Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet.Follow

Japanese game biased toward Japanese playerbase? That's a shocker

They have been doing a few things for the JP only recently.

Tanaka blames western players for making FFXIV fail and him being humi8lated, remember his comments about the problems with it being western players stirring up trouble and not understanding the games features etc? He blatantly blamed the western players on his twitter or whatever it was.

Since he has been back the game has become far more JP favoured, he/they have been going out of their way to piss everyone off at every opportunity honestly. even the fact they put Tanaka back on FFXI after failing hard on the previous game is a slap in the face.

It's also a bad sign of them selling super weapons for $6 like this, the big announcement looks to be something stupid like F2P/cashshop afterall. If they are ok to sell relics, mythics etc for $6 then it shows they will pretty much do anything now.

They gotta do whatever it takes to get as much money into XIV I guess, if they ruin the game in the process...oh well the XI playerbase will mostly all go play XIV anyway right?

Edited, May 29th 2012 2:03am by Runespider

So it's a coincidence that the game changed drastically while he was busy on XIV and when he was fired and started having more of a presence on the XI forums again it went back to exactly how it was before he was heavily involved in XIV? Also XIV was run in the way XI is being run now while he was in charge of it and ceased to be when he was fired (the public firing and his name being removed was PR cause he was hated so much, it would still be on that game too if there was no mileagein changing it) You can tell everyone your terrier is a parrot if you like but if it barks, craps on your carpet and bites the mail man it's probably a dog. Just cause the job titles never changed doesn't mean a damn.

Unless you have proof he was working on XI all along of course? Cause I never saw anything from him regarding XI again till he was fired from XIV.

Tanaka is the guy that is ruining this game, sometimes it's ok to tell it like it is. Worked great on XIV right?

Edited, May 29th 2012 4:24am by Runespider

There are some really interesting case studies out there about Japanese leadership and the damage it can do to a company (Nissan is a typical example of this, it required a guy from Renault coming in and actually firing people before the company managed to turn around), obviously not in all situations but I actually find it quite frustrating to read about, let alone experience. Unfortunately for us as consumers of a Japanese service, it's unlikely they'd ever ditch Tanaka no matter what he did (even if that was ruining a multi-million dollar project, apparently) despite the playerbase actively insulting him on both sides of the ocean.



We can dream...

Edited, May 29th 2012 7:04am by Dlaqev

Physically, maybe, but it's clear he mentally checked out at some point. He really needed to take the reins of the adrift FFXI and he was in charge of both the disaster known as FFXIV 1.0 and the adrift FFXI at the same time. All the resources went into one of the largest MMO flops (which managed to damage the FF name a bit) and siphoning resources from the MMO that was bringing them in a lot of money. Much of what went into this game since WotG's launch in 2007 was half-hearted (except for the graphics artists. They've been hands down the best personnel ont he dev team since then and have contributed a load of the new content, at least trying to make FFXI feel new/fresh). Vlorsutes, next time you have an open channel with Square-Enix, ask them which FF game made more money for Square/SE over its entire existence, FFVII or FFXI? The answer would be telling either way.



Yeah, it probably is Japanese preferentialism, but one angle to consider is this is the 10th anniversary, May 2002, when FFXI debuted in Japan. The North American debut is Oct 2003 (June 2003 if beta is considered, which is when coverage and chatter in the US soared).

In that case, we can expect to have a big NA party in October 2013, say in Las Vegas or someplace where there's cheap plane tickets... right? Right????

It's not even a 100% guarantee nor will everyone even get it.

Exactly. Anyone who's familiar with how Japanese corporate culture works likely sees the Tanaka example as a very typical one. I don't have saevellakshmi's inside knowledge, but I do have an international MBA and have taken plenty of international business classes which discuss in great detail the different corporate cultures of various countries (the standard comparisons will generally be US, Japan, and Germany and/or UK). With that perspective, this whole Tanaka saga reads like a stereotypical case study of what happens to a disgraced manager or executive in a Japanese firm. They'll very rarely be outright fired, they will just be exiled to a meaningless dead end position, to be kept out of the way but still retained in the company. Either the person will eventually quit from their demoted post, or they'll go through the motions until their eventual exit from the company (up to retirement in many cases).

The more telling part to me is that S-E feels that the lead director of FFXI is an appropriate demotion for a blunder of this scale (i.e. permanently tarnishing the FF brand, and having a disastrous launch of an MMO that was supposed to be a major income stream and ended up so bad that it went free to play for the first year+). That tells me S-E doesn't think too highly of FFXI in today's market.

This is just my perspective - but I generally tend to dislike allowing real cash access to things like ultimate weapons and endgame armor. I don't like buy to win at all - but "some people can buy to win and others can't" is even worse.

I wouldn't agree with a raffle for ultimate weapons and armor using real life money even if it was open to everyone - but I wouldn't be as mad as I am seeing the opportunity only offered to a select group of players in just one of the countries where the game is played either.

