Final Fantasy XIV

[Val the Moofia Boss]

the Japanese development team cannot possibly still be ignorant of it, therefore we must assume some level of complicity in the behavior.

The rank and file devs probably are ignorant, because most of them can't hold a conversation with an American tourist. We know that with a lot of Japanese game devs, they have to rely on and take the word of their English localizers for Western feedback, reception, and tastes. A lot of them do not understand that these positions are being filled by SJWs who are skewing what information they are receiving. The JRPG, VN, and anime communities have tried hard to contact a lot of these Japanese and tell them that our localizers are deceiving them and we don't want them, but it is difficult and they often don't understand, and it creates problems where now they have to spend more time and effort fact checking when a lot of Japanese creators just don't want to do that and instead just see exporting to foreign markets as an easy way to make extra money rather than something to take very seriously.

However, Yoshi-P has to be aware of this, given that he runs a very high profile game that has its own official forums and is also beholden to Square, and Square has a team of market analysts and people who should be browsing game reviews and twitter and Steam discussions. Yoshi-P can also speak English, and might be able to read it too. The Japanese subforums are also complaining about these exact same issues and have also been passing on our complaints for more visibility, so even if Yoshi-P isn't reading what we gaijin are saying he would be seeing them from the Japanese feedback channels, be it him reading the Japanese subforums himself or a Japanese community rep giving him a bullet pointed list of complaints. We aren't too sure how ideological Yoshi-P is. He has made some LGTBQ supporting statements, but otherwise hasn't said much on that end.

Probably the bigger issue is that Yoshi-P appears to be a liar and willfully ignorant. He has a long history of making promises that don't come true. He also seems to be surprised by basic complaints such as the terrible netcode in the West. Someone had to confront him at Fanfest about this. And a lot of complaints over the years that he has done nothing to rectified and gives lipservice about addressing but never meaningfully does. So even if Yoshi-P hears about these localizer complaints, he might feel he can't be bothered to do anything about it.

[WhiteShark]

The Japanese also have a bad habit of assuming others are acting in good faith. The rot is spreading in Japan, but it hasn't done enough damage to the social fabric yet for the average Jap to discard that notion. They're mostly still at the stage where they think everyone basically has good intentions and disputes can be solved through discussion and compromise. The average Jap dev is very unlikely to be cunning enough to realize their American counterparts are manipulative partisans.

Of course, as mentioned above, I wouldn't give this much benefit of the doubt to the producer of a game that hired a ****** as a voice actor and has natives complaining about the same things.

[J1M]

It might not be their fault, but it is their problem. And the Japanese executives have the power to fix it if they choose to.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It might not be their fault, but it is their problem. And the Japanese executives have the power to fix it if they choose to.

One of the execs at Square is a ******. Tracy Fullerton. I don't want to repost the picture.

[GhostShiroyama]

I was reading the steam reviews for this game, curious about the review bombs people have been talking about and I gotta say it's absolutely sickening. Even the developers of this game are speaking of purging lives and celebrating Charlie Kirk's death.

What's the story behind the review bombs? And why are the devs giving a toss about Charlie Kirk's death? Wouldn't have thought the Japanese even knew who he was

Haven't played in two years but was thinking of picking the game back up, but if the community (I played mostly solo for the story) and even the devs are demon possessed, I should stay away

The only players left are the vile, manipulating, gaslighting pieces of ****. People like myself got sick and tired of the toxic community, others left due to the mare mods being shut down, and there are those who are ****** off with the Charlie Kirk situation. Their western staff's comments on social media, saying they want to "purge" anyone who supports the right. This is why many people are blasting negative reviews on steam saying they are boycotting both Final Fantasy 14 and Square Enix in general. I would not want my worst enemy to go into that hellhole.

[rusty_shackleford]

why do they censor the nipples on characters though. the male character nipples just have a skin texture

why do they censor the nipples on characters though. the male character nipples just have a skin texture

That's just Asian artistic tastes. Most modern animes and mangas and games with shirtless guys do not draw nipples. It's what is in vogue.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Live letter for 7.4 was today. Some big news at the end, namely that glamour/transmog restrictions are being lifted.

► Show Spoiler

The third part of the Arcadion raid story concludes in 7.4. Looks to be either the champion or the evil president on the image.




Cool looking new trial boss. Not sure if this is going to be a WoW esque elaborate raid encounter who if you are just going to be meleeing a big boss off of the side of the platform as usual.








New PvP frontline map set in one of the scenic new Dawntrail locales.








The first new content addition to the Gold Saucer in years. Sadly it's just the air force one minigame that isn't that fun.








New Phantom Jobs, but the PH jobs introduced earlier were underwhelming so there isn't much to be excited for here.




New planet for crafters and gatherers to visit.








I thought I was looking at a new Honkai Nexus Anima town here. This is actually a brand new variant dungeon.








