CHANGE.ORG For Keep Developping FFXI

I won't sign, everything need an END. With the number of people working on FFXI, you'll never get deep content such as dynamis or salvage. Everything they managed is upgrading gear with random augments.

Signed. It's too soon for me, 5 years of playing a few months at a time then breaks wasn't enough!

And it was SE that hamstrung the game time and time again. I commend Tanaka for keeping to his vision but when it took years for quality of life issues to be addressed like say, a *** Moogle in Selbina it just showed how little the team cared about their end users. Most of XI was derived from players doing what the damn developers wouldn't. You think SE really envisioned BST solos 1-75 because no sane party would take a BST? Nope. They just abandoned the job.

Worse still, the choice to essentially ship off staff to XIV around the end of TOAU resulting in a drawn out slogfest named Wings of the Goddess that danced around the reality it lacked content. This decision to divert resources set XI down the path of slowly declining until...

XIV 1.0 blew up and turned into a terrific shitstorm of terrible that then sent SE back to the grindstone to shore up XI. Because having your flagship sink in drydock while your new ship capsized on her maiden voyage would have been too much embarrassment to take.

It's on the feed, Wolfwood posted the link to this petition and now there is over 300 comments of mostly people bitching at eachother.

Is there no possibility that the aforementioned staff WANTED to leave FFXI?

The "evil corporation" cliche is a bit too appealing.

So you move resources off a game during an upcoming expansion, neglect the game and this somehow makes sense? SE isn't evil, they were profoundly incompetent with XI.

Post-TOAU into WOTG was a huge span of neglect. Resources were moved to develop XIV and it resulted in both games being worse off. XIV failed phenomenally and XI suffered some steep decline, terrible content (Yilbegan, Evoliths, Fay Augments, Sandworm) and a general lack of direction that wouldn't return until Vision of Abyssea.

Last reports SE was still making millions from this game. What is happening is SE has been saying for a couple years they want to focus on mobile apps. Basically from years of bad decisions and over inflated budgets with unreasonable expectations on returns on new games has hurt the company greatly and wasted resources. So in what has been a long chain of bad ideas over the years they have decided to abandon one their bigger money makers for the misguided belief that mobile games will be better.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/08/06/square-enix-enjoys-strong-financial-results-raises-forecast

Key things, cost cutting most money made from subscriptions and mobile gaming.

You can say that with hindsight but transferring your best and brightest for the new project is a pretty standard move.

Have you ever worked in a creative environment? If your key developers are disinterested, you get poor results, in no way dissimilar to what you cite as "steep decline."

Rewind your tape to before XIV rolls out and re-think your ideal allocation of creative talent.

And that is why I stopped subscribing to the hashtag

Not to mention the fact that the implementation of content is generally 6-12 months after it becomes an idea.

This move was likely determined shortly after SOA came out as a result of poor re-subs.

Now, what few talented folks that remain on the FFXI dev team *stifled laugh* will likely be able to work on other projects that have significantly better economic prospects.

Transferring, with the intention of leaving people behind in charge with vision for XI. Except they didn't. And that's why patches took longer and WOTG turned into years of really nothing substantive. Compared to TOAU, it doesn't compare. Throw in the add-ons and it REALLY doesn't compare.

Rewind my tape to pre-XIV SEs taking a major misstep by not leaving a coherent plan for this game. Tanaka was obviously swamped with XIV yet had producer for this game. Yeah, that'll work. Nope. WOTG drove the game into decline and it's centerpiece Campaign didn't really change the dynamic of the game. TOAU had: Assault, ZNM, Nyzul, Mythics, Salvage. WOTG had?

Essentially, XI was rudderless until Abyssea and Matsui came aboard and that's because XIV flopped and they needed to batten down the hatches here.

Except they weren't. Plans for games are outlined years in advance.

If you wanna back-seat drive, be my guest.

But you don't have all the information necessary to qualify your appraisal. Instead, you use your dissatisfaction to assert malpractice.

Which is par-for-the-course when it comes to video-game fans in this day and age.

Rage on in your stalwart omniscience!

Who said I was dissatisfied? Malpractice? lol. I'm merely commenting on the direction the game took from TOAU to now. I use TOAU because that was the turning point for XI where it went from being quite a busy game towards decline. Top of the bell curve as it were.

It doesn't matter what plans SE had in place, XI most definitely took a dive with WOTG. It failed to capture the magic of its predecessor and added little of substance. A failure of an expansion pack compounded by a rudderless vision for the game "saved" by Abyssea, which at least managed to shift the paradigm once more, even if it meant breaking the level cap.

SE changing focus to mobile and cutting cost 2013.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/21/square-enix-leadership-changes-focus-shifts-from-aaa-to-mobile.

SE main income subscriptions and mobile becoming profitable after financial losses 2014.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/08/06/square-enix-enjoys-strong-financial-results-raises-forecast

I appreciate that you feel the way you do. I'm sorry you felt that way about WOTG.

But your disappointment does not mean SE did anything woefully inept. It means you didn't like it.

To say it had foreseeable consequences is to use hind-sight. Furthermore, your hind-sight is blind to all data SE had to make their decisions AND the scope of any individuals role in what you attribute to "SE."

Mhm. Those declining populations, addition of level sync, server merges were all just a fantasy, a puff of smoke.

Adding less substantive content surely doesn't have foreseeable consequences nor is failing to deliver on promised content paid for in an expansion pack. Nope. All smoke and mirrors.

