Player and developer communication

I'm going to preface this post with something important: the actual numbers jobs do at any given point aren't really the aim of the topic here. The purpose of this thread is to try to come to some sort of understanding on--and maybe request more of from the devs--the communication or lack thereof between the developers and the playerbase when decisions relating to job balancing and design are made.

There's a severe lack of "whys" given by the developers to the playerbase when decisions about the game are made, and the playerbase is left with the burden of only being able to assume why something is the way it is. Searing Light not coming from SMN is a burden the playerbase has been left to deal with and play around similarly to DRK's Living Dead, and most people would probably say "well, those skills are like that for flavor."

Are they, though? Have the developers ever actually said concretely that these awkward skills exist for flavor purposes?

Take physical ranged's general balance the last couple expansions, for instance. Based on how those jobs are balanced, most people would assume "well, they can move around freely, and that's why they're weaker."

Same question as above: is that actually the reason? Has that ever been communicated?

The support-oriented casters RDM and SMN. They provide a lot of strong utility, so they're weaker, right? They're balanced by a mix of utility and range.

What's going on with MCH, then? It isn't providing the same utility as BRD, DNC, RDM or SMN, so is it being neutered for reason of uptime alone? Why isn't SMN lower then, since it's got near physical ranged movement *and* utilities?

RPR shipped as--and still is--one of the highest DPS with both a raid buff and a heal over time. Shouldn't RPR's utility put it lower if that's the logic? Or is its uptime so difficult that it justifies its performance? Is uptime the only consideration in the case of both RPR and MCH? Is it the only consideration period? Why was RDM one of the worst DPS in the game for a majority of Stormblood, then? Its uptime justified it to be higher by this logic, but surely it was balanced by its raise utility, then? Is everything a case-by-case basis?

There isn't really any logic, just assumptions. The developers don't really explain to us the reason behind balance or design changes, they just push them out. The playerbase is left with the responsibility of working around these changes without any real hope of communicating how to fix the problems to the developers.

Most developer commentary is through live letters and interviews. They certainly do respond to feedback, but it’s not something that’s done off the cuff.

They do have a good track record for job balance, so stick with them for a few cycles. The beginning of an expansion is usually a bit wonky while things get dialed in, but they’ve shown us multiple times now we’ll end up in a pretty solid spot sooner rather than later.

As for the secret sauce on how they balance, that’s probably best left undisclosed. That’s the sort of thing players would latch onto and try to lawyer changes with.

I gotta wonder if they have anyone on the "Healer" development side of the team lol.

Compared to basically any Western dev studio they do A LOT of communication.
At least they don't need to go through five suits or read a script approved by them.
Yoshi and the other devs have a surprising level of freedom when it comes to this.

I think a problem is they talk about so much that they often don't have time to go in depth into things.
I'd like to hear why too tho.
But I also think we should wait until 6.1 before saying too much, it's entirely possible they have some reworks in mind and don't want to touch the numbers too much because it'd be even more work.
They do seem to have a better safe than sorry mentality and are careful with buffs and nerfs.
I get the disappointment in 6.08 but it's also not a patch where big changes are meant to happen.

The devs of this game communicate quite frequently.....Significantly more than any other MMO community I've been a part of.

just curious, sounds like you feel that the direction the devs take for their game requires player approval and clearance before implementation.

in my opinion that has ruined games more often than made anything better.

in case you have missed live letters and other releases from the producer, this game, compared to NA offerings, is virtually crystal clear in terms of transparency for changes. plus, the NA player has hardly covered themselves with glory when reacting to any change, no matter how well communicated.

why? well, its their game, their house, if they want to paint it pink and make us all wear large bows and tutus, thats within their scope.. and they dont exactly have to explain it to you

While I'm generally in full support of the devs and their ability to make the game they want to make (and make the game that will make them the most money), and I do believe they are pretty good at talking TO us, I still feel they're pretty bad at actually talking WITH us. This is an especially notable issue through official channels, like these forums or regulated Q&As. It shouldn't take a couple of years and a coming expansion pack to have the developer (or, really, just Yoshida) sit down with community reps and answer questions and/or explain development priorities. We shouldn't have to parse through fan translations of Japanese language only radio shows to try and figure out what the developers are thinking. We should have real and legitimate interaction at least with an official community team here on the Official FF14 Forums as opposed to them being completely abandoned/ignored like they have been for years now where the only "official" connection we get is through semi-consistent moderation.

So, yeah, I do feel that the developers are largely doing a good job of actually making the game. I don't, however, feel that their community engagement staff are even close to earning their keep.

