Letter from the Producer LXII

[Vahlnir]

Well... how to say. If we open "armor" section in official database, it has 8326 items. Plus 2594 in accessories. Plus 3072 in arms. Plus 650 in tools. Yes, you don't need to adjust all of them, but you will need to check that there are no any glitches anyway, so it's a lot of work.

They can say "it's a lot of work!" all they want but I'm increasingly less sympathetic to their plight as time goes on. The game is seriously understaffed. They can only use this excuse so many times before people start to ask "where is our money going?!"

I'm not saying that the devs don't work hard. They obviously do and I respect them for it. One could argue that they work too hard sometimes. But SE as a company needs to get its head out of the sand and staff this game properly imo. It's not like profits are an issue. This is probably one of their most profitable titles.

[Tharne]

They can only use this excuse so many times before people start to ask "where is our money going?!"

Kingdom Hearts 3, Final Fantasy VII Remake, probably on the Next Game that Yoshida is working on too.

[Kaedan]

I already said that there would be complaint, but no where near as much

And you'd be dead wrong, is what I'm explaining to you.

[Eloah]

The point is you're trying to explain someone's "I didn't read!" post with a terrible, nonsensical example.

Guess I'll answer that guy's post to show how silly it is ..





Ya see, there's a fundamental problem here. You seem to think "likes" mean something they don't.

let me get this straight, you refuse to accept Yoshi's study on the demand for a beast race in favor of pointing to a 6 year old outdated poll from back when this game was tiny and trying to recover from failure ... right?

BUT you think that the addition of Hrothgar makes people "want" a female beast race because of some "likes", because you think these people intend on playing it when all it takes is some lite reading on either of those threads to realize that people don't actually want to convert to them?

And you also seem confused on how "likes" for Viera can be so out numbered by "likes" for Viera male ...

On a side note this is why I like Reddit.

My guess is you don't play Bard. But you tried, that's all that counts.

Also upon paying a bit more attention to your picture I notice you are a Femroe. Now while it has nothing major to do with the current issue, remember that at one point you were this issue.

[Halivel]

They can say "it's a lot of work!" all they want but I'm increasingly less sympathetic to their plight as time goes on. The game is seriously understaffed. They can only use this excuse so many times before people start to ask "where is our money going?!"

That's another story. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My comment was more for those who thinks that "10.000 armor" thing is an exaggeration, while it's not.

[Jollyy5]

...

I too often suspect that too much money from FFXIV goes to other projects, which is... not great.

But I'm pretty sure that most of the people working on FFXIV have no say in it, they have to work with what they have (manpower, budget, etc...) until someone from higher up decides to change that.

So when developers go out of their way to do something extra outside of work hours, they deserve all the praise they can get.

[PangTong]

Did you expect that people would be satisfied and not ask for the other race if just one was released? "WE DIDN'T NEED MORE CUTE RACES, WE NEEDED BEASTS! SE WASTED THE CHANCE TO MAKE THIS GAME DIFFERENT!11!", or "I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY AREN'T GIVING US VIERA BECAUSE OF A BEAST RACE THAT NO ONE WILL PLAY!!111one!!"

No doubt that would have happened, but I still think it would have been easier to swallow than this compromise decision where neither side is really satisfied. For the record I believe that if it was coming down to Viera and Hrothgar, Viera was the obvious choice without a doubt. You only need to take a cursory look at player feedback and general character statistics to see that it's what most people would have preferred. Indeed, the thought of genderlocked races didn't even seem to cross anyone's mind until Paris fanfest where male Viera were conspicuously absent and the topic was so bluntly avoided. I understand their reasoning of wanting to offer a wider variety, but from the perspective of what the most players wanted, the choice should have been a foregone conclusion which is why I can't accept their decision.

But that aside, whether they had gone with only-Hrothgar or only-Viera, either of those decisions would have resulted in less backlash than this genderlocked solution simply because you're not presenting people with this situation where they only get half of what they want; it's all-or-nothing. Now that people have been made aware of the obvious "missing halves", the demand for those halves will intensify more than if they just had gotten one whole. It is essentially creating a problem where there would otherwise have been none.

