Rather than fixing FF14, Square Enix appears to be busy trying to cover up how badly it is doing – the much vaunted mega-patch discretely hid the server populations, which just happened to coincide with player populations reaching their lowest ever, now below 22,000, a 48% decrease from the peak.
Hidden away in the vast list of patch changes:
World population and nearby player counts are no longer displayed.
This happens to coincide with server populations dropping below 22,000 for the first time – Square Enix is probably unhappy with sites constantly publishing 2ch’s entertaining graphs of how badly the game is faring, like these, the last made before the coverup:
Growth rates are uniformly negative and show a gradually accelerating decline:
The patch even added three new enemies – although the observant will note they all use the same model with minor changes.
Most of the other changes related to balancing and interface tweaking, including a rather telling 10% reduction in the XP requirements for levelling and an alarming number of bug fixes.
In other news, Square Enix is now urgently recruiting programmers “who can work from vague instructions” and writers “who can write properly in Japanese.”
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it made me LOL when i read the last line
"In other news, Square Enix is now urgently recruiting programmers “who can work from vague instructions” and writers “who can write properly in Japanese"
someone just kill the game please... devs just need a small push like crashing their servers so they can officially give up and blame someone
You mean blame themselves for starting this shitmess in the first place.
But we know that'll never happen, so the blame game continues....
i'd give it a go if the maps weren't so lazy looking and it actually has some "merit" to it
honestly speaking how do you go from in-depth awesome-sauce (FFXI titles) to this shit is beyond my ability to understand
At least they aren't being lazy with the enemies. I mean, everyone knows that Purple Scorpions are a completely different species from Green Scorpions, right?
That sounds like science all over again.
They should have made it a Boss...
What they should do is combine a scorpion and a spider and give it demonic fire powers--
Oh wait, Devil May Cry already did that...
Well, they could always combine it with something else and give it demonic fire powers...
The hell with that. They don't need programmers or writers. What they need is game designers who know WTF they are doing. Whoever is responsible for designing FF13/FF14 needs to go away and be permanently removed from the industry.
Squeenix investors need to get their shit together and get rid of the cancer before it consumes their company.
Easy they just drop everyone they got from Enix and they are set.
don't they already have the most insane turnover rate in the Japanese game industry, rivaling the Fast Food industry? maybe they need to keep people longer and let them develop some actual talent.
The cancer, thy name is Wada.
Square and Square-Enix has been shit ever since he took control of the company.
Kinda sad to think that only 10 years ago, I would have been all ears for Square news. Now the news passes right through my ears. It's sad how little I care anymore.
Atlus on the otherhand, I'm keeping up with. Sign of the times.
You know... we're not getting any Square news. At least, I never count Squeenix as Square.
Square was and will always be Squaresoft.
Squeenix is... the bastard child of Squaresoft and Enix...
Two highly different entities, Squaresoft and Squeenix. We all stopped listening to news from Squaresoft ever since it died, so many years ago...
Vague instruction like "make this game more craptastic" ?
A job well done
will they shut down the server at the end of the year ?
Me thinks their pride will get in the way and they'll keep walking down the path to self-destruction.
Ah, the typical japanese way of solving a problem....pretending it never exists -_-.
Who wants to bet? Come, come...
Even if they do things right, this game is doomed.
I got one of those free 60 (now 90) days pass from a friend and started playing. The game is pretty nice except for some minor bugs here and there.
But when I found out about the 8 hour limitation and when I reached it and noticed how ineffective you were after that, I just lost interest in the game. This whole way of punishing those playing the game more instead of rewarding those that play less is one of those factors that make this game so unsuccessful and the reason player numbers keep falling
point taken, but still i wish so many other mmos would take this into consideration, i mean when you get powerful you kill in swarms to farm whatever you need when ever you can, and seeing 40-50 of the exact same looking mob starts to suck
iv said it before, i play everquest, i wish they would make enemies look visibly different, all they do is change the name and possibly size, on non name enemies.
for once, ff14 did something right, however minor that one thing is.
@Alidan Sadly, while it is a nice touch, it doesn't really help much if the rest of the game is still lousy.
I just don't see what the fucking point of doing this at this point is anyway, they will find out anyway & most likely very quickly...
i hope FF14 its fixed by Ps3 realese
when i think back, i was so into that game, but as time passes and news come by, this games looks worse and worse
if its like this by PS3's realese ill buy it only if its free-t0-play, wich its already announced its not
Oh my sweet buddha... I just figured it out.
