Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

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Fcret said:
Kate is almost certainly not out due to performance. Japan doesn't really do that, and even if they did, the game is floundering in all languages and regions.

It could just be that they started giving her directives from above about stuff and she refused. Or it could just be a matter of pay. Or it could just be her not wanting to be the community punching bag every time there's a story misstep.

There's so many other fundamental problems with the game that I don't see this changing much.


The Ozmafication of content coupled with the complete gutting of everything else is a major issue that none of the big content creators for this game want to talk about because they're also all Arthars-tier raidtrannies.
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I think that Kate is out due to performance but much more likely out due to her social media.

Square is, well, having some real trouble in all of their verticals, but if there was a specific lesson Square and the XIV team learned and hard coded into their very soul was "We need the playerbase to like us". The goodwill from the playerbase is core to their business model and how they normally kind of slide through a downturn (see Stormblood) without generating a bunch of hate and controversy.

Kate not only did a bad job, but threw away so much goodwill that Koji had built up from the localization side for literally 0 gain. I have no idea how control the localization lead has over the localized Voice Acting - but if the answer is "more than none" then Kate did an extremely bad job. For a team like FFXIV/CBU3 that personally felt bad for delaying Endwalker a few weeks to have go back and patch in a new recording of the 7.0's Big Climactic speech must have really burned their asses with players ragging on it for weeks on end.

It's likely not a coincidence the new lead, Koji Fox, and Yoshi-P don't have easily findable social media pages.
 
Tanner Glass said:
It's likely not a coincidence the new lead, Koji Fox, and Yoshi-P don't have easily findable social media pages.
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CBU3's leadership especially has generally been very careful about both how, when and what they communicate to the players. Basically everything YoshiP says is in carefully controlled circumstances and usually couched in the most ambivalent JP corpo speak possible, for instance. Not to say he's any sort of dishonest, as such, but there is a clear effort there to manage what he says, and overall they seem to have a pretty tight handle on the team's communication. They also vet and screen all interview questions ahead of time IIRC, that sort of thing - I believe they used to do unscripted Q&As at Fanfest once upon a time, but stopped with that years ago.

I would actually not be surprised if Kate's social media crashouts and the resulting PR problems were legitimately chapping someone's ass at SE to the extent they fast-tracked her replacement - all the criticism over DT would probably be swept under the rug with a promise to do better and without assigning blame to anyone specific, ordinarily, but then here comes Kate to make herself a controversy lightning rod and piss off the playerbase even more, solely because she's too much of an attention whore to keep her mouth shut.

Her behavior on social media is not only a PR problem for SE when they're already trying to manage the fallout of DT in the first place, it's also evidence of her massive attitude problem, which I have some trouble believing goes over all that well in the context of JP corporate culture being what it is.
 
Not your Buddy Holly said:
Much as I celebrate, I would be lying if I said I didn't a have a seed of doubt in me that this Paul guy is a bigger shitlib than she is.
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SnowBall said:
Yeah that’s why I’m still remaining cautious. For all we know the only difference between Kate and Paul is that Paul is possibly smart enough to keep his mouth shut on social media and in public. At least as of now, who knows what he will do in the future.
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Can we do a physiognomy check?
IMG_4152.png
Wow, is this guy black?
 
Well Intentioned said:
I'm curious what sort of content you'd want to be seeing and/or what sort of content has been stripped from the game that is missing?
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I am just endlessly tired of how the combat has degenerated to this precise mechanics execution, while simplifying any other combat related gameplay to an absurd level. Back in the days resource management and Job synergies were something you had to consider, with especially the tank-healer relationship being much more important since both were a lot weaker. I am just singling out Ozma because he has a horrid track record this expansion making shit too hard, but the issue is all over the dev team.

Just out of curiosity, did anyone else in here attempt Quantum? I'd be curious to hear what other people think of it.
 
They got rid of the bitch? Praise be. I will buy your game Square! All is forgiven.... If the next expansion looks cool


Kane Lives said:
In theory, we already had one (Gaia) helping us.
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I am extremely curious to see if anything happened to her NPC after the announcement of her appearance in Dissida. Does she have even have a post game NPC location?


healing rain said:
Can we do a physiognomy check?
View attachment 8135341
Wow, is this guy black?
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Shit I thought he was Asian for a sec. Interesting.
 
