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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Originally Posted by HunkyMarauder

aka incompetence

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Basically that. It would help if they just proactively went and tried to hire all the modders and tool developers. Because they have had these problems for 12 years now:

• Armoire issues.
• Glamour Dresser issues.
• A housing crisis.
• Problematic buff and debuff limits that break rotations.
• Slow packet and battle processing code that 2013 multi-threaded hardware probably shouldn't struggle with, nevermind 2025 hardware.
• "Difficulty carrying things with the player" across physical servers.
• Inability to revisit linkshells, such that they created an entirely different version of them called CWLS.
• Daily DDoS of their NA servers that, while I admit are difficult to prevent, there are ways to think outside the box like creating multiple routes to the server and proactively diverting player clients to a different route when attacks are happening.

In addition, the struggle with viera and hrothgar hats for half of the game's existence now.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Basically that. It would help if they just proactively went and tried to hire all the modders and tool developers. Because they have had these problems for 12 years now:

• Armoire issues.
• Glamour Dresser issues.
• A housing crisis.
• Problematic buff and debuff limits that break rotations.
• Slow packet and battle processing code that 2013 multi-threaded hardware probably shouldn't struggle with, nevermind 2025 hardware.
• "Difficulty carrying things with the player" across physical servers.
• Inability to revisit linkshells, such that they created an entirely different version of them called CWLS.
• Daily DDoS of their NA servers that, while I admit are difficult to prevent, there are ways to think outside the box like creating multiple routes to the server and proactively diverting player clients to a different route when attacks are happening.

In addition, the struggle with viera and hrothgar hats for half of the game's existence now.

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Yeah but they are completely incapable of hiring anyone who isn't Japanese because apparently the language barrier is too strong lmao

One wonders how studios like CD Projekt Red manages to communicate internally with people from all over Europe.

Yet another self-own by the Japanese resistance to globalization.

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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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The problem isn't that content is designed to be drop in/drop out and doesn't force you to stay glued to it for hours on end. The problem is that so much of the content either doesn't allow you to continue playing after 10 minutes and/or is fully completed too quickly. It feels less like a theme park and more like a mobile game that wants me to swipe my credit card for more spins.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Basically that. It would help if they just proactively went and tried to hire all the modders and tool developers. Because they have had these problems for 12 years now:

• Armoire issues.
• Glamour Dresser issues.
• A housing crisis.
• Problematic buff and debuff limits that break rotations.
• Slow packet and battle processing code that 2013 multi-threaded hardware probably shouldn't struggle with, nevermind 2025 hardware.
• "Difficulty carrying things with the player" across physical servers.
• Inability to revisit linkshells, such that they created an entirely different version of them called CWLS.
• Daily DDoS of their NA servers that, while I admit are difficult to prevent, there are ways to think outside the box like creating multiple routes to the server and proactively diverting player clients to a different route when attacks are happening.

In addition, the struggle with viera and hrothgar hats for half of the game's existence now.

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I've also been angry that they don't hire them or even just freelance them... they're extremely talented and dedicated people with real genuine passion for making xiv better. Yet blaming the language barrier time and time again.. when they have TWO translators. As for redemption. No. These devs will kill their own game like everything else se kills.

When ffxiv is a husk of itself se might legit go bankrupt. Because let's be real the already played the ff7 card and it's not popular. They can't just keep playing it forever

You compare it to Warframe like Warframe is better but what you may not know is that their "expansion" equivalent is basically a 2-3 hour story mission released once every few years. And then there's a new game mode or two once a year to grind for hours doing the same stuff on repeat. Don't act like FF14 is somehow committing a cardinal sin by either not being able to or choosing not to produce as much content as people are demanding. Running an MMO is extremely demanding, coding is a nightmare even without a deadline and include a high quality standard and online components as well as having to put all that through several profit driven executives, you'll understand why 9/10 MMOs end up failing within 10 years.

