Finally Understanding SE's Decision Making (And Why It Won't Change)

I've spent more time than I should trying to figure out why SE makes the decisions it does (Features ignored, added and when) , and I think I finally understand why. We're not seen as people in an MMO - we're guests in a theme park with set opening hours.
Think about recent decisions:

The Account ID system implementation
Releasing a raid on Christmas Eve yet ready a week before
Lack of content that can actually be done as friends or FC
The sparse content at the start of what was marketed as the 'most packed expansion'

Compare this to other online games.

Warframe and Path of Exile constantly evolve (Given they get their income via store they have to retain) but also keep a good relationship with their players.
EVE Online thrives on deep player engagement
Other MMOs actively work to keep players engaged and invested

Instead, what do we get?
'We don't have the money'
'It's too much work'
'We want you to play other games'

However, they've built systems like housing and beautiful cities that are designed for players to stay and engage, yet they are resistant to any feedback about improving how we actually interact in these spaces.
The 'we want you to play other games' philosophy might work for a singleplayer game, but an MMORPG is supposed to be about a community, another world. Instead, they rely on housing timers, social connections, and FOMO to maintain subscriptions rather than innovating or changing what gets begged for years, just ignoring what they don't want to hear.

Do you think that there is any redemption arc to be had here?

Well yes, I've discussed this with people and there is a reason it's called a "themepark MMO" and that Yoshi-P has said he views himself like a government and the player as the citizens. I recently described it as a "pick and mix" https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...00#post6657400

https://i.imgur.com/alN5DK7.png

Technically, it is the most packed expansion ever, if you include everything that is coming in the patches. But as my image shows, every piece of content only lasts 5-20 minutes per attempt, so on that basis people will dismiss all the content as nothing. It's mostly like this because they don't want it to be too much of a burden for casual players that just login for a few days for a patch, then move onto the next game, and that's pretty obvious really.

They've not used the "it's too much money" excuse as far as I know and even express a willingness to go over budget. They are almost constantly hiring developers in some department for FFXIV specifically (I know because I check).

The issue is that they think things are "too hard" or "a lot of work", including many things that any programmer, with any codebase, could achieve in a short period of time. There are so many ways to think outside the box if there are infrastructure issues. It comes down to either that their team is too divided up so one person can't just implement a feature on their own causing it not to be implemented at all, or that some of them don't believe they can do things that they, in fact, can.

It's not going to change because it still brings in money, so the suits don't see a reason to change. Money is the universal language.

Everything makes sense once you consider that Yoshi is, in fact, not a good developer.
His greatest success was copying WoW and making 2.0 a WoW clone with an FF skin. Since then, he has done absolutely nothing innovative, at all. Every patch since 2.1 has been the same two, alternating formulae. His great chance was FF16, to do something completely new with no technical debt or prior mistakes to work around, and it followed the FF14 formula to a frightening degree.
Player concerns and common sense things are largely ignored, and the devs make nonsensical decisions, like you mention, by releasing a piece of content on Xmas eve.

Job design has been getting worse and worse every expansion, and every expansion Yoshi dangles a carrot in front of us telling us "next time it will be better, a rework is coming this time for real", and it never does. No one expects the 8.0 rework to fix the issues people have with job design in the game.

All of the issues involving third party tools are of his own doing. By reneging on his promise prior to 2.0 launch of an addon API he has lost the ability to control what is okay, and what is not okay. By ignoring the overwhelming demand for some sort of parser, he has allowed feature creep to create tools such as triggernometry and cactbot. By making the login experience so basic, quicklauncher was created and everything that came along with it. Again, a failure on the lack of an official addon API.

Island sanctuary, the largest piece of casual content we got last expansion, was merely a chore that involved running around clicking single nodes hundreds of times and managing spreadsheets. Because heaven forbid we get something genuinely new instead of recycling the gathering node system.

Seasonal events are 1-2 quests long, mostly with just dialogue, instead of unique events and minigames like every other MMO on the market does.

I could go on, but the more I write, the more annoyed I get.

There is no redemption arc to be had.