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Originally Posted by StriderShinryu

While I'm generally in full support of the devs and their ability to make the game they want to make (and make the game that will make them the most money), and I do believe they are pretty good at talking TO us, I still feel they're pretty bad at actually talking WITH us. This is an especially notable issue through official channels, like these forums or regulated Q&As. It shouldn't take a couple of years and a coming expansion pack to have the developer (or, really, just Yoshida) sit down with community reps and answer questions and/or explain development priorities. We shouldn't have to parse through fan translations of Japanese language only radio shows to try and figure out what the developers are thinking. We should have real and legitimate interaction at least with an official community team here on the Official FF14 Forums as opposed to them being completely abandoned/ignored like they have been for years now where the only "official" connection we get is through semi-consistent moderation.

So, yeah, I do feel that the developers are largely doing a good job of actually making the game. I don't, however, feel that their community engagement staff are even close to earning their keep.

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The fact that it took someone pressing them in person about the PF RMT spam to get them to do anything about it after years of it being an issue says enough about how poorly information is relayed between them and the general playerbase.

It wouldn't surprise me if similar lack of awareness is the main reason why cheaters are thriving in the current environment.

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Originally Posted by Excaliburnina

There's a severe lack of "whys" given by the developers to the playerbase when decisions about the game are made, and the playerbase is left with the burden of only being able to assume why something is the way it is.

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That's what interviews are for. Yoshi-P does more interviews than any game producer I've ever known. Going back to when the game released, he has answered almost every question you could imagine and whenever someone asks a question, I can usually remember a time Yoshi-P answered it clearly and honestly.

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Searing Light not coming from SMN is a burden the playerbase has been left to deal with and play around similarly to DRK's Living Dead, and most people would probably say "well, those skills are like that for flavor."

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It's slightly annoying but if it is that much of a problem it will most likely be fixed. That's also what the forums are for, to let them know you think it's a problem.

If the devs are listening to player feedback so intently what exactly happened to healers? I don’t remember people asking for their entire playstyle to be reduced to literally a single button and they’ve never given any kind of explanation as to why we have insane amounts of healing output when every single piece of content outputs tiny damage amounts.

Saying ‘because we don’t want to stress healers with complex healing’ is quite frankly nonsensical because how can you stress healers with complexity when encounter design strictly forbids any kind of stress on the healer role anyway.

Or Bard for that matter. Yes I’m bringing it up even here

Last I checked literally nobody asked for it to be a high dps, middle-of-the-ground rDPS Dragoon style attacker (slight support good/high dps)who supports the party passively / through their own damage rotation so they can focus on their pure dps rotation and not have to spend brain cells on supporting anyone. Then when players gave their feedback that it was a dumb idea (nobody plays Bard to be a pure dps just like they don’t play Black Mage to be a support dps)…so they slapped some passive buffs they have taken from us back on our dps stances (aka songs), which completely ignored the point… and then they nerfed our DoTs in retaliation lol. Then this expansion they slapped Bards with Technical Finish to shut the players up. Which really wasn’t the issue; nobody asked for Bard to literally be Dancer. I mean I’m genuinely surprised Radiant Finale doesn’t give all affected party members a chance of generating Song Gauge for the Bard. It didn’t seem fair that Bard had to have its support kit demolished for Dancer to have it, while they get to run with utility that’s actually marginally useful like Waltz and Improvisation / Finish. And that’s not considering the multitude of other issues that have flat out been ignored for several expansions (i.e Warden’s Paean is basically an anachronism, Minne has been useless for a long time, Bloodletter which they essentially still haven’t fixed because half charges)

So I mean, sure, the devs do ‘answer’ a lot of questions. But how often do they actually give an answer instead of just skirting around the issue? There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they either aren’t aware or just aren’t taking player feedback into consideration; they also very rarely give us any kind of insight into why they decided to do what they do (I.e healers). I’d say Bard too but technically they’ve already said that they hate the job and regret ever adding it to the game which is hilarious but absolutely shows. And I mean I can’t deny that it’s a genuine answer lol

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Originally Posted by Jybril

I gotta wonder if they have anyone on the "Healer" development side of the team lol.

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From what I’ve heard, they don’t. Their job design team is supposedly 4 people, which consists of 3 dps mains and a PLD main. They literally don’t have a person on their team who enjoys healing in mmos, and my god it shows.

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Originally Posted by Connor

If the devs are listening to player feedback so intently what exactly happened to healers? I don’t remember people asking for their entire playstyle to be reduced to literally a single button and they’ve never given any kind of explanation as to why we have insane amounts of healing output when every single piece of content outputs tiny damage amounts.

