I'm concerned for ffxiv's future

[Neoyoshi]

OP should read the "Many Deaths of FFXIV" thread.
EDIT: Here it is!

That thread made my morning coffee taste 1000% better. ♥

[Aomine1992]

They just need more people, coding/programming and designing are huge undertakings for MMOs this is why you need teams of people, like more then Square currently has because manpower is key with game developing. The game will survive no matter what but there are obvious ways the game can over come the redundancy hole MMOs usually go through.

[kidalutz]

The difference is that WoW probably IS dying, albeit slowly and painfully. The current state of the game is a train wreck. There is no going up from where it is now, even if the next expansion is amazing. FF XIV isn't to that point quite yet. This game has a pretty dedicated fan base.

It was always said that the only thing that would kill WoW would be WoW itself. And in a way they were right that said I dont see FF XIV going that way.

[Saccharin]

Maybe revenue from ff7remake can be siphoned here like our subs were apparently being siphoned off to kh3

Do you think they operate this game for the good of mankind; it's operated to make a profit. Where do you think the money came from to make 1.0 and 2.0.

[Gemina]

But then, if you read literally the sentence afterwards that you snipped out, you'd also see that once you hit the point of "Diminishing Returns" (Which in of itself, isn't a hard wall of productivity, merely a reduction in the increase each person provides which is literally every person past 2 people working on something in my example. I.e. 1 guy going through 10,000 items. A 2nd guy then makes it 100% more efficient by splitting the load to 5,000 items for each of them. A 3rd guy merely increases productivity by 50% because it's now splitting those 5,000 items between 2 people into 3,333 items between 3 people. Thus a diminishing return of investment)

Then you can put more people towards OTHER things. Such as like Yoshida mentioned "While FFXIV will continue to strive to maintain a regular 3.5 month major update cycle, we must also ensure that sufficient time is secured for the meticulous development of new content—or else the quality will invariably drop."

They need to keep pumping out the regular release of the new Dungeons/MSQ/Raids.

Thus if you can have a larger team working on Cosmetic things like Races/Character Customization AND have a larger team working on Dungeons/MSQ/Raids at the same time, that is more efficient than having to split focus because you only have a small team working on one aspect, or you have a larger team that works on the core content (Dungeons/MSQ/Raids) first and then works on other things afterwards.

You're the one who's illustrating flawed and narrow views of the whole picture in this scenario. By having limited understanding of how game development works. Including your reference to them having a "VERY large staff". Which often will be distributed into different teams that work on different aspects. I.e. The Art team won't be doing any work on Job Balance. The Art team will simply be working on Art assets. If this team gets larger, they can work on more Art assets. If the team gets large enough where more people won't help, you get people in to different teams, such as the Job Balance team so they can work more efficiently.

You seem to get one side of the equation, and the other, but not how these two sides coincide with each other. If throwing a ton of money at a project was the answer to everything, the Star Wars franchise wouldn't have gone to total schite. Yet, if you look at a recently posted video I saw on youtube which is a reimagined version of Darth Vader vs Obi Wan in episode 4, you see how a limited amount of people with a limited amount of funds with clear setbacks was able to produce content that the hardest of the hardcore fans are saying easily beats out anything Disney has been able to churn out. Why do you suppose this is?

As another example: you have two machines, and two people to operate them, and one person that manages them. They love what they do and are passionate about it. Their work is so good that demand for their product has increased. The manager decides to get two more machines. The immediate issue here is if all four machines are not running at full capacity, then not only are you not making more money, you're losing it. Because the two operators cannot run all four machines at full capacity, the manager decides to hire two more operators. While the two new operators are experienced with running the machines, they are not familiar with the product and will require X amount of time training to learn about and adopt the same passion as everyone else.