This is where things get a little weird. They are introducing ANOTHER version of variant dungeons, called "Advanced". Unlike the base version of Variant dungeons where you run through the dungeon and fight bosses semi linearly, here it seems like you might just get straight up teleported to whichever bosses you wish.






And then for the Criterion Dungeons (or at least, the new Dawntrail CDs), it sounds like there might not be any trash fights. It might just be a string of boss fights one after another. However, it seems like you will still fight the bosses in linear order, which is odd to me given that they are letting you fight the bosses in any order for Variant Advanced. The main issue I found with Criterion Dungeon content was that if you wanted to practice a certain boss ie the 2nd boss, you would first have to spend time finding a group and progging up through the trash and the prior bosses to reach the boss you were stuck at. It does seem to suck that trash are being removed. Trash really makes M+ dungeons high tier delves in WoW thrive and are just as challenging if not more so than the boss, but here FF14 seems to only want to be a boss fight game.

It seems that Criterion Savage is not being continued. I won't miss it because it feels so bad how just one death forces you to restart the whole run.




New variant dungeon bosses and rewards.






The silver menu looks neat.




After having promised this feature for years, they are finally implementing an ingame raidplanner. It remains to be seen whether or not people will switch to this over linking a raidplan.io link in chat and telling raid members to go there and read the paragraphs.




For those people who used macros to cause extra hotbars to appear on and off, they are letting you just press a button to toggle it.












They haven't shown pictures clarifying yet, but it sounds like you might be able to wear samurai job gear as a dark knight or a viper, which would be cool. And mix and match between different armor types, ie fending and striking gear (FF14's equivalent of mixing and matching plate and leather transmogs).




Fanfest Anaheim announced for April 24th and 25th 2026 at the Anaheim Convention Center (where Blizzcon used to be held at). Tickets on sale for $249.99 each ($264.99 after fees*). Ticket gets you both days. No refunds. If you go then I'd recommend avoiding the parking garage and instead parking on the curb in one of the neighborhoods down the street. There is also an IHOP down the street to if you want to eat some pancakes for lunch. Disneyland is also right next door if you want to chain that together with your trip, though that's kinda a thing parents do with their little kids and I doubt anyone is bringing their little kids for this.

[mercerxiv]

The only players left are the vile, manipulating, gaslighting pieces of ****. People like myself got sick and tired of the toxic community, others left due to the mare mods being shut down, and there are those who are ****** off with the Charlie Kirk situation. Their western staff's comments on social media, saying they want to "purge" anyone who supports the right. This is why many people are blasting negative reviews on steam saying they are boycotting both Final Fantasy 14 and Square Enix in general. I would not want my worst enemy to go into that hellhole.

Haven't heard about Kirk situation, but here's my 2 cent.
You are mostly correct in that many normal people have made an exit. I think "normie" people are still about half/slight majority, but right-wingers are most certainly a minority and have to be careful about what they say since TOS includes protections for ******** and other minorities.

There are a lot of gooners of all stripes, although Mare shutdown must have gotten at least some of them to quit, but nice thing is that their behavior is reportable as well, so should someone accidentally end up being exposed to them it may result in suspensions for the degenerates up to permanent bans.

There are still more ******** around than what I'm used to, can't do much there unless they once again enter "against TOS topics" area, which many of them do because most of them are ******* horny. Reporting them on repeat is doing the good work of cleansing the player base of that filth.

They have also shut down character creation on Aether (raiding NA data center), which some remaining reasonable players choose to interpret as them being aware of the gooner/rainbow problem and trying to curb it in a very roundabout way (personally I don't really believe it, but it's possible given Japanese are ******* weird).

I still play and talk in public chats without filtering my opinions too much (although reading TOS and being careful just enough may net you some decent bags of ****** off libtards breaking tos and getting suspended, or simply eavesdropping on reportable events and filing them) and am yet to receive as much as a warning, less so suspension. A lot of trash people also self report pretty openly with their "bios", and a lot you can tell from their character appearance. This makes it easy to avoid the worst pieces of trash, while the others you can just ghost or quietly report/mute/blacklist.

The game still has some pretty fun content, and I hope that as the winds of change blow on the right-wing direction they will also follow that. The game features surprisingly few rainbow trash characters given it's JP and modern times, and their recent DT backlash about a talentless VA larping as a woman may have given them more to consider going into the future.

