The Graphics update was unnecessary

[Taliriah]

I just wonder how much of the dev time was wasted on something that doesn't really improve the game when all that time developing a new lighting engine could have been spent on better mechanics for play or more importantly imo fixing the garbage movement in the game so you character actually collides with terrain instead of sliding along the ground plane, that's probably the biggest barrier to entry for alot of new players.

Game developers are specialized. The graphics programmers who worked on improving the lighting would not have otherwise worked on gameplay features, because that's the job of gameplay programmers.

The graphics update was needed. Not only because quite a few aspects of the game were starting to look dated, but also because those flaws (such as the lack of subsurface scattering) made characters a lot uglier than necessary, and in FFXIV people are really connected with their character. The changes to characters are objectively minor. Of course when you are used to things being one way, flaws and all, upgrades bring a feeling of unfamiliarity that can be unsettling, but it will pass a lot quicker than people think, and character that look better are simply better in the long term, regardless of whatever temporary subjective misgivings people may have.

The people who complain should ask themselves this: if they didn't play the game before the graphics update, how would they feel about the characters appearance?

Another reason the graphics update was necessary is because at some point it can become really bad for your technology to stay behind the times. It means that new people you hire may not know how to work with it (unfamiliarity with old, deprecated methods), it means people are starting to get worried that their skills are not up to date with the industry, etc. I think Yoshi-P explained this.

[Malthir]

Game developers are specialized. The graphics programmers who worked on improving the lighting would not have otherwise worked on gameplay features, because that's the job of gameplay programmers.
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The work required to create a new lighting and shading solution inside the engine would 100% be the exact same devs that would be working on a movement system. The role is usually called Engine Developer or Engine Programmer but realistically in tech every company changes the titles slightly. But again it's not just about those specific Devs.
Ultimately though my point is not just about the sucky movement in the game.

For an MMO in order of importance:
Setting and Art Style
Core Gameplay Loop
Movement and combat
UI design
Story
Community
Graphics quality

I was initially using movement as an example, but if I was going to tier list the high priority issues in the game, the more important barrier for new players is the new player experience being awful, if you were going to play this game and your particular class fantasy is say a Samurai, only to be told O you will have to go through 3 expacs, about 100 hours of play time, as a class you don't want to play before you can play the class you want to play. You would probably just bail on playing. From their you need to look at the server tick rate being crap, and the movement system. Then the overall reduction in mechanics the games gone through in the past couple expacs, what I mean by this is you used to play with your mechanics alongside your standard rotation, now they are merging more and more the mech into your rotation to fit into the 2m burst window which is favoured by people who want to do world firsts, that's the largest gameplay issue they have. At the bottom of that list is HD and graphic overhaul.

Think about it this way, if you ordered a burger and it looked great on the plate but when you it bit into it, the cheese hadn't fully melted in places and their were bits of gristle and bone in the meat, you wouldn't care how good the burger looks.
Where as if the burger looked ok not terrible but not great, but when you bit into it, it tasted great you wouldn't give a crap what it looks like on the plate.

It's not that graphics don't matter but the game has some serious gaping holes in it especially when it comes to being able to add new features and gain new players that updating the graphics wont solve.

Adding new classes that feed into the other jobs and letting all jobs unlock from level 30, with new low level story quests made for said jobs, fixing the terrible tick rate and making it so movement is collision based would allow for alot of future development with new features

[Taliriah]

The work required to create a new lighting and shading solution inside the engine would 100% be the exact same devs that would be working on a movement system. The role is usually called Engine Developer or Engine Programmer but realistically in tech every company changes the titles slightly. But again it's not just about those specific Devs.

Sorry, in AAA games, rendering engine programmer and game engine programmer are usually different roles, because it's very different specializations. And a movement system tends to be more on the gameplay programmers side on things than on the game engine programmers side.

For an MMO in order of importance:
Setting and Art Style
Core Gameplay Loop
Movement and combat
UI design
Story
Community
Graphics quality

That's extremely subjective. For example, in the case of FFXIV I'd put Story at the top, because if the story wasn't good I'd have zero reason to bother with this game in the first place.

I was initially using movement as an example, but if I was going to tier list the high priority issues in the game, the more important barrier for new players is the new player experience being awful, if you were going to play this game and your particular class fantasy is say a Samurai, only to be told O you will have to go through 3 expacs, about 100 hours of play time, as a class you don't want to play before you can play the class you want to play. You would probably just bail on playing. From their you need to look at the server tick rate being crap, and the movement system. Then the overall reduction in mechanics the games gone through in the past couple expacs, what I mean by this is you used to play with your mechanics alongside your standard rotation, now they are merging more and more the mech into your rotation to fit into the 2m burst window which is favoured by people who want to do world firsts, that's the largest gameplay issue they have. At the bottom of that list is HD and graphic overhaul.

You're talking about network programming and game engine programming. Rendering engine programmers aren't going to be doing any of that, not on a AAA game, where you have dozens of programmers on a project and a high degree of specialization. I agree that the netcode is bad, but I don't care because the PvP is also awfully badly designed and micro optimizing a pve dps rotation doesn't interest me, so as far as I'm concerned the game's combat loop is abysmal from a design point of view anyway. It would require a complete change of philosophy before improving the netcode would be meaningful. And none of that has anything to do with upgrading the graphics. None of the same people would be involved in any of this.

[Malthir]

That's extremely subjective. For example, in the case of FFXIV I'd put Story at the top, because if the story wasn't good I'd have zero reason to bother with this game in the first place.

It's not subjective, my statement was for MMO's as a whole and not ff14. The reason being is, you already know the FF14 story was good. However a new player doesn't, they've heard things but their experience is coming in blind which is why you can look at the generic MMO's features list.
The first thing a consumer is going to notice is the art style and theme, what I mean by this is some people cannot stomach anime style games so they would be uninterested in the art of some games, those that like that style or don't mind it will give it ago, from there the first thing they will notice is picking classes and the core gameplay loop.
The next thing they will encounter is UI, movement and combat if these are bad they will stop playing.

So what I'm talking about is not about personal preference, some people put more weight on one thing or another, however FF14 has serious issues in the core gameplay, movement, combat and UI all of which could have been done instead of the graphical update. Generally speaking graphics is the least important thing to most players, hence Runescape's popularity.

I wont talk about the discussion of job roles on the Dev team because honestly we don't know their setup. I'll go out on a limb both of us have either tech or games experience so we're disagreeing based on what we've seen in industry, and I think we can agree that few people end up wearing many hats. Ultimately the budget of an expansion is the budget, they chose to spend that budget on dev hours for a graphic update instead of using the budget for technical enhancements that would improve gameplay. I personally believe this is a mistake which is why I said in the beginning, I actually like the changes. However I don't think they offer value to the game as a whole. Generally, we all play pretty zoomed out, which makes a large portion of the changes unnoticeable. There are many more issues with the game that put potential players off and generally most of them are about movement and responsiveness, also the early player experience being bad.