Are the developers of XIV out of touch?

[Vhailor]

Aiite so it comes back to the very same thing: You open up with derision. That does not seem pragmatic if you want to deliver a message to the Devs. Yes, you can have criticisms, but if its "Hey Devs are out of touch cause theyre doing things I hate like implementing some garbage bike!", youre not going to have as good luck. People who complained about removing Need, yeah some of them were pretty "WTF Outrageous", but you know, it was probably people being straightforward in their position and giving appropriate feedback. Mind you, they probably removed it to address an issue they saw and realized it made things worse.

I want to start off by saying that I'm not particularly defending the OP's position. I think SE is out of touch, but picking on character customization is, in my opinion, not the best way to go about making your case. That said... development teams are supposed to be professional enough to see through the emotional arguments. Whether a suggestion is made in a friendly manner or in a harsh one should be utterly irrelevant to the CM team and/or the development team. The only question is whether or not feedback has sufficient validity so as to warrant a fix or a change. If SE's employees aren't operating in that way, they're in deep shit. You're certainly entitled to dislike negative attitudes if you'd like, and criticize people over them, but there's no objective argument to really support your position here.

I have to point out too: For every large patch, theyve pretty much been adding glamour items and haircuts for people. New mounts which add to the flavor of your character. Armors and weaps too. And yet "They dont care about customization," in your eyes. I wonder if youve even considered their end, to be frank. Ive pointed out that adding more indepth customization can really break things in the game unless its done right, and that takes time. And yes, theyre running on an older engine because thats part of the point of recooping costs from FFXIV 1.0. You think MMOs just rebuild their engines every year like its nothing?

This would be a fair point if not for the fact that FFXIV did certain things better in the past, within its own engine. I know the butt slider is a bit of a joke at this point, but it's not like the request came out of thin air: they mangled the character models for ARR. They didn't have to, but they did. Similarly, they really mangled the texture quality. I'm not sure why, but they did. I have a degree of sympathy with developers of these long-running MMOs, because it can't be easy managing the visuals managing the customization options as newer games surpass you time and time again, but it's a bit eye-opening to see that aspects of FFXIV's character models, and all of its textures, have gotten worse over time rather than better. That shouldn't happen.

Im gonna stick to my guns on this: Sounds like youre dissatisfied. Sounds like youre not getting what you want. And if you have to ask if the Devs are listening, then I imagine you already have a pessimistic outlook on the game. Afterall, youre saying theyre hemorrhaging subs for years and nothing has changed, so they must not be then. So why are you still playing? The writing on the wall, according to you, is they dont listen or care. So why are you spending your money on something you dont enjoy.

OK, soap box time for me.

I hate these statements. I hate these statements.

Why are you making the huge assumption that the OP doesn't enjoy FFXIV? Just because someone is complaining, doesn't mean they don't enjoy something on the whole. I get annoyed every time the fucking gardeners come by my apartment window when I'm in the middle of a meeting (I work from home); that doesn't mean I want to move out of my apartment, or out of apartments in general. In point of fact:

I love this game, and I really try not to be too harsh on it.

Whoops. Egg on your face, much? Reality is nuanced. It's almost certain that, when considering anything in the world, there will be things people like, and things people don't like. Take any MMO, or videogame, or piece of entertainment on the market, and I bet there will be things you don't love about it, and even dislike about it. That's why it's naive, and incredibly judgmental, to assume that negative comments equate to overall dislike of something, or that positive comments equate to overall liking something.

So please, stop suggesting that people quit the game just because they're getting angry at the developers. It doesn't add anything of substance to any discussion I've seen on the forums, and it's easily interpreted as an arrogant, dismissive brush-off (you're with us or you're against us type of bullshit). It's no better or worse than the 'white knight' term that gets thrown around right and left.