Dear SE (Dev team of FFXIV, relay this to those that determine your budget)

[Hamada]

With all the overpriced mog station items (yay 5 dollar music scroll for ONE character) 20-30 dollar mounts/ outfits for one character, added 14 dollars a month for retainers because of insufficient funds to address proper fixes netcode, app that costs even more money with microtransactions, how come we do not see the effects of more of our money put into the game?

Don't you think it is time to invest more to the source of your income? Fund better servers, allow enough founding to allow FFXIV dev team to fix the netcode, with after everything we gave and put up with? Bad housing system, batched SB launch with no reimbursement, the bare bones/over complex glam system, the EU month long issues, so on. If not, maybe people will move on to something else, heck maple story 2 has instanced housing for everyone.

Why is it so hard to say.. take 20% of FFXIV's profits and put it back into FFXIV? because I am only seeing 1-5% of my money returned to me with how we are given content and such, and yet feels like it keeps getting worse. Fund this game properly, and there should be no need to break up 2-5 year friendships. At best, people will just flood the new aether and make the housing a 9001 times worse. This situation is making people pick between friends (like what friends to go with) vs their houses. Reimbursing the plot price and 3 M for furnishings is a joke. Do you understand how much some furnishings cost? Do you understand for the most part gil is worthless and people just want their house? With this new data center announcement, it makes me think you have no idea what is going on with the community.

What about FC housing? lets say my FC agrees to move somewhere, what about the WORKSHOP PROGRESS?!!?!? was this even a thought? That workshop has a LOT of invested in it, and it takes 300k? upfront to unlock it. Where is the notes on that? Or the people buying FC rooms? That does not matter? Are you aware how much time and gil goes into making 4 airships, 4 subs and to level them? where is this reimbursement?

All you are doing is punishing the people that give you lots of money and yet you can't put any back to make the playerbase happy? With proper servers, there should be no need to make tiny af data centers.

[TheGrimace]

This is the biggest problem I have with the game right now. Mog Station was a mistake.

[MaybeOliverB]

People that think they know about SE's expanses are the funniest. Especially when they complain about the prices of optional content in a video game. As if 15$/month was a lot for entertainment. Even if you were to spend 200$ on this game every month, it would still be fairly low in comparison to other hobbies.

[Kurando]

I wonder OP, do you have access to SE's finances? Do you know how much money is allocated to the game? How much is currently diverted to other SE titles? I'm not trying to be toxic or anything, they are genuine questions and it would be great to back up your claims as well (1-5% only going in to the game etc). I mean we all view the current situation with the game differently so trying to get a better idea of your mindset on this one.

[Hanayumi]

Yeah, I mean SE recently mentioned losing out on like $33 million with their Luminous Production for FFXV and that was pretty surprising to hear about so... I seriously doubt we know what SE's doing with their finances, lol.

[Enla]

People that think they know about SE's expanses are the funniest. Especially when they complain about the prices of optional content in a video game. As if 15$/month was a lot for entertainment. Even if you were to spend 200$ on this game every month, it would still be fairly low in comparison to other hobbies.

Thing is they've made it no secret that most of the game's funds go directly towards funding other projects by Square Enix. If I remember correctly the only 'pot' SE doesn't touch from FFXIV is the Mog Station sales. Everything you buy there allegedly goes back into the game, and it's the only service they've confirmed that with.

Also, you guys do realize most companies have to submit financial reports right? Edgar has a few filings for SE, and Edinet has their 2018 financial filings up currently, though it's all in Japanese. (Edinet might make your browser freak out just as a heads up. There are filings on Kaijinet as well, which is a bit more secure.) I'm not sure if anyone actually wants to dig through all of it but to say people can't find out about SE's expenses isn't true. At a certain size most companies are expected to submit financial reports to various government bodies. Only thing I'm shaky on, as I need to parse through the data myself, is how much the Japanese government requires they file. I've only dealt hands on with American financial statements.

Edit: They also have their earnings releases up on their official site that goes back further.

[Hamada]

I wonder OP, do you have access to SE's finances? Do you know how much money is allocated to the game? How much is currently diverted to other SE titles? I'm not trying to be toxic or anything, they are genuine questions and it would be great to back up your claims as well (1-5% only going in to the game etc). I mean we all view the current situation with the game differently so trying to get a better idea of your mindset on this one.

