Where does the mentioned feedback actually come from?

I am actually curious to know since it was specifically mentioned in the PLL that your changes are made after considering player feedback, yet I felt completely disconnected from the actual changes. I have never seen anybody asking for most of those except perhaps for AST rng, which as they say, is actually divisive (are they only going for the hotly debated feedbacks just to drive us nuts?).

I have been going through everything that's been brought up by the PLL and I am actually a little annoyed that it's so empty of anything truly daring or impactful, much like the same PLL before Endwalker was all about how Addle was getting 5% physical mitigation like it was the greatest thing ever.

Worse, all of the actual big issues of contention that have been brought up for years and years have been purposely ignored. I'd actually have liked to have you talk about the things that actually matter, even if to just be said "no" with some explanations about the direction they have in mind and your justifications for it.

Why were so many hours of live letter spent actually talking how mitigation was going to be increased by 5% of 5s? Or how Second Wind is going to be more powerful? Or swiftcast getting a lowered recast?

Meanwhile, the list of dire issues and feedback complaints that have been going on for years, with hundreds of pages on those forums alone among other platforms, have not had a single word about them:

• The infamous 2 min meta has been number 1 contention for most players for years and even if I do think it's only the tip of the iceberg, not a word on it. I do understand that you did nothing about it, but perhaps it could have been nice to tell us why?
• Healer gameplay: some jobs got some more actions added, but let's face it, nothing is truly changing on that front either. Can you tell us what we can expect to actually do as healers in Dawntrail besides spamming 1-1-1?
• Tank gameplay: tanks are infamously unkillable, and do not require active healing from healers anymore, especially in casual content, yet they get even more mitigation and improved defensives. I do not know what kind of changes you have done to the actual defensives like bloodwhetting and whatnot for Dawntrail and I do hope something will be done about them, but why the silence about it?
• On support gameplay and roles: utter silence on why it is suddenly okay that even if the healer dies in dungeons, it's not a problem. In fact, if the 3 players die but the tank, the tank can continue hitting and killing the boss forever while everybody waits on the floor. Is that the kind of gameplay you want for Dawntrail?
• Support jobs all seem to follow a system of mirrors, where GNB is just a more involved version of PLD with the same basic structure (even the change on the dot has been mirrored for Dawntrail between both to keep them identical). DRK is the same compared to WAR. AST has the same basic structure than WHM. Why is every change made to specifically keep them identical?
• Braindead and butchered jobs: SMN is the big culprit and has been under the spotlight since its inception in Endwalker, yet you double down on it without talking about it. What's the big idea? What about MCH that got a similar treatment?
• Veteran players: many veteran players feel that you have been dropping the ball and leave them out of the equation. We feel unwanted, not listened to, and alienated by unilateral arbitrary changes on core designs like the battle system or jobs?
• The game paradigm shifting completely out of the RPG systems to focus entirely on its encounters and their body checks. Is this what XIV is intended to become now? Us playing through scripted encounters with basic scripted rotations without much flavor?

I am utterly sorry if this sounded mean, but I was expecting an actual job PLL to talk about the deeper things and roadmaps and intentions for the game instead of focusing on useless minutiae and trivial balance changes? Why is SE so afraid to talk about the feedback you've been asking for and keep asking for?

And more importantly, where is the so called feedback you say you base everything you do around from? Most of what we have been presented here yet again seemed to go into the completely opposite direction of the actual feedback I can read on those very forums.

Please help me understanding. Talk to us. (and don't tell me to wait for 8.0, big changes incoming, please look forward to it)

Another thing of importance here, and again please forgive me if this is going to sound rude, but what have your battle and job designers actually been doing for 3 years? 5-6 years if we count all the way up to Shadowbringers? Is this the only changes we can hope to see after 3 years of development? It wasn't possible to do more, even though you seem to acknowledge that job identity should be worked upon, but we'll have to wait for 8.0 to see anything about it? Those issues have been there for ages.

Meanwhile you redid pvp entirely within less than half an expansion, and I actually want to congratulate you about the result, because it's actually awesome.

What's your angle here?

It sounds like the job designers have been busy designing new systems that don't have the tech yet. There have been a couple of interviews where Yoshi-P has made offhand comments that makes me think they're rethinking some core systems (maybe level sync, e.g.). His disgust at the idea of doing exactly what we're doing for another 10 levels makes me wonder if they're going to completely change systems like they ditched jobs or even the 1.0 to 2.0 overhaul. We don't know. I hope it's not just another set of minor changes for 10 levels.

