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The Mog Log: Why aren't there more tanks in Final Fantasy XIV?
To the surprise of pretty much no one, tanks are the rarest thing to find in Final Fantasy XIV at the moment. It's so rare to see a role other than tank in need on the Duty Roulette that people take notice of the times when it changes. Everyone knows that tanks are in short supply, leading to the supposed "tank rewards" introduced in 2.2 that don't seem to hit the mark. I've seen a number of posts in which people ask why there are so few tanks and what can be done about it, and most of them seem to miss the mark, either by completely misunderstanding what tanking actually entails or by misunderstanding why people aren't tanking. Really, I don't think it's terribly complicated. Why aren't there more tanks in Final Fantasy XIV? Three pretty straightforward reasons, none of which tends to be addressed when I see people asking that question.
The Mog Log Extra: Final Fantasy XIV's great housing fiasco
This past Saturday morning, Final Fantasy XIV announced free company housing prices in its patch notes for 2.1. These prices did not explicitly include an upturned middle finger and looping sounds of laughter, but they may as well have. This was not a positive move by Square-Enix. With the patch scheduled for release on Tuesday, players had an enormous part of their enjoyment kneecapped immediately and almost arbitrarily. One of the major features of this patch that has been announced and discussed repeatedly is housing, and nearly every free company I spoke with said that this announcement more or less killed any dream of having housing accessible to the players on my server. And they're not the only ones. To say that this has been disheartening is an understatement. Final Fantasy XIV has had an immensely strong relaunch, and this debacle -- and the complete lack of communication from the community team on the issue -- is absolutely astounding. These are not launch woes that almost every game suffers from; this is a result of failing to consider so many basic elements of playstyles and the playerbase.
The Soapbox: There is no gamer community
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Some of our younger readers may not remember this, but a time existed when video games were not ubiquitous. Having a game console in your house was somewhat unusual, having a computer that could run games was also not a given, and being someone who played games meant you were part of a group. Sure, there were people who just played an occasional video game, but by and large, we were a single community. We were gamers. That was then, however, a world that existed in the wake of the '83 crash, one that thrived on limited technology and divided groups. I think in the years since then, we've witnessed the very idea dissolve, to the point that we don't currently have a gamer community. And I'd even go so far as to say that part of the bitterness between various groups of gamers is due to the fact that the community no longer exists.
How the WoW community is about to push the self-destruct button
This post is going to be very meta in some regards, and it's going to touch on a few things that deal with the WoW community's very existence. We've written this article in hopes that it might help calm the waters, or at least bring some will on the part of the multitudes of individuals not to jump on the wrong bandwagon. If you've been paying attention to the role forums and the "Ghostcrawler drama" this past week, you know what I'm talking about. If not, we'll begin with a brief rundown. The Inherency of the Status Quo WoW is designed and run by a team of people, with a handful of "leads" in position to direct the design of the game. These people, such as Ghostcrawler, are at the top of the ladder in terms of game development. They are the conglomerate of the entire design and development teams underneath them. Ghostcrawler, and in the past a few people like him, post on the role forums daily in an effort to establish a dialogue with the community over some, but not all, game design principals. The community, as expected, is more than happy to talk with Ghostcrawler and the rest of Blizzard. The Harm of the Vocal Minority
