A Realm Ignored? LftP LIVE Part XIX Q&A: or Why English Suggestions Never Make It.

I just got done reading the Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XIX Q&A Update Thread. All the questions that were answered were content related. New dungeons, classes, races, all great. However, no questions addressing user interface, control or display were answered.

On a side note, I'm having a hard time finding any suggestion, in any (english) forum that actually was addressed in the last 3 LftP:L, or the last 5 patch notes.

I admit a lot if self-serving interest in this (I make a lot of suggestions) but it really seems like foreign markets have no influence on this Japanese rooted game.

Thoughts? Criticism?

You do realize ARR's design is solely based around WoW, right? To the point Yoshida even had his team play it for a year. No one market is "ignored" because there's a lot of cross questions - Not to mention if you look at english suggestions/questions a lot are repeats that keep getting asked..every. single. time. even after they answered it a year ago.

They actually did implement stuff from the English forums. For example the some people on English forums kept demanding there be a withdraw penalty on the duty finder and now there is one. This wasn't a concern at all on the JP forums.

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Originally Posted by Zumi

They actually did implement stuff from the English forums. For example the some people on English forums kept demanding there be a withdraw penalty on the duty finder and now there is one. This wasn't a concern at all on the JP forums.

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Probably because of different player behaviour on the JP datacenter...
I've seen many witness accounts mention how different it is between the NA/EU and the JP datacenters when it comes to various things.

so why did a Japanese company doing a live press event in Japan do it all in Japanese? is that the question?


There are English French and German Moderators that read all the forum posts and do provide regular reports to the developers. how much of it gets through to them though no one can say.

However if you compare the English forums to the Japanese forums you'll see some major differences. The Japanese forums don't have nearly as many trolls. Sarcasm is somewhat lost on our Japanese counterparts; something is lost in translation and its not something that they use like we do. They also don't have as many repeat threads on the same subject; Americans especially suffer from this special snowflake syndrome where we think our ideas are completely original and can't be bothered to read other threads with the same subject and contribute to the conversation. We seem to just talk over each other and are entitled to instant gratification so much so we demand it and threaten to quit and make whiny posts about it.There is a good deal more static to sift through in the English forums. It becomes harder to determine what is an actual community concern and not the just fevered rantings of some addled brain loon.

You want to be heard?
This is what you do.
Get likes. the mods pay more attention to that than you'd think.

Follow the rules pinned to the top of the forum, things that don't get less attention.

Get feedback. If I had to read all the forums posts. I would probably start with the largest and most active threads. So the ones with the most pages get more attention.

Be constructive and responsive. debate but be civil, no name calling or profanity, once it derails in an argument over semantics or a long quote war parsing sentences. You have lost. Lord knows if I'm not playing along as a white/black hat; reading all that noise would be harrrrrd and probably wouldn't be taken seriously.

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Originally Posted by OranKells

words

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This guy gets it. People voice their concerns, but it's always 10+ threads of the same issue because some people think spamming the forums with the same complaints will get attention. It doesn't. Multiple threads of the same subject get ignored because it's just people shouting the same things over and over again with their own twists on the subject. It also doesn't help that you get people who think slamming Square with stuff like "lazy" "greedy" etc won't have negative feedback, but all it does is make the person look like a raving loon that want people to pay attention to them. It also doesn't help that we have people who feel they have to mock others for posting something stupid, creating a bigger circle jerk.

To elaborate further, I frequent the Payday 2 forums on Steam and it's VERY similar to the forums here; people posting "suggestions" or complaints that were posted a billion times already and then getting all huffy whenever people tell them to do a search. People complaining in the most vile and toxic way possible while slamming the developers, then branding anyone who doesn't take their side as a white knight/fanboy. People questioning developers after they already answered a question for the fans as if the developers have something to hide. In a recent Q&A session with one of the devs, 99% of the questions asked were things that were already answered in the past; one question was about the "promised" ability to customize one's safe house. The devs already said that they'll work on it, but it's very low on the priority list. Today's session had the same question pop up and the dev said they'll do the safe house once they feel it's up to their standards. People simply want to hear their own voice.

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Originally Posted by OranKells

Words and ideas.

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This. The English forums are completely unreasonable in their "suggestions".

