My two cents on development.

[Seif]

It's players like these that make SE's fumbling seem really sad when there are still naive players like the OP who think the SE's unseen slowness in development of XIV is about to change somehow.

Even when all the evidence points to just slow speed and this is really all there is for the next patch. People though chocobos take a lot of time because there's going to be something new about the way they're implemented. Almost a year in the making and we'll be just getting the bare-bones version first. Same for the companies. An unseen amount of hype and all the plans seem to be reduced to them being just quest hubs even though previously we were led to believe they're going to be something completely new player run we haven't seen in MMOs before.

I'd like to have my head in the clouds as much as the OP but it's about time you wake up and smell the Lodestone updates. SE is scrambling to get even this patch out of the door in time for Thursday they even made the absolutely ridiculous claim that one set of gear takes half a year to complete.

To wish for them to achieve something over the bare minimum after all these disappointing patches and MW still being a code-mess then I think that's a bit unrealistic really.

When content arrives they're forced to make it extremely grind oriented and repeatable to play time for future because if players burn through the new quests in days they'll be no closer to achieving a playerbase that's willing to pay than they are now.

[Delsus]

It's players like these that make SE's fumbling seem really sad when there are still naive players like the OP who think the SE's unseen slowness in development of XIV is about to change somehow.

I'd like to have my head in the clouds as much as the OP but it's about time you wake up and smell the Lodestone updates. SE is scrambling to get even this patch out of the door in time for Thursday they even made the absolutely ridiculous claim that one set of gear takes half a year to complete.

First they are completly redesigning a game that took 5 years prior to release to develop, so its going to take a long time, if you take that into perspective they arent really going that slowly, the reason people say development is slow is because of SE's priorities, a complete battle system overhaul which needs to be top priority to accomodate how, in practice, the changes will make will affect how content works. SE say they are going to release x, y, z and people think it will come instantly when it requires alot of work to get it, then there are unforseen problems or the current systems dont make it viable for release until some battle or geographic overhauls are done, then everyone says development is slow.

Also you comment saying that them saying its ridiculous that it takes half a year to make new gear, they have to make a model for each race which is about 15 differant models, then they need to add stats to it, and make sure it affects said stats, then they need to add the physics to it, for example if you were running around in a full length coat and it didnt move around your legs, basicly like it was left in the starch too much, what would you think? Programming anything takes time, and appart from the most simple programs there are always unforseen problems, look at FFXI's latest patch, there was a glitch that made cures always do 99,999 to undead mobs, and there were no changes to cure mechanics, which is why it got through to the final patch because no one would have thought somthing would cause a problem to that completly unrelated piece of code.

The only people that can talk about slow development are programmers that know the problems of programming, I have done some, admittedly not much, but enough to know how hard it can be, I have never done as big programs as FFXIV, but i find it hard enough to sift through 50 lines of code to find that I missed 1 semi colon from the end of a line, never mind over 1 million (which FFXIV is bound to have).