Quote Originally Posted by Midareyukki View Post
Except experience taught them the exact opposite, hence the ARR transition and their slideshow. And a lot of the QoL in this game only exists because fans so asked for. In fact, your own race's male counterpart exists due to that.

It's great that devs have a vision to follow, but disregarding fans in its entirety is also dangerous. There needs to be a balance. And while this game really does have a cool dev-fanbase experience, it's not a very healthy one. Square is incredibly secretive and isn't transparent when it would actually help them out. Not just to follow their own vision, but to make sure fans understand and enjoy the vision itself. Sometimes, more so than asking fans what they think and working off of it, it helps to temper fans' expectations than blind promises and vague denials. For example, saying "It's impossible" and then ending up doing it really muddles the definition of the word "Impossible". And it makes people demand for stuff deemed "unreasonable", because when you actually mean it's impossible, you just end up sounding like the Boy who Cried Wolf.
hardly call my male "counterpart" an advance but anyway lol

it is a balance and there could be some culture involved as well. I am not saying QoL suggestions are bad to a degree.

secretive yes, I think their preference is to simply not give things away. how often, in many games, do off hand utterances get nailed down as hard facts by the playerbase as expectations? saying "its impossible" I think can be often translated as "we cant do it now" take the starting inventory in WoW, for years it was "impossible given the code and how its built into the game" yet one day, it magically increased in size. So I dont look at it as an outright falsehood, but more along the lines of "we cant do that in the present system" and they note it down as something they they can look into once other changes come into play.

people will demand unreasonable things anyway, thats more a human thing than a dev thing. plus, if they are doing something innovative, they arent going to tell the playerbase because the competition is looking for innovative ideas too. so its a double edged sword and if in testing, it doesnt work, then the playerbase is up in arms "but you said...."