Dev Tracker - Discussion

Square enix has no shame and FFXI players suffer from the Stockholm syndrome.

With all the millions of dollars generated by FFXV, FFVII remake and the 2.5M active players who play FFXIV. Square enix can not hire 3 programmers and 3 digital graphic designers for FFXI, giving them a salary of 4000 USD per month to release content once a year instead of every 3 years and a DLC expansion every 2 years.

At this point I would pay to have content once a year.

Dynamis divergence dream-lands 20 USD
Three new Abyssea Ver 2.0 zones for empy +2 / +3 20 USD
Three new escha zones 20 USD
A cash shop with fantasies, mounts and glamor clothes

I don't see a future for FFXI, the devs are using the 80%/20% minimum effort rule.

19 USD * 60,000 active players in FFXI = 1.1M dollars per month. Oh no money sorry.

They set that expectation though, not us.

One can be a "whale" with 10k a month only? Once I saw a whale streamer showing off 125k usd per month bill, for 3 years straight, all invested in one game. That guy can literally support a whole mid size game company single handedly lol.

Difference being this is a numbered FF title like I said. They have already shown they will do a lot to preserve and update those games. They have let this game wither for years. Such a shame, I think after this we can only go down hill. If after three years of hyping this event and getting only this.. yea.

Okay buddy, sure you can.

The sad part is that you think this is some sort of boastfulness on my part, rather than a realistic assessment of how little they put into it. If you calculate out the monthly work hours against content produced, and have a reasonable ability to estimate what work goes into content, you can pretty quickly conclude that they're not putting even one capable employee worth of work into FFXI.

To be fair, even the slightest amount of effort put beyond a monthly ambuscade swap out and occasionally making items would be running it better than the current team lol.

"It's really time to stop pretending it's different, stop hyping yourself and move on or enjoy what we have"

I've noticed a common theme with the bootlickers over the past few months. They all want you to lower your expectations or go away.

So desperate to protect SE and the management team. I wonder why?

reminds me of the takes around a certain president, tbh

Perhaps instead of going in on tanking, as they did with the Bonanza and Su5 C path weapon (and Nagi with Enm+40 is no slouch either), there's a niche for a more magical focused weapon. What about a katana that has an effect similar to Orpheus's Sash to pump up elemental ninjutsu damage (and the magical component of hybrid WS???) when close to the mob? NIN would become a more effective front line magic DD, which has some utility and is strongly differentiated from the existing REMAs.

Hell, I already like using Nagi/Kunimitsu, self SCs, and magic bursting on Mastery Point farming (Nagi's nice for super fast TP gain and reliable self-SC, and Macc+70 is uniquely useful among NIN REMAs for helping prevent nuke resists). This would be a better similar approach.

Hey Thorny, I'm sure SE would love to hire talents like you as the one man team that can solve all the problems of a 20 year old project in a billion dollars company! ;) Be the hero we need!!!

Joke aside.... despite as a customer I think it's perfectly valid to ask for more. Come on, some of the criticism about SE here is a little exaggerating.

ONE developer for FFXI? 3 programmers and artists for FFXI? This isn't indie game development where 1-5 programmers or artists do every job role yo. And you guys didn't even put game producer/designers which is the most important role on the list. Nor the QAs, Nor operation department which is the heart of any online game, nor coordination team to find the documents from 13 years ago, nor PRs, nor translation department, nor HR that do your tax, nor that Janitor who cleaned up your office....I'm pretty sure I missed more people on the list!

FFXI was not an indie game scale project and SE isn't a small company that runs "efficiently". I suspect A lot of "efficient" way to develop and maintain smaller scale projects(aka indie games) in the modern day isn't always applicable in FFXI.

So yeah, maybe, maybe let's just don't assume too much. It's alright to ask for more. It's another to make ridiculous statements.


You can never accurately "calculate" monthly work hours to produce content in game development.

You can probably accurately calculate how much time required to produce code and art assets. But not the actual content. Because content in a video game is a lot more than just art and code.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't view it at protecting SE.

At this point, the precedent is set. We all know by now what to expect. You're either fine with it, or you're not. The people who are not are doomed to endlessly complain into deaf ears because at the end of the day, your voice means nothing. The people who are fine with how things have been get to play a game that brings them enjoyment.

If there was ever a time for the people who had unrealistic expectations to "go away", it would be now I would think. The people who are fine and happy with what we have in the pipeline can stay and enjoy themselves. I'm not sure why this hasn't been accepted even prior to the 20th, but now that we are passed it, I'm hoping more people will accept what a lot of us have been saying for years now.