That said, if it's not a major overhaul I don't know that the game is going to have enough draw in 3 years to keep going.

Big Streamers and Japan.
They do not read the Official Forums.

Streamers who don't use hair products have exactly been asking for a lot of these things.
Combo's on 1 button, gap closer potency removed, more homogenisation, consolidation of abilities..
Etc etc.

I'm reminded of this review of Destiny 2's expansion from 6 years ago from SkillUp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFyeGmkDp7g In it he made a comparison to the world's largest ship and how long it took it to change course. I've been noticing that the XIV team seems to be multiple years ahead on content. Ion Hazzikostas of the WoW development team has mentioned in the past that the WoW team did or does work similarly and that it was lead to the absolute disasters of the Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands expansion. By the time they were able to get feed back from the end of the Legion feedback about artifact weapons, it was too late to implement that feedback into BFA, by the time they were able to get feedback about BFA, it was too late to implement it into SL. Assuming the same is true about XIV, I would expect the game to continue to go downhill for some time.

It's just tough to believe these are the problems when this is the same man in charge that steered that ship from 1.0 to 2.0 in three years.

Maybe the ship is just one of them Argonaut dealies, or maybe they didn't really understand the finer points of a game they largely copied from WoW (not that WoW understood them either).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valence

I
[*]The game paradigm shifting completely out of the RPG systems to focus entirely on its encounters and their body checks. Is this what XIV is intended to become now? Us playing through scripted encounters with basic scripted rotations without much flavor?
[
8.0, big changes incoming, please look forward to it)

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This particular point is very interesting to me because I also feel like XIV is trending in the same direction as this team's other work, FFXVI. A big issue with XVI is that it also focuses more on a straightforward gameplay loop vs RPG systems. It would seem Yoshi P, or someone on the team, is either misinterpreting some kind of data or comparing XIV to other games (particularly those popular with younger audiences), or both. It's interesting to me that they're looking at middling reviews and sales of XVI, and still think gamers can't handle deep systems or reasonable difficulty.

I guess we are just going to be stuck with braindead jobs and combat, unless you want to be "engaged" by Ultimates i.e spend your life on this game.

I know the 2 min meta has been addressed, I can’t remember if it was a previous live letter or somewhere else, but he said it came about due to player feedback, and now all the player feedback they hear is AGAINST it, so they’re confused about what people want.

If CBU3 actually intends to get feedback that represents the overall player base, then it is unsurprising that the collected feedback would differ from what we commonly see on the forums. This is for a few reasons:

1. Most of the game's players don't use the English forums. Part of this is because English is only one of many languages, and part of it is because most players are casual to the point where they wouldn't spend much if any time here. To get the voices of all players, feedback must be sought from other sources as well.
   
   
2. Generally speaking, the forums create a skewed view of player opinions because it's a bit of a bubble. There are some topics where folks have constructive and respectful debates about their differing opinions, but it's far more common to see mud-slinging and bad faith arguments. (And to be clear, I don't blame the players for this: I blame CBU3 for not doing a better job funding and organizing their moderation team.) And in that sort of environment, there's a feedback loop where people who are getting yelled at less are more likely to stay, and people who are getting yelled at more are more likely to leave the forums behind...so over time the louder opinions will tend to get even louder and more monolithic, regardless of whether that opinion is or isn't representative of a majority of the player base's views.
   
   To illustrate one aspect of this phenomena, imagine that there are 100 Users who posts variations of their pro-Buttstomp opinion 365 times each over the course of an expansion. Also imagine that there are 100 users who post their anti-Buttstomp opinion only a single time throughout the expansion. In this scenario, to your average user it's going to look like there's a lot more pro-Buttstomp sentiment because that's what they're regularly being exposed to...even though in actuality, there's a 50/50 split of users who posted pro-Buttstomp versus anti-Buttstomp. To be clear, I'm not saying the forums are actually 50/50 on any given matter, but rather that a person's experience of the forums is an inaccurate tool to use in an attempt to understand the spread of player opinions.

All of that said, I would also be curious to hear what sources were used for this feedback! Not only would it be nice to see that manner of transparency, but it would give players a better understanding of what to do to get their voices heard. I'm guessing that the FanFest survey was at least one source of this feedback, but I would hope there are others as well.

