Trying to understand the negative posts I keep seeing about the Dev Team

[Kirsten_Rev]

Personally, HyoMin summed up the details nicely. Boiling it down for me, though, I simply don't trust SE anymore. This is a company that has spent years systematically demonstrating that many of the lessons they supposedly learned from XIV 1.0 were not, in fact, learned. Consider the following statements:

"Developers stubbornly adhere to outdated policies."
"Developers allow past successes to foster a false sense of security."
"We're unable to keep up with changes in user needs."
"Things suffer from longer development periods."
"We're unable to incorporate new technologies."
"Every problem can be patched in a future update."

To me, those statements all ring true about FFXIV now, in 2018. Want to know where they came from? Copy-pasted from the 2014 Game Developers Conference when Yoshi-P was discussing the failure of FFXIV 1.x, and the root causes of its downfall. They've definitely come full circle. Sure, there is less of an unhealthy obsession with graphics quality now. It's also clear that the team is more aware of modern MMOs than when XIV first launched. But these criticisms that Yoshi-P accurately leveled at 1.x largely still apply now, and it feels like each passing update cements the issues even more firmly in place.

So, yeah. I don't trust the development team, nor Yoshi-P. I don't think he nor they have demonstrated an ability to learn from past mistakes, and I think it's long since harmed the quality of FFXIV. That doesn't mean I'm looking to quit, nor does it mean it's a bad game, but the promise of ARR, the foundation laid, has very much been squandered at this point, in my mind. SE will need to produce more than just the occasional 'oh that's nice' moments to earn my trust back. They'll need a sustained run of successful innovation and responsive development.

I'll conclude my post with a parting phrase that was also gleaned from the 2014 GDC. It's worth keeping in mind at this stage of XIV's life.

"Great success can lead to great failure."

[Enla]

So, yeah. I don't trust the development team, nor Yoshi-P. I don't think he nor they have demonstrated an ability to learn from past mistakes, and I think it's long since harmed the quality of FFXIV. That doesn't mean I'm looking to quit, nor does it mean it's a bad game, but the promise of ARR, the foundation laid, has very much been squandered at this point, in my mind. SE will need to produce more than just the occasional 'oh that's nice' moments to earn my trust back. They'll need a sustained run of successful innovation and responsive development.

Honestly I'm not entirely sure it will be possible without shake ups in management within both the XIV team /and/ at the top of Square Enix's corporate structure. Because a look at how SE has been running their other properties shows that many of these issues aren't merely quarantined to XIV.