I don't understand why some people can't accept this. It's one thing having 5-10 years to produce a high budget, massive open world game for a huge audience, but FFXIV gets 2 years tops to actually work on an expansion and that is while producing endgame content for the previous one, and they still manage to make the new expansion big enough to be its own game. That in itself is a miracle and we should be grateful that we get a playable expansion or patch at all (looking at you WoW), but some people have cultivated this discourse that FF14 is somehow a terrible game because the developers either cannot or choose not to produce content that they can spend all hours of the day on and not feel disappointed once. It's a video game! If you aren't happy just play something else instead of ranting and casting judgement on something you know nothing about.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Basically that. It would help if they just proactively went and tried to hire all the modders and tool developers. Because they have had these problems for 12 years now:

• Armoire issues.
• Glamour Dresser issues.
• A housing crisis.
• Problematic buff and debuff limits that break rotations.
• Slow packet and battle processing code that 2013 multi-threaded hardware probably shouldn't struggle with, nevermind 2025 hardware.
• "Difficulty carrying things with the player" across physical servers.
• Inability to revisit linkshells, such that they created an entirely different version of them called CWLS.
• Daily DDoS of their NA servers that, while I admit are difficult to prevent, there are ways to think outside the box like creating multiple routes to the server and proactively diverting player clients to a different route when attacks are happening.

In addition, the struggle with viera and hrothgar hats for half of the game's existence now.

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I really wished they hired English game designers. And not the care bear type. The game of thrones type.

The kind of people that are capable of killing off Wuk Lamat for being too naive, revert Koana into someone who doesn't throw their lives away for a dumb Bison, and as result of mamool ja not winning the throne throwing all of Tuliyollal into a civil war that sets the stage for Mamool Ja leading Besieged attacks against the capital city. Turning the entire world map of Yok Tural into a conquest type scenario where players need to get signet and keep control of the world map for additional benefits. adding needed gameplay to the overworld. It only makes sense as some of the contestants, namely Koana and Wuk brought foreigners to attempt to interfere in the very internal election process and it is a form a cheating because they were too weak to seize the throne by themselves and it was meant to result in chaos.

Furthermore, The warrior of light, instead of being a hypocrite and pretending what they are doing is right or necessary admit they have to go into solution 9 and kill their leadership and shut down all their systems because they are planning on using our souls for their own convenience and it's a them or us scenario. No more apologies, or pretending they weren't people. It was outright murder but it had to be done to save our world.

We need people with actual conviction and capable of making hard choices in this game. Everybody finds a compromise and lives somewhat happily ever after is not satisfying to anyone, it doesn't make a good story, and it definitely doesn't make for a good game.

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Originally Posted by KikiTia

Running an MMO is extremely demanding

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Originally Posted by KikiTia

If you aren't happy just play something else instead of ranting and casting judgement on something you know nothing about.

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Originally Posted by KikiTia

we should be grateful that we get a playable expansion or patch at all

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Originally Posted by KikiTia

That in itself is a miracle

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Are you trying to artificially win a Bingo card or something?

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Originally Posted by KikiTia

You compare it to Warframe like Warframe is better but what you may not know is that their "expansion" equivalent is basically a 2-3 hour story mission released once every few years. And then there's a new game mode or two once a year to grind for hours doing the same stuff on repeat. Don't act like FF14 is somehow committing a cardinal sin by either not being able to or choosing not to produce as much content as people are demanding. Running an MMO is extremely demanding, coding is a nightmare even without a deadline and include a high quality standard and online components as well as having to put all that through several profit driven executives, you'll understand why 9/10 MMOs end up failing within 10 years.

I don't understand why some people can't accept this. It's one thing having 5-10 years to produce a high budget, massive open world game for a huge audience, but FFXIV gets 2 years tops to actually work on an expansion and that is while producing endgame content for the previous one, and they still manage to make the new expansion big enough to be its own game. That in itself is a miracle and we should be grateful that we get a playable expansion or patch at all (looking at you WoW), but some people have cultivated this discourse that FF14 is somehow a terrible game because the developers either cannot or choose not to produce content that they can spend all hours of the day on and not feel disappointed once. It's a video game! If you aren't happy just play something else instead of ranting and casting judgement on something you know nothing about.

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How much copium have you been huffing holy shit I think it's time to cut you off.

This community spent the last 9 years chasing off anybody who tried to criticize this game in the name of "positivity". That's what you get.

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

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As far as I'm concerned some new big dragon can come from Meracydia and raze everything to the ground again. Third time's the charm (maybe).

