why are people so resistant to constructive criticism about the game?

[Gula]

For the same reason the male viera thread exists. People refuse to see the truth of the situation and instead substitute it with their own delusions.

I saw a personality disorder about that. I wonder if the DSM VI is going to have a section literally just called twitter.

[Shurrikhan]

Things like the Titanforge or the corruptions that have had to "fix" more than 3 times since they were implemented, the RNG in absolutely the entire equipment system is something that has been a constant complaint by many in the forums.

That's just a matter of having ~20 to ~1060 times the possible loot combinations at any given item level than in XIV. XIV has 1 per ilvl tier over the leveling experience and 2 at any level-cap ilvl tier. WoW has some 6 possible drops at the end of a dungeon even after trimming it down to solely what the specialization you've selected could use. The weekly Mythic Challenger chest, further, can take from literally any loot in the game, scaled to your item level reward, with any possible corruption (tens of thousands of combinations in total). Titanforging doesn't play a part in that; it's just a matter of a large loot table.

True, Titanforging was an issue in Legion, when they wanted to increase time played and bridge casual-hardcore power-acquisition gaps and increase the "RPGness" of certain loot progressions. But since then it's only really been pertinent to leveling, as to occasionally get a trinket you won't just replace in another level, and catch-up mechanics.

Gotta ask, though... did you never do the original Diadem? Now that was an actual RNG nightmare. Item level was RNG within a chest-type-derived range. The number of secondary stats attached was likewise entirely RNG, from a total no more than the typical lesser secondary stat, to 3 major secondary stats and 2 lessers, iirc.

[MaraD_]

Anecdotal evidence being a strong cause.
Player X says their way is the true way to do things.
Player Y says the opposite is the true way to do things.

Both players encounter ppl of the opposite opinion, who tell them to do the opposite method. How does one distinguish who is in the right? Well, that depends on what the person determines is a proper way to find out results. (usually again, due to anecdotal evidence) If looking into the evidence, they experience an opposite result where the evidence suggests otherwise, that "evidence" is no longer seen as a reasonable argument. (Lets say "DPS properly" is the stance. Some group, maybe 3 times in a row, tries to DPS properly, but messes up something else. (such as a dodge mechanic) They may now think all evidence that suggests "good DPS" is a "good thing", is no longer reasonable evidence of "proper play".)
Also keep in mind, the more they keep hearing something they dont agree with, the more annoyed they get, no matter how constructive it is.
This of course excludes the inability to hear "tone" in text, and that even "constructive criticism" can be a veil for someone to just vent/lash out. (feeling "morally in the right", as long as their lash outs are constructive in their phrasing. (but maybe not in their context)) An example; Someone curses at work, but in a manner thats completely neutral, such as "I had a F**king hotdog today!" This doesnt mean that person is getting smart, or showing an attitude with another employee. But they "could" be punished for "doing wrong". But another employee can use "please and Thank yous" while giving an attitude/being a smart a** about it. But they dont get in trouble, because "please and thankyou" isnt against the company rules. (Seen these examples play out at my work places for many years)

Sadly, "Constructive criticism" is never going to be easily seen as such, despite how unfortunate that is.

[PyurBlue]

FFXIV is not just an MMO, but an MMORPG, a Final Fantasy MMORPG. Story will always be part of the game. Just because FFXI may not make story required doesn't mean FFXIV can't.

The story being part of the game is something different entirely than making the story required. This is why I don't understand why people bring up that it's a Final Fantasy game when people want to prioritize doing something else ahead of the story. Unless people ask for the story to be removed, which I don't really recall seeing, no one is attempting to make it any less of a Final Fantasy game. If anything an optional story would benefit the MSQ. There would be no need compromise it for the sake of trying to make it appeal to everyone.

[Skivvy]

For the same reason the male viera thread exists. People refuse to see the truth of the situation and instead substitute it with their own delusions.

When ARR launched, it added male Miqo'te, female Roegadyn and female Highlanders to the game, all of which were not a thing in 1.0. Seems they thought it would be a good idea to add the missing genders for the reboot.

Now jump ahead to the announcement that Viera. I remember being so incredibly confident that there was absolutely no way they'd limit it to only female, especially given their inclusion of the missing gender options at ARR launch, but alas, we know how that played out. To say the least, I was completely shocked and amazed that they went with that decision.

The Devs have given there reasons why they opted to go this route, but to me it all just feels like an incredibly bad decision and any criticism is well deserved. I've not read a majority of the pages in the Viera thread, but I 100% understand why they want them to be a thing why they feel they should be a thing. To write it off as a mere delusion is really doing a disservice to the playerbase and their voices.

