It's past time to expand the dev team

[Kaedys]

To be honest, the thing I think would take the most investment, but provide the most long-term mileage, would be to devote a sector of their engineering staff to unwinding all that 1.0 spaghetti code. It's not an easy thing to do. I've spent 3+ years already at my current job trying to do something similar with a codebase perhaps 1% as large. But there are so many serious improvements they could make to this game that are more or less hard-blocked by legacy code and decade-old server design. The fact that they had to wipe the partial level XP for jobs with the XP scaling changes in EW is a good example. They said they would have had to take the servers down for weeks to do it without wiping those records. That's a really big red flag in how they have their persistence system set up.

That's not to blame them for it. 1.0 played rather fast and loose with development, and the majority of what came after was either frenetic recovery efforts towards the game as a whole, or trying to keep up with content without breaking the house of cards they somehow managed to balance on all of that 1.0 broken glass. The devs have done admirably with the hand they've had to play. But I think they'd gain an immense amount of mileage, as far as unlocking and streamlining further development, by trying to unwind some of that and get better, more stable, more maintainable and extensible foundations in place. That's especially the case given the massive boom the game has seen lately, the corresponding strain on the game's infrastructure, and the raw flaws that has exposed at times.

The 2002 error punting you out of queue at EW launch was a brilliant example of this, actually. The way the client used to be configured, every 15 minutes you were in the queue, it would drop and reopen the connection to the server. The server would treat this as a new connection, the same as someone hitting "play" from the main menu, and would throttle those connections based on the capacity of the server, rejecting a portion of them to keep the servers from becoming overloaded. And then the client wouldn't retry, if the server rejected its connection, it would simply die. But it wouldn't even die immediately. Despite knowing essentially instantly if the connection would succeed, it would wait 20-30s to tell the user. And then users were only given ~60s to reconnect to the server or lose their place in line (and that 60s includes the 20-30 the client just sat on the failure before telling the user about it).

Nearly all of that is somewhere north of "questionable" from a network and application design and robustness perspective, but it never mattered until now, because the server had never be placed under such strain that it had to start blocking connections to save itself from overload. There's a lot of ground to be gained here, even if it's not "hey, look, a new raid!"

[Hasrat]

Optimistically, kinda hoped, after they had to suspend sales, that the team would have a good bargaining chip for increasing budget. "Look, we're getting so popular we literally had to force ourselves to stop making money. Maybe we start spending a little more on the team so we don't have to do that again."

[Haventale]

Preeeetttyyy sure they’re using the money made from this game to fund:
- a different single player FF game
- an endless remaking of a decade plus year old game, because I guess we can’t have new things
- and disney hearts XXXIIV or whatever.

In all honesty though, SE just milks FFXIV for all it’s worth to fund the rest of their games, rather than letting those other games stand on their own merits. This game is keeping the whole company afloat and it’s extremely annoying that they won’t put the resources we give them back into… the product we are putting our resources into? So, ya, I guess a bigger dev team couldn’t hurt. I’m cautiously optimistic for some good news with this upcoming live stream though.

[sharknado]

Optimistically, kinda hoped, after they had to suspend sales, that the team would have a good bargaining chip for increasing budget. "Look, we're getting so popular we literally had to force ourselves to stop making money. Maybe we start spending a little more on the team so we don't have to do that again."

WoW team grew a lot duing early WoD and prior to that. Onboarding slowed them to a point of scrapping subsequent expansion patches. Aside of later mismanagement and poor working conditions they had problems making content at a good pace even when they had more people. If SE will want to hire locally then it will be hard to get more in as there is constant lack of skilled developers. They could start training juniors but it will take time. If they open a "studio" in a new region it's also will take time - and likely the plan will be to contain SE projects to specific studio location as team work on one MMO between people in multiple timezones and cultures may be difficult. Blizzard is still hiring for on-site work for all of their projects. Non-game-dev market during Covid went to remote work and stayed there for the most part benefiting from world wide hiring pool.

[zabu]

Optimistically, kinda hoped, after they had to suspend sales, that the team would have a good bargaining chip for increasing budget. "Look, we're getting so popular we literally had to force ourselves to stop making money. Maybe we start spending a little more on the team so we don't have to do that again."

Do not forget that suspend sales is due to EW drop which cause the population gain, it is temporary. but in reality , there are not that many people playing the game compare with patch drop. You can literally see how many people in Radz and old sharlayan now. So many people stop subscribe after MsQ is over, that is not something SE wants from business standpoint. another thing is There are a big part of income is coming from RP community not subscription.

[Jeeqbit]

1. They are already expanding the team. The credits grow in size with each expansion and development blogs talk of training people.
2. Expanding a team too much results in diminishing returns. They all try to work on eachother's tasks and step on eachother's toes.
3. It takes time to train them.

[Saraide]

Why hire more people when they can just press the "make fun content" button. Lazy devs these days I swear to god...

[anhaato]

Then you need more content creators and not developers. And yes, some content needs more love like PvP. Or they could overhaul the current content with sharper textures and better shaders etc.


cheers

I use “devs” as a catch-all to refer to everyone involved in the production of the game, not just programmers. This is the point I was making, yes.

[anhaato]

tbh "dev team" is more than just programmer. there's voice actors, artists, 3D modelers, animators, advertisement, social media management, and like 500 people whose job is basically just tataru.

do we need more coders? probably not. more concept artists? no. but we definitely could use some 3d modelers to come in and fix a bunch of jank and we could use voice actors and have certain animations either fixed, improved or even added.

Exactly what I meant to say, thank you. Like, the whole reason DWU got cut from 5.5 from the pandemic was because there were only precisely 8 people in their playtesting team capable of balancing ultimates. Though I actually disagree with your point about concept artists, I think they do need more of those for stuff like gear so they can stop relying on fan-submitted designs from the contests which was happening between SB and SHB, and is about to happen again with the weapon designs. Would also give them the opportunity to give better customization options. But the point is I'm not talking about just coders, I mean playtesters for better high end content, 3d modelers to put some damn hats on Viera and Hroths, animators for higher quality cutscenes (which is already being achieved), the list goes on and on.

And like I said, they’re already making some big promises, so I really really hope they’re already starting to do this to ensure they can follow through with them.

[Illmaeran]

Yeah I am that much of a nerd that I just quoted Spock. Life goals and such and such. LOL.

I am, and always will be, your fan.