Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XXVI

[Stef]

How is it that designing an endgame (<---this part is important) system that does not punish you for having more than or less than exactly 8 people would "leave the majority of the community stranded"?

How is it that designing a "hard" mode of FC-only content that requires max-level airships would leave "leave the majority of the community stranded" if it had any more added complexity than everything is the same but enemies have more HP?

You are making a lazy excuse. In no way would it ruin the rest of the game to simply fix some of the glaring problems of endgame.

Nothing you just said goes against what I wrote. In fact most of it is in agreement with what I said.

I'll try to explain my position in a slightly different way... It's basically Spekkio's Law.

If you assume that the problems facing MMO developers (managing staff and resources, creating content for a broad player base, technical limitations, etc.) are easy to solve then the only way to explain the abundance of games on the market that fail to meet your expectations is either stupidity, incompetence, or maliciousness on the part of the devs. In this case you only really have two options: quit the game and/or MMOs in general, or get angry at the devs and loudly and abrasively demand sweeping changes. Obviously I don't feel making unreasonable demands or getting angry is ever an appropriate response.

If you acknowledge that the problems facing MMO developers might actually be quite difficult, then suddenly the state of the industry (not just now, but in the past as well) starts to make a lot more sense. This in no way means that players can't make requests or suggestions for how they would like games to improve, but it does mean that individual players won't be able to get exactly what they want in the amounts they want all of the time. So, if a player isn't happy with the current state of the game they have 3 options: quit the game, get angry at the devs, or take into account the limitations and tailor requests in such a way as to better align with the realities of MMO development and the desires of the player base as a whole. I obviously prefer the 3rd option, not because it somehow is better for the devs, but because it is more likely to garner the results we'd like to see. Doing anything else is setting yourself up to be perpetually disappointed, which seems like a major waste of time to me.

[Ragns]

Since we don't have any information from the FFXIV team here are some snippets from the briefing with Yosuke Matsuda (SE's CEO) on November 6, 2015.

The MMO business was brisk, but the 1Q launches of expansion packs set a hurdle that we were unable to surmount in 2Q, resulting in a decline in net sales and net income

We are less-experienced in the new genre of e-sports, which prevented us from gaining player acceptance in some cases. While we need to work to develop e-sports offerings over the long term, we wanted to recognize the valuation losses on our books earlier rather than later. Because of the strategic value of the e-sports genre, we will remain tenacious in our efforts in that space, including considering offerings for consumer game consoles, as well as global roll-outs.

we have developed the MMO sub-segment into a stable earnings generator. We released expansion packs for FINAL FANTASY XIV and DRAGON QUEST X in 1Q and have seen a steady trend in subscriber numbers.
By taking a proactive approach to this business—including in terms of releasing expansion packs and other updates—we will maintain or expand the number of our active users and further strengthen this business as an earnings generator.

The Merchandising segment delivered strong earnings thanks to sales of character merchandise associated with the release of the FINAL FANTASY XIV expansion pack.

* The FY in Japan is 1 April - 31 March.

[arus2001]

I obviously prefer the 3rd option, not because it somehow is better for the devs, but because it is more likely to garner the results we'd like to see. Doing anything else is setting yourself up to be perpetually disappointed, which seems like a major waste of time to me.

While I generally prefer your option 3, too, there are things I feel that are a bit of a problem with some dev teams these days.

The first is you have some thinking they can recreate their own experiences as a player from a decade ago, give or take a few years. Obviously we get some players reflecting that through XI nostalgia. Some even run private XI servers under that "old school" premise, but they're also notorious for tricking themselves into believing a couple hundred players on a "free" platform is successful and indicative of what the industry as a whole desires. Wildstar stands out as the greatest and most recent commercial failure for this mentality, but I'll be damned if devs still don't seem stubborn. Tanaka is a token example, and no doubt a big reason why 1.0 bombed here.

The second fault is generally a fear of change, or deviating from what people have come to know of the genre. Some might infer to this as the WoW Clone Syndrome, but I'd say there are roots of appealing to tradition just as pointed out in the last paragraph. As is, we pretty much have raiders unabashedly believing they deserve the best of the best in character progression because they raid. Some raid because they like it, that's cool. Some raid because it's the only source of progression. Many people can't, and the reasons why are both myriad and valid. One of the biggest sources of resistance to change has consistently been the raid scene, likely in part because some realize it wouldn't be as "popular" as it is now if people didn't have to jump through all the hoops of aggravation. I've yet to really see a dev anywhere approach this problem in earnest, with gear being a tier behind the best usually being the compromise IF the players of a given game are lucky. Even then, sometimes the applied grind is way worse than raiding itself, to the point it's like the devs are saying you're a retard for not wanting to raid.

