Public Discussion: Community Feedback - Is it being heard?

[Shougun]

Recent lottery system to replace the placard spam, umbrella, wings, Ishgard housing, etc are from players feedback, it takes sometime for them to listen, people just forgot about it then move on to the next requests once it's implemented.

There are so many things that have been, I believe, influenced by community feedback- with the delay as you say. Part of it is pretty logical, you can't just turn a ship around instantly, and the other part might be whatever logistical bias or "lets make sure they ACTUALLY want that or... ...m... I don't love that idea... do they actually want that...?..." and they're trying to let the dust setttle before they change a bunch of things.

One other thing, I feel, to add to that vague list of rules I mentioned earlier is that they don't like substantially changing old things if they can help it. I think it's a sense of wasting time in the past for minor gain vs making new content that more accurately fits their playerbase feedback which is a net overall greater amount of content. I mean they do go back and change stuff but I think we've heard Yoshida make a comment on that before, and also you can tell it's not their favorite thing to do (they do it, they just don't do it 24/7).

I don't try and sit and memorize everything they listen to, particularly because of the time shift, but you've got a lot of blue changes that I strongly believe they did the above rules with (like I wish they changed the starting part of blue more, but you can see they did do that a bit but also their newer added spells did a lot to address any feedback that wasn't on the topic of making it unlimited, or making larger changes to the starting skills*, as well as adding a lot of features I saw mentioned including 100% learn rate in groups etc). *Doesn't mean I don't still hope they'll consider it, since I think the pacing of the job could be improved, longevity of some of the skills that seem to exist for like only one carnival event, make them more interesting as well since the job is limited so balance isn't as important, etc.. BUT I feel you can see in multiple phases, including the new skills added, they were directly listening to feedback.

When they were talking about how echo would be less powerful because of their stat changes I and a few others were like "please don't kill the solo potential for old content" and then in like the next live letter they were talking about epic echo which repaired the damage to that system.

When they add new zones to expansions I swear to Thal there is at least one or two that I have seen people request specifically (in theme).

A few that I can think of without stiting too long with a pencil up my nose (don't want to spend too long thinking of it) trying to remember 10+ years of comments, (some will have to be coincidence), are things like:

• Summoner egi/demi thing + progressively more primal-y summoner
• gpose (in 1.0-2.0 beta era I had talked about adding a camera and posing system to capture memories)
• Paladin protective tyrael wings
• multiple UI QoL (like the aethernet map, quest item linking, inventory searching (via cataloging the inventories client side, as they had said it wasn't really possible when people first requested it), transferring and saving UI
• Island Sanctuary like content
• Condense buttons
• Materia changes (long ago)
• group craft projects (which unfortunately appears to have not panned out because people hardly craft together in the FC...)
• Zones (before ShB asking for a hyper vertical zone and Zanarkand like zone, pre-EW hoping for a Zeal like space)
• Race (I had asked for Ronso-like race... lol)
• Freaking grass - during the 1.0-2.0 era, which had multiple patches specifically (at the time many mocked me for but even Yoshida has now said "hmmm, that's killing some of my cutscenes" meanwhile many MMOs have focused on specifically this feature and such a thing covers most of the screen in some spaces, so I think it sounds silly but people were being foolish to think it's irrelevant, though I think my post at the time could have been better worded)
• Locking servers that are too full even against the cash shop and then creating systems to encourage players to balance out other servers (preferred, full worlds, etc)
• Jobs (a lot of suggestions I made to people who said lore impossible to new dark theme jobs had many similarities to reaper added later, including using wraiths to by pass any undead type concerns (like zombies/skeletons)). Not forgetting the fact that the request for a scythe weapon had been going on for a while by others.
• I was in a thread mentioning a unique weapon idea could be pylons that float behind the player and attack (similar enough someone on the forums was like "did I read this somewhere here?")
• Healer job that uses attacking as a way to heal to increase the amount of offense opportunities
• The consistent empowering of beast tribe content and other player builds a space features (like Ishgard reconstruction I believe was a direct larger scale response to players saying "I like making changes to the world")
• Blue mage changes above, from more interesting spells, learn rates, to solo power
• Epic echo
• etc... etc...

I'm 100% sure some of it is coincidence, but there are many like that which are eerily similar with twists on ideas. Like for example for me it was crystal pylons that would float behind the player and could attack / fire off like Fenrir and be used for a Geomancer like job (as the pylons would create field effects), clearly some differences yet at the same time the weapon idea isn't super common so I feel it's not unreasonable to imagine that might have had some impact.

