The devs arent your friends. Stop pretending everyone is wrong and the devs are right

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

They know us better than we do.!

I can only assume you say this as a joke given the tone of the rest of your post, but this is unironically the reality of it, whether you like the implications of it or not.

Statistics are the single most powerful tool game developers have at their disposal - they paint an infinitely more accurate picture than player feedback ever could. Every large enough game developer has literal terrabytes worth of player data, trends, content participation, etc to base all their decisions on. They literally know the playerbase of their game better than the playerbase ever could.

During my time working at Ubisoft, the team I worked with completely stopped looking at player feedback because it was useless at best and at worst contradictory to what the actual majority were interested in - the statistics data was the only source of feedback ever needed to see success / failures of certain content designs and how we should model future DLC / content designs on to produce continuously successful results. We knew what the players wanted better than they did, and every piece of content we released following the successful data trends mirrored the same success. More content that mirrored the unsuccessful data trends continued to provide less results comparatively.

The devs don't need to be our friends, they don't need to care about player feedback on somewhere as tiny as these forums - Their huge amounts of player data paint the exact picture of how to make FF14 successful - something that both Square Enix's yearly financial reports & bancho's censuses have been showing they've been extremely nailing in their game direction. A direction of accessibility & dumbing down game design that every single AAA studio in the industry has realized encompasses a year over year increasing majority of casual gamers and what they're looking for.

In this day and age, human feedback is effectively irrelevant - data collection is so powerful now that companies know what their audience wants better than they do.

[TaleraRistain]

During my time working at Ubisoft, the team I worked with completely stopped looking at player feedback because it was useless at best and at worst contradictory to what the actual majority were interested in - the statistics data was the only source of feedback ever needed to see success / failures of certain content designs and how we should model future DLC / content designs on to produce continuously successful results. We knew what the players wanted better than they did, and every piece of content we released following the successful data trends mirrored the same success. More content that mirrored the unsuccessful data trends continued to provide less results comparatively..

I don't know that Ubisoft is the best example of this because they rightfully got raked over the coals recently because they were focusing all their various games on the same trend of open world multiplayer whether that particular game fit that genre or not. Yeah, the data they gathered about those types of games getting a lot of players across the general gaming playerbase may have been accurate, but they seemed to completely ignore what was popular among the playerbases of all their current games so they could intelligently implement some of those features instead of overhauling all their IPs to that style.

It's also good to remember that depending on how you gather the data and what you gather, it's very easy to manipulate the numbers to suit a certain agenda or idea.

[Jojoya]

Statistics are the single most powerful tool game developers have at their disposal - they paint an infinitely more accurate picture than player feedback ever could. Every large enough game developer has literal terrabytes worth of player data, trends, content participation, etc to base all their decisions on. They literally know the playerbase of their game better than the playerbase ever could.

Yet statistics lack a crucial piece of information:

What was the player motivation for participating (or not)?

Example: For Mists of Pandaria, the WoW devs added a legendary cloak quest line. Different parts required different content to be done.

Part 1 - Grind certain open world mobs to earn reputation

Part 2 - Grind Valor Points through the usual methods; kill enemy faction NPCs to earn reputation; earn victories in 2 specific battlegrounds; kill a specific elite enemy NPC

Part 3 - participate in a specific raid (any difficulty) to get item drops; grind specific open world NPCs to earn reputation; complete a solo scenario; kill an open world boss; return to the raid to kill bosses for more item drops

Part 4 - complete a role specific solo challenge - legendary cloak is earned in its final form.

Your statistics tell you that hundreds of thousands (perhaps even a couple of million) of players completed all the steps and earned the cloak. What those statistics don't tell is if they enjoyed each content type woven into the questline, or if the player only did them because they either wanted to own the cloak to get access to a specific world boss released late in the expansion or because they were under threat of being removed from their raid team (and possibly their guild) if they didn't have the cloak.

Statistics alone are not a good way to judge what players really want. Many times, players are only doing the content because a specific reward they need or highly desire is gated behind the content and it can't be obtained otherwise. That is why feedback is also important - it can give context to what is shown in the statistics.

[Mr_Gyactus]

Any MMO I've played the retention has been poor tbh.

You can be even more generic. EVERYTHING soon or later becomes boring: a food, hobbies, a friend, even your wife/husband.
Why a particular game should be different?

"go and play something else if you feel burned out" is common sense, some player returns when there is a new expansion play it and then quit until the next expansion, some quit ff14 forever, or perhaps they quit videogames altogether.