The third issue is some feel that all content needs to be participated in. Rift was pretty bad about this, as an example, by locking certain gear pieces to PvP acquisition only. This was an obvious problem for more casual players since they had neither the gear nor the coordination to oust pre-mades and get what they wanted in a timely manner. This ignores the fact that some people have zero interest in PvP itself. Ultimately, whatever content does hit a game needs to come through a filter of equal importance. Synergy is nice, yes, but independence should still be possible. It'd be like someone who loves crafting in XIV being able to play the market and eventually gear themselves in the best. Or they could do a mix of crafting and PvE content itself, farming drops directly if it happens to be more time efficient and/or enjoyable to do so. Basically, as long as you're doing something related to a game's combat system, progress should come there, since that's really what MMOs tend to be first: Combat engines. But just like reality, people are going to have interests and preferences. There's a fine line between encouraging participation to broaden the experience and effectively bribing or making it seem mandatory. So, if world building really is the goal, development shouldn't be so heavily lopsided. "It takes all kinds," as they say.

Fourth would be communication. Yoshi may be good at saying things, especially compared to Tanaka, but sometimes it comes off as hot air, PR speak, or totally missing the mark. Usually it's more talking AT us than WITH us, language barrier aside. The vision of the devs and the desires of the players can be a tricky animal, no doubt, but I can't say I've seen a game where it really seems like devs try to hammer out what players like and don't of specific issues, be it job balance, economics, event specifics, and so on. Some might be quick to assert that such would be nothing but a bunch of trolling, but I'm a strong believer that any official forum environment is a direct result of insufficient attention being paid to it. That includes moderation. There are smart and creative people on all sides, and it really just seems like vastly untapped potential.

...which I guess brings me to my last point: User generated content. The first MMO to make this both accessible and versatile will make a killing. People want hard content? They can make it themselves and challenge others. People want to create stories and usher more RP-friendly locales? Same thing. Like making (jumping) puzzles? Have at it. More importantly, it gives players things to do once official content is exhausted during a patch cycle. Let players be the devs they think they can be and you'll get some definite gems. A lot of poo, sure, but also gems. You can't really lock access to some form of playing a lot, either. That's where forms of game housing often fail as they really just function as a money sink that not everyone can get into.

In the end, I may sound like this awkward mix of harsh and oddly optimistic, but I do think we can get there eventually. Probably not with XIV or any title on the market at present or soon to be released, but some day.

[Ragns]

In the end, I may sound like this awkward mix of harsh and oddly optimistic, but I do think we can get there eventually. Probably not with XIV or any title on the market at present or soon to be released, but some day.

We'll probably have to wait for FFXVII before we can see any kind of that stuff.

The FFXIV team depends a lot on the Luminous Engine developed by SE's R&D department which is why we were able to get so many improvements in 2.0 then 3.0.

SE uses a newer version of this engine for FFXV so we'll probably have the new features backported in FFXIV 4.0 but that's about as much as I expect. It might explains why they're dropping PS3 support for 4.0 too.

From what I understand stalking SE's staff on LinkedIn most of the XIV team from 2010 to 2013 moved on bigger projects like the Luminous Engine and/or XV. If what I see on the SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD. company profile is accurate it seems they have been unstaffing XIV since the release of 2.1.

[Stef]

...which I guess brings me to my last point: User generated content. The first MMO to make this both accessible and versatile will make a killing.

Some great points and I agree with most of what you said. I think the line of yours I quoted is basically what i was getting at: developers as a rule are out to make games that they find fun and to make money. Since there's quite a lot of discontent among MMO players these days there's potentially a lot of money just sitting on the table for some company to grab if they can do it right. A lot players across various MMOs come across in their posts as if they believe the devs are just ignoring the obvious ways to make their games better that would give them a shot at that money - but if it seems obvious to us as players then it's pretty much guaranteed to be obvious to the developers themselves, they just have other considerations that may not be immediately accessible to us from the outside. And it's not just something unique to the large companies: even the smaller, indie and crowdfunded projects face the same dilemmas, as was evidenced by the recent Albion Online beta response.

This is also why I don't get overly upset if something fails to hit the mark. For me the important thing in the MMO industry is iteration. Most of the ideas implemented by developers will fall short of what the players expect in one way or another, but eventually someone will find a breakthrough idea that works and it'll slowly propagate to other games. Everquest Next seems to be a bit dead in the water for now, but I'm really excited to see what Crowfall manages to accomplish in 2016.

