why was hildebrand so short this patch and when is the next one

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Originally Posted by Kyuuen

...blindly cutting content because someone thinks it detracts from the whole is just as folly.

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You entirely misrepresent my argument. Never once did I say it /detracts from game/. What I did say is that, at a time when devs are already drastically overworked and underbudgeted, the first things to cut are the ones that make the smallest impact on long-term fiscal success. Then when things are looking better, you work them back in.

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Originally Posted by Kyuuen

Ignoring any groups of people in an MMO can have pretty sharp repercussions

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Do you think WoW had anything resembling Hildibrand at their peak of 12 million subscribers? There were some random silly side quests, sure, but not at all like what SE is doing with Hildibrand. And I can absolutely guarantee you their losing 7-8 million subscribers over recent years has absolutely nothing at all to do with WoW's lack of this kind of content.

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Originally Posted by Kyuuen

XI who in it's early life only permitted; for the VAST majority, group based play beyond a certain point, essentially chasing any sort of solo player away, thus never becoming a Massive hit as WoW or what XIV already is.

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XIV isn't as successful as people think. There's a reason SE tends to celebrate "accounts made" and "number of characters" rather than raw subscription numbers. At its peak, XI hit around 750k subscribers. It stayed around 500k average for many years otherwise. It did this in spite of being extraordinarily unfriendly to solo and casual players, and it did this in spite of not having silly throwaway questlines. We haven't been given exact numbers, but a lot of sources are estimating XIV hit around 500-600k subs at its peak so far, but not much more. It's possible it has matched XI's highest mark, but doesn't seem like it. (And there's a reason we've never had a lodestone post about celebrating 1 million active subscribers)

(Also, as an aside: FFXI might currently have 50-100k subscribers at most. It is the most casual and solo friendly it has ever been. Correlation does not equal causation, but it's interesting to consider how strange it is that the casualification of the game seems to have little to no impact on drawing in new or returning casual players. We also see the same pattern with WoW: the more casual it gets, the more subs seem to flee from the game. Curious.)

The thing is, Wow and FFXI both did have silly and fun characters and questlines, but it was usually handled one of two ways. Either it would be a recurring character that makes brief cameos in these other quests (Think Naji from the Bastok missions) without ever being the focal point, or it would just be a really fast, simple side quest with brief dialogue and maybe a quick cutscene. Focusing on just one of these silly characters, giving them a supporting cast and an involved story with lots of elements and even some battle/instanced content is something fairly unique to FFXIV, and I'd argue it's good to have something unique. Generally.

But you have to pick your battles and you have to do things at the right time. People are either willfully ignorant or just plain naive if they think this content exists and is developed in a vacuum with unlimited resources. The truth is that shareholders are forcing SE to divert a LOT of xiv's resources to other projects right now. Shareholders care about the company's bottom line as a whole and less about this one property's health. They probably don't even really understand MMOs or care much (which we saw quite vividly with XIV 1.0's failures). To them, Yoshi succeeded in their goals: they turned around a failed franchise, earned back the money and made it profitable, and restored honor to a tarnished name. Now they can just coast off the monthly sub fees.

People's memories are too short. They forget all too easily they did exactly the same thing with FFXI... to fund FFXIV... in the first place. And it nearly destroyed the game. So what I'm saying is, as long as FFXIV isn't getting all the resources and manpower it deserves, it needs to be /very/ picky about how it spends its time and money- and Hildibrand, currently, is a foolish choice.

I personally only play this game for its side-quests and minigames, and I know a lot of people who are the same, it makes it slightly different then any other games.

Wow. Uh... you guys know that there are lots of different groups in the development team, right? There are those that design the quests, those that design mounts and minions, those that design battle content, those that design the mini-games. It's not like the existence of one made the work of the other worse, or lacking. It's not by removing those developers, or making them stop working on content not deemed "important" that the "important" content will see better days. It only means that we will see less content per patch and things will stay the same. SE is looking for people that can design battle content for a while now. Hells, they even have a page on their job application website specifically for that, and it has been there since July 2015 (if memory serves me right; feel free to correct me otherwise).

It's not because they created Lords of Verminion that made content lacking in 3.1. If anything, it's due to the to the lack of staff able to develop said content.

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Originally Posted by SuperZay

Now that you mention it, what happened to Mor Dhona kid adventurers? They just dropped that sidestory entirely halfway through.

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I'm assuming it's discontinued for a while for other stuff, I'll assume it's Hildebrand.
Hildebrand is pretty popular, and gets hyped in patch trailers, too. I can see why they would go for continuing Hildebrand instead (for now).

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Originally Posted by Lemuria

Actual content? You mean another set of level 250 armor and two dungeons to grind for new tomes as opposed to interesting characters, plot developments and fun diversions? Please do enlighten us as to what you would consider 'actual content' oh mighty Fat-cat.

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I'm laughing so hard from this post.

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Originally Posted by Melondra

I'm laughing so hard from this post.

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Welp, she's not wrong lol. And I consider raids, quests of any form(Hildy included), new gears, dungeons, plot developments and minigames and even pvp as actual content.

Odds are Hildebrand will be most of the content after 3.3x. Just don't call it a comeback.

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Originally Posted by Koujiro

Wow.

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You have no idea what you're talking about, but you'll be quite confident you do regardless of anything I say. Sorry you feel that way.

Hildibrand is a meme character pandering to redditors
but he's better than most of the stuff in FFXIV

Do I sense a thread in which hardcore raiders are whining that the game isn't all about them again? Huzzah

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Originally Posted by Hayward

Professional endgamers must really be fun at parties. Anything that only 10% of the online population can enjoy is considered real content to these jokers.

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Do you take every chance you get to insult people who raid, to the point where you have to reach so far and somehow think that the person you quoted represents the raiding community? Why are you so bitter all the time? Did someone hurt you? Would you like a hug?

