Below is a great interview done for the Rift Podcast site. Watch it!

As seen on the official FF_XIV_NA twitter account:

FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test will begin on Sep. 1, 2010 at 19:00 (PDT)!

We are looking forward to your participation in FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test! http://entry.ffxiv.com/

FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test Will Start on Sep. 1!

We would like to take this opportunity to provide an update regarding FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test, which was announced to be postponed on Aug. 31, 2010.

Along with the completion on investigation and correction of the critical issue, we have decided to begin FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test on Sep. 1, 2010 at 19:00 (PDT).

Starting on Sep. 1, 2010 at 19:00 (PDT), acquisition of registration code required for FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test will be available.

We are looking forward to your participation in FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test!

Good news. See you all in Open Beta!

FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test Postponed

FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test, which is scheduled to begin at 19:00 (PDT) on Aug. 31, 2010, will be postponed due to a confirmation of critical bugs. New schedule will be releaseｄ at a later date.

Along with the postponement of FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test, the issuing of registration code for FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test will be postponed as well. With the download of client software’s installer, it will be suspended at 19:00 (PDT) on Aug. 31, 2010.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

….

FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test Postponed: Follow-up

We would like to take this opportunity to provide an update regarding the FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test, which was announced to be postponed on Aug. 31, 2010.

A critical issue where the client software for the open beta test would not respond on certain rare occasions has been addressed. As of now, we are in the final stages of preparation for the start of the FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test.

A new schedule will be released at a later date. Until then, we ask for your patience in this matter.

This news, combined with the fact that someone linked me this video (also shown below – highly recommend you watch it!) on twitter, led me to picking up a Minecraft pre-order. Securing a pre-order not only helps support the development, but it nets you 50% off the beta-and-onward pricing as well as giving you access to play the alpha, which includes the amazingly addictive and open-ended “Survival” mode. I’m having a blast with it. It literally pulls you into it’s simplistic, yet engaging world, and sucks time away. All I can remember of the last seven hours is that I started playing Minecraft around midnight and the sun is now up!

I was (still, maybe?) tempted to reactivate Aion and give it shot, considering the patch 2.0 news has got me interested in it again. I’ll probably just wait it out for the FFXIV Open Beta, as it sounds like it should still be less than a week away.

I could probably name-drop a few more “subscription & cash-shop” games, but let’s stick to EQ2 and Champions Online (and breifly Star Trek Online). These are the ones that I have personally experienced and felt that the cash-shop was an impediment in my enjoyment of the game and left a very bad taste in my mouth.

Lets’ start with EQ2. I never even thought twice about the cash-shop in EQ2 until they announced and rolled out the EQ2X campaign and payment models. Let’s stop and take a look at how most successful “free2play” MMOs work. It is the game account and client that is free and you buy bits and pieces of content that suit your needs, as well as fluff and vanity items, in the in-game cash-shop. The cash-shop purchases, from the crowd that makes the purchases, is usually what covers the lack of a subscription fee and makes up for (or surpasses in a lot of cases) the loss of the monthly subscription fee or lack of cash-shop sales from the other players. The ones that actively and continually buy things in the cash-shop, essentially pay for the bums and WoW-tourists that just want to play for free. This is a concrete model and it works for the best of them. Even games like League of Legends have shown great success in North America and Europe following this model, perhaps with the most elegantly handled execution of a cash-shop I’ve seen in any free2play. I’ve easily spent upwards of $50 in League of Legends. That alone covers a “retail box” purchase, and I’m sure I’ll spend more as more champions are rolled out each month.

EQ2 already had the groundwork to make it a purely free2play, cash-shop driven game if it wanted to. All it had to do was tinker with what they were selling in the “Station Store” and lock away some content into the store for those who were not monthly subscribers. Instead they went out of their way to make a convoluted tiered subscription system entirely separate from the normal subscription and give the free2play players nothing more than a handicapped, slice-of-content, demo.

On to Cryptic. Oh, Cryptic. Let me start by getting this out there – I’m not a fan of anything Cryptic has done post-City of Heroes and I think their game-engine is the biggest clunker, mess of a game engine, to ever plague an MMO. Just keep this in mind.

