It's past time to expand the dev team

[Equitable_Remedy]

It's past time to expand the dev team

What's interesting to me about this is that I'm assuming that you don't know how big the dev team is now nor do you have any idea of how big you think it should be.

[anhaato]

What's interesting to me about this is that I'm assuming that you don't know how big the dev team is now nor do you have any idea of how big you think it should be.

You're right I don't know everything but at the very least I do know that the only reason we got male viera was because the design team voluntarily overworked themselves to get it done, and I would rather not have that happen. Obviously they understand the importance of answering fan demands, but it shouldn't be done at the potential expense of their health. Am I required to give an exact number to have the right to say "hey maybe the design team shouldn't be juggling as many tasks as they are" or "hey maybe they shouldn't be relying on single digit numbers of people for balancing certain content" or comment on any other issues we know exist with the workload? I realize I can't offer much from my point of view considering I don't fully understand the situation, but I still believe it's worth discussing.

[Sove92]

The premise of this thread is already wrong. BD3 is hiring right now, and has been for years (including the time it was under a different name).

[NanaWiloh]

Yoshi p did say they were getting a budget increase for the game. But did not mention if any of that would be used to hire more staff. Guess its a wait and see what they do..

[Asari5]

there could already be more people. they might work on recoding the entire game..... hey, i can hope, cant i?

[KageTokage]

I mostly wish they'd hire a proper moderation team to monitor servers/DCs individually instead of trying to offload that burden onto their tiny four man STF team.

Or better yet just make better use of the team that's already there and give the GMs something else to do because I doubt actual cases of harassment are common enough that they wouldn't have significant amounts of time to be screening for cheaters.

[Catwho]

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 each other's tasks and step on each other's toes.
3. It takes time to train them.

This. This this this.

I went to school to work on software projects, not as a developer, but as part of the other bits of the team. I'm currently a business analyst for a medical software company. When I was taking my project management class, we had Brook's Law pounded into our heads: "Adding manpower to a late project will make it later."

Previously, Yoshi P said the limiting factor wasn't money, but simply the availability of high quality programmers. SE has been burned a lot in the last decade because they tried outsourcing projects to other companies in China and Korea, who over promised and under delivered, and they could not provide the quality of work on the timetable they were expected.

Since then, SE has made the decision to try to in-house as much as they can, and form more permanent partnerships with the handful of good companies they've identified to handle the region specific aspects of FFXIV for those localized releases.

There are a finite number of good programmers available, let alone ones that speak fluent Japanese. (Small aside: did you know FF1-3 were actually programmed by an Iranian-American dude by the name of Nasir Gebelli?) Despite the number of comp sci majors being churned out by major universities, and the extreme desirability of working for a company like Square Enix, their standards are very high and they need someone who is known as a "10x programmer" as opposed to a generic web dev monkey like most so-called programmers actually are. The one person I know who is successful in the game development space got a master's degree in AI and now does some insane high level math with Naughty Dog for Sony's ICE unit. Dude is BRILLIANT.

10x programmers usually are home grown, however, and they get to that point by marinating in a system long enough to learn it inside and out. I'm extremely fortunate that I've got four of them on my team at work - but only one of them was a hire fresh out of school; the other three have been doing this for decades, and that's why they're so good at it.

At this point, SE's best bet is to have a couple hundred new hires, let them hang around for a few years, and hope that a dozen or so turn out to be good programmers. The guy who originally programmed the FATEs for ARR (yes, one guy) was one such hire, and he's since been promoted to be a more general battle programmer.

[Lieri]

Thats right. Hire me SE.

[StriderShinryu]

The premise of this thread is already wrong. BD3 is hiring right now, and has been for years (including the time it was under a different name).

Bingo. On top of the onboarding issues and budget issues already raised in this topic, there's the simple issue of just finding good new staff in the first place. SE could bump the budget by millions tomorrow and someone could invent an instant training capsule so that onboarding wasn't a thing but that still wouldn't mean that capable, quality new staff will instantly appear out of nowhere. I agree that the team for FF14 absolutely should be given more resources, but in terms of money and people, but it's nowhere near as simple as just "hire more people dummy."

[Imoye]

At this point, SE's best bet is to have a couple hundred new hires, let them hang around for a few years, and hope that a dozen or so turn out to be good programmers. The guy who originally programmed the FATEs for ARR (yes, one guy) was one such hire, and he's since been promoted to be a more general battle programmer.

This is very true. People don't realize you can't just hire any dev. Most of these people are monkeys churned out of unis where creativity isn't allowed. Why do you think WoW is hot garbage these days? It's because the majority of the dev team are mass-produced monkeys with no creative skill that can program outside of the box.