From what I understand stalking SE's staff on LinkedIn most of the XIV team from 2010 to 2013 moved on bigger projects like the Luminous Engine and/or XV. If what I see on the SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD. company profile is accurate it seems they have been unstaffing XIV since the release of 2.1.

Yeah, I'd say it's fairly typical in the MMO space for teams to be pretty large before launch and then scale back massively post-launch once the base game is complete. SWTOR, ESO, Wildstar, Guild Wars 2, etc. all did this with large layoffs coming before the fates of the games were even really sealed in terms of popularity. The FFXIV team didn't exactly have to lay people off as most of them were just borrowed from around the company in order to rebuild the game in the exceptionally short period of 2 years and 9 months, but most of them returned to their original projects after 2.0 came out. (For example, Matsui designed FFXIV's combat system before returning to FFXI.)

If this is what people mean when they say that resources are being shifted away from FFXIV to SE's other games then they are technically correct, but most of that shift happened around 2.0 as you say and only because those people were borrowed from other projects to begin with. Each MMO has to find a team size that it can comfortably support during normal operation after launch, and I've seen very little evidence to indicate that FFXIV's team has gotten smaller since 2.0. In the latest Live Letter (and part of me feels this was intentional) when Yoshi-P went over the staff's memories from 2015 there were 3 staff members that mentioned having joined the team this year (on the Event, UI, and Sound teams), so it seems the team is getting some new people as well.

[Kelenae]

I just believe that Japan SE is "all hands on deck" for FF7 Remake and ff15. And trying to get them out this year. So FFXIV doesnt have any resources to get from SE.

[Ragns]

I just believe that Japan SE is "all hands on deck" for FF7 Remake and ff15. And trying to get them out this year. So FFXIV doesnt have any resources to get from SE.

I couldn't find anything about FF7 so I'm not even sure if it uses the same engine and if it's completely outsourced.

Funny fact a lot of non-Japanese were hired to work in 2.0. I've seen a lot of French, English and German devs living in Tokyo that were hired specifically to work on ARR.

[ronin sparthos]

A big part of this is just XIV being self-contained. Get a quest? You've usually got a good idea where to go next, either specific to dialogue or through map indicators. Meanwhile, XI would've been something like, "Go fetch me some Goobuue Dung!" with no hint of where. Okay, so you find some Goobuue in Zi'tah, but wait, they don't drop it! Only the high level ones in the tree might. For all the bitching people are apt here to bring up for not reading a wiki, watching a video, or whatever, the little things like that add up to lessened clutter. And I guess there's always that adage where the happy players are actually playing instead of haunting forums.

Fetch Goobbue Dung, where the dung drops from Crawlers, but only if you steal it.

Return to NPC for 300gil and some fame.

Also, Sandbox? Time to poach some ideas from Disney Infinity / Super Mario Maker. Now you can build your own dungeon, populate it with monsters and attach some rewards for the poor fool dumb enough to walk into your Twintania filled deathtrap for subpar rewards. It's like Moblin Maze Mongers! But with more complaints that in order to put Twintanias in your dungeon you need to buy a Twintania figurine from the SE cash shop. Or farm T5 until one drops at a harsh rate.

XIV needs Nyzul (XI) / Fractals (from GW2) and it needs it now. Just recycle resources, populate the area with different themes (cloudkin, voidkin, beastkin etc.) and attach bosses to specific floors. Award tokens based on how many floors you complete, make it easy enough that it's more about perfecting your floor jumps than the actual monsters, throw in some lamps for the XI geriatrics and you're golden. Allow it to be flexible enough that people can have some fun cutting their teeth with unorthodox setups while the PUGs can stick to DF.

Release Nyzul Subterra, an extreme variant that rewards exclusive loot but includes more objectives and even more difficult trash / bosses and you've made content for days recycling the same bosses / monsters you've already hammered out. After you've squeezed that dry, release Nyzul -Alliance- where you do the same shit but with 24 people for extreme ragequitting or FC funtimes. The spontaneity is what you're banking on to keep people busy until the next patch.

The biggest problem ARR has is that content is on such rigid rails players aren't allowed to have some fun and it becomes repetitive nightmare with quickness. XI had the right idea with things like Moblin Mazes where you had different objectives like sweeping trash, boss rushes or crafting rushes but it prematurely abandoned the ideas.

[Destinye]

I couldn't find anything about FF7 so I'm not even sure if it uses the same engine and if it's completely outsourced.