SE has made plenty of questionable decisions in other areas of the game as well, the limited races are just the latest to be tossed onto the heap. I wonder if all the backlash was worth it for them (I'm not just talking the forum backlash).

[Nayout]

That's just a matter of having ~20 to ~1060 times the possible loot combinations at any given item level than in XIV. XIV has 1 per ilvl tier over the leveling experience and 2 at any level-cap ilvl tier. WoW has some 6 possible drops at the end of a dungeon even after trimming it down to solely what the specialization you've selected could use. The weekly Mythic Challenger chest, further, can take from literally any loot in the game, scaled to your item level reward, with any possible corruption (tens of thousands of combinations in total). Titanforging doesn't play a part in that; it's just a matter of a large loot table.

True, Titanforging was an issue in Legion, when they wanted to increase time played and bridge casual-hardcore power-acquisition gaps and increase the "RPGness" of certain loot progressions. But since then it's only really been pertinent to leveling, as to occasionally get a trinket you won't just replace in another level, and catch-up mechanics.

Gotta ask, though... did you never do the original Diadem? Now that was an actual RNG nightmare. Item level was RNG within a chest-type-derived range. The number of secondary stats attached was likewise entirely RNG, from a total no more than the typical lesser secondary stat, to 3 major secondary stats and 2 lessers, iirc.

And that's exactly what a lot of people don't like, my whole guild with raid in BC, Woltk and Cata don't like the direction the game has taken with these things. And I know the Diadema because I still have equipment I keep in my retainers in that area, one of the reasons why it failed was because of that but if I remember correctly, the equipment they gave in that area was never superior to Savage's. I also know perfectly well about Eureka Pyros and the crystal forge with the statistics that it was a whole RNG system, but of course it is something very small or almost anegodotic.

[Melichoir]

Let me preface this by saying I have absolutely no coding/programming knowledge of any sort, and it will be evident in my next sentence. lol. But is what you're saying is that it would be possible to actually build ARR completely 'fresh' so to speak with new coding, but have to tweak things in a weird way to make it compatible with/transfer legacy characters properly?

The 1.0 coding gets blamed for many, many things by this community - but to my simple mind it doesn't seem like making legacy characters work in a new game, if that was their main hurdle, could have THAT far of a reach. But again, I know nothing in this field so I could be incredibly off-base here.


Just saw your edit, so if that's the case, I'm thinking there's a strong chance that's probably what the other thread had been talking about.

A lot of what's in the game is built on top of 1.0 coding. They didnt recode the entire game and engine from scratch, just added on top of it and modified it for their uses to get 2.0 off the ground. This approach has some knock on effects. So some of the things we have been complaining about are a result of how 1.0 was set up. In layman's terms, think of it this way: 1.0 is the foundation of a house, and 2.0 and on is the house and all it's addons. You can do quite a bit to add onto and modify the house itself, but it is still reliant on how strong the foundation is. If you arent careful, the foundation breaks and the hwole thing falls apart. So one thing it could limit how 'high' a house could be as a result.

From what Ive read, If you want to understand this in practical terms of the game, the character creation engine is a hold over from 1.0. Specifically the fact that it literally needs an exact number of fields to work. It's why fem lalafells have a breast slider even if nothing comes of it - the engine needed a set number of fields to be filled with something for it to work.

[Vidu]

The story being part of the game is something different entirely than making the story required. This is why I don't understand why people bring up that it's a Final Fantasy game when people want to prioritize doing something else ahead of the story. Unless people ask for the story to be removed, which I don't really recall seeing, no one is attempting to make it any less of a Final Fantasy game. If anything an optional story would benefit the MSQ. There would be no need compromise it for the sake of trying to make it appeal to everyone.

Let me preface this by saying this is only my personal opinion and feeling(s) on the matter - should be obvious, with this being kind of a "touchy" subject, I still feel it needs to be said.

Now to answer your question: If someone wants to ignore the story (by buying a jump/skip potion or skipping cutscenes) thats absolutly fine - I think most people, even those who like the story and play mainly to experience that, would agree with this. If you dont want to play through the story and find a way for yourself to take in as little as possible, thats your right.
But my worry would be that by turning the story into more optional content - instead of having most things in the game tied to it in some capacity, requiring you to pass certain points within the story to unlock NPCs, areas, dungeons etc. - my worry would be that the story would lose its strong connection to the world and in turn would lose meaning and maybe even quality.

