It's past time to expand the dev team

With the massive playerbase boom of last year resulting in a huge increase in profits from the game, it's about time that they put that money to use and started hiring more people to work on the game. As the playerbase continues to grow, there will be a lot more people anticipating each form of content, to where even the small minority of high end ultimate raiders is no longer truly "small" in the grand scheme of things. The game is estimated to have had 3 million active players this month, and even if ultimate raiders are within the range of 1-5% of the playerbase, that's still a LOT of people. This extends down to all forms of content.

This game does a great job with its content for the most part, but those of us who played between Stormblood and Shadowbringers, even before the pandemic hit, were noticing a decrease in overall content. We know now that they were diverting resources to other future content in the game that we saw in Bozja or will be seeing soon in Island Sanctuary, but as the game and its profitability stands now, I want to know that they're using those funds to ensure they don't have to reach that dilemma again. I truly hope the dev team can reach the point where trade-off of cutting "expendable" content that "not a lot of people do" in favor of using those dev resources on something else becomes a thing of the past.

As a software engineer, I can tell you that is a fantasy world that will never happen. It doesn't matter how big your dev team is. Something is going to get cut somewhere, whether due to feasibility, changing priorities, or financial decisions above your head.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

As a software engineer, I can tell you that is a fantasy world that will never happen. It doesn't matter how big your dev team is. Something is going to get cut somewhere, whether due to feasibility, changing priorities, or financial decisions above your head.

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Sure. But as it stands now they're already making huge promises. Island sanctuary, data center visit, a new deep dungeon, glamour expansion, and apparently they're also talking about not 2 but 3 ultimates. That's a LOT of work, and if they intend to deliver, then they're going to need a lot more help than they do now.

As a software developer i can tell you: if you add more people to a software project then it will slow down the development process. :)


Cheers

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

As a software developer i can tell you: if you add more people to a software project then it will slow down the development process. :)


Cheers

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LOL, that too

tbh "dev team" is more than just programmer. there's voice actors, artists, 3D modelers, animators, advertisement, social media management, and like 500 people whose job is basically just tataru.

do we need more coders? probably not. more concept artists? no. but we definitely could use some 3d modelers to come in and fix a bunch of jank and we could use voice actors and have certain animations either fixed, improved or even added.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

As a software developer i can tell you: if you add more people to a software project then it will slow down the development process. :)


Cheers

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Honestly don't care about a longer wait if the content is better.

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Originally Posted by anhaato

Honestly don't care about a longer wait if the content is better.

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Then you need more content creators and not developers. :) And yes, some content needs more love like PvP. Or they could overhaul the current content with sharper textures and better shaders etc.


cheers

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Originally Posted by anhaato

...even the small minority of high end ultimate raiders is no longer truly "small" in the grand scheme of things. The game is estimated to have had 3 million active players this month, and even if ultimate raiders are within the range of 1-5% of the playerbase, that's still a LOT of people.

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The individual number of people isn't important. It's the percentage that's important, and you've laid out that data right there. I agree with your estimates.

If the playerbase is 100 folks, you cater to the 96.
If the playerbase is a million folks, you cater to the 960,000.
If the playerbase is a billion folks, you cater to the 960,000,000.

Catering to the minority doesn't become easier or more desirable (from a business standpoint) as the player base expands. Remember, for every 100 people that come onboard, your goal is to appease 96 of them. It doesn't matter if 100 new people come onboard once, twice, a hundred times or eight million times; for every 100 there are 96 to please, and four that simply will remain unsatisfied.

Pleasing 95% or more of your audience with any form of subjective entertainment is an admirable accomplishment. Aiming to please more than that becomes an exercise in futility. Line up 100 folks that have seen 'Citizen Kane', and at least five will tell you it wasn't all that great despite its place in film history. That's OK, that's life, and you can't please everyone.

I'm not disagreeing with your point; more content is always better in a general sense. The only thing I disagree with is that the increased resources from the increased player base would be best used to appease some ~3% of players. It'd be better to make the ninety-seven folks happy instead of the three.

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one." -- Mr. Spock

Yeah I am that much of a nerd that I just quoted Spock. Life goals and such and such. LOL.