I think it's not too late for XIV yet, we just need more people to take advantage of TOS to report gooners and rainbow trash to get them removed from the game permanently. The rules are on the books, someone just has to use the report button to give them justification to ban those people.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I think it's not too late for XIV yet

I don't think the game will suddenly keel over dead. A collapse is almost never a sudden death, but rather a long decline and this is just another step on the way down. It is a box purchase ($50 box every other year) + subscription ($13 base, +$2 for every retainer/bank tab and you want at least 2) + microtransaction game (they are ramping up the cash shop items). That is $210+ per year per player. FF11 subs singlehandedly kept Square afloat during the 2000s and early 2010s in spite of all of their other projects being financial mishaps or underperforming, and FF14 is that pillar for Square now. Square's execs exclaimed furor that they weren't the ones to make Genshin Impact or Honkai Star Rail and rake in $100+ million USD per month, so they know just how important it is to keep the one pillar they have alive. I don't think they would be so foolish as to pull the plug.

The issue is clearly mismangement on Yoshida's part. He has greenlighted all of these issues plaguing the game. The trend for the past 6/8 years has been towards simplification, with it starting to become detrimental during Shadowbringers. Melee classes no longer have the TP resource to pool or expend. Healers now have no gameplay and just press Glare, Glare, Glare over and over. Crowd control has been removed. Materia doesn't matter. Sprawling dungeons got reworked into just straight, linear corridors. He promised an expansion about invading Garlemald and then didn't deliver. He made the player character into the reincarnation of a predecessor race and then tilted his head in confusion when the fandom was upset that their character in Endwalker was made into an accomplice to genocide of their own kind for inane reasons. He knew that he would be terminating the original storyline in Endwalker and that he'd have to set up something sufficiently cool and appealing to keep people invested and excited for what would happen next, and gave us the boring repetitive slogs devoid of tension that were the EW patch story and Dawntrail. He authorized a script where we try to push an adult woman whose persuasiveness amounts to regurgitating "love and peace and togetherness!" over and over as if that is all it takes to lead an empire, etc.

I have been reading fan translations of "Yoshida Uncensored" on my lunchbreaks. It was a column he wrote for Famitsu magazine from 2014 through 2019, and he goes through his life history and what he was doing at Square when he took over FF14 and the behind the scenes business and managerial/producer decisions involved. It is interesting to see how keen he is, how he knew that fans thought that the Final Fantasy brand name was being dirtied, how he felt that Square really needed to take this seriously and that they needed to portray to the public that they were taking this seriously, seriously enough that he began doing unscripted live letter live streams when hardly anyone else was doing this (IIRC this was even before Digital Extremes did it with Warframe), etc. It's hard to think about that same person today could be so oblivious or just blatantly lie to our faces and pretend that they weren't problems or say that he is going to go back to the roots like Da Wei's apology and promise for the direction his company's games were taking at the start of the year. Yoshida hasn't shown any apology or self reflection or promise to reverse course, so I don't think there is any indication that most of these issues are going to be resolved.

[WhiteShark]

It's hard to think about that same person today could be so oblivious or just blatantly lie to our faces and pretend that they weren't problems or say that he is going to go back to the roots like Da Wei's apology and promise for the direction his company's games were taking at the start of the year. Yoshida hasn't shown any apology or self reflection or promise to reverse course, so I don't think there is any indication that most of these issues are going to be resolved.

Makes me wonder if he burned out/gave up and is just rubber-stamping whatever gets put across his desk.

[mercerxiv]

Good points. I hope that DT failure and backlash at launch served as a wake up call for him, but we will see with the next expansion. If they choose to retain ****** VA, or get more queers contracted, and the new MSQ is just as *** - we have our answer and trajectory for the future of the game. I do hope they will choose differently from many studios in the industry right now that are simply doubling down on their woke trash.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Yoshida had an interview with a Korean gaming website in anticipation of the Korean service catching up with global.

https://archive.fo/bWLY5


- He is considering getting a Korean interpreter for his live letters (why doesn't English have this?).

- They can't do fan festivals in every region for every expansion. (Maybe they'll rotate?)

- Yoshida thinks that gamers have limited free time and that FF14 needs to change (even more!?) to fit that. (I think he misunderstands that MMOs cater to a niche, to people who WANT games that require a lot of time to play. If he tries to eliminate that to cater to the masses, he will continue alienating his MMO fans who tried sticking with FF14, and won't gain as many long term customers from the masses to replace them).

[mercerxiv]

Yeah, unrestricted glamour is a mistake, but that mistake has been made a long time ago with universal glamour items like dresses and "nightgown" type items. You already have tanks in stripper outfits, so it's just all a part of the long slide into fortnite-esque clown parade. There's already plenty of modern looking "drip" type clothing as well. I think the silver lining here is that you will be able to mix Fending and Maiming gear to escape the extremely lazy tank gear designs by SE and mix things up at least somewhat.

Since last post I've had some success getting a few leftards suspended, confirming that if you learn the rules you can get some work done towards cleaning out at least vocal shitlibs/********/etc.. I do wish there were more right wingers around to play with, but it's not all bad, there's still a decent amount of normies you can play with, and maybe some you can even radicalize towards the right.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Patch 7.4 has dropped, so it is time to get caught up.