The "we'll do it later" only leads to ruin. Art can only carry a game so far. After dawntrail msq what will keep that expansion alive?

They are going to take your feedback and then compare it to metrics and then decide from there. They aren't just going to listen to the feedback without doing any critical analysis.

Let's take Valence here for example. Valence posts nonstop about how homogenization is killing the game and everything is simpler and dumbed down and this is bad for REASONS. Some moderator or some other team member reads this feedback and the 100 other people on this forum who incessantly bring this up in every topic regardless of relevance and hands it off to yoshi p. Yoshi P reads the feedback and then goes hmm, maybe Valence is correct, I should check the numbers. So then Yoshi P would then go and check any number of metrics to see if this feedback is corroborated. Things such as:

1. Subscription count.
2. Players who cite homogenization and dumbing down in their cancellation survey.
3. Per Capita savage clears in each expansion.
4. Per Capita failed instances.
5. In the case of specific job changes like summoner, shifts in the number of players who main that job after major changes.
6. Average player damage floors across expansions. I.e. if the average hw mch only approached 40% of the theoretical best dps while the average EW mch might be at 50% (or potentially the inverse but let's be real here) then that would be a point of consideration.

And any number of other metrics that they could think of. Forum posters could post 10,000 anti-homogenization posts a day but if the sub numbers aren't dropping catastrophically with people pointing this out as the reason why they are leaving, or content clear rates are noticeably higher now than they were prior to all this homogenization and dumbing down, then they aren't going to de-homogenize things if those are the metrics they primarily care about.

You can have the best battle and job designers on the planet but it won't matter nor amount to much if it is not wholly their decision to make.

That being said, I think a lot of it is just selective feedback being relayed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Arkdra

They are going to take your feedback and then compare it to metrics and then decide from there. They aren't just going to listen to the feedback without doing any critical analysis.

Let's take Valence here for example. Valence posts nonstop about how homogenization is killing the game and everything is simpler and dumbed down and this is bad for REASONS. Some moderator or some other team member reads this feedback and the 100 other people on this forum who incessantly bring this up in every topic regardless of relevance and hands it off to yoshi p. Yoshi P reads the feedback and then goes hmm, maybe Valence is correct, I should check the numbers. So then Yoshi P would then go and check any number of metrics to see if this feedback is corroborated. Things such as:

1. Subscription count.
2. Players who cite homogenization and dumbing down in their cancellation survey.
3. Per Capita savage clears in each expansion.
4. Per Capita failed instances.
5. In the case of specific job changes like summoner, shifts in the number of players who main that job after major changes.
6. Average player damage floors across expansions. I.e. if a hw mch only approached 40% of the theoretical best dps while an EW mch might be at 50% (or potentially the inverse but let's be real here) then that would be a point of consideration.

And any number of other metrics that they could think of. Forum posters could post 10,000 anti-homogenization posts a day but if the sub numbers aren't dropping catastrophically with people pointing this out as the reason why they are leaving, or content clear rates are noticeably higher now than they were prior to all this homogenization and dumbing down, then they aren't going to de-homogenize things if those are the metrics they primarily care about.

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I literally have a friend to mains SMN because, "it's braindead and lets me focus on the boss instead". And no, he doesn't ever visit the forums.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Streamers who don't use hair products have exactly been asking for a lot of these things.
Combo's on 1 button, gap closer potency removed, more homogenisation, consolidation of abilities..
Etc etc.

---

is this aimed at who i think it is :>

Very true.

It becomes harder and harder to have constructive arguments around here, especially ones spun in a positive light. The OF has long become an echo chamber of people complaining about one thing or another in this game. It's already rare for people to come to a place like a forum with a positive opinion. Fewer people feel the need to sing praises for something they like as opposed to people coming to a forum because they are upset about something. Not that the latter is wrong to do so, but it gives a very skewed view of the forums at a glance. it's easy to take a precursory look at the forums and think it's nothing but people bitching from dawn to dusk - even I'm guilty of making that assumption and calling it out at times even though I know it's not entirely true. There are people here who enjoy the game and the direction it is going, but they are more often than not completely drowned out by the cries of the people who are upset, and in some instances even ran off.

Point is, there are just as many people out there - in the wider world of the web - that enjoy the direction FFXIV is going. The developers are seeing that feedback as well as the less-than-kind ones that are often found here. I think it's probably fair to say that there are more people who are pleased, or otherwise indifferent, than there are those who are upset.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Arkdra

They are going to take your feedback and then compare it to metrics and then decide from there. They aren't just going to listen to the feedback without doing any critical analysis.

