why was hildebrand so short this patch and when is the next one

[TheFatHousecat]

Actual content? You mean another set of level 250 armor and two dungeons to grind for new tomes as opposed to interesting characters, plot developments and fun diversions? Please do enlighten us as to what you would consider 'actual content' oh mighty Fat-cat.

Interesting characters and plot developments that cost tens of millions of dollars in development budget, and only get you to log on for about an hour every 3 months? Haaaaaaaaaaaaahahahhaha okay fam, okay.

[Skivvy]

Interesting characters and plot developments that cost tens of millions of dollars in development budget, and only get you to log on for about an hour every 3 months? Haaaaaaaaaaaaahahahhaha okay fam, okay.

Pretty cool you know all the details regarding budget and development!

[TheFatHousecat]

Pretty cool you know all the details regarding budget and development!

Wall of text incoming!

SE rarely gives exact numbers, but it's not hard to connect the dots when you look at their quarterly fiscal reports. FFXIV 1.0 cost over 400 million dollars to develop, and it had a /fraction/ of the content of 2.0 & 3.0. And while a fair bit of 2.0/3.0 development cost goes to paying for voice acting for MSQ- Hildibrand doesn't have a voice, so surely the content doesn't cost much to develop, right? Here's the rub, though: Hildibrand isn't a oneshot quest, and it isn't just text and cutscenes. They've attached FATEs and instanced battle content to it. They've attached minions, emotes and glamour. If you know anything about development costs, you start to realize really quickly that 10-20m for all the Hildibrand stuff is probably a conservative estimate.

The problem with all this comes when you start to look into the value of those development dollars, which is generally figured out by looking at how much time X number of players spend on the content. They'll look at averages and they'll look at totals. And the average dollar-per-hour spent on Hildibrand stuff is going to be abysmal. My comment about people resubbing for a patch every 3 months to do Hildibrand quests for an hour isn't terribly far from the truth. So SE will look at this and think: "is there something else we could be spending this money on with a higher dollar-per-hour spent average?" The answer will invariably be "yes" and that's a bit reason why there was a big gap between the last Hildibrand stuff and this new stuff. They were looking for better ways to spend their money. But eventually people begged for it enough that they felt cornered into bringing it back.

Compare that to something on the opposite side of the spectrum like the Coil storyline. Yoshi was pretty open about how far over budget they went, and a large part of that was because of all the CG cutscenes and the voice acting. It was incredibly immersive, with just about the highest production value we can get from an MMO. It had actually interesting characters with actually interesting plot developments- which affected the entire game setting. By comparison, Hildibrand is largely inconsequential to the plot- a cheesy detective side-story. Anyway, it can be argued that since only 5% of the game population experienced the Final Coil storyline up to completion by the end of 2.0, that it was money wasted. But look again at the average dollar-per-hour spent. How many hundreds of hours did people spend on coil progression, and farming for gear? That may not be your thing, and that's fair- but the point is, in spite of only 5% of the population taking true advantage of this content, SE is still technically getting more bang from its buck from this type of thing.

You know what they get even more bang from their buck from? Dungeon roulette. Primals with rare mounts. PVP with ranked rewards. They put much much less money into this stuff than something like Coil, and it keeps an even larger segment of the population busier for an even greater number of hours, on average, per player. So in that sense, this content is at the top and middle of the bell curve, giving the greatest returns on value. This is also, incidentally, the stuff they try to incentivize through daily/weekly chore goals. And as much as that sucks, there's a good reason for it (financially).

So what does this all mean? Is Hildibrand or similar content a 'waste' of development dollars if people find enjoyment in it? Well, to the players who like it: no, absolutely not. The same can be observed about Coil storyline stuff. But while, in the end, SE are pumping many times more dollars into stuff like Coil, they're also getting a lot more value from it. However, MORE people do the Hildibrand thing, in spite of it's comparatively lower value, so those subs add up to MORE revenue. Raid stuff = (potentially) more value. Wonky throw-away side quest stuff = (potentially) more revenue.

To seriously answer OP's question: we're getting less of everything lately, not just Hildibrand. We used to get 3 dungeons per patch, now 2. We used to get huge zones in coil with deep, interesting story and now we get little circle/box arenas with silly, annoying gobbie junk nobody cares about. We used to get a lot more from our wonky side-quests, too. We're getting less of it all now because resources are being diverted to other projects, like FFXV, Final Fantasy VII Remake, etc. Same thing they did with FFXI to fund this game. Exactly the same.

Until those projects are finished, or SE decides to pull resources back to FFXIV, we'll either get a little bit less of everything or certain things will have to be cut out entirely. I'm sore about Hildibrand because it was one of the things they had originally cut to make room for other stuff. Now that it's back, the money they're putting into Hildibrand has to be taken from something else.

And the bottom line is: this game can exist just fine without Hildibrand. I'm not sure it can exist without the other stuff.

[Kyuuen]

Text wall of death, doom, and gloom.[/B]

So would you think it best to ask SE to increase Dev support/funds for XIV instead of just accepting less as we've been getting, as you've said? Instead of just saying 'hey! I dislike this, cut devs from it!' and rolling with the status quo, bring it to SE's attention XIV can be a lot more with more Dev support/funding.

Some of the stuff that you're claiming to be the meat and bones of the game, I can just as easily find people that don't touch that, just as you can find those that don't touch side quests.

[TheFatHousecat]

So would you think it best to ask SE to increase Dev support/funds for XIV instead of just accepting less as we've been getting, as you've said? Instead of just saying 'hey! I dislike this, cut devs from it!' and rolling with the status quo, bring it to SE's attention XIV can be a lot more with more Dev support/funding.

