If you could ask 1 question to the Devs

Real honest question:

Are profits earned from Final Fantasy XIV used to fund other Square Enix projects such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, New Luminous Studio IP, Unannounced 3rd Business Unit Project, etc. instead of Final Fantasy XIV itself?

Shadowbringers was a big success and, correct me if I'm wrong, we're at peak subscriber count. Despite this, I honestly feel as if this game doesn't get enough funding and could hire additional developers to create more content and at faster pace. It doesn't feel like the success of Shadowbringers translated to more development resources being allocated to the game. It would be nice to have some transparency on where our money is being allocated to.

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Originally Posted by Jandroid

Real honest question:

Are profits earned from Final Fantasy XIV used to fund other Square Enix projects such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, New Luminous Studio IP, Unannounced 3rd Business Unit Project, etc. instead of Final Fantasy XIV itself?

Shadowbringers was a big success and, correct me if I'm wrong, we're at peak subscriber count. Despite this, I honestly feel as if this game doesn't get enough funding and could hire additional developers to create more content and at faster pace. It doesn't feel like the success of Shadowbringers translated to more development resources being allocated to the game. It would be nice to have some transparency on where our money is being allocated to.

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good luck with a major game company opening their books for lil ol you. you can throw money at the game but it still would require people of sufficient caliber to be hired. they've stated that finding people that can do such tasks are very hard to find.

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Originally Posted by Jandroid

Real honest question:

Are profits earned from Final Fantasy XIV used to fund other Square Enix projects such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, New Luminous Studio IP, Unannounced 3rd Business Unit Project, etc. instead of Final Fantasy XIV itself?

Shadowbringers was a big success and, correct me if I'm wrong, we're at peak subscriber count. Despite this, I honestly feel as if this game doesn't get enough funding and could hire additional developers to create more content and at faster pace. It doesn't feel like the success of Shadowbringers translated to more development resources being allocated to the game. It would be nice to have some transparency on where our money is being allocated to.

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We've confirmed via live letter in the past that the Mogstation profits are the only profits that 100% go back into the game. So, yes, you can make the logical assumption that a good chunk of the rest of the funds is being used for other SE projects or even to help with basic things like employee payroll.

why don’t you make a map with open pvp or a pvp game mode where players have the same status as their char pve, and could also have free company war over territory could be war over home territory for example, or something similar to a siege as in other MMO's.
I feel like all the effort we make on pve is useless, since pvp modes have their own settings and balance.

Are you planning to hire a competent and inspired game designer ?

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

good luck with a major game company opening their books for lil ol you. you can throw money at the game but it still would require people of sufficient caliber to be hired. they've stated that finding people that can do such tasks are very hard to find.

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No need to act so condescending with your reply.

I do understand that it's difficult to find amazing talents but it does get a bit disappointing when we had amazing talents like Hiroshi Takai, Kazutoyo Maehiro, Mitsutoshi Gondai, and Kazuya Takahashi step down to less significant roles but not hire enough to fill in the gap.

Thankfully, Natsuko Ishikawa and Yusuke Mogi have stepped up from their previous roles to maintain and even improve the quality of the game. Nonetheless, I do believe that additional hires can help ease their workload even if just a little bit and allow them to focus on improving the quality of their work.

I'm probably just being wishful at this point but I'd really like it if a bit more of Square Enix's resources can be put into this game.

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Originally Posted by Enla

We've confirmed via live letter in the past that the Mogstation profits are the only profits that 100% go back into the game. So, yes, you can make the logical assumption that a good chunk of the rest of the funds is being used for other SE projects or even to help with basic things like employee payroll.

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Thanks for the reply. I didn't know that this has been addressed before. It's just a bit frustrating that the success of Shadowbringers didn't translate to a huge overall improvement in updates.

