Food For Thought About This Game's Current Development...

[MizoreShirayuki]

Greetings,

Thought I would make a post regarding recent discussions with my fellow adventurers :

1) Square Enix is First & Foremost a Company Concerned About Making a Profit.

Having said this, wouldn't it have made logical sense to have hired temporary extra developmental hands & focus everyone on key development issues of dire need first? Going from one area to the next.

Instead they have chosen to break the already small development team (Going by the picture posted in December) into even smaller groups and work on aspects in parallel of one another.

I'm sorry but from a business aspect of things, doesn't a company with dire problems want to fix them ASAP rather than drag out the problems for what seems as long as possible in order to save money?

If Square Enix had to to be ones to fix the PSN when it got hacked, it would have been down for at least a year.

2) "Please be patient with us a little while longer" Just Doesn't Cut It For Me.

Having to wait 4 months (discounting 2 months for the new dev team to get settled in and another month for the earthquake.) for a company that's already notoriously slow for fixing things, for what may or may not be decent content at all, is long enough for most people.

You can post all the Walls-O-Text you want about changes and everything, but until myself & the rest of the world see actual changes, it's nothing more than smoke & mirrors.

This isn't your first MMO.. Quit acting like it is..

3) Drop the Cream Puff Content

No one currently playing FF14 is a casual gamer. That being said please make any and all monsters in upcoming content about 1000x harder than the Care Bear Troupe of mobs that you dared to label as Notorious Monsters.

Take a page from FF11 and inject this game with some seriously hard content.. It desperately needs it!

Having a hard fight or area that takes weeks (not hours) to perfect a strategy for and successfully beat is what Final Fantasy should be known for, not mashing enter 1000x while watching Netflix.

Difficult content keeps people coming back because it provides a challenge that's not easily beat in 1-2 hrs. What's the point of adding in monthly patches after the game comes off FTP if everyone playing beats all of the new content in a matter of hours? INJECT SOME STEROIDS INTO THAT CONTENT!

I want to see this game flourish... and see more than 4 people in Limsa Lominsa or Gridinia at any given time.

Get on the ball SE.. because your running out of time!

[Joeking]

1) Wada is the cause, Enix isn't though there still providing good games, and probably won't venture into the MMO scene.

2) Technically you can say it is there first MMO that tries to cater to more than FFXI crowd, though it ended up catering to no one.

3) I would say difficulty isn't an issue but that the quality of the content itself.

[Kilta_Firelotus]

they delayed several games just to bring in more teams to iron out the stuff
to bad stuff takes time to code.
casual =/= easy get off you high horse

ffxi wasn't hard just time consuming.

[Cairdeas]

Inpatient *** being Inpatient.

[Clevene]

no need to put in hard stuff if in a few months they raise the cap, then you will say these mobs are too easy and the same fight happens again. we are not even close to endgame stop asking for it. and with xi mobs everyone would just look up a strat on wiki and set it up, pretty rare to find a group that would just try to 'figure it out.'

[MeowyWowie]

no need to put in hard stuff if in a few months they raise the cap, then you will say these mobs are too easy and the same fight happens again. we are not even close to endgame stop asking for it. and with xi mobs everyone would just look up a strat on wiki and set it up, pretty rare to find a group that would just try to 'figure it out.'

I don't think the OP is asking for endgame. If you haven't noticed, FFXIV is arguably the easiest MMO on the market today. S/he was just saying make it harder.

Also, saying that people will only look up wiki for strategies is irrelevant. Somebody has to come up with the strategy to be able to post it online. FFXI had some pretty tough fights before any strategies were made public and when the content was still fresh. Your comment can be applied to any game out there, not just FFXI. Once there's a working strategy content is no longer difficult. Coming up with a strategy is what makes things difficult and, well let's face it, fun.

[Starlord]

Square Enix is First & Foremost a Company Concerned About Making a Profit.

If they did then why are we currently still on free trail after 8 months? I say making a profit here is an understatement

[Teknoman]

Well along with the battle system implementation, alot of class/skill changes, restrictions, enemy stat adjustment, placement, and equipment changes/balancing are supposed to occur to make things more challenging/match with the new system...so everyone is looking toward 1.18.

[Betelgeuzah]

There's amazingly many things wrong about everything in the OP but I'll just mention few:

Having said this, wouldn't it have made logical sense to have hired temporary extra developmental hands & focus everyone on key development issues of dire need first? Going from one area to the next.

What you can't seem to understand is that you don't simply throw more bodies at the problem for it to go away any faster. You don't simply bring people unfamiliar with the project to work on it. You need the people that were there from the start. Designers are in a different position, yet you don't need that many of them- more would simply make the decision process even slower. You don't understand game development.

Instead they have chosen to break the already small development team (Going by the picture posted in December) i

The team is four times the size in that picture. Yoshida even mentioned this in the exact same letter. Their team is huge, it could be larger but at this point it would only hurt them to add more unfamiliar programmers.

They can't fix problems one at time because everything relates to everything. There has to be a larger picture: combat (and everything it involves), class system, UI, engine, servers, content- everything has to work together flawlesly. They must be developed in a parallel because building new features off concepts alone does not work. Concepts never meet reality. In the end you have an UI, a combat system, a class system and content that are separated from each other and make no sense.

Having to wait 4 months (discounting 2 months for the new dev team to get settled in and another month for the earthquake.) for a company that's already notoriously slow for fixing things, for what may or may not be decent content at all, is long enough for most people

What you don't seem to grasp is that they aren't fixing this game with your terms. They are doing what makes it fastest for them to update the game in long-term, and that involves not splitting their workload to smaller pieces so that it can be implemented to live servers every month which would slow them down considerably. You lack the understanding needed to realize that this project is larger than anything any developer has ever made post-release, and as thus takes longer to develop.

[Peregrine]

You lack the understanding needed to realize that this project is larger than anything any developer has ever made post-release, and as thus takes longer to develop.

Hahaha oh lordy I see a few in the crowd still fall for it.