Please show us something!

[Quintessa]

You do realize the world is still in the middle of a major pandemic that has forced SE's staff to all work from home for the past few months like pretty much all major companies (and that they were having issues remotely accessing SE's internal networks used for content testing and development as part of that)?

Yoshi and his team are working as hard as they can to get 5.3 out as soon as possible under extreme circumstances, try to have a little understanding and patience.

I don't know anymore. In my country, everything has opened and people stopped caring about keeping a safe distance :/. People are forgetting about this and it's sad. Japan on the other hand can't pretend things are alright because it really isn't.

[Vidu]

I don't know anymore. In my country, everything has opened and people stopped caring about keeping a safe distance :/. People are forgetting about this and it's sad. Japan on the other hand can't pretend things are alright because it really isn't.

I think this might be part of the reason that people seem to be forgetting about this... in a lot of countries most restrictions are lifted again - shops are open, kids are going back to school, you can eat out again... sometimes its quite shokcing to see with how little precaution. I'm constantly seeing people not wearing masks correctly.

But specially in terms of the development of this game, it really doesnt matter wether or not the world looks like everything is back to normal again (and wether or not that goes for japan aswell). They still lost several weeks during the lockdown. The game isnt like those shops than can go back to their normal buisness again by just opening their doors... and sometimes it seems like people on the forum tend to forget that just because the pandemic looks to them as if its pretty much over (spoiler-alert: it isnt.) that doesnt mean that everything is just back on track. I would imagine that the dev-team is busy playing catch-up right now, trying to get as much lost time back as possible. And personally I rather have them working on developing the content instead of taking time away from that for making a trailer or a fancy 5.3-website.

[Frizze]

I think this might be part of the reason that people seem to be forgetting about this... in a lot of countries most restrictions are lifted again - shops are open, kids are going back to school, you can eat out again... sometimes its quite shokcing to see with how little precaution. I'm constantly seeing people not wearing masks correctly.

But specially in terms of the development of this game, it really doesnt matter wether or not the world looks like everything is back to normal again (and wether or not that goes for japan aswell). They still lost several weeks during the lockdown. The game isnt like those shops than can go back to their normal buisness again by just opening their doors... and sometimes it seems like people on the forum tend to forget that just because the pandemic looks to them as if its pretty much over (spoiler-alert: it isnt.) that doesnt mean that everything is just back on track. I would imagine that the dev-team is busy playing catch-up right now, trying to get as much lost time back as possible. And personally I rather have them working on developing the content instead of taking time away from that for making a trailer or a fancy 5.3-website.

While i agree 100% with almost everything you said, i do still want to see a fancy trailer and a patch promotional site. Any cutscenes or FMVs that might be in this patch should be completed by now, so the team that does those(and isnt directly related to content creation and vetting) is fine to be editing together a trailer. Ditto the website update team. Once the new items are logged into the Eorzean Database and the job guides are updated with any skill changes go ahead and crank out a patch site.

[Lauront]

I don't know anymore. In my country, everything has opened and people stopped caring about keeping a safe distance :/. People are forgetting about this and it's sad. Japan on the other hand can't pretend things are alright because it really isn't.

What's happening in Japan? Seems to be fine to me. They've scaled back their state of emergency too, which was advisory except for the government. There's a lot of focus on infection numbers (by and large asymptomatic) and localised flare ups (sometimes reported as "second waves"), but in terms of deaths, progress is being made, and we're also seeing lots of progress on the medical front, in terms of effective treatments. I'm not too surprised the lockdowns have lost credibility, though.

Anyway, most of the developed world is now scaling back the lockdown measures and they're poised to deliver an update soon, so of course excitement for 5.3 is building up. It's much nearer in sight.

"A lot of tech companies" doesnt mean that SE and specifically the FFXIV-dev-team had such a system in place - from all that we know: They didnt, at least not straight away. If you read the letter from the producer from June 4, you'll see that Yoshida talks about how at that point most of their staff had finished setting up their workstations at home, implicating that not everyone had yet and that it took them quite a while (-> https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/420143)
It doesnt matter if other tech companies had remote desktop lined up the week the pandemic became a huge issue. You can obviously take a stance of "But SE should have been able to just switch everyone to home office!", the fact remains that they didnt and couldnt - at least not for the FFXIV team.

