A Follow-up Regarding the Dawntrail Official Benchmark

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...d1d9f0db152d31

My current estimate for replacing the benchmark is the latter half of the week of May 23

Nice! Benchmark 2 at the end of the month. Very appreciated!

I guess, there will be benchmark 3. Because the Viera players will complain about their noses and Miqo players about their fangs. xD





Cheers

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

I guess, there will be benchmark 3. Because the Viera players will complain about their noses and Miqo players about their fangs. xD





Cheers

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Was this comment necessary?

They are in crunch mode, working on Saturdays. And people will still complain after it releases.

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Originally Posted by Taliriah

They are in crunch mode, working on Saturdays. And people will still complain after it releases.

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Well, other forum posters told us not to complain yet because the lighting in the benchmark was bad. So I assume people can complain when the lighting matches Danwtrail quality but their characters still don't look right.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

I guess, there will be benchmark 3. Because the Viera players will complain about their noses and Miqo players about their fangs. xD





Cheers

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I get the impression they're aware of said issues:

"Having said that, our players graciously provided a tremendous amount of feedback with screenshots, which helped us quickly determine our direction for fixes and adjustments, as well as identify points to address. We hope to return this favour by addressing as many points as possible, and I would appreciate it if you could bear with us a while longer as we solidify a release date for the updated benchmark."

I actually like the changes. I think a lot of the updates where so much nicer and less cartoon like. I do agree there where issues like the fangs and also the lips on the races I play looked too matte but that was it.
I feel it got blown out of all proportion and half the time I could not tell what was before or after as the changes are subtle.

I fantasia a lot since they changed my lovely cat from 1.0 but we where given a fantasia and have to embrace the cartoon look and that was it. I feel sorry for the workload some of the artists will have my daughter is a lead artist in a games company and she is snowed under at times so I hope they are being paid well and looked after.

I do hope that players are happy with the new benchmark but you can't please everyone. I know there was a lot who liked the changes.

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Originally Posted by Taliriah

They are in crunch mode, working on Saturdays. And people will still complain after it releases.

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People will complain regardless of how many hours the devs work. Some of the complaints were also warranted (for example, the botched hair textures on certain styles, beards having patches missing under the chin, etc.).

Personally I'd rather people make complaints when there are obvious flaws, it's not a bad thing. The devs should be able to handle criticism when they're providing a service to people (i.e. an MMO), because ultimately our satisfaction is what matters. We are literally paying to play this game.

It blows my mind how many people have tried to silence those who have had issues with the benchmark simply for the sake of not delaying Dawntrail because it's inconvenient for them and their schedules.

Like, does that crowd not think the issues the other side have been seeing are also not an inconvenience for them?

At the end of the day, I'd rather them take their time and produce a quality product (especially after the disaster the last year or so has been with Endwalker) than rush things out and ignore issues that people have just so others don't mess up their vacations days.

I'm happy they're listening to the player base and making changes quickly. I don't get the other half of this community that's actually upset and disappointed that SE . . . listened to player feedback.

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Originally Posted by OceanWater

I'm happy they're listening to the player base and making changes quickly. I don't get the other half of this community that's actually upset and disappointed that SE . . . listened to player feedback.

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I think it depends on the feedback SE is listening to. I'm sure everyone has an idea as to what kind of feedback they personally wouldn't want SE to listen to. I see plenty of arguments about that on these forums.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

Nice! Benchmark 2 at the end of the month. Very appreciated!

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A Benchmark Reborn if you will..

Praying for Moon Teeth

Thanks Yoshi and the rest of the Dev Team. This is another undertaking that they weren't expecting but so many of us are looking forward to the fix.

"Having said that, our players graciously provided a tremendous amount of feedback with screenshots, which helped us quickly determine our direction for fixes and adjustments, as well as identify points to address."

Translation: "Thank you Japan players for giving us useful criticism and identifying areas for improvement, and for not being a dumpster fire like the NA forums"

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

I guess, there will be benchmark 3. Because the Viera players will complain about their noses and Miqo players about their fangs. xD





Cheers

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Lmao, yeah you're probably right.

I'm interested to see how the lighting changes affect characters appearances. As well as seeing if they fix the more obvious issues like miqo'te keeper fangs.

Im still hesitant to be excited about anything else though. I really liked majority of the changes to the details of the faces and thought they mostly looked miles better with some notable exceptions. Elezen mouths when emoting etc. I guess at the end of the day you can't please everyone and they should probably cater to making the characters more close to how they are now. It's just a shame to see details I liked better potentially rolled back but that's what happens when you're in the minority I suppose. It is what it is and if the changes make everyone else more satisfied then great. Still hoping for a character creation update someday in the future that maybe adds some of these other options to give players more choice.

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Originally Posted by DrForester

"Having said that, our players graciously provided a tremendous amount of feedback with screenshots, which helped us quickly determine our direction for fixes and adjustments, as well as identify points to address."

Translation: "Thank you Japan players for giving us useful criticism and identifying areas for improvement, and for not being a dumpster fire like the NA forums"

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It's not our fault you're too blind to see the constructive criticism that the EN forums created and gave to the developers. Though the "JP player base is so much better" is definitely a fun form of racism you've concocted there.

