Quote Originally Posted by Wolfie View Post
It's been 6 months since the game was released, and ~3 months since the new developer lead has come in, and the game's development still moving at a snail's pace.
The 3 months that the game was still under the old staff should be thrown out of any calculations. The 3 months since should be as well as they were still working on releasing content and changes promised by the old management of the team. Also they are laying groundwork items so that when they do release the massive content update they have planned it works and is balanced. There is no point in releasing a Dungeon they might have ready now if they will just be changing it all again in less then a month or two to accommodate the massive changes to the battle system.


Monster redesigns involved increased size, when most complaints were that they had boring designs.
I've not seen anyone say the monster designs were boring. Searching the forums I can't find any instances of "Monsters look boring" or any other mix of those words. I personally think the monsters look awesome the problem was you couldn't see the detail in the monsters because a lot of them were scaled so small.

Combat effect redesigns involved, again, increased size of the effects, when most complaints were that the effects were boring and too similar to one another.
The explaination of "Combat Effects were increased in size" doesn't mean they just drag and dropped the scale of the effect. A lot of them will probably prove to have been redrawn and enhanced. We will not know until they are released.

The devs are still investigating how to implement jump/AH, and their effects. Really? You can come up with a workable database schema for an AH in less than a day, and the queries and services to add or remove entries in less than an hour. Why is this taking so long?
They are not developing the AH, they most likely have one designed and built already. The problem is that the Market Wards ARE an AH in the simiplist terms you just don't put items up for Auction, instead its all buy it now with set prices. Time Delayed Auctions are boring and useless in MMO's. A few more tweaks to the responsiveness and ease of use for the Marketwards and an Auction house would be redundant and a waste of time to implement and I'd rather they spend that time on other features. Jumping is also dumb, But the problem is deciding how they want to implement it. Free Jumping is usually frowned upon by most of the Final Fantasy Fan Base because it doesn't reflect the Final Fantasy Series and it leaves a bad taste in some peoples mouth when you see people standing around gatherpoints like Aetherite and Levequest NPC's and just jump around out of boredom. The other options are an Emote, Implementing it as a Ability in combat (Dragoon Onry) or implementing a system like Zelda/FFXIII where its situational and automatic. Which is the option I support.


There have been NO new levequests introduced, and the side quests that were introduced are extremely basic, light on lore, and few in number. Is anyone even writing lore for this game?
There actually HAS been new levequests added since launch. And the Sidequest system was introduced in the last major patch and the quests implemented at that time were the simplest ones that had complete at that time. Yoshida said they would be adding more and more Side Quests with ever major patch which will include 1.17 (And possibly 1.17a) Now that the side quest system is in place (the foundation of the system) they can add new and more extravagant quests as they are ready.

Devs still investigating map collision for getting hung up on ledges?
If a user reports a map collision that prevents gameplay in an area it should be investigated.

Market Ward search is still elementary and not flexible. Seeking items is still extremely difficult to work with.
I can seek and find items in the Marketward in less then 10 minutes and be on my way to questing again. In the Auction house in XI sometimes it would take up to 30 minutes to do some shopping because of having to fight over the price. If an item is listed as the last time bought for 1k its reasonable to expect that the next one should be about that. But sometimes it isn't and you end up haggling with the AH for more time then you expected just to try and not get screwed.

Why does everything take so long? What's taking up all the dev's time?
An Earth Quake, a Tsunami, Multiple Sub Teams working on Multiple New and Changed Systems, having to produce reports on those changes, sync and compare them with all the other teams, Make sure the content meshes properly with everyone else changes. Then Testing. LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF TESTING. The biggest delay? Localization for 4 languages. Japanese, English, German and French. All 4 localization teams have to work together so that the same experience is presented to all players fairly and in the same way But makes sense in the native language. This takes MASSIVE amount of time and just Google Translating Does NOT do it. I'd just like to make an example of something. Do you think they just thought up the name "Marauder" for Axe Users? It wasn't just a random decision based on skills it uses. Its much much deep and most likely was the result of one localization crew member spending hours and hours of researching. The word Marauder is of Old French Origin. It was used to describe Frank warriors who raided the area that is now France. These warriors were known and feared for their weapon of choice which was named after them. The Francisca, a massive axe that was thrown blindly but caused great damage to large groups of clumped up soldiers. This connection seems very simple but to come to it took a lot of research. I know because I myself had to do it. Though I had the benefit of knowing the end result of the research and instead worked backwards it was still quite a bit of time researching.
The Fact of the matter is you should be treating it as if we are still in beta and the content is coming as its developed.
The problem is people keep expecting Expansion Pack levels of content every 2 weeks an NO development team can perform that kind of miracle. Theres a reason most MMO's do Major Content Updates three times a year with a major expansion every 1.5 to 2 years. It takes Time. And if you can't give them time then its obviously just not the game for you. Those of us who have faith will stay and will enjoy the content as it comes, like we have since XI first released naked. Valkurm Dunes one of the Signature Zones of XI didn't even exist until a year after it was released.