To present it in another context, let's say they decided to add some other feature, like increasing customization options for existing races. But because of workflow constraints and creative reasons, they decide to split it up. Male characters get more face options, female characters get more hairstyles. Do you see the issue this causes? Even though there is currently no real expectation that customization options will be increased at all, now people will simply wonder why both genders didn't get both sets of options, and openly ask to get the other options for their preferred gender. If they had simply chosen one or the other, more hairstyles for all, or more face options for all, few people would be thinking "why didn't they add [the other choice] instead", because the expectation didn't exist. They would simply be pleased by the new options. The way they chose to implement the feature created the sense of the feature being incomplete, which is naturally going to ruffle people's feathers.

Likewise, people couldn't have expected Hrothgar, male or female, because they literally didn't exist to us until the moment they were revealed as a new playable race. But now that they do exist, the demand for their missing gender also exists, and it's never going away until the incomplete feature is completed.

[Physic]

They can say "it's a lot of work!" all they want but I'm increasingly less sympathetic to their plight as time goes on. The game is seriously understaffed. They can only use this excuse so many times before people start to ask "where is our money going?!"

I'm not saying that the devs don't work hard. They obviously do and I respect them for it. One could argue that they work too hard sometimes. But SE as a company needs to get its head out of the sand and staff this game properly imo. It's not like profits are an issue. This is probably one of their most profitable titles.

its not worth it because its not worth it. Every decision they make has a value and a cost, and a benefit, and must be compared to other costs.

Every race is actually less valuable the more races you have, because most players only use one or two races. There is a 1/16 chance that new race is going to be the most appealing race. Then, every race also makes every piece of gear more expensive to make, forever, and increases the costs of every skill with a unique animation/emote, cutscene etc (due to QA and development). And the upfront cost per race increases the more emotes/unique skills/armor etc the game has.

Then, you compare that cost, and benefit, with all the other things you could do with the same money/manhours and sometimes it no longer is worth it.

just because i make 1 million dollars off a tv show, doesnt mean its a good idea to spend 50% of my budget on one actor.

basically, at this point new races are no longer worth how much they cost, that doesnt change no matter how much money i make. Are you going to spend 2x the street value of a car, just because you have a good job when you already have 14 cars? Is that logical?

[Alucard135]

Lol then the <3 who spammed beast race are also a huge number lol

Here's the problem with the number of likes. That number had a sharp increase to 1400 in 4 days. But that number only increased to 1666 in a span of 7 weeks after that initial increase. Where do you think the initial influx came from? It was from those that were watching the live letter and those that were told about the thread after. So the main question becomes "how many actually saw that announcement, heard about the thread and didn't bother to like it?". That's the actual pool size that the number of likes must be compared to. And that number exceeded 48K (that's only if you count the EN and JP twitch views for Tokyo live letter, let alone the number of players that didn't watch it).

If you were now to calculate the percentage of players that posted their like on the mega thread, that's 3.4% only. The reason many thought that 1666 likes is a big number to show profitable demand for SE was because they thought the number of likes was huge but they fell to what's called "non response bias" in their calculations.

And then we have the google poll that was done. That also falls into the same issue of "those that didn't participate in it, already should be counted as neutral". Hence the "non response bias" again. And it also has the issue that some can vote multiple times and even non players can vote. So that skewed the results drastically.

[Vahlnir]

I too often suspect that too much money from FFXIV goes to other projects, which is... not great.

But I'm pretty sure that most of the people working on FFXIV have no say in it, they have to work with what they have (manpower, budget, etc...) until someone from higher up decides to change that.

So when developers go out of their way to do something extra outside of work hours, they deserve all the praise they can get.

Pretty much been my suspicion as well. And yeah, I may not agree with some of the decisions being made regarding this game, but I can't say that the devs don't work their butts off, because they really do. I definitely wouldn't question their dedication. I just wish the game would be so much more than it is. It's not enough to make me quit (heck, I'll finally be getting my gunblade soon!) and I do have fun regardless. I just want the game to be better. Being silent does nothing. Being vocal might not either but you never know.