When you keep seeing copy/paste for content, I am not seeing much of my money put back. Then you top this off with work arounds with inventory display (somewhere long ago the UI dev made a post about that) it is quite clear a tiny fraction of money is being put into this game. This is further supported with comments in regards to housing and the glam system, every change or request is shot down with "our poor serverload" So yes to me it is quite clear it is lowly founded and to me that is 1-5% of my money being put back.

The game would be much better otherwise.

People that think they know about SE's expanses are the funniest. Especially when they complain about the prices of optional content in a video game. As if 15$/month was a lot for entertainment. Even if you were to spend 200$ on this game every month, it would still be fairly low in comparison to other hobbies.

I bet you are happy, how much are you going to charge people for your houses once people want to mass exodus to Gilgamesh? I am so happy you think everyone should pay 35 +dollars a month for a video game (how much do you pay for 3 accounts? and you keep telling people they should have at least 2 because the game is that flawed?)

[Alien_Gamer]

The irony here is they've already given you the proof that they're doing exactly what you're asking them to do.

The new DC is them leasing another server rack or set of racks from the ISP. They're doing this to lower the resource load on each server to make room for things like more glamor plates, more housing, more instances, etc...which is something we've been asking them to get for years now. Leasing another server is going to directly increase they're costs but they aren't increasing our sub fees so where exactly is that money coming from? Are they taking it from other games or other parts of the company or is it coming from mogstation sales?

The server moves are a necessary growing pain for them to give us what we've been asking for. Its going to cause some inconvenience for everyone but the fact is, you don't have to move your house or relocate to another server. They've already offered very generous compensation packages for those who chose to move.

[Hamada]

The irony here is they've already given you the proof that they're doing exactly what you're asking them to do.

The new DC is them leasing another server rack or set of racks from the ISP. They're doing this to lower the resource load on each server to make room for things like more glamor plates, more housing, more instances, etc...which is something we've been asking them to get for years now. Leasing another server is going to directly increase they're costs but they aren't increasing our sub fees so where exactly is that money coming from? Are they taking it from other games or other parts of the company or is it coming from mogstation sales?

The server moves are a necessary growing pain for them to give us what we've been asking for. Its going to cause some inconvenience for everyone but the fact is, you don't have to move your house or relocate to another server. They've already offered very generous compensation packages for those who chose to move.

Easy for you to say because you get to stay on Aether, crystal is pretty much DoA and a lot of people, i am sure are going to be moving back to Aether making this whole thing pointless and making a dead data center. So it is either keep some friends, move to aether to be able progress, or keep my house with some friends and able not to do anything due dead PF/DF. "some inconvenience " is an understatement, we are not given enough for losing our houses and friends. They are not even giving us enough time to plan, SE made no statements how to further deal with the housing issues because of this. This is not fair at all.

They are not doing what I am asking them to do, they are only doing this because they do not want to pay to upgrade servers (increase/get current server tech/modernize) they are doing this because they do not want to find fixing the problem that causes all these problems, the netcode. They rushed 2.0 out so they have a bad mess for coding and it keeps making the player base suffer.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Easy for you to say because you get to stay on Aether, crystal is pretty much DoA and a lot of people, i am sure are going to be moving back to Aether making this whole thing pointless and making a dead data center. So it is either keep some friends, move to aether to be able progress, or keep my house with some friends and able not to do anything due dead PF/DF. "some inconvenience " is an understatement, we are not given enough for losing our houses and friends. They are not even giving us enough time to plan, SE made no statements how to further deal with the housing issues because of this. This is not fair at all.

They are not doing what I am asking them to do, they are only doing this because they do not want to pay to upgrade servers (increase/get current server tech/modernize) they are doing this because they do not want to find fixing the problem that causes all these problems, the netcode. They rushed 2.0 out so they have a bad mess for coding and it keeps making the player base suffer.

Cystal is only going to be DoA because the community makes it DoA. All the threats of leaving and going back to aether, all the complaints are making this a self fulfilling prophecy.

They do have modern servers. They just dont have them set up the way YOU want them to be.