Regarding that Finaland Interview...

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Originally Posted by Mesarthim

Every plot may be owned on Leviathan but the housing wards feel very much dead, at least in my neck of the woods save for maybe one neighbor upstairs.

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It's like that in Cactuar. Even when houses could only be bought and used by FCs, this was the feeling unless you had a couple of FCs nearby that were VERY active (usually some crafters squatting between the MB and the summoning bell to pull people down and appear active). It seemingly has little to do with house squatters and just no real reason to remain at your FC unless you actually have a reason to be there. Outside from a crafter (who now might have an apartment with an equally accessible ideal location or a personal house), there's really no reason to physically plant yourself in the wards. (My husband pointed out he's really loyal to his FC, but he hardly ever goes to the [FC] house. He talks with people all the time, too, but hardly anyone knows he owns a house, let alone visits it, even though that's where he is when not raiding.)

This is one of the reasons why I'd still very much like to push for housing to be moved to instanced and just remove the open wards save for maybe the Free Companies. Even then, you could easily move the FCs to the Grand Company headquarters they are listed with and access it like you do the squadron. Just make it so every member can go inside and hang out. Solves the problem for FCs that can't get access to airships and submarines, too.

A lot of ppl are blaming Japanese corp. culture, esp for the fact that Yoshida doesn't seem to be listening to a lot of the criticism that is coming from the playerbase, influencers and gaming media. No one is even sure if he is getting the feedback or if the community teams are filtering out all the bad. Even the questions he tends to gets from interviews and ones he answers on the live letteers are obviously pre selected by SE PR to make xiv sound like the best mmo ever. How they got away with the questions in this interview I have no idea. My guess is they went off script and have now lost access to future interviews.

As a game producer/director Yoshida seems clueless to the state of his own game, either that or he feels he knows better that the majority of players. 5.0 will definitely be the make or break for a lot of ppl, that's for sure. They need to start trying to retain whats left of their veteran crowd, esp with some of the new, western MMOs on the horizon. I have been here since 2010 but they are going to have to wow me even with the advertising to get me to even buy 5.0 since I took Yoshida's advice and went to play other games and found that there are, indeed, quite a few superior experiences out there and at this point I only log in to cap my tomes.

Not going to do that through another expac.

I also agree, its time for Yoshida to step down. We need a fresh perspective from someone who is in touch with the community and the modern mmo market.

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Originally Posted by MicahZerrshia

I also agree, its time for Yoshida to step down. We need a fresh perspective from someone who is in touch with the community and the modern mmo market.

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He saved the game, and in doing so SE's reputation, and for that he deserves a significant amount of respect. However I agree, it's time for him to either leave the FF XIV team entirely, or put someone in charge who is a bit more ambitious, but not entirely out of SE's comfort zone. Expecting them to take huge risks is sadly unreasonable.

I feel the interviewer should have asked if WHM's could wear armour similar to tanks or melee DPS, rather than asking if WHM's could wear something (implied to be) exclusive to Paladins. Like, remove the glamour restrictions on everything except Job specific gear (though do please remove the restriction on crafting gear. Some of those have very nice designs, but can only be worn by Crafters/Gatherers).

Tanks and DRG's can wear just about everything in ARR. Melee and ranged DPS can wear most things in ARR. Mages in general are very limited to mainly weaver and leather stuff (usually always in robe form).

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

He saved the game, and in doing so SE's reputation, and for that he deserves a significant amount of respect. However I agree, it's time for him to either leave the FF XIV team entirely, or put someone in charge who is a bit more ambitious, but not entirely out of SE's comfort zone. Expecting them to take huge risks is sadly unreasonable.

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Oh, I agree, he does indeed deserve respect.

--BUT---

he is completely out of touch at this point. He did good once and not only are we getting significantly less even though he is boasting about having significantly more resources and finances, but he found something he liked and is just regurgitating it patch after patch and its even loosing quality as it goes. We need someone who is going to be more in touch with the community and with modern gaming period.

The sheer lack of creativity that is coming out of the development dept at this point is staggering and since everything goes through Yoshida, its his responsibility to push the team to do better or he needs to stop axing anything good coming from them because its not "final fantasy" enough or he personally doesn't like it.