As long as people keep whiteknighting for them instead of demanding what they are owed for a monthly sub as MMO players. The game wont change.

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Originally Posted by HunkyMarauder

Yeah but they are completely incapable of hiring anyone who isn't Japanese because apparently the language barrier is too strong lmao

One wonders how studios like CD Projekt Red manages to communicate internally with people from all over Europe.

Yet another self-own by the Japanese resistance to globalization.

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They really still don't like hiring outside sources, and the outside sources don't like the harsh limitations Japan imposes upon them.
Overwork culture, global lower-than-average salary, affordable for very low living standards of housing, and the language problems being one of the biggest reasons.

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Originally Posted by Arrius

They really still don't like hiring outside sources, and the outside sources don't like the harsh limitations Japan imposes upon them.
Overwork culture, global lower-than-average salary, affordable for very low living standards of housing, and the language problems being one of the biggest reasons.

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Japan has a serious brain drain problem for a while now. Even the gaming industry has a technical brain drain. Like why work for a game studio when you can work as a SWE at Google for 200k if you're someone with 15 years of experience.

There's a reason there's been barely innovation in gameplay (outside of the indie scene) since game studios find it far easier to find artists and writers than people with technical competency lol

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Originally Posted by Exmo

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.

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Quality of life is possible to add, and some systems should have been outright overhauled by now. Be it as small as a shorter loot time out (3 minutes on mobile vs 5 on pc) or a roll on all button, better friends' system (Two-way among other things) and glamour system being larger changes but still doable, better map, even treasure map location finding is done nicer on mobile,
I mean a lot of modders have had stuff for years that improve Quality of Life, so definitely no excuse for the game not to have it.

Two way friends list ? Got to play on mobile to get that.

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Originally Posted by KikiTia

You compare it to Warframe like Warframe is better but what you may not know is that their "expansion" equivalent is basically a 2-3 hour story mission released once every few years. And then there's a new game mode or two once a year to grind for hours doing the same stuff on repeat. Don't act like FF14 is somehow committing a cardinal sin by either not being able to or choosing not to produce as much content as people are demanding. Running an MMO is extremely demanding, coding is a nightmare even without a deadline and include a high quality standard and online components as well as having to put all that through several profit driven executives, you'll understand why 9/10 MMOs end up failing within 10 years.

I don't understand why some people can't accept this. It's one thing having 5-10 years to produce a high budget, massive open world game for a huge audience, but FFXIV gets 2 years tops to actually work on an expansion and that is while producing endgame content for the previous one, and they still manage to make the new expansion big enough to be its own game. That in itself is a miracle and we should be grateful that we get a playable expansion or patch at all (looking at you WoW), but some people have cultivated this discourse that FF14 is somehow a terrible game because the developers either cannot or choose not to produce content that they can spend all hours of the day on and not feel disappointed once. It's a video game! If you aren't happy just play something else instead of ranting and casting judgement on something you know nothing about.

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This is some good stuff, I'm honestly jealous, I have no idea how you wrote that with a straight face

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Originally Posted by HunkyMarauder

Yeah but they are completely incapable of hiring anyone who isn't Japanese because apparently the language barrier is too strong lmao

One wonders how studios like CD Projekt Red manages to communicate internally with people from all over Europe.

Yet another self-own by the Japanese resistance to globalization.

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They won't make me believe it's hard to find japanese talents in a country over a hundred million souls.

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Originally Posted by HunkyMarauder

Japan has a serious brain drain problem for a while now. Even the gaming industry has a technical brain drain. Like why work for a game studio when you can work as a SWE at Google for 200k if you're someone with 15 years of experience.

There's a reason there's been barely innovation in gameplay (outside of the indie scene) since game studios find it far easier to find artists and writers than people with technical competency lol

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This isn't a problem inherent to Japan, but to the whole video game industry. There is a reason average ages in most studios don't go over 30, that people have garbage wages and are paid "in passion", don't count their hours because they don't have families to feed, are fresh and naive out of uni and are doing their dream job of development. The only people that oversaturate the market are found in creative jobs because they don't have much choices outside of games (especially game designers and testers). Programmers and engineers tend to get out once they start having families of their own and need actual money and stable careers to back it up which they can find in most firms that aren't about video gaming.