Nor is creating content that is then immediately abandoned. (Moblin Maze Mongers) Nope, not going to hurt the game. Not going to drive off players or look poorly upon your brand. Nope. All just mists.

The endgame content of WOTG was woefully lacking.

I enjoyed the story, I enjoyed various aspects that furthered solo play (I was a big campaign fan, and don't forget it gave us /dnc). But from an endgame standpoint it was certainly a time of stagnation as the aforementioned endgame content -- sandworm, VNMs, etc. -- was irritating and ultimately provided sidegrades that were very difficult to obtain.

And they stretched it out for so long that by the time it finished, many of the quest rewards were never worthwhile outside of nostalgic pieces if you loved the story, as I did.

I'm pretty sure that they intended to implement them as they IMPLEMENTED THEM!

In fact, I think you'd find people on these forums that would say "level sync saved this game for me."

Tell ya what. You should offer our unsolicited expert advice to SE. Surely they will see the truth in your words and hand over to you the reigns of any project you like!

Level sync 'saved' the game because the game had already began a march into decline. You know, the reason you'd need to sync in the first place!

I've no axe to grind with SE but to say that certain decisions were made and that things were unforeseeable is to apologize for SE. People are paying for a product and it failed to deliver in WOTG, hence decline. It took YEARS to get a coherent storyline out and by time it ended, the game was really in the toilet.

Why did you remind me of vnm. *** terrible event.

Behold the terrible triumverate:

VNMs, now with more shadowless, log dropping Yilbegans.
Fay Augments, where only two zones were viable unless you wanted to get spanked hard.
Evoliths, also known as what the actual *** is this ***.

I'd also throw in ANNMs but that made me a *** mint even if the content was essentially reheated BCNMs.

Also, Moblin Maze Mongers was the ***.

No it's not. It's in no way an apology. There's nothing to apologize for.

The moment you were dissatisfied with X or Y, you could un-sub.

To say that a developer is wrong because you don't like the direction they go in is the epitome of narcissism.

But you know that. Because feeling the way you do, surely they have reached out to you in all your omniscience regarding the inner workings of the development team, it's rotating cast of characters, various financial pressures put on said characters, and the ever changing online gaming climate during the period of 2004-present. I mean, they'd be remiss to neglect such a fantastic source of insight into every misstep made in FFXI... AFTER THE FACT!

You mean they haven't? Their loss amirite?

Hated MMM, as well as its big brother Meeble Burrows.

At least the former is still good for rapidly resetting SP abilities.

I looked at the financial reports/messages:

~1,000,000 million paying subscribers for XI, XIV, Dragon Quest X

They don't have it broken down between MMO and other game titles on how much $$ was generated for 2014

(millions of yen for the 9 month period for 2014)
Net sales ¥118,874
Operating income ¥14,814
Ordinary income ¥16,543
Net income ¥10,916

lol, what are you going on about? I'm making a critique of the game. As someone there. All those years. You know, criticism.
Thanks for reminding me I could have unsubbed though.

And yes, SE did make mistakes with XI as Yoshida would go on to confirm when he took the helm of the failed XIV. Right at the head of the list was failing to listen to their players. I've already mentioned how the shitstew of content that WOTG served up, the declining attention to the game, the drawn out 'nothing' and eventually 3 shamefully bad add-ons 'scenarios' did to the game. WOTG added nothing to endgame and story enthusiasts had to wait nearly 4 years for a conclusion.

Sorry I wasn't there in Japan during Tanakas focus groups to meet your ridiculous credability standards. Continue to deflect onto me as if my casual observations weren't readily available to anyone who played the game at length. WOTG was a fail, the game never recovered from its TOAU heights.

Signed it. We'll see what happens.

if all those players who wined and complained at delve launch about how they couldnt get it done (REM being useless, ect) didnt cause such an uproar i bet things would be different. i blame this whole thing on that since i feel all of the adjustments to their content and future plans were derailed because of this. if you were one of those players that complained about that content or even quit because of it, then i believe you should feel responsible for this. i personally dont really have issue with this games future now(or lack there of), but it does bother me that i see the same people complain about the game dying out that complained about the difficulty of delve and uselessness of their precious REM.

early delve was an absolutely amazing time to play this game. up until they nerfed the ***out of delve (whether by nerfing content itself, or releasing ilevel rem) i felt like they had a long term plan in place that would still be going for the forseeable future. any new content that came out that would have been worth playing this game for would have been "too hard" for the same people anyways, they would have further complained. i dont understand why its an issue for those people that the game is over when they themselves seemingly caused the change i believe thrashed the games lifespan. maybe people should take a lesson learned approach here and accept "it is what it is".

you could take that "take the time to enjoy vana diel created by each and every one of you" quote or whatever to be a passive aggressive jab at those people. (not saying it is, but saying you could take it this way.)

You can't seriously accept that player get the best weapon in the game by simply killing an NM -once, it has nothing to do with diffculty.

I log in just to kill prishe trust sometimes

No, i'm not signing this. And the reason is just because of skirmish random augments. I've been bitching about this since it was implemented, and its been going for far too long.

I would have made maybe around 20~25 equipment and around maybe 6~8 weapons with augments if it wasn't for this ordeal.

If the team decides to change the method of obtaining the augments in a progressive manner (Example: ToM, excluding for empyrean weapons) then i would happily sign the petition to help the team keep their jobs. And in addition, I would subscribe to the game once again.