Quote Originally Posted by Gemina View Post
Well yeah. If major overhauls is what qualifies as "meaningful changes" -snip-
Not just major overhauls, but general design changes. SE don't tend to do them in patch cycles.

To make healers more interesting again. They'd either have to revert changes, which they're unlikely to do. They've already said "no" to AST's.

Or rework some of the design and add in new things to replace what's lost. This isn't something they tend to do until an expansion. Whilst I accept it is possible, but we are still very much in the dark.

And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but goal post moving is the way of things. -snip-
I don't mean dev shifting goal posts. Goal post shifting is what people do when the point of their argument hasn't been proven when a goal post set is hit, so they move the goal post and tend to ad infinitum. From what I hear from WHM's, this is the exact experience they had with 4.0 and are still having (and to an extent 3.0).

I have been guilty of the "wait and see" mentality. There comes a point when you're Sisyphus pushing his rock.

This is exactly how I would define a "clean slate" in terms of mmos.
Nothing has indicated this and I've not seen it on MMO's. If this is what they're doing, they'd say something? They normally do when they acknowledge there's a problem.

Again with the ignored. Listen, nothing gets ignored in this business. Consumer demand is what drives sales and that is what pays their bills. -snip-
I feel a lot of people underestimate what consumer demands means. Sure consumer demand drives sales and pays bills, but there is plenty of wiggle room. I worked for years in the consumer facing side of a business with millions of customers globally. I can say that yes, they get ignored. Even people who say we've lost a customer come back. The mentality is often they can't please everybody, so they won't. If it's going to impact sales, then they're more likely to listen. That is, if we're talking business. It's a bigger issue for smaller businesses with smaller customer bases.


I was also in the community when 1.0 was in BETA and watched as an FFXI player as complaints came to the forums. Again, people were like "it's only BETA, wait until launch" and "the point is for feedback, they'll fix it for release", but didn't and it was only after financial failure that they listened.

But these days, I'm a developer, not in the game industry, but ecommerce. So I know that even what seems like a simple straight forward thing, might not be and things take time and resource. I can appreciate this.

But this is where communication helps us a great deal. We don't have to go into depth or detail. It curbs complaints. And SE does this already. When they've acknowledged something is a problem, they usually tell us, so the silence is more of an indicator they don't recognise it as such than "maybe they're working on it in quiet".