The Developers Need to Start Surveying Players After Every Patch

[Andrea]

That would not be practical or helpful in the long run. Such frequent surveying would lead to indecision and paralysis of development as each month you would get a new series of priorities or directives from the latest survey which might contradict the prior month, or simply be impractical, and for major features/revisions, you may end up waiting for the survey instead of proceeding.

Games are to an extent an artform, and sometimes you have to let the creators create.

Come to think on it I could understand why it would cause some problems, my bad

[therpgfanatic]

Come to think on it I could understand why it would cause some problems, my bad

Kosmos is just trolling.

Think more critically about this. Imagine you are an employee at a company tasked with monitoring player feedback. Rather than running surveys, they ask you to read every forum post and social media tweet about the game.

How effective do you think you'd be at identifying how players feel when complaints are hidden 3 or 4 pages into a thread? There's a lot of stuff that would be missed. You probably wouldn't even be able to keep up with all the posts made in this forum per day, let alone trying to monitor social media conversations, too.

That's why surveys were invented to begin with. To ask specific questions that produce answers which can be easily compared by those who analyze the results. This may be a game, but it is also a business. They aren't making FFXIV for their personal enjoyment, it is a product to sell to consumers. There's no "development paralysis" with data guided development. It's the exact opposite because it shows where to focus development resources.

Furthermore based on analyzing the SSS dummies, people have determined what the optimal DPS output is for each class. PLD is the weakest DPS in the entire game, even below healers. Healers.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...=2&pli=1#gid=0

Yet strangely no one is crying about how OP healers are.

[Kosmos992k]

Kosmos is just trolling.

No. I wasn't. Thanks so much for the unfounded accusation of misconduct. I'm not sure what your axe is, but grind it elsewhere thank you very much.

Is it any wonder that a business consultant for entertainment companies would want such regular surveys of the customers of an entertainment company? After all, who conducts such research?

As for the meat of the point. If you have ever worked on large scale computing projects whether corporate IT, infrastructure, or games, the one thing you do not want is shifting goalposts. Surveying a fickle group of consumers on a monthly basis results in contradictory responses, and altering priorities with each survey. If management start acting on the results of such surveys, they have to spend time reacting to the survey and re-planning the project, developers have to rework things, or change direction entirely. It doesn't take much of that to delay or even derail a large project.