Earlier this week, I had a column about a major change in Final Fantasy XIV’s content delivery schedule that had some pretty big effects. And if you’re wondering why you didn’t hear about this major change in a news post, that’s because this change actually took place like six years ago. It is not a new change. Rather, it’s now when I decided to look at what the net effect of that change had been on the game as a whole on the basis that rather than predicting the future or having an in-depth evaluation after just one case of something being removed, I wanted a more substantive picture of the effects.
Was this the right decision? I’m not sure.
That’s not to say that I regret making it or anything like that, definitely; rather, my point here is to say that it’s an interesting question. Because I think it’s very easy to assemble a picture of how soon is too soon, but it’s much more difficult to figure out exactly how long to wait until you have a clear picture of the impacts of a complex change.
Let’s start with the shortest possible timescale of reactions and work our way forward, starting with reacting to the announcement of an upcoming change. I remember seeing a lot of this when World of Warcraft was preparing for its class overhauls in Legion and talking about how the specs were meant to play, and I certainly engaged in speculation too, but it was also way too early to conclusively say whether the changes were good or bad because they weren’t actually playable then.
A lot of people did anyway! And most of those takes aged like milk because again, these were conclusions drawn from no data. They were drawn from loose ideas and concepts that had not actually gotten into anyone’s hands.
Moving forward, of course, there’s the obvious point of the first time the change actually hits in test servers or whatever. Even then, though, it’s still kind of early days. Like, I had my hands on Viper in FFXIV before most of the world and got a sense of how it played, but I definitely did not master Viper in one lengthy play session in California. It was too early to parse numbers or even to confidently say how everyone would find it.
This might seem a touch pedantic, but I alluded to it before, you need data to see how a change affects a game. Some of those data come down to crunching numbers and learning damage values and the like, but there’s also just general player perception to consider. Before you can really evaluate the long-term impact of something it needs to have a long-term impact.
But how long does that impact have to be before you can feel it? That’s the really tricky part. I don’t think most people would take umbrage at the idea of having some actual information about what the impact will be, but it’s not even accurate to say that you need to have data in order to make at least some educated guesses.
Heck, this year has given us a perfect example thanks to The Elder Scrolls Online. I do not know what the long-term impacts will be for that game blowing up its content cadence, but I do know that for a lot of people what made the game appealing in the first place was the fact that it had a rock-solid content cadence. Whether or not most of it was good was secondary to schedule and volume. That was its selling point. Getting rid of that seems like it’s not going to do the game any favors over the longer term.
When will we really know, though? Later this year we’ll have some information, sure, but for all we know by that point something else will have dominated our collective attention. Heck, for all we know the studio is focused on the other game that we know is in development and this is considered an acceptable loss. And without firm player numbers, we’ll be even more stabbing in the dark at player sentiment.
That’s not to say that I think my knee-jerk reaction of “this is bad for the game” is wrong, just that I do not think I can tell you what the long-term implications for it are going to be in June, much less by the end of the year. But I also don’t have a timetable for when I will know. In four years we might very easily be able to look back and say “this is when the game headed toward shutdown” but we might say “well, this didn’t help, but then X, Y, and Z made it mostly all right.”
And that’s something where the impact is kind of easy! Do you know how hard it is to be sure of the knock-on effects of these things? A Warlock spell got changed in WoW and that led directly to the vacuous destructive nature of NFTs, dude, everything is complicated.
My point is not to say that this is hard and we shouldn’t bother; that’s why we work very hard to think about these things, examine evidence, learn, collect information, and make the best predictions we are able to make. Rather, it’s to point out how hard it is to be sure about what the long-term effects of any given change are going to be, and even to provide some grace for the developers who are also guessing.
It’s easy to miss that part. It’s easy to assume that developers have all the keys and all the answers and they just know if a given change is going to have a terrible impact on the game’s long-term health or not. It’s easy to look at obvious bad choices like Secret World Legends and throw up your hands and ask why someone would think that replacing one bad combat system with another bad combat system would fix anything. Clearly, they knew what they were doing!
But they didn’t. Nobody can ever be sure. You make decisions based on the resources you have and the guidelines you’ve established, and you make your best guesses about the future. I’ve talked before about how if you ignore that you know the ending, the entire FFXIV reboot plan sounds outright idiotic. You gave one guy literally all of the power over the game and then told him to do whatever he wanted! How in the world would that work out?
Turns out it worked out very, very well. But it’s always a guess. If you’re lucky, it’s an educated one. And it means that we all know you have to spend some time waiting to see if, in fact, a given change that seems like a bad idea actually turns out to be a bad idea or not. Sometimes it turns out to be a good one, even if it looks like a terrible one. Other times it seems worse than it could be, or it seems like a great plan that just doesn’t work.
Everything needs time and the proof is in the pudding. It’d be nice if that proof were consistent about when it showed up, though.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
