servers with a ton of capacity. I mean I assume these 'server' aren't really one machine anyway. That is your server X is really a lot of machines that has the power to host 1000 people so if you have twice the machines devoted to the same server it'd be able to handle 2000 people and so on, and yeah if it turns out you got too much then you can get rid of the extra computers. This means even when the launch craze ends you still have a relatively few number of servers that have a reasonable population. The only explanation I can think of is that despite these games having tens of millions in budget, apparently they still try to go cheap on hardware which is one of the least expensive parts of the budget.

Don wrote:If you have a lot of servers you just end up with a lot of ghost towns 1 month later.

And? You can move and shift people around as needed. Or have the game work under a different model that doesn't have to dedicate a player to a "server". Rift's launch had a new server popping up every 10-15 minutes, which happened for several hours. In other words, they already had the server capacity and they were just flipping the switch as they needed more.

Yeah at this point they should really design for shifting players to other servers/shards whenever it starts getting necessary. It was INSANE that it took SWTOR so long to condense the servers and it suffered for it. GW2 let players switch servers for free from day one. For months. It may still be free. Transferring accounts to different servers should be business as usual and queues (or whatever this nonsense FF14 is pulling with people not even being able to get into the queues) during a launch just to save a few bucks is going to anger people way too much to justify the savings. If you aren't going to open shit tons of servers on the fly like Rift, then you should stagger the launch in order of purchase like SWTOR... which I guess was basically opening servers on the fly, as well.

Yeah I bought it, fun game. :p

Due to the overwhelmingly positive response to FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn, we are currently experiencing extremely long wait times for users to be able to log in and play. As a temporary measure, we will halt sales of FINAL FANTASY XIV: A REALM REBORN’s digital download products so we can accommodate all of those wishing to play. We are working to expand our server capacity in the coming days.

Merging the servers causes everyone to bail. It's literally a guaranteed way to ensure your game will die.

That said we should have the ability to simply beef up any particular 'server' by putting more hardware on it. The old EQ1 servers can hold 2000 at once easily, and Tallon Zek had 5000 during the craze. Yeah things were laggy and stuff but that was also technology from more than 10 years ago.

Anyway the game is quite good when you're not getting the 'full server please spam the 0 key some more'.

Gametrailers gave the most scathing review of Final Fantasy XIV on the internet I think lol, they seem to like this version far far more.

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/jvgn ... nch-report

Don wrote:Merging the servers causes everyone to bail. It's literally a guaranteed way to ensure your game will die.

No it's not. It's business as usual. Making a shitty game and having a horrible launch is literally a guaranteed way to ensure your game will die. Literally. Just ask Funcom how well that works.

Queuing just pisses people off.

Yeah I don't understand that statement. People would rather put up with queues than dead servers that have to get merged later? Sounds false to me.

If your game isn't shitty then people put up with queues. You're more excited about getting back into the world and the people there. Having dead servers sucks, people on the dead servers lose interest in don't come back, they don't return to the game after the merger. People stick around though if there's always other people to come back to, even if there's a queue you know your guildmates/friends are waiting on the other side.

Yeah clearly they would need to be merged quickly but any developer should be able to tell when their game is trending towards depopulation. Better yet let players move from server to server at will (with certain limitations) because, well, why the fuck not?

Games don't actually recover from a merger unless your goal is to barely break even. There's a reason why when WoW merged their server they purposely avoided using the word 'merge', though it's probably not actually fooling anyone.

Like Eric said people don't actually come back to the game due to a merger. It's more like a sign for people to start packing. Sure the condition is improved for the diehards who weren't going to leave anyway but it's not like you have to work very hard to keep those guys around.

Look, either the game sucks and you don't bother pre-merge, or the game is good and you stick with it post-merge. The merging has nothing to do with anything. (IE: "If your game isn't shitty then people put up with merges.") Sure, there's a perception problem, but anybody who is actually going to put some effort into the game doesn't care.

The idea of fixed servers is so MMO v1.0. We are well beyond the age of UO and EQ.

MMORPG doesn't work on logic or WoW would've been supplanted a long time ago by the games that are basically exactly the same thing with updated graphics.