Cryptic followed in EQ2′s footstep by focusing largely, from the very beginning, on planning content to be sold in their Cryptic Store. We’re talking vanity pets and things as nickle’n'dime as costume pieces. I’m pretty sure, eight years later, City of Heroes/Villains is still adding costume pieces for free!

Seriously, Cryptic?

I can’t really comment on Star Trek Online as I was not to be fooled out of $50 twice by them, but I do know they have a cash-shop for STO as well. “Live long and prosp..er..spend money in our cash shop on top of your $15 subscription!”

I need to stop before I start getting too cynical and snarky. This just hits a nerve in me, I guess. It’s along the lines of how Activision decided to start charging $60 for PC games with Modern Warfare 2 and how Ubisoft followed their lead without missing a beat. It’s like no one even cared enough to question why this is flying. We all just keep buying their games and we’ll just let them get away with it and let them make it a new standard? No thank you. I’ll take my free2play MMORPGs (that I thoroughly enjoy, mind you!) and I’ll take my standard $50 retail, $15/month MMORPGs as well – just keep them separate please!

Can Open Beta hurry up and start already?!

UPDATE: My rhetorical questioning has been answered. It looks like Open Beta will begin August 31st. That is even earlier than “early Septemeber!” Thank you, FFXIVCORE for being amazingly fast at breaking news.

News of Final Fantasy XIV’s fatigue system has hit the web recently, causing a firestorm of controversy.  Translation issues and mass speculation served to light a fire in the community, and a vocal segment is demanding the system be removed.  Such demands, however, stem from not thinking the system through.

When designing an MMO, one of the things that needs to go in is some sort of limit on the possible progression of players.  Developers need to control the rate at which players can approach the endgame, and other milestones along the way.  Usually this is done with an Experience Point (XP) curve.

An XP curve is really nothing more than a time sink.  Developers decide how long they want certain segments of the game to take–how long they want certain level ranges to last, and ultimately how long it should take players to reach endgame.  They then balance the amount of XP it is possible to gain in a given time frame with the amount required to move beyond a certain a certain point, or level up.

XP gain may give the illusion of progression but that’s all it is–an illusion.  Gaining XP is not progressing a character.  It does not impart any new strengths or abilities by itself.  Levels are the real progression.  Levels provide increased statistics and new abilities.

In reality, a game is designed and played from level to level, not from one experience point to the next.  Being level 57 with 8000 XP towards level 58 doesn’t let you do level 58 content any more than being level 57 worth 0 XP towards level 58 does.  Being level 58 lets you do level 58 content.  The XP required to get from level 57 to level 58 is merely a time sink.  You spend enough time grinding it out, and you get to be level 58.

Experience point income is balanced against the total XP required for a level up in such a way as to have players spending a certain amount of time between level ups.  This is true in any MMO, and Final Fantasy XIV is no different.

However, FFXIV puts a spin on the system.  The developers for FFXIV are looking at it from the perspective that levels are the progression, not XP.  XP is certainly not useless, but it is merely a means to an end.  They also, like all developers, have in mind a rate at which they want players to reach certain level milestones.

For most MMOs, with a purely XP-based system, if the developers decide that levels should be gained at the rate of 1 per week, players have to grind away all week, making no real character progress, until they get that 1 level at the end of the week.  THAT is the progress–regardless of whatever number is in the XP box, it is the 1 level that ultimately matters.  And if you can’t grind away all week, you don’t get it.  If it takes you three times as long to rack up the necessary game time, you get no progress on your character at all for three weeks.

The fatigue system is also a time sink, but functions a bit differently.  It still works off of the concept that players should only attain a certain amount of progression per week, but it doles out that progression more quickly up front.  This has two important effects.  First, it means that even those who cannot play 6-8 hours a day every day can make some progress.  Not as much overall, but some.  Second, it means that after the week’s progression on one class has been reached, players are free to mess around with others–a level of freedom and diversification that most games don’t have.

Make no mistake; if SE decides that you should only gain 3 levels in a class per week, then that is all you will gain.  Without fatigue–with a basic XP system–all your play time in that week would be devoted to a single class as XP requirements increase to compensate, and wanting to level something else would mean sacrificing progression in that one class.

