Chocobo during Queue - "Difficult"

[Hulan]

Except that programming does allow for going back and tweaking previous work to facilitate the new concepts. While not impossible, it's a little harder to do changes like that for physical items without making previous work wasted. That said, I'm going to repeat this: I doubt this is a problem the programmers caused, the issue was created during the design phase for chocobo companions and should have been considered/planned for then.

It was a metaphor. One that I thought at the time was quite clever, but clearly not. I am - in fact - a professional developer (though I will grant those who claim as much are a dime a dozen around here); and while I do not claim to be perfect at my job, I am very good at it. You can, of course, go back and change old code, but doing so carries its fair share of risks. What you say has merit, but you cannot plan for everything, and what is done is done. Saying that they should have seen the need for companions to not conflict with the duty finder system is all well and good, but they did not, and I find it quite believable that it is now in a state where changing it would take fundamental reconstruction of at least one subsystem to accomplish.

Making something "right" the first time requires a complete understanding of the final product. Unfortunately, MMOs do not have a final product; they continue to evolve and change. One lack of foresight early on can have rippling effects for years. I am not so quick to forgive people for slipshod code, but I also understand the magnitude of the undertaking an MMO represents. Getting everything right is nigh on impossible, and even a seemingly good design decision can have unexpected consequences. Does that exempt them from the culpability of not foreseeing this issue? Maybe, probably not. But that wasn't the question. The question was, "Is it really that hard?". And the answer to that is: almost certainly. This issue involves a lot more than just "Is the chocobo in the party?" It touches on fundamental server architecture questions that we don't even know the question to find the answer to.