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Yes, they have listened to feedback from the players. They heard SCH's clunky because of fairy delays. They fixed that in Endwalker by making the fairy more reactive to commands. They heard how Deployment tactics take over a GCD after using Adlo, so they made Adlo's shield go off before the cast finishes, allowing you to immediately deploy it without waiting. They heard WHM and SCH doesn't have good weave slots compared to AST, so they made all jobs 1.5 seconds on their nuke. They heard AST's card system sucked while others preferred the current version, so they tried to add something new to the AST system. They heard people saying they don't like healers with one button rotation, so they tried making SGE and to tell plays to give that job a shot. For Ninjas, they heard Raiju sucked because they cannot hold it and were forced to use the forced gap closer, so they created an extended duration and stacking buff, then later changed the skill to be 2 separate weaponskills - depending on whether you needed to gap close or if it was bad to gap close.

It's not that they haven't listened to ANY feedback at all, as changes still take time to implement while making changes to other jobs and new content. Whether the changes to the feedback worked as intended is a different story, but the devs are quite transparent in that regard.

From what I've seen in the forums and in other conversations, people disliked Bard for not being able to compete with DNC at the time during ShB, so they made Bard a bit more similar to DNC in raid buffing. That's not very surprising. The same thing happened to DRK. People complained about DRK being too similar to WAR... but in actuality, the reason why that happened is because originally, DRK players complained about how WAR was fun and DRK wasn't ... so the devs tried to make DRK similar to WAR in that regard. As you can see, that backfired, so DRK is becoming more mitigative in gameplay compared to WAR's self healing. You can't shove the problem all onto the devs as it's partly the fault of player feedback as well. Player feedback doesn't always communicate well either (memes can sometimes be part of the issue in that regard), nor does it always coincide with what the devs have in their vision. MNK suffered from player feedback from Heavensward to Shadowbringers - reverting changes left and right until they realize they need to scrap the concept since there's no vision or direction for that job to improve outside of more niche abilities.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

Yes, they have listened to feedback from the players. They heard SCH's clunky because of fairy delays. They fixed that in Endwalker by making the fairy more reactive to commands. They heard how Deployment tactics take over a GCD after using Adlo, so they made Adlo's shield go off before the cast finishes, allowing you to immediately deploy it without waiting. They heard WHM and SCH doesn't have good weave slots compared to AST, so they made all jobs 1.5 seconds on their nuke. They heard AST's card system sucked while others preferred the current version, so they tried to add something new to the AST system. They heard people saying they don't like healers with one button rotation, so they tried making SGE and to tell plays to give that job a shot.

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No disrespect meant to you, but most of these things are things they should've been aware of to begin with. This is where a lot of frustrations come from, these glaringly obvious issues that should be fixed or tweaked throughout the course of an expansion, and not touted as big expansion changes. Don't get me wrong, Scholar's fairy is better, Deployment Tactics feels better to use, and 1.5s cast times are nice to have, but none of these are "big expansion shakeups" and these are all issues that should've been addressed back in Shadowbringers. Sage also has no more DPS options than any other healer, and while Kardia is nice, it doesn't change the issue of spamming 1-1-1-1 over and over - Sage is not different from any of the other healers at all in terms of what it's doing for it's "DPS rotation" over a fight, so they've failed to address any of the issues facing the monotony of healer downtime.

It's things like this that would make some form of communication better, because we could at least understand what they're thinking. Was there a legitimate design reason back in Shadowbringers for why WHM and SCH had 2.5s cast times that made them have to sacrifice DPS to heal outside of their DoT refresh when AST didn't? Is there a legitimate design reason that WHM and SCH still lose DPS to heal with parts of their kit when AST and SGE don't, even with 1.5s cast times? Is there a legitimate design reason for why AST's GCD heals are less expensive MP wise than WHM's despite having the same potency and AST having way more oGCD heals than WHM? What is their view on WHM's place within the four healers, given that there are now TWO "selfish DPS" healers, with Sage able to do more damage than WHM, and of the two "pure/regen healers", Astrologian is able to heal more effectively without sacrificing personal DPS due to it's wide number of oGCD heals while providing raid buffs?

These aren't issues that they should be hearing about from players, these are issues that they should be seeing themselves as the ones who should be playing these jobs extensively to test and see how they feel. But it feels like they aren't and like they have nobody playing them to the point where they can recognize the problems they face. But if we had communication with say, a healer developer, maybe we could get some insight on why they think these design choices are good, vital, essential, etc to the jobs that they're developing, rather than having it feel like they just hastily look over some jobs so they can get back to designing cool stuff for the jobs they actually play.

