On a scale of 1 to 5-- Do you feel SE listens to their western players? State why.

[Zarcoft]

To be honest why would they listen to western players? Now let's be completely honest here, most of western players are whining, entitled, and don't want to put the work in to actually accomplish anything. With that being said, now not all western players are this way there are a few diamonds in the ruff so to speak, that give well thought out and actually pros and cons without bashing anything or anyone. So in my opinion if most western players stop whining, crying, and acted entitled maybe, just maybe they would listen to our feedback, but till that happens I hope they don't listen to us.

[Alberel]

I actually think the devs do listen to both communties fairly equally, they just have a more vocal presence on the JP forums and in other JP fan communities due to their being a Japanese development team.

Honestly my issue with how they listen to the community isn't how much they listen, but rather that they often listen to the wrong things. Smaller complaints often get a response and changes made, whilst major complaints that the community is almost unanimous on often go entirely ignored.

[DuskTS]

I feel like they act on small changes that are easy or low effort to implement.
Features like Mentoring and Raid Finder cater heavily to what the JP community wanted because they can self-moderate and use it to effectively improve the way their community currently plays.
It's only thrown into the western player-base for a good laugh and the faint hope it actually does some good.
(herp derp assumptions and generalizations)

[HorrorStory]

4. Because it's only natural for a company to satisfy their main consumer base first before all others.

[AskaRay]

I think, on a scale of 1-5, it's about a 3 or a 4, and that's for BOTH JP and NA/EU.
I group NA/EU together because, while I do think they listen to western fans, I don't think they differentiate between NA and EU very much (especially with the English language).

But to say that Squeenix doesn't listen to western fans AT ALL is absurd. Of course most of the community reps and devs are going to respond in Japanese directly to the Japanese forums; they speak it! I bet most of the time the English reps aren't allowed to say much without clearance or else they would say much more. No doubt the reps let them know what's going on in the non-Japanese forums.

And seriously, with the English forum having maybe 20 topics on ONE subject, while the Japanese forums have what? one topic per subject? It's much more organized than here. If I were a mod, I wouldn't bother responding to this mess.

I'm not saying to not complain, but saying "oh the company doesn't listen to half its playerbase just because we're dirty gaijin" is a bit ridiculous and comes off as a bit entitled.

[LunaFaye]

Maybe if we would stop complaining every 2 seconds and not requesting nerfs and threaten to unsubscribe 2 hours after every new patch is released, we might have a leg to stand on and being taken more serious. Till that day, I am glad SE listens only partially to us, because at the end of day, if they would implement everything and everyone complains about, we could as well go afk right after login.

I already think that if I would hire 25 monkeys from the zoo, most of the content would be less stressful, but with the today's player base every dungeon seems to be a challenge. Not SE's fault but sadly to say, due to the player base, implementing more challenging content for example would be impossible to enjoy.

[Azper]

I'll give them a 2.5 these days. It's becoming wildly more apparent that a majority of our concerns (that very well may be similar to the JP playerbase concerns) are either ignored or swept under the rug with their tired old, "we're looking into it" or, "it would be too difficult to implement" responses.

I mean just look at the live letter Q&As where we submit questions and they cherry pick easy-to-answer, already-planned questions. Whereas things we've taken issue with for YEARS now (GC restrictions, chocobos out while in DF que, etc.) are just never addressed aside from their typical canned responses.

I'm not saying I expect every one of our ideas or tweaks to make it into the game, but the courtesy of at least a response more often would be nice. And I'll agree with the people that said we're far too scattered on our forums with 2-3 topics on the same issue. We'd benefit from being a bit more organized and unified.

[Jax-Majutsu]

That's not even close to being a valid argument. Just because you don't get your way it doesn't mean your concerns weren't noticed or that the Japanese community would have achieved a different result had the same thing happened to them.

I don't know what you mean by you "didn't get it your way" I never stated a way that I wanted and honestly I would be fine with having to buy a magazine for the codes if it were Edge or any other magazine that wasn't utter garbage. I'm still saying they don't listen to us though, 80 odd pages of people just wanting some answers and we never got anything other than the rules typed out a little clearer.

[Beckett]

do you feel there is bias of any kind towards Japanese players?

Absolutely. It feels like decisions are based first and foremost considering how the Japanese playerbase will react. Then they see if they can tweak the idea to fit western sensibilities. If they can, great! If they can't, oh well.

It could be far worse, though. In FFXI, western players weren't even an afterthought. In that game, you would never be able to report a translation error in the English version and have devs actually respond and fix it.

On the whole, I give them a 3. They could do more, but at least they're trying.

[Animarelic]

I feel like they listen to us for all the "wrong reasons" because the NA players have this "Special Snowflake Syndrome" and believe that 14 bucks a month means the Dev team has to create the game to cater solely to them. Instead of making constructive posts we'd rather fuss and argue about Gender Equality, Glamour, act like the Cash shop items are P2W and being given gear equal to players who put in more effort because "We Pay 14 bucks a month for this game".

The issue is this "NEW" Generation of mmo players and gamers period. They are overly entitled, want the games to practically be played for them, then complain when you can beat the game by licking the keyboard or controller.

The people who actually have constructive comments get drowned out by the people who would rather repost and like the same mundane posts over with no new solutions to the issue.