I'm concerned for ffxiv's future

[Kaedan]

When are people going to understand, as Yoshida himself has even said, that money isn't everything? You can throw as much money as you want at something, it won't make it go faster, won't make it perfect, and won't make it necessarily successful. There are thousands of examples of companies throwing money at a project and it still going belly up.

It's a question of reasonable use of manpower. Every new race, as Yoshida said, is thousands of hours of work hours needed that could be spent more effectively elsewhere (since ultimately, races are nothing more than cosmetics, not game content).

[Kalise]

When are people going to understand, as Yoshida himself has even said, that money isn't everything? You can throw as much money as you want at something, it won't make it go faster, won't make it perfect, and won't make it necessarily successful. There are thousands of examples of companies throwing money at a project and it still going belly up.

It's a question of reasonable use of manpower. Every new race, as Yoshida said, is thousands of hours of work hours needed that could be spent more effectively elsewhere (since ultimately, races are nothing more than cosmetics, not game content).

Ehh... It's not quite as simple as that.

From a consumer perspective, throwing money at the game will make things go faster and will solve our problems.

Since, more money spent on more people means shared workload. I.e. Instead of having 1 guy go through the game altering 10,000 items to fit a new race, you get 10 people going through the game altering 1,000 items each to fit a new race. Effectively increasing efficiency tenfold.

Not only that, but more people means more teams can be simultaneously working on different parts of the game. You can have teams working on MSQ, Dungeons, Raids, Eureka, PvP, Glamour, Housing, Character Customization, Side Quests, Deep Dungeons, Job Balance, New Jobs, Job Quests, New Activities etc. All at the same time and thus creating content for each aspect regularly.

Thus, from a player perspective, money DOES solve everything (In the case where it's going towards new staff, not just going to the CEO's wallet like many companies seem to do >.>)

The questions come from the other side of the fence. From the side of the company. Since they want to make profit and they thus will not just throw infinite amounts of money at the game unless they are sure that they will get it all back AND MORE.

They're the ones that need to balance expenditure of money and reasonable use of manpower, so that they don't lose money and therefore shut down the game.

For FFXIV, it's in somewhat of a precarious situation because of the way that SE has set things up. Where the money is provided by the parent company and it's Yoshida and his team that balance out the expenditure and manpower. With the baseline situation where the majority of the money made by the game is already siphoned off by the parent company and re-distributed elsewhere.

Meaning that Yoshi and Co. Are working essentially from a limited fund that is not directly related to how well the game is doing (So they can't for example, do something well and get a bunch more subs and then use the extra money to expand the team and the content they provide to retain those subs. Instead, they do something well and get a bunch more subs and they have exactly the same amount of money to try and retain them unless Papa SE decides to give them more), which causes them to be limited in what they can and cannot do, since their every move needs to be justifiable to SE.

This is why certain things are difficult for them to overcome. Why they can't simply have a team to rewrite the Character Creation code to make adding new options such as hairstyles, faces, body types (Fat, thin, tall, short, butt sliders etc) much easier. Why they can't rewrite the Inventory System to make it not trash and allow for easier times implementing additional space and creating a Glamour system that doesn't suck. Why they can't simply alter how Housing is done to allow for things like Glamour Dressers in houses or things like Balconies. Yoshi and Co. KNOW that people want these things. They KNOW that they're popular requests. But they cannot JUSTIFY working on them to SE and thus cannot do anything about them.

It's the reason behind the single gender races. They KNOW that people want Male Viera and Female Hrothgar. But they cannot JUSTIFY working on them to SE. Not unless Female Viera and Male Hrothgar prove to be profitable enough for SE for it to be considered a reasonable use of manpower.

So, it ends up being the thing that people understand is that while Square Enix is a multi-million dollar company. The team working on FFXIV is not Squeenix as a whole, but a subsidiary that is funded BY Squeenix and is thus at the mercy of their financial decisions.