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Originally Posted by Denji

tbh "dev team" is more than just programmer. there's voice actors, artists, 3D modelers, animators, advertisement, social media management, and like 500 people whose job is basically just tataru.

do we need more coders? probably not. more concept artists? no. but we definitely could use some 3d modelers to come in and fix a bunch of jank and we could use voice actors and have certain animations either fixed, improved or even added.

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Hard agree, the game's success could be even bigger if they have more budget (this is up to SE since the dev team can't control how much they have to spend) on cleaning up the assets and working on making old work for current races and even clipping.

Entry work like making gear fit on all the races shouldn't be too difficult for an intern, newcomer even if they only worked on one race while someone is in charge of another.

The main dev team should be focused on working on the intensive parts of the game like combat design and new content.

I get that bigger doesn't translate to "better" but personally I don't think that the team spreading themselves so thin is healthy and even they need RNR.

On top of that, I honestly think the dev team could use some new eyes and opinions on balance changes.

Creativity be exhausted with how much they do on a day to day basis.

This is not to say that they're bad just that with a company as big as SE and how much money XIV brings (that they siphon for other projects) you'd think that they would at least give more budget for the dev team to expand.

It's not about throw more people at it so we can get more content, but rather, keep up the quality so the dev team doesn't pass out from exhaustion.

To be honest, the thing I think would take the most investment, but provide the most long-term mileage, would be to devote a sector of their engineering staff to unwinding all that 1.0 spaghetti code. It's not an easy thing to do. I've spent 3+ years already at my current job trying to do something similar with a codebase perhaps 1% as large. But there are so many serious improvements they could make to this game that are more or less hard-blocked by legacy code and decade-old server design. The fact that they had to wipe the partial level XP for jobs with the XP scaling changes in EW is a good example. They said they would have had to take the servers down for weeks to do it without wiping those records. That's a really big red flag in how they have their persistence system set up.

That's not to blame them for it. 1.0 played rather fast and loose with development, and the majority of what came after was either frenetic recovery efforts towards the game as a whole, or trying to keep up with content without breaking the house of cards they somehow managed to balance on all of that 1.0 broken glass. The devs have done admirably with the hand they've had to play. But I think they'd gain an immense amount of mileage, as far as unlocking and streamlining further development, by trying to unwind some of that and get better, more stable, more maintainable and extensible foundations in place. That's especially the case given the massive boom the game has seen lately, the corresponding strain on the game's infrastructure, and the raw flaws that has exposed at times.

The 2002 error punting you out of queue at EW launch was a brilliant example of this, actually. The way the client used to be configured, every 15 minutes you were in the queue, it would drop and reopen the connection to the server. The server would treat this as a new connection, the same as someone hitting "play" from the main menu, and would throttle those connections based on the capacity of the server, rejecting a portion of them to keep the servers from becoming overloaded. And then the client wouldn't retry, if the server rejected its connection, it would simply die. But it wouldn't even die immediately. Despite knowing essentially instantly if the connection would succeed, it would wait 20-30s to tell the user. And then users were only given ~60s to reconnect to the server or lose their place in line (and that 60s includes the 20-30 the client just sat on the failure before telling the user about it).

Nearly all of that is somewhere north of "questionable" from a network and application design and robustness perspective, but it never mattered until now, because the server had never be placed under such strain that it had to start blocking connections to save itself from overload. There's a lot of ground to be gained here, even if it's not "hey, look, a new raid!"

Optimistically, kinda hoped, after they had to suspend sales, that the team would have a good bargaining chip for increasing budget. "Look, we're getting so popular we literally had to force ourselves to stop making money. Maybe we start spending a little more on the team so we don't have to do that again."

Preeeetttyyy sure they’re using the money made from this game to fund:
- a different single player FF game
- an endless remaking of a decade plus year old game, because I guess we can’t have new things
- and disney hearts XXXIIV or whatever.

In all honesty though, SE just milks FFXIV for all it’s worth to fund the rest of their games, rather than letting those other games stand on their own merits. This game is keeping the whole company afloat and it’s extremely annoying that they won’t put the resources we give them back into… the product we are putting our resources into? So, ya, I guess a bigger dev team couldn’t hurt. I’m cautiously optimistic for some good news with this upcoming live stream though.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

Optimistically, kinda hoped, after they had to suspend sales, that the team would have a good bargaining chip for increasing budget. "Look, we're getting so popular we literally had to force ourselves to stop making money. Maybe we start spending a little more on the team so we don't have to do that again."