Of course as I said before I could have posted so much that sometimes I get close because I do.. like some sort of Nostradamus lol (make enough comments some of them will come true XD).. for example before GW2 had their very well received mount system I was trying to suggest FFXIV have a far more in-depth mount system rather than them being all different cans of paint. Now WoW is taking major influences from GW2 system and often when people talk about mounts you hear "GW2 is the best one". Highly doubt I had any influence on GW2 from the FFXIV forums, but I think I just had the right idea that movement can be fun even if it initially sounds kind of silly to spend so much time making movement interesting (which is proof to me that sometimes it is likely just coincidence, but too many times coincidence doesn't sound as likely). Of course I'd say GW2's idea was far more refined, but you'd hope so... with their experienced perspective and it being their job you'd hope ideas are more refined.

Heck, when people were talking about the Island by Garlean (with all the lightning) I had suggested it was owned by ancients and looked like Zeal in the past, and the players will go into the past to learn important information but wont change the future. I feel that is weirdly similar to a situation we have in game.. lol. Honestly If I spoke Japanese I'd probably apply and say either I've said enough acceptable things that feedback is taken or alternatively I've a decent track record for parodying actual content changes to the game before they happen so I'm not a terrible fit (I don't think I'd be even a tenth as talented as those who actually have industry experience but that's called learning, but I also don't think I'm far off the mark.. usually.. LONG ago I did have a bad take on the glamour system in which I was against it.. but it's clear to me that for many people glamour is substantial end game and such a system should be a treasured concept...).

I mean long, long, ago they literally said they spend a decent amount of time compiling forum posts and sharing the feedback to the related teams (to which was a question I asked them via another website).

I'm confident I could easily think of 10 or more things that I've personally mentioned that are eerily similar to game results, which again I would say it's imperative that I believe some of them are just coincidence and many are inspirations / influences to the people who might have already had similar thoughts but feel "sounds good now that someone else thinks that's cool too", but when people say "they don't listen" I just have a really hard time believing it. That's just what I've mentioned, I've seen feedback other people have said to which similar things have happened.

They might not do what you want when you want, or occasionally their vision of content is different and someone in the dev side is like "no you listen here, this is better" (like housing probably, but that's also likely a money issue because changing those systems is probably insanely expensive), but I still believe they sincerely take feedback and incorporate it when it makes sense to them.

[Stasya]

If feedback was heard there would not have been atrocious 6.1 sam. Devs just dug their heads in sand and mumble "we know better you will like it".

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

It absolutely isn't.

I've gotten to the point I no longer feel like adding my voice to things will matter. My dissatisfaction with the game is known, a large portion of the playerbase has similar grievances with everything from gameplay and class design to the way the story has been going - but so little of it is being heard or acknowledged.

It helps even less that, with any attempt made to offer critique and stating what we would like to change, the same group of SE defenders come in to argue, gaslight, and attempt to drown out any and all criticism of the way this game is handled or the decisions being made by the developers for it.

This forum is probably one of the few spaces outside r/ffxivdiscussion where people can still actually manage to discuss things at all without it being drowned under a flood of toxic positivity and defensive praise (and has the added double-edged sword of no downvote button), but with how poorly this forum is moderated, even it is losing its ability to offer a sustainable place to offer feedback and requests for improvement. And some of us are just... tired.

SE is going to lose players in the same slow bleed that happened with WoW, and I can only hope they wake up before it's too late to reestablish goodwill.

[Lauront]

"Unanimous" among a small group of people who happen to post on the forums in a thread dedicated to a particular complaint does not mean anything "unanimous" for the actual playerbase.

What's the alternative source? The "data" (what data)? The "surveys" which we have no real sight of beyond those who happen to receive them, which then vanish from our sight altogether (i.e. what does SE even do with these)? What are the devs basing their decisions on? You can keep dismissing this or that source of feedback - even on reddit, the delusion hasn't set in to the point that people don't realise that there's issues with healer gameplay, for example - but at some point you have to ask then what ARE you basing your views on? Because I can tell you, every single site that is unabashedly positive about the game is itself a minority. Metacritic? Reddit? Twitter? How many redditors actively post and contribute on any given topic? 600k figure is a red herring. Sure, we can take an agnostic position with regard to the broader playerbase, but the complaints about certain things are so well-trodden that I think you're simply sticking your fingers in your ears at a certain point and asking for something which is impossible to provide in order to dismiss complaints. Which is childish. At a certain point the devs need to explain why they're hiding from their OF feedback (which is their own company's responsibility to moderate and clean up) and, if it's the case, why they don't agree with rather broadly recurring complaints on it. SE is far from infallible, let's put that pretence to death.

[Elesh]

Okay. Enjoy being objectively wrong. I tire of arguing with absolute monkeys who force their narrow perspective on others. Proud of ignorance. It takes a special breed, so you can embrace that.

All it takes a stroll in the SAM thread, the tank voices in their forums, or the megathread with healers. Or the megathread with Hroth. Or the megathread with Viera. Or the megathread with housing. Or the megathread with-

Are you doing this on purpose? This is why I hate the community now.


Pointless hair split for the purpose of saving face. Be more subtle. Also, I wouldn't use such spicy contexts for this.

