Request to Yoshi P: Hire more staff

[Niroken]

They should hire more people to help with the burden on the main developer team otherwise they'll just burn out.

[Dyvid]

As someone pointed out, there's a massive difference between a design process and a manufacturing process. Henry Ford was most definitely hiring master engineers and designers.

The grunt work, as you refer to it, would be conducted by people on the assembly line repeatedly performing a single manual task. I suspect there is no analogous role to that in an MMO. It's not like every mob we fight is manually constructed by someone, dragging the legs onto a gobwalker and bolting them in place.

No but it allows for people to take time while having someone there to continue the work. The only reason to not buff up staff is so it won't cut into the companies profit margins. Oh and FYI someone does have take concept art and build it into a 3d engine.

[Lan_Mantear]

Just hire more project managers!

[Ibi]

No but it allows for people to take time while having someone there to continue the work.

Sure, but if the "grunt work" isn't the bottleneck on content development, then hiring more people to do that isn't going to speed up patches any.

The only reason to not buff up staff is so it won't cut into the companies profit margins.

Not every problem is solved by throwing more money at it.

Sometimes you need talent with specific training, and they're not available. Sometimes you need other resources that you can't get because there's a problem somewhere else in the supply chain. Sometimes someone higher up in the chain of command, for reasons they don't want to explain and that you're in no position to challenge, has said no.

Not to mention that FFXIV isn't a stand alone thing. The money it takes in goes to other things, much in the same way as money from other things was used to support the 1.0 -> 2.0 reworking. Even if FFXIV is raking it in, SE may decide that they have better uses for that money, and there's nothing that the FFXIV team can do about that.

Oh and FYI someone does have take concept art and build it into a 3d engine.

Do you know who does that currently? Or how many people they have working on it? Do you know if that's in any way responsible for the pace of current content production? Or if adding more people to do that would speed things up?

[Gilthas]

"lack of content" is extremely subjective. Where in vast majority of cases, when someone says there's lack of content, its more like "there is a lack of content that im willing to engage in."

Pretty much this. Most people complaining about lack of content, just do one thing and ignore most of the content that the game has to offer.

My main complaint isn't that there isn't enough content, it's rather that they make too much of it a grind, preventing me from being able to enjoy everything due to time limitations. And I used to play a minimum of 3 hours per day. 4-5 hours usually. A lot more on weekends.

[Madjames]

They did hire new staff, they will be running the true EU datacenter.

"lack of content" is extremely subjective. Where in vast majority of cases, when someone says there's lack of content, its more like "there is a lack of content that im willing to engage in."

Hmm I will go out on a limb here and say that after doing the Alex raid, it was lackluster at best compared to Ulduar, ICC, Naxxramas, and almost every other raid from BC- WOD in world of warcraft. The raids were longer, required more time, had way more trash mobs that sometimes dropped end game gear and crafting materials, and had giant legendary quests for legendary gear.

I am sorry but the raids in this game IS a lack, a severe Lack when compared to other mmorpgs that are much older then this.

[Colorful]

All these people are claiming hiring more people doesn't help with software development... Do you have any clue as to why large AAA developers have potentially hundreds of development staff? That's right, it speeds up development. Not every company is as poorly managed as SE or Blizzard, and they know how to put their employees to use. When you have to design 10 dungeons, each with 10 different types of mobs, animations, models, textures, etc. who does that all? The staff, if you have 3 people working on 30 animations with them doing 10 each it'll take longer than 30 people doing 1 each. Get it? With proper management comes good results, allocate several supervisors to each team that does its own thing.

The hired developers will need to be trained of course, but it's a long term investment with a short term delay in production. There are plenty of great MMO developers likely out of jobs due to the constant failures in the industry. SE could start hiring western developers, I'm sure a lot of the laid off Wildstar developers would love a steady job and boy, are they great at developing dungeons.They have some of the best I've played since I started first WoW way back. Hire western developers (not to offend, but Japanese people seem to want to stick to the "Don't fix what isn't broken" motto, and that's not the way to go with developing interesting content) and let them have their own teams, 2 instanced encounter teams rather than 1, etc.

But of course, none of that is going to happen if SE isn't willing to invest back into the game and the White Knights are going to propagate the idea that more developers = no improvement in time required to develop content. I wonder why any game development team has more than 5 employees? Anymore and management clearly won't be able to handle all of the employees.

[Bernelli]

derp

Stop trying to compare it to WoW raids, they took a different approach. ARR raid was fine, Alexander itself is the problem.

[Madjames]

Stop trying to compare it to WoW raids, they took a different approach. ARR raid was fine, Alexander itself is the problem.

It is not just wow's raids though. Many other MMORPG's have lively and good raids and that feeling of accomplishment when completed is justified.

I completed alex and felt nothing.

I hope SE starts to make their raids bigger with more trash mobs and bosses. Even alex savage seems lackluster and I am not even at the start of that yet.

[Shinsaki]

All they have to do is look down the corridor and see the FF11 staff, they'll be needing work soon.