Future direction of FFXIV

[Lauront]

I don't know what this is supposed to mean.

Players are actual people. If you make a statement like, "most players think X," you're making a statement about the actual world that is actually true or false. If you make a statement like, "most players think X, and I know that because the small, self-selecting group of players who post on the forums mostly say X," you're making a statement about the state of the world, but your evidence for that statement is very week.

I don't think that any of these things are controversial statements, but I'm open to the small, self-selecting group of FF14 players who post on the forum to suggest otherwise

I am curious - when people try use Metacritic, Reddit or Twitter as "proof" that the game is fantastic, would you maintain in that instance that we're dealing with a "small, self-selecting group"? I would hope so.

It's not like SE bothers to orchestrate any other means of soliciting feedback. So we've exhausted the main areas where it gets it from - reddit, Twitter, the forum. For all intents and purposes, if SE doesn't undertake any work to obtain more representative & systematic feedback from elsewhere (e.g. via surveys) - and to my awareness, it does not - what is the functional difference between that and the actual truth of what most players believe? It may - and probably - differs, but if you're not asking them and SE isn't, what real notion of it do you have above anecdotal evidence? Sales figures and profits going up? Great, now get to the bottom of why.

I feel like this "The game is great, but it could still be better" is the prevailing "negative" mentality that's going around, not "This game sucks and I'm leaving if they don't fix/improve this".

I'd say for me it's more of an "it has been decent enough to warrant the sub fee but I'm ambivalent as to whether that will continue to be the case."