[Kaedan]

Ehh... It's not quite as simple as that.

From a consumer perspective, throwing money at the game will make things go faster and will solve our problems.

Since, more money spent on more people means shared workload. I.e. Instead of having 1 guy go through the game altering 10,000 items to fit a new race, you get 10 people going through the game altering 1,000 items each to fit a new race. Effectively increasing efficiency tenfold.

snip

That's the reason I mentioned the "saturation point" of manpower. There is a point where no matter how many people you add to a project, you get nothing but diminishing returns. It's where the idiom "too many chefs spoil the broth" comes from.

They already have a VERY large staff. Far more than is typical. It isn't as simple as the basic math you have tried to apply. But you do illustrate how the "consumer perspective" is a flawed one with a very narrow view of the whole picture. That's precisely the false thinking that throwing money at a project will allow them to simply hire more people and get things done faster.

[Kalise]

That's the reason I mentioned the "saturation point" of manpower. There is a point where no matter how many people you add to a project, you get nothing but diminishing returns. It's where the idiom "too many chefs spoil the broth" comes from.

They already have a VERY large staff. Far more than is typical. It isn't as simple as the basic math you have tried to apply. But you do illustrate how the "consumer perspective" is a flawed one with a very narrow view of the whole picture. That's precisely the false thinking that throwing money at a project will allow them to simply hire more people and get things done faster.

But then, if you read literally the sentence afterwards that you snipped out, you'd also see that once you hit the point of "Diminishing Returns" (Which in of itself, isn't a hard wall of productivity, merely a reduction in the increase each person provides which is literally every person past 2 people working on something in my example. I.e. 1 guy going through 10,000 items. A 2nd guy then makes it 100% more efficient by splitting the load to 5,000 items for each of them. A 3rd guy merely increases productivity by 50% because it's now splitting those 5,000 items between 2 people into 3,333 items between 3 people. Thus a diminishing return of investment)

Then you can put more people towards OTHER things. Such as like Yoshida mentioned "While FFXIV will continue to strive to maintain a regular 3.5 month major update cycle, we must also ensure that sufficient time is secured for the meticulous development of new content—or else the quality will invariably drop."

They need to keep pumping out the regular release of the new Dungeons/MSQ/Raids.

Thus if you can have a larger team working on Cosmetic things like Races/Character Customization AND have a larger team working on Dungeons/MSQ/Raids at the same time, that is more efficient than having to split focus because you only have a small team working on one aspect, or you have a larger team that works on the core content (Dungeons/MSQ/Raids) first and then works on other things afterwards.

You're the one who's illustrating flawed and narrow views of the whole picture in this scenario. By having limited understanding of how game development works. Including your reference to them having a "VERY large staff". Which often will be distributed into different teams that work on different aspects. I.e. The Art team won't be doing any work on Job Balance. The Art team will simply be working on Art assets. If this team gets larger, they can work on more Art assets. If the team gets large enough where more people won't help, you get people in to different teams, such as the Job Balance team so they can work more efficiently.

[Gemina]

But then, if you read literally the sentence afterwards that you snipped out, you'd also see that once you hit the point of "Diminishing Returns" (Which in of itself, isn't a hard wall of productivity, merely a reduction in the increase each person provides which is literally every person past 2 people working on something in my example. I.e. 1 guy going through 10,000 items. A 2nd guy then makes it 100% more efficient by splitting the load to 5,000 items for each of them. A 3rd guy merely increases productivity by 50% because it's now splitting those 5,000 items between 2 people into 3,333 items between 3 people. Thus a diminishing return of investment)

Then you can put more people towards OTHER things. Such as like Yoshida mentioned "While FFXIV will continue to strive to maintain a regular 3.5 month major update cycle, we must also ensure that sufficient time is secured for the meticulous development of new content—or else the quality will invariably drop."

