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

[Iromi]

Funny, most of the threads the past couple years over there have been about the developers not listening, or criticizing various decisions made the past couple expansions.

It's even gotten worse in the past couple weeks.

Their forums actually look nearly identical to these, threads claiming devs don't listen etc but as I said I am childhood friends with a wow dev and actually been to their hq, they absolutely listen to the point where they ake their customers feel they are valid as I mentioned before. Again, I am no fan of wow...never touched it just friends with the devs...

[Leigaon]

2-Consistently I feel that the Japanese playerbase is listened to more because...in my opinion they should be. The thing about NA's player base is we are scattered, entitled, we don't know what we want, half of us sure THINK we know what we want but if you gave it to us...I am not so sure a better game that would make or who would benefit. Culturally most American's want to have their cake and eat it to. We are an arrogant culture, a special snowflake culture and that is why we cannot be listened to or trusted. I have a very hard time articulating it in an effective way. If you look at some of the things Yoshi has tried to implement it is in the realm of people working together and communicating....not really a great/easy thing to do in American culture. We PREACH teamwork but it is more about the individual. So culturally we are too different but that is great because overall...I want the JP leading us, call me a sheep...beep beep i'm a sheep I said beep beep i'm a sheep!

...I think you've just won about 80% of the NA threads out there with this. Go forth..the true warrior of light, may you always walk in the light of the crystal. /puts down relic.

I think I'll pick up fishing...

[Berethos]

Their forums actually look nearly identical to these, threads claiming devs don't listen etc but as I said I am childhood friends with a wow dev and actually been to their hq, they absolutely listen to the point where they ake their customers feel they are valid as I mentioned before. Again, I am no fan of wow...never touched it just friends with the devs...

It's easy to make that claim, and perhaps from their perspective they do feel like they are listening.

From the player perspective, having played it for nearly 10 years? Outside of specific troublesome issues, like working on fixing things like camera issues that cause motion sickness, it's often felt like we were subject to their latest whims for their latest expansion.

And player requested things that did get implemented either took years to accomplish (new player models) or were again subjected to what the developers thought was the right way to do it (they at one point described their garrison system as their take on player housing) that ended up being significantly different than what the players actually wanted.

[Iromi]

snip.

Yeah honestly since I have never played I cannot really say, I only know a developer and saw the team face to face. All I can say is they must have done something right because of their huge sub numbers...

Just my original point was listening to one group/set of players based on race seems very silly..(not saying SE does this, but someone told them to) that would be very ridiculous. If you listen to all your playerbase and try to meet in the middle...I think that is a much more wise idea.

I do not just listen to followers of mine from one country, I listen to all of them...so therefore since I actually care and don't single out people based on where they live..I have a lot more followers What a horrible suggestion...

[Alahra]

It's probably a 3 or 4, in general. It's hard to say whether they really accept feedback from Japanese players more often or make changes in accordance with Japanese player complaints instead of doing so for NA/EU feedback, though.

By and large, most of them time when they've made changes to things, the feedback has been consistent across regions—much of the recent feedback regarding the RNG in Palace of the Dead was coming from both the English-speaking regions and the Japanese playerbase. I'm not personally aware of any instances in which they sided with JP feedback that was specifically counter to NA/EU feedback. I'm not really aware of any major instances in which criticism or feedback has been markedly different between the two, either.

But outside of that, I actually think SE takes player feedback into account a lot more for FFXIV than they did for FFXI and far more than Blizzard did for WoW, as well.

[Jynx]

Once politics and nationalities start coming into play this thread went off the deep end.

[Iromi]

snip

Thank you, you said what I was trying to say Anyway I agree with this..preach on my friend <3

[Velhart]

Something people need to take into account is that they are Japanese and they cannot take in as much Western feedback on a small scale. They definitely go on a more large scale of how a certain country feels about certain content or what they want. It would be the same thing if the shoe was on the other foot. If developers were Western, it would be difficult for them to respond or cater specifically to the Japanese.

As much as there are some things they definitely could take from Western feedback, they still are on a Japanese mind set, and in doing that, cultural differences clash. Where Western may be opposed to one aspect, it may be fine for the Japanese side. We may oppose grinding, but may be welcomed in some aspects there.

It is not to say they are not listening to us, I am sure they take feedback from everywhere and try to get a good idea of how everyone feels as a whole. Like someone said however, they at times don't succeed in executing making everyone happy.

They do however need to take all regions into account when releasing exclusive items. I do remember Yoshi-P saying he wouldn't release anything that everyone can't have. He needs to live up to that.

It is only natural that feedback from us won't be taken in as strongly. I don't condone it, they should be listening to everyone more, but that is how it is.

[Ametrine]

Looking at how Blizzard is treating the console player base in regards to Overwatch pretty resoundly wrecks the idea of them listening to fans, considering they've literally walled off console players from using their US forums outside of bug reporting, as access to group gathering threads and discussion threads require an ID code only on the PC version, and made it pretty clear they aren't interested in changing it. Mind you, the EU forums are free to all users. It's only the US forum that has arbitrary gating.

It's made the PC Master Race trolls tear any section with console players a new one with little to no repercussions as those areas are barely touched by the GM's and tech support. Adding fuel to the fire, they are seen monitoring and helping threads for PC users dealing with issues of any kind.

This is on top of their lobsided patch schedule, weird balancing, lack of text chat inclusion despite leaving the UI for AI opponents to use, and forcing consoles to pay for the more expensive edition.

And the bugs! The patch day bugs!


So, yeah, Blizzard as it currently stands really isn't setting the best example on how to treat and communicate to their fanbase.

[Teryaani]

I'm going to go with 3/5.

I think the language difference is part of the reason for the disconnect, that and the fractured nature of the NA/EU players....and I think they see JP as their "main" market. I've had suggestions made through the game client show up in patches and I don't doubt that they try to include us.

We don't make it easy on community dev with 5 theads on the same subject though. When you're trying to quantify what the players care about, it's much easier to see "We'd like x improvement" with a large number of posts and likes and convey that as a priority for NA/EU players than trying to chug through endless variants of the exact same topic and a few opposition topics.