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Originally Posted by Clockworks

This is some good stuff, I'm honestly jealous, I have no idea how you wrote that with a straight face

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When you attack the person while not actually addressing any of the points they actually made, it ends up just being tacit admittance that you can't refute what they're saying. In other words, you're admitting that you know they're right and don't like it.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

When you attack the person while not actually addressing any of the points they actually made, it ends up just being tacit admittance that you can't refute what they're saying. In other words, you're admitting that you know they're right and don't like it.

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You're one to talk

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Originally Posted by Striker44

Actually, honest, intelligent people do take him seriously. It's quite telling (and a bit amusing) to watch how even short, simple posts by him are magically "ignored" by certain bitter malcontents around here who know they have no actual response to the points he makes. Stand up to a bully and watch how they suddenly clam up and refuse to engage.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

Narrator's voice: The couple dozen or so bitter residents are meaningless compared to the hundreds of thousands of players enjoying the game.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

Thankfully, the silent majority of players are having a blast playing the game, having fun, and may not even know these other things exist, let alone find anything meaningful in them. Pray, disregard the bad-faith forum posters who are addicted to the game but so pathetically bitter they can't stand the thought of other people enjoying something.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

I truly feel sorry for you and how bitter a human being you are around here.

Happy Birthday, Yoshi-P, and thank you for helping create a fun game.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

Note: They do check player feedback. They look at engagement metrics they have on their own end. What they don't necessarily bother with is a couple dozen bitter dregs perpetually negative about everything on the forum here.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

This. The simple reality is that the Scions are hugely popular among the fanbase at large, minus the dozen or so utterly bitter, sad, negative dregs around here that hate everything about the game, anyway, and can't stand that other people enjoy it. Final Fantasy has never been Game of Thrones. People by and large play this game to relax, have fun, and enjoy a good story with characters they know and like without wondering who's going to be offed next. New adventures with old friends, mixed with introducing a few new characters (a la Zero) is the way I hope they go.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

They don't. It's just the natural reaction from honest people who see Yoshi-P getting personally attacked and the game absolutely trashed by a select few malcontents who are so pathetically bitter they can't stand the thought of people enjoying the game.

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Like, there's virtually nothing else in your post history.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

When you attack the person while not actually addressing any of the points they actually made, it ends up just being tacit admittance that you can't refute what they're saying. In other words, you're admitting that you know they're right and don't like it.

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We are laughing and moving on. Feel free to believe whatever you need to (we'll keep laughing).

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Originally Posted by Valence

They won't make me believe it's hard to find japanese talents in a country over a hundred million souls.

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It's an ageing population. So an issue is many of the people they will employ will have a more old fashioned mindset and that is a common problem in society. Often a younger person will shock you with what they can come up with.

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There is a reason average ages in most studios don't go over 30, that people have garbage wages and are paid "in passion", don't count their hours because they don't have families to feed

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The sad thing is a lot of us would do it for free, considering that's literally what modders and tool developers are doing. They just need to ask for the help. It's that simple.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The sad thing is a lot of us would do it for free, considering that's literally what modders and tool developers are doing. They just need to ask for the help. It's that simple.

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Since you are saying that: OP posted about Warframe. Warframe has a system in place called Tennogen, where fans and modders are allowed to create their own skins and share them with the Warframe developer. Good stuff then gets implemented in the game. Sure, that would require quite a bit of lawyer work to set such a system up without risk of legal liability, but it would not be impossible to allow fan contributions in their game (after a quality check, of course).

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Originally Posted by ovIm

where fans and modders are allowed to create their own skins and share them with the Warframe developer. Good stuff then gets implemented in the game. Sure, that would require quite a bit of lawyer work to set such a system up without risk of legal liability, but it would not be impossible to allow fan contributions in their game (after a quality check, of course).

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They could also do that via github. It has a pull request system, where they can be approved or declined. It is used regularly by developers around the world to accept contributions from random people. They are checked and verified before being approved.

The issue of course is that some of their files and source will be proprietary and can't be shared publicly. But that's fine. They don't need to put everything there. Just things like lua files, shaders, textures and excel files, which the community would easily pour over and improve.