Perception absolutely trumps reality in MMORPGs, because if you're talking about a WoW clone the content has been done literally hundreds of times and it's impossible to actually suck at it. Generally speaking the biggest problem that leads to a MMORPG failure is the lack of cross server capability, but that could've been avoided if you pick your server size carefully at the beginning. Depending on your viewpoint all WoW clones (including WoW itself) either all suck or are all good, so there's no this notion of the better game will eventually win because they're all the same. Now merging servers is fine if you don't have big plans for your game, as that is an effective way to stablize the game at vastly reduced subscription numbers, but usually people are in this business to make WoW-like numbers so if that was your original goal you could consider the game 'dead' on a relative level.

Again there's a reason why when WoW merged servers they didn't mention the word 'merger' anywhere. It's probably not fooling anyone but it's a word nobody wants to use, not even WoW.

So my personal bias and login issues aside is this game even fun when you actually do get to play it? The game rated nothing but abysmal before did they even get it to be something that could rate three out of five?

Yes, it's a ton of fun. It's a 9/10 mmo atm if not higher. Tons of content, quests, the fate parties are fun to get into, dungeons are great, gameplay is clean, lots to do, and lots to learn(theorycraft is alive!!!!)

The original FFXIV was one of the worst games I've ever played.

Interesting, I guess I'll give it a go some day, but like I said I can't see paying $50 for it. Especially since I'm still happy with GW2 and Total War Rome 2 comes out in a few days. And I'm probably buying Papers Please since it's on sale.

It's $30 for the digital download though it's currently suspended. For some reason it's a lot more expensive if you buy it on the PS3. I guess that goes to the cost of the box, or something.

Don't try to do crafting without having your retainer. For that matter, don't do crafting at all unless you actually enjoy gathering a lot of stuff.

This game and RIFT are the only two MMORPGs I've played where they get the story battles right by giving bosses extreme amounts of HP but relatively low DPS. If you look at games like WoW or whatever most of the bosses are just an elite so they either kill you very fast or you kill them very fast (because otherwise they'd kill you) and either way it's very anticlimatic because everything ends in 30 seconds. The NPCs actually heal you in the story battle too. The only thing that's annoying is that there's usually some guy you're not supposed to attack at all that your uber NPCs will take care of. If you hit the wrong guy you could end up totally dead. For example it seems like the Malboros are doing like 150 damage per tick on the uber NPCs you get, and for a point of reference you've about 500 HP at that point. Of course these NPCs probably have 5 digit HPs so they don't get bothered, but if you step too close you pretty much die instantly. Yes they do tell you to ignore the Malboro but still.

$30? I coulda sworn it said $50 when I went to the website a couple days ago... See for $30 I'm probably going to just fuck myself over and buy it when available

Edit: Oh, I see, they kind of bury the $30 price point.

Shrinweck wrote:And I'm probably buying Papers Please since it's on sale.

I don't frelling get that game. Is it really more interesting than the video makes it out to be?

People like it. It has to have more appeal in practice than it does in theory.

lol Ten hour maintenance. Ouch. I wonder how well they'll keep to that. I kind of respected Bioware's approach which was either "Only God knows" and "We're going to say eight but it's going to be five hours" approaches to ETAs.

I think they exaggerate the time so it'll sound better when it's shorter. I noticed that 5pm-3am is 9am-7pm on Japanese time, so it's basically prime time for both regions. I guess they did it while people are at work but honestly it'd be much better to pay people overtime for something like 5am-3pm US/9pm-7am Japan because people obviously are going to complain losing prime time in a day. I've never heard of a MMORPG failing over non gameplay issues, but Square is trying pretty hard to prove that it is possible.

By the way I'm on Midgarsormr as Olan Durai if anyone else is playing, though I'm pretty sure you can't create new characters on these server for a while.

Yeah every day I can't buy this game I want to less and less. And yeah unless this maintenance is a magic wand that makes all these troubles disappear I'll probably just join the first server that will have me. I wish someone I trust like PC Gamer would review it. *checks PA Report* Well those are my two sites. I guess it's just as well I can't buy it yet.

Shrinweck wrote:Yeah every day I can't buy this game I want to less and less. And yeah unless this maintenance is a magic wand that makes all these troubles disappear I'll probably just join the first server that will have me. I wish someone I trust like PC Gamer would review it. *checks PA Report* Well those are my two sites. I guess it's just as well I can't buy it yet.

Currently the game's logistic problems trumps any gameplay or lack there of. I mean it's hard to talk about what's good or not if you can't even play it.

