Interview - Cost, Hiring, FT, Hardcore and Casual, Ultimate, Cosmic, Future of FFXIV

[Jeeqbit]

I'm curious about what exactly he meant with the Forked Tower changes as well, since they weren't announced previously. But we're going to find out within days when we read the patch notes anyway.

[Exmo]

Thanks for the summary OP.

• Hiring more people doesn't mean more output. He says leaders (ie. project managers) are important, and good leaders are very hard to come by.
• There are hundreds of developers working on FFXIV.
• They have assigned personnel to FFXIV as a priority.
• They are planning to significantly increase the number of QA teams but again lack of leaders is a concern.
• They have been trying to increase the number of developers over the last 10 years but the absolute number of Japanese developers is insufficient.
• Now, a lot of people who grew up playing FFXIV are applying to the development team, so a lot of developers now grew up playing FFXIV.
• However, few people have experience developing for a large-scale MMORPG, so it's still challenging.
• They are not giving up hiring. But due to the challenges with finding people with the necessary skills and experience, the growth of FFXIV has been competing with the rate at which they can hire people with the right skills and experience.
• He says overseas developers are interested, but it's challenging because they need to be able to speak Japanese, which obviously most of them can't.

Regarding the bolded parts, it's hardly a silver bullet but it seems an obvious sitting would be to relax the requirement that developers just speak Japanese. Instead they should employ teams of overseas developers each with a dedicated translator. For example, one translator per 10 developers, which might be one on a team, or one shared between two teams. Japanese dev companies love to silo teams so I'm sure the existing work processes would mitigate what would be greater problems for more agile teams. This would allow the company to hire project managers and developers outside of their already-dredged job market.

Not an instant fix, either. You might hire one team and onboard and train for 3 months in collaboration with a set of 2 or 3 mentors, then hire a new team and move the mentors across so they spend diminishing time with older new teams. It's a slow and gradual process, maybe hiring 40 devs in 12 months, but it's better than staring in desperation at a dwindling workforce.

[Kaurhz]

"At any cost"

Doesn't really substantiate much when the precursor to this entire expansion was effectively "Spare no expense".

This just feels like a whole lot of word salad.... Saying a lot, whilst simultaneously saying... Nothing at all.

[Themarvin]

Your team does not have enough people to develop the game and you and your team, is working to hard on something you can't do proper in time, due to that there is too many corners you can't polish.

Also I think the Team has serious misunderstood the use of old content, instead of making new content with the old content... you should revive much more of the old content and make it into level 100 content.

YOU WILL only spend this much time leveling up to the max level and then find out that most of the content is A Real Reborn to Endwalker and nothing proper done for level 100 or max level content.

Make old content, from treasure hunts in Heavens Ward, all hunts that is B, A and S rank level 100 upscaled to current max ilevel... make all raids except for maybe ARR and HW into level 100 raids... make the game be rounded around rich endgame, where as you having loads of content to do and even more important, let the iLevel of content follow, so you can't just run over it either.

And more to it.... hire more people to do this stuff, as you clearly can't do whatever you are doing now alone with current team, due to, too much that is needed to be done.

[AmiableApkallu]

It doesn’t sound like “forked normal” of course but forked mechanics are so intertwined with their personal responsibility design that making it “carryable tour duty” like BA would basically involve a ground up rework anyway which apparently they don’t have the time or money for

Remove the raise restriction and eviction upon full wipe, redesign the relatively few(?) mechanics that require baiting, rescale DPS checks to be 24 players + (0.5 to 0.75) * number of players past 24… and I think you'd get something that six knowledgable, coordinated light parties could help drag others through — or at least prog more successfully and with more fun than, "lol, snowballs/fireballs, gg tyfp."

(I haven't done BA, so I don't have a feel for what "carryable" means there.)

[Bryson]

Remove the raise restriction and eviction upon full wipe, redesign the relatively few(?) mechanics that require baiting, rescale DPS checks to be 24 players + (0.5 to 0.75) * number of players past 24… and I think you'd get something that six knowledgable, coordinated light parties could help drag others through — or at least prog more successfully and with more fun than, "lol, snowballs/fireballs, gg tyfp."

(I haven't done BA, so I don't have a feel for what "carryable" means there.)

Jesus at this point, why not just ask for a FT Trust Duty lol
Unironically asking for punishment to effectively, not even be possible in a raid is an interesting take to say the least.

[AmiableApkallu]

Unironically asking for punishment to effectively, not even be possible in a raid is an interesting take to say the least.

I take it you've never done anything via Duty Finder, or CLL, or DRN, or Dalriada? Because, lol, punishment "not even be[ing] possible in a raid" already has a long history in this game.

[Seraph_Variel]

(I haven't done BA, so I don't have a feel for what "carryable" means there.)

BA was "Carryable" in the fact that one shot caller (plus a second for first boss/es) could call everything, and you just needed to follow directions. If you didn't, and you died, there were enough people stacked with remembrance trays with sacrifice to raise anyone who had died, which usually only happened in small amounts in Raiden, or Absolute virtue (in ShB, BA has been steamrolled since EW, at least in the discord I run with). Ozma you just had to follow directions but if you died there was a very high chance that if your reraise didn't go off, you were going to be booted out of instance via black hole.

Delubrum Normal, CLL and Dalriada *sound like* they'd be good comparisons, but mechanically speaking they don't really compare with the type of content Forked is trying to be. I do disagree with the removal of the raise restriction and eviction, as those are some of the core systems in BA and Delubrum Savage, which is what forked tower is TRYING to be.

The problem is entirely in the entry system setting up expectations that it was going to be a CLL/Dalriada equivalent, rather than a BA/Delubrum Savage equivalent. If it WERE a CLL/Dalriada equivalent, i'd agree with you. But as it stands, it's a BA/Delubrum Savage equivalent and entirely optional, and can be ignored if you're just after the story, unlike what seems to be the plan with Forked tower magic.

Does it make Forked Blood's design good? No. Is it as close to the truth as we're probably going to get? From my perspective, Yeah.

[Bryson]

I take it you've never done anything via Duty Finder, or CLL, or DRN, or Dalriada? Because, lol, punishment "not even be[ing] possible in a raid" already has a long history in this game.

what point do you think you're making here?

just because x happened in the past, doesn't mean that has to be the normative standard for everything to be measured against moving forward?

cleared ft, recleared ft. It wasn't difficult.. idk what to tell you.

[ShadowyZero]

by appealing to everyone he is going to appeal to no one lol its literally impossible to please everyone he's going to need an entirely seperate development team if thats his aim an with staff confident in their ability to deliver mmo content. otherwise thinks will just continue to tank and flop.