Main story patch 7.3

► Show Spoiler

The locker was neat.

It is ridiculous how cutscenes show a "crowd" of a dozen NPCs max in a humongous plaza, emphasizing how empty the modelled space is. I remember when Heavensward a decade ago had a hundred+ civilians showing up for a ceremony in an Ishgardian outpost. On the PS3. What happened?







The characters are talking as if 5,000 people getting Neo Regulators is a large portion of the population of Alexandria. But Solution Nine looks like a dense metropolitan center of millions of people. 5,000 should be a small percentage.






This is the umpteenth time I've had a climatic dungeon in which I ran through flashbacks of the apocalyptic fall of a world while the villain narrated.

They do the Hades/Zeromus thing for the third time where you kill the boss in gameplay, and then it immediately respawns in the following cutscene. This time the rationale for it makes more sense than the last two times, but it's still the third time we've been subjected to this trick.

At least Necron here in FF14 actually has an explanation behind it. That was more than could be said for the final boss of FF9 that showed up out of absolutely nowhere.

They did a good job presenting Wuk Lamat's herculean strength and sheer will by continuing to grip the axe and swing into the force field.






It is very nice that the protagonist finally gets to do something in a cutscene rather than just stand there while everyone else does stuff.

Why is Bakool Ja Ja the bully now being treated as a kindly wise old man we should take life advice from?

I think that was 1 to 1.5 hours of long winded goodbyes for characters I didn't care about.

I disliked how Calyx summons a primal and then Y'shtola immediately leaps to "Ascian involvement". Alexandria had ruled over some Turalians who were caught within the dome for 30 years. It would have been trivial to have learned about Primal summonings from them. It also makes the universe feel smaller if the answer to everything is "Ascians". What little of Dawntrail's plot that intrigued me was Alexandria being an empire invading from their dying home dimension, having invented interdimensional fusion which is unique to them.

Main story patch 7.4

► Show Spoiler

The patch starts off with long winded goodbyes for Alphinaud and Alisaie. Goodness gracious. We already waved them off at the end of the base Endwalker story, only for them to almost immediately reappear in the EW patch story, and then in Dawntrail. They are the deuteragonists of the game. They're gonna be back for the next expansion within the next couple of years. Why did we need to do this? We also get inane posturing from the writers about how Alphinaud and Alisaie have learned so much from their journey and Tural and now must go back to the smoking ruins of Garlemald and teach them the secret ways of LOVE AND PEACE.




The trooncat is finally gone. Good riddance. I actually don't dislike the character as written and presented in the cutscenes that much. She sounds cute in Japanese. The English dub voice actor being a man pretending to be a kawaii furry princess just makes her dead on arrival.

If Sphene is going to be queen of Alexandria then she really, really should be accompanied by at least one or two loyal Alexandrians to bodyguard her or act as her retainers. Hire some of those outskirts hunters or Arcadion fighters, I am sure some of them would be okay with being royal bodyguards. It is unreasonable for her to expect that the Scions would be at her beck and call to escort her everywhere, and she definitely can't go out into the world alone.

Sphene's diplomatic mission to the surviving towns on the Ninth means nothing for Alexandria because the stargate is located within Tural's territory in South America, not where Alexandria is now located in North America. Any trade from Treno through the stargate to Alexandria would have to first go through the stargate and emerge in Tural, and pass through hundreds or thousands of miles within Tural's domain before reaching Alexandria. Aside from specialized Electrope support, there is no way for Alexandria to beat Tural as a trade partner for the towns of the Ninth as the costs of overland travel and border tariffs would cause the prices of Alexandria goods to increase. So Sphene just enriched her neighboring country that she was just at war with rather than her own.

Despite us visiting a town inhabited by Lalafells, we haven't gotten any actual Lalafell lore or culture like when we went to the Azim Steppe and learned about Xaela, or Viera, or the Dwarves on the First. Disappointing.

The Doomtrain was a fun boss. Cool mode, and the first boss fight we have had in - how many years? - that has terrain on the field, with there being two floors and crates you can hide behind. It feels somewhat WoW-esque with how the fight moves from train platform to platform.








More repetitive longwinded goodbyes for people we had JUST met.

Calyx is back. Ishikawa just can't let her villains go. Ever since Yotusyu in Stormblood, she has been trapped in this pattern where she writes a villain, the villain is not well received, so then she brings the villain back from the dead and tries to play him off more sympathetically to "redeem" him. She did this with Yostuyu, then Zenos, then Asahi/Fandaniel, then Sphene, and now Calyx. Calyx is a ******* turbo mass murderer who dissolves people's souls into liquid aether so they can't even reincarnate via the Lifestream so he can achieve a parody of eternal life. Look forward to his sad goodbye scene in the next expansion and the historical revisionism about how he was such a misunderstood, tragic soul.