There are some seriously backward design like dying sends you back to your bind point which is likely halfway across the world because you really need to bind near a town (to get the AH) instead of just respawning at the closest bind point. The overall game is relatively solid but it still feels like it's made by guys who haven't played a MMORPG in the last 10 years.

Breezed through the forums.. it doesn't sound very fixed. Did read a delightful thread where some idiot support technician mixed up chat logs and sent them to the wrong person, giving each person the other's account information (excluding password). Read a couple quality of life threads too and you're right on that one. I read a developer post that makes me think that the developers of the game think the players are fucking brain dead idiots. They didn't implement the ability to open a drag down on someones name in order to ignore them because people might click it on accident... Wow.

The logistics issues are just stuff people whine about no matter what. The game works fine unless it happens to not for you and that'd just be bad luck or an unusual configuration. FF14 is still designed with the philsophy that games should be as painful as possible so that it feels good when you finally stop. And there are things that just don't make sense like you can't send mail to someone who is offline. The core engine is pretty solid but like I said the game feels like it's designed by someone who hasn't played a MMORPG in the last 10 years.

Through what I will only describe as "shady, but legal internet dealings" I have purchased a key for this game at what ended up being a discounted (okay.. it was an 8% discount but still) rate. I'm patching in and I'll try to get on Midgardsormr when it finishes in 2-3 hours. Or I'll just sleep and do it in the morning. Yeah.. I think I'll have a couple beers and do that.

Game is bloody addicting, and probably the best Final Fantasy in years which is an odd thing to say.

Game is pretty cool to play, but the questing is about as bland as it gets. Still, the gameplay is fun and it has a lot of good ideas that are executed well for the most part.

I joined Midgardsormr as Rich Fingerland. I think I'm going to beeline towards monk. Upon initially reading the game I wanted to play a dragoon but upon finding out that they're the most common melee dps class I kind of lost interest. Since monk requires fifteen levels of lancer I headed over to Gridania when my monk hit ten and tried out the gameplay. I definitely enjoy the pugilist/monk style more. I may level marauder and/or gladiator to 15ish before finishing up my pugilist to 30 to become a monk.

Some day I'll have to give archers a go too, but their low level gameplay looks horrifically boring so I'll give it some time. I looked into summoner but watched a level 50 gameplay video and wow that looked boring. (Edit: Gave archers a try and people just make it look boring by standing still and basically doing nothing.. it's pretty fun if you do more than stand there)

Crafting is fairly enjoyable.

In all this game is a great vehicle to listen to podcasts to while playing so it's a definite distraction until Wildstar eventually gets released.

The localization in this game is insane... a Jurassic Park reference in one of the FATES? Geeze.

Edit: Yeah.. this game manages to be fun but the quests... Level 15 and cleaning flotsam off a net and rubbish off the docks should not be how I'm spending my time unless there's HUGE comedic pay off.

This game is bringing back to the old days of EQ1 where you better call up a developer before you attempted to a boss because there's no way any of the mechanics actually make sense and there's no way you can expect to win without knowing what the mechanism are. I'm at Titan right now and there's just no way based on the information to infer that you're supposed to stand at exactly the edge of his giant circle. The only way to figure this out is by consulting a guide. If encounters are designed like that it's going to cause the game to crash hard as people start losing to stuff that they can't possibly figure out. WoW had the right idea with the dungeon journal because even when you put in as much cue as you could like WoW it's not always obvious that a dev intended you to run criss-cross across something or whatever wacky mechanism they came up, which is why they now have a journal that says "you must hop on one foot at this phase to not die". And this is a game that has very intutive mechanics. I'd argue Titan's mechanic is completely counter intuitive as it'd seem like you're supposed to stand in the area between the platform and his giant circle, which guaranteeds you will die!

Another issue I noticed is that all the telegraphed attacks in this game hits way earlier than they indicate. You can basically assume the spell finished 0.5s before the screen claims to, and it's not because of lag. It makes me wonder if the servers are still in Japan. It makes the game extremely hard but the bigger problem is that each time you get hit by a telegraphed attack it feels like lag. Actually, for all I know it could indeed be lag, but I really don't think so because it's very predictable. That is, there isn't sometimes you could clear a telegraphed attack and sometimes you cannot with the same timing. I know on certain bosses if I react literally 0.1s too slow I'll get hit by the AE at exactly the same spot where it looks like I avoided it every time.