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Originally Posted by Connor

If the devs are listening to player feedback so intently what exactly happened to healers? I don’t remember people asking for their entire playstyle to be reduced to literally a single button

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The explanation we were given was there are a lot of healers that only want to heal. They also do not want to pressure healers to attack by giving them a combo and then have to choose between interrupting it or not healing, because they may choose not to heal. They don't want a rotation to distract them too much from healing.

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and they’ve never given any kind of explanation as to why we have insane amounts of healing output when every single piece of content outputs tiny damage amounts.

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This is true except for big pulls in leveling dungeons, which in shadowbringers forced me to burn through my entire healing kit on scholar. It was only in certain big pulls that I began to see that there actually is a healing rotation you can burn through but it is very rare to need it.

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Originally Posted by Haventale

From what I’ve heard, they don’t. Their job design team is supposedly 4 people, which consists of 3 dps mains and a PLD main. They literally don’t have a person on their team who enjoys healing in mmos, and my god it shows.

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Citation needed.

Saying the devs don't listen to the players while meaning they don't specifically listen to you.

If you ask 10 players what they want to have changed on a particular job, you'll get 6 different answers.
Some want it harder, some easier, some more utility, some more mobility while using skills, etc.
So, how are they supposed to make everyone happy? :confused:

The devs do communicate, they just say something you might not like.

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Originally Posted by Tyjacon

Saying the devs don't listen to the players while meaning they don't specifically listen to you.

If you ask 10 players what they want to have changed on a particular job, you'll get 6 different answers.
Some want it harder, some easier, some more utility, some more mobility while using skills, etc.
So, how are they supposed to make everyone happy? :confused:

The devs do communicate, they just say something you might not like.

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They can't make everyone happy and they never will, which is why for the most part player's opinions on job changes are filed directly into the trash can.

Like the example you gave, ask 100 Players what to change about a certain job and you'll get 100 different answers.

But when something is so awful, so broken that those same 100 players all agree on it... That's when the devs should begin to listen.

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Originally Posted by Maxilor

But when something is so awful, so broken that those same 100 players all agree on it... That's when the devs should begin to listen.

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not really.

you have 100 raiders from that other game that want things like they were in the other game. or 100 pvpers wanting open world pvp.

in your theory, they are more important than the vast number of people against that?

unfortunately, or fortunately, game companies are not democracies, its their vision. could there be a bit more communication? sure, why not. ever play Wildstar? they started listening to their players... hmmm.. where is that game today? Or that other game, they listened to high end raiders, and where is it today?

the player is not always worth being listened to. plain and simple.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

not really.

you have 100 raiders from that other game that want things like they were in the other game. or 100 pvpers wanting open world pvp.

in your theory, they are more important than the vast number of people against that?

unfortunately, or fortunately, game companies are not democracies, its their vision. could there be a bit more communication? sure, why not. ever play Wildstar? they started listening to their players... hmmm.. where is that game today? Or that other game, they listened to high end raiders, and where is it today?

the player is not always worth being listened to. plain and simple.

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That was just an example I made, but in real life we would be considering the entire player base and each individuals opinions.

If the great majority of a player base all agrees that a certain job is unfun, or is broken in some way should their feedback not be taken into consideration?

BTW i'm not talking about the loud minority on the forums.

I doubt the devs actually take any community feed back. Even JP feedback. Just look at the state of MCH, or WHM. The state of tanking and healing as a whole. The list goes on and on.

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Originally Posted by Caurcas

I doubt the devs actually take any community feed back. Even JP feedback. Just look at the state of MCH, or WHM. The state of tanking and healing as a whole. The list goes on and on.

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Reaper and male Viera exist pretty much exclusively because of player feedback. So.. yeah.

When the customer base jumps up a magnitude, direct communication pretty much has to go.
For multiple reasons, but even for the sake of fairness, you cannot give this, unspecific, concentration of players more attention than this other group of players, even if they are more vocal about it.
Let's think about the numbers they are willing to release. In a chart shared with the press, the game had 4 million registered users in 2015, then hit 10 million at the release of third expansion Stormblood in 2017. And then 24 million announced before Endwalker.
In face of such growth, singular voices become more and more insignificant really.

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Originally Posted by StriderShinryu

Reaper and male Viera exist pretty much exclusively because of player feedback. So.. yeah.

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And male Viera are a second class race like FViera and Hrothgar....so what feedback they take they implement half done.

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Originally Posted by Caurcas

And male Viera are a second class race like FViera and Hrothgar....so what feedback they take they implement half done.

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Thats because both male and female Viera are modified Miqo'te and Hrothgar males are modified Roe skeletons.

