Am I the only one ho thinks 8.0 should be delayed by like 6months?

[Kirutsuki]

In a span of 30 months, they managed to release 4 Savage tiers and 3 Ultimates, from the start of Stormblood to early Shadowbringers. Now, we wouldn't even get a new expansion from the start of Dawntrail, which means falling behind on many dungeons and trials. Long-term, we'll be behind on Savage tiers, Ultimates, Deep Dungeons, and Field Operations, and it keeps adding up. Everyone loses out on content, from casual to hardcore players. The extra added content isn't worth it.

I firmly believe that content ammount is NOT the issue, incentevising people to do that content is.
There's people who only raid and complain no content despite there being plenty to do.
There's casual players complaining not enough content despite there being plenty to do.

And it all boils down to giving these players reasons to do the content. One of the aspects SE is already going to test is adjustable difficulty for bosses, but
one of the major reasons is also rewarding the player in a meaningful way towards their respective enjoyments of the game.

So if a raider enjoyes rading, but is limited because they are not rewarded enough, maybe giving the raider additional chests that week if they do more causal oriented content.
If let's say a crafter needs a bunch of tomestones, then giving the crafter tomestones from raiding would be a good way to push players to do that content.

Obviously there's no way to know whos crafter or who raider, but in general it boils down to currency ammounts and unlocking additional reward behind certain tasks.
And all of that is relatively easy to implement to the game which would push the players to do more varied content.

To me it is actually harming the game when the devs keep adding NEW and exiting content every patch, because almost none of it will satify players in the end because they last 2weeks at the most and you're left wondering what to do next.
It would be far better for SE to spend time improving the player expeirence withing the game and reward players for doing varied content in the game even after they've gotten everything from them.

Have you done Eureka with all jobs just to give a hard example? Most people have not. How would you push players to do it?
Give the raid oriented player an extra chest from current raid this week if they do 5levels in Eureka.

Even if a player has done 100% of the game, the game should reward for participation in meaningful ways, but instead the game actively limits players at the high-end and it feels like a waste of time to do anything but one highly specific thing in the game.
And when you have those limitations AND the game releases only one raid tier after 6months of waiting, ofcourse people are going to say "lack of content", but it's not actually what's happening.

[Kirutsuki]

The game is in development *way* longer than I think you are thinking.

Yes, but you can look at past expansion timelines and gauge the overall development time to be ~3years, while scripts and such for the story might have been done way before that.

Need to look at SE's perspective here...

As I said I understand SE's point of view from needing to pay bills, that's it. But I wont be kissing their butt if I think that the expansion they release is not worth the money and subscription I pay for it.
At the moment it's barely worth both, it's ok since it's a full game's worth of story. But parts of even that experience are so lack luster that you feel ripped off...

As a relatively casual player, I would definitely say what they release already caters to people like me.

I am also a casual player, but I feel bad for raiders who have to wait for the following patch for their targeted content after launch. This doesn't mean they shouldn't still get a new raid tier the following patch, just that delaying an expansion would allow certain stuff to be at the base expansion.

Also, the simple reality is that no matter how much content is frontloaded into the X.0 release, there will always be people that no-life it, finish everything, and then complain there's nothing to do.

This I agree with, but the issue isn't lack of content, it's rewaring the player from playing more varied content. And there's so many ways the game could do this, but it just refuses to.
Challenge logs for example, why isn't there more interesting daily challenges that give raiders additional rolls on a chest in a raid that week. Or challenges that doubles the tomestone cap for that week?
And none of this is "new content" it's just ways for players to do different kinds of content in the game while allowing them to target their needs in the game for gear or materials.

The issue is that the players who literally have nothing else to look forward to than what the next patch brings them have nothing else they feel the would even want to do, even if it's left in the backlog.
No-one feels like going back and do some ARR specific nonsense because it doesn't translate to anything on the high-end.

[MsMisato]

its the lack of engaging and having repeatable content to keep players coming back to do it. everything once you do it, its done. no point in going back to do it. no rewards for doing, no secret boss, no secret cutscenes, no alteration to the story or anything. it quite literally is a one shot and honestly given to you on a plate the exception being ultimates. Even crafting is a bit of joke now

Second, game play. its pretty bad. its extremely homogenized. class identity has been through the ringer for the most part. Im sorry but even in PvP the jobs have way more class identity then they do in PvE. On top this the challenge isn't there everything is telegraphed so much its a even extremes use to be somewhat hard but not anymore, the difficulty curve went downward after Stormblood and even further downward after Shadowbringers. I am as casual as they come. I use to hate playing tank during 2.0. but honestly it felt good during stormblood. I never had that much fun with playing a tank. Dark was something else as well. But they all play the same. but im ranting sorry.