We get a new character introduced named Halmarut, who is a surviving sundered Ascian. In spite of Yoshida's promise that the Ascian story ended in 6.0. And now Halmarut is insinuating that because Hydaelyn is gone, the Reflections are going to collapse. What happened to the brand new storyline that was promised? Instead this is just a continuation/rehash of the first storyline.

Halmarut's faux ditzy bookworm girl mannerisms do not make her very intriguing as a villain. And the writers stuffed Calyx into a doll?!?!

The main story continues to be bad. They are still beating us over the head with death cult speeches about "seeking eternal life is bad, you must instead be content with dying and cessation of existence!". The pacing continues to be abysmally slow. There is no tension as no one or places we care about are truly at risk. Etc. Doomtrain fight was novel, though.



8 man raid storyline - Arcadion part 3/3 final chapter

► Show Spoiler

The story overall ended as anticipated (ie the President was not evil, everything turns out alright) and was okay. There was nothing really wrong with it, but I am little jaded of the "actually, the villain did it all for you! He was the true hero all along sacrificing himself against the true threat!" I have seen over and over and over again. It presents a world in which there is all of this fighting and kidnappings and other foul things happening, but there are no perpetrators. Everybody was a good boy, and evil does not exist.

Overall I'd rank tier 2 > 1 > 3. The strength of the Arcadion series was in the personalities of the characters. The second tier not only introduced new cool characters like Dancing Green and Howling Blade, but also brought back some fun characters from tier 1 like Honey Bee Lovely. Tier 3 is lacking in that regard as none of the new fighters are really memorable (the Tyrant, the reigning champion on the poster for this patch, was a let down), and the old ones don't get brought back prominently either. Tier 2 also had the best tracks with Dancing Green's disco and then Howling Blade's rock (which warmed up on me). Tier 3 had meh music, none that are keepers. Yoshi-P advertised Rage in the Machine doing a song for this raid series, but it turned out to be forgettable.






Overall, I'd rank the Arcadion as the best 8 man raid story. It is interesting throughout and all of the bosses are characterized as people, and the fun theme. The other 8 man raid series have you mostly fight random fodder monsters and villains you don't give a hoot about, not necessarily bad that they are random but it makes for an overall forgettable plot up until the last tier because everything before then is filler.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have finished reading Naoki Yoshida's first "Yoshida Uncensored" book.

► Show Spoiler

When they were supposed to be working, they were playing Diablo at work. They needed more storage space for their items, so someone kept a computer at work running Diablo 24/7 so they could drop items off and on there. A few weeks later the computer crashed and they lost all of their items.

Yoshida played a lot of Ultima Online, DaoC, and WoW. Particularly WoW while at work.

How Yoshida was assigned to FF14: Yoshida was working as the director of Dragon Quest 10 while the original director was absent for a while. When the original director came back, Yoichi Wada didn't want Yoshida's talents being wasted being a redundant director on a game, so he was taken off of the project. Yoshida, Hiroshi Takai (The Last Remnant director), and Hiroshi Minagawa (lead UI artist) were considered the odds ones out at Square Enix. They were recognized for their talents but didn't quite jive with the sensibilities of everyone else there. So they were thrown together. During this time, Square Enix - once lauded for their beautiful games - was being overtaken by high fidelity AAA titles from the West. The three were chosen by the company to go overseas to the US and London to see how Western AAA studios made their games. They came back and wanted to make games that would appeal to Westerners.

They started preproduction on a game that would have looked like Bloodborne (gothic aesthetic), but played like Evolve (4 players vs 1 player as a strong monster). Neither Bloodborne nor Evolve had been announced yet. They said that they would have panicked because their game probably would not have been as good as either if they had continued on with it and released around the same time. The early development was taking longer than usual because Yoshida wanted to train the lower ranked devs and get them to solve the problems on their own that Yoshida already had the answer to, but Takai wanted Yoshida to just tell those devs what to do and get on with development.

A few weeks after FF14 1.0 launched, the three were browsing the internet and saw the scathing criticism of the game. Initially they thought it was an Everquest 1 to Everquest 2 situation where the fans of the original are just upset with this new thing that is seemingly replacing the old thing, but then it turned out that there were actually serious problems with FF14. Minagawa and Takai were asked by FF14 staff to diagnose what was going wrong, so Yoshida let them off of the project they were working on to go check it out. At 10 PM at night, Minagawa and Takai came back into Yoshida's room and locked the doors and told him it was actually really, really bad, and were explaining to him everything that had gone wrong. After that, Yoshida walked over to the FF14 area and started asking devs questions. This happened at the beginning of October. On October 9th, Yoshida went to president Yoichi Wada's office and told him it was a company wide emergency.

