Eurogamer interview with YoshiP (Dec 10, 2019): consoles, fixing ARR, inventory, etc.

[Shougun]

I've always assumed this was a key part of what happened to blue mage:

How much work is involved in adding jobs and upgrading classes with every expansion, and do you think you'll be able to keep adding two jobs each time?

Naoki Yoshida: The current jobs class available for FF14 is a lot compared to other MMOs out there in the market. As you said, there's a lot of work involved. The work the team is putting in to adjusting jobs is really mathematical - handling 0.1 per cent, 0.5 per cent... it's a mark of detail to make sure that the balance is there. To tell you the truth, frankly speaking, the dev team doesn't want to add any new jobs because it's so hard! But because players and the community and everyone is expecting new jobs, that keeps them going forward. You can safely assume and expect new jobs in the future for a while.

I can imagine as each job gets added all the work just gets to be more and more and more and the balance becomes harder without taking away what makes them special...... Part of the reason why I warmed up to blue mage being a solo-god if not being able to be a 'real' job. Obviously if you read other threads I'm not a fan of a PF direction/"sort of balanced" direction of the job though which seems to be the main direction it's heading (to be fair some may like that, but I'm not going to see value out of that direction and obviously means I wont warm up to it not being a 'real' job either). I did notice a few more interactive spells, with some better concepts like ignoring immunities and special mechanics like Surpanakha, but they still had a sense of still trying to be balanced and I feel if they left that idea at home they'd have more / wild combinations and less similar spells in a different color vibe.

Ideally i'd like both (of course I would, more is easy to ask for lol), but I'd probably make zero complaints and just spell ideas if the job was more like madness incarnate, I also imagine far into the future once level cap stops increasing for normal jobs and blue mage catches up that the job might have some wild tools and OP feeling but I can't give feedback (or experience) what hasn't happened yet.

Would still recommend avoiding big names though, blue mage would probably have gone over marginally better if it wasn't called blue mage at all like rather if it was introduced as a special action in Eureka and other content or something, maybe new chocobo job (in the sense that it would be more easily sold as mini-game side content and if you hate it like the lords of verminion then fine and if you love the minions then great, but now it's called and associated with job content that's sort of pinned it into expectation and primed the whole situation for disappointment).

You make a lot of quality of life changes with each patch but I don't think players understand what's involved and what a big project that is. Can you talk us through what's involved on your side of things?

Naoki Yoshida: From a player or community perspective, just increasing the inventory space might sound like a simple thing but from the technical side of things, it's quite complicated. What is happening in the backend is because we cannot lose any items or anything that the player owns, we're continuously monitoring what they have and if necessary they move those items from one place to another depending on the contents and where the character is. That's what's happening on the backend. Just looking at one character and what they have, you might think that the data is light but it's not as there are hundreds of thousands of characters. And also the game is live 24/7, 365 days a year, so the server needs to watch and monitor their movement and data. That means that consistently there is a communication data transmission back and forth there. Even if we increase the communication, it could be dangerous. This could lead to causing lag or higher ping. We need to closely monitor that.

We can't do any tests while players are in the world, so what we do is have another world set up as a test server and we do this load test for a month. We also use bots to create the peak timing when a character all of a sudden, a connection can be this amount of characters in-game and there you can move about changing fields and zones. We keep doing the test for almost a few months and make sure there's no lag or issues. We really seriously care about that. This requires a massive amount of time and resources. When we can finally warrant that it will be safe then we can finally move it onto live servers. We actually take a lot of time to make sure there's no issues.

The sheer amount of work is a complicated process for us. Players may feel that increasing the inventory size is an easy thing to do but it's actually not. You may feel that the inventory doesn't increase because Square Enix wants to make money from extra storage but that is not the case. Even though it may look easy, we need to tread very, very carefully, especially for quality of life improvements of any functions that require such serious care. Each expansion seems to be the only time when we can actually improve the quality of life. But as I said, we are totally aware that probably the weapons space and the rings space in the armoured chest is also hitting the limit. I feel we need to do something about it.

I believe this, but I also believe it is a bit easier not to feel pressured to solve it when they've a pay to increase option. To be clear I'm not saying he's laughing his way to the bank "these fools" sort of deal, I don't get the feeling he'd ever do that, but that if there was no option to improve inventory that they'd feel far more pressured to solve inventory related issues. So in that sense that you can pay for retainers allows SE to not treat it as seriously as if you couldn't, not that I think we're in dire inventory territory (unless you craft and like to keep materials on hand or hold glamour lol).

In that later part is where I'd say I hope retainers are not holding back glamour log potential, they're clearly working on it (and have said it's hard to increase) but I wonder if we couldn't buy retainers if we'd have had the glamour log sooner (to the scale you see in some other big MMOs) to solve what would have been a more pressing issue then. So yeah I believe his points/perspective and that he's not trying to milk us like suckers, but also think it sort of reduces the urgency of making changes dealing with inventory concepts. I'm vaguely aware of programming database stuff (low level classes, I'm not smart enough to make them lol), and not storing the info (always seemed to be the easier part of the problem xD), but having to deal with all of it in an organized no error yet fast manor always impresses me.

It's why I believe housing is such a huge problem for them since what they've set up they'd have to probably entirely redo if they were to make every player gets a world space type system (my dream, since I think these systems provide for great environment opportunities), that challenge doesn't quite stop me from wanting it though . Also why, as I believe it's a real hurdle, that I did suggest what I thought were more memory friendly options sometimes like the player owned airships, aether forge/library (far larger item/glamour log), or like using white and black listing with accessory slot glamours to add new "slots" to our characters (like bags, backpacks, glasses, etc).