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Originally Posted by Collin_Sky

Everything makes sense once you consider that Yoshi is, in fact, not a good developer.

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Risk reduction -- the man, the myth, the legend.

Start by scrapping customization. Continue by scrapping compositionally-varied strategy. Plot the course by following prior trend. Deviate minimally.
/shrug

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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.

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This one, though, is what annoys me most. If one builds their value around just keeping the ship sailing, the least one could do is preempt improvements against obvious storms or wear. Instead, he's mostly defaulted to over-promises, half-promises, "It's just not doable from a technical standpoint", and a bunch of backpedaling.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Collin_Sky

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.

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For a while I've described what I imagine his style is, which is sitting down creating a timeline with achievable goals in a consistent manner, in a conservative format, and doing exactly that. When FFXIV was death spiraling with 1.0 I think that is probably great, and not a sign of a bad developer; however, when its time to shine and do something wild.. even the most audacious examples are severed from the main game.

I've described it as a tree where the core never strengthens and they just add branches here and there wildly and sometimes haphazardly, afraid to affect the core. It's definitely a personal issue for this example but I think BLU is one of many, where they are afraid to do something wild with the core so they just set it off to the side (and at launch it was so conservative with minor changes to very specific spells you'd have a worse performing job than a regular one lol, the spells are a bit better designed now at least). You already exampled Island Sanctuary too. We clap for exploratory content, but for the most part it's far more narrowed borrwed power (like at least for the most part WoW allows that borrowed power to affect the whole expansion, meanwhile ours is just a zone or so). Not that I am saying borrowed power is an amazing thing (they should at least have left it alone in that expansion content, instead of purging it.. kind of silly), but the scope of our power is much smaller.

I think ultimately it all feels almost always safer, smaller, and less consequential - like go ahead and ignore it because you could forget it exists (because it's purposefully built off to the side).

While I don't feel passionately about the first statement, and I think these things can sometimes be choose the lessor of two bad choices (so you'll always get hate), I dislike that I want to like this post and feel like the game has an issue with its creative forces...


I've gone from happily taking breaks here and there (to offset content amounts / burnout, sure I have concerns, but time allowing familiarity to rest helped) to just thinking "this game not only could be so much more, but honestly really should be, they're resting on laurels".

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Originally Posted by Hallarem

As long as people keep whiteknighting for them instead of demanding what they are owed for a monthly sub as MMO players. The game wont change.

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I am sure some things I've thought of are just bad, but I do get bewildered when some of the responses I've seen have absolutely no point except to say no or to try and budget / be an apologist for SE. Not everyone that disagrees is that person, to be clear, some will articulate their thoughts (most excited when I get quote farm responded as it means someone is attempting to respond sincerely), but definitely some, especially in the past, when asked to articulate had nothing more than what boiled down to "don't ask SE to work, the idea actually doesn't impact me but I still want to say no".

I have noted there are far less defensive individuals here than there used to be.. That concerns me, I think that is an example of game health (I think it would be better sign if there were more). I don't blame bad choices on people who disagree though, even literal white knights, SE is in charge here.. so SE needs to use their noggins, it's not the white knight's job, gray, or black knight, to be that.

Unfortunately money is a large part of their considerations, so I think honestly we're all to blame if SE says "yo I make choices based on money and you seem to be happily giving me that". So if we had to blame the players, I'd blame us all lol. Though I really want to say that should be SE's responsibility. We're not being paid for it, so we're not responsible ;).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Risk reduction -- the man, the myth, the legend.

Start by scrapping customization. Continue by scrapping compositionally-varied strategy. Plot the course by following prior trend. Deviate minimally.
/shrug

This one, though, is what annoys me most. If one builds their value around just keeping the ship sailing, the least one could do is preempt improvements against obvious storms or wear. Instead, he's mostly defaulted to over-promises, half-promises, "It's just not doable from a technical standpoint", and a bunch of backpedaling.