Some of the stuff that you're claiming to be the meat and bones of the game, I can just as easily find people that don't touch that, just as you can find those that don't touch side quests.

Successful long-term subscription-based MMOs with those elements: FFXI, WoW, Eve

Successful long-term subscription-based MMOs without those elements: n/a

In fact, MMOs that start sub-based but invariably fail and go P2P/F2P all seem to fail suspiciously because they lack the very "meat and bones of the game" that FFXI, WoW (and now FFXIV... for the time being) etc have. Truly strange. Truly.

Tl;dr- Fallacy of personal experience + biased/skewed sample size does not a good argument make. In other words, your friends are poor poor poor predictors of fiscal success in MMOs.

[Kyuuen]

-snip-

Wasn't using my friends, but simply using myself as means of extrapolation. Until recently I'd never completed A4, just because I didn't care to do it. Not mentioning Savage, for obvious reasons. So I am but one person out of how many that play this game?

Now by no means am I stating that the game can exist without content that you're speaking of, but blindly cutting content because someone thinks it detracts from the whole is just as folly. Ignoring any groups of people in an MMO can have pretty sharp repercussions; and using your examples, WoW and XI are primary examples. XI who in it's early life only permitted; for the VAST majority, group based play beyond a certain point, essentially chasing any sort of solo player away, thus never becoming a Massive hit as WoW or what XIV already is. WoW's issues are a bit of cluster in that it being what 11 or 12 years old now, but constant reinvention, the PvE vs PvP balance struggle, and other issues.

Point being, cutting content from either side is going to; potentially, yield unfavorable reactions from your base. And if this is a status quo that is going to be around for an extended time, do you keep slighting one side, or seek balance?

[TheFatHousecat]

...blindly cutting content because someone thinks it detracts from the whole is just as folly.

You entirely misrepresent my argument. Never once did I say it /detracts from game/. What I did say is that, at a time when devs are already drastically overworked and underbudgeted, the first things to cut are the ones that make the smallest impact on long-term fiscal success. Then when things are looking better, you work them back in.

Ignoring any groups of people in an MMO can have pretty sharp repercussions

Do you think WoW had anything resembling Hildibrand at their peak of 12 million subscribers? There were some random silly side quests, sure, but not at all like what SE is doing with Hildibrand. And I can absolutely guarantee you their losing 7-8 million subscribers over recent years has absolutely nothing at all to do with WoW's lack of this kind of content.

XI who in it's early life only permitted; for the VAST majority, group based play beyond a certain point, essentially chasing any sort of solo player away, thus never becoming a Massive hit as WoW or what XIV already is.

XIV isn't as successful as people think. There's a reason SE tends to celebrate "accounts made" and "number of characters" rather than raw subscription numbers. At its peak, XI hit around 750k subscribers. It stayed around 500k average for many years otherwise. It did this in spite of being extraordinarily unfriendly to solo and casual players, and it did this in spite of not having silly throwaway questlines. We haven't been given exact numbers, but a lot of sources are estimating XIV hit around 500-600k subs at its peak so far, but not much more. It's possible it has matched XI's highest mark, but doesn't seem like it. (And there's a reason we've never had a lodestone post about celebrating 1 million active subscribers)

(Also, as an aside: FFXI might currently have 50-100k subscribers at most. It is the most casual and solo friendly it has ever been. Correlation does not equal causation, but it's interesting to consider how strange it is that the casualification of the game seems to have little to no impact on drawing in new or returning casual players. We also see the same pattern with WoW: the more casual it gets, the more subs seem to flee from the game. Curious.)

The thing is, Wow and FFXI both did have silly and fun characters and questlines, but it was usually handled one of two ways. Either it would be a recurring character that makes brief cameos in these other quests (Think Naji from the Bastok missions) without ever being the focal point, or it would just be a really fast, simple side quest with brief dialogue and maybe a quick cutscene. Focusing on just one of these silly characters, giving them a supporting cast and an involved story with lots of elements and even some battle/instanced content is something fairly unique to FFXIV, and I'd argue it's good to have something unique. Generally.

But you have to pick your battles and you have to do things at the right time. People are either willfully ignorant or just plain naive if they think this content exists and is developed in a vacuum with unlimited resources. The truth is that shareholders are forcing SE to divert a LOT of xiv's resources to other projects right now. Shareholders care about the company's bottom line as a whole and less about this one property's health. They probably don't even really understand MMOs or care much (which we saw quite vividly with XIV 1.0's failures). To them, Yoshi succeeded in their goals: they turned around a failed franchise, earned back the money and made it profitable, and restored honor to a tarnished name. Now they can just coast off the monthly sub fees.

People's memories are too short. They forget all too easily they did exactly the same thing with FFXI... to fund FFXIV... in the first place. And it nearly destroyed the game. So what I'm saying is, as long as FFXIV isn't getting all the resources and manpower it deserves, it needs to be /very/ picky about how it spends its time and money- and Hildibrand, currently, is a foolish choice.

[Yallaid]

Interesting characters and plot developments that cost tens of millions of dollars in development budget, and only get you to log on for about an hour every 3 months? Haaaaaaaaaaaaahahahhaha okay fam, okay.

i'm not your fam, buddy!

[Slappah]

Interesting characters and plot developments that cost tens of millions of dollars in development budget, and only get you to log on for about an hour every 3 months? Haaaaaaaaaaaaahahahhaha okay fam, okay.

Hildebrand quest costing TENS OF MILLIONS of dollars

LOLWAT

[Andevom]

Hildebrand quest costing TENS OF MILLIONS of dollars

LOLWAT

They're the most expensive plots on sale at Plot Depot, didn't you know?