SE: Holding back information won't stop criticism, it will only delay it and is bad.

[Laphael]

Not gonna stop people from complaining on patch day. This may have the possibility of backfiring spectacularly and causing even more complaints than the usual amount that I normally see.

And the withholding of information can create anxiety. I feel for Summoner mains because they won't know if their job is totally ruined or not until patch day. You know, a day that's supposed to be exciting and fun but may not be because of the job they love to play could be unrecognizable? It could just be small, and mostly harmless, potency nerfs but the devs track record of nerfing jobs or buffing them isn't exactly the greatest.

Honestly, on patch day, ppl play the patch.
Especially the hardcoreplayers who are also on the forums. Meaning, there will be a few hours of discussion between patch notes and patch release instead of 2 weeks discussion during content lul and patch.
I think thats a big difference.

[MomomiMomi]

...

All of this is just part of a larger problem, and they're going about it the completely wrong way. They should be giving us more methods of giving them feedback earlier, not less. The sooner they get good, accurate feedback, the sooner they can make their changes. Instead they're implementing sweeping changes that are disliked by a large amount of players, and receiving no feedback until nobody is playing those jobs anymore.

I personally believe these developers, Yoshida in particular, are too full of themselves. You can't just design a game in a way you want to, which is something that I've seen to be the case based on a lot of Yoshida's comments. You have to design a game for the players. Your players need to find it fun, otherwise you have failed. But they are waiting far too long to give us information on what changes they're making, and waiting even longer to start taking feedback into account.

[ForteNightshade]

Yes, but there's nothing wrong with waiting until after implementation to listen to feedback as FFXIV is not a fixed game and can be patched.

If they both listened and implemented changes at a significantly faster pace, I would agree. Say the Summoner nerfs are far too severe and the job is now the weakest Caster without question. If by 5.25, they were buffing it, people wouldn't be far more forgiving. That hasn't been in the case. Barring extreme examples, they often dig in their heels and refuse to do anything. Players told the dev team Red Mage was too weak for a year before they finally gave in—but not before hand waving complaints with nonsense that Verraise was it's utility. Monks have been complaining for years now and still, nothing. Sadly, the dev team has a rather poor record when it comes to listening to community feedback.

[shao32]

snip

I couldn't say it better, this is exactly what I feel about current DRK, I just wish they didn't touch anything this expansion.

[Deceptus]

I personally believe these developers, Yoshida in particular, are too full of themselves. You can't just design a game in a way you want to, which is something that I've seen to be the case based on a lot of Yoshida's comments. You have to design a game for the players. Your players need to find it fun, otherwise you have failed. But they are waiting far too long to give us information on what changes they're making, and waiting even longer to start taking feedback into account.

It's. . . almost like this exact same scenario has happened before and they supposedly "learned from it". Clearly not.

Yes, but there's nothing wrong with waiting until after implementation to listen to feedback as FFXIV is not a fixed game and can be patched.

Shouldn't be waiting for patches to fix everything.

[SaberMaxwell]

Oh me oh my, if only the community weren't such degenerates maybe papa Yoshi P would see fit to trust us and tell us more about his future plans with this game!

Naoki Yoshida is not your dad. The dev team aren't your parents. The community isn't some unruly child and treating any of this as such smacks of an extremely unhealthy parasocial relationship. Yoshida is a service provider, and we are his clientele. They can choose to do what they want with the game, but I have not ever seen this closing of the gates turn out well for the development team. See Deceptus' post above.

[Valorak]

[I]The community isn't some unruly child

Well, I'll have to disagree with you on that point.

There's a 24-page topic dedicated to people complaining that their favorite choice didn't win in the vote for a seasonal event.

The in-game FFXIV community is definitely one of the better MMO communities out there, but the forum/reddit crowd seems to be prone to the same overblown reactions and backseat driving that most of the internet is known for.

[Kaliesto]

Square enix and fan trust has been a very long issue, way before FFXIV was made.

[SaberMaxwell]

Well, I'll have to disagree with you on that point.

There's a 24-page topic dedicated to people complaining that their favorite choice didn't win in the vote for a seasonal event.

The in-game FFXIV community is definitely one of the better MMO communities out there, but the forum/reddit crowd seems to be prone to the same overblown reactions and backseat driving that most of the internet is known for.

I'll definitely agree to disagree. Personally, a 24-page reaction to an event is more reaction than any event has gotten in a while, and it shows that the players were able to invest themselves in these characters we only got snippets of. At the end of the day, I think even pure hatred is better than apathy; the day that the community is completely apathetic towards the game is the day Yoshi P has lost.

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

Speaking for MNK's problems, we've had the same GCD rotation since ARR.. well, even less so now as we lost Touch of Death and Fracture and got nothing in return but I've seen so many MNKs on the forums give really good constructive criticism, showing why and how the MNK kit is contradictory to itself and having 3 forms of RNG to gain chakras; critical hits which is rng, actually receiving the chakra from a crit and then the % on brotherhood as well. 3 layers of RNG and to top it off, overcapping chakras feels terrible. Players have been asking for the max Chakras to be upped to 7 since the start of SB because it sucks to overcap when it's not in your control. The gauge is an all or nothing, you either have 5 chakras or you don't, there's no middle ground and it's punishing.

Meanwhile, before ShB launched, the devs were so proud of removing crit based procs and even lowered crit based raid skills so that jobs weren't forced into relying on crit compositions (bard) but completely left MNK untouched. Again, this was a criticism many MNKs had at the start of SB, the slowdown was criticized and despite saying prior to ShB release the devs, Yoshi-P even acknowledged himself that the players hated the slowdown on RoF but they still left it in. They actively ignore criticism. They would rather force the players to play the jobs their way and no other way (hence anatman getting nerfed into basically uselessness outside of Ultimate). The only time they made the job have a decent evolution was in 4.2 and then reverted it all straight back to ARR levels of boring.
It's the least played job currently and it's no surprise, it's got downright boring. Newer players may find it fun, but if you've played since ARR then MNK has never changed it's core rotation or the way in which it plays except from 4.2 - 5.0 and that was by accident I'd like to add. The job still needs fixes for problems present in Heavensward. They've even ignored the Japanese playerbase that said MNK is very disappointing and hasn't evolved and our capstone abilities have been very lackluster and see little use, yet SAM complained about their capstone ability and it was fixed almost immediately. The devs pick and choose what they listen to and if it goes against their vision of the job, well you can bet you'll be stuck playing that crap until the next expansion (Bow mage, DRK in SB, PLD & WHM in HW, MNK in SB and ShB) unless you just give up on that job or just stop playing.

The devs withholding information on job changes feels like they aren't confident in their ability to actually make meaningful changes and they don't want the criticism. People criticize because they want the best for the game and for their job to be either equal or fun. It's pretty easy to spot the "make my job overpowered posts" and ignore them, but genuine criticism is usually well written and presented. I digress though, I've never seen the developers take a proactive approach when it comes to job information so their stance was really disappointing to see that they just don't even want to include it in the prelim patch notes anymore because they want players to see the changes first hand. Stupid reason.