Im still a bit confusedFollow

Also, I'm not trying to fight here, just trying to see your side of things because I just can't figure it out

Again, this has zero impact upon servers that have lockouts for Legacy Characters. Players won't be able to bring characters over until long after people have multiple jobs capped and likely their own handful of Relic weapons.

If you're talking about social impact, that's going to happen regardless of whether charaters exist or not.

And no, again aside for selfish reasonings that should be physically beaten out of people's minds, there's no argument to be had here. It all falls back on this idea that some people with a particular mindset want to force that mindset and its rules on other people. It goes completely against what this game has been pushing for, and more importantly it's bad for gaming in total. We need more options in games not less.

Players want that feeling of continuity in what they do, which is why continuing characters is very important. Denying them that is just going to uninvest them from the game, and speaking buisness, you don't want to do that in a subscription enviroment.

Which is thoroughly solved with the introduction of new servers that only serve new players and not existing players. Which I believe Wint and others have mentioned here repeatedly.

There's no power differential between these two groups unless you WANT there to be one by rolling on an established server as opposed to a new server.

It is not logical to wipe existing player data because this isn't a new game. This is a rebuild of an existing game, and these players have put in their time and deserve that not to have been a waste.

As a side example.. Blizzard doesn't wipe player data between expansions.. this isn't strictly an expansion of FFXIV, but it may as well be.

Yeah I don't think you can compare what happens with expansions to what ARR is, that is a bit of a stretch.

I do think you're assuming the worst case scenario though Filth. It could be as you say, but at that point is when I would hope SE would stick to their guns and not allow server transfers for legacy characters. If you want to play on a "dead" server with your old char, go for it. If you want to be part of a new, fresh server then make a new character. I plan on making at least one new char on a fresh server so I can experience that perspective myself. But most of my friends who quit before even getting near the cap want to keep their old chars and continue where they left off. So I'll Keyser Soze on our original server as well.

I did make the assumption that there would be a large surge of players coming to the game, which I think after so long is optimistic. I'm not saying that this is going to cause the game to fail, but the impact will be felt and it scales along with how successful(read: addition of newer players) the game becomes.


ARR is hardly a version update. This game has been completely overhauled. SE themselves have used the specific terms 'reboot' and 'rebirth' to describe what they're doing to the game so the concept you're trying to apply here is a bit of a stretch.

That said, I'd also point out that when you have the proper mechanics in place there isn't a need for hard reset. Allow me to explain...

Disclaimer: I'm going to use WoW as an example here for the sake of familiarity. This is not a rant on how WoW is better than XI or XIV, nor is it intended to spark that age old debate. Let's refrain from beating the horse please.

In XI, there was no clear progression. To this day, there are still level 99 characters using items they could obtain and use more than 60 levels prior.

In WoW, every expansion obsoleted the previous tier's progression. If you had the best of the best gear in WotLK, it was made obsolete by quested items you could obtain in a fraction of the time you'd spent farming epic hardmode gear. If you had saved up tokens or honor it was reset when the next tier of gear became available (Note: Keep this in mind as it links to the argument about people's progression in XIV 1.0 being lost)

You didn't have to reset everyone's level to 0 because obsoleting the previous tier essentially did the same thing. On day 1 of an expansion the most hardcore guilds were all sporting the same crappy greens that 'noobs' were questing for and the field was leveled without need for a hard reset.



It's a pretty well established trend that when an MMO launches it gains a large playerbase quickly, people decide it's not something they want to devote the time to or they don't enjoy it so they leave and eventually the population settles. No crystal ball necessary. Blizzard didn't need to know exactly how many people would be playing at a specific time to know that their progression system was something that would have the desired effect on the entirety of it's population. It's not by any means a concept that Blizzard invented or even innovated.

SE actually tried to do something similar to offset of the initial 6 month gap between PC and PS3 launch, but eventually decided to remove it(probably when they realized they were years off the mark for a PS3 launch).

*EDIT*
Just realized that a new thread voicing the exact same concern I expressed here about new players and old servers popped up today. The first of many I'm sure.

Also, just to give credit where it's due, XI did add gear progression via magian trials which seemed to go over pretty well(minus the whole fire weather is non-existant thing).

Edited, Jan 29th 2013 11:30pm by FilthMcNasty