The Virtue needed.

[Randis]

Its been 6 years since they started this project. How long do you think something like this should take?

cosmetic changes and beautification should be rather fast but coding for such a game can take a very long time, especially if some programmers are replaced and the documentation is poor (i don't think it is, such amateur mistakes would rather surprise me as SE has a lot of exp).
With a larger team some things can be done faster, some however slower. every change needs to be discussed, assigned to the corresponding people, developed and then tested both on PC and PS3. everything must be designed so it would run on PS3, development of a MMO RPG for multiple platforms is more complex than PC only.
End-user can only speculate, nothing more. Only the programmer can estimate the time they will need for coding and then you have to add the time for testing, fixing, testing and so on

[TonyMontana]

cosmetic changes and beautification should be rather fast but coding for such a game can take a very long time, especially if some programmers are replaced and the documentation is poor (i don't think it is, such amateur mistakes would rather surprise me as SE has a lot of exp).
With a larger team some things can be done faster, some however slower. every change needs to be discussed, assigned to the corresponding people, developed and then tested both on PC and PS3. everything must be designed so it would run on PS3, development of a MMO RPG for multiple platforms is more complex than PC only.
End-user can only speculate, nothing more. Only the programmer can estimate the time they will need for coding and then you have to add the time for testing, fixing, testing and so on

Fair enough.

My next question is should a huge company like SE be selling us a game that still has 6 months(from Sept 30th till now) or more of development left before most would consider it beta worthy?

[Randis]

Fair enough.

My next question is should a huge company like SE be selling us a game that still has 6 months(from Sept 30th till now) or more of development left before most would consider it beta worthy?

We can only speculate why they have released it. It may be a lack of budget for this project, bad management or simply a very bad judgement. Or if the development of this game mainly or partially really was conducted by some 3th party instead of a SE studio, that might explain some quality issues of this product.

But i am very sure that they did NOT release knowing that the result would be that bad. Something went very wrong obviously but SE is taking measures and it is in their own interest to make this game as good as possible because they surely would want to generate a fine revenue some day.

Also you need to know that the production, packaging and logistics take a lot of time as well. As you see the game was released in various countries, that means that the game went gold long before the release dates, probably already during the beta. Things that were tested in the beta were probably supposed to be fixed with a patch. IMO, beta was post the RC. That als would explain the lack of concern and acknowledgements of issues addressed in the open beta by players because the finished game already went in production.

FFXIV sure has a bad and tough start but if they work fast enough and get support from the audience then they will have all reason to keep working on it.
Abandoning the game may result in the opposite, if no one plays it then the board may not see a reason to put much funding in it, team will shrink and development would be very slow.

We can only speculate as we have no insights.