November? really?

[Lucke]

I'm gonna be a keyboard dev. While I agree getting some R&R is important for worker morale, I would have handled this a little different. We are talking nearly half a year before we get something new. I would have staggered the vacations. I'd send like, 25% of the team on vacation at a time so that a majority of the team can work on patches. Sure there'd be a delay because your missing a quarter of the team, but it wouldn't be this 2 month delay.

[Izularia]

Hopefully we'll get a few more hair styles then :P

[Shadray]

I'm not too sure how vacations are an excuse. The company I work for ensures that vacations don't interfere with business productivity.

We put in a request for vacation time and if there are too many others off at the same time it gets rejected.

I would have thought this was common practice for any business.

[LunaHoshino]

I'm not too sure how vacations are an excuse. The company I work for ensures that vacations don't interfere with business productivity.

We put in a request for vacation time and if there are too many others off at the same time it gets rejected.

I would have thought this was common practice for any business.

It depends entirely on how large the team is. In a small office, even one person going on vacation can be enough to make overall productivity take a hit, and there's no way around it because you can't deny people vacations. My current team is three people-- if one of us goes on vacation, we have to pull in someone from another branch to cover for them. Even so, if the person on vacation is my boss, there are going to be some things that simply can't be done until he gets back because none of the rest of us have the authority to sign off on them. I'd imagine it's probably the same way with the FFXIV dev team.

[Kiroke]

Woohoo, I have 1.5-2 months to finish my animus!
And at this point I don't even know if new relic will be there in 3.1... someone enlight me!

[loreleidiangelo]

So if they're two months behind the regular schedule for 3.1 compared to usual 3-month patch cycles...what did the dev team do, take a two-month vacation? O__o

Kinda wondering if they weren't behind schedule for other reasons as well, and the whole "vacation" aspect is just a more PR-friendly way of admitting they're behind. Less likely to get your fanbase riled up, at least.

I don't really care either way, but I do wonder if patches will start to be more delayed in the future. Also find it curious that they're handing out free 210s in 3.1... Do they really believe a satisfactory amount of people will have cleared AS4 by then? I'm not convinced.

[fortuona]

i'm perfectly happy to unsub and give them as much time as they need to release a patch worth returning to.

[IgnisFatuus]

I think most people here are completely delusional when it comes to this holiday thing. like I care, really.

if any other company doesnt get shit done in time your business relations will suffer and your partner wont care if your staff just had vacation or not. its a matter of planning your staff accordingly.

if SE cant manage to hire enough people so that work doesnt come to a standstill while people take vacations then it just shows how utterly incompetent they are in even managing that. its just a very lame excuse because they are not able to work on schedule. ever.

[Natsukii]

People should complain less.
There are other mmo´s that do significantly worse than this one regarding offering and providing new content.
Im actually happy that they take longer with applying the next update, so now the casual players actually can get somewhere with gearing up and prepare for 3.1.
Just my opinion obviously.

[Loony_BoB]

Development hell certainly isn't unique to Japan. Although the national culture that dictates laws and the view of things as a whole is certainly at the extreme end.

However, neither is delaying vacation until after release heading up to deadlines (especially ones that affect mass media and public image on such a global scale - can you imagine if they made the release date early and had to delay it?), and then everyone taking vacation after release as a result. HW was the key release date, not 3.1. They likely missed/delayed their summer holidays. And no, not everyone took time off at once, there were obviously people working on 3.05, 3.07, etc. But there has to be some agreed time to delay holidays (before the biggest release of the year, crunch time) and some agreed time to make up for it (following the biggest release of the year, time to regenerate following the crunch).

This is normal in all things that involve huge public releases and a lot of people working on them - film, TV, video games, etc. Whether or not it's right to do this is up for debate, but it is absolutely normal.

For what it's worth, I can't find an online article, but living in Edinburgh and reading the Metro every day means I did get made aware that Rockstar staff do exactly this following successful releases (or at least they did after one of the GTA games). I dread to think what happens after an unsuccessful release, but I suspect we're more likely to hear about that in the finance pages because, well, that's where you generally hear about large layoffs.