Corran Horn said:
Revitalize our major MMO titles? Good luck with that...
XI is in the end stages of it's life cycle, I'm not sure if it has fallen below the 100k subs sunset milestone yet but it's final update is being delivered this summer and after that there are no more planned content additions.
XIV needs to be shut down and then the development team can work peacefuly on a non-live game to quite literally redesign the entire thing from the ground up and relaunch it in 2012. There's no good reason to keep it running for ~15k players who are all playing for free anyways, you can't make money on free. If Squenix was bold enough to actually go through with taking off and nuking the site from orbit, which I don't think they have the balls quite frankly, they could create a whole new FFXIV.
Re-creating FFXIV wouldn't be literally from nothing. All the engine development is done and they have a whole game's worth of assets they can reuse to speed up the process, but right now the game which is currently running is stillborn and retrofitting it will not accomplish anything. Everything about the existing FFXIV is fundamentally broken, from the core engine, combat system, and class design all the way up to the lack of any content.
The game should never have been envisioned with crafting or gathering classes side-by-side with and as important as battle classes, the entire story mission structure is entirely broken because classes which can't fight need to also be able to complete the story. The story quests can be soloed without fighting a single thing. Also, all quests in the game reward no experience and a meaningless item or small amounts of gil. Seriously. Whoever thought that was a brilliant idea needs to be executed by beheading with a katana.
The combat system's shortcomings are well-known at this point and the current plan to regress to an auto-attack based system is utterly laughable, you don't look back to the past to advance your game into the future. The game's economy is utterly dysfunctional and non-existent and quite frankly bolting on an auction house will not solve the fundamental flaws in the game's economic systems.
Oh, right, and there's still no meaningful content after 8 months of retail release. Quite literally the only thing which has been added since launch was some roaming Named Monsters, I refuse to call them Notorious Monsters because all of them except for one can be soloed or duoed. Speaking of utterly broken combat systems, because of certain completely unbalanced skills, it is possible for the Thaumaturge class (a mage class) to solo every fight in the entire game except for one Named Monster (the Great Buffalo, which requires 3-4 people).
Since the game lacks any quest content whatsoever, the only way to gain experience is to grind endlessly, or do guildleves. You can do 8 guildleves every 36 hours, and the guildleves consist of nothing more than go to a few spots around the camps and kill a pre-determined number of spawned mobs. Since you have a limited number of guildleves you can do in 36 hours, there is never any point in doing any guildleves other than the ones which reward the most experience, so everybody still playing the games does the same 4 guildleves every time there's a reset ad infinitum until they reach the level cap. For anyone who cares, these guildleves are named All Cracked Up, Dunesfolk for Dinner, Necrologos: Ranine Reveries, and Necrologos: Levinshower. Imagine an MMOG where you only have 4 quests anybody does and that's all they do, every 36 hours. That's FFXIV as it is played by the remaining players right now.
Does this game sound like fun yet? No? Big surprise. The game currently called FFXIV needs to be deleted from history and a new game called FFXIV needs to be created in it's place. Squenix could even call it FFXIV again when it re-launches in 2012 since they can reuse substantially all the existing assets, and we can all forget the current game ever existed.
