Letter from the Producer LXII

[Reeereee]

its not worth it because its not worth it. Every decision they make has a value and a cost, and a benefit, and must be compared to other costs.

Every race is actually less valuable the more races you have, because most players only use one or two races. There is a 1/16 chance that new race is going to be the most appealing race. Then, every race also makes every piece of gear more expensive to make, forever, and increases the costs of every skill with a unique animation/emote, cutscene etc (due to QA and development). And the upfront cost per race increases the more emotes/unique skills/armor etc the game has.

Then, you compare that cost, and benefit, with all the other things you could do with the same money/manhours and sometimes it no longer is worth it.

just because i make 1 million dollars off a tv show, doesnt mean its a good idea to spend 50% of my budget on one actor.

basically, at this point new races are no longer worth how much they cost, that doesnt change no matter how much money i make. Are you going to spend 2x the street value of a car, just because you have a good job when you already have 14 cars? Is that logical?

Much harder to swallow when your largest competitor just modified their engine so they could add 6 new races an expansion.

[Dualblade]

Really hope they add Male Viera and female Hrothgar in a later patch in shadowbringers.

Also "FFXIV has around ten thousand equippable items" .. now could just be me but that number seems abit high.

It won't happen in Shadowbringers I'll tell you that much. 6.0 would be the earliest we'd see them playable if they get added.

[White_Wolf_X]

It won't happen in Shadowbringers I'll tell you that much. 6.0 would be the earliest we'd see them playable if they get added.

Can always hope we see them sooner.

[Krotoan]

Can always hope we see them sooner.

Considering they've admitted they're not even done with the two promised implementations, don't hold your breath.

[zeylos]

You're forgetting the other side of that equation:

If no Viera were added, you would have people complaining about no male Viera, you would have a rabid swarm of people complaining about no Viera at all.
Conversely, if no Hrothgar were added, you wouldn't have people complaining about no female Hrothgar, you would have the same rabid swarm of people complaining about "oh, another human with animal ears attached".

Face it, they took the path of least resistance that would satisfy the most amount of people they could. As a company, their bottom line is money, so you can be VERY sure that they did the proper research to find which would satisfy the most people.

I already said that there would be complaint, but no where near as much

[Kaedan]

I already said that there would be complaint, but no where near as much

And you'd be dead wrong, is what I'm explaining to you.

[zeylos]

Oh yes, the <10 who spam the male Viera thread sure show me this huge number lol

And yeah, this forum is small ... maybe try looking at more places yourself to see better what people want? I visit a number of popular sites to discuss FF14 and the ENGLISH side of this forum is the only one that's this hung up on Viera Male.

And no, just no. This is the best route to pleasing the most people with the final addition to this game.

Lol then the <3 who spammed beast race are also a huge number lol

[Alucard135]

Lol then the <3 who spammed beast race are also a huge number lol

Here's the problem with the number of likes. That number had a sharp increase to 1400 in 4 days. But that number only increased to 1666 in a span of 7 weeks after that initial increase. Where do you think the initial influx came from? It was from those that were watching the live letter and those that were told about the thread after. So the main question becomes "how many actually saw that announcement, heard about the thread and didn't bother to like it?". That's the actual pool size that the number of likes must be compared to. And that number exceeded 48K (that's only if you count the EN and JP twitch views for Tokyo live letter, let alone the number of players that didn't watch it).

If you were now to calculate the percentage of players that posted their like on the mega thread, that's 3.4% only. The reason many thought that 1666 likes is a big number to show profitable demand for SE was because they thought the number of likes was huge but they fell to what's called "non response bias" in their calculations.

And then we have the google poll that was done. That also falls into the same issue of "those that didn't participate in it, already should be counted as neutral". Hence the "non response bias" again. And it also has the issue that some can vote multiple times and even non players can vote. So that skewed the results drastically.

[Iscah]

The restaurant analogy doesn't really work here, because that suggests every person is free to order exactly what they want, and the only thing actually stopping them from giving you meal A with non-standard ingredient B is an arbitrary decision that they won't deviate from their set menu. They could just do it if they wanted to, for no extra work. That isn't the situation here at all.

[Khalithar]

I'm just going to leave this here because it comes to me every time I hear devs mention things like this. If you know of this game's modding scene, his post becomes especially laughable.