November? really?

[Kemas]

Sick of hearing the WOW comparisons. This is a new generation mmo with new generation expectations. Having played all years that ffxi was out and playing this since beta phase 2 I can confirm that this is how SE rolls. They postpone things much to their consumers dismay and then attempt to make up for lost time upon release, then subsequent fixes happen afterwards. The only thing that peeves me is the presence of class imbalances on CURRENT endgame content. We have jobs with new abilities that are still less than optimized while we see content releases featuring minions and glamour, or repetitive equipment iterations. All we ask is for the game to be optimized in its current state. Then again, I'm still one of the subscribers waiting for the Mac version to be somewhat respectable while I play on my pc with my subpar main, PLD. I can only take so much overgeared low level content before I crave the ability to participate in cutting edge content. Instead, I was forced to level other jobs as my new "main" in order to participate in cutting edge content while we wait another month+ for a minion game to be released. Kinda salty, admittedly and understandably so...

Edit: I'm happy with having some time to truly cap out my DoW and DoM (crafting/gathering ya right- another system that's still waiting for optimization.) Here's to hoping for some QoL and job balancing pre 3.1.

[Rakeesh]

The complainers are really funny.

"Just have Square let other people work on the patch!"

Because other dev teams at Square have any clue how to work the engine of FF14? Because they have any idea of the current design direction of the actual team. Because they know how to work the millions of lines of code that make the game work as it does.

It's like asking some dude to take over painting the Mona Lisa because Da Vinci is on vacation right now.

"But... but... then they should just hire more people to the team!"

Aye. New people need training. Training new people takes time and causes more delays in making content. They can't just go "hey it's your first day. Make this raid and make it compatible with everything else we programmed." It does not work that way. So even hiring new people will cause delays which people will complain about.

"Then just send half the team on vacation!"


Maybe they did? They said the delay was because the team was on vacation. They did not say that the entire team was on vacation at the same time. Someone had to have worked on all the hotfixes they released. Same with patch 3.01, 3.05, 3.07.

Stop acting as if the entire crew just went to Hawaii to party.

Sick of hearing the WOW comparisons. This is a new generation mmo with new generation expectations.

I'm not even sure what that is supposed to mean. Pretty sure it's easier to develop art assets for a game that can run on Windows XP than a game with HD textures that requires relatively newer hardware to run. Especially since they have to make it for different platforms that run with different OSs as well.

Also name me other "new generation" MMOs that have a patch cycle that is lower than 5 months.

[Kemas]

It's not a comparison for comparison sake- I'm merely saying that people need to stop equating everything in ffxiv to wow because before hw a lot of these wow comparisons weren't nearly as frequent. That was taken largely out of context as I was trying to highlight the fact that the developers(though more frequent with updates than others) are adding a lot of fluff content rather than optimizing current content. You holding the WoW comparison against me is get another failed attempt of an inexperienced white knight.

Sincerely,

Square Enix supporter for the last 15 years.

[Dyvid]

Also name me other "new generation" MMOs that have a patch cycle that is lower than 5 months.

Well that's the point isn't it. All other MMO's that have come out couldn't keep up with the demands of their consumers and floundered for it. In fact I would say one reason FFXIV:ARR succeeded where others didn't is because they had an aggressive patch schedule, 3 to 4 month turn around times.

[Kemas]

Well that's the point isn't it. All other MMO's that have come out couldn't keep up with the demands of their consumers and floundered for it. In fact I would say one reason FFXIV:ARR succeeded where others didn't is because they had an aggressive patch schedule, 3 to 4 month turn around times.

Precisely this- we don't want SE to screw up the good thing they have going for it. A competitive update schedule with *meaningful* changes. To this day you see WoW players citing the implementation of Twitter integration and fluff content as the reason they came to our game- and as a longgg time subscriber I'd hate to see my game suffer from a potential lack of subscriptions once equally as competitive titles come out this fall/winter.

[adn]

"But... but... then they should just hire more people to the team!"

Aye. New people need training. Training new people takes time and causes more delays in making content. They can't just go "hey it's your first day. Make this raid and make it compatible with everything else we programmed." It does not work that way. So even hiring new people will cause delays which people will complain about.

This is such an important concept that people do not understand. You cannot throw money at problems to fix them, especially not in software development. If they were to hire new people, they would have to spend so much time getting them up to speed that it would delay development: if you want tangible evidence of this fact, look no further than World of Warcraft. They hired a bunch of new people during MoP and spent so much time getting them up to speed that it delayed WoD's release significantly.

That's not to say that SE shouldn't consider expanding the development team, but it should happen slowly so that it does not entail drastic delays in the content cycle. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that when Yoshi-P talked about "workflow breakdown", he may have been subtly implying that they have hired some new people that caused a change in how development works.

[Cheraa]

Also name me other "new generation" MMOs that have a patch cycle that is lower than 5 months.

If you let me answer this: Well there isn`t.

SquareEnix did extremly well during FF XIV 2.x with the content patches. Better than any other MMO currently running. Does HW provide to less content? Well maybe, I can't tell, cause I'm a new Player that still has to get to level 60. But if I look to the number 1 MMO in this Genre World of Warcraft, than I can say, yes, Warcraft has maybe about 2-3x as much content in a new expansion than HW can offer.

BUT, this has a price. Warcraft is well known to not deliver any Content Patches in the last full year before an Expansion goes live. In FF XIV there has been how many Content Patches from June 26th 2014 to June 26th 2015? I think way more than...NONE.

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I think another point for the delay of 3.1 is the datacenter movement of chaos to europe. I'm sure SE didn't want to release a major Patch and work on the Server movement at nearly the same time.