LOLPATCH 1.16a

[Abriael]

Think about it logically?

We're not just thinking about it logically. You could have notice since quite a while that we talk out of experience.

What do they need to do? People could say the class system needs a fundamental redesign, why is that? Its not unique and stats are broken. Okay so how hard is it to fix this? Well not really, you people have provided their ideas and non of them say "delete everything you have and start over". Stats would be algorithm changes which is not hard its math and in mmo its simple math. There is also the concept of: You've done it before!

This is a very, very big oversimplification. Aside from the fact that there are quite a few people that said exactly "delete everything, you have to start over", but hopefully those are being ignored.
Balancing a MMORPG is an extremely complex piece of work that will *never* end. MMORPGs that have been out for several years are still in the process, and I actually don't know a major MMORPG in which the developer has actually reached a level even near perfection.
Balancing a MMO is basically like playing Jenga. If you move a block, that move will have an impact on the nearby blocks, and those will impact on every other block, and moving the wrong block can easily collapse the whole tower. The interlocked dynamics are normally a nightmare, and even more so in a system in which flexibility is one of the major areas of interest. If you unbalance a class, you unbalance them all.
That's why every single change needs not only to be devised and implemented, but also to be tested internally in a wide variety of situations, and it will possibly go back to the drawing board multiple times as issues are noticed and eliminated. Some times it will simply be scrapped, because the issues it creates, despite the fact that it sounded good on paper, are too big to bother.
Internal testing isn't even foolproof, by the way, because internal testing very rarely survives to the ingenuity of a larger playerbase (how FFXI players turned Ninja in a rather unbalanced tank is an example), and that's why now they're consider to add even a public test server, to make the testing system more foolproof.

Implementing a change is already much harder than you seem to think, and it's only the first step of the whole process.

And your second message makes no sense because once you have a setup then implimenting systems, content and tweaking should not be a time consuming approach, especially when you have a team over a 100. Other studio do it fine, and the whole "they dont state it in the start of the cycle" i dont even get what you're trying to say here, it has nothing to do with what im talking about.

His message makes a lot of sense. A team of "over 100" (you actually don't know the numbers of the FFXIV team, mind you, not every single person at SE is working on FFXIV), needs to be split into a massive amount of areas, which are split into a quite large amount of tasks.
Even simply creating ONE new piece of equipment requires the following:
-concept design
-Modeling
-Mapping (both texture mapping and normal mapping)
-Texturing
-Tweaking to every single body or head type
-retweaking of textures and maps to avoid stretching and blurring with different body types
-Optimization of the polygonal model to reduce hardware load
-Creation of the stats
-Creation of the recipe
-Testing in several different situations, with all the classes involved
-Possible debugging

This will incolve:Art director, concept designer, 3D artist, texture artist, a possible separate one for mapping, coder, combat lead/team, crating lead/team, the QA team for testing, and everyone may be involved again for debugging when issues are found.

Game development is a much, much more complex process than the uninitiated would think, and game development on MMORPGs and prominently online environment is twice as complex.

SE are just bad developers and extremely slow, its notoriously known and not just on MMO's.

It's an extremely bad idea to judge professional figures that you have no experience about.

"other studios do just fine" is exactly what I said before, an educated guess based on lack of experience. Different games have different situations, levels of detail and levels of content, even different procedures. You bring up tera a lot, but Tera's content is based on MUCH simpler models and a much simpler system. It's no doubt that designing a piece of equipment ((or any kind of content) for Tera takes a lot less than doing the same for Final Fantasy XIV, simply because the level of detail is on another planet.

If "anyone in college" could do it, there wouldn't be a massive percentage of unemployment between people coming out even from specific software development schools.


if my claims were so "wrong", you'd have arguments to counter them, instead of exclusively resorting to personal attacks to try and belittle them.