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Originally Posted by OranKells

Sarcasm is somewhat lost on our Japanese counterparts; something is lost in translation and its not something that they use like we do.

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This is completely true. I've actually had to explain sarcasm to some Japanese college students while I was studying abroad.
There are a LOT of cultural differences between Japan and the rest of the world that we just won't EVER fully grasp.
Remember that this is a country that practically glorifies cuteness in the same way America glorifies toughness.
And one of the HUGE things is transparency. One of the big reasons 1.0 fell apart and a contributing factor as to why a lot of Japanese MMOs just don't succeed at all in the West to the point they haven't brought us many of them such as .hack//FRAGMENT and DQX is the transparency demands. Western audiences want as much communication from the company as possible, while Japanese audiences are far less demanding. In 1.0 this was a massive problem during the early days since we received an inferior product and SE went completely tight-lipped. Even now, people constantly complain about a lack of transparency. This is even a problem outside the gaming industry as one of the major criticisms levied towards Toyota a few years back during the whole brakes fiasco.
But that's just the way Japanese companies are run. The whole idea of basically explaining their entire process behind the game is new to them, and has consequently bitten them in the ass a few times so far. There's a rather large disconnect between what the company is actually doing and what you tell your customers in Japanese society. They even have a completely different speech pattern for speaking with customers! (and bosses, and superiors, and inferiors, etc.)
You know that "Please look forward to it!" we constantly hear? Well, it's actually a Japanese colloquialism and part of the same pattern for speaking to customers (keigo) that I mentioned before that means exactly what it says, but doesn't necessarily carry the same weight that it does in English, which is why it sounds so awkward.

In short, Japan is a COMPLETELY different culture and you should expect some differences in communication.
Also as for them taking Japanese questions...um, yeah when they DO take English questions, they have to be translated into Japanese for Yoshida&Co, then translated BACK into English for the live letter. Often times, the end result is a bit different.
Also remember that they will VERY rarely answer a question that they predict could end up biting them in the ass by answering.
Look forward to it.
よろしくお願いします。

No, it's just that it's not a true Q&A, it's faked, they just take or create the questions they want, the point of the live letters is to show the new contents, not to open a dialogue with the community.

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Originally Posted by OranKells

so why did a Japanese company doing a live press event in Japan do it all in Japanese? is that the question?

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No. That is not the question. There is no question, only observations. Though I admit questioning, sarcasm in the title (A Realm Ignored?) this was more or less click bait to draw attention to the statements contained in the thread.

As for the rest of your ramble, I agree. I do follow the rules, debate honestly and logically. But I counter; the reason suggestions dont receive the "likes" or volition of any kind isn't because they arn't good suggestions. It's because (BEWARE: untrained forum commentator about to make assumptions about player psychology) people A. For the majority, don't visit the forum. B. don't care about 97% of the suggestions proposed and, as you said, aren't willing to search for and propagate old suggestions of the same ilk.

But despite all this, in a perfect world, I still think it's important for the secretary of the assistant of the translator of the bug verifier of the developer to review the forums for good, easy-kill suggestions, regardless of the "like"ability. Or better yet, have a volunteer review and compile like-minded suggestions; free and good customer service. And for gods sakes, acknowledge cultural/language gaps and work to overcome them.

As it relates to the OP, agreed; there is tons of noise. But when was the last time you went out of your way to push or criticize a suggestion, even if it had no/minimal impact on your play style, system, interface, etc.?

I thank you for your clear, complete thought. "like" attached.

I think some of you are missing something. The Like system. The reason alot, if not all, English questions aren't selected are because of our propensity to want OUR question answered. Sure, someone else may have posted the same question before you, but you worded it 'better' so you added your question and ignore the rest. Or you couldn't be arsed to look through the whole thread to see if your question was asked already. Etc. Etc. The end result is alot of multiple questions asking the same thing and not alot of Likes. The Japanese are practically the exact opposite. When Square picks their questions they pool from questions that got alot of Likes because that's their only metric to knowing if it's one that's representative of the community. Maybe if we stopped trying to be special snowflakes, our questions would get asked, too.