Funny fact a lot of non-Japanese were hired to work in 2.0. I've seen a lot of French, English and German devs living in Tokyo that were hired specifically to work on ARR.

A good chunk of it may be outsourced similar to X/X-2 HD remasters and most likely the FFIX PC/iOS/Android versions. But I definitely don't doubt they're focusing hard on that project.

[Alkar]

FFVII-R is being developed by Cyberconnect2 for the most part.

[Niiro]

I couldn't find anything about FF7 so I'm not even sure if it uses the same engine and if it's completely outsourced.

The FF7 remake is made in the Unreal engine apparently.

Sounded odd to me at first, why they wouldn't use an in-house engine, but I don't really know anything about game programming.

[arus2001]

I'm a proponent for RNG-map events, too. ARPGs have been doing it for years. Not sure why MMOs have generally avoided it. Nyzul kinda cheated a little in that it was more fixed maps, just with walls that'd be up/down. I don't think they should be objective-centric or time crunched at their core (I dislike Diablo 3's Greater Rifts largely for this reason), to allow more laid back exploration and less reliance on hyper-efficiency, but that's not to say you can't have mini-events within the randomly generated dungeon(s) themselves.

[The Stig]

We are less-experienced in the new genre of e-sports, which prevented us from gaining player acceptance in some cases. While we need to work to develop e-sports offerings over the long term, we wanted to recognize the valuation losses on our books earlier rather than later. Because of the strategic value of the e-sports genre, we will remain tenacious in our efforts in that space, including considering offerings for consumer game consoles, as well as global roll-outs.

They should scrap Vermilion and implement a MOBA using minions inside the gold saucer in a 3v3 format, solo and AI vs AI, team vs AI and pvp. Each team has their base with a Hildebrand statue and to win they must destroy the statue. Your available pool of minions is what you can use. Use this as their test bed.

Seems like a missed opportunity. Something worthwhile with minions, dip their toe in e-sports (because someone will no doubt e-sport the fuck out of it) and just implement shit like win of the day gets you extra GP, a lose gives some GP, and a win gives some GP.

Once "perfected" create a real FF moba using established FF faces.

Oh, and scrap all the worthless mini games in the Gold Saucer while we're at it.

[Fiye]

Not to mention the control sceme would be WAY FRIENDLIER to console plebs and you wouldn't stick to the same 3 minions because of the high ratio of attack/cost + speed. They should hire you stig.

[haroldsaxon]

I'd rather they not waste time on side-projects in the game when we're lacking core content, but meh.

[The Stig]

Not to mention the control sceme would be WAY FRIENDLIER to console plebs and you wouldn't stick to the same 3 minions because of the high ratio of attack/cost + speed. They should hire you stig.

Oh wait good point haha; the controls! I forgot PS3/PS4 existed.
As for the same minion thing, no prob, make it unique only. Then we can drama over "omg he picked my minion" or "asshole dropped game because i picked his minion"

Well they need to start somewhere, although thinking about it in fairness there is a SE MOBA sitting somewhere but it's JP only I believe -- we were joking about it on the SE forums on BG.

[Destinye]

I'd rather they not waste time on side-projects in the game when we're lacking core content, but meh.

But according to the OF and the few white knights on Zam (basically the 7 white knights and 2 people with a brain they try to drive out based on my lurking), "No one has time to do content, so mini-game content is what we want."

[haroldsaxon]

What is Zam?

[KCem]

What is Zam?

Proto-reddit for XI. You didn't miss much.

[ronin sparthos]

They should scrap Vermilion and implement a MOBA using minions inside the gold saucer in a 3v3 format, solo and AI vs AI, team vs AI and pvp. Each team has their base with a Hildebrand statue and to win they must destroy the statue. Your available pool of minions is what you can use. Use this as their test bed.

Seems like a missed opportunity. Something worthwhile with minions, dip their toe in e-sports (because someone will no doubt e-sport the fuck out of it) and just implement shit like win of the day gets you extra GP, a lose gives some GP, and a win gives some GP.

Once "perfected" create a real FF moba using established FF faces.

Oh, and scrap all the worthless mini games in the Gold Saucer while we're at it.

Considering SE seems to be lacking resources to push out patches with frequency, why exactly would they want to continue diverting resources to things that cater to such a niche audience that it might as well be dead on arrival? We already have Tetra Master, a "popular" card game to work with not to mention PVP.

Would it not make sense to focus on one overall minigame and expand upon it rather than the shotgun approach to sidebits? Because if people wanted to play a MOBA then they'd you know... play a real one.