End Of Vana'diel Live Stream

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/61542-FINAL-FANTASY-XI-Official-Site-Updated-%28Feb.-29-Mar.-1%29

Fujito shut it off, saved about tree fiddy on something that has been running for so long.

Fujito really does come across like someone that was forced to take over the family business or something, he so negative and seems to do things purely to annoy people.

No need for him to do this.

Was anybody really watching it, though? They always sat in the most boring places watching idle characters. FFXI's in-town life isn't exactly bustling with excitement: player characters standing still or running.

XI is a game where everything gripping the players is in the text. Linkshell, yell, and party chats, combat numbers and effects. It's barely interesting to watch live-streamed from an actual player's perspective, and even less interesting watching an overview of people standing around Mhaura.

If anything, that "tree fiddy" they're saving might actually make enough room in their budget to give us some new content every once in a while lol

It seems like they're trying to cut every last line item of expense in order to keep the operating margin high enough to warrant continued service.

He has a budget to work to, and if saving three fiddy is what it takes, then so be it.

Not really but you could say it has sentimental value, which was why Matsui kept it. Removing something like this is also really stupid becasue it sends a message above and beyond this thing itself.

straws and backs, at least for me

That's also literally the job of a producer is to try and make as much money from a product as possible. With such a limited budget, the only feasible thing for Fujito to even do is trim as much fat as he can. If anything, I'm thankful he and his team were able to find something that has such negligible impact on the players.

When your executives aren't giving you enough money to produce new content to try and bring more people in, using lean thinking (which Japan is really good at) is about the only way to make the net profit grow.

I don't disagree. It comes across as yet another casualty in the overall FFXI experience, and displays how pitiful the financial situation really is.

Yet the optimist in me looks at it as though Fujito is at least sort of trying to keep the lights on. Maybe the savings from that, combined with other budget-balancing could mean more content in the future. Though I can't stress enough that that's coming from the optimist part of my brain.

if this livestream that the most people didn't even know existed or have ever watched for more than a minute is the straw that broke the camels back, you've probably been looking for any excuse for a while now imo.

???

not seeing the design update. still port 80 too, whew.

Yeah I posted about it on reddit this morning. It's rather official at this point, all but 2 very old Digests were deleted from the VoD's list.

Not certain on XI future to be honest. Not like the Live of Vana'diel was doing a good job at just streaming Mhaura (Ambuscade) on a purely dead server where there's no action.... making it look like a very dead environment in the last years. But it had better moment, like when it used to stream around Port Jueno.

Squeenix is very odd with it's doing's in the more recent years. I don't really trust the future in general to be very positive for XI...

They should've moved them from town into Sortie** instead so we can watch everyone fleehax and warp.

**I know this probably isn't feasible but that would ruin the crappy joke.

i have love relationship with xi since the sortie update. i keep lying to myself that i would find a static and pay monthly but nothing happens lol, oh no maybe i have to get Sortie +3 set for geo and get idris than i might find a grp NOPE!

*** the xi it has been ***lately

why is this shitty event time gated and locked it is sad that abyssea is better

Closing the Live stream changes nothing

maybe Fujito himself has a love/hate relationship with the game too. I don't necessarily believe that, more likely is that he is the fall guy for a bunch of unpopular decisions about the future of the game. don't envy the guy at all.

I am certainly curious to see how executive meetings go at the Square-Enix headquarters. Most people on the board appear to have their heads so high in the clouds that they're completely detached from any fanbases and even what is required for financial success. It makes me genuinely wonder how hard Fujito has tried fighting for FFXI. Obviously any attempts (if any) have been fruitless.

Perhaps he's just a Yes Man who was brought on to keep things running exactly as it was left without any questions, or maybe he's begged several times for a greater budget to deaf ears. Maybe he's biding his time to prove how efficient FFXI could be for its budget.

When was chapter 1 of TVR added? I would expect at least a year before that was when they started planning and development. It's pretty clear dev was going on while they were adding chapters, but the overall design issues most people (myself included) take issue with were probably laid out well before Fujito took over. He no doubt had say in things, but I don't think he can really take the blame for the decisions made so long ago.

He inherited a practically ancient multiplatform game with little funding and subjectively bad decisions made previously. He likely shared some blame, but not all of it, how much will depend on the internal politics at SE. OTOH, his initial response to the Sortie basement boss enrage situation was pretty out of touch, but maybe he was put in a position where he felt like he had to defend decisions made by his predecessor. Maybe not.

I saw an interview with him last year or so and someone asked what his unlimited budget wishlist was. It mostly aligns with what players here wanted, so I don't think he's out of touch with the right high level direction, just hamstrung by budget and the age of the architecture. Possibly out of touch, but maybe not when you consider how much revision people ask for to things like Sortie and how much effort it would take.

As for the board, I'd be shocked if more than one board member even knows FFXI still exists.

The impression that I get is that whenever the board is reminded FFXI still exists, they try to kill it.

