Glamours: Re-work the entire system.

[RecoveryPotion]

The actual question people should be discussing: what content would you be willing to jettison from 7.0 or 8.0 for a WoW-style transmog system?

YoshiP has said that, given how FF14 is coded, completely replacing the glamour dresser would be prohibitively expensive in terms of development time and resources. So, a serious discussion would actually address the question of what you'd be willing to pay in terms of development resources. Would you trade a dungeon? An alliance raid? A savage raid tier? Graphical update? Network updates?

Of course, I don't know what the exact tradeoffs would have to be—those were just examples. Pretending like there are no tradeoffs is a nonsense discussion.

"Do you want this Bentley?" is the forum question.
"Do you want this Bentley for $200,000?" is the actual question.

I just don't understand how they have such a huge player base, charge 12.99-20.99 (or more depending on how many retainers you own) and still do not have enough people working for them to work on and improve all parts of FFXIV without sacrificing content :/

[Silverbane]

I just don't understand how they ... still do not have enough people working for them to work on and improve all parts of FFXIV without sacrificing content :/

Have you read the classic "The Mythical Man-Month" -- just for starters?

Even on the relatively modest-sized SW dev teams (compared to FFXIV's dev team) I've been in, adding more people invariably decreased per-person productivity, because of intra-team communication issues that inevitably arise.

Add to that how difficult it is to hire competent coders these days, and how a bad coder can actually make a substantial negative contribution (because other people have to wait for them to get their part done and then hunt down the bugs they introduce), and it is clear that growing the dev team may not be a practical option. And then there's the problem of office drama -- the more people in the office, the more likely it is the drama llama will pay a visit and screw things up.

So in my professional experience (as someone who has been in and managed SW dev teams), with the exception of government contracts where creating more jobs in someone's district is the real goal, a SW dev team should be as small as can get the job done on time without burning out. And growing the team because of feature creep create a substantial risk of project suicide.

[Deveryn]

I just don't understand how they have such a huge player base, charge 12.99-20.99 (or more depending on how many retainers you own) and still do not have enough people working for them to work on and improve all parts of FFXIV without sacrificing content :/

There's quite a bit that goes into making and maintaining an MMO. It's not just a handful of staff and a few computers. You have several pieces of real estate around the world with people ready to respond to any issues that come up. That 15/month gets eaten up quickly when the monthly cost of operations gets into the hundreds of thousands. There are plenty of answers to be found outside the forums that get into the real details.

Going back and revising something even the slightest bit will have extra costs. This is why they're not doing maintenance every week or at the slightest sign of a bug. It costs too much time and money to deal with that much downtime.

It's clear they're doing better and are able to work on more these days. It's clear they've already started bringing more people on to work on content because while we continue to get the usual updates, we're also seeing updates to the older dungeons. They have a build in place where they're testing out the higher quality graphics for that major update.

Working on a new glamour system would likely be a more delicate operation.. one we likely won't hear about until they actually have something that doesn't wreck the game or everyone's existing storage. That's probably the most troublesome part. There could be a solution, but it might require a fresh start on storage. Housing has a similar problem. They could put a new system in place, but what would happen with all the existing housing?

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

I just don't understand how they have such a huge player base, charge 12.99-20.99 (or more depending on how many retainers you own) and still do not have enough people working for them to work on and improve all parts of FFXIV without sacrificing content :/

1) Silverbane does a great writeup on why larger dev teams != faster or better dev environments a few posts above mine, so I won't re-hash these points. Adding more manpower is not always the solution in the software industry.

2) Even if they wanted to add more devs, they have extremely strict hiring criteria. From their latest job posting:
-Must be able to speak & write in fluent Japanese
-Must be able to move to Tokyo

These two points alone crush 99% of their potential hiring pool, for good reason. Bringing on more developers who can't even read & communicate with the rest of the dev team would just make workflow 100x slower. All the money in the world means nothing, if no one can fit your criteria.

3) It's simple: time. They work on a tight 4-month patch cycle, where Yoshi-P has mentioned they often are working until basically the final days before a patch goes live doing QA, bug fixing, fine-tuning, etc on all the battle content they release each patch. Simply put, the developers don't have time to entertain overhauls to systems, unless it is a very long term project.

