We were told the XI developers may return to XI.

When the developers were moved off of ff11 we were told they may return in the future, that was over a year ago now. Are they returning, so we can start getting proper content additions again or are they just going to stay gone?

Another problem is that if the producer refuses to hire new people to come work on XI (because he seem to think it's "bad for their career", even though people were hired from the JP XI community previously and it worked out fine), what will happen when he retires himself? The game just closes cause there is nobody else to take over running a very profitable business?

New people have to be taken on or brought upto speed, to learn how the game operates so that people can take over if needed (even if no updates, the game still needs someone to oversee it)

FFXI is a game that has existed for over 22 years and unlike most every other game, people love it so much they pay a monthly sub for it. The players are doing their part by supporting the game financially, why can't we have peace of mind about the games future?

Never heard anything about old developers coming back. And I'm not sure what difference it would make.

And that thing about careers, it's not just in quotes, it's a real issue. I myself spent over a decade working on an Unreal Engine 3 game, long after UE4 came out, and now I'm quite the expert at UE3 but that's only useful if you're going to be hired to work on someone's legacy projects.

I share all your concerns, but their concerns aren't illegitimate either.

First, I'd like to talk about our Development team. Most of our current Development team has served exclusively on FINAL FANTASY XI for many years. Remaining on the FFXI team full-time, however, would mean giving up certain opportunities in their careers as developers. For developers, working with new technologies and seeing the fruits of their labor take form in new products can be a huge source of motivation and an opportunity to grow. So rather than limit our developers to working exclusively with FFXI and its decades-old technology, I believe it would be better to allow them to gain experience in other development environments and bring back their learnings to FFXI. As such, I have elected to further downscale the scope of our Development team to provide more leeway for our operations to continue. The scope of our version updates will become quite compact as a result, but in exchange, we will focus on stabilizing our operations environment for the medium and long term.