The Devs Listen to Us

[Nizzi]

Healers have been this way since ShB launch, or arguably Stormblood if you take into account the unnecessary heal bloat that they've been getting that runs contrary to the amount of healing the game actually requires. Depending on how you look at it, that's over 4-6 years they have been outright ignoring healer feedback or responding to it by misrepresenting it and saying "Go play Ultimate and suffer" like Yoshida said when a question about the state of healing in Endwalker was the most upvoted in the "ask the developers" liveletter thread.

I don't disagree that they do listen to some things; the recent changes to Savage gearing show they definitely do when its things that don't effect the core vision that they have for the game at the moment in time. However, there's a lot that they don't listen to, and it often comes with Yoshida outright lying about the reasons given for the changes or reasons why they won't do something, as they did for the reasons of removing SCH's DPS kit as "Scholars DPS away and force White Mages to pick up the healing" when the numbers showed that Scholars were actually healing more than White Mages with the free healing built into their kit (later his reasoning was because they wanted to "give Scholar a more heal oriented playstyle"), or more recently the reasons given for why they removed Kaiten from Samurai, "Action bloat" where SAM is pressing Shinten more now and the amount of actions has barely changed for Samurai. The most frustrating part about this, is that Yoshida will always give his classic line of "Please try it out and give us your feedback!" and then none of it goes acknowledged in any fashion or seems to be heard when it comes to gameplay systems such as that.

It's completely understandable why so many people feel like they just don't listen. There's no communication, and in the rare instances there actually is, it will never be brought up again and players are left to wonder what all of their feedback actually amounted to. Yoshida asked for SAM players feedback on the Kaiten changes, and not a word has been heard about that since. Nothing has been said about the gutting of healers in 5.0 outside of Yoshida saying "We know there are some of you who like 3.X era job design, but we're never going back to that." which doesn't even really address the issues people have with healers. When you think about it, half a decade is a long time to go with near radio silence.

[Theodric]

I wish I could believe otherwise but Yoshi-P was surprised by his own admission that people wanted more stubble/beard options for male characters...something that has been requested as a character customisation option as far back as ARR.

There's a lot of similar situations.

He was very dismissive towards the concerns expressed by healer focused players and even lore related questions have him quip in surprise that people...pay attention to the story in a game that openly pushes itself as a story focused game.

[FlutterYuu]

we have little reason to believe this will happen, not when there's complete radio silence about any of their decisions regarding job design, especially healers. I hate doomposting as much as the next guy but it is very hard to believe they'll suddenly u-turn on their design philosophy when they've been set on it for the past 4 years. I'll gladly eat my own words if I end up being wrong, but I doubt it.

I do agree they can be a bit more communicative. But job changes have always happened and we forget that there have been good job changes. Like I said Healers have been in a bad place for a long time but I'm sure that's because of FFXVI being developed by the same team that develops FFXIV. Its going to get better. We can continue to voice our opinions, I don't think its wrong to voice them. But I don't think saying that they aren't listening to us is going to make the game suddenly better, its just hurting ourselves and making us feel negative. Like I said a community post or something about them knowing that Healers are in a bad place could alleviate that. I know they are as much at fault for all our doomposting as we are, but we have to at least catch ourselves before we spiral and become overly toxic. We all love this game that's why we're here. That's why were making all of these posts.

[FlutterYuu]

Back in 2015-2016, when PvP was at a nadir of participation, literally Naoki Yoshida himself showed up to discuss concerns and respond to threads on the PvP forums, and address various ideas people had for improving the design.

Can you imagine that happening today?

Literally Yoshida interacting directly with concerns on the forums?

Dude has checked out and sailed for brighter seas a long time ago.

I don't think so. He's still the director of FFXIV, and if he truly wanted to he'd leave the position. I don't think he'd hold onto a position he didn't want anymore.

[FlutterYuu]

thats funny, is that a WoW reference?

[Kes13a]

thats funny, is that a WoW reference?

no, seems more a blanket reference some use to anything positive anyone says about the game.

[FlutterYuu]

50/50 odds on phasing out PS4. install base is too high and min specs for even PC use would have to rise beyond that, because currently this game is supposed to be able to run on something even worse than a PS4.

I did have to look up if PS4 will be dropped for 7.0. It is staying fortunately! Now I wonder where I heard that the support will drop for 7.0? Well I'm sure the graphical upgrade will look fantastic when it comes in 7.0.

[DiaDeem]

There's no communication, and in the rare instances there actually is, it will never be brought up again and players are left to wonder what all of their feedback actually amounted to

This is the issue, mainly.

[Jeeqbit]

I hope I don't sound preachy but I think there are too many people who think the Devs don't listen.

They do listen, but the question is where they listen and what they listen to. The argument is they don't pay much attention to the English forums.

They used to listen to things about job complexity and uniqueness, but they admitted themselves in a live letter in the last few years that they listen to veteran players too much when the majority of people are casual (forums mostly contain veteran players, so that means they listen to the forums too much). At that time you could already see the trend of greater focus on casual players who haven't taken the time to understand abilities very well.

You have to understand that the community used to be far smaller - 300,000 active characters. Now we are well over a million actively subscribed at any given time.

A larger community means more voices. With such a cacophony of voices in the community now, it is much harder to please everyone as well so they have to try harder to identify feedback amongst all the voices.

Maybe changes aren't happening as fast as we'd like them to.

Development takes months or years. The complaints on these forums are mostly saying things that have been an issue for years and are complaints that were being provided years ago as well. They have had time to take it on board.

But I also know that a lot of our content is planned and made ahead of time.

Did you come here from MrHappy's video?

the 2 minute meta won't be fixed until then either as pretty much all of the Endwalker Content is made with the 2 minute buff window in mind.

Nobody is saying fix it right now. They know it can't be. They are saying for 7.0. But they already committed to it by changing PLD. What are they going to do, change PLD back suddenly?

I'm sure the FFXIV Devs are reading these forums

Even though they are Japanese and we write in English?

[MintnHoney]

I don't think so. He's still the director of FFXIV, and if he truly wanted to he'd leave the position. I don't think he'd hold onto a position he didn't want anymore.

1) They're not saying that he doesn't want the position anymore, just that he's "checked out." Checking out usually means that his focus is elsewhere, to put it as mildly and politely as possible.
2) This is his job. He's not going to just stop taking a paycheck because "he doesn't feel like doing it anymore." He may be in a very good position to do so, but more money means more rings for his fingers and toes, and why would he leave a position where he's constantly earning accolades (which probably also come with bonuses and company-granted cash prizes) on behalf of his teams and things he barely has a hand in?