How much effort is it to create 1 simple fetch Quest?

[Heroman3003]

Quests like the seasonal quests are usually done in the interim of working on other content, more important and are basically filler. But what you fail to account for in your estimation of effort is a critical thing - every step is easy for one person's work, but this isn't one person's work. Each of steps is worked on by different people in different departments. Now add all the time of stuff being shared back and forth over multiple days to coordinate, idea being settled and confirmed by leads, even smallest errors taking time to fix due to need to go back and forth yet again, etc etc. Ironically, when it comes to incredibly small things, corporate development team structure is a lot slower than solo indie devs at doing it, purely because of separation of duties and paper trails. So yeah, the amount of work going into it? Less than a week, definitely. The amount of time it takes between each step as things get coordinated? Definitely adds up to just as much if not more time.

[dspguy]

But what you fail to account for in your estimation of effort is a critical thing - every step is easy for one person's work, but this isn't one person's work. Each of steps is worked on by different people in different departments.

Can't emphasize this enough. While I don't work for SE, I can't imagine development is that different from the bigger picture.

There's the "story and lore" department. How does this fit into Eorzea? Do they tie in pre-existing characters? Do we need to make a new character? What are they like?

There's the art department - new items, new characters, new zone(?), new decorations, even the new thumbnails of the items. New emotes?

Then there's actually translating the lore, art (and other stuff I left out) into the actual code executed both server side and client side.

I'm also leaving out all the infrastructure that it took to even make all of that happen. While they did have to write their own engine for much of how this is done (and that work is already done), whatever that infrastructure is dictates how the half dozen departments probably have to work together to get a "simple 10 minute quest" live in the game.