They need to keep pumping out the regular release of the new Dungeons/MSQ/Raids.

Thus if you can have a larger team working on Cosmetic things like Races/Character Customization AND have a larger team working on Dungeons/MSQ/Raids at the same time, that is more efficient than having to split focus because you only have a small team working on one aspect, or you have a larger team that works on the core content (Dungeons/MSQ/Raids) first and then works on other things afterwards.

You're the one who's illustrating flawed and narrow views of the whole picture in this scenario. By having limited understanding of how game development works. Including your reference to them having a "VERY large staff". Which often will be distributed into different teams that work on different aspects. I.e. The Art team won't be doing any work on Job Balance. The Art team will simply be working on Art assets. If this team gets larger, they can work on more Art assets. If the team gets large enough where more people won't help, you get people in to different teams, such as the Job Balance team so they can work more efficiently.

You seem to get one side of the equation, and the other, but not how these two sides coincide with each other. If throwing a ton of money at a project was the answer to everything, the Star Wars franchise wouldn't have gone to total schite. Yet, if you look at a recently posted video I saw on youtube which is a reimagined version of Darth Vader vs Obi Wan in episode 4, you see how a limited amount of people with a limited amount of funds with clear setbacks was able to produce content that the hardest of the hardcore fans are saying easily beats out anything Disney has been able to churn out. Why do you suppose this is?

As another example: you have two machines, and two people to operate them, and one person that manages them. They love what they do and are passionate about it. Their work is so good that demand for their product has increased. The manager decides to get two more machines. The immediate issue here is if all four machines are not running at full capacity, then not only are you not making more money, you're losing it. Because the two operators cannot run all four machines at full capacity, the manager decides to hire two more operators. While the two new operators are experienced with running the machines, they are not familiar with the product and will require X amount of time training to learn about and adopt the same passion as everyone else.

This is a small scale version of what happens behind SE's doors. The reason why we have the game we do is because SE has a team of peeps who are passionate about their work and the product they deliver to their customers. They work those long hours and put in the extra effort without additional compensation because they poor their hearts and their souls into their work. This is NOT something you can just throw more money and people at and achieve the same result. If it was, they could just hire more people and everyone could just work normal hours, and not sacrifice so much of their personal time. That is what he means by this comment:

"While FFXIV will continue to strive to maintain a regular 3.5 month major update cycle, we must also ensure that sufficient time is secured for the meticulous development of new content—or else the quality will invariably drop."

Gong back to my previous Star Wars comment, this is an example of how throwing more money and having more people involved ultimately causes the product to fail. Is that what you want for FFXIV as well?

[Kalise]

Why do you suppose this is?

Because George Lucas ran the franchise into the ground with the prequels and then sold it on to a mega-corporation that had already lost any essence of actually wanting to create quality content and was instead focused entirely on maximizing profits while minimizing effort?

You might want to pick a more apropos example next time.

Such as a time when actually throwing money at things was the issue, as opposed to the opposite effect where people where too concerned about profits to make good content.

[Gemina]

Because George Lucas ran the franchise into the ground with the prequels and then sold it on to a mega-corporation that had already lost any essence of actually wanting to create quality content and was instead focused entirely on maximizing profits while minimizing effort?

You might want to pick a more apropos example next time.

Such as a time when actually throwing money at things was the issue, as opposed to the opposite effect where people where too concerned about profits to make good content.

You might want to readdress this topic when you learn what passion towards one's work entails. What you stated is exactly why just throwing more money and resources at FFXIV won't work, and your arguments are self-deflating. If you look at Yoshi as the George Lucas of FFXIV; if his passion towards it was to wane much like Lucas's did for SW and/or gives it to someone with maximum funds and minimal insight, the very same thing will happen to FFXIV. You can't talk about throwing money at a project in the past tense when it is directly the cause and consequence of people being too concerned with profits to make quality content.

It's a really good thing you're not making the decisions for FFXIV.