Step It Up A Notch

[Nharil]

People don't get into game development to be lazy, they do it because you love it and have a passion for what they're doing. We work upwards of 70 hour work weeks and generally aren't phased by it. I can't really speak for Japanese game dev practices, but if they're anything like western studios then they are doing everything in their power to get the systems reworked as fast as they possibly can. If there is one industry out there that is, well, industrious, it's game developers.

Yoshida went on record explaining how the internal development teams work, and they are tackling about a dozen issues simultaneously. We're not talking content here, we're talking getting the game up-to-speed to what it should have been on its (failed) launch. They're rebuilding the game with code that mostly wasn't theirs to start with and MMOs are a tangled messy nightmare web to work through. You change one thing and it can easily affect a dozen other seemingly unrelated systems.

Also, look at S-E's track record with XI. Once they got their systems under control (XI went through the same sort of issues early on before the US/EU release), they started cranking out content like nobody's business. XI has more fun, interesting, RELEVANT content now than most other MMORPGs on the market today. We're not seeing big content updates because they aren't able to focus on it right now - they need to make the game work before they can put things in it, and overhauling big systems is a much more daunting task than just implementing new armor and new zones in an already-functioning system.

Your complaints are definitely valid and it's a shame on both of our ends that we have to go through this limp-along phase in the game's progression, but they're still picking up the pieces of a flopped launch. It's going to feel like this for the next while, so get comfy until the reworked systems get up and running. People are going to come and go with the game -- myself included -- while they continue to reboot the game. Take a break and check back in a few months if this is really bothering you enough to make a public note about it