Let's take Valence here for example. Valence posts nonstop about how homogenization is killing the game and everything is simpler and dumbed down and this is bad for REASONS. Some moderator or some other team member reads this feedback and the 100 other people on this forum who incessantly bring this up in every topic regardless of relevance and hands it off to yoshi p. Yoshi P reads the feedback and then goes hmm, maybe Valence is correct, I should check the numbers. So then Yoshi P would then go and check any number of metrics to see if this feedback is corroborated. Things such as:

1. Subscription count.
2. Players who cite homogenization and dumbing down in their cancellation survey.
3. Per Capita savage clears in each expansion.
4. Per Capita failed instances.
5. In the case of specific job changes like summoner, shifts in the number of players who main that job after major changes.
6. Average player damage floors across expansions. I.e. if the average hw mch only approached 40% of the theoretical best dps while the average EW mch might be at 50% (or potentially the inverse but let's be real here) then that would be a point of consideration.

And any number of other metrics that they could think of. Forum posters could post 10,000 anti-homogenization posts a day but if the sub numbers aren't dropping catastrophically with people pointing this out as the reason why they are leaving, or content clear rates are noticeably higher now than they were prior to all this homogenization and dumbing down, then they aren't going to de-homogenize things if those are the metrics they primarily care about.

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The classic "the data tell us" out of touch businessman fallacy. Just like the data told them attracting teenagers with FFXIII, XV, and and now XVI would make them a healthy profit? We know the opposite is true. Sure, those 3 games "sold a lot," but "a lot" is relative to the cost of production as well as value depreciation of your product.

This kind of "let's filter FFXIV 1.0 complaints through businessman filter" is exactly how FFXIV 1.0 ended up being the product it ended up being.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valence

...

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Feedback tends to define a design problem rather than a design solution. I think as players we tend to focus on the solutions that the community requests, while in a lot of cases they're looking at our collective reactions to changes.

Consider this. Many melee players have specifically weighed in this expansion as wanting to see more challenging job designs. Yet there are a number of non-melee players, including yourself, who have recently cited positionals as being a barrier to entry. I know that they tried to upsell VPR as being fast paced and challenging, but they did that for RPR as well. What's to say that designing a new job with simpler gameplay, fewer buttons, few/no positionals, and part time physical-ranged gameplay isn't the direct impact of trying to cater to people who don't play/aren't currently interested in the role? (I hope I'm wrong, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if that's how it turns out.) It's not necessarily that they're ignoring melee players input, it's just that they're trying to cater to too many people at once. And then when said job eventually gets indirectly nerfed (i.e. everyone else gets buffed) on the basis of 'lower difficulty', then both groups pull back and you end up catering to an audience that never actually existed in the first place.

It's hard to tell what the specific intention of some changes are without additional detail. For example, why do you think the 30% mitigation tools were selected to be upgraded? I don't think it's because tanks need more mitigation. Currently, they're all identical except for Vengeance, which has an additional thorns effect. This game balances nearly exclusively through upward balance. So you 'upgrade' all of them, add in job-specific additional effects, and then remove the thorns effect on the pre-upgraded Vengeance when nobody is looking. This may seem like an unnecessary amount of legerdemain for something that could have been openly adjusted years ago, but that's how they roll.

Naturally, in some cases, changes aren't made on the basis of direct feedback but rather in response to performance gaps within a job or role. The most common reason for this is if there is a less intuitive way to optimize. The obvious discussion point here is BLM/non-standard, but I strongly suspect that the new additions to RPR were deliberately introduced to interfere with the setup for Double/Triple Enshroud. These things do erode job complexity and leave players frustrated, but also make the optimization strategy more transparent and move the focus to performance/execution over rotation design. I don't agree with it but I'm also not surprised by it.

It's a combination of factors most likely, but the biggest ones are trying to cater to too many people at once and being reluctant to openly (and quickly) roll out changes that people may get upset over.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rekh

The classic "the data tell us" out of touch businessman fallacy. Just like the data told them attracting teenagers with FFXIII, XV, and and now XVI would make them a healthy profit? We know the opposite is true. Sure, those 3 games "sold a lot," but "a lot" is relative to the cost of production as well as value depreciation of your product.