Brandy [◉''] said:
I am just endlessly tired of how the combat has degenerated to this precise mechanics execution, while simplifying any other combat related gameplay to an absurd level. Back in the days resource management and Job synergies were something you had to consider, with especially the tank-healer relationship being much more important since both were a lot weaker. I am just singling out Ozma because he has a horrid track record this expansion making shit too hard, but the issue is all over the dev team.
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I just don't think it's ever gonna get fixed, if only because JP loves this boring, homogenized encounter design where they get to spend most of a 10 min fight eating raidwides and figuring out puzzle mechanics and then deal with mechanic vomit every 2min when burst is up. It fits neatly onto a macro they can just slap down and execute without communicating (because that's what I love about MMOs... fights designed so I actively don't need to communicate with other people).

I guess if people like this then I'm glad someone is having fun. I've done like five tiers of post-Stormblood savage at this point and I feel like I've seen it all and have zero interest in continuing.
 
Shieldman said:
Been hearing lots of reports that SE axed a lot of non-japanese staff.
https://www.videogameschronicle.com...yoffs-as-part-of-us-and-europe-restructuring/
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"Thursday’s layoffs announcement arrives on the same day that Square Enix shared its intention to have the majority of its QA and debugging work handled by generative AI within the next two years."

lmao this actually will kill this company, holy shit. I'm excited to see it. You see, most people are starting to clue in to the fact that "AI" is not "intelligence" in any sense - it's a prediction model. It has some limited uses for searches and sorts, and it makes easy tasks easier. It makes hard tasks harder.

The thought of a QA team made up entirely of models being fed "good QA data" by some retarded project manager that can't even helloworld is greatly exciting to me. I really, really hope they stick to their guns with this one, unlike when this tech-illiterate retard wanted to bank big on NFTs and backed away before he was allowed to hemorrhage 95% of his investment.
Well Intentioned said:
Coupled with the sheer number of minor errors it paints a dire picture of someone not doing their job.
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I don't doubt at all that Kate was doing the bare minimum, if-that, and had to be led by the hand to everything. However, I just think that's par for the course for corporations these days, especially SE. That's why I don't really think she's getting the chop for poor work - lots of people at that company clearly aren't doing very much.
Well Intentioned said:
hiring borderline amateurs to be the fucking lead in your Triple A Studio game
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But this is why I lean to my reasoning. It's hard to get a retard who thinks using genAI for QA is a good idea to understand "the writing sucks and the fans aren't happy." It's easy to get him to understand "we had to a waste a fuck-ton of money recording re-shoots for a game that has seen the subscriber-count cut in half, with one of the largest complaints from the most-populous paypiggie-playerbase being the atrocious vocal performance that Kate made us go out of our way to employ. The only one we had to re-shoot."
 
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Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
The thought of a QA team made up entirely of models being fed "good QA data" by some retarded project manager that can't even helloworld is greatly exciting to me.
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Like using AI to assist with debugging makes sense to me (I even do this a little bit in my own job) but counting on it to do QA is so fucking retarded. My prediction is that they're going to go back to outsourcing QA like they did in the Stormblood era.

When they released glamour from being job specific I had concerns that it was a sign of shit hitting the fan but at least my WOL can be cuter.
 
Lentil Soup said:
Like using AI to assist with debugging makes sense to me (I even do this a little bit in my own job) but counting on it to do QA is so fucking retarded. My prediction is that they're going to go back to outsourcing QA like they did in the Stormblood era.

When they released glamour from being job specific I had concerns that it was a sign of shit hitting the fan but at least my WOL can be cuter.
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AI QA = Actually Indian QA, so you're probably right.

I look forward to more quests where you pester Y'shtola and Alisaie for bobs and vagene you bloody benchod scion basterds and first-person sections where you scope out designated shitting streets.
 
Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
lmao this actually will kill this company, holy shit. I'm excited to see it. You see, most people are starting to clue in to the fact that "AI" is not "intelligence" in any sense - it's a prediction model. It has some limited uses for searches and sorts, and it makes easy tasks easier. It makes hard tasks harder.
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LMAO it's good to see them go for their own throats so hard after sterilizing themselves with wokeism. Yeah JeetAI can totally play your games for you and audit advanced code with the collection of StackOverflow jeet snippets it's trained on. BTW Michael Burry just threw down a $1B short on the AI market while another analyst I saw is calling it a bubble 17x more overvalued than the dotcom bust.
 
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