Request: Can we go back the old patch model? Content is now spread too thin

[Hyperia]

I don't know if its true, but I heard a rumor that Yoshi lost 1/3 of his dev team to the FF VII team because that project is running very behind schedule and needs to catch up. They are also having trouble hiring devs for that game right now so the transfers would make sense. If this is what's really going on, then it would perfectly explain why content is being spread out because the devs are spread too thin.

[Souljacker]

I don't know if its true, but I heard a rumor that Yoshi lost 1/3 of his dev team to the FF VII team because that project is running very behind schedule and needs to catch up. They are also having trouble hiring devs for that game right now so the transfers would make sense. If this is what's really going on, then it would perfectly explain why content is being spread out because the devs are spread too thin.

Why on earth are they having problems hiring devs for FFVII? Deserved or not, it's like their most popular game EVER. If they can't get people to work on the project, they either aren't offering a realistic package or they have unrealistic expectations about their potential employees. And this is part of their overall problem with personnel. They killed XI (for the most part) by moving most of that team to XIV. Now they are going to kill XIV by moving the team off of this?

Someone is making some very bad decisions if this is the case and their company will suffer. I haven't logged in today and I canceled my sub last night. If they don't even love their game enough to keep resources on it, then there's no reason for me to keep investing in it.

[Rufalus]

Someone is making some very bad decisions if this is the case and their company will suffer.

To be honest from an outside perspective it seems to be the case that they are stacked with talent but poorly managed. Most of their major projects go through what is best described as development hell. FF XV took 10+ years to complete (almost complete, has some cut content) and during that time it was scraped and restarted, changed engine, changed target platform from PS3/360 to PS4/XBO and entirely changed the story and some major characters from earlier versions which had been revealed to the public.

Likewise FF VII Remake was scraped and restarted since an earlier version was revealed to the public and moved from an outsourced project to an internal one that they then began re-hiring and re-planning for what will become another giant length development. KH3 has also been a long time coming. It will be amazing if they can go from announcement to release of a FF XVI without some kind of major setbacks. I really want them to succeed and personally wish XVI would return to series roots like IX style with modern production values... and be in development for no more than 6 years.

Having said all that, I don't believe the FF XIV team is poorly managed at all. They are very good at sticking to deadlines and must be to keep momentum as an MMO. At worst a patch may slip a couple of weeks or some side content shifted to a later patch than originally planned, but all of the core content like MSQ and raids have been coming out like clockwork since 2013 with no end in sight. I have a lot of confidence and respect for this team. Sometimes they miss the mark; Pagos is a bit too slow and punishing. It's only been available for 1 week, they can fix it.

[polyphonica]

I don't know if its true, but I heard a rumor that Yoshi lost 1/3 of his dev team to the FF VII team because that project is running very behind schedule and needs to catch up. They are also having trouble hiring devs for that game right now so the transfers would make sense. If this is what's really going on, then it would perfectly explain why content is being spread out because the devs are spread too thin.

That really seems like a baseless rumor. The FFVII Remake project doesn't even have a fixed schedule yet, and they've never shown any signs about being worried about it "slipping" before (maybe if they had some firm commitment, but they don't; they also wouldn't choose this director if timeliness were their top priority, nor would they have given up on outsourcing and brought it all in-house). I think this is part of the "all the money FFXIV is being funneled into other games" conspiracy, now evolved into "the staff are being funneled into other games, too."

More likely, Pagos just wasn't ready, and they scheduled the release accordingly. Some people make it sound as though it was sitting in the game all ready to go and they chose to artificially delay it just because, but that's pretty unlikely. The "spreading" of the content doesn't really change the amount of work involved, except for a few common services like localization and QA. The various dev teams themselves will have been assigned their tasks long ago. I think people are reading a lot into this by implying it's a new patch model when relic-related content has traditionally been "off-cycle" content anyway. The difference is just that got it split off from 4.35 into 4.36 this time. The fact that it aligned with the timing of the collaboration event was probably useful for the dev team so that it wouldn't just be this one thing by itself, but it's a bit much to say that it's indicative of a trend at this point.