TBN & WD probably wont be fundamentally changed (in 6.xx)

[Lyth]

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The main value in player feedback is in defining the design problem, not its solution.

In an ideal world, the feedback should be well articulated and accompanied by a please with sugar and a cherry on top. In practice, that's usually not the case because players are often tired, frustrated, and angry by the time they finally choose to vocalize their complaints. But the goal of the game designer is to identify what the underlying problem is. The emotional content is water off a duck's tail.

If there's a design philosophy, you have to get the players on board with it. MMOs are still viewed as a fairly significant time investment. The business plan that Yoshi-p put out during the last Live Letter was well done. It shows you a big picture view of why it's worthwhile for you to invest your time into this game over the next few years. They've always been good at that. But the devil's in the details. People want to be able to be able to focus in on the specific gameplay aspects that they individually care about, be it housing and glamour, job balance, solo content or whatever. Players want to know if its worthwhile to invest their time into those specific gameplay elements, or find other things to do in game that are more satisfying.

How much do we explicitly know about their tank role or job design philosophy? During Stormblood, there was a fairly major disconnect between the players and the dev team. Tanks were (presumably - although this was never explicitly explained) doing too much damage during Heavensward, so that was stealth nerfed through role locking accessories and removing tank STR scaling from them during the expansion transition. Tanks complained about the lack of STR scaling. The dev team buffed enmity in response to player feedback. Tanks laughed and equipped i280 STR accessories from Heavensward. The dev team made accessories scale STR.

We were very lucky that they messed up here, but it also highlights some interesting points. First, it's better to be upfront about unpopular decisions like nerfs so that you can get players on board with the reasoning behind your decision. Players still always notice what you're doing (and are smart enough to find out loopholes around it), even when the changes happen on the sly between expansions. We might not see eye to eye, but it gives us a reference frame to talk about it in an open and honest way. Second, even if you've made a design decision that you're moving towards and you're sticking to it, you won't always get the player experience right the first time in its implementation, which is why two-way communication is essential. Players want to get stronger with more powerful gear so that their upgrades feel meaningful. That's a pretty basic concept in MMO design. Imagine if we were still stuck on VIT only accessories with no damage scaling today.

Living Dead has had an endless stream of complaints about it since 2015. It gets highlighted as a problem every expansion. The bottom line is that players don't enjoy being instant killed by their own abilities. That's a design constraint right there. That thing? Don't do it. Most players aren't going to distill it down for you that much, though. The game designer has to read through the negative experiences objectively to identify that. And when you let it fester for long enough and then buff two other invulns at the start of the present expansion, you shouldn't really be surprised at the backlash. Living Dead may have accounted for 1% of the 4000 or so English questions asked this time around, but this isn't the first Q+A where it was a high demand question. It's just got to the point where players were fed up with the silence on the subject.

People are looking for the design direction. There are a lot of smaller, up and coming dev teams that seem to recognize this. Here's a ten minute VOD on our plans for gameplay feature X from the section lead, let us know what you think in the comments below. Players reinforce those ideas in the community by quoting the dev perspective. They want to be given something to believe in. Otherwise you just have a bunch of people guessing at the design direction and getting progressively more angry that nothing is being done.