But in hindsight, I do think I'm sounding unreasonably impatient (possibly due to quarantine boredom). I'm gonna sound hopeful and optimistic here, but I'm still holding out hope that the success of Shadowbringers mean that more resources are being put on the next expansion especially since they plan content way ahead of time. Thinking about it now, the Shadowbringers patches were very likely already planned before the expansion even came out.

its not condescending it's thinking within the realm of reality. so many people have so many selfish requests it's unbelievable.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

its not condescending it's thinking within the realm of reality. so many people have so many selfish requests it's unbelievable.

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It was the first sentence of your post that was condescending. You didn't need to add that in to get your point across. I'd have to admit that the rest of your post were fine and informative though.

Also, it isn't necessarily a good thing to limit yourself in thinking within the realm of reality. Science and technology wouldn't have progressed to what it is today if mankind never explored the realm of possibilities. In fact, conventional knowledge would have leaned more towards the cancellation of Final Fantasy XIV when it first launched in 2010. A 2013 reboot would have sounded ludicrous if everyone was to be pragmatic. I'm more of an idealist than I am a pragmatist however so we probably aren't going to see eye to eye over many things and that's just the nature of it.

However, I agree that many people here do bring up unreasonable requests that is beyond the scope of the project so I can see why you can get cynical. The underlying argument behind my question though was that Square Enix should give more funding to this game (which can also increase the scope of the project). Although I'd have to admit that it seemed very rash and impatient of me to say so since content is developed far ahead of time and that a potential increase in funding might be better reflected in the next expansion rather than the current updates to Shadowbringers.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

...they've stated that finding people that can do such tasks are very hard to find.

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That still doesn't excuse the fact that they could train people to do tasks.
If there was no training, then we would still be relying on Nobuo for music, and we would not have Soken writing such great music.

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Originally Posted by Payotz

That still doesn't excuse the fact that they could train people to do tasks.
If there was no training, then we would still be relying on Nobuo for music, and we would not have Soken writing such great music.

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bringing in a fresh person could take months/years to train (training in whatever engine specific stuff is going on, integration into their teams, learning their way around the codebase since basically every person has their own 'dialect' when coding) and each new person added actually decreases the efficiency of this process further (there have been a great many GDC talks over the years explaining the woes and statistics of exactly this), which is a huge investment that people would complain about not getting content ASAP after the announced new hires, since even experienced devs cant just drop in and get straight to work.

this isnt necessarily aimed at you, just that folks saying "just throw more money/people at it" are pretty greatly underestimating the challenges and time involved--and just injecting more money wont work either, since there's only so many man-hours the staff can give, and the company is adamant about not becoming a crunch-heavy or "black" company.

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Originally Posted by SpiralMask

bringing in a fresh person could take months/years to train (training in whatever engine specific stuff is going on, integration into their teams, learning their way around the codebase since basically every person has their own 'dialect' when coding) and each new person added actually decreases the efficiency of this process further (there have been a great many GDC talks over the years explaining the woes and statistics of exactly this), which is a huge investment that people would complain about not getting content ASAP after the announced new hires, since even experienced devs cant just drop in and get straight to work.

this isnt necessarily aimed at you, just that folks saying "just throw more money/people at it" are pretty greatly underestimating the challenges and time involved--and just injecting more money wont work either, since there's only so many man-hours the staff can give, and the company is adamant about not becoming a crunch-heavy or "black" company.

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This is also true. I also remember reading about how Yoshi-P really likes how efficient his team is currently set up (the same reason he brings in guest creators to break the efficient mold they've established). I've also studied programming and have even attended a GDC event in-person myself (with a student discount of course, tickets are hella expensive even with a discount) so I can understand where you're going with this.

But at the same time, it's inevitable for them to have to hire new staff as well. Developers are human beings too, some developers may want to move on from the game while some may need more rest and a reduction in workload. When these happen then we would be left with less manpower and no replacement.