This kind of "let's filter FFXIV 1.0 complaints through businessman filter" is exactly how FFXIV 1.0 ended up being the product it ended up being.

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Capitalism rules everything around us. If they had data indicating that people thought this was a real problem and it was costing them significant subs, they would do something about it. And maybe it is! Maybe it wasn't a problem of relevance early in EW but it has grown to be one now but it's too late in dev to do anything about it for DT. Maybe they actually will do something about it in 8.0. It is a mystery, I don't have any hard data, all I got is cynicism for businesses.

Also 13 and 15 were profitable and 16's problems stem from the small install base of PS5 so your examples aren't great.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rekh

The "we'll do it later" only leads to ruin. Art can only carry a game so far. After dawntrail msq what will keep that expansion alive?

---

Same things that have kept the game going all along. Story and accessibility. Having fun.

As long as players are engaged by the story, they'll want to return to see what happens next. As long as minimum system requirements and the basic content remains accessible to players regardless of financial means and skill level, there won't be barriers to continuing.

If people are having fun, why would they choose to leave?

Certainly there are those who decide over time they're ready for more intense displays of skill. That they're no longer having fun playing the game. But that's the point where they need to make a change and find the game that provides what they want instead of expecting a game to change from what it has become.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Oizen

Big Streamers and Japan.
They do not read the Official Forums.

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They DO read contents that come off the official forums, but not the General Chat channel. Several of my smaller UI requests have made it into the game over the years, submitted through this official forum through the correct UI forum discussion board.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Arkdra

Capitalism rules everything around us. If they had data indicating that people thought this was a real problem and it was costing them significant subs, they would do something about it. And maybe it is! Maybe it wasn't a problem of relevance early in EW but it has grown to be one now but it's too late in dev to do anything about it for DT. Maybe they actually will do something about it in 8.0. It is a mystery, I don't have any hard data, all I got is cynicism for businesses.

Also 13 and 15 were profitable and 16's problems stem from the small install base of PS5 so your examples aren't great.

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"Final Fantasy XIII cost millions to make, but it sold over 6.5 million copies, which is around $350 million. If the average price per game is around $54, then Final Fantasy XIII may have earned around $350 million. Some copies sold for $70–80, while others were sold at a cheaper price."-Google AI search

"In its first week of sales, Final Fantasy XIII-2 sold only 1/3 as well as its predecessor."

"Most game developers would jump on top of their servers and dance for joy if their game sold 500,000 copies within its first week. Square Enix is not one of those developers. Final Fantasy XIII-2, the follow-up to 2010’s often-maligned Final Fantasy XIII, cleared the half-million sales mark in only four days. While these sales figures are not bad on their own, it’s a decline of roughly 66% from Final Fantasy XIII‘s 1.5 million units sold within the same time frame." https://www.escapistmagazine.com/fin...kluster-sales/

"While the critics may have liked it, and Square may have fudged the initial sales figures, this game did terrible as far as consumers are concerned. It is one of the few games in Japan to drop from its near 7000 yen price tag to under 500 yen within only 5 or 6 months. Most games, especially Final Fantasy ones, never drop in price to under 980 yen even years after release (and it'll take a couple of years to get to 980 yen). But with FF13, stores couldn't even give copies away." https://steamcommunity.com/app/29212...1/?l=brazilian

I can get more if you'd like. Moreover, I don't know why you even bring up ffxvi? If a data-driven stock exchange company like square enix has to blame the ps5 for not meeting their production costs then what does that tell us about data-driven decisions?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by posona

I know the 2 min meta has been addressed, I can’t remember if it was a previous live letter or somewhere else, but he said it came about due to player feedback, and now all the player feedback they hear is AGAINST it, so they’re confused about what people want.

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Yeah, IIRC, back in the day people complained about DRG/MNK/BRD’s 90/180s buff cds made them hard to fit into a party and miserable to play. Something among these effects.

The SE investors have been told for years that stuff like 7 Remake should "print money" and that the Final Fantasy brand should shit gold bricks.

But their decision to not release on PC is really starting to hurt them, same as what is about to hit EA Sports because they're not releasing the new NCAA game on PC. Those of us who already have a PS5 or Xbox One are like "cool' but someone who spent $3000 on a gaming system in the last year is justifiably upset that game companies are deliberately ignoring them as a primary market.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Frost1800

Yeah, IIRC, back in the day people complained about DRG/MNK/BRD’s 90/180s buff cds made them hard to fit into a party and miserable to play. Something among these effects.