Eventually, Yoshida started having meetings with the FF14 staff about what was going wrong and what needed to be fixed, and more and more FF14 staff started showing up. Then towards the end of November, Yoichi Wada had heard about this and called Yoshida, Takai, and Minagawa into his office and asked what should be done. Yoshida said that the 1.0 game was fundamentally unsalvageable and that they should invest in making a new FF14 game to replace it, while also keeping 1.0 running and developing new stuff for it in the mean time to retain people already invested. Yoshida was appointed as director of this project. When it came to deciding who would be the producer, Takai said Yoshida should be the producer too since it would take too long for Yoshida to explain to some other random person appointed as the producer all of the intricacies of what was going on and what needed to be done, and the FF14 staff already trusted Yoshida. So Yoshida got appointed as producer too. Yoshida then went back to the FF14 staff and trying to raise morale/win them over by saying that he wouldn't let all of their hard work go to waste.

During this time (while talking to the FF14 staff and then doing the meetings about what needs to be done), Yoshida had never talked to the original FF14 producer Hiromichi Tanaka. Yoshida wound up feeling bad because Tanaka had originally welcomed Yoshida into the company, and now Yoshida felt like he had spat in his face.

The project was difficult for Yoshida as he had to not only manage the development of the new game, but also continued development of 1.0. So he was managing two games at once.

Yoshida started doing the unscripted Live Letters to try to convey to players how seriously they were taking the situation and to win back trust.

Fanfest by itself is unprofitable, but is necessary to keep up the appearance that the game is successful and get more people to join FF14 and to have better feelings about it. No one wants to join a MMO that they don't think is doing well or that the devs don't care.

Yoshida got the idea for the Dalamud calamity for the end of 1.0 while watching a sensationalist TV broadcast about the 2012 end of the Mayan doomsday.

Yoshida planned to unveil the End of ARR cinematic to the wider public at E3, and had already commissioned the CGI studio to make it. The foreign localization teams were made aware of this plan months in advance. He got very frustrated when about a month out from E3, the English team told Yoshida that they did not think this was a good idea and recommended he should not do it. The English team said that the cinematic Yoshida had in mind would only mean something to people who are already fans of FF14, and wouldn't mean anything to the masses at E3. The team had apparently thought this from the get go when they had been informed about Yoshida's intentions, but said nothing and sat on this for a while because they felt that they were viewed as being secondary/of less importance to the Japanese they work for. After his outburst, Yoshida wound up acquiescing to the English and delayed the End of ARR cinematic trailer, but wished that they had told him earlier.

Making ARR was stressful because they were making each of the different systems separately from each other. The graphics, the battle system, the servers, etc. They did not get to fit it all together for a test run into late into development.

The basic party size was set to 4 because it was easily divisible. An 8 man boss fight would have two party blocks, etc.

When the ARR alpha tests began, each day he had the team leads read the forums and gather feedback on what the players wanted (ie fixes or new features). The leads would then come to Yoshida and he would ask them how long it would take to implement this. Then he made schedule/queue of the things to be fixed/implemented, and this queue started getting longer and longer and would extend after ARR's launch into the patches.

During the betas, the UI system was using a middleware and was not adequate, so Yoshida had them tear out the old UI system and make a new one. This required 30 programmers. It was implemented by beta test #3.

For the ARR media tour, "interviews" with gaming press is not really being interviewed. You instead invite the gaming press to listen to you as you try to sell the game.

For ARR, they couldn't reuse the server hardware from 1.0, so all of that had to be thrown out and new servers purchased.

Servers are very expensive, mainly do the ongoing cost of the land and electricity. First, you have the physical size of the servers, so if you floor is not big enough then you need to get another floor. Second, even if you have extra space on your floor to fit in more servers, you cannot overdraw electricity on a floor. If you go over, then you get charged a huge overdraw bill. Having to rent an extra floor is a huge leap in costs. So they are loathe to do anything that will result in adding more floors. Also, when you buy server hardware, you can't sell it back to the company you bought it from, and there isn't really anything else at the company that can make use of the server hardware. So if you ordered more server hardware than you needed, then you wasted your money.

Towards the release of ARR, Yoshida had the devs use current beta test participation to estimate how many servers they would need, and they bought the servers based on that. During the final ARR beta test, while Yoshida was on a media tour in Europe, he received a phone call from his dev team. They noticed that a lot of old 1.0 players who had given up on FF14 were now returning at the last minute due to the positive word of mouth, and that the current servers would not be enough for ARR's launch. The team had already contacted the server hardware company and was ready to order more and just needed Yoshida's go-ahead, but it would take 3 weeks for them to set up the servers. Yoshida told them to do it and he would explain to Square Enix later.