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Originally Posted by VerdeLuck

It's not our fault you're too blind to see the constructive criticism that the EN forums created and gave to the developers. Though the "JP player base is so much better" is definitely a fun form of racism you've concocted there.

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Its funny because when I read the person you're quoting, the only people making english forums a dumpster fire are people like that.

Most people who gave feedback were quite thorough and there were trolls inbetween with the negging "nothing has changed", "its an improvement...", "why are you complaining, wait until DT releases".

As always, continue to ignore them and give feedback as it has clearly worked. It was a collective effort and not just a single effort from the japanese forums. At the end of the day, this is a victory for the people who worked really hard to give feedback and wanted changes. Their voices were heard and Square Enix clearly agreed there were issues that needed to be remedied.

Thanks again to Yoshi P and the FF14 Development team for working hard to correct these issues in the lead up to DT release.

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Originally Posted by Taliriah

They are in crunch mode, working on Saturdays. And people will still complain after it releases.

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And they should keep complaining since it works, as evidenced by the new benchmark.

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Originally Posted by Erin1491

I'm interested to see how the lighting changes affect characters appearances. As well as seeing if they fix the more obvious issues like miqo'te keeper fangs.

Im still hesitant to be excited about anything else though. I really liked majority of the changes to the details of the faces and thought they mostly looked miles better with some notable exceptions. Elezen mouths when emoting etc. I guess at the end of the day you can't please everyone and they should probably cater to making the characters more close to how they are now. It's just a shame to see details I liked better potentially rolled back but that's what happens when you're in the minority I suppose. It is what it is and if the changes make everyone else more satisfied then great. Still hoping for a character creation update someday in the future that maybe adds some of these other options to give players more choice.

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Really what they should do is have those changes added as optional choices in character creation instead of just a complete rollback, that way people who like the changes can have them and people who didn't like them can have their char's previous facial features. I can't see why the devs would be unable to implement this. It would definitely make players on both sides happy.

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Originally Posted by DrForester

"Having said that, our players graciously provided a tremendous amount of feedback with screenshots, which helped us quickly determine our direction for fixes and adjustments, as well as identify points to address."

Translation: "Thank you Japan players for giving us useful criticism and identifying areas for improvement, and for not being a dumpster fire like the NA forums"

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Accurate,hopefully in the next round people here can be more organized and not have fifty threads that make it hard to address actual issues.

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Originally Posted by DrForester

"Having said that, our players graciously provided a tremendous amount of feedback with screenshots, which helped us quickly determine our direction for fixes and adjustments, as well as identify points to address."

Translation: "Thank you Japan players for giving us useful criticism and identifying areas for improvement, and for not being a dumpster fire like the NA forums"

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I know its a common theme for NA players to praise the japanese and dunk on their own nationality when it comes to giivng feedback but our feedback is just as important as jp players. This along with the fact there are far more NA/western players than jp.
SE knows our culture/fourm etiquette is much different than the japanese. We prefer to make our own threads and the japanese prefer to all post in the same mega thread. I can tell you the Dev team is hyper aware of this. So NA isn't a dumpster fire. Its just a difference in not only culture but as I said, fourm etiquette.

NA players like to make their own threads so they can be the center of attention for their concern and also we don't like people's posts as much as JP and prefer to comment instead.
SE isn't going to only listen to the JP playerbase, NA/western players showed great feedback too with a huge thread with first page/op post highlighting a ton of bugs. Sadly the title of the thread is a quite over the top and over dramatic but still, that's just how NA/western players are.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ke-it-optional
^ Massive thread nothing in the JP thread highlights this much info in a single post for every single character.

So basically. I disagree with you saying "thank you jp" as if we "NA/Western players" did nothing but yell and provided zero feedback.

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Originally Posted by OceanWater

I'm happy they're listening to the player base and making changes quickly. I don't get the other half of this community that's actually upset and disappointed that SE . . . listened to player feedback.

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And it’s not like they don’t make a point of asking for our feedback every time they do something major. You’d think people would be happy they’re so eager to listen to player feedback and make changes.

It’ll be interesting to see how much difference the better environment and lighting makes, and just how much of the mouth scaling issue was responsible for some of the things that looked “off” on some of the races.

Just wonder though, if the characters I created with the current benchmark will still be saved somewhere when the new one comes out? Or will I have to create and save them again?

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Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

Just wonder though, if the characters I created with the current benchmark will still be saved somewhere when the new one comes out? Or will I have to create and save them again?

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I think if you still have your FFXIV_CHARA_BENCH files than you should be able to cut and paste them into the new Benchmark.

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Originally Posted by OceanWater

I'm happy they're listening to the player base and making changes quickly. I don't get the other half of this community that's actually upset and disappointed that SE . . . listened to player feedback.

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The community isn't a monolith. For every person who hated a change there's another person who loved it. I think the face I use turned out pretty much perfect and spot on, but I saw other people on this forum say it was ruined. I'm not worried about my face changing much if at all, but I can see how someone pleased with the updated models would be nervous about a new round of tweaks. Listening to all sides and making their best judgement call is the tightrope the devs have to walk in every decision they make.