This would require the developers to at least acknowledge the issues that people are having instead of wondering where everyone is going this late into the games development.

Now, I don't really want to single out Yoshida or any single person for that matter, as I do think it's a wider problem, but they're more concerned with filling a gameplay quota than they are in actually making that gameplay interesting or interactive, and even of those that were once interactive and engaging have been reduced to their most basic form, it's quite extensive in this game as well.

For a long while I have not really viewed this game as an MMO, it has tried going the avenue of single-player friendly, but it has ultimately come to be that it has all the downsides of a single-player experience and none of the upsides. RuneScape is probably an example of where this is utilized well since the large single-player experience of that game allows for longer-form experiences, rather than short form.

Now obviously MMOs have their own target audience but for a game that is aiming to go another 8-10 years at this point according to their plan, then I actually do dread it in many respects. We have very serial-like cutscenes, with generally poor animation and story-telling, everything and everyone largely just feels like a prop when it comes to the next person talking or the next segment of the cutscene starting. The sad part here is that they have demonstrated they can do it with Hildibrand, but they're more concerned with running what effectively feels like a minimum viable product versus something that actually aims to improve and innovate.

What's going to be a big show on just how little innovation, improvement or care has been put into the Console/PC versions of FF is the mobile version, it looks like the studio who made that looked at what the players frustrations over the last 11 years and went "Is this possible to implement/avoid on mobile" and if they could, did.

I'm going to stick around to see what comes with 7.2, probably complete it (I don't expect it to be lasting content) and then unsubscribe.
A big reason for me staying in FF was my house and my friends, however the content that can be done with friends is either so old or so boring that we just logout and play something else to do things together.
The house? I don't care anymore, what's the point.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NaoSen

What's going to be a big show on just how little innovation, improvement or care has been put into the Console/PC versions of FF is the mobile version, it looks like the studio who made that looked at what the players frustrations over the last 11 years and went "Is this possible to implement/avoid on mobile" and if they could, did.

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This doesn't make sense. The mobile version has a "design doc" compiled across ten years worth of evolution and feedback. The PC version which is its point of reference had no idea what it needed to look like ten years from its original (difficult) development, so obviously could not plan for it. It's totally unreasonable to put their differences down to the attitude of the devs.

Square Enix keeps taking CS3's money t make up for their bad decisions and its starting to show. I wouldn't mind expensive store mounts and having 10 times the more inventory in buyable glam items if it means we get more in-game. If China can get lv1 replicas of ALL DoH and DoL gear to glam onto other jobs so should we.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The issue is that they think things are "too hard" or "a lot of work", including many things that any programmer, with any codebase, could achieve in a short period of time. There are so many ways to think outside the box if there are infrastructure issues. It comes down to either that their team is too divided up so one person can't just implement a feature on their own causing it not to be implemented at all, or that some of them don't believe they can do things that they, in fact, can.

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aka incompetence

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Well yes, I've discussed this with people and there is a reason it's called a "themepark MMO" and that Yoshi-P has said he views himself like a government and the player as the citizens. I recently described it as a "pick and mix" https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...00#post6657400

https://i.imgur.com/alN5DK7.png

Technically, it is the most packed expansion ever, if you include everything that is coming in the patches. But as my image shows, every piece of content only lasts 5-20 minutes per attempt, so on that basis people will dismiss all the content as nothing. It's mostly like this because they don't want it to be too much of a burden for casual players that just login for a few days for a patch, then move onto the next game, and that's pretty obvious really.

They've not used the "it's too much money" excuse as far as I know and even express a willingness to go over budget. They are almost constantly hiring developers in some department for FFXIV specifically (I know because I check).

The issue is that they think things are "too hard" or "a lot of work", including many things that any programmer, with any codebase, could achieve in a short period of time. There are so many ways to think outside the box if there are infrastructure issues. It comes down to either that their team is too divided up so one person can't just implement a feature on their own causing it not to be implemented at all, or that some of them don't believe they can do things that they, in fact, can.

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Guess what.

All of those "full of packed content that takes a lot of time" rewards you with the same tomes that you will get anyways by just doing 1 roulette every day and nothing else.