November? really?

I'm gonna be a keyboard dev. While I agree getting some R&R is important for worker morale, I would have handled this a little different. We are talking nearly half a year before we get something new. I would have staggered the vacations. I'd send like, 25% of the team on vacation at a time so that a majority of the team can work on patches. Sure there'd be a delay because your missing a quarter of the team, but it wouldn't be this 2 month delay.

Hopefully we'll get a few more hair styles then :P

I'm not too sure how vacations are an excuse. The company I work for ensures that vacations don't interfere with business productivity.

We put in a request for vacation time and if there are too many others off at the same time it gets rejected.

I would have thought this was common practice for any business.

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Originally Posted by Nekodar

Since Blue gear is better than Green/White/Grey of the same ilevel, and Pink (Aetherial) tend to be about the same as White/Grey with random melds, I don't think it's going to change anything. People are going to want Eso gear plus upgrade items and/or Savage gear.
Pink gear will however be useful to spiritbond... or maybe hand in for points.

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Uhm... Color does not mean what you think it means.

When equipment has the same ilevel the Primary stats (Weapon Damage, Def, MDef, STR/DEX/VIT/INT/MND) are always the same:

HQ Crafted White/Green = Random Stat Pinks = Dungeon Drop Greens = 8 man/Tomestone Blues = Relic Purples

NQ Crafted are 90% the "standard" ilevel (previously they were 80%)

With Secondary Stats:

Unmelded HQ Crafted = Dungeon Greens = Raid/Tomestone Blues

Each item has one secondary at cap and one secondary at 70% cap.

Pink items have 1 to 3 Secondaries and those secondaries are randomly selected based on the piece. Tank pieces can have any combination of Acc, Parry, Det, Crit and Skill Speed, DoW pieces can have Acc, Det, Crit and Skill Speed and DoM pieces can have Acc, Det, Crit, Spell Speed and Piety. The bonuses are also random and can vary between 70% of cap and 100% of cap.

Pinks vary between being being worse (fairly common) than other gear,roughly equal to (fairly common), and (very rarely) being better than other pieces of the same ilevel.

The big difference between Whites, Pinks, Greens and Blues before level 50 was the level you could equip them at in comparision to their ilevel. Most Whites (Vintage/Goblin gear was unusual) were on level, Dungeon Greens were equipable at the minimum level of the dungeon you got them in with the highest unsynced level being the item's ilevel (+3), Pinks tended to be on level with the occasional lowered minimum level and Blues had a significant gap +5.

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Originally Posted by Shadray

I'm not too sure how vacations are an excuse. The company I work for ensures that vacations don't interfere with business productivity.

We put in a request for vacation time and if there are too many others off at the same time it gets rejected.

I would have thought this was common practice for any business.

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It depends entirely on how large the team is. In a small office, even one person going on vacation can be enough to make overall productivity take a hit, and there's no way around it because you can't deny people vacations. My current team is three people-- if one of us goes on vacation, we have to pull in someone from another branch to cover for them. Even so, if the person on vacation is my boss, there are going to be some things that simply can't be done until he gets back because none of the rest of us have the authority to sign off on them. I'd imagine it's probably the same way with the FFXIV dev team.

Woohoo, I have 1.5-2 months to finish my animus!
And at this point I don't even know if new relic will be there in 3.1... someone enlight me!

So if they're two months behind the regular schedule for 3.1 compared to usual 3-month patch cycles...what did the dev team do, take a two-month vacation? O__o

Kinda wondering if they weren't behind schedule for other reasons as well, and the whole "vacation" aspect is just a more PR-friendly way of admitting they're behind. Less likely to get your fanbase riled up, at least.

I don't really care either way, but I do wonder if patches will start to be more delayed in the future. Also find it curious that they're handing out free 210s in 3.1... Do they really believe a satisfactory amount of people will have cleared AS4 by then? I'm not convinced.

Here, let me put this in easier terms: everyone is thinking of an American (or maybe even a UK) work week where it's 40 hours, 5 days a week, 8 hours a day.

Japan is not like this. Just a normal salaryman can work 49+ hours a week, and while they have time off they CAN use (not including the one day holidays they have across the country) most don't. The reason? It's seen as disrespectful. So while they may have MAYBE 19 days or so of vacation time they can take, they don't. They don't want to kick back while their peers and coworkers are working and picking up their slack and going from a 12-14 hour day to a 16-17 hour day at work while that person is on a two day paid vacation.

That's why the devs taking a break after working ridiculous hours to pound out a core game, 5 patches, and a huge xpac at the same time as developing your content patches, is such a big deal. If my day consisted of reading lines of code to make sure things weren't buggy, and if I did that for upwards of 15 hours a day? I'd want a break too, even if it were for 4 days. Japan has a high suicide rate due to schooling/work conditions, and this is precisely why (out of 100k people, 19.4 people will take their own lives, for clarification.) They also have a fairly high amount of stress-related illness/deaths that come from overworking themselves.

So, there's your reasoning on why the devs needed a week, likely a week that they were reluctant to take, before jumping into making a content patch: because they're likely to work themselves to death if they don't.

tl;dr, their culture is radically different from everyone else's.

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Originally Posted by rainichan

Here, let me put this in easier terms: everyone is thinking of an American (or maybe even a UK) work week where it's 40 hours, 5 days a week, 8 hours a day.

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Culture in this case has nothing to do with it. People here in the US and the rest of the west can regularly do 60-70 + or more hour work weeks when its crunch time on a video game without over time. Dev studio crunch times no know culture. This kind of thing happens all the time see: EA spouse <- and thats from 2004

i'm perfectly happy to unsub and give them as much time as they need to release a patch worth returning to.