It's one thing to give out souvenir gear at an exclusive event. It's another to sell the opportunity to access to weapons and gear used/usable in endgame.

Oh and it is nothing like a barbeque etc. If they were raffling mog house furniture or real life plushies I wouldn't give a fig. It's when you raffle off stuff that gives you a serious advantage in game that it is problematic.

Edited, May 29th 2012 1:19pm by Olorinus

First off, I already said that we wouldn't be attending the event. Second, there will be none of that going on here.



Since having people send you money for you to buy these things would qualify as a violation of such things in my opinion, I'm going to say it right now that you don't go around saying that anymore (this is your only warning on the matter). Among other things, we can't moderate that the transactions are actually made, so if you wanted to you could just swipe the money of everyone that wants you to get them ones.

Besides, 1) you're limited to the number you can get, 2) those are almost certainly going to only be redeemable to Japanese Square Enix accounts, 3) You're likely going to find out the results of the tickets at the event, making it unfair to others (i.e. one you get ends up being nothing, but one you got for someone else ends up being a mythic, so you might just keep the mythic one and give the one person nothing).

As said though, we will not allow you to buy those to sell to others or allow you to take money from others on here to purchase them, so don't advertise this again.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/23724-Vana-diel-Festa-in-Japan-10th-anniversary-special-event-Random-Deal?p=321655#post321655

Quite. What's baffling is FFXI is a solid revenue stream for SE and they control the flow rate. It's clear they wanted or were stupid enough to turn the roaring Mississippi into an arroyo or something (they built a damn and diverted the flow to FFXIV). They are treating it as if they have some big successful MMO that's been bringing in money for 2+ years. FFXIV has the development costs of 2 games (2.0 costs less than 1.0 because they already have any of the new computers for making the graphics, servers, etc. Strangely, I've read that FFXI was cheaper to produce than FFVII, FFX). FFXIII sold well, though it had a high return rate and a lot of complaining, which SE no doubt ignored. The proof in the pudding (Flan?) was in the much lower sales of XIII-2 which when compared against XIII and X:X-2 shows a lot of people didn't bother to get it.

They do probably fire people, it's just that the high profile people can never get fired unless they do something outrageous like loot the company. I am reminded of Gunpei Yokoi, one of the most prominent people at Nintendo. The man behind Metroid, Game Boy et al, was shamed for the Virtual Boy debacle (though some allege he was forced to take the fall for Nintendo because they wanted a stopgap out in 1995 to keep Nintendo current against the Saturn and new Playstation since the N64 was still a year away). He eventually resigned because he couldn't do anything and for a person like that, that is punishment. He was then killed in a hit & run in 1997 which some conspiracy theories allege was Nintendo trying to take him out for designing a competitor to the Game Boy (WonderSwan) which they feared would be the strongest competitor since this was the man who designed the Game Boy after all. I wonder, what was the car's license plate? M BRAIN? SR 388? Yeah, it's one of the more intrigue-filled parts of video game history. But like I said, FFXI is still an active revenue stream, so it's not exactly a shameful position. And if he was responsible for all the decisions in FFXIV, he's lucky he wasn't fired or demoted to some project like developing FFII for some cellphone used only in Bhutan.

What Tanaka needs is some introspection (if delusional) or being open about what went wrong at SE. Some of it is clearly him (like why did he think he could handle 2 MMOs at the same time without one suffering), some of it is SE since Kitase & Toriyama and even Matsuno went off the rails and/or got bogged down in unending game development. Tanaka was a competent developer, he could make good games, and he had a damn good track record at Square. Toriyama, one can expect that kind of crap from him, Kitase was always a bad idea as a #1 and always needed to be counterbalanced by a Sakaguchi or Itou though unlike Toriyama, brought enough good stuff to development to make him a useful member of the team. Really, that's the one missing thing, the big question- what was going on behind the scenes at Square-Enix that interfered in the ability of seasoned developers to make good games and finish development on a reasonable time scale?

Sort of like how WotG sat "half done" for who knows how long? Look, I know it's fun for some to bash Abyssea and blame it for all of FFXI's current ills, but the problems of today just would've been popping up two years ago if SE "stayed the course" they'd set with WotG where things like Dynamis and such weren't really being done anyway because most old timers were done with it.

It's funny, Rift just announced a 10 level cap increase with their pending expansion in the Fall. Unsurprisingly, you'll see people claiming that the sky is falling and all the "hard work" they put into stuff will mean nothing. The root of that fear lies in the fact people who aren't on the same page now might actually be on equal footing for a bit. In truth, they're not, nor will they ever be. Just like XIers pimped out from 75 endgame were better prepared for the cap increase and probably got geared far faster than those they were afraid of. Nonetheless, people could at least talk about doing the same things and not it looking more like two communities looking in at each other with one exclusive bunch claiming all rights while the other might want to be like them, but can't for varying reasons, some beyond their control. Naturally, you'll see the one come and bitch about the gimps taking forever to kill sh*t, and the eventual evolution of whining about cheap brews or AoA.