The forums... are a small portion of the population. If I had to make an estimate based off of post counts and forum activity, I'd say somewhere in the range of 1% of the overall game population ever posts here, much less regularly.

Which is why I said that in your limited viewpoint, it can seem unanimous. But you're not taking to heart the very important context that your perspective IS limited.

Let's take the healer megathread for example... even assuming that the majority of healers who post on the forums agree that healers should be more engaging to play... there is a very significant disagreement as to the HOW of that or what we would even want. Many point to old rotations involving cleric stance as a 'gold standard', but a LOT of us never want cleric stance to come anywhere closer to our character again than the Bozja version as a silly zone effect because we consider cleric stance to be the worst designed ability in ffxiv's history.

We're still not completely unanimous, even about a seemingly 'unanimous' thread. The reality is that no feedback you see is unanimous, even if it seems that way from the limited perspective we get looking at the forums or reddit or twitter or where-ever else. That perspective is VERY IMPORTANT to avoid letting things go to your head. The devs have many more sources of feedback than just us.

We are a minority here. Even if we're a unanimous minority about some issues, we're still a very small minority, so we should recognize that our feedback is just one source of information the game devs have that they use to help determine their course and not assume that all other sources mirror the feedback we're giving and thus not expect them to always cater to every piece of feedback we submit, even if it seems unanimous.

[HyperiusUltima]

10 pages full of feedback regarding people's responses, and I'm going to have to hope on a prayer that a CM even bothers to come in and read the thread. But, let's not get our hopes up - we already know how it is after close to 3 years of radio silence.

Also, I've seen a few people backing up that they do hear our feedback - and yes. They nitpick it so that they are not put in a precarious position to be criticized. However, a main component of development is accepting this criticism and acting on it in an appropriate manner. If it is an illogical criticism or an impossible one to implement, then they may live with that or simply deny it. It's all too easy to deny and nitpick feedback that reads 'positivity' and I want Yoshida to get rid of that toxic positivity surrounding him. I will give him praise where it is due - for one, addressing certain topics through communications channels such as the 5ch brigade and the delay of Endwalker - however, there are criticisms in its place that can begin to outweigh if they muddy the waters too much for the community like they have: For instance, healers. Accepting your mistakes is a part of development of an MMO as much as it is a process. It's a matter of what you do to fix those mistakes.

I still have respect for the Development Team, but I want them to know we need to be communicated with in some retrospect - as someone commented earlier, potentially giving us a monthly Community Team discussion of sorts for us to vent our grievances or give praise. I find this important because we currently lack a medium to begin communication between us and the Development Team instead of their one-way communication via their Letter from the Producer LIVE.

Also please allow intercommunication between Forums, provided you keep the language the same in those forums(English in English Forums, French in French Forums, Japanese in Japanese Forums, and so forth). This would allow our communities to speak with each other and share ideas that may be stuck in a bubble. We have Google Translate(albeit it's not the best...it's still a useful tool regardless).

[Jeeqbit]

I still have respect for the Development Team, but I want them to know we need to be communicated with in some retrospect - as someone commented earlier, potentially giving us a monthly Community Team discussion of sorts for us to vent our grievances or give praise. I find this important because we currently lack a medium to begin communication between us and the Development Team instead of their one-way communication via their Letter from the Producer LIVE.

How is it one-way when Yoshi-P reads the stream chat now and even spent a lot of time responding to the chat about the Samurai and Hrothgar changes? Some live letters contain a Q&A from the forums as well.

[HyperiusUltima]

How is it one-way when Yoshi-P reads the stream chat now and even spent a lot of time responding to the chat about the Samurai and Hrothgar changes? Some live letters contain a Q&A from the forums as well.

While he does read chat, he's reading JP Chat since it's in his native language. NicoNico is a lot easier for him to read instead of trying to read English. Of course, if we're going to talk about the QnA sections of their streams, let's get to the point on that:

They nitpick which questions to answer that will not put Yoshida or Foxclon on the spot, such as with Healers for example. They'll answer things regarding content, of course, but if Jobs ever get talked about? They balk at it in their heads akin to how Yoshida said "Go Play Ultimate" and yet, there's an entire thread dedicated to that off-putting response. They need to take a hardball once in a while.

[Jeeqbit]

The ones who can speak English do read the English chat, but obviously if you want Yoshi-P to see it then it will help to translate it for him.

Don't forget that Yoshi-P does more interviews than any developer I've ever heard of. During the media tours and events like gamescom he has done them all day for two days. While some of the ones conducting interviews are journalists that don't play very often and ask useless questions, many of the people doing the interviews play a lot such as streamers, youtube channels and the staff of popular websites for the game. Whenever someone asks a question I can usually recollect a time that Yoshi-P answered it in an interview and that says a lot about how many he does.

[Canadane]

Neither JP nor NA feel like they're being heard on the forums.

EU players get all the fun.