
Originally Posted by
Vhailor
My takeaways are as follows:
(1) Why is Yoshi-P and the development team not speaking directly to the community via the forums and a proper Live Letter? Why is the communication not bi-directional? As a player, the single largest frustration I've had with Eureka is the utter silence on the part of the development team up until now. This "walk" of Yoshi-P's feels like a half-arsed attempt at damage control, not an honest attempt for SE to engage players in a dialogue that leads to a better product, a dialogue that has been sorely missing for years now.
(2) How in the f**k were things like Level Sync not introduced in the first place? "Too convenient" my ass. If SE was worried about convenience, they wouldn't have so badly imbalanced FATE rewards vs. monster-grinding rewards. Things like the lack of Level Sync, the atrocious crystal exchange system, and the immensely problematic object culling system are things that any halfway-decent QA process should have identified before the content was ever released. So, did SE simply ignore these lacks, or is their QA process that bad? These issues have crippled the player reaction to Eureka right out of the gate. Fixing the content later isn't nearly as effective as getting it right the first time.
(3) In regards to solo options, see my above comment: tossing this in as a response to massive community uproar is not nearly as effective as getting it right the first time.
I'll repeat something I've said many times before: the FFXIV community is very forgiving, as MMO communities go. Speaking personally, as disappointing as Eureka was for me in terms of shallow content, I'd have held off on major criticism if it had been released as a polished platform upon which new functions and game play elements could be built. If Level Sync had been there out of the gate, if it didn't carry so many Instance downsides (no /tells, no queuing for Roulettes, etc.), if it had legitimate solo options, if balance wasn't so badly skewed toward mindless FATE trains - if all of these exceedingly basic issues had been identified and resolved prior to Eureka's release, I would have gotten behind it as a good start. Too shallow for a long-term solution, but a good start.
Instead, as usual, it feels like we're beta-testing lazily developed content. If SE is truly going to build upon this platform to make real, solid content - content with some depth - then good on them. That's a follow-up that we haven't seen before in FFXIV, and I'll look forward to their future efforts. But they really shoot themselves in the foot when the initial core release has so many problems.