Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[reivaxe]

They shouldn't have added any new races if they will impact the continued development of the game.... or hire more people.... but profits....

It's not a black and white thing ...

They can very well have the means to make ONE new race (As in a female and a male ... Viera and Hrothgar) and keep up with the pace they're at now with the work flow they have and not negatively affect the content. That's why they say that this is it, this is all they can do. This is the cut off point.

Just because adding too many new races would hurt the development of this game does not mean that they just should have never added any new races.

And people saying they would be OK with longer waits between big patches if it mean't male Viera were in the game ... Ok. You can feel that way or say that if you want, I think it's silly/ short sighted/ single minded and wholly lacking in perspective though. In the real world people come to and leave this game for other forms of entertainment all the time between updates. They are in a never ending fight for player's attention, money and time. New content is a major asset in keeping people coming back to this game and keeping this MMO from being a ghost town for months at a time (even if you're not interested in the content at the time BUT still sub ... you're sure to loss interest if everyone you know is gone and the towns are bare because everyone's playing something else since there's "Nothing to do" in FF14).

[polyphonica]

And people saying they would be OK with longer waits between big patches if it mean't male Viera were in the game ... Ok. You can feel that way or say that if you want, I think it's silly/ short sighted/ single minded and wholly lacking in perspective though.

Besides what you said (which is totally valid) the other part of the issue is you delay the whole patch cycle to account for a bigger workload in certain departments, that isn't balanced with the work that needs to be done by other departments that are okay with the current pacing. It's not easy to find extra tasks for these other teams that could fit into the small gap you've created each cycle.

It also may have long-term repercussions on things like the schedule for expansions, which are part of SE's long term budgetary planning. Right now they happen every two years, but if you delay all the patch cycles by two weeks, it adds up to about 2 1/2 to 3 months every expansion cycle. Over time it'd mean you'd get a cycle where FFXIV goes three fiscal years between expansions (even if it's only 2 1/4 years in real time), which would impact annual revenue and hurt the stock price.

So basically, they will want to find a way to make this happen on an on-going basis without disrupting the overall pacing of development. I don't think Yoshida was suggesting that there *isn't* a way, but at the moment they don't know, so don't want to make any promises. I do think people should keep the pressure up... in a respectful way.