Next visual improvement: Status icons

[Atomic_Skull]

Ok, here is a scenario for you.

Company has 500,000 of that country's currency to spend on improving their product. They want to keep their customers, because their product is on the decline in it's product life cycle. They know that there is one complaint that their current customers want changed. They instead spend half the money to make the box look prettier. Is that a waste of resource? Yes.

Now, I'm not saying that the example is Square Enix, but like everyone else, they have a specific budget for this game, and spending money to make the "box look pretty" is a waste when there are technical issues their paying customers have brought to their attention, or at least it would be brought to their attention if they actually read their own "forum" instead of picking one/two things that people have mentioned....

What exactly does the ascetic changes do to this game in terms of customer retention? Absolutely nothing! What would fixing known issues do to this game in terms of customer retention? Increase it by a marginal percentage, but it is still an increase! For any products on the way to an inevitable death, any retention should be the company's top priority!

But that is intermediate business knowledge here, most of you guys wouldn't know stuff like this.

Example doesn't fit because that's not how game development works. The artists are on salary and you'll spend as much on paying them no matter what they're doing. And they are artists not programmers so you can't just move the personnel over to coding.

[Korpg]

Example doesn't fit because that's not how game development works. The artists are on salary and you'll spend as much on paying them no matter what they're doing. And they are artists not programmers so you can't just move the personnel over to coding.

But you can fire the artists and hire more programmers.

It is called reorganizing your staff. All companies do it, including Square-Enix.

Why have 3 or more artists when they don't even do anything 90% of the time? One artist is enough for this game.

[Eric]

But you can fire the artists and hire more programmers.

It is called reorganizing your staff. All companies do it, including Square-Enix.

Why have 3 or more artists when they don't even do anything 90% of the time? One artist is enough for this game.

Sure, let's fire someone who could be designing the new material that's coming over the next year, just because you don't want the status icons to be updated.

Do you realize how stupid you sound? You have no idea how the FFXI team is composed. None of us do.

[Vicious]

Why have 3 or more artists when they don't even do anything 90% of the time? One artist is enough for this game.

Yeah, y'know, you're right; FFXI would be way better without new gear/weapon/furniture/item/spell/icon/npc/weaponskill/etc. designs for the rest of the game's life. With such brilliant ideas, why haven't they made you a dev yet?

[Ravenmore]

The graphics reboot seemed to do help WoW, or people really like cartoons.

[Sargent]

New icons is way overdue, it's like SE added 20 status icons to the game.

[Panthera]

I agree with the OP.

Many Icons do look similar, if not identical.

The Utsusemi Icons changes were a good thing, as was Third Eye. The Icons should get an overhaul such that no two icons look identical. A little similarity isn't too bad, but icons that look that same that mean different things is just confusing.

Biggest, most important change FFXI needs? No, but far from trivial, and thanks for bringing it up; it's worth discussion, and what's more, attention from devs.

[Sesh]

Here's the thing though if you have ever re-skinned .dats or HQ'd them you know that even with unofficial software it would take maybe 7 minutes to HQ a status icon. So you're looking at less than a half a day easily to HQ all of the status icons, recolor, create new ones, and still take a nice long break for lunch. Acting like a few hours work would be taking away from the games "Big Needs" is just silly.

I would love to see them commission out .dat re-skinning work (I know they never would) however if they commissioned someone like Mooshywooshy from (dead) ffxidats we could probably have icons, AF1/2/3 all HQ'd in a week.

[Korpg]

So you guys are saying that it takes more than one "artist" to design and create such awesome gearsets like Teal, Aurore, and Peale armors? Or the emp armors? It takes more than one "artist" 6 months plus to create all these designs and stuff?

It takes more than one "artist" to spend 3 months redesigning a title page?

Or that the artwork done for this recent update was worth the entire art staff of Square Enix's time? We really got our money for the work put into...well...nothing?

I'm not saying that they need to get rid of their art department, I'm saying that they aren't being effective for doing nothing but reskins of old gear. Might as well fire half the art staff and hire more programmers to fix problems they are obviously having trouble fixing.

[Alhanelem]

But you can fire the artists and hire more programmers.

Yeah, those damn artists. Always using up our money for no good reason. Fire the lot of em!

Give me a godforsaken break. If you were running this game, it wouldn't have graphics at all. it would just be a text based game.

After I made the suggestion, it probably took them 5 minutes to fetch the orgiinal master logo and use it to replace the low-res copy in the dats. I'm so sorry I delayed your patch by 5 minutes. I know graphics aren't everything (personally I think good music is one of the most valuable and underappriciated things in any video game), but it's something that's worth improving.

If the game is so riddled with problems to you, maybe you'd be better off playing a game that's more polished. It's not like SE hasn't had 8 years to get it right.

Many other older MMOs have recieved graphical overhauls over the years, and these did not interfere with their ability to release new content or balance changes. D&D online came out not that long after FFXI, and it's recieved MULTIPLE graphical overhauls, including adding directX 9 and 10 support. If SE REALLY wanted to, they could do stuff like this. The real problem here is SE not wanting to commit too much in resources to this game even though it's making money for them, and that even if they wanted to devote more resources, they feel like they can't do a whole lot because of the PS2 which they feel they need to maintain support for for some reason.