[Dev] Cait Sith Video

You're not getting it. I can only speak for myself but in this case I'm not pissed because they made something and then I didn't like it. It's that they made absolutely nothing and acted as if they did. If they want to feed us stupid lines like "we haven't forgotten" or "we're hard at work on it", maybe you want to show us something other than what was already in the game files for years.

If you ever feel like really, really appreciating the FFXI community, play Tera for a month or so.

or SWTOR :(

The thing that the XI community has in bucket loads over other MMO's is pseudo intellects though. At least in things like WoW and TERA they'll call you a *** and be done with it.

I get it just fine, they're people who are making decisions, bad ones yes, but decisions nonetheless. But I'm not going to throw a fuss over it, if they feel other things in the game takes priority over something the player base wants, then that's their choice. It's not exactly their sole purpose to satisfy the player base, even though it should be a high priority. But there isn't a single game company with a 100% satisfaction rating, they often mess up somewhere eventually. Either that, there's always someone out there who sweats the little things.

I will say this though, that it's pretty much safe to say that breaking the development team in two wasn't a smart idea either. Had they not decided to make XIV an online game as well, pretty sure XI might be in better shape.

When SE stops collecting a monthly fee, I'll agree with the notion that people should shut up and stop complaining about wanting proper updates to the game.

I'd rather them open a cash shop and sell items in order to raise revenue if it meant they hired a proper staff to service this game.

As it stands, there's very little reason to support SE's horrible philosophies and development decisions with $12~15 when you have far better offerings from other developers.

Trion and ArenaNet are the best examples of how to treat your playerbase right, rapid content development, listening to the playerbase instead of coming up with *** excuses and "lol we're working on it gaiz... for the next 3 years", and in general, developers that are fun to interact with. All of this while costing less money per month, RIFT going as low as $10 a month and GW2 being free. Why can a F2P game afford to give me tons of content every month (not to mention four extra free character slots, of which you have to pay for every single one on XI monthly) but XI's ludicrously high monthly subscription intake can't afford to give me a pet in less than 2 years?

Seriously. SE apologists, you really don't have much ground to stand on. SE is not doing their job properly, especially given what they're being paid.

Then you can call me weird for not making it such a big deal. I personally don't care if they're doing their job right or not, I simply enjoy the game regardless if they don't give me what I want. Or maybe it's the fact I DON'T want anything out of them to enjoy the game in the first place.

I don't expect to have to pay a subscription fee just to enjoy a game, I expect that money to be used properly to give me more fun content than I previously was getting out of the product.

Well GW2 and RIFT are done differently. With one character slot we can play every job in XI, whilst in RIFT and GW2 that isn't the case.

And I wouldn't be ready to say that GW2 is offering tons of content monthly as of yet. At least wait until 6 months has gone down the line to see if they stick to the whole "Massive content patches monthly" plan, seeing as we've only seen one and been promised another.

Other than that, You're pretty much on the money. If everyone who agreed didn't actually pay monthly then maybe they'd get the message.

That is actually the sole purpose of every video game developer out there. If you aren't trying to make a game that satisfies consumers, what is the purpose of existing? SE is not the only company that really needs to evaluate this core philosophy..looking right at you EA.

Peter Molyneux.

This excuses nothing. In RIFT and GW2 I can level any class I want just using the free slots and all of the crafts. In XI, sure, I can level every job I want, but can I store all of the equipment? How about level all of my crafts on that one character?


So far they're 2 for 2. The Halloween event was possibly the most amazing holiday event I've ever experienced, and as a holiday event it added more things to do than FFXI has in several months. November is going to have an even bigger patch featuring new game modes and another huge event that's opening up an entire new zone and gigantic new dungeon. I've little reason to fear.

EA and Capcom have gone down the road of forgoing satisfying their base in order to rack up profit at any cost - even spurning the very people plunking down 60/game for incomplete games where you pay to unlock ***that should be in the box. It's dispicable and exactly what's wrong with the industry.

This isn't to say that micro-transactions are innately bad however.

With regards to FFXI? SE could be making a mint selling trinkets ingame through a cash shop without worrying about upsetting balance. An apkallu companion here, a set of unique looking armor there, race changes, name changes, inventory expansions etc etc.

