Tag: FFXIV

Square Enix Redacts Server Merger Announcement


Remember last week when Square Enix announced the details of their server merger? Well who says that Square doesn’t listen to their community? After an enormous amount of discussion on the forums, Square is taking the server merger back to the drawing board.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for the wealth of feedback you have provided us with following the announcement made on February 9, 2012 (Thursday), regarding the World merge and character transfers. In order to ensure that the most desirable and effective outcome is achieved, we will be reassessing the method of the merger process.

Initially, the server merger was set to take the game’s eighteen servers and merge them down to ten. Square has promised to release more information as the company decides upon what to do next.

(Source: Lodestone)

Final Fantasy XIV Server Mergers Coming


We’ve known about Final Fantasy XIV’s upcoming server mergers for a long time, since December when Square initially announced them. At the time, Naoki Yoshida commented that Square would be taking a look at the server populations after billing began and judge how many servers to merge afterward. He also stated at the time that the mergers were expected to be temporary, until FFXIV 2.0 launches in late 2012 and an anticipated surge in returning players necessitates for more servers.

On the Lodestone today, Square Enix is finally ready to discuss brass tacks. The original eighteen servers will be merged down to ten, on March 27th. Players will have much of the month in order to designate a destination server to move to, and worlds will be locked as they fill up in order to prevent overpopulation.

Name duplicate rules on characters and retainers are based on whoever has an active subscription as of March 26th, and then on which character is older. Linkshells will be deleted, as will friends/block lists.

(Source: Lodestone)

Final Fantasy XIV Server Mergers Coming After Billing Begins


Now that I can shut up about services being hacked…I think it goes without saying that Final Fantasy XIV is long due for a server merge, and that the sparse population on many servers is only going to get worse when the billing starts and only those willing to remain monthly remain. FFXIV 2.0 is a long way away, and for now Square needs to focus on their current customers. Naoki Yoshida has posted that the server merger will be discussed in more detail once Square has a better idea of how many are sticking around once billing begins.

We will first analyze the number of players in the game after the billing service begins.
Based on that analysis, we will be running a simulation where the maximum concurrent access during the peak hours will become somewhere around 1500 to 2000 per World.
* The above number is provisional and not a finalized number.

More information is expected around mid to late January.

Important: Final Fantasy XIV Subscriptions Start Soon


It’s been ten long months since someone at Square Enix restructured the Final Fantasy XIV team with the human resources equivalent of a carpet bomb, and since then the game has arguably come a long way, both in the huge number of updates bringing in new content, much needed content, fixing the old, purging the bad (physical levels?) and a new way of thinking for the FFXIV team. Unfortunately for us, the time we all knew was coming has shown is ugly head: The free period of Final Fantasy XIV will be coming to a close.

In a new lodestone, President Yoichi Wada announced that the transition will come in late November or early December of this year 2012. But hey, anyone who has been with FFXIV since the beginning has had a full year to play for free. Unless you are me, who adopted early and thanks to my already slow leveling process managed to get three skills above level ten. More importantly, as any person who bought the game should question, what about the subscriptions we still had to sign up to when the game started?

Anyone who has played FINAL FANTASY XIV at any time since its release is already in possession of a FINAL FANTASY XIV service account. These accounts are set to renew their subscriptions automatically, barring deactivation by the account holder. Therefore, if we were to begin regular subscription billings for all existing contracts, players who will not see this announcement or who may not currently wish to pay subscription fees would automatically begin to be charged for their accounts. To avoid this, we have decided to first suspend all automated renewals for service accounts. Only account holders who have agreed to reactivate the automated renewal system will be billed.

That’s generous of them. Final Fantasy has had a year of player dropoff, making for a lot of people who stopped playing and probably don’t follow the game anymore. You can read the entire announcement, as well as download a few documents outlining the team’s plans for the future.

Final Fantasy XIV Patch Notes Are A Novel


Final Fantasy’s slightly delayed 1.19 (not to be confused with Minecraft 1.9) patch doesn’t come for another few days, but you can read the patch notes and list of planned changes right now, and a long read it is. The update is enormous and covers so many things that I couldn’t possibly go into each and every aspect in this blog post (but I’ll try anyway). Square Enix is implementing a wide variety of updates, from abolishing physical levels, attribute points, and elemental points. The update also introduces a massive change to the crafting system, with some new recipes, a lot of altered recipes, and a couple abolished recipes. Players will also be able to rent/buy chocobo, travel in air ships, and take part in new guild leves, grand company quests, and more.