You know that trend Japan has had about making Beta games before making the full one on the PS3?
THIS IS IT! They're trying to sell an incomplete Beta experience to the PC gamers and then iron it out and make it a fuckton better for the PS3 version, screwing all PC gamers in one fell swoop.
...
Either that or it'll just suck anyways.
you made me want t play the game just to know how bad it it is
that's why I watch shows like OreImo, just to see how bad it will become
I only bought the game because I refused to believe it could possibly be as bad as everyone was saying.
I can honestly say it was a worthwhile purchase.
This remember me the tale of "The Emperor's New Clothes".
A King think he is wearing a special cloth only visible for intelligent people but he is really without clothes. Nobody's around with guts to recognize the fact they are looking him nude, the noblemen lie about it, telling him how good he looks. But when a kid tells the truth and everybody starts to laugh and the king was ashamed for life.
well, that king is Square. Their games start to suck a long time ago, the nobleman is the critic and now is the truth is evident for everyone and everyone is laughing. Square never will recover of all this bad experiences of the last years... maybe if they recover the fans with the remake of FF7 (but I doubt)
They started to suck with X-2. XII was not so bad though... personally, I think FF I, FF VII and FFX were the best.
And the King's name is Wada.
He came to power a little after X came out. It's no coincidence that Square has sucked since then.
so true
And the noblemen are the fanboys and -girls that still defend the game. xD
Can't wait till the free trial ends and it goes from whatever it is now to a miniscule amount... Square Enix got cocky, made a shit game, now they can't accept the failings of the company. Just shut it down and I hope they make considerible losses on it, enough to stunt game development for a while... Let some other RPG makers like Atlus take the helm of the industry for a while.
It's not that easy. If they shut it down now, it's like admiting their failure, which wouldn't sit well on the next investor meeting. Depending on the total amount of losses, somebody may have to answer in court for irresponsible mismanagement.
Not in a Japanese company. Generally management can ignore shareholders quite a bit more than they could get away with in an American company, for better or worse.
Whoa, stop the presses people.
An mmorpg using texture/color swaps on enemies? This is industry breaking news.
"In other news, Square Enix is now urgently recruiting programmers “who can work from vague instructions” and writers “who can write properly in Japanese.”"
Hahaha, I guess that outsourcing didn't pay off, huh?
So that they wouldn't need to publicize the epic drop in player numbers after the 2 free months expire for fear of embarassment.
How obvious.
Desperated times, desperated measures!!!
Didn't they increase that to 3 months?
They probably gave plus one month to give time to the programmers to put this in order...
A horse-bird. Shit just got real.
Square and Enix became crap when they fused, because then they didn't have to outdo each other anymore, and could just ride on name recognition.
If they don't get their crap together, it's only a matter of time before a new RPG king emerges.
I totally agree with you, one thing that made Square good is that they had a big rival like Enix. Same for Enix. Square number one was Final Fantasy and Enix number one was Dragon Quest. As a matter of fact Dragon Quest out sells Final Fantasy in Japan.
For me Enix is no more, what I like about them yes they where small but they created more RPG elements than Square's story and graphics telling.
I hope Atlus kick there asses and become the new king of J-RPG making or Factor 5.
The only way to save it now is probably to copy the good things from FF11. The creator got too cocky claiming to give it's players a total new experience. Yes, we got one. A very shitty experience we've never had!
I must admit I'm rather curious to see in with state this game is gonna be when it hits the PS3
1. Hide the player numbers
2. Claim that FF14 is The Final Fantasy
3. Pretend that everybody playing a FF, plays the FF
4. ... Profit!
Hey! I don't agree with you, they are right when they say FF14 is the Final Fantasy!! FF14 may really be the final Final Fantasy of the franchise if Square-Enix continues this way!
You forgot the ??? step
Maybe I should apply for the positions. At least I won't mistake Chocobos with "Horse-birds".
You're missing something really bad -- since FF14, like FF11, is designed with consoles in mind, they CAN'T add new models to the game. That's why in FF11 we didn't get shit after a certain point -- the PS2 couldn't handle it, and Square Enix never got it in their damned heads to just make the PS2 display shittier recolored models instead of the new stuff.
LOL at the bipedal horsebird at the bottom XD
Srsly, why can't Square Enix admit the FF14 is a catastrophe?
Are they on a self-destruction spree?