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Raiding scene; the smallest group. Not saying they're not important but that's who essentially complained about buff exclusivity and windows. Square has gone overboard listening to that group, to the detriment of the non-raiding population.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Catwho

The SE investors have been told for years that stuff like 7 Remake should "print money" and that the Final Fantasy brand should shit gold bricks.

But their decision to not release on PC is really starting to hurt them, same as what is about to hit EA Sports because they're not releasing the new NCAA game on PC. Those of us who already have a PS5 or Xbox One are like "cool' but someone who spent $3000 on a gaming system in the last year is justifiably upset that game companies are deliberately ignoring them as a primary market.

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The multi billion dollar company uses moderators to filter their paying stakeholder's requests through data-sets.
Meanwhile data-sets used by investors to influence square enix are ignored.

what i think is a big mistake is how they want to keep everything on the same lvl.... there will be 21 jobs in DT.
enough jobs for everyone one could think. but no, instead they want a everything for everyone... which is impossible.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valence

I have been going through everything that's been brought up by the PLL and I am actually a little annoyed that it's so empty of anything truly daring or impactful

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Could have been worse. Many of us fearing about the DRG changes a lot but they decided to keep jobs mostly the same actually.

Quote:

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much like the same PLL before Endwalker was all about how Addle was getting 5% physical mitigation like it was the greatest thing ever.

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I didn't see it that way but it was a win in the sense that it just felt like if you used it well it wasn't always useful because the enemy didn't use that type of attack...

Quote:

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Why were so many hours of live letter spent actually talking how mitigation was going to be increased by 5% of 5s? Or how Second Wind is going to be more powerful? Or swiftcast getting a lowered recast?

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It was a bit repetitive. They could have just said these changes were happening to all roles instead of repeating the slide, predictably, for all the roles.

Quote:

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The infamous 2 min meta has been number 1 contention for most players for years and even if I do think it's only the tip of the iceberg, not a word on it.

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It was interesting that this wasn't mentioned, but we aren't really going to know about it until the media tour shows off the details in 2 weeks.

Quote:

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Healer gameplay: some jobs got some more actions added, but let's face it, nothing is truly changing on that front either. Can you tell us what we can expect to actually do as healers in Dawntrail besides spamming 1-1-1?

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It wasn't a lot, but healers did get a little more in the attack department: aoe DoTs and more off-GCD attacks. It's not a lot, but it's better than nothing.

Quote:

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Tank gameplay: tanks are infamously unkillable, and do not require active healing from healers anymore, especially in casual content, yet they get even more mitigation and improved defensives.

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To be fair, it may be due to increased damage output in Dawntrail associated with the higher level cap. But the chances are that tanks can handle this increased damage output from enemies as it currently stands.

Quote:

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Why is every change made to specifically keep them identical?

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It's as I've been saying for a while. They're making 2 of every job play the same so that it's as easy to balance as ARR. I would have to admit I was surprised DRG doesn't seem to be changing completely into a RPR clone like I thought, although we'll have to see in the media tour.

Quote:

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SMN is the big culprit and has been under the spotlight since its inception in Endwalker, yet you double down on it without talking about it.

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I think they did reference that some people want things harder, easier, etc, but that is the direction they go in. They have added a setting to adjust whether abilities change into other abilities or are separate to recreate some of the feeling that used to be there on jobs, but I think many of us will just save the hotbar/keybind space and not bother.

For SMN specifically, I was disappointed that Bahamut is the "new" summon. We were all getting excited for the other possibilities like Ramuh, Shiva or Leviathan and all they did was add an enhanced Bahamut? I hope they will at least expand on egi-glamour so we can disguise them all as different summons.

Quote:

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Us playing through scripted encounters with basic scripted rotations without much flavor?

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Scripted is kinda how it's always been, especially since Heavensward.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Arkdra

They are going to take your feedback and then compare it to metrics and then decide from there. They aren't just going to listen to the feedback without doing any critical analysis.