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Originally Posted by Caurcas

And male Viera are a second class race like FViera and Hrothgar....so what feedback they take they implement half done.

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Tbf Female Viera are also a thing only because SE was listening to player feedback. They were going to go all in with Hrothgar, but decided a bit later into the game to listen to the player demands since they wanted to stop making new races after that. Which shows they probably should have just ignored the requests for viera and stuck to their guns with Hrothgar. They gambled and lost big time, and now have to keep working on two races for some time because of it.

I play many MMMorpg and I think the ff14 dev explained a lot of their decision making and game design in the live letter, they were not obligated to do that much explaining but they did, one of the reason why the dev is doing a somewhat balanced good (and bad) job at the same time is because they use both logical and emotional aspect in balance to make the vision forward, if they simply use logical approach on development, just look at many predatory money hungry Game out there, more focus on make it easier to play the game if you pay more than other player, or simply look at data statistic and see how many people play what class and buff other underused class or nerf overused class, but the dev will take some emotional approach by hearing to some player thought that perhaps illogical or the data statistic disagree, this could work and also could fireback, this is really a tricky stuff to do, also just for my opinion on the ff14 dev focus, they will give more focus on casual stuff aside from combat

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Originally Posted by Maxilor

Citation needed.

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I went into depth on this a few years ago.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ealer-designer.

As to how that stands today, I believe Sato has been promoted to a producer role below Yoshida whilst still effectively overseeing battle system design as a whole, whilst another team member was taken on in his place. I've not dug through the credits to be sure but I'm guessing team are currently at 4.5 to 5 members depending on what else Sato is managing now.

And yes, SE are generally pretty good at communicating feedback with players. They have historically been rather quiet on the healer front though, I suspect Yoshida's comments about WHM vs SCH healing early on and the bewilderment it produced kind of burned them on that topic. It's also worth keeping in mind that they do seemingly vet or at least reserve the right to veto interview questions. Whilst this is pretty much the norm, it does also highlight that they are hardly fielding 'Ask me anythings' here.

Player and developer communication https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...r-Questions%21

For me this game has one of he most healthy player dev communication because of Yoshida. After the failure of 1.0 Yoshida made it one of his principle to listen to the playerbase. Of course they cannot see and hear all, and they will still need to balance player feedback with their overall vision and direction of the game.

Too much of player feedback is regarding glamour, and not enough is about class balance or design.

A lot of this games problems also stem from the devs listening to feedback as well.

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Originally Posted by IdowhatIwant

Too much of player feed back is regarding glamour, and not enough is about class balance or design.

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I mean we have a section of the forum dedicated to the Jobs, we don't for glam.
So it makes sense general would be where people talk about glam and less about Jobs.

The player <-> dev communication is not great but it is OK, IMHO. I do not see, that the devs and designers are living in an ivory tower and are immune to feedback. :)


Cheers

People are gonna argue there is a lot more communication going on here compared to other games. And it's true.

But the way they take player feedback now compared to 2011~2015...? It's far, far cry from how it used to be. Probably because the game hit it big and now they only respond when things get really really bad, and the Letters only exist exclusively to build hype for patches now. For better or for worse there was a level of "our players know what they want and we should try to deliver it" in the first years Yoshi-P was around. Now it's more like "we know you want X but we want to give you Y because we care more about the players less invested in the game".
They don't even pay much attention outside twitter anymore.

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Originally Posted by Haventale

From what I’ve heard, they don’t. Their job design team is supposedly 4 people, which consists of 3 dps mains and a PLD main. They literally don’t have a person on their team who enjoys healing in mmos, and my god it shows.

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And you heard it where?
Just asking.

Unless I missed something I don't ever remember SE mentioning their job design team composition.
Just a rumor unless proven otherwise.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

I went into depth on this a few years ago.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ealer-designer.

As to how that stands today, I believe Sato has been promoted to a producer role below Yoshida whilst still effectively overseeing battle system design as a whole, whilst another team member was taken on in his place. I've not dug through the credits to be sure but I'm guessing team are currently at 4.5 to 5 members depending on what else Sato is managing now.

And yes, SE are generally pretty good at communicating feedback with players. They have historically been rather quiet on the healer front though, I suspect Yoshida's comments about WHM vs SCH healing early on and the bewilderment it produced kind of burned them on that topic. It's also worth keeping in mind that they do seemingly vet or at least reserve the right to veto interview questions. Whilst this is pretty much the norm, it does also highlight that they are hardly fielding 'Ask me anythings' here.

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Thanks for taking the time to provide evidence. That's actually wild.