Hot rumor, Open beta August 17

[Malacite]

Re: Hot rumor, Open beta August 17

So the live letter is about 2 hours in... grr

[Wise Donkey]

Re: Hot rumor, Open beta August 17

Well, balls. I am out of town phase 4 weekend. EA will be when I can dive in.

[Malacite]

Re: Hot rumor, Open beta August 17

I can't wait to unlock ACN, SMN & SCH and get back into my crafting groove.


EDIT: I also sincerely hope our achievement progress was saved for the crafting achievements or there's gonna be some serious raging on my part and several others I know. I want my luminary tools god damn it.

[Aeni]

Re: Hot rumor, Open beta August 17

Aeni have you been playing XI or XIV before ? lol, not being snarky but in my 10 years dealing with Square-Enix's online ventures into gaming, they haven't made a single, NOT A SINGLE, time table they've ever stated that wasn't withing a 3-4 week forecast (i.e. if they say something is coming out in 2 weeks, it probably will, 2 months, not so much) lol

They are notorious for publishing year long projections, and then 2 months later being completely off schedule to the the point where people will quote time tables from 6 months prior, and be completely off base.

This wasn't even a one month forecast. Official murmurings over on the beta forums by moderators indicated Phase 4 will be at least a week long. And that was towards the end of Phase 3. Suffice to say, they pulled the wool over even their own employees. As for the original indications of an August 17 P4 start, that wasn't even a source; someone guessed it based on what they saw on SE's registration website and inferred from it. Another person could have inferred another meaning altogether.

Every vendor out there was told by SE that the Early Access would be a week ahead. The Live butchered that down to only 3 days. My gut feeling is that SE will argue that P4 could count as early access, even if there's a level cap (level 20) and not every content will be unlocked. Theoretically possible if you were a part of P3 that you get the "one week Early Access privileges (1 day + 3 days + 3 days = 7 days) which I think is a bit sneaky and misleading.

I see two reasons for chopping everything down:

-Yoshi-P didn't want to eat his own humble pie. Promising a release date too far in advance was just asking for trouble.

and/or

-They are having a whale of a time nailing down bugs from P3. I'm going to go out on a limb and even suggest that the amount of unhappiness surrounding some content changes from previous phases of Beta or even a lack of promised features is forcing them to pull all-nighters in an effort to prevent another 1.0 release from happening.

Whatever the case may be, I'm starting to get a deja vu from 2010. I just know that someone fucked up and they have a media black-out with regards to any release day activities (in other words, maybe they don't really want too many people to hit their registration servers after all)

I said it before somewhere else, I'm sure they're trying to avoid FFXI's opening day fiasco (even when it was only opened to Japan at the time), even at the cost of many other things. I hate to be in their shoes. It will be the first of any MMO title in history to have a completely underwhelming show and wanting to throw reputation and money away in order to have a "second chance at a first impression".