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WoW team grew a lot duing early WoD and prior to that. Onboarding slowed them to a point of scrapping subsequent expansion patches. Aside of later mismanagement and poor working conditions they had problems making content at a good pace even when they had more people. If SE will want to hire locally then it will be hard to get more in as there is constant lack of skilled developers. They could start training juniors but it will take time. If they open a "studio" in a new region it's also will take time - and likely the plan will be to contain SE projects to specific studio location as team work on one MMO between people in multiple timezones and cultures may be difficult. Blizzard is still hiring for on-site work for all of their projects. Non-game-dev market during Covid went to remote work and stayed there for the most part benefiting from world wide hiring pool.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

Optimistically, kinda hoped, after they had to suspend sales, that the team would have a good bargaining chip for increasing budget. "Look, we're getting so popular we literally had to force ourselves to stop making money. Maybe we start spending a little more on the team so we don't have to do that again."

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Do not forget that suspend sales is due to EW drop which cause the population gain, it is temporary. but in reality , there are not that many people playing the game compare with patch drop. You can literally see how many people in Radz and old sharlayan now. So many people stop subscribe after MsQ is over, that is not something SE wants from business standpoint. another thing is There are a big part of income is coming from RP community not subscription.

1. They are already expanding the team. The credits grow in size with each expansion and development blogs talk of training people.
2. Expanding a team too much results in diminishing returns. They all try to work on eachother's tasks and step on eachother's toes.
3. It takes time to train them.

Why hire more people when they can just press the "make fun content" button. Lazy devs these days I swear to god...

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

Then you need more content creators and not developers. :) And yes, some content needs more love like PvP. Or they could overhaul the current content with sharper textures and better shaders etc.


cheers

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I use “devs” as a catch-all to refer to everyone involved in the production of the game, not just programmers. This is the point I was making, yes.

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Originally Posted by Denji

tbh "dev team" is more than just programmer. there's voice actors, artists, 3D modelers, animators, advertisement, social media management, and like 500 people whose job is basically just tataru.

do we need more coders? probably not. more concept artists? no. but we definitely could use some 3d modelers to come in and fix a bunch of jank and we could use voice actors and have certain animations either fixed, improved or even added.

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Exactly what I meant to say, thank you. Like, the whole reason DWU got cut from 5.5 from the pandemic was because there were only precisely 8 people in their playtesting team capable of balancing ultimates. Though I actually disagree with your point about concept artists, I think they do need more of those for stuff like gear so they can stop relying on fan-submitted designs from the contests which was happening between SB and SHB, and is about to happen again with the weapon designs. Would also give them the opportunity to give better customization options. But the point is I'm not talking about just coders, I mean playtesters for better high end content, 3d modelers to put some damn hats on Viera and Hroths, animators for higher quality cutscenes (which is already being achieved), the list goes on and on.

And like I said, they’re already making some big promises, so I really really hope they’re already starting to do this to ensure they can follow through with them.

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Originally Posted by Breakbeat

Yeah I am that much of a nerd that I just quoted Spock. Life goals and such and such. LOL.

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I am, and always will be, your fan.

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Originally Posted by anhaato

It's past time to expand the dev team

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What's interesting to me about this is that I'm assuming that you don't know how big the dev team is now nor do you have any idea of how big you think it should be.

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Originally Posted by Equitable_Remedy

What's interesting to me about this is that I'm assuming that you don't know how big the dev team is now nor do you have any idea of how big you think it should be.

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You're right I don't know everything but at the very least I do know that the only reason we got male viera was because the design team voluntarily overworked themselves to get it done, and I would rather not have that happen. Obviously they understand the importance of answering fan demands, but it shouldn't be done at the potential expense of their health. Am I required to give an exact number to have the right to say "hey maybe the design team shouldn't be juggling as many tasks as they are" or "hey maybe they shouldn't be relying on single digit numbers of people for balancing certain content" or comment on any other issues we know exist with the workload? I realize I can't offer much from my point of view considering I don't fully understand the situation, but I still believe it's worth discussing.

The premise of this thread is already wrong. BD3 is hiring right now, and has been for years (including the time it was under a different name).

Yoshi p did say they were getting a budget increase for the game. But did not mention if any of that would be used to hire more staff. Guess its a wait and see what they do..

there could already be more people. they might work on recoding the entire game..... hey, i can hope, cant i?