I gave them a pass to recoup their loses from v1, but its been more than long enough and with the money that is said to be going into this game, they need to show us more of a return for our investment. Esp with a sub + cash shop + app + retainer fees

I like the part where they said that they are Blizzard fans and like Diablo but failed to implement a loot style system similar to said game. The closest we got was in Anemos and despite the grind getting a relic was reasonable and you also got a mount, glamours etc. Pagos was the farthest thing from that with heavy grinds locked behind rng progression. As far as some of his answers, it did seem a bit passive aggressive and completely dodged the question. He wants you to take a break but he doesn't want you to stop paying for a sub. Kinda defeats the purpose of taking a break unless he expects people to just throw away money. I'll chalk it up to maybe poor translation but he really needs to start looking at things from the player's perspective and not a developer/business man.

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Originally Posted by MicahZerrshia

either that or he feels he knows better that the majority of players.

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He does, judging by this thread.

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Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

Regardless of Yoshi I think SE is more interested in just making FF XIV a cash cow than they are taking risks and investing to improve the game overall. Feels like they're more interested in milking it to fund other projects.

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I'd be a bit more inclined to excuse Yoshi-P here were it not for the position he occupies within SE's executive structure. He has influence there, serious corporate influence. Also, the whole cash cow idea doesn't really justify the various mistakes made over the past few years. Diadem, Eureka, the inconsistent Glamour restrictions... these are issues of poor, illogical vision and design, not lack of money. And that definitely falls on Yoshi-P so far as I'm concerned.

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Originally Posted by Melichoir

Also, server resources are limited and must be factored in. As of September, the rough estimate of active players in the US alone is 280k-ish. Every ward can hold a max 60 different land plots. They would need 4666~ wards to allow every active player their own place in a ward. That kind of server load is not reasonable, unless we change the housing system completely to be independent instances for each house. Even then, its still harsh. Even if we assume only 10% of hte population wants a house, thats 28k people in 466 wards. Its still a hefty amount.

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The issue here is that, as I described before, the limitations only exist because SE decided they wanted to pursue a neighbourhood-style structure. That's it. Without that structure, no issue - they've been able to run per-player instances of things even dating back to FFXI. Individually instanced houses - outdoor and indoor areas, seamlessly zoned through - are easily doable. They just chose a different path.

And it's here that they owe us an apology and additional work. The path they chose was flatly unrealistic given the limitations of XIV's servers and netcode. They should have realized this, and decided to do something else. They made the same mistake they did with XIV 1.0, and Yoshi-P unsurprisingly sounds a lot like Tanaka trying to defend the god-awful repeated geometry and textures from XIV's 1.0 days. If you can't pull it off properly, then don't do it. That's game design 101. I'm actually quite disappointed that SE went from so clearly acknowledging the 1.0 issues to ignoring some of the same mistakes made from ARR forward.

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Originally Posted by Kirsten_Rev

Yoshi-P simply lacks vision. Every time I read his interviews, I feel like I'm listening to a customer service representative reading a script. Where are the big ideas? Where is the drive, the ambition? Where is the recognition of existing problems, and the plans to fix them?

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I remember an interview where he stated that FF14 now has every system in the game that are mandatory in the MMO business (like housing, the glamour wardrobe) and that they now can focus on other things and I was really sitting there and wondering how they can be fine with having systems in the game that are there but far away from standards. When F2P games have better housing, better storage for glamour and more shouldnt one try to get at least on that level? Having them in the game in a medicore way does not imo mean that they are done with it but honestly it sounded like they are fine with the way they are implemented..no matter how bad this will be in the future with more and more glamour, less space and systems that need to be changed again and again.

I think their problem is that they put barely any money in this and are fine with medicore systems because the game is popular enough but are forgetting or ignoring that things can change in the future. What will happen if you get a F2P game with good graphics, a nice story, great housing, glamour and more? Will people then forever stay with FF14? Or will they realize that they need to use lots of money to create better systems out of their existing ones but because they did not go for the best of it they might not be able to bring us that.

(They also should maybe start to invest into another person that at least takes one of the jobs from Yoshida. He himself has stated more than once that he would love to give one back and all that traveling, all the work probably does not help with being creative..)

The responses shouldn't surprise anyone. That glamour issue has been around since 2.0. It isn't really hidden that they take the older pieces and recycle them in such a way to allow it to be gathered for glamour later. And that isn't really much of a problem -either- because it saves them the dev time to use on other things. It just sounds really shitty if he says, well we have to recycle it for xyz reasons. As for the apartment he is sort of right on point. People should be weighing if they really need a house if they can have an apartment. A lot of people are asking for instanced housing and it already exists.. right there. Granted, they could do with expanding the sizes or making them upgradable. I would kill for a large penthouse suite to have. I would never want to buy a large in that case. Otherwise, why have a house if you arent going to use it? If you are going to use it later, are you actually going to keep using it, or are you just going to have it sitting there without anything? xD