Whatever happens, kudos to Yoship and the rest of the team for being so transparent with the community. People love to be dramatic and say they never listen to feedback but that is clearly not true at all and we're quite fortunate to have a team that really cares behind this game, even if they do make some boneheaded mistakes sometimes. :p

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Originally Posted by Plushy

NA players like to make their own threads so they can be the center of attention for their concern

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Or you know writing in Japanese is hard

Very glad at the communication being so high and the breakdown of what they are doing. From what he has written this time I think they have noted people disliking the loss of certain racial traits. Time will tell! I'm hopeful.

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Originally Posted by LillyWandsworth

Or you know writing in Japanese is hard

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I think they mean, rather than consolidate into one thread on the English forums, we had like 30 threads. On the Japanese forums, 1 thread.

I will never understand the people here that were saying "the benchmark looks fine, your character looks identical, you're just nitpicking!" when even SE admits that the benchmark had texture issues, lighting bugs, wrong mouth scaling, etc. Or saying we were being too mean or negative, just because we don't wrap our critique in layers of politeness (just because the Japanese language has this as a more normalized thing baked into it does not mean that people speaking "politely" are not also upset and angry, it's just a cultural difference in ways of speaking. English is a much more exaggerated and blunt language, for better and worse). The vast majority of those with issues posted extensive screenshots and detailed the changes in a helpful and informative way.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...d1d9f0db152d31

My current estimate for replacing the benchmark is the latter half of the week of May 23

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Neat! It looks like matters are well in hand.

Personally, I like what I see in the DT benchmark. They caught Kacho's (my main) and Nonomy's (my primary alt) appearances quite well in the actual benchmark. It was the character generator which had me scratching my head, thinking, "well that's not right." I won't go into the details, there's a bajillion threads already, and my feedback would be redundant.

So, I'm looking forward to to seeing what Kacho and Nonomy look like in Benchmark 2. May 23rd-ish with a July 2nd early release date doesn't allow for substandard work. I'm hoping they rise to the challenge and dazzle us.

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Originally Posted by CuteBucket

I will never understand the people here that were saying "the benchmark looks fine, your character looks identical, you're just nitpicking!" when even SE admits that the benchmark had texture issues, lighting bugs, wrong mouth scaling, etc. Or saying we were being too mean or negative, just because we don't wrap our critique in layers of politeness (just because the Japanese language has this as a more normalized thing baked into it does not mean that people speaking "politely" are not also upset and angry, it's just a cultural difference in ways of speaking. English is a much more exaggerated and blunt language, for better and worse). The vast majority of those with issues posted extensive screenshots and detailed the changes in a helpful and informative way.

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I think there was a small clique of people going around trolling people just to get their jollies. I agree most of the feedback was quite good and just what the devs needed to know.

As an aside, did you know many Japanese companies specifically hire someone to be "the American?" Specifically, they need someone willing to break through that cultural politeness for feedback. Our cultures are so different; but, when we recognize those differences, and work with our strengths, great things happen.

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Originally Posted by Taliriah

They are in crunch mode, working on Saturdays. And people will still complain after it releases.

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Yeah but crunch is a problem with the company, not the players being rightfully angry about SE releasing a messy benchmark. If they didn't set a date in stone before they fixed this horrible mess of a graphics update, it would have been fine. And yes, people will complain because of course not everyone will like the changes. And that's fine.

As much as I'd like to believe BenchmarkII will fix things, I know it at least won't people expectations.

Aside the "environmental" part of the update, it seemed obvious that enhanced character creation would be a thing ; otherwise the graphical update would be little more than a HQ textures pack for characters (that probably already existed) as their previous focus was on small characters details ; unless you spend more time looking at our character face than playing.

They didn't even "fix" the latest races creation that was endlessly complained about ; I guess it sells fantasia...

I hardly see them adding that this late, considering they already have to fix the untested mess it actually is right now

The new benchmark isn't going to fix the bad design decisions they've made to the faces. It's just lighting. The actual eye / face / lip shapes are all going to be the same. Sure, shading can do a lot, but what does that mean? As soon as your lighting changes you turn into a plastic doll monster? Right, so we're going to have Jekyll / Hyde moments with our characters in game?

I get we have to get used to the changes, but there was no need for those changes. I think that's why people are so upset. Most of the mistakes are just unnecessary. There's no need to change those shapes to update the textures. This was a bad choice that they made, and no amount of lighting is going to fix that.

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Originally Posted by LittleArrow

As soon as your lighting changes you turn into a plastic doll monster? Right, so we're going to have Jekyll / Hyde moments with our characters in game?

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That already happens.

From #2: “We compiled a list of feedback from all regions and categorized the points as bugs, data issues, or sections in need of further attention.”

If I remember right, they specifically called out “mouth scaling” as one of the things that was a bug or error when they first announced they were redoing the benchmark, so it’s not just going to be the lighting and character creator environments, although I’m sure those will help a great deal. But it’s entirely possible that the other issues people were concerned about made it to their list of fixes and will be addressed.