So when you have 4 months of precious time and want to implement an overhaul to the glamour system, something that would likely require a very large re-write to the fundamental item structs of the game and immense amounts of QA to make sure the new system doesn't break any item, any other system, etc from over 4 expansions worth of content, what is the playerbase as a whole, willing to sacrifice for an expansion to get it done? I'm going to give you the short answer here: nothing, since everyone enjoys different things and there will be backlash no matter what.

So Square instead opts to keep the current technical debt and occasionally dole out more dresser space when they can. This is personal opinion, but I also think they choose this path since its extremely likely only a small % are actually utilizing the full glamour dresser space, but only the statistics Square has on their servers will tell the true tale on that front. Not to mention, it's also extremely likely that if I were to peer into anyone's glamour dresser, I could likely find at least 100 items that are super easy to re-farm to toss out, and Square likely knows this and wants people to be pickier about what they choose to put into it.

It's a simple reality - the software industry isn't a place where money or manpower can fix your troubles if technical debt rears its ugly head. Why do you think delays happen, or when a dev is interviewed about why their game fails, they almost always say 'we needed more time but the publisher wanted it out the door?' Time is the great resource of the software industry, far more precious than money or manpower. And FF14 simply doesn't have any time with their tight 4-month patch cycles.

[Equitable_Remedy]

I just don't understand

I agree that you don't understand. That's ok—neither of us are MMO developers.

However, YoshiP is an MMO developer, and he has said several times that the developer time and resource requirements are prohibitive. That being the case, there is at best a trade-off between replacing the glamour dresser and other things they could be doing (like content, backend improvements, etc.).

Pretending that there isn't such a trade-off leads to vapid discussion.

[Darthgummibear]

I agree that you don't understand. That's ok—neither of us are MMO developers.

However, YoshiP is an MMO developer, and he has said several times that the developer time and resource requirements are prohibitive. That being the case, there is at best a trade-off between replacing the glamour dresser and other things they could be doing (like content, backend improvements, etc.).

Pretending that there isn't such a trade-off leads to vapid discussion.

Ok fine then remove glamour restrictions for which we already know there isn't any legitimate reason. There is absolutely no excuse for them to continue to release gear with these limitations.

[Bobby66]

Ok fine then remove glamour restrictions for which we already know there isn't any legitimate reason. There is absolutely no excuse for them to continue to release gear with these limitations.

I mean to you no valid excuse may be present, but to those in power clearly have a reason. While an old interviewing Yoshi - P has stated they are in favor of clear role differences between attire. Sure it may not be overly constant I agree with that but in truth they have the final say.

I have dabbled in client side modifications for friends regarding hats and stuff while not overly complex which does lead me to think the problem lays with how the data is stored on the server which is not simple fix.

[Darthgummibear]

I mean to you no valid excuse may be present, but to those in power clearly have a reason. While an old interviewing Yoshi - P has stated they are in favor of clear role differences between attire. Sure it may not be overly constant I agree with that but in truth they have the final say.

I have dabbled in client side modifications for friends regarding hats and stuff while not overly complex which does lead me to think the problem lays with how the data is stored on the server which is not simple fix.

There does seem to be a fair amount of issues relating to data storage as a holdover from the original game development. It's why we have things like "mobile data" being such a problem for what we can do and where. If data limitations were the reason that something as simple as who can glamour a piece of gear is so problematic, than they have far bigger problems than glamour with the game's overall structure.

[Bobby66]

There does seem to be a fair amount of issues relating to data storage as a holdover from the original game development. It's why we have things like "mobile data" being such a problem for what we can do and where. If data limitations were the reason that something as simple as who can glamour a piece of gear is so problematic, than they have far bigger problems than glamour with the game's overall structure.

I agree they have to handle their technical debt sooner rather than later.

[Gemina]

Ok fine then remove glamour restrictions for which we already know there isn't any legitimate reason. There is absolutely no excuse for them to continue to release gear with these limitations.

The legitimate reasons have been pointed out to you multiple times, in multiple threads. Quoting yourself on your stance with the matter and making that your sig also is indicative that no valid reason, or truth will penetrate that noggin of yours, so there is no point trying to force a square peg, yeah? Instead, I will say that the devs don't need a reason at all. They have the innate, and inherent right to set restrictions on gear as the see fit. Your feelings have no bearing on their decision making process whatsoever.