With the fatigue system, instead of sacrificing XP time to do things that don’t involve leveling your main class, you get to have all the XP you’d normally get for the week anyway, and then focus on other aspects of the game.  Want to level another class? Go do it.  Want to quest? Sure.  How about crafting? Also an option.  Or maybe you just want to explore.  In other MMOs, all of these activities come at the cost of XP.  That is not the case here.  And if you really want to grind away at one class well, you can hop on it at the beginning of the week, and still have time to hit it again later in the week after surplus has cleared from not leveling it.  Bonus!

Final Fantasy XIV was designed with a certain philosophy.  The fatigue system is part of enacting that philosophy.  It is no more limiting than a standard XP system, as progression is balanced around it.  It offers more freedom than conventional systems, simply by allowing for different allocations of play time with no penalty.  Can it stand some tweaking and balancing?  Probably.  But doing away with it entirely will cause a progression re-balance what will completely undermine any kind of horizontal character development, as well as force unnecessary choices between whether to XP a main class, or do anything else.  And the ultimate gain on main class progression will be no different.

Final Fantasy XI forums and fansites blew up yesterday with the translation of a developer update posted on the Japanese beta site that covered the “surplus system,” or as I like to call it now, the “xp threshold system.” People were going crazy with conspiracy theories and threats of “I just canceled my CE pre-order Square-Enix!” (Onos!)

Today Nobuaki Komoto posted an update on the North American FFXIV beta site addressing these issues directly to the NA/EU audience. No shoddy translations or guessing games. This is what he had to say:

Once again, we would like to thank you all for your participation and support during the Closed Beta. We will continue to take your valuable feedback into consideration as we develop the game during Open Beta and even beyond the official release.

Now I would like to take a moment to respond to the many questions and opinions regarding the manner in and rates at which experience and skill points are obtained in Beta 3.

Firstly, the concept for FINAL FANTASY XIV was to design a system of character progression that offers meaningful advancement for those with limited time to dedicate to playing. We did not want to create a game that forced people to play for hours on end to see their efforts rewarded. To that end, in addition to the Guardian’s Aspect and guildleve systems, we introduced a means of apportioning swifter advancement to shorter periods of play.

In order to achieve this balance, we calculated a value for the amount of skill or experience points that could be earned in a one-hour period. This theoretical value represents an hour spent engaged solely in combat, levequests, or any other activities that earn skill or experience points, and sets a threshold delimiting how many of these points can be earned in a period of play.

Based on this, we have implemented a “threshold value” concept. These thresholds are regulated by a one-week timer that begins counting down the instant you earn skill/experience points. After a week has passed, the thresholds will reset, and the moment skill/experience points are earned again, the timer begins counting down anew.

For the first eight thresholds during this week-long period, players will receive skill/experience points at the maximum rate possible. The actual amount of time spent reaching these thresholds is not significant. That is to say, a player who exceeds eight hours of gameplay will still be rewarded the maximum amount of skill/experience points, so long as the total amount earned is below the eighth threshold value. For the subsequent seven thresholds, players will earn skill/experience points at a gradually decreasing rate, eventually reaching a rate of zero.

It is worth noting, however, that the reduced rate will also gradually recover while players are engaged in activities that do not yield skill/experience points. In this manner, it is possible for the threshold value to reset completely, even before the completion of the one-week timer.

Any skill points earned in excess of the threshold maximum—that is, at a rate of zero—will be stored as “bonus skill points.” These are specific to each class, so players limited to earning bonus skill points still have the freedom to change classes and begin earning skill points again at the maximum rate, allowing their reduced skill rates to recover in the meantime.

The experience point threshold, however, is unrelated to class, and switching classes will have no effect on the decreasing rate of earnable experience.

This is how the progression system currently works.

This system was not introduced in Beta 3, but has been in place since the beginning of beta testing. There are several reasons why many people believe that these features were only recently implemented:

- Leading into Beta 3, operation hours were extended, making it possible to play more often during the span of a week.
- To encourage players to form guidleve parties in Beta 3, skill and experience point rewards for guildleves were significantly increased.
- The process that reduced the amount of skill/experience points awarded for weak enemies attacking in groups was unintentionally removed at the start of Beta 3. (This issue has been addressed.)

