How is anyone fine with the 4-month patch delivery schedule?

[Shougun]

First off, they need to fix their manpower issues. The reason more difficult content gets put to the side or scrapped, for example, is stated as being due to how stretched thin their battle team is. Yoshida has talked about how stretched thin their resources are in general in the past many times. I think they are taking steps in the right direction with whatever they are doing with pvp, and I have heard that they are looking into more small scale content. I just want more stuff to do in general, and more - quality - things to strive for and collect.

No idea on their manpower thing, if I recall they said it's not money as much as it's people with the ability to do what they need. Which I'm curious what issue they have specifically, besides the Japanese language issue (barring basically almost all but the JPN forums lol), I assume they could easily just find people passionate about the game in their community. Wonder if it's a blizzard thing lol, "we only want people with many years experience, and we're going to pay you peanuts on a salary, and there will be loads and loads of overtime- please live with your parents".

These things are hard to tell, I don't really like playing on the money side of SE's issues because I just feel we can't really understand them. Anyway, while commenting on what I think I probably shouldn't, I personally imagine at least SE has the ability to acquire the talent to do what they want, just might be painful doing so (if money is an issue, that might mean paying more, if unique talent is an issue it might mean being willing to train- which is a huge problem in the US too "entry level, 10 years experience" lol). I've trained a lot of people and the main issue I tend to have is convincing management to pay people more once they get the hang of it, a lot of time in training and could be used better just.. making people feel better valued for their effort. Yet again I want to say I have no idea what goes on with SE, it could be they pay excellent with an amazing work value and there is some other issue, or maybe not- I literally don't know. There are so many wheels in the machine.

That isn't to say you can't have desires still, that's why my policy is to not be for or against their budget. It's not, imo, our position to calculate but rather to be honest and fair customers. Generally my posting policy is like- Don't mislead SE into making something you didn't actually want, or worse maliciously or jealously manipulate content on someone else that you've no interest in (which includes shutting down conversations, if you've naught to add then perhaps don't add anything), tell them why you want it too, don't push them to hate their jobs, but also that doesn't mean telling them every single thing is the most important work to ever grace the universe and anything they do is pixie dust gold (which is to say you're not obligated to 'eat it up', I think white knight is just as bad as 'dark' knighting- we should just be honest to SE and ourselves).

On the note of making them hate their jobs, maybe also make sure to occasionally talk about what you quite liked- because it's easy to remember negatives (besides just appreciating your work more, can also energize people to do better when they've got a mix of both "this was awesome! but this part wasn't my favorite"). There isn't really an image to have in these forums, and I assume the only one I'm famous for is insanely long posts, but one that is personally important to me is to just be honest about how you view things.. if I don't like something SE does I want talk openly and put effort to say how I feel, why, and perhaps to the best of my honest ability what I think would be like able (without expectation that will be copied), some effort given too especially as I actually believe they take feedback or... I have a pretty good guess record.

I am also excited for some of the PvP changes, and in general I think PvP gets more flak then it should (as someone who used to play A LOT of warsong gulch in WoW). You commented on difficult content, is that one of the things you're looking for? Like recently they announced they will have that dungeon of 1 to 4 players. We don't know much, but the name of it makes me think it might be a bit on the at least medium side of difficulty. As for quality, is it like really cool looking gear or valuable gear (maybe a slightly more horizontal approach to items?). Cause I mean we have loads of glamour like stuff, but maybe it isn't fancy looking or something. I'm just wondering what you're looking for specifically. Like if they added ocean fishing just now, is that a huge "meh" or is that a win? If it's not good would it because it was DoL, or because it's not updated enough?

It's not an easy suggestion, but I can imagine collectors of things having and absolutely insane amount of 'things to do' if they added the item log they scrapped due to technical impossibility long ago (basically the thousand+ slot glamour log, in catalog format, vaguely akin to WoW's).

For the DR comment you made to another, I often think they start this way because they have players who do play FFXIV as if it was their second (or first lol) job. . So for those players if they don't have quite grindy stuff they will finish like 3 days into any patch, no matter the size of it. For people who play A LOT on specific content grind is kind of the only successful wall to them (not that you should answer such an issue with just 'big grind' because even then those players would be annoyed, but it is certainly an important tool against those who are intending to play a content 15 hours a week and nearly only that content). I do highly appreciate and support that they 'roll the mountain of difficulty' though as those players move onto new content and so the much slower / spread out players can enjoy that old content more easily (nerfing drop rates/making things more accessible).