Patches take too long to come out. Please Hire more staff

[quantumsaint]

http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

these are probably the types of things going on in all mmo and gaming companies. just replace the names with SE names and it probably pretty close to it. pretty long reads but very interesting also the replies are interesting, they removed the original from the real site it was posted, that one had tons of other workers reply to it with there thoughts too.

this is a part that shows maybe they do need to hire more people.

""Now, it seems, is the "real" crunch, the one that the producers of this title so wisely prepared their team for by running them into the ground ahead of time. The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm -- seven days a week -- with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week. Complaints that these once more extended hours combined with the team's existing fatigue would result in a greater number of mistakes made and an even greater amount of wasted energy were ignored.

The stress is taking its toll. After a certain number of hours spent working the eyes start to lose focus; after a certain number of weeks with only one day off fatigue starts to accrue and accumulate exponentially. There is a reason why there are two days in a weekend -- bad things happen to one's physical, emotional, and mental health if these days are cut short. The team is rapidly beginning to introduce as many flaws as they are removing.""

i can only imagine the words from these workers is probably true to any mmo company. and think SE been doing this for a year and another year to go.

http://natural-order-guild.com/conte...-online-failed

Here is a slightly more relevant article:

http://kotaku.com/5778294/is-making-...sy-a-nightmare

[Yumi_Hibiki]

nope, pay them in full out of your wallet and send them to SE or wait like everyone else.
i find the the wait between patches more than acceptable
can we please close this stupid waste of a thread?

[Noir]

From each patch they seem to take extra time to finish them or too long and work on bugs and such after releases. Such as 1.19a,1.19b etc.

They take about 10 days extra to finish a patch. So for them to finish everything up till Ver2.0 it will take them 6 months extra.

Version2 & Patch 1.23 says its going to be completed by Oct.2012.

So ver2.0 might not get done on time including the patches until Nov.2012~April.2013.

For them to make patches on time they would have to increase the development staff by 20%. This would make faster released content and better testing before releasing to early to meet patch due dates.

How about you pay the monthly fees so they can hire more people?
Oh wait, next month we won't see you again anyway.

/ignore this troll

Totally piss me off people , only complain. Let them work you bum.

[Tempestmoon]

There is only going to be one thing that satisfies the content hungry population that plays the game. Some kind of massive input of content. Hopefully when releasing 2.0 they will not only port everything we have now (aside from from the limited time story line of the next year) and add a massive amount of content.

Give the population 6 months of NEW and FRESH things to do while they explore the new Eorzea. When PS3 launches do it with an expansion pack and I think all the content woe's will be gone for 99% of people. After that with the staff they have I am confident they can churn out content at a good rate with all the foundation solid and beneath them.

Content complaints come directly from a lack of content at launch and the inability to provide it in the year since then because of revamps. The little bit of content that is provided is but a crumb to a hungry beast and will never be enough. They need the whole meal at once.

SE is doing to right thing in what they are doing, there is no doubt about that. it is my strong belief that once these issues are behind us Yoshi will take this game to heights no one thought possible.


Thanks

[ShinChuck]

The patch rate is more the acceptable by any dev studio's standards.

SE themselves have said numerous times they need to be quicker. How quickly people forget all these Producer's Letters - Yoshi-P ain't doin' them for his own health, ya know!

[Mug]

At this rate, I'm just happy if they manage to get a patch released on schedule.

[Biggs]

The cynic in me wants to say "it took them 5 years to make a smoldering piece of crap with a full development team, what the hell is 2 more years of redevelopement with half the staff gonna produce?" I actually happen to think that, since most of the last patches have been more fixes then content, they should release small patches for fixes that come out immediatly when they are ready, and save the larger patches for content only stuff. So, for example, when they finish working out their plans for the redevelopment of the market wards, they release it in a small patch we get on monday. Then, a week or two later, when the dev team that was in charge of doing the player search function finishes up, they bring that out in another small patch. Seems to me that would be showing the current player base more progress is being made faster than waiting for 2-3 months in between patches that have more fixes than content. Its now been over a year and there has been little to no mention of when the level limit will be increased. That by itself is making the rest of the game very stale. It should be 2 different teams with different schedules, one for fixes, and one for content.

[Bahn]

Man, it's funny how you can rely on the same set of white knighting defenders to come into a post (that I agree is pretty inflammatory towards Square, so the white knighting is somewhat justified) to always come up when these types of comments are made. However, I'm going to defend SE on this one. Yes I'm a hypocritical git.

I'm usually one to bitch at Square myself for the way they're handling things, but I have to say you need to cool your jets. I'm as cynical and bitchy about the way Square does things as you are, and I too am disappointed by the giant gap between 1.19 and 1.20 and their haphazard way of dealing with certain things over others (them being hellbent to overhaul the class system vs. fixing how boring synthing is vs. the UI delay on EVERY action we take and the steep and unnecessary PC requirements).

However, I honestly don't think this is an issue with having enough staff - Yoshida revealed sometime back they have a team of over 200 people working on both XIV Beta (which 1.0 is) and 2.0. They are not shortstaffed, they are not underfunded. This is not some random MMO that has an underpaid and understaffed team doing 9001x the amount of work as a regularly staffed properly managed team. They're fucking Square-Enix. They have money, they have resources. I can only pull things out of my ass about the current patch development process, but do think about how much of a tiny window they have to develop and Q&A each patch. Granted, these patches are to fix what should have been in the game in the first place, but let's step outside of that train of thought and realize they're getting a ton of work done in a short amount of time. I'd rather they delay the patch and get it right than have it be released early and be in a buggy mess like XIV's release was.

tl;dr - just wait. Yes, they failed to meet their projected patch and subscription deadline of "late November - early December", but that just means that you have more time to play better games and even try out other MMOs (like SWTOR) to compare. XIV won't die and it will still be around even if you move on to other things, so you need to just calm down. Come back when it's patched and see if it's for you, else there are always other more complete games for you to play while waiting for 2.0.

[weeble]

Here is a slightly more relevant article:

http://kotaku.com/5778294/is-making-...sy-a-nightmare

maybe lol, but i like the picture that is painted with the 2 i posted only cause it just shows how horrid it is in some eyes that work in the industry. but i doubt more people will help, if it does anything it can give some people some needed rest and not have to work 24/7

[PrettyPrincess]

They take about 10 days extra to finish a patch. So for them to finish everything up till Ver2.0 it will take them 6 months extra

According to the outline, it says late November early December. I';d say this patch is coming out in a timely manner and they have people working on patch 1.21 already and probably teams working on a whole bunch of other things. of course you're not in game development so of course you wouldn't know these kinds of things.