That last reason in particular was the biggest cause for players running up against the threshold penalty, with characters earning far more skill/experience points than we anticipated. We also faced an issue where we were simultaneously unable to adjust the amount earned for guildleves as well as the effects of crossing each threshold.

We sincerely apologize for the lack of explanation and our failure to make the necessary adjustments in the game.

The threshold values are being reexamined, and we plan to further adjust the different rates of earnable points based on feedback from our testers. One of the top issues we are looking at right now is fixing the excessively rapid drop after crossing the eighth threshold. We also plan to improve experience point reduction rates, even more so than for skill points, considering the threshold is unaffected when changing class.

At the very least, we can promise that players won’t be running into the threshold penalty in the same short time span as they did in the beginning of Beta 3.

We would like to take this opportunity to also explain the following issues.

The diminishing results experienced during gathering are a function related to that class alone, and have no connection to this progression system. We are in the process of adjusting this system, and plan to make changes based on tester feedback.

We are currently in the process of considering the means in which bonus skill points can be used. There have been suggestions for various types of incentives, but as encouraging people to play with that in mind defeats the purpose of this threshold system, we will be examining this issue very carefully.

These are not the only adjustments we have planned for Open Beta. As mentioned previously, we are looking into increasing the amount of skill points earned when fighting in a party, and we look forward to seeing your input on these changes.

Last of all, I would like to apologize for the delay in releasing a developer’s comment due to my recent attendance to Gamescom. The article based on my interview during that trip, coupled with conjecture, outdated information, and some misunderstandings on overseas websites, only added to the confusion. In the future, I hope to avoid similar problems by responding directly through official developer’s comments as often as possible. Thank you for your understanding.

See you in the Open Beta Testing!

FINAL FANTASY XIV Director
Nobuaki Komoto

This is what we all wanted.  Excellent, in-depth, explanation of the “surplus/threshold” system and how it is implemented. I don’t see how, even the forum gloom’n'doomers, could twist this into the shit-storm they had made it yesterday. The system Komoto-san explained today sounds completely reasonable, very well thought out, and a great way to alleviate that nagging feeling I always have when playing an MMO (that always leads to me getting burned out). That feeling like you just have to play every waking fee moment you have near a computer, or else you’re falling behind or wasting your hard earned money spent on the monthly fee. I love it.

Best yet, he completely acknowledges that they are still tweaking it and that the system people saw in Beta Phase 3 was not even properly implemented, and was broken by other mechanics that were in place for the beta. How about let’s all withhold judgement till Open Beta or launch. Sounds good to me.

I have sucked at anything that resembles writing/blogging lately, but I felt this was needed. Torchlight is 50% (re: $10) on Steam until Monday. Go buy it!

That is all.

UPDATE: It’s just $4.99 on Steam today (12/26)!

I have a handful (eight at the moment) of League of Legends beta invites to send out and all you have to do is leave a comment with your email or shoot me an email to iWinButton.jt[at]gmail[dot]com with the subject “LoL Beta.”

I’ll update this post once all eight of the invites have been taken care of.

For the less-informed, League of Legends is a spiritual successor to the extremely popular Warcraft III map DOTA (Defense of the Ancients). Check out the LoL site for more info.

I was excited to give Champions Online a try, for if nothing else, to get back into blogging and updating my site. Something about WoW just leaves me completely indifferent towards writing about it, so it’s always nice to play something else and get some actual inspiration and creative juices flowing.

I went into Champions Online retail knowing that performance of the beta client had left a very nasty taste in my mouth, but I was going to try and look past it. About a day into playing, and the game’s performance is really the only knock against the game I have. The graphics are perfect for the style they’re trying for, the character customization is deserving of all the hype (if not more), the depth of character progression and customization (beyond visual) is reminiscent of Star Wars Galaxies level of options, and the combat feels fresh and “actiony,” but still enough of the traditional MMORPG feel to make me happy.

I can’t go into much more than that at this point as I’ve seriously only played an hour hear and there. I’ve been scrapping and remaking characters just to try out a few of the power-sets and I think I’ve settled on the “Telekinesis” powers, which are quite fitting for my psychological-adept, mind-game hero “The Passive-Aggresive.”