As to your first point: Can you level all the classes with 5 character slots? Can you experience all of the personal story chains with 5 character slots? It's the exact same thing. Every hardcore GW2 player is going to buy more character slots (which albeit is better than paying monthly, but it's still a pretty shady thing to do).

As to the second point: We had September with no content update because they were busy squashing bugs. I wouldn't go as far as to say that the Halloween event was that amazing either. The entire attitude Regina had toward players unhappy with opening 100+ chests with absolutely no costume reward was terrible. Whilst the event itself was a success, It lacked the feeling that the GW1 events had. And in reading other peoples opinions, they felt the same way.

When we're six months in and we've had meaty content updates monthly, I will concede that they are following through. Until then, bold promises don't do it for me.

They also need to fix Orr giving more Karma rewards, balance Warriors and sort out the botting problems. They need more middle ground goals too. Currently there's only dungeon armor and Legendary weapons, which are at either end of the easy <> hard scale.

I want to see some armor that's akin to the prestige armor in GW1.

"Legendary" armors were mentioned in Colin's interview

I didn't actually watch that yet. Is it going to be heavy/med/light or class based?

Forgot to have this in my original post, bear with me:

As far as the Halloween event, agree to disagree. Her initial response was colder than it had to be, but they made strides to make it right. They had no obligation to give us a second set of free chests just because we lost the lottery, and they didn't have to allow the halloween skins to drop from all of the successive halloween festivities (although I suspect this wasnt part of the chest debacle and was intended from the start, and I found it to be really cool).

Fact of the matter is, it was a holiday event that added a dungeon, an entire farmable zone, two PvP modes, a fun jumping puzzle challenge, several minigames and costume items to pick up for free on top of the ones that you could buy from the gem shop using in game or real money, awesome decorations in several zones that obviously had a lot of work put into them, and all around a fun week of festivities to take part in.





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And he didn't specify really. Just said legendary armor was definitely on the table, I suspect it'll be the prestige armor of GW2. He also mentioned new types of rewards from dungeons, particularly the new one coming this month, and new types of progression so that it isn't entirely a cosmetic grind.

I think that the event was good, and blew most other MMO's events out of the water... but it still lacked the 'oomph' that GW1 events always had.

I'm cautiously optimistic about GW2 at the moment. There's things they do right and there's things they do wrong. For the most part they make an effort to make everything right though, so I do respect them for that.

The skill system still feels a little sloppy to me too. They made it casual friendly by taking out build customization, and that is something I greatly miss from GW1.

I dunno. I agree about the skills lacking much customization since most classes see use out of only a handful of them, and outside of that you can only use three at a time, but in terms of customizability I feel it'll all be balanced out in time. The trait system, in tandem with the skill system, offers plenty of room for flexibility once they manage to fix classes like Thief and Necromancer and give them more than one viable spec.

Personally, my Guardian feels pretty customizable right now. I can go with a spirit weapon build for solo PvE, I can go with a defensive shout support spec for groups, offensive fire field blast combo might stacking empower build, I can use a meditation build to sustain, or altruistic healing in tandem with symbols and my other support abilities... it's diverse. It doesn't feel much less open ended than GW1, which really didn't have a massive amount of viable range when it came to effective skillsets. if you want to do an elite zone, you need to conform to a specific skillset for your profession, if your profession is desirable at all.

Fact is they actually care though. They're actively working to fix their issues and add more things for us to do. Actual developers and lead game designers are on the offical forums and community sites daily telling us what's happening, status of things, they make us feel like they actually play the game with us (which they do, I ran a dungeon with an ArenaNet guy!).

SE is doing things like this so minimally that it feels like they aren't doing anything at all, and are for the most part hurting the playerbase. One major developer reports things on any forum, and that's incredibly infrequent. Their mouthpieces are given *** to throw at us, and the same old "we're doing this, and it will be done when we feel like it". The connection isn't there at all.

GW2 is chock full of issues regarding jobs and the endgame situation but here's the thing... they've got people working on it, they have devs announcing ***coming down the pipe and you have interaction regarding why certain changes cannot happen.

SE? I know the game is not in the growth phase but the number of times SE has sat down and actually shown why the math for something cannot work is astoundingly rare. It's either we're working on it (by 2015), no or some handwaved *** where they assume their base is so dumb regarding the mechanics of the game that we can't tell when we're being jerked around.