Again there is far too much for me to fully explain here. It’s good to see the Final Fantasy XIV team is still trucking along, even hiring new people to expand the team, especially after Square Enix boss Yaochi Wada stated a few days ago at a press conference that “the Final Fantasy brand has been greatly damaged,” placing much of the blame on Square’s most recent MMO.

More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears.

What Happened This Week: 4/15-4/21 Edition


This weeks question is for those of you who have quit an MMO (so virtually all of you). What level of interaction do you keep with your estranged title? Do you forget all about it and move on to your next title of choice, or are you one of those people who turns on jihad mode and begins a crusade to bring the game and company down because they did something that caused you to quit? Do you keep watch to see if they improve upon what made you quit to begin with, or is it a matter of once they lose your interest, it’s gone forever?

I can’t explain my interest in Hellgate Global. When I played the game at launch, I wasn’t too interested in it. In a way, I had the same reaction to Hellgate as I did with All Points Bulletin, in that it was a shooter/sword/RPG that tried to combine the best of both worlds, but ended up not doing either in a unique way. Essentially, it was Diablo, but played from a different perspective, and I lost interest in the same fashion I lost interest in Diablo: Going through similar looking dungeons (often the same dungeon several times for different missions) over and over again. And yet, I’m signed up for the beta. I could not give a single valid explanation why, other than that I paid the money for the boxed copy.

1. Yoshi’s Cookie: I Admire the Final Fantasy XIV Team

Say what you want about Final Fantasy XIV and odds are your complaints are very valid. What you can’t say is that the current development team, lead by Naoki “Yoshi” Yoshida, lacks motivation. Reading the producer’s letters, I can’t help but admire the devotion and passion that Yoshi and his team have put into Final Fantasy XIV in the past few months. Development has been steaming forward, with a ton of needed updates to turn Final Fantasy XIV into a viable product. FFXIV is functionally a great game, but it needs content and direction so players are doing something other than grinding exp and taking up the same leves over and over again.

What Yoshi has proven is that the team is not above slashing content that doesn’t work, or making drastic changes to other content. Among the updates in the works are the complete removal of physical levels, reworking the battle system, changing the job titles to be more recognizable, introducing grand companies and an achievement system. You can read the list of planned and currently in-the-works updates here.

2. Omali, Why Do You Hate Gamersfirst So Much?

I don’t have a personal grudge against Gamersfirst, I just have very low confidence in the company’s ability to police their own games, mainly because the company has absolutely failed to police their own games. The titles they do maintain are filled to the brim, as I’ve said before, with cheaters and gold farmers. So although I’d like to believe Gamersfirst when they say they have the cheaters all figured out, that’s exactly what Jagex said about gold farmers in Runescape, and I have the feeling Jagex has better resources for catching cheaters than G1.

Those of you who frequent MMO Fallout are well aware that I refuse to join in on the “I hope ___ game fails because I hate ___ company” trash that populates video game forums, and that it’s rather rare that a game comes out that can be labeled purely garbage. Just to name a few examples, DC Universe is a game I harp on, and my issues are not in the gameplay, but its longevity. The original All Points Bulletin had a lot of promise, but needed a real identity as either a shooter or an MMO, but not both. Earth Eternal had less bugs than any other game I’ve ever played but had almost no content outside of kill quests.

I want All Points Bulletin to become Gamersfirst’s big title that will come out and virtually lobotomize all of the cheaters that Realtime Worlds never dealt with, that will inspire the company to run the gold farmers out of their other games. If they are unable to, hopefully Gamersfirst will be able to survive the disappointing reception. Realtime Worlds didn’t.

3. Let’s See Some More Games Revived.

Let’s go over some titles, shall we? Earth Eternal is being revived by a Japanese company, APB by G1, Star Trek Online was revived by Cryptic, Gods & Heroes is entering closed beta under Heatwave Interactive, T3fun is bringing back Hellgate London, and there are probably a few more I can’t think of right now. If The Mummy can get an MMO deal, I want to see some of these other defunct MMOs come back.

I want to see Tabula Rasa brought back, because with all the changes that the developers made in the two months before the game shut down, a lot of the community’s problems were fixed, albeit too late. Shadowbane should be brought back now that the existing version wouldn’t suffer the same problems of the original run (remember the Shadowbane reboot?), and would be run by a single, stable company. I want Dungeon Runners brought back as a free to play title with a cash shop, so the game can financially support more than three people. But above all, I want Tabula Rasa brought back, so I can shoot Richard Garriot in the face with a level 40 shotgun for allowing his team to screw the game two ways to Sunday.

4. I Don’t Have Autism.

The reason I set up MMO Fallout is because of my fascination with the business side of the genre. This is one of the few sections of the gaming industry where a company can’t just throw a game into the open, occasionally lower its price, and then get to work on the sequel. Currently, I feature over 70 MMOs on the category list, including news for games I don’t list (Guild Wars among them).

