Interview - Cost, Hiring, FT, Hardcore and Casual, Ultimate, Cosmic, Future of FFXIV

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Originally Posted by Hallarem

With Yoshi P, I'd say believe in his actions and not his words. That's the nicest way to put it.

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And that's the way you should see it. That's the way everyone should look at it, really.

It's 100% clear that Yoshi-P and the leadership at CBU3 got comfortable "suffering from success".

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• "I believe we can only gain trust and confidence by continuing to build on it one step at a time, so we want to approach this as a new starting point for us as well."
• "Of course, I don't expect all content to suddenly reach the level I've talked about today. But I want to do my best to show you a glimpse of that and my determination"

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Like you said, lets see if his deeds match his words going forward.
I know they can do 5 star work on this game when they *really* set out to do it. They've done it before. I hope they'll do it again. ^_^

If you know how to read corporate speak he really didn't say a whole lot here.

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

Remove the raise restriction and eviction upon full wipe, redesign the relatively few(?) mechanics that require baiting, rescale DPS checks to be 24 players + (0.5 to 0.75) * number of players past 24… and I think you'd get something that six knowledgable, coordinated light parties could help drag others through — or at least prog more successfully and with more fun than, "lol, snowballs/fireballs, gg tyfp."

(I haven't done BA, so I don't have a feel for what "carryable" means there.)

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That’s the thing off the top of my head for mechanics that probably need to be redesigned

Tablet- tablet is mostly fine. About the only thing I could see is maybe one of the stack markers to bounce the meteor placers over to the safe side is pre set and doesn’t move because if the stack bouncers stand too far back all meteor placers just die

Dead stars- snowballs and fire towers need to change. Snowballs they could probably just get away with removing the tether stretch invuln stack but towers basically needs a ground up rework because if two cleaves don’t kill you then positioning in the mechanic suddenly doesn’t matter which makes it a nothing mechanic. Like that’s explicitly designed as an all or nothing that I can’t figure out how they would fix that

Bridges- bridges could stand to delete the Romeo’s on the idols (since Romeo’s is already used on the sprites in dragon) and delete the ability for line cleaves to pull enemies beyond an unbroken wall

Dragon- dragon is fine, dragon has basically zero personal responsibility

Lockwards- lockwards doesn’t have personal responsibility but the rhythmic keyward interruption should be deleted anyway because it discourages spawning support

Cow- holy lance and rune axe both are arguably already balanced by the fact that they give thrice come ruin rather than just kill you but they go off so quickly that doesn’t really help. You really can’t drag people through them, people need to understand raid plans if they haven’t seen them to make them work but I can’t even think of how to make them easier because it’s a dance to avoid ruin stacks. Canisters one is also arguably too tight a check considering you can’t use burst for it

And then just in general no occult armour gives defence like magia or eureka armour or rays so you are incredibly reliant on a shield healer for dead stars, bridges and cow specifically

There is just so much they would need to fix that to fix it feels like would take as much time as making forked normal anyway

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Originally Posted by Bryson

cleared ft, recleared ft. It wasn't difficult.. idk what to tell you.

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yeah, that's the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from someone who has no idea what the the poor plebians who aren't in the top 1% have to deal with.

maybe just try having some empathy? it's surely as easy as just not being bad?

Every issue that the dev team is experiencing is self-inflicted. You mean to tell me that over the course of more than a decade you couldn't have your ops guys develop a strategy for ensuring you're maintaining quality, highly trained, highly skilled personnel? What kind of circus is the management structure in that company? You can't honestly expect us to believe that in 10 years you can't find and develop enough people to maintain the labor and skill requirements to continue performing your duty as a studio in a satisfactory manner. Or wait. Yoshi P...Could it be??

- Your "engine" is a complete nightmare to work with
- It takes FOREVER to train someone to even work with the shoddy dev tools you've managed to patchwork together due to the "limitations" of this engine (remarkably expensive, far more expensive than migrating engines over the past decade would have been)
- You staff your leadership far too lean, and don't have any personnel "up to bat" in the event one of these leaders departs from the company, resulting in critical knowledge and softskill gaps
- You underpay your staff for the work that they perform, and you refuse to pay new devs enough to generate a massive influx of cream of the crop prodigies to make up for your skill deficiencies (temporary, but you have to make up ground so open up that checkbook)
- This is an incredibly critical issue, and you are downplaying it with the structure of your statements to soften the blow to fans, to set diminished expectations for the players, and to prevent an investor panic
- This is a problem that you will not be able to remedy for an extraordinary length of time

I'm ngl, if even an ounce of this speculation is true, then they are in some deep shit gg's man. Even if not, they'll still have an absolute mountain to climb to overcome their current issues. What an expensive problem they've caused for themselves. In America, heads would roll over this whole debacle.

I am at the I'll believe it when I see it stage. Especially the new dd to see if they have tee he we made it ultimate difficulty again.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I'm curious about what exactly he meant with the Forked Tower changes as well, since they weren't announced previously. But we're going to find out within days when we read the patch notes anyway.

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Only if they have the changes ready to go for 7.3. If it’s more like 7.31 or 7.35, those will have their own patch notes.

I'm intrigued by the discussion of the difficulty in hiring sufficiently qualified people.

Such people aren't deposited by storks into cabbage patches. Surely corporations needing personnel with specific skillsets, magnified by legacy code, have a responsibility to train employees to the required level?

Well, I had to assume that the issue was skills and experience. It could also just be interest I suppose, or whether a person defines themselves as a game developer.

They do put required skills and experience in job adverts, but they also say in live letters to apply anyway, since it's common that a company may hire whatever they can get even if it's not ideal.

Underpaid developers, recruitment restricted to national territory, dated engine with multiple band-aid fixes through time. Current developers don't even have the expertise to implement a proper blacklist system, and exposed sensitive user data to every client.

Meanwhile nonpaid international developers have (illegally) built a much better engine themselves that works well with the game, and the mobile version has features which might never come to FFXIV. It's only natural that the developers applying will be below expectations for a global product.

The true question is: what is Square Enix going to do about it? How long until we get meaningful changes that will restore the faith many once had in them? All of this PR talk and lack of personal accountability is only going in the opposite direction. When faced with complaints regarding content or job design, Yoshi-P has told people to play Ultimates or other games before.

The lack of effort on developing long-lasting content and decision to lobotomize every rotation into a 2-minute bland meta are not resource issues, they're just bad decisions. By many of Yoshi-P's statements, it's reasonable to conclude they've been designing the game for people who spend most of the year unsubscribed. Who's to say hiring experienced coders is going to change anything... For all we know, we've been on 2-year expansion cycles before, and the game was less profitable.