Entitlement: Why I don't get it

[Naunet]

Neither party is entitled to anything more then the terms laid out in our subscription contracts. We are engaging in an at will transaction. If we don't like it, we are entitled to "fire" them by not continuing to subscribe.

SE is a business, but we are consumers. A healthy relationship between the two necessitates a steady exchange of ideas - and criticism. This is how we consumers improve the product/service we want to invest in.

[AzakaTonnerre]

My team is allowed to take a break too but I dont let them all do it at the same time. We all have two months a year as PTO but somehow we always seem to work it out that there are enough people to complete the work while we take turns having time off.

And the dev team may have been told they were unable to take any PTO over the last 6 or 8 months during development of Heavensward with an understanding that time off would be allowed after its release. Your team and its schedule is not the same as all teams and all schedules in every facet of business. Many business use black out time on PTO when a big deadline is approaching to ensure all resources are working to meet a tight deadline. In some industries it is quite common, even on a yearly basis, to have blackout time.

I get what you are saying, I don't disagree that they could have handled it better. But to use your cookie cutter explanation of how your team handles PTO does not make it an industry, or even business standard for every situation. That's business 101. We don't know if they had a 6 month or more PTO blackout for Heavensward, creating a situation where a whole team may have to take vacation in a compressed schedule. And to speculate either way is just simply that... speculation.

[Reinfeld]

SE is a business, but we are consumers. A healthy relationship between the two necessitates a steady exchange of ideas - and criticism. This is how we consumers improve the product/service we want to invest in.

Unless it's for frivolous crap like flying mounts or Gold Saucer it seems like they stopped reading the criticism part. How else can we explain why they decided to re-release hunts in the same broken manner that people have complained about since they were released, or how they decided to continue the monotonous 2 reskinned dungeons, 1 primal, 1 "raid" schedule that have people bored out of their mind? It's not even "rushing through content" like the White Knights would have you believe, it's that almost all the content they release is made to be cleared on the day of release, so after that you have 5-7 days of primal farming then another 85 days of logging in once a week to clear weeklies until the next patch.

[Asmodai]

But to use your cookie cutter explanation of how your team handles PTO does not make it an industry, or even business standard for every situation. That's business 101. We don't know if they had a 6 month or more PTO blackout for Heavensward, creating a situation where a whole team may have to take vacation in a compressed schedule. And to speculate either way is just simply that... speculation.

To halt production because you give your entire team time off at the same time is the worst possible thing you can do. That is business 101, dont stop.

[Yaichiro]

snip

I am not sure about "many business" there, tell us exactly who. On the other hand EVERY (yes can confirm) multinational company can't allow a whole department overseeing a core product go on "vacation".

SE is a company with product and we are customers, in fact they make it clear that the game is a service! Now imagine this situation, you have insurance on your car and you got involved in an accident. You go to your insurance company and they tell you "sorry all our staff are having a vacation so you need to wait 3 months to get money to fix your car, we will surely pay but after 3 months". Now you're left with a broken car for 3 months thanks to their "vacation".

They are definitely not going against their ToS as we are not entitled things such as patches. However, the game reputation is taking the blow especially with unsubs and you need to work twice as hard to get back those who unsubed compared to keeping subbed people. Many people quitted the game including myself last year and most people didn't return for subsequent patches but they returned for the expansion only to find it a "bigger" patch which we are stuck with for 5 months.

[Waeksyn]

Blaming the delay in the next release on a well needed break by the design team is frankly an admission from SE that they suck at managing a technical development team. I've managed design teams at director level (managing managers who manage engineers) and I made sure that release staffing was planned so that I didn't need to destroy the teams' lives by demanding they work without taking time off. There are always challenges to manage, but that's what managers are paid to do. My customers (and executive management) would not have been pleased with a release delay because I screwed up release staffing.

[Gumbercules]

I missed the dev-post where they said they "halted" development, can I get a link pls?

Myself as a paying customer, am a little bummed about the delay. (a delay of one month for me since yoshi-p had already hinted at at least 4 months before 3.1 because of the rest) I could maybe argue that i feel SE should maybe invest more into the ff 14 dev team structure, but as it currently stands I see a "one month delay" as something i can tolerate, and if for w/e reason i couldn't tolerate it i would simply do what ive done in other mmos and unsub.

[Sylve]

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Christmas is a common one. Easter too. At least it is where i work. Any other time is free game though.

I'd also like to point out that no-where in the subscription "contract" or ToS says the developers must bring you new patches in an explicit time frame.
So yeah, the people demanding content NOW are being "Entitled" in the more derogatory sense. Our Sub grants us access to the game and nothing more than that.
If you have "nothing" to do in the game, go grab some people interested in attempting Savage Alex and work at getting a clear. All these people claiming boredom and nothing to do haven't cleared Savage Alex nor raised every job/class to max.

I end this post with a question ... If not now, when do you lot want the Devs to take some time off? No matter when they do it SOMEONE SOMEWHERE is going to freak out that the patch is late.

PS: Letting the whole team take time off at once eliminates issues that stem from missing staff at all times for the entirety of the year.

[Colorful]

So, you think there is an A team and a B team? Like they are competing and Yoshi is just like "Sorry guys, your stuff isn't making it in this week"?

It was the same with the the whole Dark Souls 2 fiasco too, even though the "B team" did a lot significantly better than the A team in some aspects, but there were no "teams" in the end. Just one large team where staff members switched between projects when needed from what I've read.

[Saggo]

The community is also "entitled" to content updates, as that's why they're paying monthly for.

We're paying monthly for server maintenance and access.

Consistent, free content patches are just good business sense.