Point is, they're looking at everything the wrong way. The game they want involves forcing people to run the same treadmills they had to, if only because they had to. In Rift's case, getting gear ready for the current top raid at least involves getting decently geared from the raid prior. If you can't do that, you're not stepping into the current raid and being effective. Consider those raids have lockout timers, and you basically present new players with an artificial wall saying, "You will never be current because you have <x time> ahead of you to earn your keep." Now, I argued that alternative gear sources could be had so people could hope to step into the current, but wait! No, no, no, that old raid the cutting edge would never want to step into to help some gimp MUST remain important. If CoP's taught us anything, it's that not being around for the initial play basically screws you out of timely progression.

MMOs change. Fighting that is futile, just as FFXI's years of sidegrade stagnation led to its progressively diminishing numbers and a reputation I've never really seen brought up favorably in the few games I've dabbled in when it came up in public chatter. You and maybe a few others being fond of the good ol' days is not at all reflective of the majority. And of course, instead of trying to offer solutions to problems cap increase or the like may bring, they'd rather stomp their foot and declare it a bad idea. Some might even quit in protest like it means something!

Think I'm full of sh*t? Browse this thread at your leisure, and in particular, look for commentary from Laeris and people like them.

Edited, Jun 2nd 2012 7:44am by Seriha

You mean all that stuff that was old as dirt? Man, if the soul of this game was 6 man parties getting, at the absolute best, 20k an hour while excluding 75% of the existing jobs, we played a very sad game for a very long time.

Perhaps it was the difficulty level of XI that attracted and retained a certain sort of (slightly more mature than the average MMO) player, which is why those who stuck around through the Bad Old Days formed such close bonds.

Maybe that's true to a point... but certainly not to the extent some seem to think. I think the FFXI community has more than its share of immaturity, It's just a different brand than what you see from WoW.

I've made better friends since Abyssea. Back in the day you'd just get attached to folks in your LS when a bunch of them would hit level cap and then disappear into "end game" shells, almost never to return. Now that you can have a really casual shell that does "endgame" - that doesn't happen anymore. It's nice.

I'd pin it on a general lack of alternative games back in the day, too. Even WoW wasn't really priming until 2005 or later, and by that point XI was at least into CoP. Being painfully aware of the design flaws of that expansion at its launch, I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to learn of some people just sticking it out because they'd labored up to a certain point and dreaded bringing on that feeling of waste if they bailed. At the very least, I know the few months leading up to ToAU and even a few after were fairly dull for me to the point I actually did try WoW then.

Either game is basically a matter of falling in to the right crowd for you, and it's always why I'm wary of anti-casual content requiring large groups of people. Somewhere along the way there is almost always a snag, resulting in tedious or frustrating experiences. Sometimes both. Good company can lessen that, but it's always about luck in being at that right place at the right time. Ironically, this also why I tend to scoff at guild/linkshell applications since they're rarely indicative of the true experience you'll find within a group. Additionally, jumping through such hoops is almost harmful since you'll rarely, if ever, see one group honor another's point system and the like, leaving someone who's trying to find their place as a perpetual low man on the totem pole and more prone to being screwed or exploited. So, it's not much of a stretch to see why also favor game managed point systems and exchanges over random drops and player politics.

No one should care about rate-downs, but people arguing that FFXI pre-Abyssea would have had more subscribers are factually wrong. Abyssea brought back more subscribes, it did not decrease subscriptions. The reason you see less people on the game now is because the development of Abyssea like content ceased and we moved to a flawed system of scattered events that at best can be won only by cheating (Nyzul), and/or specific setups (Nyzul again, certain VWNMs), and/or is not as well thought out as Abyssea (e.g., Legion). Not to mention the horrific drop rates of one of these events, VWNM.

Abyssea was the perfect blend of time:reward ratio. Pre-Abyssea was more like VWNM, but worse, where no rewards were given except to one or two selected people in an alliance that cheated to get the claim.



Edited, Jun 4th 2012 4:20pm by TheBarrister

Tanaka shouldn't even blame western players, should of been evenly cut down the middle everyone gets a piece of cake, not just one side gets something and cut the middle man out.

He should of stuck to making a Xenogears 2 and the other great games back then.

still not happy about mog bonanza everyone walking around with moogle costume and we got pretty much screwed out of that, don't give me laws about gambling cause it's perfectly legal to gamble, play lotto even though you have to be 18 years of age to do this, this shouldn't be a problem in a game its not like the parents are bringing the kids long island ice tea's to their kids while playing bonanza lol

well tanaka you had a great run wish you the best.

Nvm just saw the post where they smartly listened to concerns and removed the big items. Nothing to see here.

Edited, Jun 24th 2012 6:08pm by Llester