Regarding that Finaland Interview...

[Bright-Flower]

I very much think FFXIV would be better off if Yoshi-P were to step down.

I mean, really, the Glamour response? It's frustrating everyone, on both sides of the issue. I know that tons of forum-goers - and likely a majority of the playerbase - want more Glamour options, fewer restrictions. Myself, I want fewer options, more restrictions, because for me, a lot of the outfits do look ridiculous. This middle ground though? What gives? If you're going to allow chicken suits and bikinis, just throw open the floodgates.

The housing answer is predictable shameful. I can barely even get mad anymore. SE has doubled-down on a broken system for years now, without even admitting that they screwed up. It's so blindingly obvious that their infrastructure wasn't able to properly support housing in the past, isn't able to today, and likely won't be able to in the future. We still have people who can't buy a house at all. We still have ridiculously low caps on the number of objects we can place outside. We still have demolition timers. Can we at least get an apology for all of this, and a public commitment to continue working on it until it's in an acceptable state?

Yoshi-P simply lacks vision. Every time I read his interviews, I feel like I'm listening to a customer service representative reading a script. Where are the big ideas? Where is the drive, the ambition? Where is the recognition of existing problems, and the plans to fix them?

Get rid of him already, SE. He seems to be a fine director when it comes to salvaging broken projects, but he appears to be utterly incapable of growing said projects once they're in a stable state. You don't want a status quo guy leading an MMO, and that's exactly what Yoshi-P appears to be.

Regardless of Yoshi I think SE is more interested in just making FF XIV a cash cow than they are taking risks and investing to improve the game overall. Feels like they're more interested in milking it to fund other projects.

[Kirsten_Rev]

Regardless of Yoshi I think SE is more interested in just making FF XIV a cash cow than they are taking risks and investing to improve the game overall. Feels like they're more interested in milking it to fund other projects.

I'd be a bit more inclined to excuse Yoshi-P here were it not for the position he occupies within SE's executive structure. He has influence there, serious corporate influence. Also, the whole cash cow idea doesn't really justify the various mistakes made over the past few years. Diadem, Eureka, the inconsistent Glamour restrictions... these are issues of poor, illogical vision and design, not lack of money. And that definitely falls on Yoshi-P so far as I'm concerned.

Also, server resources are limited and must be factored in. As of September, the rough estimate of active players in the US alone is 280k-ish. Every ward can hold a max 60 different land plots. They would need 4666~ wards to allow every active player their own place in a ward. That kind of server load is not reasonable, unless we change the housing system completely to be independent instances for each house. Even then, its still harsh. Even if we assume only 10% of hte population wants a house, thats 28k people in 466 wards. Its still a hefty amount.

The issue here is that, as I described before, the limitations only exist because SE decided they wanted to pursue a neighbourhood-style structure. That's it. Without that structure, no issue - they've been able to run per-player instances of things even dating back to FFXI. Individually instanced houses - outdoor and indoor areas, seamlessly zoned through - are easily doable. They just chose a different path.

And it's here that they owe us an apology and additional work. The path they chose was flatly unrealistic given the limitations of XIV's servers and netcode. They should have realized this, and decided to do something else. They made the same mistake they did with XIV 1.0, and Yoshi-P unsurprisingly sounds a lot like Tanaka trying to defend the god-awful repeated geometry and textures from XIV's 1.0 days. If you can't pull it off properly, then don't do it. That's game design 101. I'm actually quite disappointed that SE went from so clearly acknowledging the 1.0 issues to ignoring some of the same mistakes made from ARR forward.