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I recall literally telling people they're going to lose in the end, though I am surprised it took this long. We're here though, the addon scene in FFXIV is substantially more powerful than WoW's because FFXIV chose not to control the fire.

thee last couple days i spent clearing up my shared fates in Dawntrail

I was looking forward to seeing what they would have available, be it a new mount, or a minion, something to show for all the Fates you end up having to grind through

my end conclusion, it wasnt worth it. for the first time since they started the Shared Fates.. it felt like a waste of time. Two framing kits and two orchestrations... oh.. and a table lamp. wooo... hoo...

they need to re-examine their reward structure.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shougun

We clap for exploratory content, but for the most part it's far more narrowed borrwed power (like at least for the most part WoW allows that borrowed power to affect the whole expansion, meanwhile ours is just a zone or so). Not that I am saying borrowed power is an amazing thing (they should at least have left it alone in that expansion content, instead of purging it.. kind of silly), but the scope of our power is much smaller.

I think ultimately it all feels almost always safer, smaller, and less consequential - like go ahead and ignore it because you could forget it exists (because it's purposefully built off to the side).

---

Tbf, the "borrowed powers" complaint is one I never quite understood about WoW... unless one would make the same complaint about any seasonal/expansion ups and downs to gameplay, degree of available customization, etc. At its simplest, the woes of "borrowed powers" were that, for purposes of experimentation, WoW would wipe the slate each expansion to ensure the base kits were working before again allowing further means of customization -- but for that exact reason they were able to go more wild and expansion-thematic with said customization each time. While it felt bad going from much more involved builds with further flavorful powers back to the basics each time, the results were some very fun and varied gameplay experiences expansion by expansion. The repeated changes largely just caught flak for the times in which one's / the largest camp's preferred playstyle wasn't also the most optimal playstyle, just as they would have if the optimal playstyle remained stagnant. Yes, in some cases they over-experimented or pulled an XIV-style infant-yeet in the course of clearing out the waste in ways that they didn't strictly need to, but I suspect many also overestimate the amount of time it took to (re)build different but fundamentally similar systems as compared to retuning whatever was deemed to be functional around whatever else could be added for expansion-tailored thematic effect.

/rant

Anywho, in XIV's case, though, we're largely just looking at forced commitment. The more a lane of content's requirements are progressible only through that particular lane of content, the more isolated it becomes and the more it forces you to play just that. Which is why I never really understood the goal of having Eureka be self-contained in its gearing atop whatever unique gameplay-affecting power-unlocks it may include instead of that gear simply being an alternative means of general progression. It's not as if players would necessarily feel compelled to skip out on early power unlocks just because, already equipped with raid gear, they could feasibly skip ahead to fight the second zone's mobs, etc. Or, one could have gear matter not at all -- only the power unlocks would -- but still at least allow players not going for week one clears to get around the need for crafted gear (or even just the former tier's BiS) before jumping into Savage.

I guess what bugs me most about that is that we end up with content that either feels so piecework that one doesn't feel like they have much per patch of whatever content they like (even if the actual sum of doable content would nonetheless be decently high -- even if inferior to what greater replayability might provide within, say, core content) or we end up sectionalizing things for which gating indirect progression (e.g., gear, rather than the actual clears) serves no real purpose.

If we're meant to be able to enjoy these things together, why is there so little effort put towards making content more accessible without reducing difficulty, say...

• via built in personal parsers with contextualizable analytics for personal performance information, progressive encounter journals, and tighter checks on progression a la an improved High-End Duty Finder to reduce chance of intentional or unintentional leeching, atop greater rewards for repeat weekly raid clears to decrease queue times, etc., by which to make PuGing raids more time-accessible and far less frustrating without changing the encounters themselves; and even
• for Exploratory Missions and the like be "real" zones and therefore allow players to queue for other content while within -- if they're not going to have zone-wide events that would actually require all players within the zone anyways -- alongside revamping UI and party-only skill limitations to better support party-less multiplayer play (e.g., automatically resized Party List-like bars, improved nameplate support/functionality, and AoE supportive/healing actions spliting their effectiveness after 4 affected allies, to a max of 8 nearest, prioritizing party members, rather than their effects being limited to only party members).

Like, we both fail to make the open-world or EMs that interesting in themselves, as if they were to be backdrop content, but we also don't go very far to make them (enjoyably) compatible with drop-in multiplayer gameplay. ...Why? You'd think at least one or the other would appeal as an avenue of further improvement.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

It's an ageing population. So an issue is many of the people they will employ will have a more old fashioned mindset and that is a common problem in society. Often a younger person will shock you with what they can come up with.

