The Sad Saga of Square Enix and Final Fantasy XIV

[Thanatos 2,847]

Alternate Title: How a great game is being threatened by a piss poor developer.

 

Square Enix, once upon a time, was known for being a great developer. I've seen several of you mention them in the "favorite game developer" thread.

 

As an avid player of FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, let me just share the absolutely incredible stupidity with which SE is handing this MMO.

 

Let's start with something I'm sure everyone has heard before. Underestimating the playerbase at launch.

 

Now, this can be somewhat understood. SE wanted to be cautious, the original FFXIV was a stinker and they thought it would take awhile for people to get back into it. However, they had four beta phases, and pre-order numbers. It would make sense to somewhat underestimate the players who would be coming, say, 80% of them.

 

Square Enix underestimated it by TEN TIMES. Ten times as many players were playing in the preorder as they had thought would be- which makes no sense as they should have had the pre-order numbers.

 

Roughly 250,000 players were playing in early access. This directly leads to idiotic mistake #1:

 

No queue. Instead of logging in and being placed in a queue, albeit a long queue, and thus you could do something else while you were waiting to get in the game, SE, in their infinite and omnipotent wisdom, decided to make a queue that was only 250 players long at max. So 250,000 players are trying to get into a game that they underestimated severely, and only 250 were able to get into queue. This resulted in people creating scripts to hit the numpad zero key over and over again to constantly relog in hopes of getting into queue. I personally was unable to log in for over three days.

 

Idiotic mistake #2 directly impacted the severity of idiotic mistake #1.

 

There was no AFK detection implemented in the game. This meant that people who did manage to log in had zero incentive to log out. They would not be booted, they could leave their game open all night and return the next day. Both of these things are something even first-time MMO devs should know.

 

We won't call the next mistake idiotic, because it's simply a game design "feature" that I feel is a significant flaw. The crafting system is based on having each craft be an entirely new class that you have to level up- all the way from 1 to 50, for each craft. As a botanist in particular, this is looking like it's going to take several weeks just to level up the class- not to mention, there is particular gear you have to buy to allow to harvest the rarer mats, or in the case of crafting classes such as leatherworker, particular gear to let you make the higher quality armors.

 

The last mistake, which occurred last week, is the most egregious. The others are just stupid decisions, this is so incredibly stupid it goes above and beyond the others.

 

As of September 23rd, SE took the unprecedented step of banning everyone in the game with over 8 million gil. Legal or illegal, they were all temporarily banned while SE sorted out who was legit and who was not.

 

My guild lost six people, all crafters, who had pretty much done nothing but craft and sell items and had 9-10 million gil apiece- all completely and totally legal.

 

As of October 4th, they were all un-banned- minus nearly all of their gil, which SE confiscated with the "explanation" that it would upset the economic balance of the server. Needless to say, given that practically five weeks of work was taken from them despite the fact that none of them had done anything wrong, they have all quit the game.

 

To add insult to injury, the ten days those six people were banned? SE refused to add those ten days to their free month you get with purchasing the game. So they were banned for doing nothing wrong, and SE won't even give them that time back for being unjustly banned.

 

Let me just reiterate this. A game developer banned people because they had made too much money, legally, and then took away the money they had made, legally, with not even the accusation of wrongdoing, and then refused to extend their subscription by the length of the time they had been unjustly banned.

 

FFXIV:ARR is a great MMO. It's probably going to be destroyed by the fact that it has the worst company running it.

[Favre4Ever+ 4,476]

I find it really hard to believe they would just remove gil from peoples accounts that did it "legit". They can track where the money goes and where it comes from. People have stepped forward with more than double the gil your friends have and said they are still going strong.

Most likely, your friends are cheats. Sorry bro.

Those other issues are pretty hilariously bad though... But the game is still great you say? Even with those slip-ups? While they deserve blame, it sounds like they have done something right.