The matter of fact is also that they eventually made working from home possible - but it took them a while. Ultimatly thats the reason that 5.3 wont get more delayed, though.

WFH is basically not as entrenched in Japan because of the smaller housing units there - but at least now SE have the infrastructure set up for it.

[Beardo04]

all work from home for the past few months like pretty much all major companies (and that they were having issues remotely accessing SE's internal networks used for content testing and development as part of that)?

i know it might be slow but remote desktop exists. Been using that and vpn since before this pandemic started. A lot of tech companies already had these system in place for wfh. Just saying..

[Vidu]

i know it might be slow but remote desktop exists. Been using that and vpn since before this pandemic started. A lot of tech companies already had these system in place for wfh. Just saying..

"A lot of tech companies" doesnt mean that SE and specifically the FFXIV-dev-team had such a system in place - from all that we know: They didnt, at least not straight away. If you read the letter from the producer from June 4, you'll see that Yoshida talks about how at that point most of their staff had finished setting up their workstations at home, implicating that not everyone had yet and that it took them quite a while (-> https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/420143)
It doesnt matter if other tech companies had remote desktop lined up the week the pandemic became a huge issue. You can obviously take a stance of "But SE should have been able to just switch everyone to home office!", the fact remains that they didnt and couldnt - at least not for the FFXIV team.

The matter of fact is also that they eventually made working from home possible - but it took them a while. Ultimatly thats the reason that 5.3 wont get more delayed, though.

[Beardo04]

"A lot of tech companies" doesnt mean that SE and specifically the FFXIV-dev-team had such a system in place - from all that we know: They didnt, at least not straight away. If you read the letter from the producer from June 4, you'll see that Yoshida talks about how at that point most of their staff had finished setting up their workstations at home, implicating that not everyone had yet and that it took them quite a while (-> https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/420143)
It doesnt matter if other tech companies had remote desktop lined up the week the pandemic became a huge issue. You can obviously take a stance of "But SE should have been able to just switch everyone to home office!", the fact remains that they didnt and couldnt - at least not for the FFXIV team.

The matter of fact is also that they eventually made working from home possible - but it took them a while. Ultimatly thats the reason that 5.3 wont get more delayed, though.

Oh no worries I did watch and read the letter. I know about the assets reloading issue where it would take multiple hours just to recompile the assets and what not locally.. That's why I mentioned remote desktop. That way you don't have to do that stuff locally but on the same pc they had at work.

[TAS]

You do realize the world is still in the middle of a major pandemic that has forced SE's staff to all work from home for the past few months like pretty much all major companies (and that they were having issues remotely accessing SE's internal networks used for content testing and development as part of that)?

Yoshi and his team are working as hard as they can to get 5.3 out as soon as possible under extreme circumstances, try to have a little understanding and patience.

And you do realize it was a request, not a demand? Right? Get over yourself...

I know the team is working really hard under their current limitations. But there's no harm in asking for a peek either.

[Aldora]

And you do realize it was a request, not a demand? Right? Get over yourself...

I know the team is working really hard under their current limitations. But there's no harm in asking for a peek either.

Of course there's no harm in asking for a peek into the future content. We all want to see more about whats coming in the next update. But, ending a sentence with an exclamation mark indicates that the sentence is a demand, urgent request or a statement, not a question or a friendly request. This is mainly the reason why Enkidoh reacted the way she did.

I would reply the same way.

Because it's written text (rather then verbal communication), proper punctuation (or interpunction) is necessary to give the reader the right idea of the intention behind the text. Mostly because we can't hear / see the emotion behind it. This is also why there are so many miscommunications through written text like the in-game chat, where players fly at each others throats just because of 1 sentence (and why trolling works so well on forums). The "Tales of the Duty Finder"-thread is a good example of that.

[KageTokage]

I reckon we'll probably get an update to the Shadowbringers website and the 5.3 patch trailer after the director's letter is posted as they confirmed we're not getting another live letter before the patch release this time.