The feeling of beeing Home ...

[Lauront]

Oh, get over yourself:

Everything in this game is what Yoshida and his team wanted, not you.

That's how it works:

• They, the creators, decide what goes into their creation.
• You, the consumer, decide whether to buy it.

Don't like it? Then start your very own game design studio.
See if "what you want" makes for a game as successful as FFXIV.

Part of what Yoshida believes/believed is the approach to making it successful is to listen to one's customers. Not exactly unheard of as a principle in business.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

Part of what Yoshida believes/believed is the approach to making it successful is to listen to one's customers. Not exactly unheard of as a principle in business.

Can't say if he ever believed it before but he sure as hell doesn't anymore. I suppose it's a good thing we have all these people encouraging us to move to Canada to escape a dictatorship.

[Silverbane]

Can't say if he ever believed it before but he sure as hell doesn't anymore.

Live and learn: years of trying to make sense of the complaints in the forums have no doubt imparted Yoshida with a wisdom he previously lacked.

Besides, "listening to customers/complaints" doesn't mean taking all customers/complaints seriously:
there's far too many wack-jobs in the world for that.

[TaleraRistain]

Part of what Yoshida believes/believed is the approach to making it successful is to listen to one's customers. Not exactly unheard of as a principle in business.

It's entirely possible and even desired in business to listen to your customers but still maintain your own vision and identity. If you constantly act only on the whims of customers, then that becomes unsustainable. Either you start to lose customers because you're too lenient and trying to keep up with demands becomes impossible and causes you to neglect other customers, or you're so inconsistent your customers can't have faith in you. My company actively seeks customer input, but there are some things some of them ask for that are just flat out impossible to accommodate.

I would argue that Yoshida's team has been too lenient and now that they are starting to push back more, people who were used to the old way are unhappy. But setting boundaries is going to be healthy for them in the long run.

[Lauront]

It's entirely possible and even desired in business to listen to your customers but still maintain your own vision and identity. If you constantly act only on the whims of customers, then that becomes unsustainable. Either you start to lose customers because you're too lenient and trying to keep up with demands becomes impossible and causes you to neglect other customers, or you're so inconsistent your customers can't have faith in you. My company actively seeks customer input, but there are some things some of them ask for that are just flat out impossible to accommodate.

I would argue that Yoshida's team has been too lenient and now that they are starting to push back more, people who were used to the old way are unhappy. But setting boundaries is going to be healthy for them in the long run.

These problems are not novel to business. They are why tools such as customer lifetime value models exist, so you can evaluate which customer relationships are most valuable and concentrate on those or building more like those. How is it that you think they're being "too lenient"? For instance, on the issue of how they went about adding Hrothgar hairstyles, or the persistent and widespread complaints about healer gameplay being very boring? I will agree that they probably do try to accommodate too many demands, but that is precisely why they need to be quite methodical in how they get feedback, and how they analyse it.

I definitely agree that maintaining a vision and identity are important but the point there is you can't just grow complacent about what you're doing and need to constantly engage the feedback you get from your customers; even the ones who say nothing. Bad word of mouth is in and of itself a potential source of lost sales. The game lacks any real strong competitors at the moment, with WoW shooting itself in its foot, and it is also a major source of revenue for SE - no matter how much integrity of the artistic vision matters, you can safely bet that they are very conscious about ensuring the game remains a profitable stream of revenue. SE is no stranger to making some very bad decisions in what it believes will achieve this goal, ones which can be very tone deaf and ignorant of its customers' actual desires. The lessons Yoshi learnt from 1.0 are valuable ones.

You do realize you just completely proved my point, right?

Well it was less of a point, more just shade being thrown at the OF. Every site they harvest feedback from has its issues. Twitter is horrendous for conducting proper discussions because of the nested nature of comments and the fact that people create their own little echo chamber bubbles on it. Reddit has pervasive issues with groupthink and downvoting, and behaviours that go beyond this (e.g. stalking) and has similar problems with how the discussions eventually become too nested to follow. The OF isn't the best moderated site, in spite of being under SE's control, and (this is can be taken as a + or -) requires a sub, but it is at least free of the downvote system and the nesting issues/conversational bubbles that can hinder discussion on Twitter. At the end of the day, this is a site they have set up to create engagement with their product and to harness feedback. It is not much to ask of them to put some of the effort they devote towards gathering feedback, sometimes on sites with an even more aggressive tone, to their own forum, and to ensure moderation is set up to keep matters civil and engage with their customers on it, as they do on Twitter for example.

[MikkoAkure]

The official forums likely have far less users than the FFXIV reddit and I wouldn't exactly call this place a realistic representative of the game's population as a whole when it's the same 50 or so people talking back and forth.

If your ideas don't do well when presented to a larger audience, maybe the problem isn't the audience but your ideas themselves.

[Raoabolic]

The official forums likely have far less users than the FFXIV reddit and I wouldn't exactly call this place a realistic representative of the game's population as a whole when it's the same 50 or so people talking back and forth.

If your ideas don't do well when presented to a larger audience, maybe the problem isn't the audience but your ideas themselves.

Yes, but those 50 or so people are paying for admission. If they are going the route of listening to broad strokes rather than doubling down and reminding the playerbase that the forums exists then they might as well go f2p since that's the usual MO of f2p games.

[hagare]

Yes, but those 50 or so people are paying for admission.

compared to how many that pays sub but doesn't visit OF?

[Necrotica]

The official forums likely have far less users than the FFXIV reddit and I wouldn't exactly call this place a realistic representative of the game's population as a whole when it's the same 50 or so people talking back and forth.

If your ideas don't do well when presented to a larger audience, maybe the problem isn't the audience but your ideas themselves.

Reddit is a cesspool. I am fine with getting a variety of opinions, but reddit is moderated by batshit crazy wokeists. Hardly the best place to go for an unbiased opinion.

[Lauront]

The official forums likely have far less users than the FFXIV reddit and I wouldn't exactly call this place a realistic representative of the game's population as a whole when it's the same 50 or so people talking back and forth.

If your ideas don't do well when presented to a larger audience, maybe the problem isn't the audience but your ideas themselves.

What is the number of users on Reddit on any given day, on any thread? It's not anything like that figure it displays on the side, I can tell you that. In terms of people who speak, it's usually the same gaggle of redditors I see on a routine basis. Even the most upvoted threads at most reach 2-3k, and that's usually the very low hanging fruit, typically interviews, announcements, or popular memes or art; most threads on there get nowhere near that and don't even surpass double digits. These are figures which even a moderately sized discord server could influence, if so inclined. Secondly, are you positing that the audience in question (that subset of reddit users that actually engage again; not the supposed figure on the side) is reflective of the broader playerbase and therefore trying to argue that if ideas don't sell to it, it must somehow indicate they would not resonate beyond that?

I'll add, we could circumvent these sort of issues if SE was a bit more transparent about the surveys it conducts, where it could take reasonable steps to ensure it's dealing with representative samples, indicating what player opinion on various issues actually is, so we're not left playing these guessing games. Ideally, they should be conducting such research anyway to validate whether what they're hearing on social media sites lines up with what a more methodical approach would indicate.