They have outright said they have six members, all of which are shared with other departments, including no developers. The other side roles you're talking about are bundled into creative business unit iii. So, while they may briefly borrow from other parts of creative business unit iii, it's a huge misrepresentation to claim that they have all these people.

It wasn't, but it is now, by their own admission. I maintain that I'm being in no way hyperbolic when I say that one person could improve FFXI more meaningfully than their entire team has, given 40 hour weeks and reasonable productivity.

It helps that I understand almost the entirety of their server-client flow, huge parts of how the client operates, their asset format, etc. You can pretend their content is incredibly in depth, but most of it just amounts to copy/pasting an existing mob, with existing movesets, and tweaking stats or adding random mechanics until it feels to be the correct difficulty.

Again, this would be a better argument around Adoulin release or further in the past. Nothing post-adoulin has been complicated enough for you to accurately evaluate in this manner, and single developers have managed to create comparable content in very short time periods for private servers with neither access to client source nor an official server source.

(why tf does filter block as*es* ..? cmon guys, get it together)

I edited last post, see here:





If SE only used 6 members for FFXI, like they said, these guys are likely not easily replaceable people.

lol as if Square-Enix could afford to develop FFXI. Didn't they just sell off millions of dollars worth of intellectual properties and funnel every penny of it into NFTs?

It sounds like outside of XIV, XVI, and VIIR, all of their funding is going towards Matsuda's "play-to-contribute" project.

You didn't read the last sentence Thorny!


But it's okay. I see programmers that claimed the same all the time, who thinks a video game project is ALL about producing art and code. But game design is just "value tweaking" and that can be done by one random guy who is also a gamer on the team. Which is totally not true.

I read it, I just don't agree with it in this particular case. I would fully agree in most games, but FFXI content doesn't seem to have a high degree of thought going into it. You're postulating that the ideas behind the content are the bulk of the work, and I fully agree for most games, but disagree on the basis of recent FFXI content.

Odyssey-A/B/C were just spreads of exactly 10 mobs, with a handful of agon clusters. The design for agons was not a particularly creative mechanic, the mobs are likely just using the default stat spreads with a mod to damage types. There was extremely little in terms of story or flavor text, just a few paragraphs on the moogle for each installment.

Odyssey-Gaol was just the 17 mob types in adoulin, with their stats pumped up and a random aura/weakness added. T3/T4 got procs. Unless I'm remembering poorly, they didn't even get any TP moves that didn't exist in Delve era(though some did have their effects changed). I'm not saying these could be thrown together in minutes, but this is what they've released for battle content since the conclusion of Dynamis-Divergence. You don't need to be a content creation expert to get these values together in a few weeks of work.

The mission line required more creative work, but again, not an excessive amount. It has minimal battle content, with minimal thought put into said battle content. A developer wouldn't be the best person to create that, given the emphasis on storylines, but it's still not thousands of hours of work.

Keep in mind the period from when Dyna-D finished until when Odyssey finished is 1286 days. If 4 day work week, 7 hours work day on average you have 5144 hours. I completely understand your point, I just don't believe that they are getting more value than one all-around talented developer could provide in that amount of time.

Ultimately, it's not a meaningful argument and you are entitled to your opinions. It's easy to oversimplify things and assume you could do better, and it's perfectly possible that I'm falling prey to that. But, I didn't make the statement without a good bit of consideration as to what it entailed. I do not believe they are getting the equivalent of one good employee's worth of work right now.

Wait, I'm sorry, only $48K USD annually for each of those six people? I had to google the salary range for programmers in Japan, and ok, that seems reasonable now that I look at it. But, I don't know how Japan's economy works so who knows if that is sufficient enough to pay the bills

Early career Japanese programmers don't make ***. Think of it like... teaching in America. So many years in, it pays pretty alright. If you don't quit before then.

The six people also aren't programmers, they're storyboard or general creatives or something. They've made it clear they don't have a single full time developer on XI.

edit: nvm, realized you're talking about potential hires not what they currently have

Meant to reply directly to Special.

By move on I didn't necessarily meant to go away. I meant to finally drop expectations. I'm not even saying Thorny isn't right, because I have said the same (that one full time dev in FFXI would help a lot), but I also understand that they are not interested in trying to make it more efficient or more profitable. They see no potential in FFXI to grow enough and that is the sad truth, that some people need to accept. Crying over it won't change anything. They have shown how they care about non JP playerbase by providing no translation to 20th anniversary. You can say it's Stockholm syndrome, but I will disagree. It's simply the ability to accept facts and make decision to either keep enjoying the game we have and stuff we are getting or stop creating fantasies how you could run FFXI better than SE. Unless you are Japanese with direct access to SE boarding meetings, your frustrations and ideas will only be meaningless posts on this forum.

I second that.

Love looking over the artwork while listening to the Sanctuary of Zitah theme.

