Ishgardian Restoration world visit.

[Barraind]

He isnt wrong about low pop servers.

The problem is NA and EU dont have them except the two new ones, and those are already roughly the size of the smallest 5 JP servers.

JP has a handful of 37-40k pop servers, because they have a smaller population and 8 more servers to have them on.

The smallest non-new NA/EU server is DOUBLE the size of the smaller JP servers.

It's the same reason why housing is wonky here. It's the same reason why EVERYTHING designed to work with the size of JP servers ends up feeling terrible elsewhere.

[Patriclis]

He isnt wrong about low pop servers.

The problem is NA and EU dont have them except the two new ones, and those are already roughly the size of the smallest 5 JP servers.

JP has a handful of 37-40k pop servers, because they have a smaller population and 8 more servers to have them on.

The smallest non-new NA server is DOUBLE the size of the smaller JP servers.

It's the same reason why housing is wonky here. It's the same reason why EVERYTHING designed to work with the size of JP servers ends up feeling terrible elsewhere.

Yeah exactly what I keep telling people. They design for the JP audience almost exclusively, despite the fact that they have more NA/EU players. Wish they would cater to their *actual* market instead of just catering to themselves.
But then again I remember that BLM, the job that Yoshi plays, has been top-DPS for 4 years straight and has never required a major balance change while all other classes are constantly being reworked. When I remember that, I lose all hope that Yoshi and his team will ever develop anything not solely for themselves.

[Anselmet]

Yeah exactly what I keep telling people. They design for the JP audience almost exclusively, despite the fact that they have more NA/EU players. Wish they would cater to their *actual* market instead of just catering to themselves.
But then again I remember that BLM, the job that Yoshi plays, has been top-DPS for 4 years straight and has never required a major balance change while all other classes are constantly being reworked. When I remember that, I lose all hope that Yoshi and his team will ever develop anything not solely for themselves.

I'm just gonna say that this is not just a Yoshi-P problem but Square Enix problem as a whole. They have a long history of catering to their Japanese market and not internationally. It has gotten better over the years and Yoshi-P is certainly one of the more progressive- if not the most progressive of the Square Enix board of directors. But I feel your frustrations. It's not like they had all of Stormblood to realize that really desireable instances or fates will create server congestion and therefor lockouts. They did a great job preventing Raubahn Extreme or the Ixion fate debacles with the launch of Shb. But how could they just drop the ball this hard? They know that Ishgard is near and dear to the majority of the player base. So much so that they even pulled the Haurchefant sad moment in one of the first cutscenes in Shb. Which leads me to how could they not predict that we would flood Ishgard Firmament? Why did they not prepare like Shb launch and at least give us instances!!!

[MrKusakabe]

[...]
But then again I remember that BLM, the job that Yoshi plays, has been top-DPS for 4 years straight and has never required a major balance change while all other classes are constantly being reworked.[...]

While I like your healthy scepticism and ability to see trough the cozy fluff of a game developer's sweet talk and explanations (which should be a bare mininum towards his paying customers) you also must remember that Black Mage was always the "We blow up the whole screen and everything dies" profession since decades, and I am glad Square Enix sticks roughly to their design ideas like these. I don't think it has anything to do with the current problems. I am more afraid of the current changes to make everything the same..