Speaking in terms of the series as a whole: The story has always been the driving factor in these games. The story was never optional - areas, dungeons, NPCs, partymembers... all of that has always been locked behind the story - so yes, in a sense, an optional story would make it less of a Final Fantasy game.
Now, admittely that argument "Its always been like this!" is obviously not the best or strongest one to be made. Given the basic design of this game though, I think its a fair one to be considered. To me it doesnt seem that content is locked behind the story just to force people to go through the story - its locked because it has its place within the narrative and disconnecting the two would cheapen both the story-experience aswell as the duty-experience.

[Kolsykol]

I am assuming that we're only talking about legitimate criticism here and not just the usual '' lol weeb gaem ''.

There's different kinds of people who hang around forums and social medias and one of the largest groups are groups that have very strong opinions and overinflated egos.
People who have problems and with high emotions are more likely to say something, you see this a lot on social medias too and how places like Twitter is such an inaccurate reflection of society at large.
These places aren't used by the average person it's a very small group of people.
And it kinda naturally scares away normal people, and you get small groups essentially monopolizing everything.
In reality they only represent a very small and extreme group of people and they bully everyone else into silence.
It's the same on a certain infamous '' gaming '' forum, a small group of people that are organized can make themselves seem very large and monopolize any discussion or platform.
But most of the userbase isn't like that but are basically sitting hostage because they're afraid of speaking up ( in that case the moderation is why it's infamous, so they'll get banned too ).

I remember when WoW Classic was coming out and the '' NoChanges '' thing was talked about and you had a very obnoxiously loud group of people who would spam this every thread, but I sincerely doubt that attitude was as widespread as they made it seem.
And the '' Vanilla experience '' was never going to happen to begin with, totally different times.
And now it has proven that this attitude actually lead to a lot of problems and the game and the community is in a pretty poor state because of it.
And it has become a bit more acceptable to be critical towards things like World Buffs for example or about how there's no AoE cap and leveling has just become P2W which anyone should've been able to foresee.
There's some more controversial takes like maybe classes should be rebalanced so that 80% of talent builds aren't totally useless and non-competitive but people are at least a bit more open-minded to that now.
The loud and extreme minority has sorta died down and the average person is allowed to speak, and suddenly some changes are wanted.
The changes were always wanted and a lot of people have come around and realized how bad the previous attitude was, but those people just couldn't speak before because they were shouted down by an organized minority.

FFXIV is a game with a very dedicated playerbase that appeals to different people who are very passionate about different things.
Depending on where you post or what you talk about you'll get people who only care about hardcore raiding content or you'll get people who have a super casual approach or a super hardcore RPG approach.
And then lets be real here too, a lot of people who say that they want a discussion don't actually want one.
They talk about things as if what they want is a fact and are just as toxic as the organized group of minority opinions too.

Like when you get people who have strong opinions against sexualized content, those people almost never talk about it with an open mind.
They're almost always like '' this is bad and harmful and I am offended ''.
What discussion is there to be had then?
To me it just comes across as someone with an overinflated ego at that point who think that what they want is more important than what a game actually is.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

A lot of what's in the game is built on top of 1.0 coding. They didnt recode the entire game and engine from scratch, just added on top of it and modified it for their uses to get 2.0 off the ground. This approach has some knock on effects. So some of the things we have been complaining about are a result of how 1.0 was set up. In layman's terms, think of it this way: 1.0 is the foundation of a house, and 2.0 and on is the house and all it's addons. You can do quite a bit to add onto and modify the house itself, but it is still reliant on how strong the foundation is. If you arent careful, the foundation breaks and the hwole thing falls apart. So one thing it could limit how 'high' a house could be as a result.

From what Ive read, If you want to understand this in practical terms of the game, the character creation engine is a hold over from 1.0. Specifically the fact that it literally needs an exact number of fields to work. It's why fem lalafells have a breast slider even if nothing comes of it - the engine needed a set number of fields to be filled with something for it to work.

Some of this is true, but not all.

The games engine is completely different. 1.0 used crystal tools, while 2.0 and beyond uses a modified luminous engine.


The 1.0 foundation is there, but only as a compatibility thing. The game was rebuilt from scratch, but they had to make it compatible for character transfers from 1.0, so a lot of the character creation restrictions stem from that, as do retainers. This is also likely why the class system still exists, and they simply make new jobs have no classes.


This would also explain why they don't want to mess with a lot of those systems and why we have so many limitations. People cite the spaghetti code thing a lot, but I don't think they really understand the meaning behind it.

It is not referencing the 1.0 code, or 2.0 code itself, but the compatibility coding that makes the 2 talk to each other. And since it was put together in a hurry and possibly by people who no longer work there, they don't want to go messing with it because it's something that may truly break the game.