One thing I'd like to point out is the one arguing the most against additional dev time to Hildebrand isn't saying it should go to Raids (though it seems to be one they would enjoy) but to other content with better replayability.

Which is a worthwhile argument, but there is also a good bit of the story, MSQ, class quest, and others, with content that isn't replayable that players also quite enjoy. Certain cases have us wanting to atleast have it show up in some form to do again (Case in point, the Grand Melee that we just got.)

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Originally Posted by Zari

Do I sense a thread in which hardcore raiders are whining that the game isn't all about them again? Huzzah

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This thread started because someone wanted MORE Hildebrand and not whining for less/completely cut, and many people commenting support more Hildebrand. The one person "whining" on the other side doesn't even mention raiding much.

I think Hildibrand tried so hard to be funny but he's not funny at all.

The content based around him is also worthless and pointless.

I hope he'll never comeback, unless he's gonna get killed in the last episode of his boring saga.

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Originally Posted by ValkyrieL

I would prefer dev. time on something that has REPLAY VALUE, not something than u can skip through in 5mins and NEVER do it again..

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You mean like Alexander Gordias/Midas, where the duty can last 5 minutes or less but the only reason they have replay value is because of the bolts and gears you get from them for current non-savage equipment?

Yeah, right.

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Originally Posted by Arrius

You mean like Alexander Gordias/Midas, where the duty can last 5 minutes or less but the only reason they have replay value is because of the bolts and gears you get from them for current non-savage equipment?

Yeah, right.

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Yes. Reward is everything these days. If it doesn't have any then why even bother? Midas is relevant content for progression, re-playable and also a very fun tier, so this is actually worthwhile content than Hildebrand which you can't do again unless you do it with an alt.

I doubt a lot of people actually bothered with Hildebrand after getting the rewards like the Manderville Dance or the Gentleman Pose, or bothered with it in the beginning at all.

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Originally Posted by Evangela

I think Hildibrand tried so hard to be funny but he's not funny at all.

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I'll be fair and say I found his antics amusing in 2.1 and somewhat in 2.2. 2.3 and onwards, however... ergh. When I can see the joke before it's told and when it's repeated three or so times, it's not funny or even amusing.

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Originally Posted by Nestama

I'll be fair and say I found his antics amusing in 2.1 and somewhat in 2.2. 2.3 and onwards, however... ergh. When I can see the joke before it's told and when it's repeated three or so times, it's not funny or even amusing.

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It's kinda why I wanted him to be a one off thing or something once in a while Hildibrand is a bit of a one trick pony with his humor.

Hildebrand is the most boring content ever. It's just not funny, it's trying so hard to be slapstick and falling into the realms of cringe.

I really hope it will stop or atleast not attach trials to it so it is completely optional. Then Square will how small an amount of people actually enjoy it and put their efforts elsewhere into relevant content

Haters gon' hate. Hildibrand is still gonna be the coolest investigator around, and I'm still gonna enjoy every single bit of content that gets added to his repertoire.

Every.
Single.
Bit.

/manderville

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Originally Posted by Yasuhiro

It's kinda why I wanted him to be a one off thing or something once in a while Hildibrand is a bit of a one trick pony with his humor.

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This is how I feel as well. The problem is that there's a lot of vocal players who claim that it's the best thing ever...and that everything else is 'boring' by comparison. I'm a bigger fan of subtle humour, personally. I don't mind slapstick from time to time but it rapidly becomes obnoxious when it's put forward again and again. I'm also rather troubled by the recent quests involving major lore characters. Keeping Hildibrand as it's own separate bubble is the most efficient path, in my opinion. Letting him affect MSQ material is...dubious and a slippery slope. I left WoW because of how common 'silly' quests became despite them once being subtle and tasteful.

It's like an old joke from 1960's cartoon. I don't find it funny at all.

http://i.imgur.com/aqsc4mE.jpg

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Originally Posted by ArturVernon

Hildebrand is the most boring content ever. It's just not funny, it's trying so hard to be slapstick and falling into the realms of cringe.

I really hope it will stop or atleast not attach trials to it so it is completely optional. Then Square will how small an amount of people actually enjoy it and put their efforts elsewhere into relevant content

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Square was all ready to leave it closed at the end of 2.x but made mention that if enough people wanted it, they'd bring him back in 3.x. So it would seem that plenty of people wanted him back. Me included.

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Originally Posted by Odett

Do you take every chance you get to insult people who raid, to the point where you have to reach so far and somehow think that the person you quoted represents the raiding community? Why are you so bitter all the time? Did someone hurt you? Would you like a hug?

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A vast majority of raiders don't do content that doesn't directly benefit their ilv nor do they do things for players who aren't into raiding. I'm in a linkshell with a vast amount of raiders on Jenova, ask them for dungeon runs, you get crickets, but ask them for raid help depending on the raid and you'll get a answer. True, there are others who help graciously, but it's still a stigmata that the raiding community has to live with.

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Originally Posted by Jetstream_Fox

A vast majority of raiders don't do content that doesn't directly benefit their ilv nor do they do things for players who aren't into raiding. I'm in a linkshell with a vast amount of raiders on Jenova, ask them for dungeon runs, you get crickets, but ask them for raid help depending on the raid and you'll get a answer. True, there are others who help graciously, but it's still a stigmata that the raiding community has to live with.

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Its like claiming everyone who doesn't raid is lazy and unskilled.

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Originally Posted by Andrea

Its like claiming everyone who doesn't raid is lazy and unskilled.

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And yet, many raiders have that exact mindset.

It's a stigma. Doesn't mean it's a 100% truthful fact about all people who do or do not raid. Both of these stigmas stemmed from people's experiences.