Are the developers of XIV out of touch?

[Vhailor]

It's the good side of the game and one of its strongest features against all other MMORPGs.
The complaints we have is with gameplay features we ask for years now.
The game's engine and code is utter crap.
This leads to the walls of limitations which prevent game from further growth and evolution.
For example they still can't figure out how to add more glamour plates and how to add the glamour dresser as a housing items for personal houses. In a recent E3 interview Yoshi said it's very difficult and they still didn't figure it out.
Same with character creation options and same with the game's graphic engine. And we still don't have numeric values over the TP bar on the group list HUD despite the drop of the PS3.
I'm just not happy how they are not even trying to solve those issues.
Yoshi himself said many times in past than for an MMORPG to stay alive it needs to evolve and enhance it's features and graphics over time.
I see nothing of this.

I'm curious - do you think FFXIV would really become a transformed experience, one well worth its monthly sub, if technically-limited QoL features like the Glamour system and housing and character creation system were completely resolved to everyone's satisfaction?

To me, the core issue isn't a lack of QoL features, it's boredom. Certainly I'd love to have a Miqo'te with a proper ass again, but at the end of the day, it wouldn't entertain me more than I'm entertained now. Shallow gameplay surrounded by overhauled and improved customization and UI systems is still shallow, to me. I think these problems are easy targets for complaints, but to me, it's a very surface-level issue that SE would be wise to back-burner in favour of creating enduring, longer-lasting content.

the code is not crap, it was planned for use console and not for this much player.... the game was means to be played by 600.000 player at best and we are more of 5M.... they need to work on this all the time, they did improve the server and continue to improve it.... the game engine is far to be shitty too....
plus they did improve the engine, by adding more stuff over time, it not super change, because the engine was very good from the start. the only complain we can have is about the texture.... outside this the game is gorgeous.... anyway, they already planned to improve graphism, but not for the 5.0....

Oh, man, yes, the code is awful.

Firstly, due to server sharding, there's really no difference between 600,000 and 6,000,000. Just add more servers. And as an aside, we're nowhere near five million. Not even close. That would be around 75,000 people per server on each individual server. That's too large by an order of magnitude. Do you remember when SE was splitting map instances near the launch of Stormblood to handle the temporary influx of players? Yeah. They used three instances, and none had more than 150 people in it at any given time. I'd be surprised if there were more than 5,000 truly active players on any given server, and the true number could easily be less than half that. Nowhere near five million total players.

Secondly, the engine was awful at the start. It's based on FFXIV 1.0, which, for its time, looked like utter ass considering the resources it required. Sure, character textures were decent and polygon counts were high, but textures and level design was noticeably repetitive (literally there were copy-pasted chunks of map), and there were plenty of single-player titles that looked as good or better while drawing less power. ARR solved this to some extent by bludgeoning the engine's technical side (texture resolutions, poly counts, etc.) and attempting to gloss over it instead with vibrant artwork, but that approach is rapidly showing its age.

What worsens this, of course, is that SE routinely makes the bone-headed mistake of designing content that squarely collides with the limitations of their crappy engine. Eureka is a prime example of this. The idea of an instanced, cross-data-center environment where players can team up in large packs and have a different experience sounds good on the surface. Until you remember that we can't send /tells from instances, obviously can't join a friend's party if they're in the instance and we're not, can't Black List from within instances, can't form truly durable Linkshells with the people we might meet in instances, couldn't at the time consistently target party members or monsters when enough players came together in one spot... these issues should have sent Eureka back to the drawing board. Instead, SE stupidly plunged forward, and released a piece of content that will in all likelihood never fully realize its potential. Or, look at Housing: SE devised a tremendously ambitious Housing system, with nary a thought paid toward the fact that their existing server infrastructure was wholly inadequate to address the demand. The result was players waiting literally years for the Housing supply to even remotely approach demand, and the wait is ongoing on more crowded servers.

Look, I get the desire to defend SE sometimes. I can certainly be harsh on them myself, and so can the forums. But FFXIV's underlying code is not a hill upon which to make an effective stand.