I wasn't referring to XI being a direct cause of squeenix losing money, but more about their terrible decision making as a company overall. On the contrary, I believe XI is actually still quite profitable in terms of a 10 year old game. Just choices like XIV and XII and XIII.....it seems to be more nails in the coffin than ingenious ideas.

Ashton and Claude both have bones to pick with you!

Ashton Anchors is the greatest backup character in an rpg outside of.....anyone. Plus his dragon twins kick ass.

I'm double posting because it took me the course of an hour to write that last post, its hard to finish a thought while at work.

I can understand botting, which is horseshit and should be banned. It's one thing to pay a person to do your work, but making a program do it is beyond dishonest. One of the things I HATE about ffxi is the massive amount of mods they have for the pc version. Sorry, it's cheating to use windower, it is, deal with it. But bots that allow you to operate while elsewhere.....no, fuck you, banhammer. That's where rmt is out of hand and needs to.be dealt with, and I'm sure it could be handled alot better if companies were more forthcoming on paying for solutions or people to solve these problems directly. I blame that on corporate greed once more, as it's some rinky dink kid sitting in his basement that makes the software to perform these tasks, not some MIT grad with a bachelors' in programming and an associates'  in computer science. What little you claim to know about economy, Akanbe, is about what I know regarding computer program design, but sometimes basic knowledge is pretty good itself.

If RMT stood to be accepted as real people doing the work, then I stand by my opinion that they shouldn't be treated so negatively for it. You wanna bot and and hack and cheat, you deserve the banhammer.

The reason I say it can't hurt them is because generally, the players are going to find methods to do things like that anyway, so if SE drops the banhammer, all they do is lose subscriptions that were paying money, even if they were not doing much in terms of actual play. Instead, they could allow players the limited ability to conduct business via an authorized assistance channel, paying commission fees to veteran players for their services. Something like 1 dollar per 10,000 exp aquired, or 5 dollars for a mission battle completion along with all rewards going to the customer. Takes away some of the competitive edge of selling items like that, which in turn could help adjust the fucked economy in some games. Matter of fact, assigning the drops to the player in a fashion that they couldn't be sold after would even fix it further. This is pretty simplistic to me, as I know it's fully possible to do a fixed to player thing ( ex items in ffxi). You could even leave the non- assisted versions as free to sell, giving players incentive not to pay to win. It's pretty common knowledge that if you make bad things acceptable, people tend to not use them as often, or generally don't go beyond the one bad habit.

Obviously I am no business graduate, but for a company that's losing money because its playerbase is getting annoyed at their bad decisions, maybe they should cater to the fans more instead of assuming they know better. I can't say the same about blizzard or bioware or other mmo developers maybe, but the people who play those types of games are pretty similar between titles. What works on one should work on others. But meh, who am I to call out these asshats, eh?

But in prior years, FFXI was unapproachable as a short term game. The scope of involvement required to advance was massive. As a career Dark Knight, it took me almost a full year of play to reach level 75, which was the old level cap. I had the freedom to dedicate lots of time to do this, so I stayed playing. Numerous friends of mine left the game at around 50 or so due to the sheer grind of getting to the fun stuff end game content. It defeats the the player before they even have a chance to try something hard. Granted, since XI changed its entire everything to easy mode, its more approachable, but players still need to do ridiculous amounts of grinding for the better weaponry and armor. Long story short, this either scares fresh blood away, or infuriates current players who are singled out due to being inferior in terms of gear and level. In this case, I feel that allowing a player controlled boosting system using real money isn't a harmful thing at all. It may not be the case for some mmos, but that's just my opinion here.

Personally, I feel squeenix would do well simply taking a cut of the rmt profits. Can't hurt them, that's for sure.

That's exactly what I was thinking regarding it. Spoiled corporations just want more money, no matter how they get it. I find it hypocritical that we work for their gain only. If I offer 10 bucks to a player for me to tag along and leech experience from their work, and claim any valuable stuff, who is Square Enix to tell me I am breaking their terms of service? Square Enix, Blizzard, SCEA...they don't own my time, and are entitled to no say how I spend it.

Corporate greed is balls.

Ok, so I've been playing FFXI for about 2 years now, with 2 years of PSU and a year of random free to play MMOs, and all this time, real money trading haa been a dominate force behind these games. You get people who don't wanna work who are willing to spend money to make progress in games that usually demand effort for rewards, it's no different from real life. Now personally, I've got a sense of honor (???) when I play games. I earn it, I own it, I keep it as a souvenier, but there are others who don't feel this way as strongly, and as a gamer, I feel this has isn't as huge an issue as companies make it to be. On the contrary, I feel that selling an item or service for a real monetary value is ingenious. So why do so many people frown upon it? Even worse, why do companies like Square Enix and Blizzard go so far to stop it? I can understand that as I don't own the game, selling materials amd items I have found in it are not legal, but in that respect, it's my time I am selling, and no company owns it. If I waste 2 years of my life farming a super rare item and then sell that item to a person, I am not selling him the item, but the extended amount of time I used in my life to obtain it. If I spend 6 hours a day farming cheap crap to sell for money that I intend to sell to someone else, why is this so heavily frowned upon? How does it destroy economies in these games? It's no different from a group of players exploiting high prices in a game by camping any and all places to obtain these items and control the price influx, just one merits a person doing this in a financial way. And as insult to injury, some of these companies offer their own variation, selling items or specialized currency in game for real value to obtain certain items or equipment otherwise inaccessible to players (casual players anyway).

Basically, why does it seem to be okay to condemn players who take advantage of lame people who rather pay to win? Even worse, why is it okay for the companies to take advantage of it?

I enjoyed star ocean 4 as well, outside of terrible.characters. I'd like to see a new star ocean entry that doesn't have such a bleh story and lame characters, because the gameplay is always solid.

Aren't you supposed to be studying right now?

But yeah, I don't see that too much here. 

They did already, and as I recall, Sega flipped the fucked out and filed lawsuits, which is why I assumed a similar reaction here.

I think my first couple of posts here may have lead you all to think I dislike megaman....it's not the case. I would love to play this if my pc wasn't sitting in my room gathering dust because it's shot.

Alright, I figured anything with the word "free" in it wouldn't be supported by capcom, so I'll eat that. But to say it looks amazing.....what? It looks exactly the same as every other megaman nes title. Sure, I sort of wish to play it, but not because it's pretty, but because it's Megaman.

I give it a month before capcom files a complaint.

Based on the video, kiting seemed pointless for those mobs though. Considering as a mage, the player was fighting 2 enemies at once, and standing her ground.

I don't know about anyone else here, but that "typical mmo fare" seems better than anything else I'm playing right now. Quests offering actual rewards, who would have thought it.

I had barely beat the guardian, myself. After the pixie thing said I should defend the major attack, I ended up getting hit by his bellow attack which paralyzed me. So I started spamming the heal spell til he used that special attack again, which I defended against this time. Then I noticed the little orbs everywhere and started picking them up, which made everything easier.

I still look forward to this game's release, but the demo was just balls.