Another thing to consider as well is to spend resources in hiring third party support. I don't know if the FFXIV team outsources any programming work (which sounds like a nightmare in my opinion) but I know that they do outsource art assets from third party companies and companies from even outside of Japan. Consider the state that the Viera & Hrothgar are in; since you also studied game development (I assume so since you watched GDC seminars), then you'd know that the adding a new race is an exponential (non-linear) increase in workload since they'd have to create even more assets for every new armor they make in addition to recreating past assets to work with the new races. While they'd have to tighten their quality control if they decide to outsource more art assets, doing so is a lot less demanding than recreating assets themselves.

The addition of Viera and Hrothgar is just one of those cases where I think Yoshi-P's team bit off more than they can chew, and now there are fans chewing them out for it because these new races can't wear all helmets. This is how a team expansion and increase in resources can really benefit the game in the long run and why I think this type of investment is worth the risk.

Next expansion pack?

just by looking at the credits roll for Shadowbringers i'd def say that they outsource work to 3rd party studios.

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Originally Posted by Payotz

That still doesn't excuse the fact that they could train people to do tasks.
If there was no training, then we would still be relying on Nobuo for music, and we would not have Soken writing such great music.

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It's more than just an issue of training.

Ask Blizzard what happened when they doubled the WoW development team 6 months into Mists of Pandaria with the intention of releasing more content faster in the following expansion and all future expansion.

Better yet, ask anyone who was playing WoW at the time. We got what's generally considered to be WoW's worst expansion ever with very little content at the start and not all that much content added during the patches.

Part of it was training the industry veterans they had hired on Blizzard's systems and methods. Part of it was helping them fit in with their new teams.

But Blizzard also discovered that having a lot more pieces of content to add to the game created big bottlenecks post-creation when the time came to make certain that content integrated successfully into the rest of the game and alongside all those other new parts. What time savings they had gained in initial creation was offset by the additional time needed to test and fix it when there were inevitable conflicts causing things to break.

As a result, WoW didn't up getting more new content than ever before. Warlords of Draenor was very disappointing with the dismal content they added. Even Legion, which felt like it had more content than an expansion had gotten in years, was largely reliant on content created for other reasons being given a new look for end game. Leveling dungeons became Mythic+ dungeons at level cap. Zone story quests became world quests at level cap.

For all that it sounds reasonable that more money should mean more new content, it's not the way it works out in the long run.

Why would you ever allow an account to own more than one house in such an extremely limited resource pool?

Do you have plans for unlocking other gearsets like you did for the Sky Rat sets?

(I also have questions on Chartreuse yellow dye, macro icons, and Glamour Dresser expansion, but the thread is limited to 1 so...)

Why haven't our Chocobo buddies been given attention since 2.0? They still have accuracy traits despite accuracy being removed in 2017.

Would it be possible to go into a more in-depth, job-specific explanation for design decisions being made, especially when significant changes are being made to jobs?
I feel most players would feel better if they had a better understanding of what you were trying to achieve with the jobs, and it would allow players to provide better feedback that's more specific to the issues that remain or are trying to be addressed.

Why can people buy more than one house? So people keep buying more sub to keep their houses obviously.

Can we get some new direction to the story so we don't need to be Hydaelyns puppet? I don't wanna be a hero anymore.

Why can't we have NPC hairstyles(like Yugiri, Gaia, Lyse & Hien, Cid & Zenos) & full beards/ body hair for male characters when there is a clear huge interest from the playerbase that wants a better character creator & non-exclusive hairstyles?

Mine is simple, why not other lalafell type playable characters. Short oddly shaped beings of glorious awesomeness.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Why haven't our Chocobo buddies been given attention since 2.0? They still have accuracy traits despite accuracy being removed in 2017.

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this was i think because they only had 1 guy on chocobos and he moved on to something else. they haven't gone back to it since. and it hasn't really been necessary to imo really.

Why is taking an airship in this game just a loadscreen? In FFXI you travel across the overworld, though it's in LOD.

yoshi please fix hair clipping please? as a long hair avatar player, it always dread me out whenever i found a good piece of armor only to be ruined because whatever it is on the back of the armor is clipping with my hair.

and not helping that when we play this game, we mostly see our player back lol

Are you also doing your best to ignore the sparse but extremely rude troll questions in this thread?

