Are Ultimates a major contributor to Job Design issues?

[Valence]

From their perspective, when they tried making non-raid content, they got attacked for it (Island Sanctuary etc), and concluded that they can't win whatever they do.

Not gonna lie, they have such a weird way to tease and speak about things they intend to do in liveletters, and when you get the final product in the next patch, it's nothing like what you imagined at all. Who would have thought we'd have to make weekly excel spreadsheets to keep our factories pumping in order to satisfy the archipelago stockmarket? Can anybody tell me with a serious face that they actually expected this out of it?

[Kisshu]

To be fair, they did say once that people need to reduce their expectations for Island Sanctuary. Though, they still refused to give us any info, so it wasn't clear how low we were supposed to go.

I recall they gave a few hints during the second fanfest leading up to EW, showing the artwork for IS and a few lines. Then it was more or less radio silence on it all the way till 6.1 live letter or such where they gave a picture of the island to show the scale. Even then during the 6.2 live letter we didn't really get any indication what the end product of each patch would end up with (Excel sheets stock market).

By not saying much, and only downplaying expectations in interviews, it created a foundation for players' expectations to grow, imagining Animal Crossing style with lots of activity. It was something like 8-12 months from initial reveal till we started getting actual information on it.

I would really like to know who the play-testers were for IS and what they reported to the developers.

[Jeeqbit]

Not gonna lie, they have such a weird way to tease and speak about things they intend to do in liveletters, and when you get the final product in the next patch, it's nothing like what you imagined at all. Who would have thought we'd have to make weekly excel spreadsheets to keep our factories pumping in order to satisfy the archipelago stockmarket? Can anybody tell me with a serious face that they actually expected this out of it?

What I expected was what they originally said:

• A place to let your minions and/or mounts roam around (this turned out to be true).
• An island away from every other player (this also turned out to be true).
• Although they were unclear about everything else, there was a lot of speculation that it was intended to be a sort of life simulator. However, the implementation was thoroughly boring, probably because it's a tab-target MMO but I don't know.
• There was speculation we would be able to build things which seemed pretty certain considering an island is otherwise empty, which turned out to be true. However, as yet, there is no actual housing there.
• Given it was taking the Ishgard Restoration/Field Op slots, it seemed there would have to be some sort of progression system like those had, which explains why we got the ranks and rewards.

I think the reason it got managed by Mammets is because they quickly discovered that it risked becoming a grindy chore like MMORPGs used to be. In fact, on release day some people actually got to max rank by click gathering instead of relying on things like workshop EXP.

So the potential for it to be very grindy was there and they obviously nerfed that a lot by giving giant EXP awards from crafting, building and daily workshops.

Managing it with Mammets was obviously to consider players with only 10 minutes to play per week. I think the text that shows when you unlock them almost completely admits that. Knowing how concerned they are that everything works for extremely casual players, it was predictable it would be finished "quickly".

I mean, did it surprise me that even Yoshi-P got through the majority of ranks within the first livestream he did of it? Literally half finishing the content in under 2 hours? No, that didn't surprise me tbh.

The play testers are the devs themselves. That's how they test their flagship pve duties, why would it be different for side content like this? It's literally a self congratulating loop with no external feedback.

They have a QA team of over 100 people and also get staff that don't play the game to test it out (such as Marketing and PR teams from other departments). Their goal is literally that people who have never played the game before can get through it.