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

[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.

[Peopleofwar]

I personally only play this game for its side-quests and minigames, and I know a lot of people who are the same, it makes it slightly different then any other games.

[Koujiro]

Wow. Uh... you guys know that there are lots of different groups in the development team, right? There are those that design the quests, those that design mounts and minions, those that design battle content, those that design the mini-games. It's not like the existence of one made the work of the other worse, or lacking. It's not by removing those developers, or making them stop working on content not deemed "important" that the "important" content will see better days. It only means that we will see less content per patch and things will stay the same. SE is looking for people that can design battle content for a while now. Hells, they even have a page on their job application website specifically for that, and it has been there since July 2015 (if memory serves me right; feel free to correct me otherwise).

It's not because they created Lords of Verminion that made content lacking in 3.1. If anything, it's due to the to the lack of staff able to develop said content.

[dinnertime]

Now that you mention it, what happened to Mor Dhona kid adventurers? They just dropped that sidestory entirely halfway through.

I'm assuming it's discontinued for a while for other stuff, I'll assume it's Hildebrand.
Hildebrand is pretty popular, and gets hyped in patch trailers, too. I can see why they would go for continuing Hildebrand instead (for now).

[Melondra]

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.

I'm laughing so hard from this post.

[Ampheni]

I'm laughing so hard from this post.

Welp, she's not wrong lol. And I consider raids, quests of any form(Hildy included), new gears, dungeons, plot developments and minigames and even pvp as actual content.

[Kotemon]

Odds are Hildebrand will be most of the content after 3.3x. Just don't call it a comeback.

[TheFatHousecat]

Wow.

You have no idea what you're talking about, but you'll be quite confident you do regardless of anything I say. Sorry you feel that way.

[Yasuhiro]

Hildibrand is a meme character pandering to redditors
but he's better than most of the stuff in FFXIV

[Zari]

Do I sense a thread in which hardcore raiders are whining that the game isn't all about them again? Huzzah