Quote Originally Posted by Mirabelle View Post
I appreciate your post GG, but I don't think the playerbase is as smart as you make it out to be.
You highly underestimate the FFXI playerbase. I know more FFXI players with Masters degrees and Ph.Ds than players without them. I can count the number of actual teenagers I know on this game on one hand.

We don't need to explain SE's corporate marketing strategy to them. The fact of the matter is that Developers are not corporate or marketing professionals. They are game design professionals. Their only goal should be the creation of fun and engaging content that the players enjoy. Marketing can come in and yell at them later if said fun content somehow causes a severe drop in subscriptions, which is unlikely.

Even so, many of the qualms the player base has with the Development team do not stem from manpower or budget issues at all. We all know that FFXI's server hardware is maintained by 2 red pandas and a schizophrenic homeless man named Karen. In fact, it really just gets on our nerves when they claim that time/budget issues prevent them from making what most programmers or design professionals would consider a 5 minute fix, such as the issue of Recast timer indexing.

Besides, like I said before, there's nothing wrong with asking for help. FFXI is 10 years old. No one gives a damn about the secrecy of the source code any more. If the Developers really don't have the time to re-index recast timers as 32-bit or 17-bit numbers, why not ask one of us to do it? Let's be real, it's not like we haven't been cracking their data files and taking apart their UI for years. All it would take to increase the amount of available recast timers in the game is to add a few 0's to a bunch of numbers and maybe change a data type here and there. Really not a huge deal.

Players do care about the bottom line, though. When players are happy, the bottom line is good. It's just a natural consequence of players, you know, being happy with the game and thus continuing to pay for it. When the bottom line goes south, it means that players are not happy - generally, players do not enjoy being unhappy. Maybe some are into that sort of thing, maybe not. However, those who are into that sort of thing will probably stay subscribed in order to continue feeling unhappy so any net effect on the bottom line is going to be brought about by players who are unhappy and do not like being unhappy.

I am not particularly unhappy with the state of the game right now, personally. I don't take drops seriously enough to care that I probably won't ever get a voidwatch body, if only because my luck with drops is always epic-tier bad. I love how Legion looks, especially considering it is essentially what I've been espousing as the ideal in drop systems since day 1.

However, I am upset that the Developers seem to insist on treating us like children rather than functional adults. It's bad for us, and honestly it's bad for them too. I can understand being daunted by the plethora of often-conflicting feedback presented by the player base, but that does not mean that legitimate concerns are not being raised. I feel that the Developers have an extreme disconnect in perspective from the actual players of the game, and that they will not be able to understand what it is we want until they resolve that. Beyond that, they will be functionally incapable of resolving that disconnect until they learn to view us and treat us as equals.