I still hold a tiny bit of hope, they they will start address jobs in PvE and give them some much needed identity in 8.0. No job should be 1,2,3 and extremely similiar in play style with each other and I hope they address the terms of re-playability because honestly its feeling more single player with co-op play options and a cash shop on top of sub service. But like I said, i still have a little hope.

[seolhyun]

no actually it should be released 6 months earlier in the summer like it used to

[Saraide]

Your link is actually showing "average yearly income of employees", not just developers. Square Enix also runs arcades, publishes manga and handles other merchandising, music and mobile services in addition to digital gaming. Many of those maintain employees who are not paid at developer rates.

Aside from video games, Sony Group also has a lot of high-margin sectors such as toys and electronics, as well as a vast media presence, as does Bandai Namco.

Spin it however you want, SE has a shortage of devs. That's why yoship is constantly talking about how difficult it is to hire. People show up if the pay is right, if it isnt then they will look elsewhere.

[Kirutsuki]

no actually it should be released 6 months earlier in the summer like it used to

Considering the content hasn't changed what you get from expansion to expansion I would agree.
On the flip side I do see alof of improvements in general cutscenes visually and character animations, so they 100% spend more time on detail.
The game also has grown alot since Stormblood, it's grown alot from even Shadowbringers, so when you add content to the game it increases development time pretty linearly.
Even if they leave some of those gameplay systems behind, some of them they keep.

Just a small example, but by adding adventure plates, they now have to allocate some resource into someone making all the adventure plates.
Dnd that adds time in development, minor as it might seem.

Add to this the financial issues Japan has with it's currency and square's problems with hiring new people to develope the game, well it's no wonder that it takes longer and longer to complete an expansion.

I would love if reality was different and we could just throw money at it and it magically got released earlier.
But realistically it makes more sense to allow the devs to make an expansion they want to make and release it when it's ready, not when they have to.

[Kirutsuki]

Spin it however you want, SE has a shortage of devs. That's why yoship is constantly talking about how difficult it is to hire. People show up if the pay is right, if it isnt then they will look elsewhere.

Something to be said also about hiring someone who's there just for the money, don't care two shits about the game and creates slop all year around, gets fired and it's a loss on everyone. SE especially for wasting time with someone like that. ������
I would imagine atleast that SE would like to hire someone who has genuine interest in improving the games they make and being part of the team.

[Xactly]

While I know there's pvp ranked seasons which has a shorter period than a series. With 6.5 and 6.55 back then I was a bit surprised we didn't get two series for the 8 months wait.

[brinn12]

snip

The content they're producing right now isn't enough to keep up with the current patch cadence, both in terms of quality and quantity. If it were, we wouldn't be seeing so many players leaving this expansion. Rewards are supposed to complement content, not mask a low-quality product. The two go hand in hand. The main issue is that most casual content, by design, can be finished within a single day, and repeating it quickly becomes tiring for the majority of the playerbase. It's the same bosses, same trash packs, no friction. CBU3 can't be short-minded, and really needs to improve both the content itself and the rewards that go with it.

[Kirutsuki]

The content they're producing right now isn't enough to keep up with the current patch cadence, both in terms of quality and quantity. If it were, we wouldn't be seeing so many players leaving this expansion. Rewards are supposed to complement content, not mask a low-quality product. The two go hand in hand. The main issue is that most casual content, by design, can be finished within a single day, and repeating it quickly becomes tiring for the majority of the playerbase. It's the same bosses, same trash packs, no friction. CBU3 can't be short-minded, and really needs to improve both the content itself and the rewards that go with it.

Yes, that would be ideal, but my issue is that producing such content would take alot of time from the devs and we already have an issue of waiting for that content.
So rather than try and hope every-single-time when they introduce something new that it will please all players, why not add smaller scale reward implementations to the game that
don't take a so long to design and playtest and just add rewards for player activity regardless of level. why is it for example that special treasure maps are only obtainable reasonably from Moogle events etc?
While it might not be the perfect solution, it would be a solution that's easier to implement and add player retention in some form.