Eorzean Evening Post: FFXIV Recruitment Woes .

So you’ve logged into your new MMO. You absolutely love it, whatever it is. It’s fun, it’s got engaging quests, a wonderful storyline, fantastic PvP, whatever draws you, it’s all here. You tell your friends, and a few of them inevitably decide it’s time to give it a shot themselves. They get the trial, buy the game, do all the patching and get ready to log in. They make their character, detail it just right, hit the character creation button and…

And I already have a character there. I still can’t make one.

…damnit.

Full servers have become one of my greatest banes on Final Fantasy XIV. I try desperately to sell this game to my friends, and for the most part many are willing to try it. However, when they attempt to make their character, they find themselves hitting a brick wall known as a full server.

The server Balmung, as well as Gilgamesh, Excalibur, and a handful of other servers will generally be difficult to get into at almost any time, save for approximately 6 a.m. Central Time. This means that getting friends into the game – friends which, in my case, generally have jobs, families, and other reasons to not be up at 6 a.m. to create a character – has become a significant challenge. I can’t be alone in this problem, and this week we’re going to go over potential problems that could result as a consequence of eternally filled servers.

Pictured above: player retention. This is at 1 p.m.

It’s important to first argue the fact that this is, at its heart, not a problem for Square Enix. The fact that their servers are packed full means their method of player retention is still holding strong. Player retention is at the heart of an MMORPG. Many different companies try many different methods to keep the players interested. ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 provide story content every two weeks, and they’re currently taking a small break from that. The Old Republic consistently updates its cartel market and pushes out large free patches on a semi-regular basis. Square Enix’s method of retaining players is to create long, involving quest lines that will eventually produce something of great quality to a player. There’s just one problem with this.

Grinding is boring as hell.

Now, this is a subjective statement. I find grinding boring as hell, and have actually fallen asleep during Atma grinding. Don’t know what Atma is? It’s basically the worst form of random-number-generation hell, where you have to do five minute quests over and over trying to get a certain item to drop, then repeat it eleven times in eleven other zones. When you finally get the item, it’s an incredibly precious weapon to you as a player. However, it took immense amounts of work to get that weapon in your hands. It becomes a question of farming in a raid, or spending your time grinding in the fields.

This is my armor, my axe. There are many like it, but these are mine.

However, farming is much easier with distractions, and friends can serve as the well-needed entertainment that keeps one sane. Most MMOs are honestly better with the massively-multiplayer part being some people you know and have a connection to. Many form that with their guild. I bring in my friends. I’m sure I’d be willing to stay in FFXIV longer, were I to have people I could easily play with.

But I can’t, because my server is quite full.

This brings me to the crux of my problem with a full server. I can get people in, but I have to ask them to do things in a different way. I have to ask them to make characters at odd hours, to simply be patient with their gaming. Patient gamers aren’t particularly common, even if the process is fairly easy. Do you know how hard it is to make a character at 6? It takes virtually no time. You can create your character ahead of time, save them, wait for 6 and then just load the character up and go. However, I’m in an aging bracket of gamers. We’re not just sitting down and playing video games for eons at a time anymore. We have jobs, families, social lives, events to attend. I’m having to ask friends who wake up for their 9 to 5 job to take an extra few minutes in an already stressful morning (that at this point likely involves kids, given the people I’m around) to sit down and play a video game they might not want to stop with. It’s a problem that doesn’t seem like one, but believe me, it is. So out of the dozen odd people I’ve asked to play this game, I’ve gotten two people to join. That’s just out of the real-world players I’ve asked. I’ve yet to get any of my other MMO friends to give it a shot. It’s a small problem, but small problems can add up with players. Is this going to cause me to break my sub? Well, not right now. However, if my friends were to wander over to ArcheAge and try to pressure me into joining it, I’d end up looking pretty foolish for not going.

Before the game released a free trial, this wasn’t anything worth commenting on. However, now that Square Enix is trying to actively court new players, it might be worth considering. As far as rewards, those aren’t a big deal for me. I got that taken care of with the first of the two people I recruited, who I generally help by hauling around the world. This is a problem of simply not allowing the player to do what they want, which is play with their friends.

So what solutions exist? Well, we could lift the restrictions, but people have been at Square Enix about the restrictions since they were put into place and nothing’s changed yet. There’s the option of simply going to another server, but that means leaving the roleplaying community for me. Gilgamesh, the other RP server, is just as full. There’s the option I keep coming back to in the article, but we’ve already gone over that. The much more likely scenario is that this will continue until player retention begins to fall away and people go to other games. It’s a real shame it has to be like that, but unless something’s done to make it easier for people to join in, then Square might be trading short-term profits for long-term sustainability, and that’s never a good trade at all.