I am now on the second book.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Square Enix has shut down a fan blog by threatening to sue them, claiming that they are "protecting their staff". Bear in mind that when Dawntrail launched in 2024 and people complained about the heroine being dubbed by a ******, Yoshida came out to defend it, and then SE said that they would take action against people who "harm their staff". Though I am not sure what the inciting event was for this blog.

https://archive.fo/tXRgU

As the administrator of this blog, "Netoge Breaking News (formerly FF14 Breaking News)," I deeply regret the inconvenience and burden that some articles posted on it have caused to Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd., Square Enix Co., Ltd., and their affiliates.

After discussions between the parties, we have decided to close this blog. While

the posting of the articles in question was not intended to infringe on the rights or reputation of any specific corporation or affiliate, we would like to apologize for the concerns that have resulted.

March 2, 2026 Administrator of
Netoge Breaking News (formerly FF14 Breaking News)

[url="chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.jp.square-enix.com/company/ ... d0cb73.pdf"]Square Enix's press release: [/url]

Translation
Regarding Our Response to Harassment Against Our Officers and Employees
We sincerely thank you for your continued patronage of Square Enix Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "the Company") products and services.
We take the valuable feedback, opinions, and requests we receive from our customers very seriously, recognising them as essential for improving our products and services. We strive daily to utilise this input for enhancing our existing offerings and developing new products and services.

As announced on our company website on 10 January 2025, maintaining a workplace environment where our officers and employees can work safely and securely is an extremely important management issue, particularly in response to certain instances of excessive harassment. Therefore, based on our "Policy for Addressing Customer Harassment", we are taking resolute action against such harassment.

We hereby state that we have requested disclosure of the sender's information concerning the administrator of the website "Netoge Sokuho (formerly FF14 Sokuho)" (URL: https://ff14net.2chblog.jp/). This request was made on the grounds that the website published an article containing content that diminishes the social standing of the staff of 'Final Fantasy XIV'. Subsequently, the corporation providing the service used by the administrator of the aforementioned website voluntarily disclosed the sender's information. Following discussions with the administrator, a settlement was reached whereby the site was closed, an apology statement published, and a settlement payment made. We hereby report this outcome.

Moving forward, we will continue to take strict measures, including legal action, against acts that attack specific individuals or harass our officers and employees, threatening their safety and mental well-being. This is to protect our officers and employees and maintain a healthy workplace environment. We strongly urge everyone to review our "Policy on Responding to Customer Harassment" and refrain from any behaviour that undermines the dignity of our officers and employees.

We shall continue to strive to meet and exceed your expectations, providing entertainment that surpasses them.

We sincerely ask for your continued understanding and support of our activities.

<signature of the company>

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The saga continues!

https://archive.fo/mGXfl

Just a day later, another blog, called Umadori Sokuhō, announced that it would cease updates and shut down. The administrators have also issued an apology to Final Fantasy XIV development and management staff.

Both Netoge Sokuhō and Umadori Sokuhō are so-called “matome” sites, which generally post “articles” created by compiling excerpts from the anonymous message board 5channel. In the case of Netoge Sokuhō, some of the content posted to the blog was determined to constitute harassment of Square Enix employees, which ultimately prompted the company to take action. However, it seems that that whoever is running Umadori Sokuhō has decided to learn from Netoge Sokuhō’s example and self-initiatively cease activities.

The statement posted on March 3 reads: “Having reconsidered the weight of responsibility involved in disseminating information online, I have decided to draw a line under this matter in my own way. To all the FF14 development and operations staff whom I have inconvenienced, I sincerely apologize.”

[mynameismortis]

For ****'s sake why did i check some random youtuber's twitter profile. This game is hotbed of degeneracy, how did it became such in the first place?

[rusty_shackleford]

For ****'s sake why did i check some random youtuber's twitter profile. This game is hotbed of degeneracy, how did it became such in the first place?

It's over for val....

[Val the Moofia Boss]

For ****'s sake why did i check some random youtuber's twitter profile. This game is hotbed of degeneracy, how did it became such in the first place?

The game's 1. attractive characters, 2. modding scene due to no anti-cheat, and 3. housing led to the game building a subcommunity who treat it as Second Life. People who log in to go to "venues" (player houses that are opened up and used as virtual nightclubs hosting dozens to hundreds of people... and beyond that, ERP dens and brothels). There were also "modbeasts", people who download lots of mods to give their characters humongous breasts or futadicks or whatever, and even used another mod called Mare Synchronos to allow people to automatically download and install each other's mods during runtime so everyone can see how they are "supposed" to look like. Predictably, a lot of these users are also BluSky people.

That scene was only a minority of the playerbase up until recent years. Up until Endwalker, most FF14 players were sane, playing mainly for the story, and/or for the MMO parts.

After Endwalker concluded the story and then transitioned into a lackluster followup storyline, a lot of the story players lost interest and quit. And as a MMO, the experience has gotten worse over time. You get less bang for your buck. We used to get patches every 3 months bringing with them three new dungeons, then 2 new dungeons every 4 patches. Now we get one dungeon per patch every 5 months. Etc. So a lot of the MMO players left too.

