ffxiv Icy Veins x FFXIV Roadmap and Release!

[Valks 2,375]

Today marks the official launch of our Final Fantasy XIV section on Icy Veins, as well as the first post in what we will hope be a long series of communication between us and our users, showing some of the thought processes, plans, and things we're working on for the FFXIV section!

In today's post, I am going to be covering some of the things that have happened since we first started planning the section, the team we've built, our plans for the future of the section, and so much more. Prior to launching into the bulk of what this post is going to be about, I wanted to take this post as an opportunity to re-introduce myself to our existing users and introduce myself to those of you that are browsing Icy Veins for the first time.

New Logo

Outside of the new information contained in the post below, this is also my opportunity to introduce you all to our brand new logo, specifically for Final Fantasy XIV, which you'll be able to see when browsing the FFXIV section.

Our original logo for Icy Veins has always represented a Mage in WoW, the source of our website's name, but we felt that this simply didn't fit well with FFXIV - instead, we thought a Black Mage was a perfect basis for a new logo to be made, given their affinity for using Frost/Ice spells, and what better way to represent them than their original artifact set?

I really hope you all like the new logo - we tried hard to make it not only fit the aesthetic of Icy Veins and FFXIV, but also incorporate the Fire phases of a Black Mage as well, with the flames at the top of it.

About Me - Section Manager

My name is Valks and, for those of you that have used the site in the past, you may have seen me around over the past 6 years working on a variety of other games on the site, but mainly focusing on the WoW sections, albeit under a different name (Blainie). Since the start of our plans to make an FFXIV section, I have come onto the project as the Section Manager for FFXIV on Icy Veins, with the hopes of bringing my experience working on the WoW sections, as well as a real love of FFXIV and enthusiasm for Lalas, to the project.

The Team

Now, prior to discussing the team, I'd like to make it completely clear that we are not done with recruitment and, for certain areas, we are still getting in touch with new additions to the writing team.

As of posting this, I am going to give as much information as I can on the writers we have brought on, but rather than simply listing a bunch of names, I thought it would be nice to allow the writers to make their own "entrances" as we release their guides, so in the coming weeks, we are going to be working on a "Meet the Team" series of news posts, where we'll be introducing and interviewing the writers 1-by-1, giving them a chance to give a bit of background on themselves, their experience, and why they're the right person for the guide they're writing!

Combat Jobs

As it currently stands, we have writers for nearly every single combat job ahead of Endwalker's release, and very large portion of them are writers and theorycrafters that the players will likely already know from The Balance Discord server. The exception to that, currently, is Summoner, which is going to be written by members of the AkhMorning Summoner team. 

Now, while for WoW we generally have 1 writer per spec, we have taken a different approach to the FFXIV Combat Job guide planning, essentially allowing the teams to bring on as many writers as they felt was necessary for the best set of guides we could make. On the WoW section, we have 1 spec with 2 writers (Blood Death Knight), but as of writing this, we currently have nearly 50% of the jobs being written by more than 1 writer.

Crafting & Gathering Jobs

Once again via the Balance, we have taken on 3 writers to handle the world of crafting and gathering in Eorzea, with each of them specialising in varying areas, but we're not done recruiting here. There are a lot of nuances to some of these areas that require extremely specialised knowledge to cover, so we are still in discussions to fill in a spot or two here.

General Guides

Currently, we have a few writers working on general guides for FFXIV, one of which has come through the Balance, but the others are actually simply sourced from the community itself. 

News

While those of you that browse our news section frequently are likely familiar with both Stan and Starym, we have actually taken on our first news writer in years to handle the FFXIV section specifically. She will be focusing on ensuring that you can always get the latest news here on Icy Veins about anything FFXIV-related, as well as working with community projects and figures to highlight some of the incredible work the members of the community do every day.

As she has already been posting, some of you may have already seen Alhena around, but you can look forward to reading a bit more about her and her experience when we release our introduction interview with her tomorrow!

Videos

Now this section is likely something that any of our existing users are surprised to see, as Icy Veins has never really pushed much focus onto the video sphere, instead focusing mainly on the written guides we have on the site.

Moving forward into FFXIV, we have currently brought on 2 content creators to work with us on producing videos for a brand new YouTube channel, with others still in discussion, and while I can't share who they are for now, I can't wait for you all to see who it is next week!

The Section & Guides

The Section Today

As many of you have likely noticed, we only have a fairly simple selection of guides live on the site right now, but I can assure you, we have guides written already that are being prepared for publishing and, once we start releasing them, the section is going to be expanding extremely quickly. 

The first period prior to publishing the guides on a new section involve a massive amount of planning, preparation, and learning, but I feel that we have done a massive amout of all 3, and we're ready to start pumping content out at a much, much faster rate than before.

The Future (Up to Endwalker and Beyond)

As of right now, we're essentially playing catch-up in terms of the section and the guides - as many of you know if you do play FFXIV, there is a massive amount of content to cover that is already available and has been for many years, but we have no intention of simply taking guides from the past and slapping them onto Icy Veins (especially not without permission, as some felt we would do when this was brought up on Reddit and Twitter).

Once we've managed to clear that "backlog" of guides, we'll be ready to innovate and create, but for the forseeable future up to Endwalker, it's likely that many of the guides we release are the kinds of things that you would simply "expect", especially if you have used our WoW guides before.

With that said, we aren't just going to be boring and not do anything new or interesting, which leads me on to our plans for the future, but not in terms of guides themselves.

Tools

There's going to be a lot more shared on this topic in the future, but we are currently working on the development of a number of tools that we feel would not only benefit the community as a whole, but will also help with the reading, understanding, and creation of our guides here at Icy Veins.

As updates become available for us to share, I'll be keeping you all as up-to-date as possible on the progress of this, but for now, there's little I can tell you all beyond - we're working on it.

Working with the Community

We are currently already reaching out to a number of members of the community, content creators, and so on to try and bring the community not only easier ways of accessing and viewing content and guides, but also potential events and giveaways for the community.

As with the Tools we are working on, this is simply a heads up from me to say, we're working on it, I can't share much on it for now, but I can't wait for the day that I can!

But what if they..?

There are certain worries that were brought to my attention around the time of the initial announcement that, at the time, were very focused on the "fear" of having certain things brought over from our WoW section - we were never planning to do so, but we heard the worries nonetheless, and will always be monitoring the community's reaction and general feeling towards certain pieces before and, if we go ahead with it, after posting them.

Future Updates

For today, that's the extent of everything I can share with you all, but this isn't a one-time post; with our previous sections, we felt that we didn't share enough with our users about what our plans were and what we were working on, instead opting to just go ahead and work without any feedback as to what they would want or be excited for.

With FFXIV, we're looking to move ahead differently - there will be updates posted in the future as we make new plans and changes to our vision of the section, as well as points where we will simply consult our users, to properly see and understand what it is that all of you want to have on the website.

[Elfomal 55]

Looking forward for all the future updates <3

[Thaun 0]

Lmao, an Ice Mage Logo, perfect.

[RollingLifeblooms 0]

Cool! I like the new logo.

I'm a longtime WoW player and IcyVeins reader who just started playing FFXIV, so, this sounds really useful!

[lolblizzard 38]

time to get off the sinking ship and reach into brighter shores