Frustrating Design

[Squintina]

Ok, it's from 1.0, but how on earth can a major software house that's been around since the 90s (at least and afaik) end up with issues of such a basic nature. It's literally programming 101. Then again, I've seen codebases where literally everything was handled via the equivalent of std::list, so maybe I should wonder why this kind of stuff still surprises me.

Oh I can answer that one.

Handling data for offline games is simply not the same as handling it for online games. With offline games it mostly comes down to console itself (ram, cpu). With online games you have to account for bandwidth and the amount of people pushing said bandwidth at the same time.

With that same thinking there's also a difference in games that are online but with a smaller data scale (such as the Triad online game that existed) and an MMO with inventories.

FFXI was their only other data-heavy online game before this and it was a completely different team working on it. Simply speaking, whoever worked on 1.0 didn't have the large-scale online experience for it. They then chose to reuse some of the assets of 1.0 for 2.0, not fully thinking out into the future (and honestly given what happened to 1.0, who'd have thought 2.0 would become so popular? They mostly just wanted to get it to be good enough to stop being a big stain on their brand)

Of course they need to figure out how to get away from the 1.0 base code or else this game won't last many more expansions.

[Dirich]

your post

You are right.
Still, I've been there (starting from HPC background), and I've seen others been there and I've never seen anybody get it wrong. You need to completely disregard the hardware having physical limits in order to get this particular detail wrong, but if there is an industry that deeply think about (cores and caches) physical limitations it is the gaming industry.
Probably it was the work of someone new and they were not really doing a good job with code reviews.

Regarding the full replacement of the legacy code, I have to agree with others: between spending a year or two rewriting it, it is more cost effective to spend such time to develop new content to retain your current playerbase. They would otherwise be developing what could be rebranded as FFXVI (or FFXVII or whatever number they'd be at by the time they are done with).