So the playerbase has hollowed out. But the Second Life community of venue and modbeast people remained relatively intact, so the proportion of them in the remaining player population has become relatively larger. When Mare was finally banned last year, it had 100k users, which amounts to about 10% of FF14's remaining estimated playerbase as per LuckyBancho's census.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

New live letter happened.

The promised Blue Mage update for this expansion will not be happening as promised, and has instead been pushed back to the next expansion. Apparently it came at the expense of the Beastmaster job.

Beastmaster job unveiled. Is basically blue mage in that you can only really play by yourself in its own isolated game mode and not for normal play. You can tame monsters and summon up to three of them at a time to help you solo clear dungeons. Level cap is 50 so you can only do ARR content. RIP

Beastmaster was announced as a key selling point for this expansion way back in 2023, and will not have arrived until 2026 in the last patch of the expansion.

[J1M]

Would love to hear a candid conversation between Japanese businessmen about being beholden to degenerate Second Life modders for their IP's value.

[methoxetamine]

Would love to hear a candid conversation between Japanese businessmen about being beholden to degenerate Second Life modders for their IP's value.

God I can't even imagine how somber that room is at Square Enix, those guys gotta be all on the verge of suicide

[anvi]

I tried a final fantasy MMO, don't know what it was. Maybe this one. I hated having to run miles and miles and mileessss. I also didn't like the style in general. I kept hearing it gets good later on but that just made me dislike it more. Why can't it be good from the start? I don't like being baited like a fish.

EQ gets remembered as being a harsh *****, which it mostly was. But yet I was hooked by level 2 and the long range running was far more eventful than anything I played since. I could get Spirit of Wolf off someone which felt like getting nitros. And I liked sneaking through areas with invis. Also finding even one group of mobs that are a similar level was something useful to make a note of.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I tried a final fantasy MMO, don't know what it was. Maybe this one. I hated having to run miles and miles and mileessss. I also didn't like the style in general. I kept hearing it gets good later on but that just made me dislike it more. Why can't it be good from the start? I don't like being baited like a fish.

Hrm hard to tell which one it is. FF11 is the one in which you have to spend A LOT of time slowly running on foot across a huge world. FF14 has a higher movement speed, relatively smaller maps, teleporters everywhere, and gives you a mount early on. FF14 however is the one with the reputation that the story gets better in the first expansion.

As for why FF14 wasn't "good" from the start (I thought it was), the dev team had the difficulty of both continuing to produce patch content for the original 1.0 game, and making a new game at the same time. They were developing the different systems like the graphics, the battle system, the netcode, etc, in isolation from each other, and did not successfully combine them together until late into development. The base game's questline was made in a mad scramble during the last 6 months of development. It was not until 2.0 had released and they were beginning work on the Heavensward expansion that the situation had stabilized and they had more time to think through what they were doing. There was a revamp of the ARR questline a few years ago that trimmed some stuff.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

7.5 live letter happened.

Surprisingly, Beastmaster pets will be able to be summoned in the cities.




It turns out that the "three pets" was a translation misunderstanding. You cannot have 3 pets out at once, only 3 pets equipped and able to switch between during combat.

It seems that there is a skillchain-lite system for the beastmaster and their pet. Hard to tell because they are speaking in Japanese and there is no translation for what they are saying. We have to play this game of telephone of relying on people on discords doing translations of what they are saying offhand.






You can get big pets.




Too bad Beastmaster will be a limited job and is thus capped at level 50 and can't do real content. Given how Blue Mage came out 7 years ago and is still two expansions behind, capped at level 80, it seems doubtful BST will ever catch up.

There is no reason why this should be a limited job. WoW hunters can go do the latest expansion story and raid, GW2 rangers, etc. But FF14, this (and everything) is apparently such a struggle.

[rusty_shackleford]

There is no reason why this should be a limited job

Blue mage was the only class I tried that actually felt unique, and this was because it was limited. The game was so homogenized that it made late-era WoW look like EQ.

[J1M]

What can a Beastmaster actually do then? I'm assuming anyone interested in this stuff has a max level character so they aren't seeing the main quest with the new class.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

What can a Beastmaster actually do then? I'm assuming anyone interested in this stuff has a max level character so they aren't seeing the main quest with the new class.

It used to be that you could do side quests or the beast tribe reps on limited jobs, but a few days ago it was announced that the devs would be restricting that come the new patch on the 28th.




Limited jobs can't queue for content like everyone else does, or do PvP. The only thing they can do is open world FATEs, solo queue (or in a group with other limited jobs) for instances for achievements (and in Blue Mage's case, obtain the exclusive abilities there), and do the solo challenge content exclusive to that limited job (Masked Carnivale for Blue Mage, Crucible of the Unbroken for Beastmaster).