Not because they hate it or because it's unprofitable, but because SE does not have unlimited resources, and they want everything available focused on their big money AAAA pipe dreams. Japan has strict laws about layoffs, so "just hire more developers" isn't a viable solution. From the board's perspective, FFXI is a distraction holding SE back from true success.

Matsui fought to keep the game alive from 2013 to 2023; Fujito seems to be trying the stealth approach in the hopes of keeping the lights on for the next decade.

Very sad honestly, I used to watch this as a kid before I got the actual game. I still have this memory of watching it while it was in the jungles, and it passed over a Malboro and I was like oh no way cool. I really enjoyed it when I remember it was around, thru the years. Then they just sat it in town and it just died silently, like no explanation why they left it there. Truthfully it was probably due to bots and people POS hacking lol. I still am curious as to how it was done originally, was it just an NPC that they live streamed and it could go to any position? Seems interesting, wonder if they ever had anyone botting on the camera and they would send a GM or something.

Just a sign of the times I guess... how sad that every little resource is being pulled. Will be interesting to see the state of things this time next year. Apparently his goal of preservation means getting rid of any and everything possible.

All this piddling money saving, is only good in a vacuum where people can't be convinced to unsub due to your cost saving actions.

If you saving money leads to losing more revenue then you're not saving money.

I think you're still missing the point. They aren't downsizing the team to save money, it's because people on the team want to do other things, and increasing headcount to replace them isn't an option.

Put yourself in Fujito's shoes: Your boss is retiring, your team is leaving, you can't hire replacements. Pretty soon it's going to be just you. Do you shut it all down, or streamline everything the old XI team did so that one person can keep things running indefinitely?

isn't this the second time that the live stream has been canceled? like, it used to have the bowing Tarutaru and Mandragora image in its place on the main site for ages

You guys misunderstand, it's a new livestream called End of Vana'diel

I mean, if someone's bored and doesn't mind paying an extra sub fee every month, it wouldn't be hard to re-create one for your preferred server. Sure, as players we can't have invisible floating NPC's, but XICamera can do some really neat stuff like top-down view.

You don't even have to host it yourself, can set up twitch or youtube for 24/7 livestreaming, just move your camera mule from scene to scene at whatever schedule you like.

They should have set up the live stream cam next to the rmt botters in KRT

If downsizing is purely because people want to move on - that implies those positions are budgeted/approved, which means they can be backfilled.

The understanding I got from their commentary is: "We want to give XI devs a chance to learn new things because XI won't be around forever -- and the re-assignment of their salary to other projects helps the XI margin"

When the times come, I hope one of you will set up an "End of Vana'diel" live stream though.

They aren't downsizing the team because they are trying to save money, or cause the game isn't profitable. Money isn't the problem with XI. If you read the interviews on weareVana you can see what the problem is.

They are downsizing the team cause they ran the game in a stupid way, and didn't plan ahead. Matsui was the guy that was the ps2 devkit expert and he isn't on staff anymore, if you no longer have the guy that effectively made the patches then having lots of staff that do the higher up work is a waste of money.

It's like having a building company with electricians, plumbers and painters and the foundation guys leave, ok well now what?

The positive take is that maybe Fujito is learning to take his place and is spending his days getting to grips with this archaic box or there is something else going on (because Fujito did say they may come back at some point) and when they are upto speed again those people can come back, maybe that will happen and maybe it wont.

My issue with taking stuff like the the live stream down is that it's false economy (assuming it was done for money reasons). It's like if you work at an office and your boss decides to save money by removing the coffee machine, the tv in the break room or the air freshner, and he is happy he saved a few bucks a week. Then peoples performance starts to slide cause of these small things, or they just quit and wanna work somewhere else cause this was the straw that broke the camels back, so in an attempt to save some money he missed the bigger picture and now is losing far more money. Cause the world isn't as simple as some people want to think it is, it's actually a jenga tower and one thing can impact many others even if they appear to be inconsequential.

Things like the live stream matter becasue they are part of the confidence factor of the game, and Fujito has been chipping away at this and that makes people unsub. An online game has more to do with peoples mindset than the facts of the thing, a positive mindset will carry you through bad times.

I mean let's be real here. It was a stupid waste of effort from the minute they started showing Mhaura on Shiva or whereeverthefuck it was.

There couldn't have been more than 10 viewers at any point in the last decade.

The only thing they did was admit it was stupid too late, taking it down isn't bad, leaving it up was. Having verifiable evidence that no one plays is more damaging than removing something no one even knew about.

It's just a boring stream of Mhaura that no one watched, no big deal.

Probably the least interesting 'cutback'. Out of everyone feigning upset at its absence - did any actually watch the stream? Doubt it.

If it wasn't for a place to download the client from, they should just take the website off the internet entirely.
They aren't getting any new customers from there if the first thing is a big warning saying it might be insecure to visit the website on modern browsers default settings.