I am not anywhere close to Sid Meier level of game designer, but I love this discipline enough to have something to say about it. For whatever reason, I have a complete different opinion from you for everything you said here. So I wonder why....inc wall o text.

I play quite a few stat based single games, at least compare with most single player rpg games, I'd rank FFXI having better game design than most when it comes sheer amount of "variables", aka decision making components such as job/item/skill/stat combination available, AND balance them fairly well for the most part.

So at least from game design pov, I don't agree that FFXI has less work than "most games". Maybe MMO giants like WoW did an even better job, idk. They have an entire department for design if I remember correctly. Certainly not worse than your average Falcom level RPG that relies on spamming few relevant skill over and over with a few relevant buff skills to win, and has a worse variety than FFXI.



Right. So anyone can just throw in reused mechanics, insert a reused value, then somehow magically make a content in a video game work? May as well kick the game designers in a game company! (Not even a joke, plenty of programmers that I've met irl like to say that...)

So question: How do you know the value that you use, allows exactly % amount of player to clear within X amount of timeframe as you intended to? How do you know if the value that you used, wouldn't cause more(or less) people time out than you anticipated, or not? How can you design content that make the best of the best geared player happy, as well as "I play 4 months per year" super casual players? How do you avoid your best of the best geared players complain about v20 too hard or too easy, AND avoid super casual complain about the same thing on v0 NMs?

I can kind of guess the answer. As countless other programmers that I've met irl, who often come up with answers like "easy, I'll just use spreadsheet/write an auto QA tool to test all the values so they are perfectly balanced done in a few days!!!!".

What these people don't get, it's the fact that game design isn't just a game of values, but a game of human psychology. Try to design a mechanic, release your game to your players and I promise players will always play it differently from what you expect them to. They will try to "break the game" in most creative ways possible, even when you thought you included all the possibility. The more "variable" aka choice combinations available, the harder it is.

Move that into an MMO environment when economy and social interaction actually affecting content, it's 10x more complicated.

And this is the main reason why game development often delay again
and again, despite code and art production schedule is easy to estimate correctly. Or sometimes Capcom will tell players their latest RE game is 99% done with assets but they've been tweaking gameplay for 6 months and still 6 months+ away from release.

Because surprisingly, game design and balance is the hardest, time consuming and uncontrollable part in game dev. It needs lots and lots of real player data to done really well.

Which I believe it's the true value of the 6 guys SE hired to work on FFXI. It's all a guess, but I think they probably established certain work flow to collect large amount of player data from the past, then create future content based past data establishing certain formula. So they need someone that knows the project inside out to keep it running and still maintain fairly high level of player satisfaction.(bolded for the importance, it's what pays SE bills). It's a lot more than just asset format or server structure.



I think it's not meaningless. And I think you have screwed pov of what "employee's worth" either. If I am SE management and I'm going to put one guy on FFXI, it's going to be that guy working with SE for decades and knows how online department and their projects work inside out. Not one outside programmer who is also a hardcore player of FFXI who claim to know everything about the game. And "important employee" to me is the one that has the highest chance to achieve highest player retention rate because they know what worked in the past and what didn't, not one skilled programmer who can run the server single handedly.

But yeah, to you my opinion is just another random person on the internet, not SE, so whatever.

I try not even to look at all that nostalgia site stuff. Really depressing seeing where they stopped caring and poured everything into 14. This game will always be a special place to me and their lack of care over the years since they decided to do RoV has been really obvious. Just the nature of things I guess, oh well.

15 years later... Draylo finally comes to the realization that the development team ghosted him for XIV.

I would probably start by releasing relatively easy and pointless content with sparse rewards, examine player progress, then increase the difficulty accordingly. You know, like they did with Sheol-A, low tier gaol nms, escha, dynamis. Then I have a barometer on strategies and efficacy to use for the harder parts of the content. Throw in a difficulty meter for gravy and tune higher levels accordingly.

I really don't like the way you keep trying to turn this conversation toward generalities, becauae most of what you are saying is spot on in terms of game design and I am in no way trying to demean game designers in general. They played a crucial role in establishong FFXI, and in almost any game I have ever played for that matter.

I think you are attributing my attitude to other interactions in your life and not looking at FFXI for what it is. Early master trials were overtuned and took months to be defeated at all. Players never hit the intended clear rates for delve and it was nerfed multiple times as a result. Omen was expanded to alliance content one month after implementation. Early sheol, escha, and dynamis were set far too easy. Absolute virtues mechanic was not possible at release due to latency. Legion and ADL were only farmed with maximum cheese and tactics like stunning every 4 seconds in combination with PD. All of abyssea waa duoable halfway into scars because atma was overpowered. Original era alliance endgame could be defeated with single parties or less.