Let's take Valence here for example. Valence posts nonstop about how homogenization is killing the game and everything is simpler and dumbed down and this is bad for REASONS. Some moderator or some other team member reads this feedback and the 100 other people on this forum who incessantly bring this up in every topic regardless of relevance and hands it off to yoshi p. Yoshi P reads the feedback and then goes hmm, maybe Valence is correct, I should check the numbers. So then Yoshi P would then go and check any number of metrics to see if this feedback is corroborated. Things such as:

1. Subscription count.
2. Players who cite homogenization and dumbing down in their cancellation survey.
3. Per Capita savage clears in each expansion.
4. Per Capita failed instances.
5. In the case of specific job changes like summoner, shifts in the number of players who main that job after major changes.
6. Average player damage floors across expansions. I.e. if the average hw mch only approached 40% of the theoretical best dps while the average EW mch might be at 50% (or potentially the inverse but let's be real here) then that would be a point of consideration.

And any number of other metrics that they could think of. Forum posters could post 10,000 anti-homogenization posts a day but if the sub numbers aren't dropping catastrophically with people pointing this out as the reason why they are leaving, or content clear rates are noticeably higher now than they were prior to all this homogenization and dumbing down, then they aren't going to de-homogenize things if those are the metrics they primarily care about.

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Way to completely miss the point.

1) I'm asking where is the feedback they mention and where does it come from, because unless i'm living in a parallel dimension, it doesn't come from those forums where they tell us to give our feedback. So it has to come from somewhere else, or perhaps the JP forums idk. I don't read japanese. I'm sure the feedback they keep mentioning comes from somewhere, but it doesnt come from there.

2) I'm asking for them to address extremely widely accepted core issues that I listed in the OP. It's not just Valence's issues. You'll find them everywhere on the internet, ingame, reddit, streamers, everywhere. Don't tell me the 2min meta is something I invented. Don't tell me healer problems is something I made up. Don't tell me you haven't seen any of those mentioned before.

3) I'm sure they have their reasons, I want to hear their side of the story, especially regarding those points they keep dodging and not addressing at all.

The point of this post was never to whine about how the devs don't listen to muh feedback.

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Originally Posted by Sjol

I literally have a friend to mains SMN because, "it's braindead and lets me focus on the boss instead". And no, he doesn't ever visit the forums.

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If your friend wants a job that allows him to focus on the boss, then the existence of a job that allows him to focus on the boss is good, actually. If your friend has 18 other choices (plus the option to not play the game at all), and chooses SMN, it's sounds like the SMN rework worked out well for your friend.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Way to completely miss the point.

1) I'm asking where is the feedback they mention and where does it come from, because unless i'm living in a parallel dimension, it doesn't come from those forums where they tell us to give our feedback. So it has to come from somewhere else, or perhaps the JP forums idk. I don't read japanese. I'm sure the feedback they keep mentioning comes from somewhere, but it doesnt come from there.

2) I'm asking for them to address extremely widely accepted core issues that I listed in the OP. It's not just Valence's issues. You'll find them everywhere on the internet, ingame, reddit, streamers, everywhere. Don't tell me the 2min meta is something I invented. Don't tell me healer problems is something I made up. Don't tell me you haven't seen any of those mentioned before.

3) I'm sure they have their reasons, I want to hear their side of the story, especially regarding those points they keep dodging and not addressing at all.

The point of this post was never to whine about how the devs don't listen to muh feedback.

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1. These forums is the only answer they will ever give. Even if they are getting it elsewhere, to let that knowledge out would contaminate that as a source and then just open that place up to criticism from whoever disagrees with it and that's just a nightmare for everyone involved. Like if he came out and said that he has Aimi collate information from r/ff14discussion then that place would immediately get slammed by people looking to get his ear and whatever value it had is lost. Now it's just ff14 forums 2: with an even worse format.

2 and 3. They've talked about this stuff before already (well, 2 minute meta and healer changes specifically) but honestly, I don't disagree . It would have been good to address it again and I do generally enjoy hearing their view on things even when I disagree. If we're lucky, someone on the media tour will pick his brain about it.

Def not the forums, because the forums are a echo chamber and SE do not care the about the english department.

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Originally Posted by Rekh

Raiding scene; the smallest group. Not saying they're not important but that's who essentially complained about buff exclusivity and windows. Square has gone overboard listening to that group, to the detriment of the non-raiding population.

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And it wasn't even technically the "raiding scene", it was a small subgroup within that scene. The people who want the prestige of raiding and to swing their "achievements" around like they're compensating for something, but don't actually want to put any of the work in to achieve it. The kind of people that looked at 90 and 180s buffs and instead of figuring out how to align them properly they wanted them gone.