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

[tinythinker]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...-proofing-mmos

Fairly thin on new information, but we might see some of the first updates to ARR coming as soon 5.3

Didn't think we'd see anything at all so soon, but it will be a gradual process

[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).

[Shori]

We'd probably need to make some drastic changes to the game where there are text chats, but people are using voice chat...

Why are they assuming only under 30s want this? I've been an online gamer for 20 years and dont remember a tiem where voice chat hasnt been possible in some form.
Until recently, teampseak or discord have filled that gap, however with Discord now begging for cash just to make a simple voice call understandable in call quality we really need to move away from these apps.

[VenKitsune]

Why are they assuming only under 30s want this? I've been an online gamer for 20 years and dont remember a tiem where voice chat hasnt been possible in some form.
Until recently, teampseak or discord have filled that gap, however with Discord now begging for cash just to make a simple voice call understandable in call quality we really need to move away from these apps.

Wait...What?

Lanline phone - Phone bill
Mobile phone - Contract/Pay as you go.
VoIP (Discord, Teamspeak, Skype) - Free to install. Teamspeak requires you to pay for servers, But Skype and Discord are free at a base level. You cant expect everything for free...And these kind of aps are DEDICATED VoIP, not the horrible ingame voip you've always gotten.

[He-Saiyan]

If there was a true solo job, they could creatively make it as OP as they wanted. The job would not be grouping with others, so they could just let their creativity run wild. I would personally enjoy a job that was not about balance, not about grouping, but about being fun, just running wild, being a beast, no restrictions.

Balance is difficult; it is the the virtual world's version of equality.

[Vnolan]

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.

I don't understand. If someone pays the money for it, they can access additional retainers and a second page in the saddlebag. If they don't pay that money, they can't access it. How does that fact work with his statement? What would happen if tens of thousands of customers maxed out retainers?

[MrKusakabe]

Wait...What?

Lanline phone - Phone bill

My landline is a flatrate built-in into my internet contract. I think it was 3,99€ stand-alone, but then it faces technical and contractual problems (roaming / ownership of the phone lines troughout my country etc.) VOIP does not. Discord is really poor and me and my cousin often have to re-connect several times because it's inaudible. That means, in fact, that 0% of the calls are properly established. That is not just "asking for a bit of money", that is basically acting like a phone company. "Want calls, pay us", despite there are ads - at least I look at random games that I don't play, I see League of Legends ads, and Minecraft ads,... A VOIP call cost maybe like 5 Cent/hour, and I am sure those ads cover it by far, especially since I am on Discord like daily but do only call once a week.

People need to stop over-estimate the cost of things. FFXIV also does not need 10€/month for "servers" and "support staff". It's just moneygrabbing. We pay full-price for the game that should contain everything upcoming, then we pay monthly and then again for the expansion packs. We do we pay for milestones when we pay the milage already? Discord is the same: Daily ads for poor, low-bandwidth calls and still they want money. My landline is more reliable and cheaper after all, and that should not be the case that landline wins over VoIP cost-wise.

[MitsukiKimura]

My landline is a flatrate built-in into my internet contract. I think it was 3,99€ stand-alone, but then it faces technical and contractual problems (roaming / ownership of the phone lines troughout my country etc.) VOIP does not. Discord is really poor and me and my cousin often have to re-connect several times because it's inaudible. That means, in fact, that 0% of the calls are properly established. That is not just "asking for a bit of money", that is basically acting like a phone company. "Want calls, pay us", despite there are ads - at least I look at random games that I don't play, I see League of Legends ads, and Minecraft ads,... A VOIP call cost maybe like 5 Cent/hour, and I am sure those ads cover it by far, especially since I am on Discord like daily but do only call once a week.

People need to stop over-estimate the cost of things. FFXIV also does not need 10€/month for "servers" and "support staff". It's just moneygrabbing. We pay full-price for the game that should contain everything upcoming, then we pay monthly and then again for the expansion packs

So tell me in what world do you live in that the devs should just create so much content on their time to bring these expansions that you should get for free? Running the servers isn't a free service that you should get either. You want to play on their servers? Pay the sub fee. Also tell me who's going to address any trouble shooting if people encounter problems? You want them to work for free also? No I don't think you're that cheap, or at least I hope you aren't. $12 for a sub without any tax added on it is not asking much. They even gave Heavensward expansion for free for a limited time. I think they're generous in my opinion.

[linay]

I don't understand. If someone pays the money for it, they can access additional retainers and a second page in the saddlebag. If they don't pay that money, they can't access it. How does that fact work with his statement? What would happen if tens of thousands of customers maxed out retainers?

The context of that statement is he's talking about the inventory space that you take with you and you can freely access, not your retainer's inventory or the saddlebag that have limited access locations. Even then, SE has increased the inventory space in the past, if I recall correctly.

Also, if it's just about the money, then they can increase the retainer/saddlebag space even more. The fact that even the extra retainer/saddlebag space is still limited while behind paywall means they also don't want everyone to just gain access to the extra storage.

People need to stop over-estimate the cost of things. FFXIV also does not need 10€/month for "servers" and "support staff". It's just moneygrabbing. We pay full-price for the game that should contain everything upcoming, then we pay monthly and then again for the expansion packs. We do we pay for milestones when we pay the milage already?

If you feel this way, you can do like what some players claim they do: subscribe for only a part of the expansion, typically at the beginning and/or end of the expansion, and just pay for each expansion and whatever time it takes to consume whatever content you want.

You're probably right that SE may not need what it charges for the product and service, but that's why SE is categorized as a for-profit company. If you feel the product is being overcharged, feel free not to consume the product or to limit your consumption of it.

[HyoMinPark]

Why are they assuming only under 30s want this? I've been an online gamer for 20 years and dont remember a tiem where voice chat hasnt been possible in some form.
Until recently, teampseak or discord have filled that gap, however with Discord now begging for cash just to make a simple voice call understandable in call quality we really need to move away from these apps.

I don’t pay Discord a dime and haven’t noticed any issues in call quality. The only time when it starts acting up is when my Internet is acting up at the same time—so it’s likely my net that is the issue. So, what is this in reference to exactly?