Regarding that Finaland Interview...

[TheCurls]

In this thread people are asking a man to quit his job because they can’t keep a house in a game they are no longer subscribed to play and might never subscribe to play again.

[JunseiKei]

In this thread people are asking a man to quit his job because they can’t keep a house in a game they are no longer subscribed to play and might never subscribe to play again.

Well, not really just that, but asking for changes to things that Yoshida might have his hands tied on because he still answers to Square Enix. A lot of assumptions being thrown around while not being privy to critical information.

[Kirsten_Rev]

In this thread people are asking a man to quit his job because they can’t keep a house in a game they are no longer subscribed to play and might never subscribe to play again.

Not at all. The housing is an example; it's not the problem in and of itself. Every time FFXIV has attempted to add industry-standard systems, they've come with asterisks and functionality flaws. The vast majority of new content additions have been riddled with problems, problems significant enough so as to render the content dead almost immediately once the rewards are no longer cutting-edge. The core end-game formula has grown stale, with no sign on the horizon that it's going to change.

As Director of FFXIV, Yoshi-P is failing. It's his job to prevent things like this from happening, to ensure that FFXIV continues to grow, continues to set the bar as a leading AAA MMO. He's spectacularly failed to do so for years now. How is this not a scenario in which he should be asked to step down?

Also, it's disingenuous to suggest that someone shouldn't lose their job just because the concerns aren't all that important in the grand scheme of things. Coaches and GMs of sports teams lose their jobs all the time for failing to deliver winning seasons. Movie stars and big-name directors rapidly lose their influence and prestige if they fail to deliver strong performances at the box office. When your job involves entertainment, you're going to be judged on some silly-sounding stuff, up to and including, yes, housing systems in a video game. That's the job.

It's ridiculous to defend Yoshi-P's performance over at least the past 2.5 years or so. Maybe it's not termination-worthy in your eyes, that's a fair point to make, but to suggest that he's done a good job is hopelessly biased.

[LineageRazor]

*Snip*

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that FFXIV is a failing game, or is even in remote danger of losing its status as a AAA MMO. People come here from WoW, of all places, hands down the most successful MMO of all time. WoW is getting old, certainly, and it's reasonable to expect folks looking for something new - but several MMOs have come and gone since FFXIV's been active, just about all of them flash-in-the-pan, and FFXIV's still chugging along.

Undoubtedly, FFXIV has a sub-standard housing system. A large part of this is a failure on Yoshi P's part back in the early days of ARR - and that failure was overambition, not lack of it. He had a vision of actual towns of player houses, not just the same old instanced stuff you can find in almost every other MMO. His reach exceeded his grasp, however. The initial, FC-only wards worked well enough, but wanted the same for private housing - and his devs couldn't give it to him on the scale he wanted with the infrastructure they had available. But they had this ready-made FC housing right there, and still mostly empty... It's easy to say "Yoshi, you should have taken the safe, boring path and given us all instanced houses!" now, but back then players were just as excited as Yoshi P was about real player towns.

Honestly, I think that 95% of the whining about houses would come to a halt if SE would give apartments the ability to do actual, outdoor gardening. Give them a patio, or miniature greenhouse extension, or something. Perhaps that is something they should consider.

[Kirsten_Rev]

See, here’s the problem with this statement. People are still subscribed and paying SE money. You want things to be shaken up and changed, then stop giving them your money. I promise you that they’ll hear that far more readily than the entitled cries of people who want to keep a house in a game they no longer play. When you unsub, SE has to consider that you will never come back or else they waste resources that currently subbed players can use.

You hear an argument you don’t like and right away use the “white knight/fanboy/fangirl” defense and that’s dumb. I don’t care who is in charge of the game. All I care about is that they make a game I’m happy to give my money to and play. And while there are things I’d wish were different, and it might come as a shock to many of the people on these boards, some of us actually like this game.

A couple of notes.

Firstly, ceasing play really isn't productive for anyone. Sure, it can generate change, but it also effectively means severing your ties with your in-game friends, abandoning the parts of the game that do work quite well (such as the broad strokes of the storyline), losing your house if you have one, etc. It's very much a 'nuclear option' from a player point of view. It's also as likely as not going to push SE to invest fewer resources in XIV, rather than more, which isn't something most of us want. Again, just because they behaved one way when XIV 1.0 failed, doesn't mean they will behave the same way if, say, XIV 5.0 fails.

Secondly, I wasn't using a white knight / fanboy / fangirl defense. It's perfectly acceptable to like XIV. I do too. Anyone subbed should like the game they're playing. That does not mean one cannot hold an objective opinion of Yoshi-P's performance over the past few years, which has been pretty bad. Has it resulted in an awful game? No, not yet, and it might never reach that point - but XIV isn't anywhere near the level of quality it could have been at, and as a player, that's distressing. It makes it harder for me to recruit friends to play the game; it makes it harder for me to really invest myself into the title. Those are issues I'd like to see remedied.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that FFXIV is a failing game, or is even in remote danger of losing its status as a AAA MMO. People come here from WoW, of all places, hands down the most successful MMO of all time. WoW is getting old, certainly, and it's reasonable to expect folks looking for something new - but several MMOs have come and gone since FFXIV's been active, just about all of them flash-in-the-pan, and FFXIV's still chugging along.

I'd agree, which is why I never said it or at least, never intended to; I didn't find that statement in my post but I didn't parse it word by word either. I do think Yoshi-P has failed as a director, but it's hardly caused enough damage for XIV to become a failing title a la 1.0. I do think it's lost its status as a leading, bar-setting AAA MMO, however.

I also don't put too much stock in the conversions from WoW or the long-term popularity. The Final Fantasy franchise is far more popular than most of the flash-in-the-pan MMOs that have released over the years (there are a couple of exceptions that featured far more broken MMOs, like Star Wars). It's also more or less the only MMO available on consoles, which gives it a built-in advantage over others. And it is, objectively, an incredibly fun game until one hits level cap and begins branching out into what else the game has to offer. Most of the serious flaws - the bland content cycles, Eureka, housing, Eureka, glamours, etc. - only make themselves truly visible once someone's invested quite a bit of time into the game. This is almost certainly the reason XIV continues to survive, actually: SE gets enough time out of the average player before they let their subscription lapse out of boredom.

Still, a strong bottom line does not a great game make.

Also, in regards to the sub-standard housing and Yoshi-P's excitement... I still don't have much sympathy. Being a project director primarily involves accounting for things that players can't see: budgets, infrastructure capabilities, long-term scalability of a given system, etc. I get being excited by the neighborhood idea, I really do - it's a great one. But any halfway-decent planning process should have considered the infrastructure and long-term scalability, at which point it would have become obvious that they simply wouldn't be able to execute it properly. Once that conclusion is made, the onus really is on the person at the top to make the tough call.