Thanks to Corinth from Eorzeapedia, there is a new translated article from Famitsu’s website that features an interview with FFXI’s and now FFXIV’s Global Producer – Sage Sundi. After reading the translated version of the interview with Sage Sundi, however, a sickening feeling of dread came over me.
I am mostly in annoyance over their reasoning over NOT having a global official community forum because of “language barriers”, but going as far as making a claim that they do not want to give up on cross-regional servers because doing so would be a step backwards.
Do not get me wrong here; I like global servers. I have met some decent EU players and I still fondly remember the kindness the JP showed me and my boyfriend when we first started playing FFXI. But I feel that if you are going to choose to do this as a company and create a diverse environment for different regional players, then you should have no reason against creating a single and/or official forum for people to be able to voice their opinions, concerns, or questions.
During a conversation with a fellow FFXIV blog member, the thought came that S-E just wants to control their customers. If this is the case, I think that S-E has failed to understand that their customers are not blithering idiots. People already see the double standards, how illogical S-E’s stance is on the matter and how unbalanced it is given that not even the JP has a proper outlet to express themselves to the dev team.
I think that if they were to create a community, they could easily create different forums on the community to pander to the different languages. Translators could provide communication between the community and dev team, or at least hire people who have more experience/understanding with the game to be a go between. What is more important is that there is a platform that truly allows the customer/player to be able to freely communicate their thoughts and ideas to the dev team, and for us to get simultaneous feedback that feels as though they are sincerely hearing our concerns and addressing them. The dependency on Premier Sites is only putting a barrier between player and company and does not help those who feel discourage to contribute in communities were reputation matters by how many posts you have made vs. the quality of the information and concerns you bring up.
It is clear, however, that both sides of the table are interested in opening up paths of discussion. The dev team has already expressed wanting to get as much feedback from the beta testers to know what works and what doesn’t before things are set into stone. This itself is monumental, but is frustrating in and of itself given that the only road block between both sides wanting to exchange dialogue is Sage Sundi and his team. However, given that the game is not even in its beta stages, there is hope (albeit a rather slim one) that maybe Sage Sundi will have a change of heart and create an official community since he had expressed wanting to search for new ways of communication previously unavailable in FFXI.
Please note that this entry is expressly the thoughts and opinion of the author (Calaera) and not the FFXIVBlog team.
Calaera was foiled on her plan for dominating Vana'diel with Cuteness Attack, but is now working on Cuteness Attack v2.0 to take over Eorzea! She also maintains her own gaming blog: 
I agree. Honestly, the forums thing has always bothered me, because it really seems that SE does not care about what their players think. Just look at WoW and the rich community they have–although some might argue that Blizzard’s attention to every Joe Schmoe who posts a thread might actually hurt the game, I think it still shows an attempt at really trying to understand how your players feel about the game, and what might be going right or wrong. SE has no such thing.
Also, as for cross-regional servers, I don’t mean to sound rude but I really wish they would split them up by region. I hate playing with such a huge language barrier in place. None of the JP players want to play with English anyway, all the EU players are 6 hours ahead and not online during US peak hours, etc. It simply leads to dead servers at various peak times even though the server population might be “High”. I would really rather be guaranteed to join a server where I know everyone can speak my language, and will generally be online between the hours of X and Y.
I think SE is making a big mistake on both counts, but I guess there’s nothing to do about it, since they obviously don’t listen.
Another interview on that site mentions pvp, saying there probably won’t be pvp at launch, at may never be true pvp at all, instead sing the competition like in XI. Disappointing, but not really unexpected.
Having regional servers will help with latency too. FFXI was admittedly throttled to response rates where everyone would get the typically the same response rate no matter where you lived.
Connected to a server on the same continent as me would be better. I’d ask for the same country but no one likes Canada and their free space. lol
Ayko: Not rude at all. I understand people will have different views on the idea of segregated servers. Sometimes when I am frustrated, I really want to just play with EN players. For my own personal experience, however, I found that the NA peak times on my server were much earlier than when I was able to get home and play. When I was able to start playing, JP time was starting and NA (who were mostly on EST) were starting to go to bed. So I honestly wouldn’t have gotten anywhere at times because of the times I was actually available to play.
Keith: I LOVE Canada! :3 They are the coolest next door neighbor we can have! Plus, my mom thinks its awesome you guys have tiny little spoons as coffee stirrers in your McDonalds!
I feel bad for not starting with a more in-depth comment on this but…. I can’t stop laughing at the top picture. Now whenever I see them in FFXI, I’m going to imagine those suckers running around going “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!!”
Even coming from a site that is trying hard to become a premier site for FFXIV, I think that the system is very limiting in some ways for a lot of the reasons you mention in your article. Not every forum community is going to fit every player. There is also a limit to the number of “Premier sites” that SE can support before it becomes kind of silly. For news and info from SE, premier sites are good because the people most familiar with the game are reporting on the info versus a large gaming site that doesn’t have anybody playing the game. However, for player -> company communication, some sort of official place would make the players a lot happier too.
If you are talking about SE not having an official forum have you been to the Square Enix Members website? You can talk to Japanese about FFXIV there also you could use google translate to translate what you want to say to japanese and what they are saying to english. It’s pretty easy.
Notacka, yes I have been to the S-E Members website but that is a different thing in and of itself. It is not an official FFXIV discussion platform, and doesn’t show communication between S-E as a company and us as their paying customers.
Guys, the thing is that in FFXI, there is auto translate so you can talk to JP players with some ease.
On the internet, in a forum, there is no auto translate. So language becomes a barrier again.
=P not that hard to understand. Although they should still set up regional sites.
I definitely agree with regional servers. I think it only makes more sense to avoid language barriers. The auto-trans system was useful, but only for casual encounters. I think the only advantage to foreign communities sharing the server, is that there was less competition at certain times for certain NMs, and the economy ran a little smoother. There was definitely more available because of JP (mostly because they had been playing for over a year before NA launch).
I see this move as logical, not a conspiracy to control it’s customer base. If someone posts entirely in French, I cannot participate in that thread because I have no idea what the thread is about. You have 4 different languages in the forum, which will flood the forums resulting in each person only able to read about a quarter of the posts. Not to mention if they have someone from SE reading these posts, your post is more likely to be pushed to the back where it will never be heard from again.
Could they make it a global forum? Sure. It just doesn’t seem practical to do it that way. And if you want to talk with others of another language or region, just go to their forums (assuming they allow you to post there); or read their forums and bring the ideas to your own forums for discussion.
As for the WoW comment, they do separate their forums too, and do fine with communication! =P