Because goddamn. There are lots of good questions here, but every so often I see one that makes me just want to stare down the poster and say "wtf bro."

This is a tough one because the immediate response would be to want to ask/plead for a specific feature or content type you want individually, or to express some sort of personal complaint. But that's not really something you're going to get any sort of answer to even if you can phrase it in a way that isn't immediately entitled or rude. Though I'm sure most of the questions of this sort are things they have heard before and have a set reason for not having already implemented or addressed.

Anyway, I would probably ask something along the lines of "Where do you see the game in 2 years or 5 years?" with a potential addition or follow-up about what sort specific content or direction that would personally like to see added or updated in that time.

Could be interesting to see what they have to say about the direction of the game in the future.

I'd ask them to remove all the unnecessary confirmations. I don't need to be asked "Are you sure" when going through a door when I can easily return if I do it by mistake.

The only actions that should have confirmations are ones that can't be quickly reversed, or have a cost.

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

What would you ask?

Try to keep it to 1 question per post, can be long rant, 1 word, whatever, just what would you ask them if you could directly?

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When will we be getting more Hildibrand? I've done all I can find, and I enjoy them immensely. They bring a bit of levity to the heaviness and seriousness of the game in the latter half.

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Originally Posted by TeraRamis

"Why is the story so moronic?"

I'm locked into being the blind, unquestioning worshiper of some glittering space rock. That's not compelling.

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I felt that a lot in ARR, but moving into SB and ShB it started to change. But I do understand where you are coming from, just blindly agreeing with everything that you are asked to do is eh.

Can we get an honest answer to the number of active players instead of the number of accounts on file

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

you can throw money at the game but it still would require people of sufficient caliber to be hired. they've stated that finding people that can do such tasks are very hard to find.

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This is the biggest issue, if Yoshi found somebody he just has to have, SE would hire them, no questions. Finding the right people with the talent, ability to speak Japanese, can handle the crazy working hours, fit in perfectly with their internal culture and deal with all of us... there terribly rare, and SE has nearly all of them.

Why can't I write on my maps?

Are you happy with secondary stats always leading to "stack crit and that's it"?

The most obvious one.

WTF?!?

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Originally Posted by Gothicshark

Why is housing still impossible to get? Seriously, What's with the limited slots. Millions play this game a few hundred can have houses.

Edit for honesty 5k per server. But still, Too few houses per server compared to the Server populations.

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I agree. Is there some issue which prevents phased instance housing?

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Originally Posted by MonsutaMan

https://i1.wp.com/www.ungeek.ph/wp-c...80%2C669&ssl=1

I am no dev, but around 2022-ish for the anniversary is my guess.

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I should have said new , I played this for about 7 years and moved onto XIV. No interest in going back to XI ;)

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

this was i think because they only had 1 guy on chocobos and he moved on to something else. they haven't gone back to it since. and it hasn't really been necessary to imo really.

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I disagree they could have added a lot of more content to choco buddies

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Originally Posted by Coombah

I disagree they could have added a lot of more content to choco buddies

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sadly the 'chocobo guy' for the gold saucer etc was moved over to encounter design back in stormblood (the Ultimates, iirc).

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Originally Posted by Coombah

I disagree they could have added a lot of more content to choco buddies

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Seriously.

First and foremost they NEED the ability to move chocobos and have them stay. The amount of healing birds I've had die because they always want to be RIGHT next to me is too damn high!

Second: They need to develop a ranged DPS bird. Have it wark, throw rocks, wing flap a wind attack, whatever but that needs to happen.

Can we expect a comprehensive representation of what secondary stats do in terms of percentages at some point? I understand what they do, it's just not clear in what mesure the stats affect how much critical rate or direct hit rate we get.

When something gives you 300 critical hit rating, it'd be best to be able to tell of that is a lot or not in terms of percentages in-game rather than having to use third party tools to figure out what those numbers mean.