Glamours: Re-work the entire system.

[DragonFlyy]

yes this is true as I remember him stating this multiple times throughout the launch of the dresser system but the fact is-is that the glamour dresser system has been out for 4 years.

There is being lazy and then there is just sheer incompetence and greed. which honestly at this I think the only reason why they limit it now is because they are making money from people buying multiple retainers to store gear. I know I have a $25+ extra charge on my monthly subscription from the amount of extra retainers I use.

So you'd be okay with an entire expansion being just a re-write of the whole game engine? Because that is what it would take. It's not laziness or greed. It's time. It took them how long to get from 1.0 to 2.0 and that was using parts of 1.0 that are still in the code today? Imagine how long it would take to change the entire system, with having to re-write the database too, and potentially having a bug that would delete some peoples inventory.

[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.

[Angellos]

They know glamour has issues, and no, they've already stated repeatedly countless times in the past that a WoW style system is simply out of the question due to technical problems with how the game is coded and handles gear appearence. And they simply cannot "rework" the system easily without affecting the game's operation, the only way that could happen would be for the game as a whole to be completley redesigned and coded from the ground up, a "Version 2-3.0" if you will.

As for glamour restrictions, that's a whole different subject and is mostly a design choice. Yoshi has particular ideas how he wants classes and Jobs to look like, so he has stuck to the gear restrictions ever since (and your "BLM wearing plate armour" arguement is somewhat irrelevant anyway as there is already some plate armour glamour choices available for mages like BLM, to say nothing of that originally being something the late Gary Gygax of Dungeons and Dragons fame established - mages can't wear heavy armour that would intefere with their ability to concentrate, healers can't wield bladed weaponry that would draw blood etc, and SE adopted. The very first FF game was virtually a Japanese homage to DnD after all, and FFXI outright stated those restrictions in it's manual, so FFXIV also having them is nothing new.

Now, don't get me wrong, I do support a lessening of generic gear restrictions, with 'Artifact Armour' (AF) and some other specific items remaining class locked, but it's a slippery slope, inevitably someone would then demand those items be lessened too, so... because of this 'all or nothing' attitude, I would rather SE not make any changes.

This is 100% inaccurate. There is no limitation preventing them from changing the system entirely. It would just take work, and it would take time. It's easier to throw on a band-aid. It's not IMPOSSIBLE to change it.

Also I've played D&D since I was 13, I'm now 37. There are very simple, easy ways for a Wizard to gain proficiency in heavy armor. So if it is an homage to D&D? Then surely they know that too.

As for the 'Others will demand artifact gear being unlocked too': Well, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Tough luck. SOME class stuff should remain class specific and I think most of us agree on that.

But no, there is no programming limitation stopping them from changing the system. It'd just be a lot of work. Don't fall for that.

They claimed doing instance housing was impossible due to spaghetti code.

BEHOLD: Island sanctuary. Who actually falls for that excuse?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

This is 100% inaccurate. There is no limitation preventing them from changing the system entirely. It would just take work, and it would take time. It's easier to throw on a band-aid. It's not IMPOSSIBLE to change it.

Also I've played D&D since I was 13, I'm now 37. There are very simple, easy ways for a Wizard to gain proficiency in heavy armor. So if it is an homage to D&D? Then surely they know that too.

As for the 'Others will demand artifact gear being unlocked too': Well, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Tough luck. SOME class stuff should remain class specific and I think most of us agree on that.

But no, there is no programming limitation stopping them from changing the system. It'd just be a lot of work. Don't fall for that.

They claimed doing instance housing was impossible due to spaghetti code.

BEHOLD: Island sanctuary. Who actually falls for that excuse?

Island sanctuary isn't instanced housing. Housing is very different. This is more akin to Doman enclave in terms of the instancing.

[Deveryn]

Island Sanctuary is just a bigger inn, if anything.

[DPZ2]

I'm not buying this even for a second. WoW touted said technical issues for years before finally relenting and giving in. It took them 7 years to add something even resembling a glamour system (transmog/void storage), and 4-5 years later for the actual log (appearance tab). Just because something is hard or even some semblance of a challenge, doesn't mean it's impossible.

Wow was finally able to provide a glamour system (transmog/void storage) because they rewrote the entire back-end of the game. The expansion was called Cataclysm. I don't remember a lot of requests prior to that for the transmog system. I would have remembered something like that.

And SE didn't say it was 'impossible', only that they couldn't do it with their current setup. There's a big difference between "won't do it" and "the cost isn't worth it at this time".

[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.

[DPZ2]

There is being lazy and then there is just sheer incompetence and greed. which honestly at this I think the only reason why they limit it now is because they are making money from people buying multiple retainers to store gear. I know I have a $25+ extra charge on my monthly subscription from the amount of extra retainers I use.

You know nothing about the work schedule, budget, or design teams for this game, yet you have the gall to write "sheer incompetence" and "greed" in a sentence because someone said "no" to your oh, so ever polite request? Pfui.