I noticed a surge in this after Minecraft really gathered steam, and that’s the amount of people who are equating what they see as hard work to autism, and I’ve had a few people asking me if I have autism. First of all that’s an incredibly offensive thing to ask someone, and as a random person on the internet it’s none of your damn business.

Next, I want to make something clear about MMO Fallout. I have a job, I work around generally between 25-30 hours a week at my retail job that I’m using to pay for my car and insurance. I subscribe to, at most, two MMOs, by virtue of my own wallet and time. Writing articles for MMO Fallout takes up a couple of hours of the day at most, spread out throughout my free time. So I wouldn’t call MMO Fallout my “second job.” More like a hobby I’m using to get myself trained for my ultimate end-game (as you’d see in my about page, talk radio).

5. Taking MMO Fallout To The Next Level

I’m going to start trying to get some interviews with different developers. When I call MMO Fallout a hobby, that doesn’t change how serious I am with expanding this website into something bigger. I have a lot of ideas on what I want to do with this blog, and simple text based articles aren’t going to cut it.

To Fix Your Patcher: Use A Torrent Program (Final Fantasy XIV)


Big thanks to 'Torotoro Ton,' 'Mikuli Candelilla,' and 'Wyvern Myaji' of the Karnak server for inadvertently creating this beautiful scene.

Quick question: What do you hate most about Final Fantasy XIV? Odds are, the slow patcher is one of your top answers, and one you haven’t been able to find a fix to. If you are like me, you’ve been finding your patches through external hosts, through Mediafire or FFXIVCore until Square Enix started telling their fansites not to host patches. Despite Square’s patcher, peer to peer networking is truly a more efficient way to distribute patches, assuming the company steps in to host peers when not enough players have the patch (such as right after launch).

So I did find a quick fix. As it turns out, the problem lies with Square Enix’s patcher (go figure) not allocating a proper amount of seeders and leechers. Start the patch download in the client, and then cancel it. Go to C:/users/[user]/My Documents/My Games/Final Fantasy XIV/Downloads/FFXIV and the torrent will be sitting in one of the two folders “2d2a390f” or “48eca647.” Open the torrent file with a separate torrent client, and you should have no problem connecting and downloading. Whereas on the Square patcher, I had one running connection at 0.0b/s, using this on uTorrent was able to completely download the latest patch in about five minutes.

Move the patch from wherever it was downloaded to, to its correct folder (hunt around in the two folders until you find the file that the Square patcher created, and replace it with the one you downloaded). This was done on Windows 7, so your file location may have a slight difference. You can find the folder it is in by doing a windows search and typing in the name of the patch, in the case of the latest being “d2010.12.13.0000.”

More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears. I would offer to host the patches myself, but Square Enix would shoot me.

Square Enix: Embargo On Your Reviews! Thirty Days!


Excuse me, I'd like to return this company.

As I’ve stated before, it has become standard in our culture of gaming for companies to hold swag over a company’s head, in return for more favorable reviews. Ask any developer with loads of cash, and they’ll tell you it’s not technically bribery for, say, Eidos to purchase a major full page advertising space on Gamespot for Kane and Lynch, and then have a reviewer fired for giving the game a poor rating. Or when a company puts an embargo on reviews for their game, where the publishers can probably expect not to get any preview copies if they break that embargo.

So Square Enix has put out a polite request to reviewers to hold back their reviews for three to four weeks after launch, much in the same way Clint Eastwood holds a gun to your head and asks if you feel lucky, punk. Sure, there’s a chance that all six rounds were expended, but do you really want to take the risk and miss out on the Final Fantasy XV preview copy? I didn’t think so.

The real question will remain in how Square Enix responds to those who do not listen to the embargo, especially those that publish poor reviews, like Gamespot (4.0). Will there be an embargo on Square Enix sending swag to said publisher? Will Square take the Realtime Worlds method and try to laugh off the bad reviews by saying they were expected? Personally, I’m against reviewing MMOs at all, in favor of getting players into free trials.

Square asking for a few weeks to fully review the game really isn’t a terrible idea, what will make the difference is how they respond to those who go against their request.

More on FFXIV as it appears, which could be a while due to the slow patcher.

Final Fantasy XIV: Running, Not Jumping


The more I read about Final Fantasy XIV, the more strange quirks I find in the game. Square certainly looks to stab the conventional MMO in the heart yet again with this title, and changes not only from Final Fantasy XI, but other traditional MMOs leave us with a myriad of thoughts, ranging from cool to…what?  Continue reading “Final Fantasy XIV: Running, Not Jumping”