I’ve been a die-hard player since 2.0. I love where the game is at in a lot of places. My gripe is that for all the money this game brings in, we’re constantly being told that things are out of their budget. Getting all the races to be able to wear hats, for example. If XIV is their most lucrative title, why is the budget the excuse for EVERY little thing they “can’t” do?
Usually when a dev studio says “budget”, it’s primarily a time budget, not just money. Yes, money can be used to hire more staff, but everything we know about software development says that output doesn’t scale linearly with man-hours.
Fixing hats in the way they would like (which isn’t just the modded method of having ears or parts of heads clip through whatever hats/helms exist) would require them to go through every headpiece created so far and rework them for the races’ head shape. Is it possible? Yes. Is it the best use of their time and effort? Probably not. It’s a live game; they’re always pushing on for the next bit of content.
I’m unfamiliar with software development output bottlencks and how they relate to artists. In your opinion, how could an increase in production artists not increase art production?
You’re right, I guess I wasn’t thinking it all the way through. Guess it’s up to SE to decide if they want to hire more artists and spend their time polishing bits of older content.
The issue is you provide production/team lead more artists and they can dedicate them to cinematics, environment, character and costume design and have them improve and make the process behind the stuff that already exists better, or put them into a fan-requested feature that’s a potential time sink that won’t really gain them any subs.
Alternatively you can end up in a too many cooks situation. For instance if you have 30 new armour designs putting more than 30 artists on the task sees diminishing returns.
The financial side can also be an issue. If your budget equates to having 6 months for the next patch, hiring more people reduces the time available, but might not speed up the process significantly enough to make the effective time loss worth it.
Any time they give a reason that there’s some technical thing they can’t accomplish, just remember mahjong. The devs programmed a fucking mahjong client into FFXIV (and it’s quite a good one too, on top of being free trial accessible, apparently some people get the free trial primarily for mahjong). If they have the technology and budget to do something as irrelevant and orthogonal as that, they can put in anything (as long as the devs are interested in making it). So basically it’s all bs, plus there are mods and plugins that do every QoL and visual upgrade imaginable already implemented as a third party tool.
I’ve been a die-hard player since 2.0. I love where the game is at in a lot of places. My gripe is that for all the money this game brings in, we’re constantly being told that things are out of their budget. Getting all the races to be able to wear hats, for example. If XIV is their most lucrative title, why is the budget the excuse for EVERY little thing they “can’t” do?
Usually when a dev studio says “budget”, it’s primarily a time budget, not just money. Yes, money can be used to hire more staff, but everything we know about software development says that output doesn’t scale linearly with man-hours.
Fixing hats in the way they would like (which isn’t just the modded method of having ears or parts of heads clip through whatever hats/helms exist) would require them to go through every headpiece created so far and rework them for the races’ head shape. Is it possible? Yes. Is it the best use of their time and effort? Probably not. It’s a live game; they’re always pushing on for the next bit of content.
I’m unfamiliar with software development output bottlencks and how they relate to artists. In your opinion, how could an increase in production artists not increase art production?
You’re right, I guess I wasn’t thinking it all the way through. Guess it’s up to SE to decide if they want to hire more artists and spend their time polishing bits of older content.
The issue is you provide production/team lead more artists and they can dedicate them to cinematics, environment, character and costume design and have them improve and make the process behind the stuff that already exists better, or put them into a fan-requested feature that’s a potential time sink that won’t really gain them any subs.
Alternatively you can end up in a too many cooks situation. For instance if you have 30 new armour designs putting more than 30 artists on the task sees diminishing returns.
The financial side can also be an issue. If your budget equates to having 6 months for the next patch, hiring more people reduces the time available, but might not speed up the process significantly enough to make the effective time loss worth it.
Any time they give a reason that there’s some technical thing they can’t accomplish, just remember mahjong. The devs programmed a fucking mahjong client into FFXIV (and it’s quite a good one too, on top of being free trial accessible, apparently some people get the free trial primarily for mahjong). If they have the technology and budget to do something as irrelevant and orthogonal as that, they can put in anything (as long as the devs are interested in making it). So basically it’s all bs, plus there are mods and plugins that do every QoL and visual upgrade imaginable already implemented as a third party tool.