For instance, there is no reason Alexander and Odin couldn't be normal summons. The avatar BCNMs already did a majority of the work regarding Blood Pacts and it'd be buffering out current content and adding two new tools to a Summoners belt without actually doing much.

I'm not claiming that GW2 isn't working on fixing these issues, or pitting them against SE. They're doing a better job currently at listening to the player base, I just don't agree with singing any praises until they're worth singing for.

SquareEnix vs ArenaNet is a very Japanese vs Western developer style argument.

Generally, the content is on par, but the western developers are always more vocal.

They clearly feel that FFXI can survive with minimal updates because the people who complain are normally paying a subscription fee (and will continue to do so because they need the crack. You can see a stark difference in XIV vs XI in terms of development quality. The reason imo is that they need XI to survive with a minimal amount of money spent, to make it viable.

Okay, I worded that wrong. Should have said "They can't always satisfy the player base even if they try their best". Course, can argue that their best isn't exactly very much, but still stands that they have the choice what they want to implement first and when. May not be when we want it, but eventually. I won't argue that they probably should have had him/her available sooner, but at least it's coming. But complaining at them that they're moving too slow isn't going to help things. So I still stand at being patient about it.

Implementing something would be a good start.

I'm not even hating on XI, but it has a notoriously bad record.

To me the most frustrating aspect of SE isn't that they do things the playerbase doesn't want them to do. Obviously at the end of the day they shouldn't have to listen to the playerbase's suggestions but there's just onebig overlaying problem I have with all this, of which this Cait Sith thing is just the latest example:

The point of the official forums has been completely lost. Here I thought the point of the forums was supposed to be a way for us to discuss things/have a direct line to the devs, when all it is is basically another discussion forum for the players to gather at. There is no indication our suggestions are reaching the dev team at all, and if it does, few responses are given. This especially makes me sad when I see posts by people like Kingfury, who can make dumb-sounding ideas sound like a lot of fun and puts a lot of thought and care into his posts, and then gets no response whatsoever, whereas some really insignificant posts get responses because they just happened to not only also be posted by a JP player at some point, but also just happens to be something a dev feels like responding to.

English-speaking players almost never have their queries responded to, very likely because the devs arn't looking at them. Take a look at this thread, it's a response to a JP player outright telling him what the Enhances Third Eye trait on the Kogarasumaru does. When have the English-speaking players ever gotten a response on this level? I place the blame on the devs and not the NA team btw. They must have the worst job in the world, because any experience with the localization team will immediately tell you they're pretty prompt at responding and then fixing any translation errors within the game.

How can this be solved? A weekly or even a monthly post by one of the dev team, or probably Ito, involving recent posts on the forums in every language. What Camate and team often do is just take a news report that appears on the JP side several hours before, finds a suitable post, and then quotes them as if the response was tailored to them, when just a bit of investigating will let us know better. Of course, a bunch of the time they can't find such a thread so they end up having to make a completely new thread announcing it.

Unfortunately yeah, but like I said, priorities. Also, they always have updated in bulk like I said before, so they very well could be waiting to throw em in once they have a sizable update, which I'm thinking around when Adoulin is scheduled to be released. That is kinda redundant considering Cait Sith and Atomos are a part of WotG, but knowing them, they very well might do just that.

Going from the SE roadmap:

-New 2hrs were slated for June-July.
-Cait Sith for July-Sept.
-New BST familiars/familiar adjustments for October.
-DRK magic buffs for July-August.
-New 2hr enhancements for Sept-Nov.
-New PUP attachments for Nov.
-Play as a Monster between Sept-Dec.
-Meeble Burrows for July-Sept.
-(2)Meeble Burrows Expansions for Sept-Dec.

I've always said that the roadmap is more for showing us what is coming moreso than when. But they are way behind on the job related updates.

Even if you take that approach, they haven't announced anything regarding the BST pets (what will they be?), what the DRK magic buffs would be beyond adding tiers of Fast Cast or what Play as a monster will entail outside of concept talk.

These things should(?) be in development so get to spilling details at the least. Show an evolution chain, some combat or what the interface is going to look like at the least.

Like I said, way behind on job related updates. I would love to hear an explanation as well.