I would be curious to know as the exact amount of people working on both products. They say not to many people are working on XI but what is the exact ratio is it like 20 are working on XI with 100 working on XIV or less? I"m just wondering like how many people are actually on the XI development team now.

I honestly wouldn't say this patch is lackluster, the changes to WoE is nice and does open the door to obtaining loot without really having to setup a party even if the drop rate is low. As for voidwatch I"m not sure if drop rates are an issue there though I would agree that it would be nice if there was some option to allow people to share rare/ex loot they might not want with others since it prolly is a pain to see a rare/ex drop to you again when you either don't want it or already have it and you know someone that would like it. While voidwatch is nice in the sense you get your own loot it does hurt in terms of not being able to share. While sure there have been those who would steal loot and such it's not like it was out of control and happening all over the place. I do believe that the way voidwatch was setup was a means to prevent people for stealing loot that was suppose to go to others first but when you prevent the ability to share rare/ex gear it can be discouraging for others who have been loyal to doing the event not get anything while someone who did the event/fight for the first time gets the rare/ex you've been hoping for for the last 10 runs.

It is hard to really talk about XIV though it's execution was a lot to be desired where the open beta felt as if they were hiding stuff for the release only to find out that upon release it was the exact same game except stuff that was used to analyze data was out of the system so it ran smoother. While sure it's release went smooth it was easy to tell that the world was very empty and when compared to something like SWTOR, the content from that game alone from what I've seen already seems to outweigh what XIV has even now.

It's like they are desperately trying to save it but the way they went about it was wrong as it stands now I don't really see any structure in the game everything seems scattered and fragmented without a real focus. While perhaps they can make something out of it in a year, if they actually focused on a game people were paying for and worked on ways to advance the game they could prolly gain more subscribers rather then feeding resources to a game that is bleeding them.

It is kinda foolish gamble if you consider something like let's say an average person pays 180 a year to play XIV nowthe servers been up for a year let's just say 50k play atm I really don't know how many people play though I do feel like it's a small number that is 9mil. Now I really don't know how much it cost to make the game let's say 100 million budget for release. Now let's say they have used another 50mil including the salary for people working with them to work on the game as well as the cost of keeping servers up. Now to break even with sucha cost they would need about 833k subscribers for one year which is quite a feat when you consider how edgy people may be to want to even give the gamea second chance along with their methods of paying for subscription fees. At best I'd say perhaps they could get 250k playing if they make changes to it so that's 45 million. Let's just say the upkeep is 10mil a year including salaries and such while of course this is a fabricated number with the tech they are using for the game I wouldn't be surprised if teh upkeep was a lot.

So say they charge people this year at the 150mil production cost, then every year it goes up 1mil. Let's just assume they can keepa 250k fanbase and that's being generous cause I really don't know how many will attempt to play once it's released but based ona 250k fanbase it would take 4yrs to break even about with the 4th year showing signs of profit.

With the ways MMOs work that's quite a dedication to put into it in hopes of an mmo succeeding. Rather then rely on an mmo that has already paid for itself and has loyalty to it they are pretty much putting their eggs in one basket if they are diverging resources to update XI into XIV if you consider that more people are working on XIV then XI. While I did wish that 14 could've been better I really do wish I could understand why they are so adamant about making it work. The only real conclusion I can come to is they are to proud of the FF name to allow it to die in such a way that they are willing to push all their resources into making it work so it's a game both fans and those new to the game can enjoy. They feel that if they let the game die then things liek FF13 versus and even a future of FF15 will be lost cause of the damage FF14 has done to the franchise.

Which i can understand though as always time will tell how things settle in the end, while I had been keeping up with the news it almost feels like the only real time it might be worthy to look at 14 again is when they deem it p2p. Then perhaps I"ll look over all the changes they made and see if there's a real chance for the game to sign or will it just crumble away like Asheron's Call 2