As an avid player of both I have to say , Bungie could learn a good deal on how to make destiny better by what Square Enix did with FFXIV . I suggest taking notes on this wiki page excerpt on FFXIV's development bungie ,especially the second paragraph : [b]The original release of Final Fantasy XIV began development under the codename Rapture somewhere between late 2004 and early 2005,and was officially announced in 2009. This version was directed by Nobuaki Komoto and produced by Hiromichi Tanaka, who was also serving as the producer of Final Fantasy XI at the time. After a bug-laden, shortened test period the game released to near-universal negative reception.After two extensions to the initial free trial period, Square Enix President Yoichi Wada issued a formal apology to players and fans in December 2010, as well as announcing a dramatic overhaul in the development team, most prominently the removal of Tanaka from the project, demotion of Komoto from Director to Lead Designer as well as the suspension of monthly fees for the game until further notice and the cancellation of the previously planned PlayStation 3 version. After the change in development team, Naoki Yoshida, who had worked as planning chief on Dragon Quest X, was brought in to supervise the project as both producer and director. Speaking in an interview with Polygon, Yoshida said that, in his opinion, fans had been treated badly, He also said Tanaka and the team were "conceited", saying: "We had server troubles, technical troubles, a lack of international marketing and research, a lack of communication with gamers. There were many problems, but they were all caused by the general idea that 'we're okay, it's the [Final Fantasy] brand, we made [Final Fantasy XI] work."In the same interview, he said that the game's sales were a secondary concern when faced with restoring faith in the franchise. In a different interview with Kotaku, he stated that he felt the production team had not been enough in touch with the modern MMO community, that their primary goal of making XIV different from XI was unrealistic, and that it would have been better if they had followed the production model of XI, playing current MMOs for inspiration: in one of his remarks, he said that "[Square Enix] should have said, 'Hey you, go play [World of Warcraft] for a year [for inspiration].'"He also stated that the game would not release until it was ready, as that would be "at the level of destroying the company."In attempting to improve Final Fantasy XIV, Yoshida quickly discovered a number of key tasks; first and foremost, he had to restore trust in the player base while bringing the original release up to a playable quality. To address this, Yoshida began writing "Letters from the Producer" which would discuss design direction, upcoming changes, player feedback, and increase transparency in the development process. However, outdated and cumbersome programming choices in the game code prevented the more radical changes necessary to improve the game. Thus, planning for a brand new game built from scratch began in January 2011 and development began in earnest by April, with work on a new game engine and server structure. Meanwhile, the team's efforts on the original release first began to come to fruition with patch 1.18 in July 2011, which included major changes to the battle system, implementation of auto-attack and instanced dungeons, removal of the controversial "fatigue" system, and the introduction of the Grand Company storyline which would supersede the original main scenario questline. Subsequent patches would further refine the gameplay as well as set the stage for the Seventh Umbral Era events. On the anniversary of the game's release, Wada claimed that the initial launch of Final Fantasy XIV had "greatly damaged" the Final Fantasy brand.Thus, Wada and Yoshida announced the brand new version of Final Fantasy XIV in October 2011, dubbed "Version 2.0", which had been in development since January, along with a tentative roadmap for future progress for both PC and PlayStation 3. Current players would be provided copies of the new PC client at launch, free of charge, and their character data and progress would be transferred as well. Along with the roadmap, they announced that monthly fees would be instated in order to offset the cost of redevelopment. Billing for the original release began in January 2012. To encourage players to stay with the game while paying subscription fees, Yoshida revealed the "Legacy Campaign" which rewarded players who paid for at least three months of service with permanently reduced monthly payments, an exclusive in-game chocobo mount, and their names featured in the credits of Version 2.0 . Speaking to Siliconera about his experiences on both Dragon Quest X and Final Fantasy XIV, Yoshida commented that the difference between the two games: while the idea for the Dragon Quest series was to be a hybrid between MMOs and single-player games, his goal for Final Fantasy XIV was "to get into the hands of hardcore MMO players [and] reach out to players that have never played them before. We wanted to reach out to those Final Fantasy fans, knowing that a lot of Final Fantasy fans have never played a MMO before, perhaps because they are very intimidated by the genre." In creating the scenarios, Yoshida was mostly inspired by the work of Yasumi Matsuno, the scenario writer for Final Fantasy XII. [/b] this below is the short verison for those who hate "walls of Text " . In short the original FFXIV was more or less seen as failure and a loss , much as many over all see how our game right now , but rather than abandon it , or as bungie is doing , skirting around a lot of the problems , they decided to salvage it , and brought in a new team to take over it's development lead by Naoki Yoshida , and created its successor : Final fantasy XIV : A Realm Reborn , improving everything that the original FFXIV was weak in , story , interface , and gameplay . if bungie looked to what they did with FFXIV : they can restore the faith of those who have left the game and reward the faith those of us who have stayed despite destiny's shortcomings , and repair their image to we the fans and the gaming community overall . so deej would you kindly pass this along ? cookie to any who get the reference there in that last bit .