20th Anniversary Reddit AMA

You're assuming the same person would take financial responsibility as development responsibility. You have a complete lack of understanding of any business structure. It isn't a contradiction to pay people to develop a server without the end goal being profit. I don't see why that's difficult to understand.

SE preselling an expansion is a totally different premise from running a kickstarter. A kickstarter can pull in thousand dollar donations from people like Draylo(and others who are less vocal but have spare cash). An expansion caps at the sale price per unit. Even if half of all active players prepaid for a $30 expansion, you're only looking at like $750k. For it to be sum profit, they need to take a risk in assuming how long it will keep players subscribed and how many new players will subscribe, both of which occur after release.

There are still the issues of the only developers they have with existing knowledge being tasked to FFXIV or FFXVI, which both have much greater profit potential. SE as a company is unlikely to tap the pool of talent in the third party community(granted, I think very few would even want to work there, and even fewer speak japanese), which unironically contains the people most well versed in how FFXI works right now.

They'll do it once the quality of a private server rivals theirs.

Quality?

Boned again, boned again...
Nothing is gonna change, I really should let my sub expire...
All I wanted was new content. New solo stuff. New 6 man. New 18 man. That sh*t is never going to happen again. Why stick around? Just to pay to watch it fizzle into nothing?

If I go to work and accept a paycheck for my labor, I am making a profit. If I produce a product on my own and use that product to pay myself, I am also making a profit off my labor. If I steal someone else's product and sell it as my own, I am also making a profit. You are literally performing the work to make a profit.

I've read of some good private servers but they fall short due to things including (but not limited to) treatment of players, admins with God complexes, and a "it's not a good idea unless it was my idea" mindset.

being able to pay someone does not mean profit.
Profit is:
so a profit means you need to make more money than you put into it (that includes your time as you are not free)

You can just say wings, we all know what you're trying to say.

As stated, if XI becomes a freebie for playing XIV the quality will hit the floor anyway. When you pay nothing, they owe you nothing.

Retail will be garbage, to the point of not even worth playing unless you just want to level a new character.

I think a caveat could be made that it's only a profit if you make more money developing the private server than you'd make working a fulltime job (if you spend your time working on only the private server) OR the time you're spending developing it in general. I imagine the main consideration when donating to the developers of a private server would be to cover hosting and development costs (aka the time of the developer, especially if they're using working hours to do it and not just throwing an hour at it every night after working another job).

For it to be profit you'd have to assume they get to put the money they're making into their savings account or spend it on some ***that isn't related to further development of the server.

Found the other adult with real world experience.

Why is the assumption that either game will be free?

If I pay $15 a month for each game, at a total of $30 and they give me a couple dollars discount for having active accounts in both, how is that free?

If I go sell crack on the corner but use all the proceeds to write myself a paycheck, then I'm not profiting! I can't wait to use this one in court.

If Draylo decides to fund a server, and hires Atom0s,Arcon, and Zach2good for $120,000/year each, he is losing $360,000 a year. If he does not charge for his server, he is not operating at a profit. He is paying to have something he likes available.

You said:
In this case, nobody is profiting. Nobody with real talent is getting better job prospects or long term future out of working on something like this. You can argue until you're blue in the face because you don't like the idea of someone being paid, but it isn't a profit-making endeavor to run something like that. It's only profit if the server charges in some way, and takes in more than it's operating costs.

The way they would do it, would be $12 for XIV and you get XI free. The only reason they would do it is because XI is done, and they are trying to convert players over. Which will be near impossible because 14 is completely different to 11 and simply not a rewarding game unless you're into wizard hats and robes.

I appreciate that you want to play semantic games so you don't have to publicly admit that you contradicted yourself, but just take the L. Anyone who takes money for services is profiting. Your labor is a service and you're selling it.

Unless you're not getting more back than you're putting in. That's operating at a loss, not a profit.

Correct and those private server admins do not owe you anything either since they're providing something free. However, without players, your private server will not flourish. Treating your players poorly by accusing them of things that you can't prove they did.

Or going off on your God complex on the forums where you love to announce to everyone what action you took against who so your sycophants will reply with "lol pwned ***" or blowing off people's suggestions for improvement then coming back 2 months later pretending it was all your idea.

The person paying out salaries is the one potentially making the profit. Salaries themselves are not profit.

let's not talk semantic games when you fail to grasp the difference between income and profit.

This is just outright not true. There are no p-servers that are even remotely close to what we have now. From ToAU onward, it’s a crapshoot. They are missing loads of ***, with some expansions/add ons being virtually untouched.

Nasomi is doing well for a private server and they don't even have TOAU fully functional.

They are 100% your profit. Is there an LLC for the bootleg server venture now? Who is the CEO? These individuals, if I were to buy into this ridiculous argument, are their own boss and run their own companies.


Time is worthless, until sold for a profit.

I think this alone says more than anything anyone can say against you. This argument is a lost cause.

It's wildly amusing to me that you think you aren't profiting off being paid to repurpose stolen IP lol.

You can call it a paycheck, from the imaginary LLC if that makes you feel better, but uh - you're still profiting.

I'm not profiting. I don't work on private servers at all. I'm pointing it out because the reality of the situation is that only a handful of people(both at SE and outside SE) have the knowledge needed to maintain and improve FFXI. Those at SE are not going to be tasked to it, because they are currently on more profitable projects like FFXIV and FFXVI. Those outside SE are not going to be hired by SE due to optics and language barrier, among other reasons. However, they are potentially available, and a project like a private server has more freedom to unlink itself from the detrimental components. It is a feasible way that FFXI could continue to receive updates and improve performance.

Let's go back to your statement again:
Nobody is 'running and profiting off of' a private server in this scenario. Money changes hands from a funding source to a developer to create the server. The private server costs money to make. The private server, once created, has costs to operate and no income model. No matter how you look at it, the private server is not the source of the 'profit', the person funding it is.

Ejiin charges a subscription to stream FFXI, is he also being 'paid to repurpose stolen IP'? The content he produces is free, that doesn't mean his time is.

Non-profit organizations still use hired labor to advance their goals. Does that mean non-profit organizations don't exist..?

It can be hard conceptualizing the "value" of intellectual work like programming and as such the costs. Unlike a physical widget which you can say cost $10 in materials and $5 in labor. there is very rarely a "real world" value to source code that is easy grasp.

It goes so far beyond the "instant gratification" era. XI is antiquated and painful in so many other ways, and has been for way over a decade.

Now we're getting close to a concept I do feel at least partially ok to comment on- how to reimburse someone for time without a tangible result of that time.

Between my work in music, teaching privately, and now instrument repair, the greatest lesson to learn is that you are not charging for the 1 hour lesson, or the 2 hour concert, or even for the 4 hours of time spent repairing an instrument. You charge for the years of time to perfect the ability to do such tasks- and just because you can do a job in 30 minutes and someone new can do it in 2 hours doesn't mean you make less than the rookie. Your expertise is the skill, not the result.

In the end, all work that doesn't result in a concrete product should be evaluated on 2 factors: first, the demand for such work in your region; and second, the skills needed and time spent to refine those skills. The hours spent for such work is the least important factor, and that's often hard for others in more concrete industries to accept. I do agree that at times it can be very hard to pinpoint an exact value, but that's why the personal relationships in such arrangements will never be fully erased.