FFXI is not a game that toes the balance line. They release loosely tuned content and adjust after the fact. They have periods where they consistantly overestimated players ability and threw nerf after nerf, and periods where content was all a joke. The variety of jobs is too unmanagable(while it does make the game great imo). I think it is disingenuous to claim the ridiculous ups and downs of their balancing are by design or worthy of acclaim.

Japan's salaries are typically lower than the US and SE is notorious for underpaying their junior employees and having terrible work-life balance. Both of these facts combined are why I have a hard time believing the line from the yoshi-p interview claiming that hiring a single full-time engineer for XI would make a serious dent in its profits.

I don't believe they have any business development people on it either, since you could raise profitability massively (while also solving some other problems) with just a few decisions that would mostly be business in nature and not require a lot of technical effort.

NIN doesn't have an answer to Burtgang/Epeolatry so that's more along the lines of what I'd want to see. Enmity generation isn't exactly one of NIN's weaknesses.

Forgive my overreacting. It does sound cocky to me when I read that content production is "one man inserting the model and tweak some values". Maybe in a school project or 5 man project you can totally do that because workflow doesn't need to exist for them. Definitely not a 20 year old project like FFXI with 50k sub.

So if I am association your claim with some bad rl experience, that's probably your problem with choice of words. :P


How do you know that it's in fact "overtuned" though? Maybe their entire goal is to gate highest end players for months from quitting. Because it's never meant to be a progression content so they don't need players clearing them early. But they decided to drop this idea after 4 release due to low participation rate.


But do you know what real intended clear rate at release was, before drawing a conclusion?

When a game designer design content, the difficulty will very often be much harder than they intended. This is hard to avoid, because content creator will more likely to test their values using perfect condition and intended setup. But players will have a much harder time reaching such condition nor figuring that out. Further more, since the purpose of the hardest content is to gate hardcore players from finishing them and quit anyways, I think it's a perfectly legit strategy to nerf the hardest content only after hardcore players getting their first clear using data collected from them. FF14 did that too!

Just because you may not like such strategy to tune a content, doesn't mean it wasn't doing what they intended to do.



I do agree that older FFXI content and job is designed more poorly than newer ones. So I think current content designers deserve credit.

From what I've seen now, there are generally more than 1 effective setup for most content and plenty of creative choice of jobs can be applied, without actually breaking the game. Community used most of their jobs in harder Odyssey clear and that includes jobs that used to be unpopular in harder endgame like PUP and BST or DNC. For mechanics that they bring to the table, not artificial job diversity like VW or Abyssea proc.

That's very definition of "depth" of a game which is amount of meaningful choices available for players.

I personally don't think they did a bad job at all, definitely MUCH better than lolAV one. It isn't fair to write them off entirely only because AV was so poorly designed 15 years ago.




Most game dev do that, smart ones. One reason being what said above, it's easier to make a game too hard than too easy as a dev. Another reason is, it's mentally more satisfying to see games get easier overtime than hard. If I am a player, I find a game too hard , I complain on forums. Dev nerf them in a patch and now I can beat them. That feels good to me. I beat things that I previously can't.

Now if a game is designed too easy, you are screwed. Make a patch that makes everything harder and players cry and whine because they got punished for no reason. Don't make a patch then hardcore player leaves. It's a game of human psychology, remember?

If you still need more data to tune things perfect. Better make it hard than easy. It isn't fair to say FFXI is worse than most games in that regard. Most smart game dev would apply the same strategy for content tuning.


I look at FFXI for what it is, and I sincerely think it has better game design than most games. Yeah, maybe their server suck, UI sucked, recent storyline is mediocre, POL client is bad, art is recycled and *** SE cash grab with mog wardrobes and Trove. Did I mention SE doesn't care about western community opinion? Yeah they don't.

The list goes on. Yup.

But when it comes to amount of total and meaningful choices a player can make to beat a content, aka depth, I'd say FFXI is on top of the industry, or at least close. Tons of different choices, strategy, setup combination to get one thing done. Every choice feels different enough but not OP enough to replace the rest of them.

And I can tell you amount of "work" required to do excellent designs, is more than just talented designers do a few meetings, finish their GDD in a week then have coders and artists produce code and assets. It's tons of trials and errors and deleting countless failed prototypes then create new ones and repeat which takes time. But outsiders will never know. They can only estimate amount of time investment on visible assets but not time wasted during trial and error design process.

I think It isn't fair to say FFXI is worse than most in such regards. Or else why would people even play this terrible game that can't do one thing well. Or wait...maybe their game design is so good that we happily ignore the flaws and pay $13-$16 or more a month because it's fun!