Not enough are saying that to matter. Squeenix's bread and butter will come from the Japanese player base (PS3 mostly, but also PC users who bought it before). The NA/EU player bases are ancillary to that.

ARR won't go F2P simply because Squeenix would gain nothing from making it F2P.

Thing was, XI never really became "safe." At level 75, things that conned "too weak to be worthwhile" would still hand you your head on a silver platter. No matter what, you always, constantly had to avoid aggro, even "easy prey" mobs would slaughter you with impunity.

That's not at all what I was talking about. That "sense of danger" was a fun novelty the first week, but after that it became just a colossal pain in the ass.

It's rather Western on the surface (it's easy to see how much RIFT inspired the developers), but it's got a LOT of the same charm that made FFXI so memorable. Even though the UI and the battle systems may give you that post-WoW feel, the game is still very much an anomaly in the industry, unlike either Western MMOs nor like Korean MMOs.

My biggest gripe with DS is that I can't just quickload after dying. Instead I take a penalty, which is stupid.

That's real life. People play games for abnegation--to get away from responsibility and consequences. Why do you think people love going on crazy rampages in GTA? And single player games (except arcade style games) usually do not have any form of failure penalty.

Your penalty for failure is that you failed. What's fun about dying on a boss and then being forced to grind weak mobs for an hour to make back the EXP/gold?

What I meant is that systems used to lengthen playtime (to slow the player down, in essence) should be designed so that they are fun, rather than feeling like a punishment.

I don't actually agree with death penalties at all. In your average single-player RPG, if you die, you just load your saved game and try again. Some are even more forgiving than that--i.e. Trails in the Sky, which if you die on a boss, the game will actually WEAKEN the boss slightly and give you another try, and it does this up to four times.

These are what are called Anti-Frustration Features, and they're important in games. Systems that frustrate the player take away from enjoyment and engagement. When you die, you're already dead and you're probably not going to beat the boss if the whole raid is dropping like flies. You're going to have to start all over again, and that's not easy when it comes to tough raid bosses.

There are less negative ways to keep people from zerging down content. Basically every MMO ever now prevents you from entering a dungeon while an encounter is in progress. Most boss arenas have gates or hazards or force fields to keep people out who try to zerg. So a death penalty isn't a deterrent to zerg tactics.

Death penalties, especially very strong ones, disincentivize the player from actually playing the game. This is kinda what the devs want, though, because it slows the rate of content consumption.

I see. Thanks for telling me that. Was kinda freaking out that I had to download everything again. Anyway, I hope you get the access soon too.

Yeah, I don't know what to tell you. It was pretty random for me. But if it's any consolation, I'm getting an error so I'm currently not playing it. ^^'

True, but once you've spent 15 minutes running to the same dungeon for the 50th time, it starts to grate on the nerves.