Development Team Downsizing and Justification Makes no Sense

[Alhanelem]

What Draylo said. I just said players felt the impact of the focus shift; not that they necessarily knew what was causing the lack of content.

This interview is talking about when FFXIV 1.0 was in development. At this time there wasn't any sort of lack of content in our updates- At least I certainly don't remember getting that impression. I'd agree with you if this was near or post-audolin times, but this was much earlier than that.

I blame SE and Tanaka for pulling resources from FFXI at a time when they could have turned the metaphorical ship around.

I respect your perspective on this, but you have to remember this was a business decision. They felt like they would be more financially successful with a new game that can attract a lot of new players vs trying to keep a ship from sinking. And at this time there wasn't really an accepted rule as to whether sequelling an MMO was a good idea or not- Few games other than Ultima and Everquest had been around remotely long enough to demonstrate how long an MMO can truly last.

It wasn't til later that they realized "Wow, there's still quite a few people playing this and it's worth our time to keep things going a while longer" because players of FFXI and FFXIV were substantially different and there wasn't a ton of overlap.

8 months+ between updates during WOTG....

I don't recall us ever going 8 months without an update of any sort, at least during the time period relevant to this discussion? Even today we *technically* still get updates on a monthly basis. Even the updates that actually add things hadn't been 8 months apart.