Append: The Lego beat me to it. I was being a selfish little snowflake as well. T,T

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Originally Posted by Gilraen

I think some of you are missing something. The Like system. The reason alot, if not all, English questions aren't selected are because of our propensity to want OUR question answered. Sure, someone else may have posted the same question before you, but you worded it 'better' so you added your question and ignore the rest. Or you couldn't be arsed to look through the whole thread to see if your question was asked already. Etc. Etc.

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Quite right. Also, you have inappropriately placed suggestions, or ambiguous suggestions that are appropriate for multiple forums. THIS VERY TOPIC could easily be housed in the websight feedback discussion.

In a way this proves the point of the OP; if SE was taking note of suggestions, why are they not being moved to appropriate forums?

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Originally Posted by OranKells

We seem to just talk over each other and are entitled to instant gratification so much so we demand it and threaten to quit and make whiny posts about it.

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This right here, I notice this the most on here.

They make something new its instant complaining.
I understand people want to voice their opinions but, they do it in the wrong ways and if they don't get their way all hell breaks loose.

Demand, quit, making multi threads of same topic, spamming, I understand why they wouldn't want to pay attention because its the same thing over and over again.

For example.

Say someone suggests to remove crystal teleports from each land so it takes longer.

So SE listens and does it and then right after you have tons of people unhappy mad and some of these people were for it and threaten SE to pull plug cause they liked the crystals or made a mistake by saying get rid of them.

The other issue in the English forums is when you have certain individuals posting multiple threads that are either complaining about something or "suggesting" something for the devs to look into. It's like a customer at a restaurant who nit picks everything about their meal or keeps calling the waiter back to change their order. There's one person here, who I won't name, that seems to keep posting a new suggestion/improvement/complaint everyday and it makes me wonder if he even enjoys the game at all or enjoys speaking out on the forums more.

It's kinda funny now that I think about it...to someone who doesn't speak English as a first language, the difference between a "suggestion" on the forum and a "demand (DO THIS OR I QUIT!)" is so thin as to almost be invisible.
The next time I see a nice juicy fresh one maybe I'll link it in here to show what I mean.

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Originally Posted by Gilraen

I think some of you are missing something. The Like system. The reason alot, if not all, English questions aren't selected are because of our propensity to want OUR question answered. Sure, someone else may have posted the same question before you, but you worded it 'better' so you added your question and ignore the rest. Or you couldn't be arsed to look through the whole thread to see if your question was asked already. Etc. Etc. The end result is alot of multiple questions asking the same thing and not alot of Likes.

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I remember for the most recent Live Letter, reading through the question submission thread. I wanted to make sure I posted questions that had yet to be asked, or address topics that yes, while important to me, would also appeal to a wide range of folks. By page 30 I was pretty sick of seeing the same questions, especially regarding glamors/hair styles/housing issues popping up. Not just because these issues aren't as important to me personally, but because a good 20 of those 30 pages were taken up by repeat questions along the same lines.

You could look through the thread from page 1 to page ... what, I think it ended on 50 or so? You could see the likes on the first page. Some questions had more than others, but there was plenty of activity with the Like button there. By the time you got to page 10 the Likes had died down, and every suggestion after that had 0... 1... 2... likes on it. Clearly people read the first few pages, got bored, and posted their own version of the questions which got asked in later pages.

Naturally this means that my own questions get less attention as a result, because now they're just appearing in those subsequent pages that most people are skipping over. I was pleasantly surprised when most of them got to 7 likes each, but that wasn't nearly enough for them to get the kind of attention that they could have gotten if people actively read through the thread instead of skimming, or SKIPPING most of the questions.

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Originally Posted by radioactive_lego

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Put simply, you didn't look hard enough. At the very least I know of one specific question from the English forums that was answered for Live Letter 18, because I was the person who asked it. The question they used to announce the Ninja nerf, that was me. Otherwise, well, they pick and choose the questions that are most relevant to what they want to talk about. This means questions about the new content that's coming and the rewards it can supply. Half of the English questions for Live Letter 19 were nothing more than whining about the cash shop. Obviously in an event where they're trying to hype up the new content coming to this game, they wouldn't want to address the huge amount of whining that came out of us for that live letter, and instead only briefly drew attention to it by announcing that the Gold Saucer would have no cash shop tie-ins.