This is a small scale version of what happens behind SE's doors. The reason why we have the game we do is because SE has a team of peeps who are passionate about their work and the product they deliver to their customers. They work those long hours and put in the extra effort without additional compensation because they poor their hearts and their souls into their work. This is NOT something you can just throw more money and people at and achieve the same result. If it was, they could just hire more people and everyone could just work normal hours, and not sacrifice so much of their personal time. That is what he means by this comment:

"While FFXIV will continue to strive to maintain a regular 3.5 month major update cycle, we must also ensure that sufficient time is secured for the meticulous development of new content—or else the quality will invariably drop."

Gong back to my previous Star Wars comment, this is an example of how throwing more money and having more people involved ultimately causes the product to fail. Is that what you want for FFXIV as well?

[Amarande]

Workload is definitely the limiting factor for races, and it probably is something SE has struggled with for a while (notice how many of the models in Stormblood were reused, even if it was nice to be able to get dyeable versions of some of the older gear like WoD and Void Ark).

As for jobs, I'm not sure how much of it is really the workload; the biggest issues facing the addition of further jobs to XIV are IMO:

- the fact that we're running low on ideas (particularly there being not many classical FF jobs left to implement after considering that many of the jobs in the older games either were more or less duplicates mechanically such as Monk and Black Belt, or two or more were essentially combined into a present XIV job such as Bard and Ranger),

- there are limitations to what ideas are viable (e.g., Chemist is probably a limited job at best because something that would have to spam consumable items just doesn't work in a high APM MMO, alternately it would use items as abilities a la X-2 but that's got its own issues that probably would also require it be limited?; the missing fourth healer falls into this category as well as the existing fight mechanics more or less expect X Y and Z to be true of all healers so coming up with an idea for another one that isn't mostly a copy of WHM/SCH/AST without breaking in previous content is probably a toughie)

- perhaps most of all, the small party size (especially we already have more than twice as many DPS as DPS slots, and the fflogs DPS job statistics already show that several are nearly falling off the radar, those Monk and Machinist memes unfortunately exist for a reason).

[Dyvid]

We all saw the live letter. They said they could only do two jobs in this expansion. And then said this is the only races they could do for awhile.
I understand the hard work that goes into mmo's. And I also understand that this game was rebuilt basically in two years.
And I look at older mmo's and even wow seems to have a hard time holding up.
It's going to be harder and harder to meet the demands of all the players. It already is.
I feel it is time for another rebirth for this game.

So to sum this up, since you can't be a male Viera you believe it's time to scrap the game, yes?

I know it might not seem like it but MMOs aren't a license to print money, if it was Blizzard wouldn't be a subsidiary of Activision.

[Fenefab]

I'd be more concerned if they constantly pumped out half-assedly made jobs and races.

[Kalise]

Why do you suppose this is?

Because George Lucas ran the franchise into the ground with the prequels and then sold it on to a mega-corporation that had already lost any essence of actually wanting to create quality content and was instead focused entirely on maximizing profits while minimizing effort?

You might want to pick a more apropos example next time.

Such as a time when actually throwing money at things was the issue, as opposed to the opposite effect where people where too concerned about profits to make good content.

[Gemina]

Because George Lucas ran the franchise into the ground with the prequels and then sold it on to a mega-corporation that had already lost any essence of actually wanting to create quality content and was instead focused entirely on maximizing profits while minimizing effort?

You might want to pick a more apropos example next time.

Such as a time when actually throwing money at things was the issue, as opposed to the opposite effect where people where too concerned about profits to make good content.

You might want to readdress this topic when you learn what passion towards one's work entails. What you stated is exactly why just throwing more money and resources at FFXIV won't work, and your arguments are self-deflating. If you look at Yoshi as the George Lucas of FFXIV; if his passion towards it was to wane much like Lucas's did for SW and/or gives it to someone with maximum funds and minimal insight, the very same thing will happen to FFXIV. You can't talk about throwing money at a project in the past tense when it is directly the cause and consequence of people being too concerned with profits to make quality content.

It's a really good thing you're not making the decisions for FFXIV.