You knew that I wouldn’t be able to let DAW go by without talking about the FFXIV team. During a Blaugust years back, I wrote about them then. But even as time passes, I find my appreciation for this team continuing to grow.

This past online Fan Fest really brought home a lot of these feelings – I’d say they were fairly much shared by most of the FFXIV community who were witness to it.

From the incredible memeing of the Twinning…

To the extremely emotional announcement at the end of the Fanfest by Soken – something I blogged about on my main gaming blog. I won’t go into that deeply here because I’ve said most of what I wanted to say in the previous post already.

As time goes on, the team is opening up new members to the fans, such as Natsuko Ishikawa who has earned much applause due to being the lead writer for Shadowbringers. It’s not very often that a writer on a team is held up for praise in a dev team (I know because I am a writer on a software dev team), so it thrills me to see her getting so attention for all of the writing team’s great work.

Even beyond that, we’ve had the recent letters from Yoshi-P, one directly addressing the issues with the increased server population and detailing everything they’re trying to do to secure new servers (and why it’s so difficult to do so right now).

Yoshi-P also wrote a public post about changing the Sage icon design. The previous design was causing issues for folks with trypophobia, and so the team quickly turned that around with a new icon.

It’s the little things like this that show that the FFXIV team does a pretty good job of keeping their finger on the pulse of the overall fandom and are responsive when issues that need to be addressed (or can’t be addressed) arise.

While I don’t always agree with everything the FFXIV team puts into place, and not everything has always worked 100% perfectly (housing, I’m looking at you), I have a lot of confidence that this team is working hard to make the best game they can. When things come up that are frustrating to the majority of the fan base, I know that sitting back and giving the team time to address the issue will often prove the best results.

Having been a core player of FFXIV since 2013, I could write a novel about my experiences with this game, the devs and how it’s evolved over time. I won’t do that, though. I’ll just send my appreciation and thanks to everyone who has a hand in bringing Hydaelyn to life and giving my characters a world to live in.

May there be many more years to come!