The sad thing is a lot of us would do it for free, considering that's literally what modders and tool developers are doing. They just need to ask for the help. It's that simple.

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But that's the whole point. It's mostly young people that work in that industry. If anything it's the industry that should the least be affected by aging demographics...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Tbf, the "borrowed powers" complaint is one I never quite understood about WoW... unless one would make the same complaint about any seasonal/expansion ups and downs to gameplay, degree of available customization, etc. At its simplest, the woes of "borrowed powers" were that, for purposes of experimentation, WoW would wipe the slate each expansion to ensure the base kits were working before again allowing further means of customization -- but for that exact reason they were able to go more wild and expansion-thematic with said customization each time. While it felt bad going from much more involved builds with further flavorful powers back to the basics each time, the results were some very fun and varied gameplay experiences expansion by expansion. The repeated changes largely just caught flak for the times in which one's / the largest camp's preferred playstyle wasn't also the most optimal playstyle, just as they would have if the optimal playstyle remained stagnant. Yes, in some cases they over-experimented or pulled an XIV-style infant-yeet in the course of clearing out the waste in ways that they didn't strictly need to, but I suspect many also overestimate the amount of time it took to (re)build different but fundamentally similar systems as compared to retuning whatever was deemed to be functional around whatever else could be added for expansion-tailored thematic effect.

/rant

Anywho, in XIV's case, though, we're largely just looking at forced commitment. The more a lane of content's requirements are progressible only through that particular lane of content, the more isolated it becomes and the more it forces you to play just that. Which is why I never really understood the goal of having Eureka be self-contained in its gearing atop whatever unique gameplay-affecting power-unlocks it may include instead of that gear simply being an alternative means of general progression. It's not as if players would necessarily feel compelled to skip out on early power unlocks just because, already equipped with raid gear, they could feasibly skip ahead to fight the second zone's mobs, etc. Or, one could have gear matter not at all -- only the power unlocks would -- but still at least allow players not going for week one clears to get around the need for crafted gear (or even just the former tier's BiS) before jumping into Savage.

I guess what bugs me most about that is that we end up with content that either feels so piecework that one doesn't feel like they have much per patch of whatever content they like (even if the actual sum of doable content would nonetheless be decently high -- even if inferior to what greater replayability might provide within, say, core content) or we end up sectionalizing things for which gating indirect progression (e.g., gear, rather than the actual clears) serves no real purpose.

If we're meant to be able to enjoy these things together, why is there so little effort put towards making content more accessible without reducing difficulty, say...

• via built in personal parsers with contextualizable analytics for personal performance information, progressive encounter journals, and tighter checks on progression a la an improved High-End Duty Finder to reduce chance of intentional or unintentional leeching, atop greater rewards for repeat weekly raid clears to decrease queue times, etc., by which to make PuGing raids more time-accessible and far less frustrating without changing the encounters themselves; and even
• for Exploratory Missions and the like be "real" zones and therefore allow players to queue for other content while within -- if they're not going to have zone-wide events that would actually require all players within the zone anyways -- alongside revamping UI and party-only skill limitations to better support party-less multiplayer play (e.g., automatically resized Party List-like bars, improved nameplate support/functionality, and AoE supportive/healing actions spliting their effectiveness after 4 affected allies, to a max of 8 nearest, prioritizing party members, rather than their effects being limited to only party members).

Like, we both fail to make the open-world or EMs that interesting in themselves, as if they were to be backdrop content, but we also don't go very far to make them (enjoyably) compatible with drop-in multiplayer gameplay. ...Why? You'd think at least one or the other would appeal as an avenue of further improvement.

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Sometimes I have nothing to disagree with, or haven't an idea enough to respond, but I do enjoy that I know if you respond to me that it'll be an entire thought lol.

