Quote Originally Posted by Hashmalum View Post
When people complain that FFXIV has a huge development team and FFXI's is tiny, it's true, but they are leaving out another serious personnel related problem. You see, FFXIV still has all its original development staff (ok, except Tanaka) while FFXI does not; over the years, they were moved to other projects such as FFXIV, that new Dragon Quest MMO that hasn't come out yet, maybe even single-player games. Why does this matter? Because familiarity with the code base matters! It takes time to understand how code that was written by other people works, and that is time that could be used actually doing things elsewhere. That is why when we ask for something and are told that it "can't" be done, usually that's not true in any absolute sense, or even any reasonably technically feasible sense, but simply in the sense that the current skeleton dev team can't do it alongside their normal dev work in any reasonable time frame.

But wait, it's even worse than that, because FFXIV took all the best developers--we know this because the CEO himself promised that turning around FFXIV would be handled by SE's best talent! By elementary logic, therefore, everybody working on FFXI right now (along with all of their other projects) does not fall into the "best talent (as considered by the management)" category. Not an insult, simply a fact.
All of this should just simply upset us as a community even more so really, but they have us right where they want us atm. It's like they continue to keep punching us in the face and we keep going here's your 12.95 thank you here's your 12.95 thank you. Maybe at some point there will be 1000 page threads on this subject when people have had enough, and SE might understand that hey can only punch us for so much longer.