I mostly wish they'd hire a proper moderation team to monitor servers/DCs individually instead of trying to offload that burden onto their tiny four man STF team.

Or better yet just make better use of the team that's already there and give the GMs something else to do because I doubt actual cases of harassment are common enough that they wouldn't have significant amounts of time to be screening for cheaters.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

1. They are already expanding the team. The credits grow in size with each expansion and development blogs talk of training people.
2. Expanding a team too much results in diminishing returns. They all try to work on each other's tasks and step on each other's toes.
3. It takes time to train them.

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This. This this this.

I went to school to work on software projects, not as a developer, but as part of the other bits of the team. I'm currently a business analyst for a medical software company. When I was taking my project management class, we had Brook's Law pounded into our heads: "Adding manpower to a late project will make it later."

Previously, Yoshi P said the limiting factor wasn't money, but simply the availability of high quality programmers. SE has been burned a lot in the last decade because they tried outsourcing projects to other companies in China and Korea, who over promised and under delivered, and they could not provide the quality of work on the timetable they were expected.

Since then, SE has made the decision to try to in-house as much as they can, and form more permanent partnerships with the handful of good companies they've identified to handle the region specific aspects of FFXIV for those localized releases.

There are a finite number of good programmers available, let alone ones that speak fluent Japanese. (Small aside: did you know FF1-3 were actually programmed by an Iranian-American dude by the name of Nasir Gebelli?) Despite the number of comp sci majors being churned out by major universities, and the extreme desirability of working for a company like Square Enix, their standards are very high and they need someone who is known as a "10x programmer" as opposed to a generic web dev monkey like most so-called programmers actually are. The one person I know who is successful in the game development space got a master's degree in AI and now does some insane high level math with Naughty Dog for Sony's ICE unit. Dude is BRILLIANT.

10x programmers usually are home grown, however, and they get to that point by marinating in a system long enough to learn it inside and out. I'm extremely fortunate that I've got four of them on my team at work - but only one of them was a hire fresh out of school; the other three have been doing this for decades, and that's why they're so good at it.

At this point, SE's best bet is to have a couple hundred new hires, let them hang around for a few years, and hope that a dozen or so turn out to be good programmers. The guy who originally programmed the FATEs for ARR (yes, one guy) was one such hire, and he's since been promoted to be a more general battle programmer.

Thats right. Hire me SE.

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Originally Posted by Sove92

The premise of this thread is already wrong. BD3 is hiring right now, and has been for years (including the time it was under a different name).

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Bingo. On top of the onboarding issues and budget issues already raised in this topic, there's the simple issue of just finding good new staff in the first place. SE could bump the budget by millions tomorrow and someone could invent an instant training capsule so that onboarding wasn't a thing but that still wouldn't mean that capable, quality new staff will instantly appear out of nowhere. I agree that the team for FF14 absolutely should be given more resources, but in terms of money and people, but it's nowhere near as simple as just "hire more people dummy."

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Originally Posted by Catwho

At this point, SE's best bet is to have a couple hundred new hires, let them hang around for a few years, and hope that a dozen or so turn out to be good programmers. The guy who originally programmed the FATEs for ARR (yes, one guy) was one such hire, and he's since been promoted to be a more general battle programmer.

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This is very true. People don't realize you can't just hire any dev. Most of these people are monkeys churned out of unis where creativity isn't allowed. Why do you think WoW is hot garbage these days? It's because the majority of the dev team are mass-produced monkeys with no creative skill that can program outside of the box.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

SE has been burned a lot in the last decade because they tried outsourcing projects to other companies in China and Korea, who over promised and under delivered, and they could not provide the quality of work on the timetable they were expected.

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This was 1.0 btw.

"Horsebirds".

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Originally Posted by anhaato

Honestly don't care about a longer wait if the content is better.

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And this underlines why you'll never get what you're asking for. Not only do most customers disagree with this, but the dev team courting those subscriptions is trying to keep an ironclad schedule. So far only a worldwide pandemic has got them to deviate from their release dates. And it is not likely to change for anything else.

They don't add more content than they can release per patch cycle. Adding more employees would only slow this process down, because it would require even more top down management for the handful of senior managers, and ultimately Yoshi-P.

Making a game is not the same as making fast food. You can't just create a third shift to run the drivethrough overnight.