I agree on the borrowed power, the only thing I'd suggest is to leave it alone for that expansion content. Give it some time warp excuse and call it a day. This way people can enjoy the progression mechanics later and weird ideas that were present. Yes you'll still have a drop in power at the next expansion, but as you said this is one of the ways they can change the meta and keep people on their toes (burnout protection).
-
Man back when we were talking parsers I was like "what if SE added a personal parser" and people were like NOOOO WE CANT LET THE GAME HAVE IT.. we have to beat it. Now we have whole websites you get parsed whether you like it or not lol, and still no tool in game. Just ignorant players vs those who see everything. I suggested that the game would also catalog people of similar ilvl / job / group / content, and then aggregate that (anonymized) and show it to you. That way SE and you can see how you're doing in the scope of other jobs, your job, and in general. For MSQ content eh, but for savage and such, it would have been nice if the game attempted to gate people to increase success and reduce frustration (like I was all for having a hall of experts that you had to pass to join hard content, yes some people would try hard once and then not afterwards, but it would filter those who 'cannot', PF ignoring this of course).

100% on the exploratory thing, though I think we were clearly in alignment just from the general thought on borrowed power lol. How cool if instead of a funnel set off to the side that locks up other choices, FFXIV added new progression mechanics to the whole expansion, that then also entailed entirely new zones to take those things to? :/

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Originally Posted by KikiTia

blah blah blah

I don't understand why some people can't accept this

blah blah blah.

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That line alone...im going to say something that might be new for you but
THIS IS A PAID SERVICE , PEOPLE WONT ACCEPT ANYTHING BELOW OF WHAT THEY'RE GETTING
is like you're paying for a stream service but then for the same price the catalog is reduced...we're going backwards, is people money they are entitled to feel that way in any way they want and you cant say anything about it

@ Shogun
Aside/Extension:

Don't get me wrong. I would love the likes of Eureka to have an instanced option, still, into which people would typically spend a solid 45-120 minutes at a time in trying to optimize a collective 16 to 72-man run in which players work together to uncover relics, trigger branching events, fend off invasions, delve together into open raids, etc.

But, so long as it's going to just be a zone populated by vaguely rebranded FATEs... it should just be a standard zone, and thereby accentuate the need for all open-world zones to see some functionality improvements and added affordances.

As mentioned before, all zones should better support drop-in play (e.g., being able to attach themselves to a friend/"flagbearer"/"veteran hunter"/what-have-you so that they return to the channel they left next to a player among the chosen category if possible, at the edge of the FATE if said player is already in combat). Add to that the aforementioned ability to automatically see nearby players per the aforementioned expandable list -- say... an Allies List, which would automatically include any friendly players involved in the same FATE or similarly hunting either a normal, quest, or hunt mob, with a set maximum total size and minimum & minimum player-frame size between which it could resize itself -- and you've got a lot more cross-content friendly open world that would likely also happen to be more engaging in itself.

Take advantage of that to add areas of relatively more dangerous mobs worth teaming up with others to farm as a sort of mini-dungeon (as you progress through the mob camp, suppressing alarms or bringing in them all, triggering subtle mini-events, etc.), or find a way to take on a herd of beasts (such as by baiting predators towards them, pushing them to flee together towards a nearby canyon, etc.). With that affordance possible, you've reason to build more of a sense of ecosystem and dynamism. With that much effort spent, there's better reason to get the tuning tightened up for the conditional encounters possible, and perhaps even revise the model of FATEs as a whole to feel a bit more natural and less banally isolated. And finally, putting that all together, you might actually have interesting open-world content to rival the instanced pieces.

Pipedream for now, but damn would I love even some initial progress to show some intent of making improvements to the things XIV has otherwise sequestered to the copy-machine.

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Originally Posted by HunkyMarauder

Yeah but they are completely incapable of hiring anyone who isn't Japanese because apparently the language barrier is too strong lmao

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It takes about 1100 hours to become fluent in Polish. On average, it takes at least twice that long to learn Japanese or Chinese. Alphabets are a primary problem. Go figure.

So, who would you be more willing to hire, an English-only speaker with no idea what このガイドの目的は、プログラマーにコードを書くための要件を知らせることです。 (not especially functional Japanese, mind you) means outside of Google Translate, or someone who can actually read coding specifications in Japanese?

More importantly, why should a decidedly Japanese company tailor their most important private intellectual property to an English-only programmer just because ... globalization?